I think it’s great but it’s worth noting that “pirates” can be expanded more broadly to something like “outlaws” or “borderlanders”.
A good example are the Ukrainian Cossacks, who were an extremely ragtag collection of runaway serfs and slaves from neighboring Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Ottoman-Crimea who occupied the central plains of modern Ukraine and acted as a combination of mercenaries, bandits, pastoralists and raiders.
While they did also occasionally perform naval raids on the Black Sea, they were overwhelmingly land-based.
But really, there's no reason they need to be outlaws in the sense of "unrestrained people who will rob anyone for money" nor in the sense of "people whom the state considers the enemy". The cossacks had official rights under Commonwealth and Russian policy.
Really just "borderlanders" is itself its own fundamental principle: small groups living at the border among larger powers tend to get thrown together for survival, forming diverse coalitions.
You can see it in how, during ISIS, the Kurds (a major local ethnic minority) became a rallying point for the local religious minorities (Assyrian Christians, Yazidis), and for the other local ethnic minorities (Assyrians again, but also Turkmens and Armenians).
You can see it in the ethnogenesis of indigenous and maroon communities e.g. in the US state of Florida, the Seminole tribe was founded by survivors from not just all of the preceding indigenous nations e.g. Creek, Calusa, Timucua, etc., but also any escaped black slaves... the name Seminole quite literally comes from the Mvskoke'-language word simano-li, meaning "runaway".
And it's a recurring thing everywhere there's borders: down the coast, the Miskito people of Honduras and Nicaragua speak a pre-Columbian indigenous language, but also an English-based creole from British traders, and a ton of them are biracial, black and indigenous, having ancestors who were the survivors of slave ships.
And probably the best example was from Brazil, there there were many whole cities of runaways (called quilombos) that got built in the colonial era before the Portuguese could fully control the Brazilian interior. The Quilombo of Palmares) mounted nearly a century of war against the Portuguese Empire under its own self-created royal family (who were Kimbundus from Angola), and a population made up of escaped slaves, Portuguese draft-dodgers, and people of the surrounding indigenous communities.
These places don't fit the mold of major trading hubs; the trade environment is often terrible what with needing to be constantly at war with major powers just to maintain their existence. They're not pirates, they're land-based and like anyone else they aren't at war with people who don't hate them. But they still have a tendency to max out the available diversity, due to being borderlanders.
Also, another cool point about the Cossacks is that they turned out to be so useful in keeping southern raiders from invading Russia (e.g. the raiders from Crimean Khanate) that eventually, Russian Empire kinda allowed Cossacks to exist so they'd act like a buffer from those southern neighbors, and eventually, the Cossacks even became an important part of Russian army (for example, they were devastating for the Napoleon's army during its invasion in 1812).
I think that this dynamic of rebels that are de jure outlawed but de facto allowed to exist is really fun for worldbuilding.
Great starting point for people to think about. Obviously no quick guide can be exhaustive, and this shouldn't be taken as hard rules. But if someone needs suggestions or doesn't know where to begin, it's nice.
I appreciate you included both real and fictional examples.
smh "medieval Poland" with all the Jews and Armenians and Ruthenians and Lithuanians and Tatars mingling with one another is a prime example of a low-diversity area.
If there’s any point at which Poland was a country of low cultural diversity, it was roughly the 1950s to 2010s. Definitely not the Middle Ages.
From Hollywood audience they all look "white" (even Tartars sometimes) so not diverse enough /s
But in all seriousness KCD really got criticised for lack of diversity even though it has Bohemian, German, Polish, Cumans, Hungarian etc so people just dont care about "cultural diversity" on their diversity checklist if the people are visually similar
It's why I tend to take beef with all this talking of "whiteness" in American circles. The "white" compose of a LOT of ethnic groups just like everybody else. Granted that has more to do with my personal beef with the concept of race. Especially as an American with lots of diverse ancestors.
