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Originally Posted by Sorloc
I've done a bit of thinking on Dwarves and Dwarven culture... and Elves too.
And the thing is, that I can't think of any good reason why all members of a given species would all have the same culture everywhere in the world.
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Well, the standard explanation is that they all derived from the same root/mythological source and so would share a common culture or have very similar cultures. In Glorantha elves come from Aldrya and dwarves from Mostal. In M Iddle Earth, they have common ancestry but have slightly different cultures.
But, there's no reason why they can't have as radically different cultures as humans do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sorloc
In my game, I have a particular continent with 3 different Dwarven societies, 5 different elven societies, 8 different human societies, 1 halfling, 1 centaur, and 1 idiyva (feline) society.
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What, no Orc societies? You mention enslaved orcs, so why don't they have a society? Not bugging you, just interested.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sorloc
I always felt that it was important that nonhumans were treated with the same amount of thought as humans; their societies should not be simplistic, cookie-cutter things, copied from Tolkien or not. Our historical cultures always followed linguistic and religious lines before racial ones (sometimes 'race' is determined by language rather than ancestry - see Europe for examples of this).
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My view of society is that it comes down to Us and Them in the end.
Historically, Us were differentiated from Them most easily racially, as that made things obvious. Language also differentiated Us from Them fairly easily. Religion differentiates Us from Them, but is more subtle.
When a language/culture became dominant, it was more difficult to separate Us from Them because Us could include many conquered or allied people of different race, language or religion, so culture became important.
But, there has always been a gut-deep feeling of Us and Them in any society.
One thing that has bugged me for a while is this. Why are non-humans normally all the same race? Sure. Glorantha has different types of elves, but they are more of a sub-species than a race. Most other settings have elves, dwarves, orcs and whatever but no races within them.