---
name: civilizations
description: Route questions about the people and structures of a world — cultures, factions, religions, and history. Use when designing a civilization's values or governance, building political entities, creating belief systems, writing a timeline, or understanding how groups of people organize themselves and conflict over time.
metadata:
  author: nirav
  version: "1.0"
compatibility: Designed for Claude Code
allowed-tools: Read
---

# Civilizations — The People Who Live There

The physical world is the stage. Civilizations are the story. Every culture, faction, religion, and historical era emerges from the constraints of geography and ecology — but then takes on its own logic, momentum, and internal contradiction.

## Routing Table

| What you're building | Skill to load |
|---|---|
| A culture's values, governance, customs, economy, or social structure | `cultures-societies` |
| Trade, currency, scarcity, economic structure, fictional economies in depth | `economic-systems` |
| Characters as products of their world — psychology, motivation, contradiction, arc | `character-design` |
| Political entities, organizations, secret societies, factions with competing interests | `faction-design` |
| Pantheons, cults, philosophies, any organized belief system | `religion-design` |
| Timelines, historical eras, events at any scale, how history accumulates | `history-builder` |

## How These Skills Interconnect

These four skills form a feedback loop, not a sequence:

- **Cultures** define the shared values and structures that make factions coherent
- **Factions** are the actors that drive historical events
- **Religion** shapes both culture and faction — it provides legitimacy, motivates action, and creates conflict
- **History** is what happens when factions with different values collide over time

Design can start anywhere in this loop. A history-first approach works: define several key eras, then ask what cultures and factions existed in each. A faction-first approach also works: design the competing powers, then let their conflict write the history.

## Key Design Principles

**Internal contradiction is mandatory.** A culture with no internal tension has no story potential. Every civilization should have at least one value it holds that conflicts with another value it holds. This is where drama lives.

**Faction interests > faction alignment.** Factions work best when defined by what they *want* (power, land, purity, survival), not what they *are* (good/evil). Competing interests that are each internally coherent generate more interesting conflict than moral opposites.

**Religion as legitimacy machine.** In most pre-modern societies, religion isn't separate from politics — it *is* politics. Who controls divine authority controls everything. Design religions with political implications, not just spiritual ones.

**History as archaeology.** The `history-builder` skill uses a fractal-zoom approach (from the Microscope RPG): define big-picture eras first, then zoom into specific events, then zoom into scenes within events. This avoids the trap of writing history chronologically and losing narrative focus.

## See Also

- `worldbuilding-orchestrator` — parent orchestrator
- `physical-world` — the geographic constraints that shape these civilizations
- `systems-craft` — how magic/tech intersects with political power
- `character-belief-tracker` — track what specific characters know about these civilizations
- `extrapolation-engine` — trace the cascading consequences of historical events