Worldbuilding Tutorial #10: Supernatural Forces and Culture
Intro This is a tutorial on how the practice of magic, religion, or other supernatural forces can shape or be shaped by culture; and how different cultures perceive and understand those things separately from the objective truth of those forces.
Check Your Notes Before starting work on this part of building your world, it’s a good idea to check your notes. Refresh yourself on anything you’ve written so far on magic, the divine, or other supernatural forces; as well as any culture notes that are relevant to those forces. Now is the time to edit any of those if you need to. As you build your world you may find that earlier ideas didn’t end up panning out, or that you misremembered something and built things off of it after that. This is normal, and checking and retroactively editing things for consistency is good to do on a regular basis. If you want to do any editing to these things, now is a good time - then continue.
Awareness of the Supernatural After you revise your notes, the first thing to consider is what different cultures can actually percieve of different supernatural forces. If certain phenomena can only occur in certain parts of the world; if supernatural events only occur during particular times of season or century; how different forces manifest, and why; all affect your cultures’ ability to understand what is going on.
Conversely, there are many things your cultures may not be able to notice. For example, if magic is a finite pool but that pool is very large, your cultures may believe that it is infinite and not go looking for the mechanisms by which that pool is replenished - because they have no reason to believe that it is. If your deities have secretly manifested on your world in the guise of heroes and been catalyst to historic events, your culture may understand that as the work of mortals rather than anything relevant to your world’s pantheon. Look at both what your cultures can see and what they can’t, and start to draw their conclusions from that.
Cultural Twists The next factor to consider here is your own culture’s day to day life and what they have exposure to. If you have a culture that is entirely landlocked and unable to access the ocean, they may not know that an ocean deity exists. Or, they may ignore the ocean aspect and understand the deity by other aspects instead (death, time, travel, etc). This applies to magic too: if particular substances are used to practice magic but those substances don’t occur naturally near a particular culture, they may have never known that magic existed at all.
Similarly, two cultures may understand the same thing very differently. If your magic works through force of applied will, a culture that has an extensive war or sports culture may understand magic as a work of physical exertion and a force that a person outputs; whereas a culture with a heavy emphasis on language and writing may understand magic as something that is cast by being written onto scrolls and the power is in the language itself. Neither of these is wrong, per se, but both lead to differences in casting technique and what the culture is likely to use magic for.
Geography and Politics Once you have a sense of what is generally known, not known, and understood by people in your world, consider geography. Religion and other supernatural practices often do not follow the same boundaries as political boundaries - it’s plenty common to either find a single practice that is widespread and crosses many borders, or variations upon variations on practice within a single political border. Culture matters here more than politics; culturally similar areas are more likely to not only have similar practices, but also to share those practices with each other. The more culturally diverse a region, the more diverse forms of practice may be.
There are exceptions to this. For example, if you have any theocracies or magocracies - any form of government which is steered by adhering to a supernatural tradition - a particular form of practice may be mandated within the borders of the region. Even without there being such a governmental system, certain practices may be actively banned within a region for being too dangerous, blasphemous, or morally objectionable. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there’s no one who practices in a contrary way in either of these situations; just that whoever it is will likely be practicing in a secretive way, and there won’t be very many of them.
Conflicting Practice Religious, supernatural, and/or magical practices in your world don’t exist in a vacuum. In places where the edges of two different and conflicting traditions meet, or in places where many traditions operate within a relatively small space, they will change. There are a couple different ways this usually goes - which is to say, by sharing or by force.
Force is the easy one. Our real world has seen its fair share of religious wars and large-scale conversion efforts, and most people have some sense of what that looks like. It can take the form of wars in which one group tries to dominate the other; in these cases you will often find places of practice (be they religious buildings or mage schools) refitted to the conquering practice and laws made to limit the influence of the practice that was supplanted. It can also take the form of proselytizing, in which individual people organize without the force of a government to try and convert as many people who do “other” practices as possible - violently or nonviolently.
Sharing is the friendlier way this tends to happen, and is more likely the more cultural or circumstantial similarity there is between differing groups. Sometimes sharing results in each side adopting some of the customs of the other - holidays, rituals, ingredients, or the like - and creating a local variation on the practices that is its own unique thing. Sometimes sharing results in a new practice entirely springing forth from the participating practices as people draw from the most relevant pieces of each practice to make something new.
Time is another factor that can change a practice. All practices change as time goes on - because the culture shifts, because certain ingredients are no longer available or newer ones become accessible, because certain phenomena no longer happen, and so on. Consider how time and cultural interactions will have affected supernatural practices in your regions; no practice is a monolith, especially those which are most widespread.
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Next will be an a tutorial on more about culture - both day-to-day culture and how to integrate the last few tutorials into your local cultures.