daze oc blog

(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)

So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented: → Three types of ceremonial jewelry → A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed → A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn

Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.

And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.

Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.

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🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style

Ask yourself: → Who’s in charge, and why? → Who has land? Who doesn’t? → What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?

Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.

Start there. Not at the embroidery.

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2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict

Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?

→ What was destroyed and mythologized? → What do the survivors still whisper about? → What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?

No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.

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3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists

Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about: → Death? → Love? → Time? → The natural world? → Justice?

Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.

You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.

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4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)

Culture shows up in: → What people apologize for → What insults cut deepest → What people are embarrassed about → What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately

For instance: → A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?” → A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.

This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.

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5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals

Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about: → Breakfast routines? → How people greet each other on the street? → Who cooks, and who eats first? → What’s considered “clean” or “proper”? → How is parenting handled? Divorce?

Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.

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6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture

A culture isn’t a monolith.

Even in deeply traditional societies, people: → Rebel → Question → Break rules → Misinterpret laws → Mock sacred things → Act hypocritically → Weaponize or resist what’s expected

Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.

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7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap

Worldbuilding gets boring fast when: → The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure → The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric” → Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like

You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy. → Let ugly things be beloved. → Let beautiful things be corrupt. → Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.

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📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy): → Culture is not food and jewelry. → Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction. → Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter. → Let your world feel lived in, not curated.

The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list. It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.

Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)

—rin t. // writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range // thewriteadviceforwriters

Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:

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But it is just so fascinating to me. The only sea occupation where your destination was literally just THE SEA. That’s it. You go out there and you don’t come back until it’s somewhat worth it, however long that takes. There are familiar grounds one would go to first, yes, but no routes, no schedules, no final destinations, no sense of when one comes back if one ever comes back. Just going to lonelier and lonelier places that no other ship is going to nor has need to go to. And when one finally happens to see another whaler it was a cause for an extended social event in ways that other maritime jobs just DID NOT have time for.

Highly diverse crews that were, of course, not without racism and inequity by any means (the entire job was…rife with inequity since idle agents ashore were already taking around 60% of the cut), but also one where one’s rank was ultimately determined by ‘can you kill a whale?’. And where the social component was so closely intertwined the fact that one would be at sea likely 3-4 years and if there was ANY surviving it and ANY success of it everyone had to more-or-less get along with each other.

And over the course of those years and years staring down aimless stretches of boredom you get the most fascinating folk art. And folk art that is so often tied to domestics. Making yarn swifts and pie crimpers and valentines for your girl outta BONES. Bones that came from the moments where that boredom was punctuated by Complete Terror.

An industry that was just like…SO violent and bloody and brutal, all for the aim of bringing back materials to make things that were so staid and domestic. Lamp oil. Candles. Corset Stays. Perfume Bases. Soaps. Just…candles paid for by so much blood from people, from animals. And was something that for such a fleeting moment was one of THE American industries, before settling, mercifully, into obscurity.

Milwaukee at Night   -    Tom Shropshire

American,b.1943-

City Noctyurne   -    Tom Shropshire, 2010

American, b. 1940s

The Three Books of Occult Philosophy, the most influential magical text of the Renaissance, is directly structurally styled after Euclid's Elements, and spills quite a bit of ink on the topic of the inherent magical properties of numbers.

Hell, in the Monas Hieroglyphica, John Dee explicitly attempts to create a sort of magical semiotic system to unify language and geometry, the two things he considered fundamental to God's creation.

“Hark, Lord Bollemer, ye shall taste the steel of my Cursed Blade, and thine doom willst finally be upon you! Ready thyself!”