#($15 is a steal for the pdf considering its an rpg book and those things usually cost double that at minimum so)

[theprofessionalpromptmaker]

Worldbuilding Questions (Ask Meme)

(IMPORTANT NOTE: These questions are either taken directly, paraphrased, or added to the questions provided in the book ‘HARP Folkways’ by Johnathon Cassie, which goes into way more detailed explanations and has even more questions to consider and is a great read for anyone doing heavy duty worldbuilding.)

These are some questions to ask when developing fictional cultures. They are broken into 20 categories with a couple questions in each.

As an ask meme: Send a category and a number (or numbers) in to be answered.

Questions Below the Cut!

Environment: Topography | Water | Ecosystem | Weather

How do your cultures respond to, shape, get shaped by, understand, anthropomorphize, and live in their physical environment?

What are their water sources, fauna/flora, landscape, altitude, weather patterns, etc. like?

Do they have seasons and what do those season entail?

Urban: Permanence | Configuration | Aesthetic | Stratification

How does your culture build villages, towns, and cities?

What does the built environment look like?

How do people move through it?

How permanent are structures (settled vs. nomadic)?

How are things placed and spaced?

How do different socioeconomic status people’s homes differ?

Family: Reach | Relationship | Authority | Idealization

How does your culture structure and support families and households?

And what is the difference between the reality and the ideal?

How are power dynamics distributed in the family?

How far does the connection of family reach (to sibling or first cousins or distant cousins, etc.)?

What are family obligations for different members?

What is the most common family structure?

Marriage: Authority | Inheritance | Legitimacy | Love

How does your culture define and understand the courtship ritual, the marriage-bond and divorce?

Who inherits what when someone dies?

Who are you allowed to marry?

How many spouses are acceptable and/or common?

Under what circumstances are you allowed to terminate a marriage?

What is the relationship between marriage and family?

Lifespan: Infancy & Childhood | Adolescence | Elderhood | Transitions

How does your culture treat children, adolescents, adults, and the aged?

What does it say about birth, dying, death, and the dead?

What education is given at each stage?

Does it differ between groups?

When does a child become a productive member of society?

Are there ritual practices in transitioning between stages?

What are birthdays and funerals like?

How does the culture mark the transition from living to not?

What are the obligations of those close to the deceased to perform if any?

What behaviors are allowed or restricted in different stages of life?

What celebrations or experiences are required/common for a person to have they move through their life?

How do these transitions shape the next phase of life?

What is the age of majority in your culture?

Gender & Sexuality: Definitions | Norms | Non-normative Patterns | Relations

How many sexes does your culture/species have? How any genders?

How is gendered defined in comparison to biological sex and separate from biological sex

What aspects of biological sex and gender and sexuality are acceptable in the culture?

How do people outside those norms interact with the culture?

Are they suppressed, eliminated, exiled, or punished?

How well does the society tolerate and treat them?

How do the different genders, sexes, and sexualities interact with one another? Is there norms for this? Are their social rules and expectations? Gender roles and obligations?

How is the difference between biological sex, gender, and sexuality defined in my culture?

What will it enthusiastically embrace as a norm, what will it tolerate as an emerging norm, and what will it suppress?

Association: Distance | Fraternity | Guild | Obligation

How does your culture govern patterns of friendship, kinship, clan, fraternal organization, affiliation, and settlement?

How tightly does your society bind those in association together?

What do people who become friends do together? What makes them friends?

And once they are friends, do they develop special subcultural behaviors that make them obviously different from others? Do they acquire a tendency to wear particular jewelry or clothes or speak in a particular way?

When part of a group, what does that mean? What does their membership obligate you to do? Is your association public or private? Do you wear insignia that identifies you as a member of your group?

About what do members of the society gather together for purposes of fellowship, friendship, safety, and collective action?

What is the line between friendship and family?

What makes an association legitimate? What makes it criminal?

Rank: Nobility | Mobility | Exclusivity | Coercion

How does your culture assign rank between members of the society?

What do the different roles entitle or obligate the holder to and what are the relationships between ranks?

How does one raise their standing?

What privileges are given to the different ranks?

What are the mechanisms that compel the holders of specific ranks to act in a certain way?

Do these elements coincide with family or marriage?

Order: Sphere | Joining | Tenacity | Presence

How does your culture define orderly and disorderly behaviors?

How does it maintain orderliness and punish disorderliness?

What are the ordering institutions within that society?

How does the culture exert social control or legal control?

What are the social or legal laws of the culture?

Who decides the rules?

Who has the power to enforce and assign orders?

What organizations are in place that do the day-to-day business of enforcing the rules?

Where do they draw their authority?

What are the police and militia equivalents of this culture?

What parts of your culture are so important, so integral, that your culture would kill to ensure they aren’t violated?

What cultural practices does your culture’s most powerful forces ignore or miss? What can powerful people get away with?

What venues are available for disorder or protest?

Who has the power to give an ordering institution authority to enforce its will?

What happens when ordering institutions within one society are at cross purposes?

Authority: Legitimacy | Power | Authority | Participation

How does your culture define power, authority, and political participation?

What marks someone as having legitimate and real power?

How are they allowed to wield it/where might they wield it?