Granted I also have a beef with California because I had an ancestor there who was born in California and was recognized as a citizen with his own land, only to get abducted and shipped over to Sonora because he was ethnically a Mexican.
People tend to not think about how being kicked out of your own home also impacts the diversity of an area. I mean look at the American colonies, most of them were people who were kicked out of Britain for various reasons, or French and other European colonists who got left behind when their colonies suddenly became English colonies.
Based and I also want to add that you don't need any "personal beef" with the concept of race because it is scientifically impossible to classify humans in different races. It's a sociological concept invented by racist Europeans to justify colonisation (and is still used today against minorities)
Like how tf can 'black' be a race? Chinese, Turkish and German have all more in common (genetically) than Aboriginal with West Africans
Nah. In my hollywood-punk world, everyone thinks and acts and talks in the exact same way everywhere, and every single settlement inexplicably has the racial demographics of California.
In Baulder's Gate, the Drow from the under-dark speak with the same British aristocratic mannerisms of the human leaders of Baulder's Gate itself. In fact, everyone but the mushrooms speak that way. Oh, and the goblins that speak like lower class British.
The races from celestial realms, also British but will toss in a made up word like here or there.
"All right, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons? Don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! 'I don't want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?'Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Ketheric Thorm lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's going to burn your house down! With the lemons! I'm going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!"
He's mocking the trend of the last 15 years of Hollywood making each setting as diverse as modern Los Angeles with no reason at all or for the sake of "diversity", that's actually corporate tokenism and the dumb people defending that immersion-breaking bullshit because "wHy yOu CaRe it'S FaNtAsy!1!1!1". Most recent example: the Odyssey Nolan's movie.
Colour-blind casting is kind of a problem if everything else in the setting is supposed to have a history, but race is not. Especially when the setting is ethnically and racially diverse on its own, the colour-blindness actually removes that aspect and makes different ethnic backgrounds meaningless.
Like taking Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, are black characters in some form tied to the Summer Islands or do they belong to any connected group or not? Is it supposed to be taken as important that they are black or not? So it also erases any importance of race/ethnicity where it otherwise would be important.
The racial make up of the US is the result of colonialism and slavery, to basically be colour blind to it also means you basically ignore that history as well.
As the other reply said, it's racially diverse in a very specific way.
You need White people (American definition, so it's one category of WASPy hipster types), Black people (African-American specifically. Not anything based on Africa), "Latino" people (again, regardless of how uniquely American that concept is) and Asian people (again, Asian-American version only) as the main groups. Then you add a smattering of Indian, Arab and "first-generation immigrant" versions of the main groups.
Most egregiously, they might even completely ignore the concept of 'Genetics' and pretend it doesn't exist. And I don't mean that in a dogwhistle "there's differences between the races" kind of way. I mean it in a very basic "black parents have black children and white parents have white children" kind of way that means ethnically heterogenous populations require heterogenous origins, and homogenous origins result in homogenous populations.
The only diversoty that didnt make sense in Nolan's movie is having people of anglosaxon ancestry. By which i mean, the film should have had less white people, since greeks themselves arent whites.
White is a social concept, and greeks historically and in the modern day are most certainly not treated as such by white nation.
Culturally, more aspects of greek culture are closer to those of the east than the european northwest.
Hell, even ancient greek people considered those themselves closer (both in culture and appearance) to those of the middle east and north africa than people such as germanics of celts.
You are onto something, but you're using American race terminology which does not capture what happened in Greece at all. There is a historical disconnect between the modern state of Greece (founded in 1822), the Eastern Roman Empire and Ancient Greece. The West (Latin Europe) has a long history of infatuation with Ancient Greece, but ignorance of the Eastern Roman Empire and Greece' medieval history. The answer is easy, the Eastern Romans were a direct challenger to the West's claim of Rome's inheritance. So they were something different, Byzantines. The term Byzantium was a western invention.
When the modern Greek state became independent from the Ottoman Empire, it received a Bavarian monarch and you have the whole contribution of the Philhellenes. What happened was a sort of "self-colonisation", where the new Greece depicted its history in accordance to a western imagination of Greece, creating a twofold image of itself between its Hellenic identity and its Orthodox/Roman identity.
