Cultural Backstory—Starting With Some of the Societal Roles, Gender

Continuing with building a community I am going to focus on developing a larger community that is not yet a city. The reason for this is to get a feel how a place may be growing from its roots to a place where there are continual inhabitants creating an endpoint for adventuring in your campaign setting. Of course the same ideas apply to smaller and larger communities. In fact, in larger communities these ideas apply to different areas in the community.

After establishing a community (the fact that one exists where it does), people naturally determine ways to regulate themselves and the others in their society. This doesn't always mean set laws, but the facts of their lives that usually are the basis for laws they may eventual enact. These are the social norms and taboos. The way people interact with each other based on how they perceive themselves and others in terms of their roles in the community.

Societal roles are complex, so we usually break them down into simpler identifiers when they are discussed. For example, in discussing gender roles and what is expected in the community from the men and women. However, the roles change depending on the age of the people, and possibly the race of the person. There are additional considerations based on the person's state of physical and mental health along with aspects of a person's size. In some societies there might even be considerations for the person's physical characteristics like hair and eye color. All of these can be interwoven to create an amazing tapestry of the community. But working to create this level of complexity while developing a new location for your gaming would mean you probably would never be able to use it.

So, let's break this down into smaller pieces and find some places to begin.

Since we started with the example of gender roles, let's keep with it. What are the expectations placed on the different sexes in your community? If you want a more complex setting with multiple sexual relations, then you might want to consider what the expectations for each group you define as part of your community. (This is nothing new for many societies throughout our own history can provide examples.) To keep the discussion shorter, I am going to go with the idea of having two basic roles: men and women. I am also going to keep it to some general concepts.

From http://missinghumanmanual.com/?p=777

One of the ways societies survive is by defining what it means to be a man or a woman. These are usually defined by the activities they perform in the family structure and in the larger community. This goes back to the earliest hunter gatherer societies and continues right up through modern day, and I believe there will be some definition as long as societies continue. These rules do not have to be "right" in terms of what we are looking at, they have to be right for the community that has adopted them.

Some of the reasons for developing gender roles may be for survival purposes. This is most likely one of the reasons for the role difference of hunter gatherer societies. The women developed into roles of gathering close to the home base and took care of smaller children while the men would travel further from home and hunt animals. In agrarian societies the roles change because the dependence becomes more on growing the food instead of hunting it. Other societies that depend on raiding will have other roles defined.

In the development of your community you should take into consideration what is needed for the people to survive. Advanced technology creates all new levels of requirements when compared to a society based solely on how much muscle the people of the community can harvest. You can see examples of this in the new world societies that didn't have horses or other beasts of burden. But survival is only one defining factor of gender roles.

From http://memim.com/agrarian-society.html

Another major factor throughout our own history has been religious belief. Religion throughout time have defined gender roles to fit the needs of the communities the religion served. Many earlier societies were matriarchal (and it could be argued this was because of the survival needs). As time progressed most of our world's societies have moved to patriarchal, most of which have been defined by the religious aspects of the community.

Many game world communities have defined religions being used. When you have a defined religion you are playing with, you should consider the impact of those beliefs on the roles the men and women in your society have. Even within the religion there are usually defined gender roles. Some religions have only priestesses. Others may relegate certain activities to men and others to women. Each of these defined roles impact how the community develops and how the sexes are viewed, and treated.

There are other factors, some already touched on here, like political power, magic use, and family structures impacting gender roles. At this time in developing a community I might be jotting a few notes on what these other aspects are, and maybe some brief comments on how they may impact the community. Some of these topics are going to be covered in later articles, but I know there is no way of covering every aspect in these shorter articles. So as the creator of your gaming world, you may have one area of higher impact than someone else. In my current writing I mark these sort of things so I know what they are.

From
http://futurehumanevolution.com/space-colonization-future-human-habitats

Societies change, and sometimes they change rapidly. This is one fun thing (saving attribute) of creating your own gaming community. You can start with something as basic as we have put forth so far in the past few articles and turn your players loose. What you will find is the players will insert their own ideas into the setting, thus helping you in the creating process. As the creator of the world you can accept, reject, or alter the idea to fit your vision. You can allow your players and their characters to define the world, but you can also just have them influence the world through their actions. Explorers have had this type of impact all over Earth, throughout history. In simple terms—play your game with what you have and allow it to develop, change, and grow as you need it to.

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