What About Worldbuilding? #34 - What is Bread May Ever Fry

Happy… March? April? I don’t like that. Let’s just dial back the playing speed this year, please.

I’m still mentally in mid-January.

Well… anyway, topic! I don’t really feel like rambling on at the start here so let’s just get right into it.

You heard me

Donuts.

Churros.

Crepes. Freakin’ crepes, man.

Seems like wherever you may roam on this old marble of ours, you’ll find some sort of regional fried bread. Isn’t that fun? Heart disease… er, hearty fare knows no boundaries!

And, no, this topic isn’t solely due to the fact that I’m hungry. There’s a point to this… let me just, uhh. Well, if I keep talking I may just stumble into it.

And, yes, I did stretch the pun in that title to its absolute limit. I feel no shame in having done so.

Cartoonish Culture Clashes

One might be inclined, when concocting cultures in a vacuum, to tend toward the oddest of oddities from their own perspective to create this sense of otherworldliness.

That can have benefits, I won’t dispute that, but you can also wander so deep into your own culture building that what comes out is a confusing mess that drifts far off from believability.

Instead of trying to look for what makes different people, places, and things… well, different. Look instead of the common threads that compose a cultural identity.

Food, music, art. Things in that vein, near universal concepts that emerge. Break those down, find commonality there.

Take a cuisine, for example, from our own world. Find another, and then find dishes that kind of look alike. Take that further, break them down to the ingredients and see what stands out. What’s similar? What’s different? What can you glean from those differences?

Wheat, eggs, rice. Hell, you’ve got kelp, acorn, and mung bean noodles too. Variations of the same concept, likely inspired by the region within which they were created. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

If we look elsewhere, we’ve got music. How many variations of a drum are there? How about a flute? String instrument?

Somehow all those disparate cultures stumbled their way into the same basic instruments, but with their own unique twist.

And, honestly, need I even say a thing about art?

The thing here is to envision every culture you try to craft as a tapestry and, while you’re working with the same base threads, you can weave whatever you wish.

Same base elements, entirely different products. People are wild, man.

Okay, that’s it. We’ll make this a short one since you’re all busy nano’ing anyway.