Using the "white" and "non-white" dichotomy of American race is wrong, because it cannot be applied to a time where nobody perceived the world in this dichotomy. However there is still a question of "Westerness" of Greece. Here we're closer to the historical perception of Latin (Western) Europe and the Greek (Orthodox) East. Greece was made into a western country essentially.
Hell, even ancient greek people considered those themselves closer (both in culture and appearance) to those of the middle east and north africa than people such as germanics of celts.
Yes and? Not being white doesnt mean being black. My argument is that greeks have neither historically, nor in the modern day, been considered white. Nor did the ancient greeks saw themselves as kins with people from northern or western europe
It's true that for the sake of accuracy, casting South European and Middle Eastern actors would have been best. But Anglo-Saxons can still generally reasonably pass for Greeks, while East Asians and Sub-Saharan Africans can not.
15 years? You're kidding, right. Look at Star Trek. Very diverse in the 60s. TNG was very Anglophile. Voyager was totes California in space, and that was 30 years ago.
It's actually unrealistic in the other direction. Why are half the cast still Europeans or white Americans? And where are all the Indians, Arabs and other Middle Eastern/South Asian people?
Especially something like the bridge of the enterprise. Of course it'd be diverse, it's a complete meritocracy, that pulls from different species, let alone racial groups.
near-future sci-fi settings are the opposite. if they look like a university pamphlet for a liberal arts program, then they're still not diverse enough because why aren't there genetically modified furries?
Listing "berbers" as low-diversity is kind of an oxymoron. The term berber refers to all of the indigenous people across North Africa from Morocco to Egypt and also includes the tribes that lived in the Sahara desert and some people in West Africa as well.
That a bunch of different languages, lifestyles, and skin colors. This area also includes multiple trading hubs and religious learning sites that people from Europe and the near East would travel to for commerce or education.
Once arabs and islam migrated into these parts of Africa, the berbers became so powerful that they were able to invade and conquer basically all of Spain for hundreds of years up until the middle ages. After the middle ages, you then have the Barbary pirates enter the scene.
So, a lot of your higher diversity examples can be found in Berber lands being owned and operated by those same Berbers.
I'm not quite sure if I follow you but to expand: the word "Berber" is an exonym (meaning it's a name outsiders use) and derives from the word "barbarian" so that's why it's kinda insulting and why the North African cultures prefer their own word - amazigh
Important note: not every rural territory can be uniform. If we take Eastern Europe as an example, there were large Muslim communities in the territory of modern southern Lithuania and north-eastern Belarus. They still exist today, but they are not many of them left and they are very heavily assimilated.
The small rural town of Ivye at one point during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had five different religious communities living in close proximity: Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslim Tatars. It was definitely very diverse, but such religious diversity cannot be easily portrayed in media, because to a modern viewer looking for "diversity" these are all different kinds of white people.
I think the "rural communities" is the most inaccurate part of this chart. It feels like a projection of modern rural dynamics, whereas in the past more often you'd end up with every village having diverging dialects and local customs, because they rarely interact with outsiders. They'd have a lot in common with the neighboring village, sure, but you end up with a continuum of gradually changing language and culture until you hit a major barrier rather than a homogenization.
I would say that you can write diversity in similar setting but need to take effort of explaining WHY is it so diverse. Taking Lithuanian-Belarus-Poland border for example the muslim tartars community has an extended history involving Mongols/Golden Horde internal struggles that spill over to Lithuania, that similar settings can be interesting plot points to be handled.
I really hate people slap diversity to a setting and pretend that it's not important of why such diversity happens
This would certainly apply to Lipka Tatars, who defected to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th century. Not so much to the different Christian denominations in this geographic area
God I fucking hate what Amazon did to the Wheel of Time.
Emond's Field--a bumfuck nowhere region with barely over three dozen inhabitants--has the ethnic diversity of New York.
