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FelineArchmage
2018-04-05, 11:01 AM
Hi all!

I am running a campaign (Out of the Abyss 5e), and am going to run a future campaign with a different group, in Eberron. In both cases, none of the players (except my husband) know anything about the setting.

So how do I go about beginning to introduce the setting to the players? Actual settings - especially Eberron - have a LOT of lore and history. I don't want to completely ignore it, but I also don't want to overwhelm my players with a lot of information at once.

Should I just introduce and explain information as I go? Should I give a [very] broad explanation when I start the campaign/make it to the surface? Has anyone been in a similar situation for their TTRPGs?

One thing to keep in mind too is that one of the groups consists of just teenagers. They are all very bright kids but sometimes the attention span is lacking during sessions. I don't want to drop a ton of history on them where it isn't necessary.

Thanks in advance!

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-05, 11:09 AM
Hi all!

I am running a campaign (Out of the Abyss 5e), and am going to run a future campaign with a different group, in Eberron. In both cases, none of the players (except my husband) know anything about the setting.

So how do I go about beginning to introduce the setting to the players? Actual settings - especially Eberron - have a LOT of lore and history. I don't want to completely ignore it, but I also don't want to overwhelm my players with a lot of information at once.

Should I just introduce and explain information as I go? Should I give a [very] broad explanation when I start the campaign/make it to the surface? Has anyone been in a similar situation for their TTRPGs?

One thing to keep in mind too is that one of the groups consists of just teenagers. They are all very bright kids but sometimes the attention span is lacking during sessions. I don't want to drop a ton of history on them where it isn't necessary.

Thanks in advance!

Show as well as tell. If goblins are purple, describe them as such and make it clear from the NPCs reactions that it's normal. Don't be afraid to drop broad "your character would know" statements. Especially with teenagers. A little exposition goes a long way (and a tiny bit more means boredom).

I use a custom setting for all my games (with large changes from "stock" as far as monsters and cosmology especially). You just have to expect that they'll murder the lore. That's normal. Don't be so tied to the "established" lore that you force it down unwilling throats.

2D8HP
2018-04-05, 05:45 PM
"A shadow passes over you, as you look up you see a Dragon passing overhead",

"What do you do?


That's about it usually

No lengthy setting history essays.

No big lists of nationalities and social classes

Unless I tell you otherwise PC's are ignorant/isolated farm kids ala Luke Skywalker/Percival newly arrived from the land of Generica (part of the Nondescriptian Empire), in an unfamiluar land were they somehow understand the language (except when they don't!), and have them learn about the world through NPC's.

If there's backstory, unless it's a map, journal etc.that a PC finds I try to not give a handout!

Oracles, street prophets, and witches will give voice to the backstory in character (hopefully).

I:
1)Make up or steal find a scene that looks like it will be fun/exciting.
2) Listen to what the players say.
3) Have them roll some dice for suspense.
4) Tell the players what changed in the scene.
5) Repeat
"Your at the entrance of the Tomb of Blaarg what do you do?" If they're real contrary "Your inside the Tomb of Blaarg, what do you do?, or "your trapped deep inside the Tomb of Blaarg" etc. Just quickly narrate to the part where the actual adventure begins. They can role-play how they turned tail and ran back to the tavern.



For a crash course inbad DM/player interaction see DM of the Rings (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=14)
While much of the fun of DM'ing is in making a world (the other part is witnessing the PC's shenanigans), I try to keep world building bare bones. It's usually more fun to read, then to play. When the players start to get jaded, then maybe introduce "exotic", "innovative", and "weird" elements, but usually at first freaky "Alice in Wonderland on LSD" "adventures" are not fun!

One of the most successful (i.e. my players liked it) "campaigns" that I DM'd/Keeper'd (I reused the same setup for both Call of Cthullu and Dungeons & Dragons) was a mashup of the plot set-ups of "Conan the Destroyer" and "Young Sherlock Holmes" (cultist, Elder gods, yadda, yadda, yadda), I didn't map anything out on paper before hand at all! I just imagined "scenes", described them to my players, and had them roll dice to see if they did whatever they were trying to do, then on to the next scene!
As a player I prefer Swords and Sorcery settings, but I can remember some particularly fun sessions of Shadowrun that had no fantasy elements at all. The trick was that a very good gamemaster amped up the roll-playing aspects, and downplayed the role-playing aspects, with lots of action and suspense, resolved by many dice rolls (a chase were you roll at each corner or notable landmark lends itself well with this approach).

