Click this thumbnail to reach the full-sized map, © Aboriginal Studies Press, AIATSIS and Auslig/Sinclair, Knight, Merz, 1996.

In Part 1 (make sure you have read it before continuing) I made reference to a map of Australian Aboriginal Languages which contrasted so strongly with the media stereotyping of these peoples as a single collective population that it was revelatory and inspirational.

I meant to provide a link to that map, but ran out of time. But it’s just as relevant to this half of the article, so I have provided such a link below. The map was sourced from the Museums & Galleries Of NSW website. The map was created by David R Horton and is © Aboriginal Studies Press, AIATSIS and Auslig/Sinclair, Knight, Merz, 1996.

The first part of this two-part article told the reader how to construct the building blocks of a tribal “collective” view from known sources of information, and from your own creativity. Specifically, we have a list of “tribal elements” that collectively describe the “generic” member of the population; we have a very brief overview of the history of that population, and have used that to create a list of cultural contaminants and influences that have either operated directly on the population or that have caused a reaction in that population’s development.

Extending the Tribal Elements List +

The contaminants and influences now have to be added to the tribal elements. Once again, this is to be more than just a list of things that have affected the population, it needs to explicitly state effect as well as cause.

If the race was once conquered and enslaved by Giants, or Bugbears, or Drow, or whatever, how has that experience influenced the population as they are today? What traces of the experience remain?

Encoding The Tribal Elements List =

The final step before we’re ready to begin using what we’ve developed is to encode the tribal elements list. This simply means preceding each with an alphabetic code so that we can refer to it easily. So the first one is “A”, the second is “B”, and so on.

If you run out of letters of the alphabet, start using 2-letter codes – AA, AB, AC, and so on, all the way through to ZZ. That’s capacity for 702, which should be vastly more than enough.

In terms of the number of Tribal Elements, there are two separate influences at play: you have variety of source material tending to inflate the list, but the practice of conflating cause and effect, and filtering out anything that doesn’t have a practical, observable, manifestation, both operate to condense the list. So, while I would hope that you would have more than ten or twelve items on your list of tribal elements, it would be rare to have more than 20-25. So I would not expect the “two letter” provisions to be required very often.

“I don’t have enough items. Now what do I do?” +

Game sources provide quite a lot of material on some races, especially those available for PCs. In other cases, there can be a pronounced dearth of source content. If you don’t have AT LEAST EIGHT entries on your tribal elements list, it can only mean that the race is insufficiently distinctive at present, and you need to supplement the source material with content of your own creation.

There are two directions from which you can work: You can go from “invented cause” to “logical effect”, or you can go from “invented effect” to “logical cause”. In practice, I would use both.

From “Invented Cause” to “Logical Effect”

This means adding something fundamental and original to the racial profile. It could be an ability that the race didn’t previously have, but that seems to make sense (given everything that you do know about them, or it could be a skill that they weren’t previously noted for, or it could be made from broader conceptual strokes.

The treatment of Ogres in my Fumanor campaign stands out as an example. I described these in detail in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series, part 2, so I won’t go into too much detail here. In a nutshell: Ogres were quite intelligent, and naturally good civil and military engineers. Drow hand-picked some of the brightest, and taught them things, and twisted their worldview, creating Ogre Magi to rule over the rest of the populace. The Ogre Magi distributed an addictive Drow creation, Bluevein, which made the population docile, and much larger and stronger, giving the Drow the biological equivalent of a tank corps. The occasional resistant individual was taken away by the Ogre Magi and made one of their number. All this came to light when a tribe’s Ogre Magi was killed and they were cut off from Bluevein; most died from Withdrawal, but the rest got their higher faculties back and began figuring out the story. This adds a number of new ideas to the Ogre concept, largely inspired by the Jem’Hadar in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – with Drow in place of the Founders (aka Changelings), Ogre Magi in place of the Vorta, and Ogres for Jem’Hadar.