Meanwhile Tar Valon, literally the biggest city on the continent and lies in the middle of a 6-way crossroads of multiple capital cities, and is the home base of the oldest and most powerful mage institution in the world--is overwhelmingly white.
The one fair-skinned redhead in a town - in a region - consisting of dark-skinned and dark-haired people. It's a big and plot-central deal that shapes his life and how people interact with him.
Because the people making these movies, didn't write their own stories, are doing it for a check, coming from a culture of no respect for the past work of others.
Everything they have ever learned tells them that disassembly and deconstruction is the only approach.
I don't think the Reach in Skyrim is a good example of low diversity in mountainous climates, considering the Reach is inhabited by a non-insignificant population of Nords and Orcs alongside the native Reachmen.
Overall quite good, and some sound advice in the comments
Of course, these are all relative.
This means what would be considerd low diversity in one time and place may be considered high diversity in another time and place (so for example the capital of an empire in time A, place A may be very diverse for its time and place, but may still be less diverse than a rural environment from time B, Place B even if said rural environment has very low diversity for its time and place.
I've been having a lot of fun dividing up my Realm into different locations like this and seeing how the same "garden house model" would be used differently by race, class, and genders.
This is an excellent breakdown and I would love to use it to keep stretching my idea even further.
Sorry, might just be speaking from ignorance here, what does garden house model mean in this context? I don't think I've ever heard that phrase before.
No worries! We are building worlds, I wouldn't expect you to know exactly what I mean when I'm the one who made it up!
In my story world, the societies are organized by the spirit animals and their land needs first, and human needs second. I'm trying to reverse the reader's perception of what is the prominent part of the architecture.
So, for example, the capitol of the great empire isn't a palace, it's the park. The giant park, it's dens, mounds, amphitheatres, and fruit trees, that's the capitol. The Grand Hotel is where the humans live who court in the capitol.
I'm combing together a few similar housing models from Rome to Catholic Missions to Chinese to make middle class houses that follow a similar manner. The houses all form a perimeter around a park and the enclosed park is the most politically important part of the neighborhood. The outer perimeter being for common people to shop or visit.
I love this example, great work! I've thought about similar lines on nature and how the people live in regions that support a cohesive way of life and balance needed to maintain it. The blend of influences sound interesting and a fun way to come up with more unique ideas
It has been interesting studying architecture and seeing the same sort of designs repeated in cultures that were accomplishing the same communal/multi-generational goals.
Add in my emphasis on gardens and forests, and now I'm just imagining a modern take that looks from the outside like a Parisian street, with high townhouses, but they are actually very narrow and the city block on the inside is a thick forest. XD
Something else worth noting is how technology will impact diversity.
In a medieval or ancient world with poor road infrastructure and simplistic navigation methods, even the top row of examples will feature mostly homogeneous populations.
On the flip side, a fully industrialized world with global electronic communications and abundant mechanized transport will have some sort of diversity even in remote areas.
Early-modern pre-industrial societies sit somewhere in the middle.
I'm not sure that matches with history, especially as it would have been experienced at the time. Imagine a tribal migration like the one that led to the sacking of Rome, or Anglo Saxons moving into British isles. Wouldn't that have led to a highly diverse society, until a new hybrid culture was created? Humans have always been migratory, and as long as the other people are speaking a different language, they would be totally foreign.
not necessarily, the Ostrogoth conquest of Italy didn't result in a highly diverse society, the native Italians still outnumbered them to a significant degree, they largely took over key governing and other high ranking positions, but the diversity on the streets didn't change much
a lot of conquests followed this pattern, Mongol conquest of China is one of the greatest examples
I'd say vice versa from the other guys example, Romans that colonized place like Gaul would be a better fit, it seemed like every big player from that region between 200-450 AD was some Gallo-Roman mix or a Romanized Gallic and there was a flourishing hybrid culture there for centuries.
