Cultures are not personality types shared by millions of people. They are living conversations about how to survive, belong, celebrate, remember, and disagree. Factions emerge when people organize around a particular answer.
By the end of this step, you will have a community with everyday texture and at least two groups whose goals can collide.
Start with needs and values
Choose a community connected to your anchor location. Ask:
- What must people cooperate to obtain?
- What behavior earns respect?
- What responsibility cannot be refused?
- What do people celebrate or mourn together?
- Which value sounds noble but creates a burden?
In the Tidemark Exchange, flexibility is admired because everything must be dismantled when the islands separate. Permanent buildings are seen as selfish. That value protects the community, but it also makes permanence difficult for elders, archives, and people with limited mobility.
Show ordinary life
Build culture through repeated choices rather than summaries. Describe one meal, greeting, garment, job, joke, childhood lesson, and public disagreement. Connect each detail to environment, history, or belief.
Avoid creating customs only because they feel exotic. Ask who participates, who does not, how the practice has changed, and what different people think it means.
Create factions from disagreements
A faction needs more than an aesthetic. Give it:
- A future it wants
- A reasonable fear
- A method it considers acceptable
- Something it misunderstands
- A disagreement within its own membership
Create two factions that share at least one value but interpret it differently. Conflict becomes richer when opponents recognize something of themselves in each other.
Create it in Summon Worlds
Record shared cultural truths on the World or Location. Add faction membership and personal interpretations to individual Characters. A Character should never become a complete representative of an entire culture; give them at least one belief that differs from their community's expectation.
World checkpoint
Imagine a wedding, funeral, meal, or public emergency in this community. Can three inhabitants respond differently while all still feeling shaped by the same culture? If not, replace cultural absolutes with values people can interpret.
Next, create people who carry these tensions in Create Characters with Roots.