My reaction is this scene from Austin Powers:
What I expected to be a book on simple chronomancy and how to apply it to role-playing (and come on, Amadeus the naked Paladin would be so much cooler in a TARDIS) turned into a complete philosophy class on discussions such as paradoxes, multiverse theory (in the real-life variety and not in the D&D Great Wheel/Astral Sea variety), free will, God, and the cosmos. And it couldn't have been more glorious. Of course, I revel in Philosophy, my favorite classes in college dealt with Philosophy. It just too bad the only thing a Philosophy degree would ever get me is the chance to ask why someone would like fires with that. I kid, I kid.
On my bookshelf, I have a shelf dedicated to Spirituality, Philosphy, and the Occult. From Plato to Buckland to Tenzin Gyatso (our current Dalai Lama for the unaware). It's something I also try to inject in my writing and planning. Sure, Plato is not walking round the streets of my fictional locales, and you won't find any Wiccans in those locales either, though I have written in a Buddha analogue named Agartha, but that's a story for another time. However, what I bring in is the philosophy and the spirituality, the immaterial culture (I studied in Sociology, I guess to figure out the effect of how people want fries with their fast food meals, again I kid). The strongest fictions are the ones in which the people act like us. NPC's are not supposed to be the quest-giving cardboard cut-outs of MMO's and the RPGs of the 80's (although the 80's has the excuse of memory capacities); NPC's are your common run of the mill folk who live, breathe, work, worship, play, eat, have sex, sleep, struggle, and die. What local superstitions are there? Do they have a belief that sneezing is how evil spirits enter the body (btw, that is a possible source of the response to sneezing that is Bless You)? Do they think that only water from a running source can fertilize crops properly? Do they have drinking songs about beautiful voluptuous women and certain poultry on rafts?
You know, I think in some ways we are turning into the bland cardboard cut-out NPCs anymore. I suggest philosophy could help, that and maybe a brand new superstition. So here is mine, one I just created off the top of my head. Seeing your hair cut soon after getting it cut in a mirror will result in shortened luck, so if you want to look in a mirror, you need to wear a silly hat to counteract the bad luck, for the bad luck will think it silly to look at you in a silly hat and leave you alone.
Or a turban, because turbans are cool!
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