WEIRD Worldbuilding
WEIRD Worldbuilding
This post is refers to the book The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich, which I have reviewed here.
The WEIRDest People in the World isn't specifically about tabletop RPGs or worldbuilding. It is about cultural evolution and how certain packages of cultural norms, institutions and psychology emerged and developed over time into Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies today.
The book does spend a lot of time discussing the kinds of features that affect societies' collective psychology, institutions and ability to scale to larger populations. A big concept is the idea that different kinds of institutions are necessary to bond society together. In this post I will try to lay out what I have gleaned and how it can be used by prospective worldbuilders.
Laying out the building blocks: Clans & Family
The vast majority of human societies historically have been based on kinship (familial) ties. There is a powerful urge stemming from evolutionary psychology to default to protecting and working with your extended family. In order to organize on a social level beyond that of individual family units, people need social institutions that can bond larger groups together.
For the typical tabletop game that is set in a pseudo-historical fantasy setting, especially the vaguely medieval European implied setting of D&D the most important relationships for most people should be kin-based. People might be organized into patrilineal clans following their fathers' lines, where all members trace lineage back to a significant ancestor and typically share a surname. In many regions clans would be the basic unit of society and governance, with each village consisting of one to several clans, each providing its members economic support, defense, conflict arbitration (in place of formal laws and justice) and importantly, identity. In most cases clan land and significant property would be held in common, fostering a more communal identity. Reputation inside the would have been based on bringing productivity and honor to family. Outsiders would generally be judged on their clan's relationships and strangers distrusted. When creating a clan, it's worth thinking about a clan's common ancestor (or eldest living member) and using that as one means of conferring identity.
Some other common and important norms in a clan are arranged marriages, patrilocal residence (newlyweds live with the husbands' parents), and corporate responsibility (all clan members are responsible for all others' actions - including seeking justice).
Generally individual clans will be important within a given local area like a village but they cannot maintain cohesiveness over larger geographic areas or population sizes. Individual clans and villages tend to fragment if population reaches a few hundred and reform into new clans or villages.
Building up the LEGOs
To reach larger sizes, clans can combine in several ways. Segmentary lineages are essentially groups of related clans organized into smaller segments based on geographic and relational proximity. Ritual obligations require clans with shared ancestry and adjacent territories to come to each others' aid in times of need. The smallest groups of clans form a single segment, but if outsiders threaten an individual segment, other groups of clans will join to help, involving larger segments potentially up to the entire maximal lineage.
Segmentary lineages can field large numbers into the tens of thousands and are very effective at competing with other groups to defend territory. The individual clans need not interact regularly unless called upon and there isn't an overarching hierarchy within the structure. People living within these lineages tend to maintain a keen sense of clan honor, careful genealogical records and sets of shared rituals lest the organization drift apart. When there are disputes between members with a common living ancestor, the ancestor settles the dispute otherwise feuds may result.
Chiefdoms are essentially groups of clans where one clan is elevated above the others. Typically within a chiefdom, people maintain clan relationships among their own families but some authority is reserved for the chief. This often takes the form of arbitrating disputes between clans and dealing with significant issues that affect the entire clan (conflict with outside groups). Chiefdoms can become very large, spreading through conquest or marital alliances, and fielding significant personnel in case of war (up to thousands or in cases of multiple layers of chiefdoms, tens of thousands).
One important feature is that in addition to clan identities and loyalties, people within a chiefdom tend to regard their relational distance from the chief as a source of status and identity. Chiefdom is a generic title but this could encompass many types of clan-based social organizations. Who is the leader and who are their key family members? What do clans owe the chiefdom and what does the chief owe the people? Are there opportunities to advance in status through marriage, tribute or conflict?
Whereas chiefdoms feel like tribes of people, segmentary lineages feel more like ethnic groups or large surname groups.
What is a Kingdom?
As a chiefdom gets larger, an increasing divide may emerge between the leading clans and those with less social status, stratifying society into an elite (noble) and common strata. As this divide becomes formalized and as society grows larger, the elites will begin to develop institutions to address social needs (military, financial, judicial, etc.), thus creating proto-kingdoms.
Just like chiefdoms, kingdoms will have roles for the sovereign and his nobles and for commonfolk, but there will be a much greater gulf in social status between them. In a kingdom, like a chiefdom, relational proximity to the leader provides social status. State administrative roles mediate between elites and the rest of society allowing common people a means to rise (though not likely to status of noble). State administration also allows for a greater number of social roles outside of kin-based relationships.
A kingdom is defined in many ways by the king. Who are they? How are they viewed? What about the people around them? What is the role of nobles in society and how does the right to that role delimit what commoners can do? Landowners? Judges? Businesspeople? Military leaders? How do elites support themselves? What is the role of outsiders in the social hierarchy?
Beyond Family: How Rituals Pull Society Together
Up to now we've most just discussed different ways families can help to organize societies, but there are other methods. Communal rituals draw upon various bugs in our mental programming to help pull people into alignment and cooperation. These "mind hacks", synchrony, goal-oriented collaboration and rhythmic music, exert powerful influence on people's actions.
