Diana - Ii would argue that for multiplot novels in particular (those are the ones with several viewpoint characters or faction, whose stories weave together like a tapestry) strong culture building is essential to give the book cohesion and unity. Consider Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, they have lots of great characters and memorable and meaningful stories, but the principle which motivated the creation of those great characters and stories was the ideas of portraying a cross-section of society.
Shweta - Sure, I'm always happy to talk about my WIP.
My dragon-aliens (this is what the human dubs them, from their own perspective they're People) are biologically like a humanoid bird-dinosaur. Their species used to fly, so they have hollow bones and feathers and wings and lay eggs, but their evolution favored size over flight, so modern civilized dragons are large with useless vestigial wings and feathers only on their cockatoo-like crest, wings, and tail tip (like how humans lost their fur except at head, armpits, and groin).
The dragons have scent glands and scent-mark their territory, which may at first seem unusual for bird-like creatures, but some birds such as vultures have good senses of smell, and scent is a natural way for ground-bound 'flocks' of dragons to mark their territory. They do live in flocks, or clans, or prides, or whatever you want to call them. Basically a dominant male defends a territory, is supported by one or two subordinate males who are usually his brothers, and together they hunt for and protect one or more females and their offspring. In a civilized setting subordinate males are a political necessity as well as a practical one, so if a guy has the ill-luck to not have any brothers he has to adopt a cousin or a best friend as a blood brother if he ever wants to rule a territory.
Because clans tend to have more 'wives' than 'husbands' there is a prevailing shortage of marrigeable females and excess of bachelor males. So females of marriageable age are usually given to an established clan as part of an arranged marriage, usually tied to a trade agreement. Sons of an established clan may inherit that clan, or sons of a particularly rich clan may be given funding to establish a new clan, but sons of poor clans, sons whose fathers have died, those rejected by their brothers or fathers for being too much of a troublemaker, and those born to 'unwedded mothers' all tend to end up in mercenary bands. They are not soldiers so much as they are migrant workers, commonly employed for large architectural construction projects, hunting a particularly dangerous beast, guarding trade caravans, etc.
The dragons do not cultivate fields, their agriculture is limited to managing fruit and nut trees. They have strong claws and good legs for running and springing so they usually hunt bare-handed, but they can also make nets and traps. They have medieval-level technology and most dragons have one small magic talent or another, and these are casually used in everyday life, and taught informally along with other job skills.
So, the hideboundness and pressures of change. Traditionally clans were widely distributed, but with the growth of technology towns have sprung up, a town being a cluster of houses, each of whose territory is a wedge radiating out from the town center, like the slices of a pizza. With towns a noble class emerges, and the idea of an organized army to defend the town, and a rudimentary school (dojo) to train the soldiers, etc.
The dragons put a lot of emphasis on ritual and doing everything the traditional way, which is related to the importance of family and individual reputation in their society. They also have a religion based on the idea that everyone has a totem, fits into the social category with that totem, and is supposed to 'be fruitful and multiply' because this contributes to their racial destiny of reaching a nirvana-like state of collective godhood.
Really everything comes down to children - bachelors struggling to sort themselves into dominant/subordinate hierarchies, claim a territory and a mate so they can have children, protect the fragile eggs the children are in, and behave traditionally so that the clan accrues a good reputation and can help the children make good marriages, rinse and repeat.
So to 'hit them where it hurts' I introduced mutant children, a mysterious plague of infertility, and some homosexuals trying to find love even though no children will get produced that way. The traditional culture is afraid of change and clamps down even harder when threatened by new things, which is a dead-end road, like trying to avoid growing pains by refusing to grow up; the moral is that they can't achieve their racial destiny by looking to the past, they have to embrace the future, because only in new ideas will they find solutions to their problems.
