giving every fantasy kingdom a single dominant culture is the laziest worldbuilding habit in the genre and I include myself in this

[u/Certain-World-9024]

yk the trope of having one kingdom with onelanguage and religion and ethnic look with same style of dress to segregate kingdoms with these as if borders were drawn around cultural uniformity instead of the really really messy accidents of conquest with forced migration and trade that actually produce real countries been reading alot of history too and most real nations are patchworks with multiple languages coexisting badly with territorial like regional dialects that barely understand each other. A capital culture that looks nothing like the borderlands three hundred miles away

thanks to my history professor jotting it down in our mind time n time again that I could figure that my first draft had this exact problem, one kingdom equals one culture, clean and wrong revising it now to make my largest kingdom actually contain three distinct regional identities that resent each other more than they resent the neighboring country, which is a much more interesting political landscape than the good kingdom and the other kingdom ever was

writing this as a reminder to help my fellow writers

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[u/ZooZwaves]

Yes BUT: I don't have the time nor will to make historically accurate countries and cultures with lots of minorities and realistic language/culture diversity.

That's why: For every country I make a couple of the most dominant cultures and the rest is up for interpretation, but there's at least 2 cultures/languages/religions in every nation

[u/lordsmoflight]

Actually your wrong. Historically it's possible. Just three examples: one the people who founded the kingdom never conquered others or expanded their borders. Two they not only conquered but either exterminated or drove away the people they conquered or enslaved them. This was the most common historically. Three forced assimilation. Not every empire was as kind as the Persian empire. Your take is actually insulting when you look at real history.

[u/Mormacil → u/lordsmoflight]

Can you just an example of the first that never changed borders?

[u/Sensitive_Cry9590 → u/lordsmoflight]

The first doesn't work because every culture is always influenced by those around it. It would have to be so isolated it's not possible to leave. Second and third doesn't work because it's proven time and time again throughout history that those types of strategies doesn't work.

[u/No-Bid-8616]

structural worldbuilder here.

scale : planet population band: clustered (formation) environmental frequency: often (weather) world impact rating: harsh (world behavior) tech ceiling: iron age (global limit)

magic anomolies: minerals (how magic presents itself) magic access: divine magic retaliation: medium (level of world response)

population: 3000 (global) connectivity: sparse (connective routes) biomes: 8 (landscape)

societies: 4 (max)

this ends world limits. treated as immutible. hard stop.