Exchange of Realities

I’m one of those people who tends to need to know how a world works ahead of time to function in it. Several questions an hour, most of the way through the session, poking and prodding until it all makes sense. But despite that, if given half a choice, any character I play is likely to be from as culturally terra incognita as I can get while still being acceptable within the game setting, and from many of the games I’ve seen I’m sure I’m not alone in this regard.

Why? What makes these not-yet-fleshed-out peoples so interesting?

One, it’s near impossible to get the cultures wrong. If they’re nothing more than outlines with a couple of general purposes, it takes a more than small amount of effort to come up with facts that don’t directly contradict what these people already are.

Two, the reason why they’re not fleshed out is as often as not because the GM’s not quite sure how to handle something with their particular schtick that isn’t making it pretty similar to a lot of other things that have displayed that schtick before. If you’re choosing them because of the schtick, you’ve probably got a decent image of how to play it anyway—and now you’ve got a lot of room to come up with how it manifests both directly in the area it encompasses and indirectly in related things. It leaves room for things like the semi-criminal culture making an explicit linguistic distinction between illegal-because-they-say-so and illegal-for-a-reason, or the race whose schtick includes being good with animals also being decent mediators (how else do you handle trying to keep the different species from gnawing on each other when you aren’t looking?) And of course, if this is a race/culture with schtick, that means you have a schtick to work with that’s unlikely to be duplicated by another (added bonus, right?) and if not, at some point your understanding of your culture will probably come in handy.

Three, even without an affinity for a specific racial/cultural/sub-cultural schtick, the act of creation is fun in its own right. While a role-playing game is at heart a collaborative endeavor, it’s easy to forget that in a lot of circumstances; after a while, the world’s defined enough that you’re mostly creating your own character, occasionally her relatives (depending on how plot-important they are) or contacts, but mostly just one person and one personal bubble worth of material. Even familiars and animal companions seem to vary; some people let you play your own, others insist on hanging on even to them. But if you’ve got carte blanche to offhand develop up a culture, that puts the ball back in your court and gives you a way to balance out what you can’t do.

For the worldbuilder looking for a creative outlet, the player looking to carve out a niche for her character, or the perfectionist trying not to run counter to the GM’s world, a race not yet fleshed out can be a golden opportunity. Have you ever gotten to try one?