- language
- food
- religion
- architecture
- clothing
- music
is there a big seventh that i'm missing? i'm trying to stick to things that all cultures would probably have, so nothing like "movies"
very funny to me that these are like, 6 chapters of an ethnography. You would just need political/judicial system, neighbours, and like kinship structure.
Okay I know this is silly but, actually hear me out.
The problem with Capitalism right is the profit motive, everyone gets that, industrialists have things they force on society so they can extract the value from labor.
However, think about the identity of a people in the context of their labor. "We here in Eldburrough are proud of our Druidic heritage and we produce cruelty free meat substitutes" sounds funny, but it's your fantasy setting, why not!?
Many communities and by extension civilizations are archetypal in their industrial capacities due to the iterative multigenerational investment of time and labor into various crafts and disciplines. Be it scholarship, farming, hospitality, or even warfare, there are countless examples you can look to in your own immediate community's history to draw inspiration from. It's cool I promise. Ask yourself: "What does my fictional community produce", find a niche, and slot it in.
I once wrote a oneshot campaign for Dungeon World where the party fought cheese creatures in the great cheese mines. Before the monster outbreak, it was running human run cattle farms out of business!