Other times that I've had a lot of fun involved lots of described magical elements and dialog, and almost no dice rolls at all. More boring RPG sessions seem to involve an intermediate amount of dialog (role-playing), and action resolved with dice rolls (roll-playing). So I would advise GM's to stay away from a "middle-of-the-road" approch, and to stick with what's working at the time. If the action is flowing keep the dice rolling, if the players are "playing" (doing the thespian thing), only stop them to roll dice for the suspense of it, otherwise keep 'em talking.

As a player, sure some guidance on what sorts of PC's will fit the game would be nice, but when I ask they usually start on "10,000 years ago a great meeting was held on the continent of...." and I'm zzzzzz.

You know how it oft said that most Americans can't find most nations on a map, or even other states?

Don't give "macro" details.

Instead tell of the village where the PC came from, the name of the fishmonger that the PC's fisherman family sold their catch to, not the name of the freaking ocean they got the fish from!

Small details help build characters, big grand "5,000 years ago the armies of Argle-Bargle invaded the lands of Generica" don't help much

That said, I still get carried away with worldbuilding, and wind up doing

Far to the West the land descends gently into swirling mists, several rivers run to it, and the closer one gets to the mists the louder the sound of rushing water becomes.

The mists are known in many tongues both as "Worlds Edge" and "Will to Live" as for centuries there are records of the despondent, and the bold vowing to either walk down into the mists or explore what's in the distance down the hills, but all of them are recorded to have turned back.

It is also noted how relatively prosperous, healthy amd happy are those in the lands that border the mists are, and it is also noted that until recently few lived near the mists, with most families being only a few generations old despite fertile farmland being near the mists. Both those families that have newly arrived, and those that have been longer have had more births in the last 20 years than those families have had before, with each year there being more births.

Within a days journey of the mists the differences between those who live near Worlds Edge/Will to Live and those who don"t, is apparent, and then first gradually, then quite abruptly, those differences dissipate the further from the mists one goes.

Strangely, the population is less dense the more days journey from the mists one travels until about four days out, it becomes quite crowded and gradually less so the further east from the mists one travels. While being less crowded with people, it is clear that the further east from the mists one travels, the older buildings appear to be, and most families, and even nations have histories of travelling west, few of migrating east.

Quite alarmingly, more and more around the world have just this year have decided that they either "Have nothing more to live for", or "Want to be the first to solve the mystery of the mists" and are journeying west to either end their lives inside the mists, or explore what's is past the point one may see, but so far no one has yet done so, just as they have not for centuries.

Some Sages have proposed a reason for these anomalies:

When one goes into the mists, one ends not just your existence in the present, but that you ever existed at all.

There is no proof for this whatsoever.

But if I can do it via an My theories aren't crazy at all!
Just because those blind fools at the Mages Guild roll their eyes, and won't admit the truth!
I'll show them! All show them all!

First, the half-elves, and half-orcs among us show that elves, humans, and orcs are in fact the same species! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?481829-Why-the-Sentient-Species-Don-t-Make-Mutts)
Humans are actually descendents of long ago Elves and Orcs.
Don't walk away! In your hart you know it's true!

Also the reason Elves have low light vision like Dwarves and Gnomes, is because they too originally lived underground. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?475794-Drow-the-original-Elves) Clearly these rumors of "Dark Elves", sometimes called "Drow", point towards the inescapable conclusion that "surface" Elves are in fact descended from Elves who were exiled from the Underdark because they were insufficiently badass! And in fact the day star bleached them! That is why Wood Elves who lived under the shade of their forest homes are darker hued. Either that or the reliance on magic among the so called "high elves", makes them both lazy and pasty!

In fact this overuse of Magic by some may doom us all!
The ruins of the Ancients all around, in the wastelands and underground shows the truth!
Long ago the Elves
used up all the magic causing the fall of their civilization! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?487606-Magic-Lost-and-Reborn)

Overuse of Magic in one place leeches the Mana from the Earh, leaving desolate wastelands in it's absence!
The ancestors of the Elves having squandered all the magic fled underground, with a few remnants learning to survive in a world without magic. Yes humans and orcs! The Orcs who infest the ruins are the savage descendents of the Elves too stupid to leave. We humans are the descendents of those who didn't hide underground, or stupidly stay amongst the ruins, but instead pioneered new lands and made new tools.
Why else would it be humans who invented the crossbow, the plow, sailing ships, and windmills? Only in times without Magic would anyone bother to build such things! That's why so many of us still toil on the land and in our smithies, instead of just learning Wizardry, were not too stupid to learn Spellcraft! Nay, deep in our souls we feel the warning that it can't last!