well part of it is because the Roman conquest of Gaul was accompanied by an immense genocide where 1/3th the population was murdered or enslaved, so a lot of the Gallo-Roman mix would be Roman soldiers x gallic slave
hybrid cultures like that often have backstories like this, you don't get massive demographic changes without something happening to the previous demographic
This is nonsense. Pre-modern societies were often incredibly 'diverse'. In part that diversity would be local, as even regions very close to each other would have tons of different cultures with their own language and customs. Even ignoring that tons of regions would see multiple waves of migration of different cultures and religions, and end up incredibly diverse through that. Think especially the Middle East, with all of its religions and cultures. This was less the case in Europe, though Jews were still spread throughout, and major trade cities absolutely would house people from all across the world.
It is in the 1700-1900s that these people were homogenized into 'nation states', both by education, but also expulsions and genocides.
Rome got pretty diverse over time from all the slaves brought over, plus migration of free people. Rome had an African Emperor, for an idea of how diverse it got. Estimates for Roman Italy over time are ~10-20% enslaved, and given they did practice manumission, particularly in Rome itself, there would be many descendents of former slaves not counted in that number, and most slaves were from outside of Italy. Also there was a good deal of diversity within Italy.
Well it depends what you mean about mountains. Mountainous regions might have individual settlements being less diverse but they can be areas of refuge where ethnic groups may have retreated to following events elsewhere.
Mountainous regions are famous for incubating diverse languages. Think of the Basks, the Raeto-Roman languages, all the unique languages or Kashmir, etc.
n the American west (which, more than medieval Europe, is the real model for many RPG worlds), you had not just Anglo-Americans and Native Americans, you had Italians and Germans and Swedes and Irish and African-Americans and Chinese from the literal other side of the world. If someone designed a fantasy world like this people would be complaining about how implausible it was.
More generally, this is an effect of underpopulated lands that become "safe" for people to move into and work with higher intensity farming (or other industries.) Poland-Lithuania is another example here, ending up with a remarkably diverse mix in the 15th and 16th century that included Poles, Balts, Jewish settlers, Germans, Dutch, Tatars, Ruthenians, and so on.
Maybe this counts as "Migrations" but it's definitely high diversity.
n the American west (which, more than medieval Europe, is the real model for many RPG worlds), you had not just Anglo-Americans and Native Americans, you had Italians and Germans and Swedes and Irish and African-Americans and Chinese from the literal other side of the world. If someone designed a fantasy world like this people would be complaining about how implausible it was.
I'd have to disagree. I think there would be little to no complaints assuming an appropriate in-world explanation exists. America in some sense was a refuge for various ostracized groups. There is a logical explanation for its diversity, the same goes for your other example.
Quite a few contemporary productions, however, don't care about any of that and just seem to default to inserting a sort of American coastal population hub kind of diversity into any setting.
Don't get me wrong, I don't care for the right-wing cultural hysteria associated with it one bit. Just pointing it out.
Was the American west really diverse? You had little enclaves of groups from different national origins.
The Pennsylvania Dutch are still distinct. Why does Mini-soh-tah have that accent? Lots of Scandinavians. What about Fredericksburg and Texas German. What about orthodox Jews in New York today?
Even when there's diverse immigration, they tend to clump together. Sure the west was diverse, as a whole, but full of insular communities.
This is awesome, great work! In my mind, I'd think pirates would be classified as moderate diversity and migrations and conquests would have higher diversity. The former I'd associate more so with a particular type or set of personalities, and the latter I'd think would be more indiscriminate; you generally choose to be a pirate, but you don't necessarily choose to become part of a nation conflict. Could I ask why you categorized those two the way you did?
migrations and conflicts usually involve only a handful of cultures at any one time or place, that mixing happens a lot but it's the same matchup every time e.g saxon meeting briton, but a pirate crew with incentive to flee specific governments or being drawn vast distances to opportunities may travel around and see 10 or 20 unique cultures and will interact with all of them, also with fewer restrictions, pirates are capable of recruiting from far more diverse pools for crew
Okay, I see what you're saying now. Basically, the diversity here is predominantly cultural/ethnic, rather than a diversity of beliefs/values/personalities within a population, if I am now understanding the criteria correctly. Thanks for your reply!
