A little tiny microscopic dragon, rotifers passing by.
I've spent a lot of time peering down a microscope in the last few years, enjoying taking inspiration from the real tiny organisms to make one of my own.
if you're confused about all the pumpkins and ghosts and stuff, it's actually a sort of seasonal harvest festival in parts of the northern hemisphere. yeah, it's kinda weird to think about how it's autumn down there when up here it's spring, haha yeah imagine them all, upside down, and getting colder in october when it's just starting to warm up
and can you imagine, down there it's COLD at christmas, crazy right?
that's nonsense, why would it be cold at christmas, it doesn't even make sense? that's a festival about the birth of something??? obviously that happens in summer.
🍖 How to Build a Culture Without Just Inventing Spices and Necklaces
(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)
So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented:
→ Three types of ceremonial jewelry
→ A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed
→ A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn
Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.
And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.
Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.
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🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style
Ask yourself:
→ Who’s in charge, and why?
→ Who has land? Who doesn’t?
→ What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?
Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.
Start there. Not at the embroidery.
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2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict
Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?
→ What was destroyed and mythologized?
→ What do the survivors still whisper about?
→ What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?
No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.
─────── ✦ ───────
3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists
Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about:
→ Death?
→ Love?
→ Time?
→ The natural world?
→ Justice?
Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.
You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.
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4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)
Culture shows up in:
→ What people apologize for
→ What insults cut deepest
→ What people are embarrassed about
→ What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately
For instance:
→ A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?”
→ A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.
This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.
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5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals
Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about:
→ Breakfast routines?
→ How people greet each other on the street?
→ Who cooks, and who eats first?
→ What’s considered “clean” or “proper”?
→ How is parenting handled? Divorce?
Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.
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6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture
A culture isn’t a monolith.
Even in deeply traditional societies, people:
→ Rebel
→ Question
→ Break rules
→ Misinterpret laws
→ Mock sacred things
→ Act hypocritically
→ Weaponize or resist what’s expected
Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.
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7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap
Worldbuilding gets boring fast when:
→ The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure
→ The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric”
→ Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like
You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy.
→ Let ugly things be beloved.
→ Let beautiful things be corrupt.
→ Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.
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📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy):
→ Culture is not food and jewelry.
→ Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction.
→ Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter.
→ Let your world feel lived in, not curated.
The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list.
It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.
Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)
—rin t.
// writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range
// thewriteadviceforwriters
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Ok, mother of GOD that's a lot of responses and I am but one man with Excel. I'll update these ASAP but also some rules:
A Pokemon only counts for itself, not its evolution line.
A Pokemon with multiple forms (like Zygarde) will only be counted for the specified form. A Pokemon with multiple appearances (like Spinda, Vivillon, Sylvally, etc.) count for all their appearances.
I'm literally doing this as a testament to my own depression that not everyone is lovable, so add that to the weight of this post's meaning.
A Contraption is a device with multiple moving pieces, all of which are of unclear purpose until it's actually activated and it reveals its overly-elaborate function
A Whatsit is a variant of a Contraption which is typically much smaller in both size and complexity, but no less bizarre. Most Whatsits are one-use only before breaking down.
A Doohickey is a device which resembles an existing device with additional extraneous parts, which may or may not perform the function of the device it resembles
A Gizmo is similar to a Contraption, but it's primarily electronic and usually has numerous lightbulbs attached and may have multiple unrelated functions
A Doodad, much like a Whatsit is to a Contraption, is a smaller variant of a Gizmo. Though both of them are typically small enough to carry with one hand, a Doodad usually only performs one function.
Since the Mortasheen handbook didn't come with a character sheet, I decided to try making one for myself. Hopefully I got all the necessary information... this might end up getting edited at some point.
Mortasheen (and the logo on the first page) belongs to @bogleech!
AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC FOR 13 DAYS, FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, HAPPY HALLOWEEEEEEEEEEEEEN
HOW TO BUY IT:
PHYSICAL COPIES ONLY: ETSY
PHYSICAL OR DIGITAL: KO-FI
DIGITAL ONLY: ITCH.IO
Mortasheen is a monster-collecting setting I've developed for over twenty years, it has been in development as a tabletop roleplaying game for over fifteen years, and I have spent more than the last five years laboring on this first book alone. Credit to Morgan Mullins for the gameplay system, @gutsygills for every single playable monster build, rules expansion, testing and enormous amounts of other editing work.
History of the project here
A condensed guide to the setting itself here
Expanding and co-managing a new tabletop gaming "brand" out of this setting is MY SOLE CAREER PROSPECT and potentially my entire new livelihood for the foreseeable future. This is literally now more than half my life's work.
If you can't afford such a LARGE AND CONTENT DENSE new gaming book (a fair chunk of the price is only the raw printing cost!) you can help me survive and get this life-consuming project off to a good start by signal boosting and spreading the word.
Miscellaneous Book Information:
8 x 11'', 350 pages. Includes all rules and mechanics for running a campaign or playing in one, player biotypes, NPC's, locations, gadgets, lairs, setting culture, ecology, unique original battle system, story hooks, a secret antagonist faction for more epic life-or-death adventures and a modular ability system for modifying and creating any conceivable monster, object or phenomenon. All 177 monsters in the bestiary include detailed biology and characterization.
Featuring guest artists including @biomechanicalmush, @sabedilemon, @iguanamouth and more
Softcover $60, Hardcover $70-80 (more on etsy to offset their fees) digital pdf download $40 so we have enough to split with the gameplay devs. Books ordered during this first run will most likely arrive December within the USA, while international shipping from this country is currently undergoing unpredictable chaos.
Backers of the original kickstarter should still receive their books first, and many already have! Over half are yet to finish printing, but we're getting there.
Free online-only playable bonus monster builds available on the front page of bogleech.com or at the bogleech.com/mortabook link, also all assembled by @gutsygills
theartofmadeline
dededos
baratheonpilled
areudirty
titsay
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