That is why these tomb robbing Adventurer's have lately been finding magic items littering the ruins. For centuries there was insufficient environmental Mana for those items to be worth picking up!
That is why there are Sorcerers now born among us when previous generations had none!
The return of Magic to the wastelands is why suddenly all these magicsl monsters now infect our lands! Do you think our ancestors could have survived long if they'd always existed?

We have forgotten and grown soft!
We must conserve what Magic is left and learn from the Gnomes ways to make wonders without the Arcane arts. Too much reliance on and use of Wizardry will doom us!

We must learn to grow our on food and distill water, without relying on Create Food and Water Spells, and if these Magic-User's continue to waste the Magic away in trivial goals, we must learn to fight off without spells, the bears, wolves and other beasts that threaten us, else we fall to claws and fangs!

Take these pamphlets and spread the word before it's too late!

The truth is out there.

Heed the warnings!

But my campaign ideas are rather more prosaic and unoriginal,
Your PC's are adolescents and very young adults in an isolated village where two summers ago all the fighting age men, and many of the women left on a "trading" mission, and have not returned, so the elders of the village at a moot in the godshall have some of the you accompany "old Ragnar", a one armed former Viking (who will die of natural causes soon after they set sail) as their guide.

What they find is that nearby they are de-populated and sometimes burned towns with no bodies and little evidence of what happened.

Upon returning home (assuming they do), they find their village simillarly emptied, with cooking fires still smoldering, and in the distance a low thumping sound, like a muffled hammering.

If they seek out the source of the sounds, they find what look to be new wells outside the village, but they see no water at the bottom, and ha hand and foot holds along the sides, and descending and exploring leads them to discover albino "Goblins" leading the enchanted people of their village deeper into the earth, and then....
....well basically the Goblins are the Morlocks in the 1895 Time Machine novella, and the 1960 film, led by albino Drow/Elves not unlike the character played by Jeremy Irons in the 2002 film.

Further exploration by the PC's leads them to find tunnels made by digging machines (like in At The Earth's Core), and locales like in Journey to the Center of the Earth (ruins and dinosaurs!), and a civilization a bit like the Selenites in First Men in the Moon.


https://i.pinimg.com/originals/be/cd/be/becdbe61eaa6aecd066a697cbef57715.jpg

https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/2x/z2tm2qgh2h31.jpg

https://ingeld.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/stave-church11.jpg?w=218&h=300

https://68.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9wv1dc6LR1r9gwhe.bmp

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w1U7VldXczM/VtcnnDjKVdI/AAAAAAAALGk/dVZdltN5_vM/s280/Eoli%2Bunderground.jpg

https://68.media.tumblr.com/0e9aca8fe922c2ef369ba370d70a66be/tumblr_o2afjzv7Ek1syptjoo7_500.png

https://68.media.tumblr.com/e247703f22fbaa609cf56741365b1706/tumblr_o2afjzv7Ek1syptjoo1_500.png


https://pre00.deviantart.net/6570/th/pre/i/2004/09/e/b/morlock_emerging_from_a_hole_.jpg

https://pre00.deviantart.net/0caf/th/pre/i/2012/057/2/2/here_be_morlocks_by_mattpocalypse-d4r2eg6.jpg


https://68.media.tumblr.com/2022bb37f8ba55fe62daadcbc61a1df2/tumblr_o2afjzv7Ek1syptjoo4_500.png


http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_s8l-yu7AZLM/SVppXmlmMYI/AAAAAAAAFdM/_uaE0SOEVds/s280/tm13.jpg

http://pages.erau.edu/~andrewsa/sci_fi_projects_fall_2015/Project_1/Charalab_Constantine/Updated_Project_HU338/Morlocks.jpg

http://cdn3.bigcommerce.com/s-x8dfmo/products/11724/images/34773/Jeremy-Irons-in-The-Time-Machine-2002-Premium-Photograph-and-Poster-1023101__47680.1432433158.386.513.jpg?c=2

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_TRju1TnYfxU/TN5ipt5ZoqI/AAAAAAAAAjY/GCUVQIL_CO0/s280/Mushroom+forest.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_TRju1TnYfxU/TN5iQWoLrxI/AAAAAAAAAi4/mXGlR6nEiyU/s280/cave+5+-+Alantis.jpg

http://cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/515889167041822721/640/10/scaletowidth

http://www.pellucidar.org/moleh3.jpg

So yeah, I just don't make the setting so exotic that much intro is needed.