From “Invented Effect” to “Logical Cause”

Going in the other direction means adding some behavioral or social trait that fills an empty niche in the societal description and then inventing (through as long a chain as necessary) a cause for that trait, by continually asking “why is it so?”. Once you have reached whatever you judge as the “fundamental” why, you then start from that and look for more consequences. Better yet, you can start with some aspect of the racial profile that isn’t explained, or whose explanation seems inadequate, and fill in the blanks from that starting point.

I illustrated this process in inventing the extra sense “Commune With Earth” for Dwarves. This was a spiritual connection with Earth and the spaces beneath the surface which manifested in all the things Dwarves were supposed to be able to do from the Player’s Handbook / Fantasy Literature, linking them together. You can read about this sense and the profound impact that the concept has on Dwarfish society, in Creating Alien Characters: Expanding the ‘Create A Character Clinic’ To Non-Humans, which I revisited in Part One of this article.

The Other Reason: Uniqueness

The other reason for doing this is to make each race distinctive within your campaign. I’m not going to go into this in any detail here, having done so on many other occasions in great depth; but some mention is warranted. There are three basic principles: first, you might have a theme or central concept for the campaign that is not currently represented within the makeup of the race; it is therefore necessary to either add a connection to the theme or concept to the race’s makeup, if necessary replacing some established fact with a variant that suits your thematic needs; secondly, you might simply have an original idea that you want to explore just because it feels original or fun; or thirdly, you might want to make the race more reflective of a certain non-standard source. These are all good reasons to customize a race. The process is the same, except that you might be replacing, instead of adding, a tribal element.

The Common Core =

For any given collective population, there will be some Tribal Elements that are definitive and fundamental; if a population group has these Elements, then they are part of the collective population, no matter how significantly other tribal elements might vary. These are the things that define the population as a whole.

Before you can begin ringing in variations within the collective structure that you’ve defined, you need to know what you aren’t going to change, in other words.

There are two approaches to doing this, and once again I would employ both. The first is to define one or more Elements that you consider “conceptually central” to the racial profile, i.e. definitive; and the second is to generate the variations, and to select one or more elements with the fewest number of variants. As a general principle, I would recommend using the first, with ruthless self-restraint, and then using the second to pad out the list to the required number.

How Many Tribal Elements in the Common Core?

There should be a base number of three tribal elements in the common core. I increase this by one if the race still occupies its homeland. I also increase it by one each if any two or more of the overall geography, climate, and ecology match that of the homeland even if the race doesn’t occupy that homeland or it has changed since the population group came into existence.

The term ‘population group’ has been used because we could be talking about a race, or a civilization, or any other way of collectively defining a population.

So that’s 3-5 tribal elements that need to be considered ‘definitive’ for that population group.

Selecting the ‘Common Core’ Tribal Elements

As a general rule of thumb, the three ‘base’ items should be “fundamental” or “definitive” to the way you think of the population group; any additional items can be either definitive or can be chosen because they don’t lend themselves to easy variation. If part of the Common Core exists only because of similarities in environment, I would also try very hard to choose a Tribal Element for that part of the Common Core that derives from an appropriate environmental factor. But sometimes there simply isn’t one that’s appropriate.

Tribal Element Variations +

With the “core identity” of the population group identified, it’s time to create as many variations as you can think of for everything else on your Tribal Elements list.

For example, one of the differences between the 3.x description of Centaurs and that in Pathfinder is that Pathfinder describes their habitat as Temperate Forests and Plains, while 3.x only lists the Forests. D&D also emphasizes but doesn’t explicitly state that Centaur tribes have a central lair that is the hub around which all their activities orbit, abandoning these central lairs only in the event of a threat to the tribe as a whole, such as a Dragon or a Giant. Pathfinder provides for more variety, and explicitly states that there are “vast regional variations – from lean plains-runners to burly mountain hunters” – while also stating that they prefer to occupy the fringes of forests. Both emphasize the territoriality of the race but only Pathfinder explicitly uses the term.

That suggests to me that there are already three major variations predefined for the GM: D&D 3.x centaurs (Population A) for deep within forests, a Pathfinder variant (Population B) which occupies the forest fringes in mountainous regions (because those are where the forests are) and another Pathfinder variant (Population C) who live on the plains.

