Anthropology and Archaeology: A Blog Carnival Call to Arms

With the launch of this year's #RPGaDay, I began following the Nerd's Variety RPG Cast.   The host, Jason, ran a contest in support of #RPGaDay, and I submitted Day 25 of the event for him to read.  

As one who has heard both calls and emails go horribly wrong, even I was shocked when I started formulating a basic outline of what a call in from me might entail.  

Then Jason beat me to the punch, by announcing another community event. 

Anthropology and Archaeology: A Blog Carnival Call-to-Arms for September is being hosted by the Beneath Foreign Planets blog.  RPG Blog Carnival is essentially a new centralized topic each month for the community at large to write-up, and hopefully discuss.  Blog Hosts propose the topic then do the administrative work, compiling the links provided to them into a cohesive reference document for other to explore, discover, and expand their horizons.   It's been going on consistently with a new topic every month for the last 16 years, so there's definitely something working with it.

Looking back at prior months, their topics, and the responses the participants gave, I remember why I perused this topic many moons ago and never returned.  These topics can attract a certain clientele of gamer. the "Intelligentsia"  and "Crunch-master Generals, yet I did find a number of posts and answers that were medium length #RPGaDay.  

Beneath Foreign Planets has also provided an excellent list of prompts (copied from their page as proof) to start the creative juices flowing.  And no, you don't have to answer all of them, just the one that tickle your fancy, all you silly pants!

• What might player-characters find it they just start digging?
• How academic are you feeling? Write a short ethnography of a people and their practices from your world.
• Could a character's starting equipment be culturally specific? Surely, different cultures in your setting have potentially very different equipment lists for your players to paw through?
• What archaeological periods exist in your setting and what sort of items would an archaeologist (or dungeoneer) find for each of those periods?
• Could culture result in character class differentiation? For example, how might a magic-user from the Fungal-Id culture differ to their counterpart from the Industrious and Munificent city of Hsan?
• Could you create mechanics that support or incentivize players to have their characters act according to their cultural or religious beliefs?
• Could you replace race-as-class with culture-as-class? If so what would those cultures be like?
• What adventure or adventure hooks might be given by an anthropologist or archaeologist in your world?
• 'The Archaeology of Magic' just sounds cool, right?
• Get meta and promulgate a variety of in-game worldviews and theories by writing a list and summaries of setting-specific anthropological books and treatises that your player-characters can find and read.
• There are a host of generators you could create - a ruin or archaeological dig-site generator, a broad-strokes culture generator, archaeological artifact generators, clothing, taboos, religious customs, food, ceremonies, rites or special days/events generators.
• Even in very small countries, one community's culture will differ from another's - what local or regional differences can be observed in a section of your world and why do/did those differences occur?
• Could you make a mini-game or mechanic for a cultural event, rite, festivity or ceremony to engage your players with?
• How do different cultures grapple with fantastic concepts such as the existence of cosmic Law, Chaos and Neutrality?
• Flesh out a culture from your game, there are so many different avenues to do this - etiquette and taboos, special days or events, clothing, food culture, religious beliefs and customs.
• Create cultural treasure or 'loot the body' tables (this is what I [the September host] will be doing).
• Could a micro-setting be created around a particular social theory, so a purely functionalist, structuralist, materialist, Marxist or even a social-evolutionist world?
• Furthermore, could you create mechanics that incentivize players acting in ways that conform with your chosen social theory?
• Acculturation is when cultures assimilate. Are there places in your world where two very different cultures have begun to fuse? What conflicts would result from this process and what might the new culture be like?
• How has a beast, fantastic species, divine intervention, curse or magical material affected the development of the people who live with it?
• What would Durkheim say about your dwarves? Franz Boas about your Bugbears?
• How would the culture of non-humans logically work? If you think about it, Elves would be very strange indeed. How do reciprocity and kinship work among aboleths?

Again, it's one post, involving Archeology and Anthropology, and the TTRPG hobby.  To be honest, I copied the list over to this blog so I could read each prompt as I reformatted it.  To be even more honest, the first prompt makes with the question "Why is there a dungeon here???" much more important, from the origin of the structure to why it was abandoned, to who or what claimed it and when.  Every one of those prompts is a great question to ask yourself in campaign world development, sometimes multiple instances.

And here I was looking for something to fill in between #RPGaDay and the #CharacterCreationChallenge.