The flavor of any setting can be baked right in to nearly any game system through a careful tweaking of the skill system. As a gamemaster or designer, you can impress upon players not only what sorts of abilities might be important within the campaign, but what is deemed to be of value by the world’s various cultures. Many games offer lists of suggested skills for classes, archetypes, and professions, but lists can also be created for races, nations, regions, castes, and socio-economic strata. These types of lists hold up a mirror to the world, and give characters some background to build a personality, story hooks, and roleplaying hooks on.
The suggestions below are intentionally generic, and should be adapted to best suit the system of your choice as you see fit.
Athletic Skills
Think about the real world here for a moment. Sports are ingrained into cultures. Football means one thing to most of the world, and another to Americans. Consider things like ancient Greek marathon runners, Scottish caber tossers, the Pony Express riders of the American West (endurance riding could easily be considered an athletic skill set separate from normal riding). What sports might kids play at in a given culture, that adults might still engage in? How did those sports develop? What sorts of rivalries and tournaments might arise?
Craft Skills
Different peoples have different forms of arts and crafts. Some of it might be geographic, based on materials available such as gems and minerals for jewelry or marble for sculpture. Some might reflect the refinement of the society, like flower arranging or portraiture. A region or race might be known for their high degree of skill with a particular craft so much that trade of that item might be a major part of their economy.
Knowledge Skills
Consider that some cultures or races may know more about certain subjects than others, making those people sought-after expects. Woodland-dwelling elves may excel at botany, and be hired to help human farmers during droughts and other crop failure. Dwarves might be better geologiest, called upon by architects and masons to select building locations for firm foundations and check the quality of stone using in construction. Consider what will be considered useful knowledge to survive from region to region. Universities or other institutions of learning might also specialize in types of knowledge; if you want to know about the occult, you’re going to seek out someone who graduated from Miskatonic, right? Some knowledge might also be held to be proprietary, for economic or tactical reasons.
Languages
Not enough is done with languages in roleplaying games, in my opinion. The erroneous meme that Eskimos have 20 words for snow and Arabic has none is the sort of thing to consider. Vocabularies are built up around what needs to be communicated, so hobbits might have a dozen words for grades of pipe tobacco while Klingons have a more extensive array of terms for combat. A culture without a word for something will borrow a word from another language when that item or concept is introduced. Consider the number of words in English that are borrowed from other languages. Consider also regional dialects; English-speakers from different regions not only have different accents, but different words for things, different usages for words, and different spellings of words.
Performance Skills
Back to real-world examples here, Mexico has mariachis, England has Morris dancers, America has steel guitars, Japan has haiku poetry, India has Bollywood musicals. Each culture is going to have its own unique performance skills, which may or may not be appreciated by people from other cultures.
Trade Skills
The economies of societies are dependent upon citizens with the right skills. Farmers, miners, IT specialists, auto workers, whatever that society needs, the non-player characters in the area will have those skills. A player character may have been plying a trade before they became an adventurer. As with knowledge skills, trade skill show what a culture values and reflect the things they need to do to survive.
Summary
How much emphasis is placed on these skills is up to you. Many of these skills might have no practical benefits for adventuring, so players might not want to take them. I recommend giving players some free background skills, based on the types of lists suggested, to flesh out roleplaying opportunities. It’s then important for you, as the gamemaster, to work in ways for players to use those skills. Not in every adventure, certainly, but somewhere over the course of the campaign. The sorts of skills named above make good icebreakers when dealing with non-player characters. Maybe an NPC only speaks that odd language one PC knows, or also writes sonnets or is a baseball fan. If nothing else, the player character might get a bonus to social interactions because their mother was aa baker like the NPC, or they share an appreciation for native pottery along with an NPC.
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