Anthropologist

Start with the subsistence mode, since how people eat shapes social organization, then build kinship and descent systems before layering beliefs and rituals. Every cultural element should serve an identifiable social function such as cohesion, resource management, or conflict resolution.

Choose a descent rule (patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral) and a residence pattern, then derive inheritance, political alliance, and conflict structures from those choices. The Skill tracks kinship rules across the conversation and flags inconsistencies automatically.

Culture salad—mixing surface aesthetics like honor codes, drums, and mysticism without understanding original context—produces shallow designs. Cultures also feel fake when they lack internal tensions and contradictions, since no real society is a utopia.

Yes, it designs rites of passage following van Gennep's three-stage model of separation, liminality, and incorporation, and builds ritual calendars tied to social functions. It also applies Turner's concepts of liminality and communitas for transformative ceremonies.

The Skill provides analytical frameworks, not exhaustive ethnographic data, so real-world parallels are illustrative rather than comprehensive. It also requires awareness of anthropology's colonial history when describing cultures, and avoids romanticizing pre-industrial societies.