Category: culture

  • Tools in the Toolbox Part 2: An Illustration from The Mandalorian

    Tools in the Toolbox Part 2: An Illustration from The Mandalorian

    In my last blog post, I introduced Mary Douglas’s culture theory of grid and group as a potential world-building tool, but I never really gave an example of how you might use it to not only create more convincing, coherent cultural worlds, but to clarify the sorts of conflicts and tensions that might naturally arise…

  • Tools in the Toolbox

    Tools in the Toolbox

    One very useful framework for studying society is in terms of grid and group, an approach created by anthropologist Mary Douglas more than fifty years ago in her book Natural Symbols, and then elaborated upon by her and others in the years since. Without bogging ourselves down in the minutiae of the theory, Douglas contends…

  • Feuds, Divisions, and Stability in Viking Society

    Feuds, Divisions, and Stability in Viking Society

    Creating a new dungeon campaign can involve–and often does–a lot of world-building. World building is not, and probably should not be, constrained to the sorts of fidelity expected of the sciences, but it must achieve sufficient plausibility and internal coherence that those participating in the experience are not distracted by it; if there are blank…