"What do you do?

Beneath
2018-04-05, 10:43 PM
Yeah, a little bit at a time. Don't try to show the whole world at once; if they wanted to learn the world that way, they'd be DMing. Show them what's in front of them and go from there, introducing unfamiliar elements one thing at a time.

There's a wikia site for Eberron, I think, but to your players that's like the Codex in a video game: stuff they see in-game might suggest things they could look up on the wiki, but they probably won't and the stuff they need to know will be explained in-game. You don't lay out the magical principles behind how the lightning rail or airships work, you describe how they look and the parts of their operation that are gonna be relevant to the next adventure and go from there.

With the underdark, this is even completely in-character; their characters aren't at all cosmopolitan, they're surfacers coming down to the underdark who don't know anything about it starting off.

Dalinale
2018-04-06, 04:34 AM
Whenever the party is in a entirely new region/world and it's not clear to them about the biggest surface-level stuff that will immediately interest them (there's a dwarven vault fifteen days travel from here, the local evil empire is thataway, ect), it might be best to try and lure them to a large, notable village or mid-size town and introduce information to them through going about there and roleplay. In the case of total party unfamiliarity, it might be good to ask the PC's if they're willing to play as characters from relatively isolated villages or regions that might not have the best grasp on the world in a IC perspective.

In a OOC perspective, as long as you're not running a campaign based on the metaplot of the setting, giving them access to the normal setting information through simply referring them to some good online resources might be for the best.

BWR
2018-04-06, 05:39 AM
How to do it?
With patience, time and forgiving mishaps along the way.

I love fluff heavy settings but understand the problem some people may have trying to get into them. Sometimes they don't give a damn, and sometimes they simply don't have the time to do a lot of reading outside of a session. The best thing you can do IEM is:
1. have a brief introduction, a couple of pages at most, for the players to read and understand before the game starts. The absolute basics.
2. try to have the PCs start in situations that require the minimum of complicated interaction with the setting, have them come from some background that explains ignorance. Don't throw them headfirst into situations where mistakes made from ignorance of the setting will have grave consequences
3. dole out information regularly. Whenever something comes up, make a brief explanation or expansion. Allow them to make mistakes and don't be afraid to allow them to retcon stuff they may do that makes no sense for characters to do. When introducing places and people and organizations, add an extra few sentences of lore. Make it feel like flavor rather than a history lesson. Or just tell them some cool bit of trivia about something as a tangent during a scene
4. Accept that things won't always go according to what makes sense for the setting.

This sort of thing requires some effort on the part of the players, however. Players will just have to accept that there's a lot of stuff they don't know and be willing to learn and make mistakes. The amount of effort the players put into learning about the setting and playing by its rules determines how effective this whole strategy is.

Knaight
2018-04-06, 06:08 AM
The slightly snarky response here is "often and with minimal difficulty", but there's something to that snark - not having a "standard" setting is freeing, and lets you get away with a lot of variety, and to some extent using an almost standard setting like Eberron can be harder than something weird. Still, the same general principles should hold. The big ones:


Start small. This has been pretty well covered, but the short version is that you don't need to know the whole setting to use part of the setting. To use a modern example, if I'm running a game about street gangs in London the players don't necessarily need to know much of anything about wildlife, be familiar with the politics of any other country (or even England in any real detail, though things like "there is a queen" are probably going to come up at some point), etc. There's a small scope there, and the same thing applies to fantasy worlds. I happen to particularly like archipelagos for this, but that might just be the hydrophile in me speaking.

Use proper nouns heavily. This one is a bit counter intuitive, but it's essentially a soft introduction technique. After a first description I'll start dropping proper nouns. Players generally catch on quickly, and learn the nouns in the first place. It might start as a knight in weirdly pale armor with a metal lance thundering towards the party, but once they start talking (or shooting) it's an aluminum knight. This technique is particularly appropriate for things the characters should know, and for genuine in setting mysteries should be clamped down on a bit.

Start abstract. There's a certain level of gloss that can be given to actions early on, and generally stripped away. You don't need to know every niggling detail of how the PCs navigated social etiquette, and can allow them doing so to be a background element. At the same time, those smaller details can be used in NPC descriptions. Again this provides an area to gradually learn the setting without the lack of setting knowledge causing a problem, and that layer of gloss will become more and more optional, though still recommended for less focal scenes.

