Or, if you prefer, grab a copy from your favourite online retailer in print or ebook!

For a high-res version of the climate diagram in Part One, click here.

INTRODUCTION

Let’s be honest: there is a lot of information out there in the great cobwebby beyond about how to create cultures. And a lot of it begins with checklists: what do your people eat, what sort of government do they have, what kind of clothes do they wear, what level of tech do they possess, etc?

Now, while I have nothing against a good checklist, approaching your culture creation thusly is somewhat misleading. It rather implies that culture is a kind of mix-and-match grab-bag: a style of government from over here, a style of clothing from over there; a little of this cuisine, a little of that technology.

And while this kind of approach can certainly generate some creative results, a lot of the time, the results it produces don’t intuitively work. Why? Because cultures are born from their environments.

We know intuitively that polyester is a bad idea in the tropics; and maybe we can even see that meat-heavy diets are linked to colder climes, while diets rich in tropical fruits are, well, obviously tropical.

But what about things like art? What about family, and marriage, and the economy? What about the type of government?

Believe it or not, these kinds of things are influenced by a culture’s environment too, as well as by the culture’s level of industrialisation. And this book is going to tell you exactly how.

There are two parts to How To Create Culture. In Part One, I will walk you through the ten major land-based climate zones, as well as the six major aquatic environments. For each we’re going to explore how that particular type of environment—or biome—impacts a culture’s:

  • Food
  • Clothing style
  • Shelter style
  • Attitudes towards marriage and family
  • Economic development
  • Approach to health and medicine
  • Style of art and leisure

Of course, some biomes impact culture more than others. There are some biomes, for example, that support such wide ranges of cultural behaviour and beliefs (about marriage and the family in particular) that it’s impossible to draw generalisations. In these instances, some of the above sections have been left out. If a section is missing, assume that you’re safe to choose any option and still have it sit plausibly within the environment of your culture.

Also, the biome of the culture isn’t the only thing that impacts how it develops. Technology plays a major role in shaping societies; the more complex the technology is, the more influential it is over the culture, reducing the influence of the culture’s physical environment on it.

So, in Part Two, we will explore a concept called the demographic transition. Now, to quote Barbossa from The Pirates of the Caribbean, this is “more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules”.

The demographic transition isn’t prescriptive, it isn’t compulsory, and it’s certainly messy, complex and sometimes outright problematic in its application to real life—but when you’re looking to create your own plausible culture, it provides an excellent reference point when thinking about how different levels of technology can impact the development and values of a culture.

And now that that’s sorted, let’s turn to Part One…

Table Of Contents

  • Introduction  
  • PART ONE: THE BIOMES  
  • Tropical Forests   
  • Tropical Savannahs  
  • Deserts    
  • Temperate Climates   
  • Cold Forests  
  • Tundras  
  • Water Biomes  
    • Ponds and Lakes 
    • Rivers and Streams 
    • Wetlands 
    • Estuaries 
    • Oceans 
    • Coral Reefs
  • Moving Forward  
  • PART TWO: TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE  
  • Stage 1  
  • Stage 2 
  • Stage 3  
  • Stage 4
  • A Note on Religion  
  • Conclusion 
  • References
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