Who has authority in smaller groups? What’s the descending order of authority?

What gives someone authority? And how do people gain authority?

Who wields power in the culture and where does the person’s mandate derive?

Who exists in my culture that challenges the most powerful?

What are the competing forces at work?

About what do the members of the culture care about when it comes to power and authority and where do they feel compelled to use their own authority?

Freedom: Freedom | Liberty | Binding | Directionality

How does your culture define liberty, freedom, restraint, and libertarian customs and institutions?

What is the relationship between individualism and collectivism in the society?

About what is the individual both entitled and encouraged to act on?

Where do expectations about the broader society impinge on the rights of the individual?

What are the correctives that society uses against people that do not behave themselves?

What are the correctives that your culture uses to limit the power of the collectives to act?

Wealth: Objectification | Status | Gift-Giving | Reciprocity

How does your society feel about wealth, wealthiness, the wealthy themselves, and the impoverished?

How does your society distribute wealth?

What is rare in your culture and what is recognized, by its scarcity, to have value?

What does having a lot of money confer a particular status?

Does having wealth make you powerful or not?

Does it give someone access to the levers of power?

Does wealth shape order, authority, or rank?

Does your culture have private property?

What does it mean to have anything in your culture?

Does having or not having wealth cause people to have certain obligations to others and their society?

Work: Subsistence | Feudality | Ethic | Slavery

What does your culture value about work?

What is its work ethic?

Is there slavery?

Why do people work? Is it due to needing to stave off starvation or for other reasons?

Do people commonly enjoy their work?

What value do people assign to their work?

What value is assigned to different jobs?

Leisure: Leisureliness | Competitiveness | Athletics | Diversions

How does your culture design leisure? Does it value it?

What do people do to kick back, provided they have the means to?

Do they like individual sports? Team sports? Learned pursuits?

What do members of the culture feel competitive about? How do they manage these feelings?

Is your culture vigorous or languid?

What does a typical member of the culture prefer to do to relax?

Are different ranks/groups allowed to engage in leisure together or the same leisure activities?

What sports and games are played?

What do people do to pass the time other than sports and games?

Dress: Practicality | Status | Jewelry | Body Modification

How do members of your culture dress and adorn themselves?

How practical are their clothes?

What do different ranks wear?

What is considered jewelry? What is precious in your society that isn’t money?

How does clothes express different ranks or groups or ages?

How is social status marked via dress?

What are the materials that your culture uses to make clothes?

What about accessories like hats, shoes, gloves, and such? How are they used?

How does your culture engage in body modification of any kind? Are branding and scarring and tattoos common and used? What about piercings?

Food & Drink: Locavore | Status | Embellishment | Technique

What do members of your culture eat and drink?

What animals and plants and potential food materials readily available in the culture’s landscape? What are their local ingredients?

What foods and ingredients are reserved for people of certain statuses?

What do the poor eat vs what do the rich eat?

How do they cook? What preparation techniques are used in cooking? What are common cooking techniques?

How do people embellish their food with tastes and textures and visually?

How are kitchens commonly laid out? What are common items found in a kitchen?

Language: Dialect | Majority | Pidgins | Naming

How does your culture use language and naming?

Are there mannerisms of speech, terms, phrases, accents, etc. that are reserved for/commonly spoken by different groups/ranks? What’s a snooty way of speaking? What’s a low class way of speaking?

How is naming done? How is it important?

What are the linguistic/ethnic minorities and how is their cultures and languages treated?

How many names does a person have? Does this change based on rank?

Are named sacred and if so, how?

How do they use slang and what makes something slang?

What are terms used by different groups that aren’t commonplace in the majority language? What are code words in different groups?

What words or expressions mark someone as being of a certain rank?

What are the naming conventions of the culture?

Do the characters conform to these conventions?

What is common and what is considered completely weird when it comes to naming?

Magic: Value | Occasion | Constraint | Instruction

How does your culture understand, shape, control, teach, and use magic?

Does it have a positive or negative relationship with magic?

How do non-mages view magic?

When is magical commonly practiced, what occasions call for magic to be used?

What personal limits would an individual impose on themself and their magic? What magic is off limits/taboo?

How are mages trained formally? Is it passed down and taught by parent to child or is their public institutions for it?

Who is allowed to use magic?

How does magic impact one’s rank and status?

How hostile or friendly is the majority of the population to users of magic?

Is magic viewed as supernatural or natural?

Would magic frighten a child or delight them?

Does the practice of magic have any influence on other sections of the culture?

Supernatural: Reason | Reflection | Ritual | Soul

How does your culture understand the relationship between that which cannot be seen and that which can?

Does the culture engage in religious practices? If so, how and what are they?

How much do people trust religion and the intangible vs science and the tangible?

What are the big questions that shape the culture and it’s religion or religions?

What is the right relationship to have with the supernatural?

What kinds of relationships can people have with it?

Are their rituals or buildings or people who wield religious authority and power?

Do the religions generate a rich interior life?

How does it help the mind and soul?

Is it more internally or externally practiced? Is it personal or public?

How are people without a religion treated?

What are the religious minorities of the culture?

Self-Reflection:

What lies does your culture tell?

What does it refuse to be honest with itself about?

What are secrets and tension and cause for shame?