None of these yet meet the criterion of a tangible manifestation. For that, we need to look at what these groups do.

• Group A strikes a balance between hunting and agriculture, with the suggestion that they are very good at the latter. The males hunt while the females control the central nest and the crops. The impression is left that the tribal populations are centralized because the females prefer stability, and dominate the males; if the females were less rigid about their nesting places, the males would range far more widely than they do. Because staying in the one location makes you vulnerable to that location being attacked by enemies and predators, the males have become far more territorial in defense of the females.
• Group B: Pathfinder makes no mention of agriculture or tribal culture, but places greater emphasis on their hunting skills. Hunt-dominated tribal behavior is generally oriented around the food supply – the hunters follow the game – because you can’t count on game to come to you. Territoriality results from and is defined by a tribe’s hunting range. This is exactly the effect you would expect to see if the males dominated the females, and there was no agriculture to pin the tribe down to a singly location.
• Group C is barely mentioned except as “lean plains-runners”. The only way to populate this group with any information at all is to take the differences between groups A and B and extend them. Group B are more mobile than group A, less centralized; extending that trend gives us a highly mobile population with virtually no reliance on agriculture. They have a far wider range – plains tend to be fairly open spaces relative to mountains – and that also favors a more nomadic lifestyle. What unifies tribes of this type? Generally, they centralize around a semi-domesticated herd of animals – less ala-carte hunting of whatever is available, more consistency of diet. They follow their herd, which is not penned up. We also have hints that they are leaner and probably fleeter of foot therefore, and that suggests that their herd animals also tend to be fairly fast. So, instead of animals that are fairly solitary, like deer, we’re looking for a herd animal that moves quickly. Impala meet that requirement, or I could get creative and look at smaller dinosaurs – it’s a fantasy world, after all!

Beyond that, I would think about the environments that aren’t mentioned. A smaller, slighter Centaur that climbs like (and hunts) mountain goats to live at the tops of the world. A camel-like centaur with a hump for more arid environments. Another small variety with long white fur that wears furred skins and hides on the human torso and copes well in cold and snowy areas. And for wastelands, perhaps a centaur that is half giant lizard instead of half-horse – but that retains the central core that we have defined as “Centaur”. Again, why not? It’s fantasy.

The Principle Of Variation

For each item that you have not selected for your Common Core, there are inherently a number of variations possible. These are:

• Dominant trait
• Significant trait
• Marginal trait
• Suppressed trait

…and that’s before you even begin thinking about changing the trait itself, as I did in the Centaur example above.

A Dominant Trait is one where the tribal element in question is the most important non-core characteristic of the group and is strengthened sufficiently to justify that prominence. Everything that is not a dominant trait else is secondary, and may even have to be adapted to serve a role in the dominant tribal element. Society and religion and the rituals of daily life all revolve around the dominant trait(s). Common core traits are only dominant to the extent that every sub-group of the overall population has those traits in common to some degree at least – they keep your centaurs being centaurs by defining what it means to be a centaur, or whatever, but nothing beyond that. That makes a dominant trait the central theme that pulls the one sub-group together as an identifiable characteristic, the thing that subgroup all has in common.

A Significant Trait is one that is stronger than in the average representative of the whole population, but not strong enough to dominate. It’s a point of similarity between two tribes or sub-groups, like a common language or shared heritage or attitude, but it’s not a point of tribal identification.

An Average Trait is a typical part of the makeup of a group, but not significantly stronger or weaker a constituent of that group than it is in the overall populace. Except in the limited circumstances described above, Common Core traits are always of “Average” strength, because that lets tribal diversity be prominent. This is the default strength unless defined otherwise within the trait.

A Marginal Trait is one that is weaker in a specific subgroup, while still having an influence.

And, finally, a Suppressed Trait is one that is virtually non-existent within this subgroup.

