Building a Fantasy Culture

 

As I was preparing to write a blog about an example fantasy religion, I realized it would probably be interesting to start at an earlier point in the development process as a religion should not be developed in isolation from the culture that follows that faith.  To be a bit more interesting, we will be looking at an orc culture.  As evil societies don’t really work I am assuming that the society falls somewhere around chaotic neutral on the D&D alignment.  I am also assuming the overall setting is vaguely medieval fantasy.  You will see as we go that this process is a mix of making informed choices and following where logic takes us.

 

 

Now the first thing we are considering is the general terrain and climate this culture lives in.  Ships aren’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think orcs, so they live somewhere inland.  Natural borders are usually either mountain ranges or rivers, so we will assume that it is a river that separates the orcs from the coastal lands to give us options on the far side, away from “civilization” is a mountain range.  Tributaries of the river flow through the orc lands from the mountains so it is a fairly fertile place.  We will probably have to come back to terrain later as this process iterates.

Next we at least take our initial look at the government.  I don’t want this to be a highly unified land, so it will be a collection of effectively independent tribes rather than a kingdom.  Each tribe is led by a chieftain or warlord.  Among the tribes there are usually one or a few that are considered to be the firsts among equals.  But how do they pick a new chieftain when the current one dies.  We could go with the eldest son, or even eldest child but the development of primogenitor as the only type of inheritance didn’t completely dominate western europe until well into the middle ages.  There are many risks with just assuming the eldest is competent and able to run things well.   Primogenitor is also relatively boring, so I think something different is in order; at the same time we don’t want complete chaos in picking a new chieftain so I am thinking a system somewhat similar to the Tanistry system used in Ireland and Scotland.  The simple explanation is that an heir is chosen from among the close male relatives of the chieftain, thus the choice would probably include the old chieftain’s sons, brothers, nephews maybe even cousins and their sons.  This has the added benefit that if the chieftain dies before his sons come of age, another male relative of age can be picked; also complete idiots won’t be chosen so the tribe doesn’t have to risk that issue.  This system allows for all kinds of scheming that could be an interesting backdrop to a campaign.  You have two choices for how the next chieftain is picked, all eligible candidates get a vote or all freemen get a vote.  Probably some tribes use each option, there could even be some kind of wealth/property requirement to vote so it isn’t all freemen.

So we have a rough idea of the overall government structure and the general terrain, next I think we need to look at how the population is distributed.  The decentralised nature of the area means there probably isn’t one dominant city, or even two or three clearly largest ones as their tribes would subjugate the others.  At the same time, the lands have managed to stay independent, so the population on such fertile land cannot be too low otherwise their neighbours would have conquered them all.  A logical compromise is a decent number of large towns, probably one major one for each tribe and then a few smaller towns and large villages within the lands controlled by most tribes. 

Each tribe having multiple centres of at least several hundred people to low thousands will require leaders below the chieftain.  There are several options for how to handle this, first is to make these leaders other relatives of the chieftain, maybe more distantly related than other sons of the last chieftain, cousins and second cousins.  The other option is for them to be different families, likely still connected by blood as families reasonably close geographically and of similar social status tend to intermarry; this would be more like the headman of a major town’s mother is the aunt of the chieftain or the chieftain married the sister of a headman.

Next we come to a maybe random question that has more impact than you would think.  How literate is the population?  At least some portion of the population has to be able to read and write, you can’t run a government for tens of thousands of people without some records, but it would be highly unlikely that everyone can read.  

I feel like for their army the vast majority of them are part time warriors, active during the raiding season over the summer and working as farmers, labourers and tradesmen the rest of the year.  Towns would have a few watchmen to guard the gates and discourage petty thieves that could defend the town while the rest of the warriors gathered if they were attacked unexpectedly.  Chieftains and other elites would have small retinues of full time professional warriors.  Different tribes would raid each other or the non-orc lands around them.  Usually this is a fairly decentralised affair with small bands of 50 to 200 warriors doing smash and grabs trying to avoid any real fight.  Most warriors would have a spear, round shield and helmet; often with a hand-axe or other basic secondary weapon and some hardened leather armour.  The few full time soldiers would generally have chainmail and often had swords.

Hopefully you found this interesting and will be back when we look at their religion in a future blog post.  What did you find most interesting about them?