Cultural Randomness

Tribe Leader by Daniel Romanovsky

A few days ago I was reading through Gundobad’s blog entry on historically coherent campaign settings. The article lays out a great technique for creating map locations with proper history and context, I thoroughly recommend giving it a read if you haven’t already.

After reading it I got to thinking of a few tables to give some more inspiration to anyone not sure what aspects the civilisations they were introducing should have. These are based on my (extremely limited) historical knowledge and while I’m sure they could be expanded and improved upon, hopefully they’ll be enough to get someone in a rush started making campaign factions.

There are four tables below handling why this group has appeared, how they live, what they believe and how they fight. If one choice makes more sense then don’t bother rolling, or re-roll if the option doesn’t fit with your setting; like all random generation tables these are meant to help the GM, not limit them. I’ve left the descriptions as vague as I can so they can be defined to fit your setting, and number 6 in each table relates to existing factions (so it probably can’t be used to start off with).

Arrival:

1 - Refugees

2 - Expanding Empire

3 - Traders

4 - Explorers

5 - Slavers, Raiders or similar

6 - Mercenaries brought in by an existing faction

Civilian Culture:

1 - A single tribe

2 - A mixture of different tribes, working together

3 - A single-culture kingdom or empire

4 - A multi-cultural kingdom or empire

5 - Nomadic herders

6 - A group related to one of the current factions

Religious Culture:

1 - Monotheist

2 - Polytheist

3 - Animist

4 - Athiest

5 - Ancestor worship

6 - Schism of, or different group of, a current faction’s religion

Military Culture:

1 - Highly regimented

2 - Tribal – Each family puts forward it’s warriors to defend the tribe

3 - Mercenary Employers – They tend to hire other people to fight for them

4 - Warrior Class – They have a caste or class purely for fighting.

5 - Pacifists, or at least purely defensive

6 - Linked to a rebel group of a current faction’s military

So, for example, rolling 3, 1, 2, 5 would give us: A people that arrived hoping to trade. They all look similar, to your people’s eyes, and follow one god rather than your traditional pantheon but they bear no weapons and pose no threat (or at least, don’t appear to).