The Importance of Complex Cultures in Worldbuilding
And Storytelling
Verisimilitude is essential for worldbuilding. Everything needs to tie together in an internally consistent manner. This helps ensure that your world meets audience expectations. Often this means removing superfluous elements from your world. Other times, it means adding interesting details and developing a robust explanation for why things are the way they are. Cultures in your world are a great example of this.
Cultures should be complicated.
They shouldn’t initially appear to make complete sense. They should be difficult for outsiders to navigate, just like cultures in real life. The longer cultures exist and the more events they experience, the more complicated they become and the greater the education required to competently navigate them.
They become complicated as a response to internal and external pressures. These cause the culture to distort like a piece of foil. Even dissipated pressures leave impressions on a culture. They may fade over time, but just you can’t smooth a bent piece of foil, it’s almost impossible to return a culture to its original shape. Over time, this results in cultures with
