It’s April… I don’t have anything clever to say.

Let’s just get into it, yeah?

What about Worldbuilding?

Today we’ll do something with...maps, no… even better, culture.

So, dear reader, you’ve got this world. It’s your baby, and you probably love it. Now you just need to dress it up in cute outfits and show it off to your friends. And you, being you, can’t just bring yourself to show off that world without a whole slew of new and exciting features to ensnare the viewer.

Well, how can you do that? A baby just needs a cute outfit and cuter hat, so you pick one from a beloved local sports team, certain to delight anyone with any sort of civic spirit. Maybe a onesie with some technicolor mascot designed to catch the eye and add elements of magic to the moment.

This is crude, wanton pandering, and you know it.

You can’t make the baby more interesting by playing to your audience’s personal biases, and you can’t make a world more interesting by relating it to the familiar.

Are They Romans?

We get it, you love the Romans. Now stop inserting them in every damn story you create. The obsession with pseudo-Roman substitutes is littered across modern works, but I can see the appeal. It makes perfect sense to me that the idea of establishing a common, relatable empire would make the writer’s job so much easier, and using the model that made Rome so formidable make sense as well… but if you were reading it, and it wasn’t your world… would you be entertained?

Think about it honestly for a moment, I’ll wait.

…

You were bored, right?

The legions and senate nonsense were nowhere near as interesting when you didn’t have a personal, vested interest in the world. Ironically, it’s never the Roman Republic that people seem to love, but instead, the Roman Empire which was born from it. The two entities, while similar, had very different approaches to government, and transposing one upon the other is not a good idea.

That’s cool, it really is, but what about their defeats? The Romans didn’t always win. There is a reason their empire fractured, and others rose in its place.

Furthermore, there is this conceptual belief that the Romans are the personification of strength in the ancient world. They molded disciplined soldiers and had tactical superiority over their foes that carried them to countless victories. Also, if you’re going to have a Roman-copy culture, why not copy one of their principal rivals instead? Carthage was mighty too, the Punic wars may have been a total loss for them, but that doesn’t diminish their presence in the ancient world.

Hell, the Germanic and Celtic tribes offered some resistance as well, proving Rome wasn’t infallible.

Look, all I’m saying is this... Branch out. Don’t throw cookie-cutter Romans into your world.

For want of Rome, a story can crumble.

...

There are also darker aspects of the culture which are ignored entirely in favor of celebrating their virtues or glorifying this behavior through a set of romantic lenses. For this, look no further than…

They Must Be Vikings

That’s right! Our favorite northern raiders, unless of course, you’re from LA... You might not like them so much anymore. Regardless, if you want an example of how certain groups can be romanticized for fantasy adaptation, look no further than the Norsemen of yesteryear.

You see, far and away in the barren North, life is hard… and it so it, inevitably, produces a hardier people than other places. But what are these hardy, tight-knit people to do when it comes time to make their wealth or provide for their kin? The land is barren or frozen, and growing things is hard. That means you have to hunt or trade, and there’s only so much you hunting you can do before conflict arises.

Trade then. Trade is how they will survive, but then the question becomes ‘how?’. Well, the answer is simple. If you don’t have nice things or wealth of your own to trade for the things you need, there are only two options available to you.

ONE - You rob the traders and take what you need to survive.

It’s a solid plan, and it will feed your family for, at most, a month. Then what happens? If you killed the traders that came before, others will know not to come that way. If you let them live, you and your people are marked as thieves… either way, nobody is going to come around again to trade with you. What’s option 2?

TWO - People, other people, have things you can steal and sell.

Lovely how the moral math works out on that one, right? You rob them and, if you wish, kill them. You take their food, you take their wealth, and, if you’re a particular sort of bastard, you enthrall them. Dark work, really, but it leads to the desired outcome. You have the wealth you need to trade with traders, and a little extra food and income besides.

Great, right?

Trouble is, now that lifestyle has become co-opted by modern works into a series of Viking surrogates who live a raider lifestyle to great and varying degrees of purpose. Wholesale slaughter for wholesale slaughter’s sake is not unheard of in contemporary, or even ancient, history, but it begs the questions as to why they are doing it.

Romanticizing raider culture is not something I am against, the best stories are often centered around grey actions in grey worlds, and knowing who the villain is should never be easy. The trouble I see, and the trouble you may run into is that they are, again, too familiar.

What makes your Vikings special?

“Well, you see, they’re actually Orcs who live in these volcanic pits in the…”

Let me stop you right there … That doesn’t work. Let’s put aside the toxic atmosphere entirely and look at what you did there, friend. You decided that barbarous acts were better done by non-humans, so you could increase the savagery without paying the moral toll. Clever? No. And then you took them from extreme cold to extreme warmth. That would be like me recasting the Others as Ash-walkers and calling it original. It doesn’t work and assuming that we don’t see it is insulting.

You’re not thinking outside the box, you’re pressing right up against the edge and deluding yourself.

Oh, and don’t make your Nazis or Romans into Elves, that crap is played out.

Okay, but what the hell do you want us to do, dude?

That is a good question. I will confess I’ve gone off on a bit of a rant here, but let’s try and bring things back in perspective. I am not telling anyone here to ignore historical cultures and use them to inspire places in their own world, because that would be silly.

There is no greater tutor for a writer than the history of humanity itself, every heinous thing you can imagine has been done, in one form or another, in some minute moment of a long lost age. Twists and turns abound, it’s like a long-form soap-opera.

That being said, don’t play to the most commonly explored cultures. Branch out and find others that help you concoct something new and exciting, something unfamiliar that challenges. Hell, South America had a whole civilization before Europeans ever wandered over, there’s got to be something cool to explore there.

Just don’t be afraid to go looking, and then transmogrify that instead of Rome, the Vikings, or the Mongols (a horse of a different color, really).

Discussion

Let’s try something new here. No pressure on anyone, but if you’d like to, please talk about stuff like this you’ve found in your own reading or dealt with in your own work.

FFC Winners! - Courtesy of last month’s judges. Be sure to thank them.

/u/breadyly - First!

/u/Xacktar - Second!

/u/TA_Account_12 - Third!

Honorable Mentions:

/u/DannyMethane for “if he brings the popcorn”

/u/mags_world for “don’t want no scrubs”

/u/zippitydoodiddly for “something wicked this way comes”