Textile traditions in fantasy, a how-to guide: part 3 of 3!

 Continuing on from the past two posts, this is the final part of a 3 part series dealing with textiles and traditions in fantasy worlds. 

Today, I’m going to give a few examples of textiles in RPG worlds that I’ve built, but first I want to briefly talk about working these into a game. Working worldbuilding into an rpg plot is a complex subject and requires a lot more effort than I can give right now to cover comprehensively, but specifically for textiles, one thing I do is to describe what clothes people are wearing. This is especially useful if clothes denote something special in society, but even if they don’t, “light brown linen robes” and “neon yellow polyester raincoat” come from two very different cultures and textile traditions, and imply two very different levels of technology. Beyond clothing, consider dropping in household items — a “woven rug with geometric patterns” can give a good setting to a scene and reinforce bits of culture, or a tablecloth could be made of “a heavy, cream-colored wool fabric, covered in thick lines of green embroidery”. Since these items aren’t always described, some players might think that they should suddenly investigate them, but that can be a chance to bring world building into the game as well! You can also make them plot points, like a dishonest weaver selling a garment only the aristocracy can wear to the players, and someone noticing… 

Now, a few things about this list of ideas: these are random things I wrote down to use in various worlds. If I’ve mentioned the world here before, I’ll try to link it. Otherwise, if you use these for personal games or worlds, that’s fine. Please don’t just steal this and sell it; even though I don’t make any money off of this, I’m proud of what I do, and I’d love attribution if you use anything from this online. 

For Neverron — I’ve already described a lot of what I came up with for Tyrus, but:

• the Empire and Requia and Cantora are all pretty industrial, so they’re at the point of having fast fashion; clothes are becoming much less precious except in a few rare cases
• Tyric fabric is worth something specifically because it’s handmade 
• There’s one particular style of embroidery, similar to real world cross stitch, that’s become a fad among the young people of Cantora. It’s been used to protest the recent Cold War, much like some modern cross stitch patterns are loudly protesting unfairness in society. 
• Someone definitely started an armbands-as-anti-war-protest thing among Requian schools. 
• Of course an empire has court weavers on staff, and I’m sure one of them tried to pull an emperor’s-new-clothes-like trick on the ruler of the Empire of the Emerald Dusk, who promptly executed them for treason by hanging them from their own looms, because she cast a true-sight spell and could see there was nothing there. The fable is still told as a precaution. 

For the Auri;

• Making clothing out of pure magic is an art. It’s considered a rite of passage for people hitting the age of majority and passing the rank test that denotes adulthood (3rd, usually, but remember they go from sub-8 to 8 to 1 to mastery) to create at least one item from their own magic, but the fanciest of artists make whole formal robes out of their own magic. 
• Also, if you make magical threads and fabric, they can be used as raw materials to cast with, but it does destroy them. Years ago, the biggest scandal of the social season was someone starting a duel in the middle of a ball… because he cast from his dress, and ended up wearing just a crinoline when he cast too hard. His opponent ended up wearing nothing, though, because ze was wearing a suit and using that to power a particularly large spell. 
• There’s a spindle belonging to a major historical figure, Aurora d’Ardenne Alta, on display at a museum, and supposedly it can spin even the strangest of things. 
• A holiday, the Festival of Sheep, celebrates the win of a small band of spinners who used their fleeces to transport contraband and plans to overthrow an evil empire attempting to destroy the Auri (no, totally not Auraic Chanukah or Purim or anything). It’s celebrated with spinning bees and such. 
• A fairy tale for young children is about Thalathrie, or Little Woven-Bracelet, a girl whose skill at making bracelets of thread and generosity in giving them away allowed her to survive a series of trials that led to her marrying her true loves, rebelling against the society which outcast her in the process. Thalathrie is a common costume for young Auri. 
• Embroidered and woven records of various events are a Thing. 
• Loom computers! Because if the first programs were for Jacquard looms, why not figure out a way to weave magic threads and make essentially programmable magic spells. That turns into simulating computer functions with a combination of magical threads and programmable looms, and eventually an internet of yarn. That, combined with modern electronic computing, allowed the creation of a number of AI systems, bodied and unbodied, and the communications system that controls the CTN/Em transport system. 
• Magic threads and displaying whatever you want to display at a given moment in a tapestry. 

General:

• Knitted socks as a trophy celebrating someone’s accomplishments.
• “Each thread a person, each person a thread” — proverb about how even the smallest things matter, but in the end nobody individual matters because people only see the larger picture.
• Diviners pull threads out of woven fabric that’s been dyed erratically and predict the future based on the patterns of color on one individual thread.
• A bunch of kids start a fad where you wear fabric dragon wings. It becomes a thing everyone does, either all the time or just for some holidays. 
• Expanding on a thing I did in middle school, imagine being able to turn a given combination of crochet stitches into letters through the magic of non-decimal number systems and then passing secret messages with that, or binary with knit stitches v purl stitches. Then imagine that’s how everyone stores their data, kind of like quipus in the Incan empire. 
• Ojos de Dios, a thing I made a lot as a kid with colors of yarn wrapped around two perpendicular sticks. Now imagine that it was actually the eye of a god, and it could see whatever you do, and people still made them for protection. 

In general, especially for your “standard early European fantasy”, think holidays, clothing, legends/stories, music, displays, history, protests, expressions, anything that might have something physical attached to it!