Synchrony is movement that matches the movement of others. This could be moving in unison or tiny movements like mirroring postures or facial expressions. I'll just quote Heinrich (p. 76):
"When moving in step with others, the neurological mechanism used to represent our own actions and those used for others' actions overlap in our brains. This is a neurological by-product of how our body's own representational system is deployed to help model and predict others' movements - it's a glitch. The convergence in these representations blurs the distinction between ourselves and others, which leads us to perceive others as more like us and possibly even as extensions of ourselves. For evolutionary reasons, this illusion draws people closer together and creates a feeling of interdependence."
Working together toward a common group goal has a similar effect of aligning people's interests in ways that last beyond the effort itself. Anyone who has been a part of a team or cohort of any kind can attest to the strong bonds the experience creates. Music amplifies these effects as it provides a rhythm to aid synchrony, a possible group goal (making song) and a separate modality (auditory) apart from movement.
In this way rituals act to bind people together, convincing us that separate individuals are actually connected. Rituals can also act as signifier to show in-group status and even provide common experiences, symbols and means of thinking to extend the size of a group.
Age-set institutions are a non-kin-based means of binding groups together through ritual. Group members go through rituals at different parts of their lives initiating them into the next life stage and imparting essential cultural knowledge. Children go through coming-of-age rites, and enter young adulthood, perhaps going through courtship and marriage ceremonies. Adults might be inducted into a warrior class or be trained and initiated in some sort of productive activity before becoming elders. The age-sets themselves are essentially cohorts with defined obligations, responsibilities and social roles. Age-sets impart a strong sense of shared experience, teach common values and dictate social organization. Age-set institutions can be more egalitarian than kin-based ones as any group member can be initiated into a given cohort.
Rituals and kin-based institutions are not mutually exclusive. Many varied types of cultural knowledge can be encoded into ritual, from food preparation to hunting, to building a home and protecting from disease, all of these types of knowledge can be based on ritual. Since many traditional societies were based around clans and family, it is only natural that families would amass and protect this cultural knowledge. In the real world, this is in part how clans carve out reputational niches as particularly adept at a given skill or trade. When worldbuilding for RPGs or stories, secret family knowledge can provide conflict and revelation, motivate marriages and alliances. Rituals, esoteric or mundane that bear seemingly mystical efficacy are a strong basis for magic if your world requires it.
In your world, one of the most visible means of differentiation between groups is the rituals they used. What did they look and sound like? What kind of materials do they use and what sort of commitments do they entail. Rituals flesh out the bones of society. What did they need? What did they care about? How did they show that care? A society that sacrifices animals to the harvest god by draining their blood into the earth has a very different character from one that engages a month long courtship ceremony in which games of chance determine pairings.
The specifics are important not only because they fill, but also because the rituals are important to the people and achieving the means to carry out rituals is likely a strong motivation for people in your world. Getting that eye of newt or the garland of near-extinct flowers or 36 unmarried celebrants could make for adventure.
Religion - Communities of the Faithful
Religion is one of the most powerful social binding agents. Not only are they steeped in ritual, but religions also help explain the world, creating shared worldviews. Early hunter-gatherers tended to have deities that were relatively weak, whimsical and morally arbitrary. Over time, groups tended to adopt more powerful deities with more exacting moral and behavioral demands on their adherents. Heinrich claims this is due to cultural evolution and that stronger more morally punitive gods aided in scaling societies up. One reason is that these types of gods would be more successful in following similar sets of moral values, beliefs and behaviors. These increased similarities make unfamiliar coreligionists seem more like members of the same community.
How could this play out when worldbuilding? Deities among smaller groups might be more likely to act as nature spirits or trickster gods, superhuman but not cosmic in scale. These smaller gods would tend to have more local interests and morally arbitrary desired behaviors. In worlds where smaller groups interact with larger ones, there would be strong incentives for people from smaller groups to adopt both sets of beliefs. Larger religions spanning diverse geographic areas would be more likely to demand more behavioral and moral adherence from followers. For example there might be lists of taboos in action or belief. These larger and more demanding religions would be more precise in determining who is and isn't accepted as a member and schisms can emerge over doctrinal differences.
In tabletop games I would definitely think about desired behaviors and values among different groups when designing a reputational system.
Enough already! What are you banging on about?
In writing this, I wanted to highlight pathways along which human societies have evolved and organized themselves. These paths are rooted in our primate evolutionary psychology and different methods of growing societies exhibit fairly strong path dependence. That is, these common bundles of norms tend to reoccur and build on themselves.
When building a world, using these common features as templates will lend a sense of verisimilitude. Any society I create could be totally fantastical, but it will feel more real if I consider how it treats familial units, its common rituals and religion and how these things affect people's values and psychology. If I were creating a society procedurally using semi-random generation I can use these institutions as building blocks. I hope to show some examples in a future post.
Institutions affect the character of a people. Markets encourage the adoption of norms that value impersonal fairness and positive appraisal of strangers. People in a market society are likely to treat strangers in a markedly different way than one without market norms. The same goes for different types of kinship structures, beliefs, taboos, norms and rituals. Starting with these seeds should help to crystallize all sorts of strange and yet strangely plausible structures.
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