Culture is very important in worldbuilding. Without a culture, every race seems bland and the same. Culture adds flavor to your world, gives your characters motivation, and often explains certain aspects of the story. It is an essential ingredient in effective world creation.

We will start by choosing a race to build a culture for. Probably one of the easiest is the human race, though you should create a culture for every race you have, if only superficially. For good ideas to use in creating cultures, look at various cultures around the world, and draw pieces from them.

Other pages in this site cover a few of the more specific areas of culture. These are religion, languages, naming systems, music and storytelling, history, and magic. However, these elements are not all there is to creating cultures. Culture creation is an ongoing process, and your cultures can and will develop and change throughout the course of your writing. What I will include here is just the basics of beginning your culture. You must finish it.

Use the other sections of this page to determine those other elements of culture that I have already listed. It might help to keep a summary of each race's culture, both to help keep track as you work now, and to refer back to when you write your stories. Remember that this is not extensive, and is subject to change without notice.

There are surface elements to cultures. This includes clothing styles, architecture, decoration, etc. Decide what your race wears on a regular basis, and what their buildings look like and are made of. Take into account where they live in your world, and adjust accordingly. Your race would not be living in grass huts on the tundra, or igloos in the desert. They would not be wearing loincloths in the arctic, or heavy furs in the savannahs. Be careful when you choose clothing and housing. As for decoration, decide how creative your race is. Are they highly decorative, or only moderately so? Do they need to hide easy, or can they wear clothing as flashy as they want? Consider carefully what you give them. Also, consider their weaponry when you work with these physical cultural attributes. Are they a race that works better with bows and arrows than with swords and spears? Or are they like humans, versatile, changeable, adaptable? Also consider what animals they raise and (possibly) ride. Warriors on horseback don't usually use longbows, which aren't suited for the saddle. You can even invent weapons if the need arises, as long as you describe it effectively and work it into the culture.

There are incorporeal elements to culture as well. Some of these deal with daily life. You need to determine a fighting style to go with your weaponry and war-animals, but it doesn't need to be extensive unless war is a constant element in your world. Other intangible elements include special occasions and sacred days they may celebrate, what they do for a livelihood, their system of government, their forms of eductation and training, especially with children, their methods of marriage and child-fostering, how they care for the elderly, the sick, and orphans, and traditions they have. Look at what they consider art, how their professions are set up and whether they have guilds, what they usually do as craftsmen, what they trade in if they trade, what forms of entertainment they have, and so on. You also need to decide what type of society they are, and if they've ever been anything else. For example, they could be hunters and gatherers, or they could be an agricultural society. They might have once been nomadic. You need to answer questions like these, and think of others of your own to answer, in order to develop a successful society.

There are also attitudes in culture that you must work at. How do they view love? Do they treat strangers kindly, or are they very cautious with outsiders? Will they fall in love with one person, and marry another for reasons of strategy, wealth, or power? Will they turn away an outsider of another race? Will they turn away an outsider of their own race? How do they deal with fear? With oppression? Decide how their attitudes link to the rest of their lives, and work with it. Probably the only one you'll deal with more than the others is their attitudes toward strangers.

Here's an example: My Tytheran raptori were once somewhat nomadic, following herds of creatures called skor throughout Tyther. After a while, they learned to husband the creatures, and settled down and began to grow crops as well. Their lifestyle is generally a mixing between Native American and African, with a touch of Hawaiian in there as well. Their clothing styles closely reflect this, in the furs, leathers, and brightly-patterned cloth wraps they wear. When they were nomadic, they lived in tents made of animal skins. When they settled down, they began to carve homes out of cliff sides, building whole villages in the stone. They also built buildings in the valley areas at the foot of the cliffs to act as stables, meeting houses, etc. These buildings were also built of stone. Their crops are often grown in the soil around the village, and their herds usually graze in those fields as well, or in fields on the top of the cliffs. Raptori houses are much like human houses, with "back doors" that all link into a warren of tunnels and caves within the cliffs, which eventually lead to an escape route for use in times of siege. Raptori decorate their things with beads, woven threads, and so on, using bright colors. They believe in Fate, marry for life, use strings of white beads called troth-strings to signify marriage, and are highly magical, though most only have telepathy. They often train their mages at a young age, and use weapons similar to humans', such as swords, bows, spears, and axes (maces and halberds are rare). They also distrust the human race, since when they were still a young race, the native Tytheran humans turned against them after being taught the ways of magic. Those humans were all slaughtered, and they were forgotten until they were no more than legend. Then a colony of humans came to Tyther, and again fought against the raptori, though these humans only had the "magic" of their technology, not true magic. They were also all killed off. The third set of humans eventually earned the raptori's trust, and also gained magic of their own.

As for your world, plot out basic elements for each culture, and make sure they don't conflict with each other. Decide what sounds and feels right to you, and go with it. Again, for good guidelines to follow, use examples from other cultures in our world.