Our Cultural Coding Principle

Our worlds are inspired by the real world. Each culture and city in our games should feel familiar without borrowing directly from the real group it evokes. Our aim is to evoke a feeling, not to copy a real culture.

The core rule: evoke, do not lift

We build the surface ourselves. Names, words, scripts, and sacred terms are invented. We borrow only the general feeling: the cadence, the values, the aesthetic, the social structure.

A lift is any real element used directly:

• A real proper noun or sacred word used as a name, such as Asura, Mal'akh, Yokai, or Merkabah.
• A real word used unchanged, such as a Mandarin or Japanese word used as a genotype name.
• A living script used as a decorative font, such as Cherokee or Vai letters.
• A real term used against its meaning, such as yokai, which names the spirits, used for the people who hunt them.

When we find a lift, we keep the texture and replace the lifted element with an invented one.

What is not a lift

An invented word that happens to resemble a word in a real language is a coincidence, not a lift. We do not search the world's dictionaries for accidental matches.

When our work draws on a living sacred tradition, we bring in a sensitivity reader from that community before deciding what to change. We do not remove material on guesswork. The people the work depicts are better judges of harm than we are.

Two things that raise the level of care

The first is power. Coding a dominant culture, such as American, British, or broadly Western culture, carries low risk, because those cultures are not in danger of being reduced by a game. Coding a marginalized or historically exoticized culture, including many Asian cultures, Jewish culture, and Indigenous cultures, requires more invention and more care.

The second is attachment. Familiar flavor is acceptable on its own. Familiar flavor combined with an essentialist trait, or with the villain or monster role, is harmful. We do not pair a coded culture with a stereotype, such as the cold and hypertechnological Asian corporation, or with an inherited moral status.

The test

We ask three questions of any culture, city, or name:

1. Is anything here lifted directly rather than invented? If so, we replace it.
2. Is the coded group marginalized in the real world? If so, we raise the level of care.
3. Does the coding carry a stereotype, or a fixed moral or monstrous role? If so, we remove that link.

Tell us when we miss something

If you see a lift or a stereotype in our work, tell us at gamemaster@manyworldscollective.com. When we make a mistake, we correct it publicly and say what changed.