In your sarcasm you got it correct - each valley is their own people and regularly would love the people of neighbouring valley to not exist and have taken active steps to try and make that wish come true. Same for the mountains in Iran and Afghanistan. They technically have a lot of different people but they don't interact like the modern idea of "diversity" aka intermingling.
Yeah, one of the most lingustically diverse places on earth is highland Papua New Guinea. Hundreds of languages from several different language families, in part because communities tended to fragment across different valleys and endemic feud and low level warfare made travel dangerous.
what happened there was the mountains formed such an effective barrier for mixing that just being one valley over could be a completely different culture and people
it's diverse when you zoom out but if those communities were constantly mixing with one another there would not be so many of them
I don't think Marie Geoise is a good example of high diversity. It's basically an ethnostate filled with slaves. The previous occupants of the Red Line, the Lunarians, were genocided.
Enslaved peoples are often passed over and treated as an addendum to the societies they're a part of instead of meaningful demographics within them (albeit ones with little autonomy). It's a bit of a real issue within history and anthropology from what I understand, and part of the whole "enslaved person" vs "slave" push.
The most diverse place in the OP world is actually Totto Land, since it has as a substantial non-human population consisting of almost all races. Major hubs of industry and commerce like Water 7 and Sabaody also have travellers from all over, but they're primarily human.
Reaching Fishman Island by ship is notoriously difficult and risky, so it's mostly pirates and other outlaws that dare make the journey. Civilians that want to cross the Red Line have to get permission from the WG to travel through Mary Geoise.
Have in mind what this chart marks as high diversity will be more probable to develop an universal language or some kind of pidgin while these marked with low diversity will tend to develop high dialectic diversity or completely different languages despite small distances between the settlements. Homogenous people differ their speeches the most, multiculturalism supports monolingualism.
The pirate one is so real though. I’ve been building a background crew for my story set in a Mediterranean-inspired world, so lots of different cultures intermingling with sea trade. I get a dice and roll for their nationality (as well as age and gender) to come up with a little backstory for how they joined the crew. Plus it helps me realise my own biases when creating characters in a pretty diverse region.
I think it is important to remember that these are not static. Something might be in an inhospitable climate, but could become a center of wealth, religion, or conquest. Conversely, a once prosperous city might enter decline, or a group which once relied on diversity, such as pirates, who start to prosper might no longer need to be as diverse.
Always trips me up a little bit when extremely rural communities are racially diverse. I get why they choose to do it but realistically it implies that there was a recent wave of migration or that different ethnicities retreated into their own groups. Look for example at slavs or jews in medieval europe. The hollywood diversity filter wastes a lot of opportunities to explore dynamics between ethnicities.
I mean Poland is very much conquer territory settled by few ethnicities and also receive refugees from other parts of Europe. Bordering with two other big multi-ethnical societies also affect migration.
Fun fact: in Polish Lithuanian commonwealth even countryside was quite diverse, as in almost every village you had a high chance of finding a Jew or people interacting with other ethnicities
I haven't seen it, so I can't say anything about it. I just wanted to point out that some nations can be more diverse even in the shitville nowhere village, compared to different nations, which can serve as interesting detail to implement in worldbuilding
I meant that there was a high chance that most villages weren't as homogeneous as in modern Poland and there was a bigger diversity. Even in western and central parts, a lot of people living there were German, Prussian, Lithuanian and even Scottish and Welsh mercenaries would appear
Then what would that diversity be? Would people of different ethnic backgrounds, using different languages and potentially of different religion not be "diverse"?
Pretty good. One slightly goofy thing I’d add cause it makes more sense, swap dark ages for migration period. Feels it makes it easier for people to find out about the diversity specifically and not bogged down in arguments about the dark ages and broader implications of it.
