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    How To Create Cultures: Inkprint Writers, #3
    How To Create Cultures: Inkprint Writers, #3
    How To Create Cultures: Inkprint Writers, #3
    Ebook208 pages2 hours

    How To Create Cultures: Inkprint Writers, #3

    By Amy Laurens

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    About this ebook

    Did you know that all cultures are a direct product of their environment? Do you know why? Better yet, do you know how an environment is likely to shape the culture that develops there, in order to make your own worldbuilding both rich and plausible?

    How To Create Cultures is here to help!

    In this comprehensively-researched, easy-to-read book, learn all the major biomes and climate zones you can expect to find either on Earth or in your fictional world, and the kind of plant and animal life you are likely to find in each of these zones (and why). Even better, learn what human cultures are likely to look like in each of these zones, and why cultures are likely to evolve this way to survive and thrive in their environment!

    A complete worldbuilding primer for a culture in any given environment! Use it as a springboard for developing your own ideas, or pick and mix from the options given for a minimum-fuss ready-to-go cultural milieu that you know will feel seamlessly integrated into its environment.

    Appropriate for authors, gamers, and amateur geographers alike!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInkprint Press
    Release dateJan 7, 2019
    ISBN9781386647782
    How To Create Cultures: Inkprint Writers, #3
    Author

    Amy Laurens

    AMY LAURENS is an Australian author of fantasy fiction for all ages. Her story Bones Of The Sea, about creepy carnivorous mist and bone curses, won the 2021 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novella. Amy has also written the award-winning portal-fantasy Sanctuary series about Edge, a 13-year-old girl forced to move to a small country town because of witness protection (the first book is Where Shadows Rise), the humorous fantasy Kaditeos series, following newly graduated Evil Overlord Mercury as she attempts to acquire a castle, the young adult series Storm Foxes, about love and magic and family in small town Australia, and a whole host of non-fiction, both for writers AND for people who don’t live with constant voices in their heads. Other interesting details? Let’s see. Amy lives with her husband and two kids in suburban Canberra. She used to be a high-school English teacher, and she was once chewed on by a lion. (The two are unrelated. It was her right thumb.) Amy loves chocolate but her body despises it; she has a vegetable garden that mostly thrives on neglect; and owns enough books to be considered a library. Of course. Oh, and she also makes rather fancy cakes in her spare time. She’s on all the usual social media channels as @ByAmyLaurens, but you’ve got the best chance of actually getting a response on Instagram or the contact form on her website. <3

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      Book preview

      How To Create Cultures - Amy Laurens

      How To Create Cultures:

      How Climate Influences The Cultures You Create, A Reference For Writers, Gamers And Amateur Geographers!

      AMY LAURENS

      www.InkprintPress.com

      Acknowledgements

      How To Create Cultures is a stand-alone section from my non-fiction ‘magnus opus’, From The Ground Up. Writing this book (both as in How To Create Cultures and From The Ground Up as a whole) has been a massive, massive journey. I owe extreme thanks to everyone who’s been even tangentially involved, but without Krista D. Ball, I would never have moved past this vague, nebulous idea that I could one day put my love of demographic geography to use and talk about the ways that climate impacts culture. Krista was the one who encouraged me to write this up as a proper proposal and submit it, thereby overcoming the massive writing block I’d been experiencing. I’d actually quit writing entirely, largely because of postnatal depression, and this project—and Krista—got me writing again. With all my heart, thank you.

      I also owe massive thanks to Margaret, who spent hours combing over my early drafts, suggesting massive restructurings that have made this whole mess comprehensible for people outside my brain. Both she, and also Jason, deserve so much gratitude for their assistance with those early edits.

      And finally, immense thanks to Lynne McInnes, Cadena McKenzie, and Katje: this book would have been infinitely poorer without you, and far more riddled with errors. Thank you so, so much for your generosity and time in helping me to get as much of this right as I could. Any remaining errors are, of course, all mine.

      Of course, none of this would have happened in the first place had my Dad not instilled a love of maps and geography in me early on in the first place: our huge, gold family atlas will always hold a special place in my heart. Thank you so very, very much.

      INTRODUCTION

      Let’s be honest: there is a lot of information out there in the great cobwebby beyond about how to create cultures. And a lot of it begins with checklists: what do your people eat, what sort of government do they have, what kind of clothes do they wear, what level of tech do they possess, etc?

