I like the idea of defining culture, and tracking it. The cards are a cool idea, but I don’t know if I’d ever use it. (Then again, I’ve disliked random generation since AD&D 1E.)

I use existing cultures. Everyone knows a Northman is one of the Nordic cultures, and a Saracen is from an Arabic culture. There’s plenty of room for detail, though… a Rus and a Norman are nowhere near identical.

Alternately, you can write up more minor breaks and twists. So there might be a lot of people in the society who twist the rule, but the twists might be minor– more eccentric than blatant, if you get what I mean.

@BryanB – Combine it with other tools and you’ll soon have a complex character. It’s one tool for the box; if it gives you a starting place for a character or helps you communicate a culture more succinctly, call it a success.

:p

For example, we want the society of the dwarves above to be rigidly enforced, but full of sneaky bastards who twist those rules to their advantage and step on those they can, so we add another full deck, sans clubs, and then a further set of Hearts and diamonds.
Thus, the normal mix of rules applies, but there’s a three times greater chance of being a paragon, or twisting the rule to your favor than disregarding it, and twice the chance of being impacted by it than disregarding it.

For a simpler setup (ie: you don’t need 4 decks of cards), set up a table for the 4 attitudes fitting how you want your culture to pan out:
1d10
1-3 Paragon
4-7 Bastard
8-9 Effected
10 Breaks

and roll that die in conjunction with a d12 to see what rule it applies to.

I’m actually working on a book of cultural backgrounds that players and GMs can use in their games, so this is particularly relevant to me. One thing I’m hoping will make PCs want to use the cultural backgrounds is that there are associated feats and powers. If you’re from a culture of wanderers, you’re better at improvising, and your feats reflect that. So it’s hard to forget that your character is a wanderer when it comes up every time you realize you have as many bonuses to swing on a rope and hit someone with a bottle as to just fire your hand crossbow.

@LordVreeg – Excellent points. Many of the issues you bring up are dealt with at length in Hard Boiled Cultures. He gives running examples of offshoot cultures of a couple of races in 4e, how that affects the stat, skill, and other bonuses granted, and how the separated races may come together and interact in an overall culture. There’s a lot packed in 16 pages.

A few quick notes.
1) Race is not always culture. So basic we sometimes forget, but the larger a culture becomes, the more it ‘assimilates’.
2) We make character backgfround and culture context part of character creation. An initial tweak years ago in our ruleset brings this into the initial character build.
3) If you want it it matter, make it part of the remuneration. No matter how hard a GM works, if the world is just a backdrop for a series of encounters, all the work in the world won’t matter.
However, if knowing how an NPC feels about your culure, if knowing their mores and code makes a difference in the success of the PC’s, they will learn.
Penalize them socially for not remembering the right form of address od a pertinent day of the week, or if the country inherits on the patrilineal or matrilineal side…Culture will matter then.
Like everything in our games, it only matters if the GM makes it matter.

Thanks again.

I’m so stealing this idea. *yoink!*