Conscientious Culture Design
Building fantasy cultures from real-world inspiration calls for care, since leaning on tired tropes reduces real peoples to caricature.
Parent page Location, Size, and Population
Creating fantasy cultures is a delicate topic, as it can be all too easy to create a culture or a group based on damaging stereotypes or simplistic reductions of real-world groups. Creating entire cultures out of harmful genre tropes such as “jungle heathen” or “noble samurai” reduces real-world cultures to caricatures and perpetuates misconceptions about people from those cultures. Taking inspiration from the real world is wonderful—our world is filled with an incredible diversity of cultures and peoples—but you should do so with care and respect for those sources.
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