      Now, while I have nothing against a good checklist, approaching your culture creation thusly is somewhat misleading. It rather implies that culture is a kind of mix-and-match grab-bag: a style of government from over here, a style of clothing from over there; a little of this cuisine, a little of that technology.

      And while this kind of approach can certainly generate some creative results, a lot of the time, the results it produces don’t intuitively work. Why? Because cultures are born from their environments.

      We know intuitively that polyester is a bad idea in the tropics; and maybe we can even see that meat-heavy diets are linked to colder climes, while diets rich in tropical fruits are, well, obviously tropical.

      But what about things like art? What about family, and marriage, and the economy? What about the type of government?

      Believe it or not, these kinds of things are influenced by a culture’s environment too, as well as by the culture’s level of industrialisation. And this book is going to tell you exactly how.

      There are two parts to How To Create Cultures. In Part One, I will walk you through the ten major land-based climate zones, as well as the six major aquatic environments. For each we’re going to explore how that particular type of environment—each biome—impacts a culture’s:

      Food

      Clothing style

      Shelter style

      Attitudes towards marriage and family

      Economic development

      Approach to health and medicine

      Style of art and leisure

      Of course, some biomes impact culture more than others. There are some biomes, for example, that support such wide ranges of cultural behaviour and beliefs (about marriage and the family in particular) that it’s impossible to draw generalisations. In these instances, some of the above sections have been left out. If a section is missing, assume that you’re safe to choose any option and still have it sit plausibly within the environment of your culture.

      Also, the biome of the culture isn’t the only thing that impacts how it develops. Technology plays a major role in shaping societies; the more complex the technology is, the more influential it is over the culture, reducing the influence of the culture’s physical environment.

      So, in Part Two, we will explore a concept called the demographic transition. Now, these are more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.

      The demographic transition isn’t prescriptive, it isn’t compulsory, and it’s certainly messy, complex and sometimes outright problematic in its application to real life. But when you’re looking to create your own plausible culture, it provides an excellent reference point to think about how different levels of technology can impact the development and values of a culture.

      And now that that’s sorted, let’s turn to Part One...

      PART ONE: The Biomes

      Before we get to the demographic transition though, let’s lay the groundwork.

      (We’re about to refresh our collective memories about what the different biomes are. We’re literally figuring out what the ground the culture lives on looks like. Laying the groundwork, right? Ha!)

      First of all, what’s a biome? (BYE-ome)

      ‘Biome’ is the scientific word for the combined plant and animal life that exists in a particular location.

      The key, though, is that this plant-and-animal life is a distinct community that has formed in response to the climate of the area. It’s different to the plant-and-animal life in neighbouring areas, because the long-term weather patterns—the climate—is different.

      You can have small biomes (microbiomes), as specific as the microbiome of your hands or your stomach (each containing different plant-and-animal life at a microscopic level that have adapted to live in those different ‘climates’), and you can have large biomes, such as a desert or tropical rainforest.

      As I mentioned before, in this book we will look at ten different terrestrial (land-based) biomes, and six aquatic (water-based) ones. Here’s a quick summary of them before we get into detail:

      ––––––––

      Tropical Biomes

      Tropical climates receive large amounts of rainfall throughout the year and have high average temperatures. They are found around the equator and in tropical regions, and can be further categorised as either having year-round rainfall with no dry season, a short dry season with fairly continuous rain during the rest of the year, or tropical temperatures but semi-arid levels of rainfall (i.e. not much).

      •  Tropical Rain Forests

      •  Tropical Dry Forests

      •  Tropical Savannahs

      ––––––––

      Desert Biomes

      Deserts are climate that form in areas with very little rainfall and a huge variation between night-time and day-time temperatures. Dry climates can be semi-arid/steppe, or arid/desert.

      Deserts

      Semi-arid or steppe regions

      Temperate Biomes

      Temperate climates generally have warm, dry summers and cool, wet winters. There is a lot of variation across these climates, mostly influenced by how close the area is to the ocean. This category includes subtropical climates (which, rather than having dry summers and wet winters, can have year-round rainfall), Mediterranean climates, and most coastal regions.