Let’s say, for example, that Goblins have a trait, Hatred Of Bugbears, due to some incident in the past of the race. In some Goblin Tribes, this trait is dominant, it’s the most central fact of their lives. In some, it’s a significant part of the tribal makeup, but only to a limited extent. In some, it’s no stronger than it is in the population as a whole. In some, it’s marginal and has little impact on that particular tribe; and in others, it’s ancient history and has virtually no bearing on the tribe’s activities. A member of the latter group might even speak Bugbear, or at least have adopted some Bugbear terminology, and might be accused by the first group of having been collaborators in the past – depending on the reasons for this particular trait, and on how the trait manifests at a cultural level. In this case, because I always equate Bugbears with bullies and bullying, I keep thinking of the cycle of domestic violence and how that form of bullying can be a learned behavior – so, because the Goblins were historically mistreated by Bugbears, some have learned the lesson that this is the right way for the strong to treat those weaker than them, while others have rejected that fundamental premise. This would manifest in how the different tribes treated the weaker members of their own society, assuming that there is no other race that the Goblins have managed to subjugate. This in turn would influence the roles of the genders, and the treatment of the young, and – to some extent – the treatment of those who are simply different.

What’s more, each of the content variations should also have it’s own set of intensity variations.

Differences Plus Consequences

In short, then, each variation is a “difference from the mean” plus the practical consequences of that difference. This is the most important thing to bear in mind: because a Tribal Element must have some overt manifestation, must have some practical expression within the culture or society or abilities of the population, each of these variations makes a practical and tangible difference from one tribe to the next.

Variations within the Elements List

Each tribal element is followed on the list with its variations. These may be variations of content or of intensity or even of manifestation. And each should be encoded with the alphabetic code of the tribal element from which it derives, plus a sequential numeral – so you have Tribal Element A, and then variations A1, A2, A3, and so on, and then Tribal Element B, and variations B1, B2, B3, and so on.

At least, that’s the theory

In practice, things don’t work out quite as neatly. It doesn’t much matter if there’s a difference in content or manifestation if the tribal element is very low in intensity. What we’re looking for are meaty, substantial differences that we can get our roleplaying ‘teeth’ into; “bland” is not an acceptable flavor option except when it leaves space on the palate for some other strong flavor to take center stage.

It’s also possible for some of the alternatives to lead to internal contradictions; if any of these occur, that particular combination has to be rejected. More importantly, if there is a contradiction between a variant and one of the Common Core elements, that variation has to be scrapped on the spot.

As a result, and as a general rule of thumb, no matter how many variations in content and manifestation you have, don’t expect any but the base set to have all four variations plus ‘average’ available. Sometimes you will have only the three most intense, and sometimes you might be able to squeeze a fourth.

In the final analysis, you might have some tribal elements with only 2, 3, or 4 variations, more with 5, 6, or 7, and only a few with more.

A Tribal Element Index: Organizing Your Variations =

Once you have all your variations, the hard work is done, well almost. There’s one step left before we can start using everything that we’ve created, and that’s creating a tribal element index.

This is nothing more complicated than a list of your tribal element codes across the page and, underneath, a list of the variant codes for each. It also makes life simpler if your selected Common Core traits are grouped separately to the rest. So it would look something like the image below:

It’s easiest if you use a sheet of square-grid mapping paper or graph paper for this – half-inch or 1cm squares would be about right, turned so that the longer axis of the page runs across the top – or a spreadsheet. What you can see here is an example with four Common Core elements across the top, 15 non-Core elements, the first of which has 12 variations, the next 7, and so on.

What this is for:

As a variation gets used, it gets crossed off in pencil or some other temporary format change is made, so that the next tribe to have a variation in this respect – I’ll get into details of usage shortly – has a variation that hasn’t yet been used.

The Heartland Population =

In theory, the population of the heartland is the standard against which all others are measured. In practice, as discussed last time, it’s not necessarily that simple. Just because most Lizardfolk have a spiny crest doesn’t mean that those in the homeland do. It just means that in MOST characteristics they will fit the general pattern.

As a general rule of thumb, the more variations you have for a given tribal element, the more likely it is that one of those variations will apply to the heartland population.