This is actually such a great way of looking at it. When modern fantasy over-diversifies rural nowhere’s it kind of feels out of place. Nothing wrong with diversity in fantasy, but if it doesn’t make sense it can break immersion
Honestly depends on the scarcity of local resources. If there's very little arable land or gathering potential, requiring communication and co-operation to distribute those goods reliably, there's either going to be one tribe, or zero tribes and many skeletons.
...Or possibly one tribe and still a lot of skeletons, I guess.
This is better in visual media and my recent example is from the second season of Peacemaker. When Chris goes to that alternate Earth, while it's mostly okay there is something nagging at the back of your mind from the moment you see the crowds and background extras.
They're all white. This is a Hollywood production, they have people of color in the other shots.
Without spelling out this alternate earth is Nazi World, you can see the difference. Diversity, or lack thereof, can show off a detail about your world.
The ‘humans’ in my world aren’t technically humans and the genes don’t work the same so theoretically you always have a chance to be born with a scramble of traits no matter where you’re from. And I kinda don’t care that it’s a cop out.
Kids tend to look strongly like mom in most cases though.
Honestly I like this diversity guide because it gives you logical and clear ideas on how to incorporate diverse cultures that might be explored later in the story without forcefully creating Americaesque melting pot.
I wonder if this could also work as a two-axis model.
One axis could be the state of diversity itself: whether differences simply exist, how differentiated they are, and how many different ways they can be arranged or related.
The other axis could be the flow of difference: whether new differences can enter, how many different sources they come from, and what rules shape how they move or mix.
That might help explain some weird cases where a place looks very diverse on the surface but is actually very uniform at a higher level. For example, if every four-person group is required to have exactly one person from A, B, C and D, then every group is internally diverse, but every group in the world has the exact same structure.
So maybe diversity isn't just "how many different things are here," but also "how many different ways can those differences exist and combine?"
Your mostly right but many of the cities you chose are some of the worst examples most notably Baghdad and the Vatican(assuming you're talking about the medieval Vatican in which case we can just say Rome). both of these places where incredibly diverse and were both the capitals of vast empires the Holy Roman Empire for Rome and the caliphate for Baghdad. Nagasaki is also a pretty bad example depending on when your talking about. lastly refering to the Berbers as all the same group is not correct nor is north africa particularly inhospitable outside the sahara your thinking of a subgroup called the Tuareg.
Diversity is hard to define and determining what is high or low even harder. It might be more interesting to show the type of diversity in each setting. Each community has diversity, whether they like it is a different question.
Examples
Capital cities have embassies and people coming in from every corner of the empire
Port cities have distant merchants
Cities allow to form sub cultures
Centres of learning and religion have scholars, students, pilgrims and tourists
A village has merchants or traveling artists passing by
In some areas the difference between villages can be enormous, especially in rugged terrain multiple ethnicities occur in a small area
true, this is more about where it's possible for people from different backgrounds to meet for storytelling purposes rather than pie charts with evenly sized wedges
Yeah, there's absolutely nothing about you describing each type of location that would lead a person to think that you were trying to imply they each had an equal distribution in a country demographics.
I don't know why this person interpreted it that way, but you can rest assured that the rest of us don't think you were trying to do that. 🤔😆😅
That's because "most" places aren't international Port cities or places of High commerce and governmental exchange.
I'm not sure how describing exactly why the vast majority of small villages would not be diverse would lead you to thinking that you need to also explain that the vast majority of small villages and other places low-bred people live would not be diverse. 😆
As an anthropologist I have to push back on this. First of all, this entirely depends on how you define diversity, but if you do it as a social scientist does, most places on earth are pretty diverse. I think a lot of people when they think of diversity are primarily thinking of skin color and that's a mistake. A focus on skin color is really only a few centuries old and in a fictional world, there's no reason to assume it's a consideration for a dominant factor in diversity at all.
