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Message: <blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 7563695" data-attributes="member: 12377">I wrote it the way that I did to illustrate the practice of gross oversimplification: If this were a homebrew world, I would have written it the same way, but you (people reading this thread) would not have understood the depth of material that I was covering up. Even those of us who are not super-familiar with the history of Great Britain know that there's a lot more material there than what was stated in a few paragraphs. My point was that you should not reveal any more of that large body of material than is necessary.If it helps, imagine it with the serial numbers filed off: cruel Prince Lohan, the haunted Wyrwood Forest, Dilleton County, the Count of Dilleton, Sir Manse Marhault, etc. It works just as well as a campaign intro, because the players know what terms like "Prince" and "kingdom" mean, and for D&D they are expecting a pseudo-European setting, unless you tell them otherwise.Definitely. Here are some more techniques that can help with that:1. Anyone can give themselves considerable advantage by alluding to a known culture from a know period of real-world history as a foundation. E.g., if you want to run a Robin-Hood-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off campaign, you could just say, "The kingdom is sort of like medieval England." Many fantasy authors do this reflexively -- throw in a few words from a real-world culture and the audience instantly gets a head-start imagining what the setting is like.2. You don't have to do all the background stuff yourself; you can actually leave considerable chunks of the setting undefined. For this to work, you need to have a super-strong sense of what KIND of stuff can appear in the setting. This is informed by genre, theme, etc. For example, you might not know what the kingdom to west is like, at the start of the campaign; but then, you decide you need a desert for the next adventure, so you decide that there's a mountain range to the west, and on the other side is an ancient desert kingdom. In a grim and gritty setting, the desert is inhabited by ruthless nomadic warriors; in a high-fantasy world, you might populate it with honorable mystics; in an over-the-top semi-satirical world, you might fill it with lizard-people who sleep all day and party all night.Doing this well can be tricky, and the best way to practice is to... do all the background stuff yourself. Once you've designed a dozen settings, it becomes a lot easier to come up with setting elements on the fly. But you still have to decide how much to give the players up front.3. One good exercise is to start with the assumptions of generic, baseline D&D and then explain how your setting differs. In my "Sherwood Forest" example, I mention that magic is rare, and attitudes towards spellcasters and demi-humans are different. Also, it's a semi-political guerrilla-warfare campaign, not a traditional dungeon crawl. Players definitely need to see stuff like that before they start the campaign.4. When I'm developing a setting in more depth, I like to separate out common knowledge from secrets. "Secrets" are basically anything that the PCs can't discover just by asking around or reading a book in the public library. Setting secrets really help make a setting come to life, and can reward players for efforts to learn more about the setting. More importantly, anything that's not well-known is usually juicier and more interesting. For example, if the Duke of Duenham won many tournaments in his youth, nobody cares and it won't really help you decide what's going on in Duenham. But if he cheated to win those awards and is now being blackmailed by the Assassin's Guild? That's a secret that can really drive the game.</blockquote>

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