Image Credit: FreeImages.com / Elinor Gavin

A lot of people seem to have the opinion that Primitive is the same thing as Simple.

While I would hope that most GMs are better educated than this, that knowledge doesn’t seem to translate into their depictions of primitive societies within their games. Most Orcs, for example, are treated as being cookie-cutter representatives of a single society with unified belief systems, common social practices, and identical behavior given the circumstances.

Exactly why this is the case, I don’t know, but not only is it not good enough, it’s missing an opportunity to inject drama, realism, and adventure into a campaign. Those things don’t often come gift-wrapped in one package, so ignoring the opportunities they represent is almost criminal.

Perhaps there’s a conceptual problem insofar as the creation of all these variations would seem to be a lot of work for insufficient reward – after all, how much of the results would the players realistically get to see? The mere tip of an iceberg, at best.

Or perhaps it just seems too difficult.

I don’t think those reasons are sufficient, and it’s my mission with this 2-part article to take them off the table, in the most direct way possible: by offering a technique by which generating these variations becomes so easy that you won’t hesitate in creating a tribe or three every time that race appears in the game – and will never reuse one unless that constancy is necessary for plot reasons, and as a deliberate choice by the GM.

A note about Scale

It takes a lot more space and time to explain something than it does to just do it, so this article contains the barest minimum needed to demonstrate the principles and processes under discussion. This doesn’t impact depth in this particular case so much as it does breadth; where I might have one, two, or three of something in this article, if you were to apply these principles and processes in a real life situation, you might have eight, or ten, or twelve.

But that’s not true of everything in this article, so I needed some way to indicate at a glance “You need to scale this up in number” or “This part of the process does not need to scale.” I’ll be stating it explicitly within the text as often as necessary, but I think an “At A Glance” mnemonic is also necessary.

What I have chosen is to append either a “+” or an “=” at the end of each section where scaling is definitive. What does that mean?

If there is a ‘+’:

…it means that whatever I’ve described in the section needs to be done repeatedly.

If there is a ‘=’:

…it means that whatever I’ve described in the section only needs to be done as often as I have demonstrated.

If there is neither:

…then it means one of three things: either

1. the question of scaling is not applicable to the subject; or
2. the topic has subheadings which have different scaling parameters; or
3. the heading relates to a sub-topic or stage within a broader subject which is where the scaling is specified.

All that might not be completely clear yet, but it will make more sense as we roll along and you see it in action.

The basic premise is this: sophistication comes from complexity, and complexity is best represented by, and generated using, iterations and variations on simplicity that, when viewed in aggregate, portray the primitive as a simple subset of a more complex social collective.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? It’s not that bad, trust me.

This system was inspired by a map of the native Australian aboriginal tribal dialects that I came across a month or so back when I started thinking about the way much of the media and even many Australians portray the entire racial population as a homogeneous whole. I realized that I also saw the same thing in American media when discussing Native Americans, and that some politicians (both Australian, American, and elsewhere) used exactly the same broad brush to describe Muslims or “Boat People” or Syrian Refugees – and there are many other examples. By labeling and collectivizing smaller groups as one larger group, it becomes easier to marginalize individuals within that group, dehumanizing them.

It was while contemplating this that I realized that by collecting these smaller groups and individuals under one monolithic label, what these people were inadvertently doing was creating and defining diversity under that collective umbrella.

In terms of application to RPGs, the broad strokes that most use to collectively describe any given race is effectively a racial profile, and most GMs realize that at best these racial descriptions have only a limited applicability to any given individual. What I realized was that there was an intermediate possibility, and that the process could be reversed to divide a monolithic group definition into smaller groups. I thought it would be ironic to use the weapons of prejudice to create, explore, and celebrate diversity within a collectivized population, and so here we are.

Tribal Elements +

The core instrument that we will use to generate different tribal groups within the one racial collective description is something that I am terming “tribal elements”. A tribal element is a single idea and all the ramifications and baggage that derive from it, but not just any concept nexus is suitable; only conceptual elements that have an overt manifestation, that make a clear and tangible difference in culture or behavior or society that the players will perceive or experience when they meet a tribe who exhibit that tribal element.