Answer questions. If the players ask about setting details their characters should know, hand them out freely. Answer these questions quickly, getting in essential information and no more. The goal is to avoid info dumps here, instead maintaining a persistent setting learning layer subtly doped through description and dialog.

Give warnings. If the players are planning something stupid based on information they should know (including information that you've told them before but hasn't stuck) about the setting, go ahead and give warnings that include this information. Often it's repetition in the warning phase that causes it to stick, and it's not like being warned that a plan is stupid actually prevents players from using said plan reliably.

FelineArchmage
2018-04-06, 11:02 AM
Thanks everyone! There's a lot of good advice!

I'll definitely go slow, and really only describe things they need to know at that point in time. If anyone asks for more information about the setting, I'll point them in the direction of online resources. :smallsmile:

Bulhakov
2018-04-06, 11:12 AM
You can always take a cheap way out and have the characters know as little about the world as the players - they either came from isolated backgrounds (grew up in a remote village/monastery/tribe/island) or have some sort of amnesia (which is very convenient, as it slowly wears off, they remember/learn more and more about the setting).

FelineArchmage
2018-04-06, 11:16 AM
You can always take a cheap way out and have the characters know as little about the world as the players - they either came from isolated backgrounds (grew up in a remote village/monastery/tribe/island) or have some sort of amnesia (which is very convenient, as it slowly wears off, they remember/learn more and more about the setting).

It will definitely be the first one. Most of the kids haven't gone deep deep into their backstory, and those who have given me tidbits are definitely from isolated backgrounds. Same with the adult group except for my husband, who gave me lots of stuff since he's just as much of a nerd as I am. :smallredface:

Edit: I'm originally going to play the world as if they were in this setting all along, but if one of them realizes that "Hey, weren't we in Faerun?" (unlikely) I have a backup plan to explain how they got to Eberron.

Kelb_Panthera
2018-04-06, 01:36 PM
Give them the info as you go. Most people barely gloss over an info dump so you gotta feed them new knowledge piece-meal.

Give them the extremely basic knowledge that even a kid would know as it becomes relevant, have plot info and some surrounding info handed out by NPC exposition, and encourage the players to -ask- if they're interested in a particular topic as it comes up. They'll gradually get the feel of the setting as you go. If they -really- care, they may even do some research on their own and, if they don't, then no amount of effort on your part will matter.

RazorChain
2018-04-06, 01:55 PM
Like every other setting I guess.

Just tell them about the world briefly and then let them experience it through play.

This has worked for me when running Glorantha, Exalted, Deadlands, Legend of the five Rings, Mythic Europe, WHFRP and every other homebrewed or official world.

Some players will bury themselves in the lore of the setting or what is relevant to them. One player wanted to know everything about his clan in L5R, another player wanted to know a lot about his faith in Stormbull in Glorantha.

Mostly I introduce the setting in tidbits during play or handouts between sessions. For example in my Mythic Europe campaign there is a lot of politics going on so I sent the players in email "A treaty on the current political situations" by brother Giorgio of Salerno. It describes the relationships between key nobility and explains the war between the Holy Roman Empire and Kingdom of Sicily which the PC's are caught up in.

My group likes these kind of information and often things get discussed in our facebook group or chat which is we keep around the campaign.

Nifft
2018-04-08, 11:18 AM
Session Zero: "This is the area where we're starting, so you're all probably from here, or you had some reason to be here. Let's all make characters together now, and figure out how you all know each other."

Give players info about the setting which is relevant to their characters as they create the characters, so you can show them setting-specific feats / spells / gear, or talk about potential plot-hook stuff, like the goals of their religious order, or why their neighbors across the river don't like them, or the like.


After Creation: Give each player a cheat-sheet of stuff that their character would know about the world, and then ensure each cheat-sheet has useful clues going forward. You can get some useful examples in books like Eberron's Five Nations:


https://i.imgur.com/odbzbsx.png


Then, make sure everyone's cheat sheet is relevant once every few sessions.

Kaptin Keen
2018-04-08, 01:01 PM
A bit at a time.

Having players arrive in Sharn on the lightning rail is good - introduces the level of magic, and let's you go to a major travel hub, meaning you can showcase the racial mix.

Doesn't have to be Sharn, obviously, but the principle is sound.