If you have no variation pools that are larger than eight or nine entries, the expectation would be that the heartland would conform to the “standard model” described in the rule books, plus whatever content and internal logic you may have added.

Starting with a base of 5%, and doubling for every variation pool with 9 or more entries, you can – in sequence of smaller to larger – determine just how likely it is that the heartland has “drifted.” If the heartland is not also the original homeland, use pools of 8 and above and a base of 6% – which may not sound like a lot of difference, but it will add up.

In the index illustrated above, there are three variation pools with 9 or more members: A, Q, and S. A has 12, S has 11, and Q has 9. That means that there is a 5%$ chance of a heartland variation in Q (the smallest pool), a 10% chance of a variation in S (the second smallest), and a 20% chance of a variation in A (the largest). All told, that’s a 35% chance that there has been a drift somewhere in the heartland population.

If this particular example belonged to a civilization or race that had been driven out of their homeland (which, technically, would include most versions of the Drow), it makes a big difference. R gets added to the mix, with a pool of 8 variations, and – as the smallest applicable pool – is awarded a 6% chance of a variation in whatever the heartland now is. Q, as second largest, gets double that, or 12%. S is now third largest, so we double the 12 to get 24%; and A, the largest, gets double that again, or 48%. Add those up and you get 90% – so there is a virtual certainty of a variation.

If, for the reasons described in part 1, you want to make it a complete certainty, use a base of 7%. In this case, that would add up to a total of 109% chance of a variation.

The Neighboring Tribes +

Each tribe that neighbors the heartland will be somewhat different from the heartland population. How different? To determine that, we use something called the Similarity Rating.

Similarity Rating

The similarity Rating has a base value equal to 1/3rd of the total number of Primary Tribal Elements or the number of Core Elements, whichever is higher.

There are additions to that number for a number of factors, described below. The total that you end up with are the number of tribal elements that this neighboring tribe have in common with the population of the heartland, NOT COUNTING the Core Elements.

The Similarity Rating has an absolute maximum of 1 less than the total number of Tribal Elements – EVERY tribe needs to have at least ONE point of distinctiveness to it! It also has an absolute minimum of 1 – so there will always be at least ONE respect in which the neighbors are the same (in addition to the core elements).

Loss Of Homelands

Most of the time, each factor will add 1 or more to the total if there is a point of similarity between the environments of the two tribes. However, if the homeland has been lost a historically-significant period of time in the past, each point of dissimilarity will subtract one from the total instead. In this case, the base Similarity Rating should be increased 50%, i,e, to one-and-a-half times whatever it was.

Geography: Similarities and Differences

For each respect in which the geography of the two realms is similar, add 1 to the total, or for each respect in which they are dissimilar, subtract one, depending on whether or not the homeland has been lost.

Geography II: connections vs isolations

If there is a means of connecting the two tribes, i.e. a road, or a waterway, or a passable border, add an additional +1 to the Similarity Rating.

If they are geographically separated – a lake, a mountain range, a desert in between them, or whatever – subtract +1 from the total, even if you have already subtracted one for a point of dissimilarity. This includes otherwise passable terrain that is occupied by a hostile force – so two tribes of Orcs might both neighbor an Elven Forest but not be connected by it.

Climate

If the climates are similar, add +2 to the Similarity Rating. If they resemble each other but are still different, add +1. This applies regardless of any effect of Homeland Loss.

Cultural Infusions

If one of them has a neighboring race other than the tribal collective and the other does not, subtract two from the Similarity Rating. If the homeland has been lost, increase this change from a two to a three.

This adjustment can occur multiple times, but subsequent occurrences count for 1 less – so if both have odd neighbors but these are of different races, there is a 2 or 3 reduction in similarity from the first, and a 1 or 2 reduction in similarity from the second.

GM Intuition

Finally, the GM can adjust the total by 1 or 2 in either direction according to his intuition, provided that he doesn’t violate the maximum or minimum value.

Selecting A Variation

So, you now know the number of ways in which the neighbors are the same. That makes it easy to determine the number of ways in which they are NOT the same.