That’s what separates a list of tribal elements from a simple bullet-point summary of a racial profile. Not only must each time have a tangible manifestation, but each entry is a cluster of cause-and-effects, a compilation of related pieces of information.

That’s also what makes the results that I might achieve using the processes I’ll be describing in this article different from those that you might come up with, and from those that the GM down the road will achieve – very few racial descriptions connect cause with effect, and most don’t even state cause in the first place. Each GM will come up with their own concepts of how known piece of information “A” connects with known piece of information “B” by way of invented and inserted piece of information “C” – with the whole ABC package being a single Tribal Element.

The more tribal elements that you can identify for any given umbrella (usually, in fantasy terms, a single race), the better off you are. This article will be quite parsimonious in the number I will present as examples, but you should be as generous in creating them as you can be, based on the information you are provided by the game reference materials that you have available.

Fair warning: these might seem easy to create until you actually go to process a race, but they are not as easy as they seem when you go to do them for real. They aren’t hard, but they can be harder than they seem.

How To Generate Your Tribal Elements

There are a few tricks to generating tribal elements that will be useful in overcoming that difficulty. In general, the operational principle is to pair like with unlike. If the central component of your tribal element is a racial ability, find a way for that ability to manifest in a social behavior, for example.

Some pairings tend to “go together” more naturally most of the time, so I thought it might be useful to talk about the different element components that are most naturally derived from the most obvious sources.

Racial Abilities

Racial Abilities are the easiest to work with in many respects; all that’s necessary is to ask how having that ability would affect the lives of the possessors. The ability to resist poisons not only makes a character better able to cope with tainted or off meat, it means that this can become a food preparation technique. What other cultures might put into a stew, or salt, can be roasted or baked. Richer and Gamier meat would form a larger part of the diet. Further, the tendency would be toward weak sauces constructed from flavorsome herbs, flowers, roots, and fruits because the race have no need for strong flavors to disguise meat that’s past its best. Thus, Orcs, Half-orcs, and Dwarves might well make the best sous-chefs in the better kitchens – with appropriate training and ignoring other social factors, of course!

Racial Characteristics

Racial characteristics would be reflected in terms of the things that a race is naturally good at. A low stat could either mean that the race devalues skills based on that characteristic or that the occasional exception is praised and prized all the more highly. Elves, for example, are generally considered to have better reflexes and be more nimble overall because of their higher DEX scores; they are also keen-eyed. This combination means that they would not fish with nets, they would spear-fish: more challenging, more fun, better exercise, and their natural abilities mean that they can do just as well that way as a less-endowed race who uses nets. What’s more, that would make it relatively unlikely that they would kill any fish that were not intended; with a net, you get interlopers, and fish that are too small, all the time.

Racial Skills

Skills are a little harder, because not only do you need to understand why a race is better at a particular skill, you also need to appreciate how that betterment impacts on the society. The first might relegate this whole question to an ability- or characteristic-based tribal element that already exists, or you might get to create a cause all to yourself.

I have often gotten good value from considering all the different applications of a skill and selecting one at which the tribe are especially adept, in compensation for being ordinary (at best) in all the others.

Bugbears, with their natural strength, might well have a heightened climb skill. Why not restrict that skill to climbing rocks, swarming up cliffs, etc, and balance that by making them ordinary at climbing unnatural surfaces (like buildings and roofs) and worse than ordinary at climbing organic surfaces like trees? From that start you could get into the shape of their hands and the strength of their claw-like nails, which then leads you into thinking about their ability to grip things. Applying the basic principles from Ergonomics and the Non-human then manifests this in terms of their ability to use tools, which influences everything from food preparation to architecture/habitat construction – and those meet our criteria of a tangible manifestation.

