cultural-consistency

name	cultural-consistency
description	Review fictional cultures for internal coherence, historical causality, material conditions, language and custom consistency, subgroup variation, and avoidance of accidental stereotypes.

Cultural Consistency

Use when a culture, people, society, religion, or regional identity is being expanded across multiple artifacts.

Procedure

1. Define the culture's historical, geographic, economic, technological or magical, political, and religious conditions that shape everyday practice.
2. Trace customs, clothing, food, architecture, family structures, rituals, values, institutions, and language back to those conditions where relevant.
3. Check that different classes, regions, generations, professions, sects, and individuals vary without making the culture incoherent.
4. Review terminology, naming, symbols, etiquette, taboos, and social expectations for contradictions across existing canon.
5. Identify elements that exist only because of a real-world stereotype, aesthetic grab bag, or unexamined analogy and either ground or replace them.
6. Check contact with neighboring cultures for trade, borrowing, conflict, migration, mixed identities, and historical exchange.
7. Distinguish in-world ideology about a culture from the project's own canonical description so propaganda is not mistaken for truth.
8. Record changes in the world bible and flag downstream art, lore, dialogue, and level assets affected by corrected assumptions.

Decision rules

• Internal diversity is compatible with cultural coherence.
• Cultures change through contact, technology, ecology, politics, and history.
• Do not treat one character or faction as a complete culture.
• Real-world inspiration should be transformed with care rather than copied as shorthand.

Quality gate

The review is complete when major cultural practices have plausible relationships to world conditions, subgroup variation and external influence are represented, canon terminology remains consistent, obvious stereotype shortcuts are removed or contextualized, and downstream creators share the same corrected assumptions.