I use a simply random roll to select trait columns across the index. Whether or not I’m marking off points of similarity or points of variation depends on which one is going to be the least work. If I end up with only 4 points of variation, it’s a lot easier to roll dice four times than it is to make 12 or 16 or whatever-the-similarity-rating-is rolls. If I wind up with only 4 points of similarity, that’s the easier set of results to determine.

Next, I locate the variation on the column that describes the “known neighbor” – in this case, the heartland, but the same process can be used to go further out – on the index. Let’s say that we have a variation in Tribal Element F, and that the heartland has a value of F. Skipping over any that have already been crossed out as used, I count either one step up or down, or (if the homeland has been lost) two steps. That identifies either one or two possible variations for the new tribe. You must pick the one that provides the least contrast to the reference tribe – this is again a matter of judgment for the GM. Note this variation on the description code of the tribe – I’ll get to that in a moment – and cross it off the index.

If there are no uncrossed-out entries in the column, use one of your vertical steps to move left or right instead (again, ignoring crossed-out entries), overriding the random selection of column.

Put all the selected variations together with the selected similarities and the results describe the new tribe.

Only when every entry on the index has been crossed out can you erase those crossing-outs and start all over again.

The image to the left illustrates the process. First, the central population, i.e. the homeland or heartland, are defined. Then you generate tribe #2, ensuring that it has a mixture of commonalities and differences that are appropriate to their circumstances relative to home tribe. You then move on to Tribe #2, again using the home tribe as reference, but making sure of reasonable levels of similarity and distinctiveness to both the home tribe and tribe #2. Repeat with appropriate corrects for tribes #3, #4, #5, and #6.

Outer Tiers +

You can populate new rings of tribes in exactly the same way. This graphic illustrates a seventh tribe that is neighbors to both tribes #2 and #3. You can base the tribe on either but once again the comparison should be to both. Just keep adding tribes – of varying size – until you are satisfied that the entire area in which the collective population resides has been covered.

The Tribal Code

Every tribe that you generate can be defined by the codes that constitute it. If you look again at the sample tribal index, one valid tribe would be A3BC2DEF4GHI2JKL5MNO2P3QRS9. Which just looks like alphabet soup until you put dashes or fullstops in to separate the different components: A3.B.C2.D.E.F4.G.H.I2.J.K.L5.M.N.O2.P3.Q.R.S9 or A3-B-C2-D-E-F4-G-H-I2-J-K-L5-M-N-O2-P3-Q-R-S9.

But why go to so much trouble? Institute a policy that anything that’s not an explicit variation is presumed to be the core, and you can simplify the code to A3.C2.F4.I2.L5.O2.P3.S9 or A3-C2-F4-I2-L5-O2-P3-S9. If you keep a list of the variation combinations that you’ve used, you can make sure that you never repeat a tribal combination unless you want to – in other words, that every tribe is unique while still being definitively a part of community X.

Who Is This Tribe?

That’s all well and good if you’re creating a game world. What if you aren’t, or don’t want to do the whole lot in one go? What if you need a tribe – just one – right now?

Easy! All you have to decide is how many tribal “steps” away from the homeland the tribe that you need to create are. In the illustrations above, tribes 1 through 6 are all one step removed, tribe 7 is two steps removed.

Then adjust the Similarity rating accordingly:

• One Step: determine the base Similarity rating. Adjust it half-way in the direction that would normally apply – so if the homeland is still viable, that would be be (1/3 + 1)/2 similarity, or 2/3 similar, and if it’s not you start with 2/3 and adjust back to 1/3 similarity. If there are 15 variable Tribal Elements, as there are in the Index Example above, that gives similarities of 10 and 5, respectively.
• Two Steps: Every subsequent step reduces the similarity, but by a decreasing amount each time that allows for the possibility that a subsequent variation will occur within a Tribal Element that has already been modified. This is achieved by multiplying the adjustment (half the similarity) by the similarity and dividing by the total number of Tribal Elements that aren’t part of the common core. So: Half of 10 would be 5; 5 multiplied by 10 is 50; 50 divided by 15 is 3.333, which rounds off to 3. So the similarity drops by 3 to 7. Or, of the homeland has been lost, the similarity starts at 5, half that is 2.5, multiplied by 5 is 12.5, divided by 15 is 0.833 which rounds to 1 – so the similarity is now 4.
• Three steps: perform the same trick. Similarity with a homeland is now 7, half of that is 3.5, multiply by the 7 to get 24.5, divide by 15 and you get 1.63 which rounds to 2. So the similarity is drops to 5. If the homeland had been lost, the similarity was 4; half of 4 is 2; 2 times 4 is 8; 8/15 is 0.53, which rounds to another loss of 1 point of similarity. The similarity rating is now 3.
• Four steps: do it again. Similarity with a homeland is now 5, and we have already calculated that that results in the loss of 1 point of similarity rating, giving a result of 4. Similarity without a homeland is now 3, half of which is 1.5; multiplied by 3 is 4.5; and divided by 15 is 0.3. That rounds to zero, so the Similarity rating stays at 3, but we save the 0.3 to add to the next result.
• Four steps: The similarity with a homeland at three steps was 4, and we’ve already calculated that this produces another loss of 1 point of similarity rating. The similarity without a homeland is 3, still, but with a 0.3 divergence carried forward from the previous step – so that will become 0.6 change this time around, which rounds to a further point of similarity loss, giving a rating of 2.

Just keep going as often as you want. Once you know how far removed from the base description (ABCDEFGHIJKLMOPQRS) the tribe that you’re creating are, it’s just a matter of selecting the variations and compiling the description of this particular tribe.

These calculations aren’t statistically rigorous; this is a relatively simple approximation that is “good enough” for game purposes.

Who Is This Tribe? =

I can’t speak for everyone, but a lengthy list of variations from which particular items has to be extracted each time in order to get a description of a tribe is both impractical and error-prone. If I were using this system (and I will be, in future), I would open my list of variations and “save as” [Tribename], or even just “Tribe #6” or whatever. That lets me delete from the text everything but the variations that are actually in force for this tribe.

I would then highlight the overt manifestations, either by making them bold or changing the font color, and sort them using copy and paste into six categories. When I had finished that, I would look at any of those that don’t fall naturally into that particular category and add a relevant manifestation if I could think of one. One of my early articles (actually, it’s a multi-part series, but the first one has links to the rest) can help: Distilled Cultural Essence – Part 1 of 4: Creating a different society.

The categories are detailed below.

1. Questions Of Culture

Culture is how the people live their social lives – their entertainment, their modes of artistic expression, etc, their languages, and their traditions.

2. Practices Of Society

Society is about who’s in charge, why them, and what their priorities are.

3. Issues Of Architecture & Domesticity

This is about the everyday lives of the members of the tribe.

4. Curiosities Of Ideology

This covers the tribe’s beliefs and how and when they worship.

5. Matters of Capability

This covers any unusual abilities that the tribe’s members have, and any usual abilities that they don’t have. It also asks why and why not, respectively.

6. Cohesion And Collision

Finally, there’s the diplomatic side of the tribe – who they get along with, who they don’t, who their neighbors are, and so on.

The Strength Of The System

This system works because it constructs diversity from generalization in a very structured and managed way. It’s extendable – you can add more variations whenever you think of them – but it also ensures that the “core” of each sub-population contains those elements that are definitive for the race or civilization. That means that you can invest whatever time you can spare in prep and supplement it at your leisure, making it very efficient.

It doesn’t waste a lot of time on things that make no difference, by deliberately focusing only on those things that have an overt manifestation, that make a tangible distinction between this tribe and the next. It goes beyond simple re-skinning but doesn’t involve much more work, and the dividends that can result are enormous.

While the entire article has been written from a D&D/Pathfinder perspective, it is systemless, and can be used with ANY game requiring primitive cultures – whether that’s pulp, or space opera, or whatever. And every time that you use it, the forces of xenophobia are reviled and mocked. That’s a bonus, but a good one!