Racial Flavor Text

Probably the richest source of tribal elements, though, is the flavor text that accompanies the racial description; you can practically break this up into bullet points paragraph-by-paragraph if not sentence-by-sentence, and each can then form the heart of another tribal element; all you need do is find practical implications or tangible expressions of each. I offered an example of how to do just that in the example that accompanied my article Creating Alien Characters: Expanding the ‘Create A Character Clinic’ To Non-Humans which looks at expanding the principles in Holly Lisle’s excellent “Create A Character Clinic” to non-humans. You can get the book from How To Think Sideways (it’s on the bottom row) or by going directly to the product page by clicking on the cover thumbnail, US$9.95.

Thumbnail History Of The Collective =

You need a couple of other tools to make full use of the system. Most of these can be summed up as “a thumbnail history of the collective”, where the collective is the grouping together of all the tribes to be created. Where did they come from? What is their shared cultural heritage? You need to know these (and similar) things, even if the race in question has lost the knowledge. This anthropology has a profound impact on the social morphology, i.e. the context that translates tribal element concept into practical manifestation.

It should be obvious that you can’t tell the story of the race except in the broadest possible strokes until after you have created the tribes; at present, you are missing at least half of the basis of the history. But you need everything that you can determine in order to create those tribes and ensure that the detail is consistent with the bigger picture.

There are a couple of things to specifically look for / decide at this point. Each of these is discussed in its own section below.

The Tribal Heart

Where did the race originally call home? What was the climate and the geography? What effects have those had on the foundations of the collective society, and what might linger as tradition from that time?

I am perpetually astounded at the myriad of subtle influences that these two factors exert on any given society, both directly and indirectly. Agriculture, Diet, Politics, Race and international relations, arts and crafts, capacity and willingness to explore, social practices – and those just scratch the surface.

I wish there was a single reasonably non-technical reference that I could point at for readers to fully assimilate the principles at play; unfortunately, all I’ve ever come across is an isolated reference here and another there, relating only to specific applications of the sociology.

Here’s a list of promising websites and articles, none of which I’ve had time to read (yet) that should at least get you started:

• How does geography affect politics/political views? | Yahoo Answers
• Political geography | Wikipedia
• How Does Environment Affect Culture? – Why do Cultures Develop Differently?
• How does climate affect culture? | Yahoo Answers
• The Effect of Climate on Human Behavior in History | JSTOR
• How does weather variability affect our economy? | The Weather Guys
• Climate Economics: The Impact of El Nino | The Market Mogul
• Is there any relation between a country’s climate and its wealth and economic development relative to other countries? | Quora
• Why Tropical Countries are Underdeveloped | National Bureau of Economic Research
• Climate, weather, and political behavior | University Of Iowa (PDF)
• How did Greece’s geography impact social, political, and economic patterns? | eNotes

Homeland Or Resettlement?

One of the most profound questions to be answered as part of the history is whether or not the modern heartland is the homeland of the collective of tribes, or is the modern heartland the result of resettlement or diaspora.

Proposition one, the traditional homeland, provides a cultural touchstone that tends to keep diversity reigned in, similar to the Imperial model. Diverge too far from the acceptable standards and you are not only considered to be a less-than-“true” representative of the collective, but you may well think of yourself as being less than a “real” member of the collective, a phenomenon of Fringe Marginalization that can be embodied in social practices, religious beliefs and practices, evaluations of cultural value, economics, and isolationism. Distance from the central homeland defines how “civilized” you are perceived to be. A greater emphasis is placed on adapting an environment to permit traditional approaches and values, even if this is less efficient than adapting those approaches and values to the dictates and opportunities of the new environment.

Proposition two removes that central touchstone, stating that for one reason or another, the original homeland has been lost to the collective. This could be environmental (a forest, swamp, or otherwise fertile land becoming a desert, a terrible volcanic eruption, or whatever), disease, population pressure leading to over-farming and loss of soil fertility, invasion, religious schism, or conquest. Even if the details of these events are lost to tribal history, the effects of the cause will linger within the society, mythology, and theology of the populace, though they might manifest in different ways. There is no longer a point of central reference to dictate “civilization” to the collective, so there will be far greater diversification over time.

