Nationalist Behavioral Norms

In a recent post, I talked about computing a value for nationalism using the trade system, getting a value for each city based upon its proximity to nationalistic sites (capitals, major battles, etc.), but I left myself room for some further disambiguation.

1). I'm using the word "nationalism" as a shorthand to talk about a larger group of things you might call "cultural myths". A cultural myth is a behavior or set of behaviors typically ascribed to some culture. The ideas that German people are efficient and Japanese folks are hardworking and scrupulously polite are both strategic essentialisms (to borrow from Spivak) that help define the "national character" of a place. While in real life these things can be terribly problematic (like the false impression that Christianity or Islam condone the violence done in their name), these kinds of ideas can be tremendously useful in an rpg scenario, where we don't have the ability to model a city full of real and different people. "Cultural myths" is a cleaner term for the intentional racism usually practiced in rpg worlds (goblins are dumb and violent, orcs are soulless killing machines, elves are haughty and/or hippy-dippy, dwarves are greedy, the list goes on and on). The use here is to create a list of expected behaviors against which an individual from a particular society can be measured against - i.e. how much does this person cleave to a particular cultural myth.

2). The system I outlined provides a number between 0 and whatever that measures the strength of a given cultural myth in a specific city (nationalism, again, being one cultural myth). I haven't adopted this yet (it's brand new), but my list of cultural myths might look like this:

Nationalism (Tarluskani Empire)

Nationalism (Southern Kingdoms)

Nationalism (Confederacy)

Nationalism (Nithya Bairnedred)

Nationalism (Arein)

Nationalism (Catacombs)

Nationalism (Ferocia)

Religious ID (OTG)

R. ID (The Order)

R. ID (Splendor of Sahargeen)

R. ID (Fiája)

R. ID (Ancestor Spirits)

R. ID (Twin Gods)

R. ID (Mystery Cults)

Ethnic ID (Southerner)

Ethnic ID (Ferocia)

Ethnic ID (Bairnedred)

Ethnic ID (Archivist)

Ethnic ID (Tarluskani)

Ethnic ID (Confederate)

And so on.

What I'm interested in is not the absolute values of any category. Instead, for each city, I want to know what these values are, relative to each other. For example, let's consider the nationalism of the made-up city of Gazildapop.

Gazildapop has:

Nat (TE): .8	0.8	0.04
Nat (SK): 2.65	2.65	0.14
Nat (Con): 3.9	3.9	0.21
Nat (Nith): 3.6	3.6	0.19
Nat (Are): 2.25	2.25	0.12
Nat (Cat): 4.8	4.8	0.25
Nat (Fer) .85	0.85	0.05

We can then take each number and divide it by the sum of all of the numbers to determine how important that myth is to the overall picture, which looks like the second column above.

The significance is that if I want to know how an NPC in that city might act, I can now roll on the table above to determine to which myth(s) that NPC subscribes. If Gazildapop resides in an area politically controlled by the Tarluskani Empire or Ferocia, it is likely a hotbed of resistance, given the antipathy the city feels for both nations - it's a fairly even mix of Confederates and Nithya and Southern Kingdoms and Areinians, which indicates a high degree of cosmopolitanism - there's likely a sizeable population of each within the city itself, and/or the city has regular and positive dealings with all 4 groups.

This, to me, is an excellent way to get a feel for a fictional city and how it relates to the larger geopolitical climate, as well as providing plenty of information to inspire specific choices made about each site. Determining where monuments to each of these ideologies will be a time-consuming process, but it will vastly enrich my world. One more thing to the to-do list!