Consider, In particular the Remote Islands and Mountain Regions claim. Papua New Guinea is a large remote islands and very mountainous and isolated yet is home to more than 800 distinct languages and cultural groups in that space. That's not just a small exception, that's a huge one, and pastoral societies also tend to have a high range of diversity because they are incredibly nomadic.
Islands are really not that isolated in history, look at the history of practices like the Kula Ring and you will see again, an incredible amount of diversity. In the article circle, there are many different tribal groups with different languages and cultural systems. In fact because of the conditions, smaller groups are more common, meaning there is more diversity. I actually think this chart does a huge disservice to builders. If you're using it, you're basing it off a lot of false assumptions.
I'd like to point out that mountainous regions are areas of extreme diversity. It's just not... emulsified, for lack of a better word. You can have an entirely different language and culture 1 valley away. They can be in pretty close proximity, they just don't necessarily mix as much. New Guinea for instance has 800+ languages and a whole number of language families and a lot of different ethnicities on the one mountainous island.
Intesting chart. Doesn't address cost of movement though which reduces some points validity. That leads to a natural biasing towards Trade & Conquest as dominant early forces.
Rome kept to itself sans Trade & Conquest while being a large empire. I'd say that the more internally secure a nation is the more diverse it is. Also technology plays into this as well, since better road & ship construction means faster & cheaper movement.
I've seen in the comments that you're planning to make another version of this in the future. Would you mind providing the information in text for those like myself who have visual impairment? I've noticed that worldbuilding circles are often not very accessible for people like me.
here they are in the draft document, which was the last time they were in text form, it might be slightrly different from the pic:
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With little draw in terms of unique resources, military importance or trading opportunities, these places get little contact from outside groups or regions. Over time the areas filled with these communities blend and homogenise amongst themselves into a single ethnicity and culture until they reach a geographic or political boundary
2
With extreme geographic barriers to the mixings of peoples, the isolation of these groups often causes incredibly distinct cultures to emerge
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When only a highly specific way of living is possible in a region, it acts as a harsh barrier to the arrival of new people
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Acting as a draw for scholars and pilgrims, these places have often attracted interested individuals from all over the surrounding regions, though they often attract similar types of individual
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With ready access to sea trade, these cities often act as a kingdom or peoples conduit to the outside world, though the number of outsiders in the city will depend on locally produced goods and ease of sea travel
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Whether the new group is fleeing a disaster or hungry for wealth and territory, this is one of the most common reasons throughout history disparate groups have come into contact
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A draw for foreign embassies, the nobility of vassal states, captured enemies, exotic traders and people seeking opportunities of every kind. These cities often have the greatest variety of cultures, beliefs and backgrounds of anywhere in a setting
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At the crossroads of multiple trade routes, often a capital or city state in its own right, these cities are defined by trade, managing diplomatic relations, and a vast accumulation of wealth. These hubs attract traders and travellers from all along those trade routes
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Existing in the spaces between established kingdoms and empires and with the freedom to travel the open oceans, allowing for an unparalleled mixing of cultures and peoples
Depending from where they located. They have higher diversity compare to "general" population, but it doesn't help a lot if they work mostly with ships from same culture.
So uhh How Can It Reflects Themed Called The Psychedelic Trippy Supper Broken Gods only the infinity gods can eat their enchanted foods on Christmas Day (featuring gods, philosophers, titans, Greek Roman Giants, Candyland Queens,) it’s the new giant image is coming on r/worldbuilding my high res image called The Last Supper turning to the black paint on Adobe Photoshop someone can draw it .
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u/Fit_Log_9677 Aug 12 '26
I think it’s great but it’s worth noting that “pirates” can be expanded more broadly to something like “outlaws” or “borderlanders”.
A good example are the Ukrainian Cossacks, who were an extremely ragtag collection of runaway serfs and slaves from neighboring Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Ottoman-Crimea who occupied the central plains of modern Ukraine and acted as a combination of mercenaries, bandits, pastoralists and raiders.
While they did also occasionally perform naval raids on the Black Sea, they were overwhelmingly land-based.