This illustrates the effect described in the text to the right. Rows 1, 2 and 3 show growth and diversification from one step to the next. Row 4 shows growth and the catastrophic loss of the homeland as a unifying force. Row 5 shows the new cultural “center” of the collective, the yellow square. Those tribes that were very similar to the original homeland remain closely related to the new center, and those that were moderately divergent are now either very divergent or much closer to the common community. But without a homeland, drift and divergence accelerate, the more removed from that center the more severely; the last row shows the situation a generation or two later. The heart of the culture is unchanged, and even those on it’s “side” (i.e. had drifted in a similar direction prior to the cataclysm) are no more divergent than they would have been anyway. Those that had drifted in the other social direction are almost unrecognizable in comparison, and their divergence is accelerating. In fact, unless something happens to bring them all back together again, the right-hand tribes are about ready to form a new common culture of their own, or engage the left-hand side in a Civil War.

There is a special case in which the civilization of the original homeland withers due to one or more of the causes listed above without being completely annihilated. It can thus still exist within the collective without being able to sustain a role as the central point of reference.

This encourages diversification in most areas of society whilst preserving through folklore an increasingly-distorted perception of the commonality and traditions of the past – with the nature of that distortion being another point of variation from one tribe to the next. One would retain “this” from the original, while another retains “that” – and neither are completely correct, depending on how far back in time divergences began.

Quite often, what will happen is that the strongest military or economic tribe will define themselves as the spiritual successors to the original culture, defining a new “normal” that – by definition – further defines other branches of the original society as more substantially divergent, and hence less “pure”.

Cultural Connections

Another critical component to note are any cultural connections or contaminations that have taken place, especially if the degree of impact over a number of the tribes differs. Simply being neighbors with someone is enough for at least a segment of the population to be influenced by those neighbors.

There are two more substantial forms of cultural connection that merit special mention. The first is trade, which is often a logical outgrowth of being next to someone – even if that trade is clandestine.

Imagine we have three tribes, A, B, and C. The first tribe trades freely with their Elvish Neighbors. The second tribe is rather more cautious about the Elves, and while they will also trade with them, they will also refuse any deal that doesn’t clearly benefit them without risk. Tribe C are even more paranoid toward Elves, almost Xenophobic. They will treat tribe A with suspicion because their thinking has been “contaminated” by Elvish attitudes, and would prefer to trade with Orcs simply because Orcs are enemies of the Elves. As a result, while tribe A is exposed to Elvish cultural influence, and tribe B accepts goods and techniques that are clearly of practical value, tribe C is exposed to Orcish influence purely as a reaction to what is happening with tribe A.

The other cultural contaminant is war. This can manifest in two quite separate ways.

During World War II, Australia provided R&R for Americans on their way to various wars in the Pacific, and while some Australian culture rubbed off on them, far more American culture found its way into the Australian Society of the time, especially in terms of the entertainment and fashion arenas. We were allies, and the American culture was the dominant member of that alliance. To those areas which were not directly exposed to this influence, it was only an assimilated and appropriated second-generation form of the influence that impacted locally; and in areas that were remote even to this, a very dilute counter-cultural movement arose in response.

The history of England provides examples of the alternative mechanism by which War can influence a culture. Conquest by the Romans had a profound impact, one that outlasted the actual presence of the Romans. Over time, most of the more overt impacts were lost, but others such as road building and social organization, were assimilated and absorbed. The principles remained and were retained, but the execution was replaced with a British way of doing those things. More recently, when the English struggled to resist the Nazis in World War II, the very act of resistance, and the necessities that it conferred on the society, had a profound impact on the society for the duration of the emergency. As usual, a generation or two later, this impact became opposed by counter-cultural movements; whereas during the war, subservience of the individual over the needs of the collective society was the driving principle of society, post-war generations elevated individual independence over all but the most demonstrably urgent needs, and British interests over those of Continental Europe as a whole began to take a stronger role in the politics. Even today, those two opposed movements – pro- and anti- EU entanglement – continue to play out in English politics.

I’m only about half-way through, and I’ve completely run out of time. I’ll bring this article to a conclusion later in the week in part 2! Oh, and it the title doesn’t seem to make much sense, that’s because it’s only relevant to the process as a whole. Be patient….