      Temperate Forests (regular rainfall year-round)

      Temperate Woodlands (rain concentrated at a particular time of year, usually winter or summer)

      Temperate Grasslands (less rainfall than temperate woodlands or tropical savannahs)

      ––––––––

      Continental Biomes

      Continental (cold forest) climates are found only in the interior of large continents in the northern hemisphere in our world. They have lower rainfall than other temperate climates, but still more than desert climates.

      •  Boreal Forests

      •  North-west Coniferous Forests

      Tundra Biomes

      Cold climates are, as the name suggests, climates where temperatures are above freezing for less than four months of the year. They are also known as polar climates, and much of their ground is permanently frozen solid.

      •  Tundra

      ––––––––

      Water Biomes

      As well as these terrestrial biomes, we’re also going to look at the following aquatic biomes:

      •  Ponds and lakes (standing fresh water)

      •  Rivers and streams (running fresh water)

      •  Wetlands (such as bogs or swamps)

      •  Estuaries (where fresh and salt water mix)

      •  Oceans (large bodies of salt water)

      •  Coral Reefs (a specific part of ocean biomes)

      Somewhat obviously, the aquatic biomes have more to do with the amount and type of water available than with climate or weather patterns. You can also have most of these aquatic biomes located inside any of the terrestrial or climate-based biomes, with the exception of coral reefs, which are sensitive to temperature.

      To give you a starting point in visualising this information, here’s a map of the key biomes as we find them on Earth (for a higher-res version, see www.amylaurens.com/books/non-fiction/how-to-create-cultures/).

      For each of these biomes, we will explore the general characteristics of each before turning to the characteristics of the populations. I also provide a list of common plants, foods and animals for each biome to get you started. These lists are not exhaustive, and you can use them as the basis for inventing your own plant and animal species (though for more detail on how to do that, and on how plants and animals adapt to their environment, see How To Create Life in the Inkprint Writers series).

      However, remember that plants and animals are specific to their environments as well: just as you can’t pick up one culture and plonk it down into another biome and expect it to work, you can’t pick up a polar bear and drop it into the tropics, or substitute a hedgehog for a monkey just because they’re both omnivores. (Unless that conflict is central to your story.)

      So, the lists are not comprehensive, but they are a list of suggests of plants and animals that will work in that environment.

      Tropical Climates: Rain Forests and Dry Forests

      Tropical climates include both rain forest biomes and dry forest biomes. Although both have distinct features in terms of climate, plant life and animal life, both are similar in terms of the types of cultures that tend to form in them.

      ––––––––

      Rain Forest Biomes

      In tropical rain forests, both the temperatures and humidity levels remain stable and high throughout the year, and rainfall is also high year round (although there can be a little seasonal variation). Average daytime temperatures are around 27C/80F, and humidity is usually between 77% and 88%. Because of the high surface temperature and high humidity, cumulus clouds form almost every afternoon—one source of all that rain.

      Tropical rain forests have soils that are high in iron- or aluminium-oxide and are therefore reddish in colour. They are poor in organic matter and nutrients, although there is usually a thick layer of decaying organic matter over top of the soil. Because of this, vegetation tends to be shallow-rooted and to rely heavily on sunlight and rain for its nutrients. Luckily, both sunlight and rain are abundant in a tropical rain forest, meaning plants often grow huge leaves to capitalise on photosynthesis, and grow tall to compete for sunlight. In fact, rain forests arrange themselves fairly neatly into four layers:

      ––––––––

      ––––––––

      The emergent layer consists of the tallest and oldest trees (the ones emerging out the top). These trees bear the brunt of climactic change and receive most of the sunlight. They are home to bromeliads, which are specialised plants that have developed the ability to do without roots, instead capturing and pooling moisture from the rain in their stems and leaves, and absorbing nutrients from decaying leaves that fall into them.

      The canopy layer shelters the layers below from heat, wind and rain. Creepers and vines are abundant, and because there is very little wind to help with pollination, plants tend to produce berries or nuts to encourage animals to disperse their seeds for them (one reason for the abundance of food in the rain forest).

      The understorey consists of shorter, younger trees and shrubs, and due to its sheltered nature is home to a wide variety of animal life.

      The forest floor gets much less rain than the rest of the forest, with the little rain it does get coming from drips and trickles down the main trunks of larger trees. It also gets little to no sunlight. To combat this, many rainforest species have seeds that can lie dormant for years, waiting for the sunshine to appear when a larger tree falls. When this happens, a race between seedlings begins

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