Character Creation: Culture (Patreon)

Sure, your character is a dwarf, but does that mean they know how to make armor and tell a thousand different types of stone apart? What if they were raised in a forest by elves? What if they were raised by human monks who found a dwarf baby left on the steps of their monastery? What if they sailed the high seas as part of a pirate crew? There might be cultures of mostly dwarves, but there are also dwarves hanging out in the cosmopolitan streets of Capital and working as bandits on the road to Blackbottom. Why should these dwarves who aren’t steeped in a typical dwarf culture also learn blacksmithing and geology?

(It’s James.) I’m down for ancestries to provide anatomical and physiological benefits. A dwarf’s stone skin allows them to take more damage. Makes perfect sense to me, but assigning dwarves (or elves or memonek) or any ancestry automatic cultural benefits is limiting. It means that a hero ends up with largely the same origin story and skills as other PCs and NPCs who share their ancestry. That’s fine if you want to be a hard-drinking, fake Scottish dwarf, but what if you want to be different? Most heroes are extraordinary, and it’s because they have extraordinary origins. At the same time, there are players who enjoy the idea of being an elf who’s into hugging trees or a gnome who is a tinkerer, and we don’t want to discount those possibilities either. So what do we do? We need to separate your physical ancestry from your culture.

By the way, we’re not the first people to do this. In fact, among the designers who have made games and supplements that separate ancestry and culture is ARCADIA author Gwendolyn Marshall. She did this very thing for fifth edition D&D in her best-selling, award-winning book, Ancestry and Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e.

As Matt and I delved into character creation, we started out with the example that your hero might be a dwarf raised among high elves. Our first idea was to have each ancestry also have a culture, then you could pick one ancestry and one culture. They didn’t need to match. You could be a dwarf ancestry with the gnome culture or a wode elf ancestry with the high elf culture. We quickly realized that this idea was also too limiting and not reflective enough of the real world. There’s more than one culture dominated by humans, dwarves, and other ancestries. How can we pick which of these is the human ancestry? Also, there are some ancestries, like revenant, that don’t actually have a culture associated with them at all. Your culture is whatever it was when you were a breather. Finally, there are cultures out there that aren’t dominated by any one particular ancestry. A culture could be a diverse city, guild, or even a village that’s half humans and half polder. We needed something that a player could tailor to fit their origin story and the Director could tailor to pick their world.

I worked on a planetary culture creation system that’s part of Burn Bryte with Darcy Ross and Kat Kuhl. In this science fantasy RPG, you built your hero’s culture by selecting how open they were to outsiders, what their population density was like, how diverse their population was, and how wealthy the planet’s people were. This gave you a combination of skills, money, and special abilities for your hero. If your planet was welcoming to visitors from other worlds, you got a boost to one of your social skills. If your culture wasn’t wealthy, you started with less money to buy your equipment, but got a special ability to compensate. It was a quick and easy system that allowed players and GMs alike to create cultures. We also gave a bunch of sample cultures that were part of Burn Bryte’s default campaign setting, so if you didn’t want to build a culture, you could grab one from the menu and go.

We’re trying a similar thing in the MCDM RPG. You build a culture with four cultural aspects: language, environment, organization, and upbringing. Each of those aspects has options beneath it. Your culture’s environment could be nomadic, rural, secluded, urban, or wilderness. The aspect you pick gives you a list of skills, and you get to select one of the skills you know from the list! That’s also how your organization and upbringing work, while your language aspect gives you a language plus Caelian (aka the common tongue). You can use the rules to pretty quickly create a culture that fits your hero’s origin story or world. If you’re using Orden as your setting, we’ll give you a list that lets you know what the aspects of different cultures are and let you make up your own.

Why don’t I run you through building a culture for Gornosh, a human from Forest Rend? As a baby, Gornosh’s father, Dorkar, was killed battling a hydra in the wode. That same night, Gornosh’s mother, Thraka, dreamed of her son as a young warrior dying in the forest to the same hydra. Believing this could be a sign of her son’s doom, Thraka fled with her baby. After a year of travel and working as a baby-wearing sellsword, Thraka arrived in Capital, the Greatest City in This or Any Age. She put down roots in a neighborhood of other orcs. For work, she hired herself out as a bodyguard and guide to noble travelers visiting the city. This is where Gornosh grew up.

