Worldbuilding

How do you write your own original cultures? Is there a better way than carefully laundering things you’ve stolen from real human societies?

I wish more writers would steal. A lot of fantasy races look like pretty generic, bland, cultures. Reading Anthropology books has shown me cultures far stranger than any of the fantasy races.

Things I've "stolen":

• Languages can be whistled coherently, like entire sentences, communicated only through whistling. The sound travels further in some locations.
• Fire placement in caves is a matter of life or death.
• You don't need words for 'good' or 'bad', for a language to function, but once you meet a culture which doesn't have those words, it's extremely difficult to communicate (and hilarity often ensues).

I develop cultures naturalistically and idealistically. I also primarily work on ttrpg settings. I start with a creation myth then flip a coin to determine if it's true or only believed to be true. Then I come up with the deities and whether the deities are cohabitative (like Celtic deities) or extraplanar (like Egyptian deities) and from there I work on the beliefs and religious practices of the people.

This them gives me a set of values and ethics for which they follow and that I can start working on a social structure. I begin by determining what type of society they live in. Most of the time this means deciding if they're a feudal society or not and determining their social taboos and such.

For me sometimes ideas just come out of nowhere, but it's quite frustrating if you're just about to sleep, or, more dangerously, driving a motorcycle.

Besides that, I write my fictional cultures by looking at what I already have and expand on that, or carefully taking a little something from a real-world culture, like a style of clothing, and contextualize it to the fictional culture.

I think it's easier to mix and match cultural elements from the real world and imagination if a race is non-human. It allows for more experimentation and less risk of cultural appropriation. It's also easier if their built environments are already distinct from regular human environments.

For example, my human-dragon hybrids mostly live their lives out of single-family (magical) treehouses, and I think that serves me well if I ever want to apply some real-world cultural stuff into that. I find inspiration for those treehouses from postmodern/contemporary architecture, surprisingly enough.