Language

Your culture’s language aspect is pretty simple. Here’s what it says.

Your culture’s language determines the language the people of your culture use to communicate. You know Caelian, plus another language used by your culture from Languages.

I’m not going to give away the entirety of the languages section at the moment, but I will say that Caelian is also referred to as “the common tongue,” in Orden. If you have a different, universal language in your campaign, you can just swap Caelian with that.

Since Gornosh grew up in a neighborhood of orcs, I’m going to give him Kalliak, which is one language that many orc cultures predominantly speak. It’s also an offshoot of Zaliac, a predominant language in dwarf culture, but that’s another post. If your campaign takes place in another setting, you can substitute a different language here.

Environment

Next, I pick the environment of Gornosh’s culture. Capital is a big city, so this aspect is urban. Here’s what the text currently says:

An urban culture is inside a city. It could be within the walls of Capital, a massive metropolis with a cosmopolitan population, within the caverns of an underground city, or any other place where a large group lives crowded together. The people of metropolitan cultures learn to effectively misdirect others in order to navigate the crowds and politics that often come with city life.

Skill Options: One interpersonal or intrigue skill

Gornosh gets to pick one skill from the list of interpersonal or intrigue skills. (By the way, if you’re looking for our list of skills, you can find them in this post.)

I think Gornosh learned a lot living in the city. He probably had a lot of friends from his district, orc and non-orc alike, since all those families were crammed together. Since it was just Thraka and him, when she had to work, he probably spent a lot of time with neighbors and friends. All that social interaction taught Gornosh how to relate to others, giving him the Empathize skill from the interpersonal list.

Organization

The organization aspect has three options: anarchic, bureaucratic, and communal. Capital has a lot of guilds and nobles locked in power struggles and using laws to grab what they can. The government has rules a plenty to bend. It is most definitely a bureaucratic place to grow up. Here’s what the rules have to say about that:

Bureaucratic cultures are steeped in official leadership and formally recorded laws. Members of the organization are often ranked in their power according to the laws, with a small group of people holding the ruling power, which might be determined by birthright or popular vote or some other official and measurable method. Many bureaucratic communities have one person at the very top, though others might be ruled a council. A trade guild with a guildmaster, treasurer, secretary, and a charter of rules and regulations for membership, a feudal lord or rules over a group of knights who rule over peasants who work the land, and a military with ranks and regimens are all examples of bureaucratic cultures.

Those who thrive in bureaucratic cultures don’t just follow the rules, they know how to use them to their advantage. They can bend, change, or reinterpret policy to advance their interests. Schmoozing with those who make the laws is often key to getting this done. Others in the culture might operate outside the strict regulations that govern the culture without getting caught.

Skill Options: One intrigue or lore skill

Gornosh was the kind of kid who got into some trouble around the city. He wasn’t a bad kid—just mischievous and a little bit of a lawbreaker. There were so many laws though! Is it really a crime to nick a few sweets from a nasty merchant, especially if they’re overcharging? Apparently, the Gold Buttons think so. That’s why Gornosh learned how to not get caught. He has the Stealth skill.

Upbringing

Upbringing describes how a hero was individually raised within their culture. The options for upbringing are academic, creative, illegal, labor, martial, and noble. While Gornosh did get into some trouble breaking the law, Thraka, a sellsword and bodyguard, raised him. Our hero has a martial upbringing. Here’s what the text says:

Warriors raise heroes who have a martial upbringing. These warriors could be part of a monarch’s army, a band of mercenaries, or a guild of monster-slaying adventurers. Heroes with a martial upbringing know how to prepare for a fight for their lives.

Skill Options: Blacksmithing, Fletching, Climb, Endurance, Jump, Ride, Intimidate, Alertness, Track, or Monsters

Gornosh’s mama worried most of all that he might someday return to Forest Rend and face the fate in her dream. So she taught him about the hydra and many other dangerous creatures. Gornosh has the Monsters skill.

That’s the culture. Gornosh has a language and three skills. Next, we’ll do his career … in another post!

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