Hand outs for new players?

[Corsair]

[ first a preface: This is my first thread here, go me! Been a reader for a long time, but I just finally signed up ]


I know a lot of you are running or playing in Eberron campaigns. I'm looking to start my own, but I am divided over how to introduce my players to the setting. I obviously need to provide them all with copies of the Artificer, along with stats for the three new races, but how to I introduce them to the rest of the setting? The places and events which have shaped the recent past?

I had considered writing up an intro hand out, but I figured I should ask to see if anyone else already had something handy.

 

[EricNoah]

A handout would probably be very useful. You'll want to maybe have a map of the region and/or world, calendar info (what the months and days are called, what the current year is), one or two sentence descriptions of the new races and classes, a summary of action points and other new general rules, maybe a timeline of what's happened the past few years. Other stuff you can work into the game itself -- encounters with a wounded veteran of the Last War, members of the new races, dragonmarked underlings from one of the great houses, etc.

 

[Corsair]

A handout would probably be very useful. You'll want to maybe have a map of the region and/or world, calendar info (what the months and days are called, what the current year is), one or two sentence descriptions of the new races and classes, a summary of action points and other new general rules, maybe a timeline of what's happened the past few years. Other stuff you can work into the game itself -- encounters with a wounded veteran of the Last War, members of the new races, dragonmarked underlings from one of the great houses, etc.

I think one of my guys has access to a heavy duty printer at work. I'll see if I can get him to print out a big map. (I have a couple nice ones which I've found online made by other fans, but no means to print them up)

I think I'll just have like 2-3 sentence descriptions of each region, with maybe a slightly longer description for the remaining four nations.

I want to include pretty solid descriptions and rules for all the races so the players will have enough info to be able to choose one and make a character if they want.

 

[Klaus]

Go to the Eberron Art Gallery over at WotC's site and pick the images that best sum up the world: Lightning Rail, Sharn, the Eberron PC party (complete with warforged), the chapter openers. Assemble a two-pager with setting info (as mentioned in earlier posts) and throw the images in there as well.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Pick a area, provide what is to the north, east, south and west as general information. Provide major cities in their area and products produced. List groups that are active as these would be rumors and current events.

Give what history you want but you can also build cultural taboos, things like warforged are not to be trusted.

You may want to give a bit of info on the gods, as all are worshipped, which my players took some time wrapping around that thought.

 

[MavrickWeirdo]

This might help

New Eberron helpsheet!

P.S. are you looking for players?

 

[Corsair]

Actually Mav, I got that from your post on the Wizards Eberron forum (where I use my old online nick, Dauntless). It was very helpful for presenting mechanical info.

 

[barsoomcore]

Give 'em a link to Wizards' Eberron pages

 

[Corsair]

I've been reading the Dragonshards myself, but I'm not sure I want to encourage them to read too deeply into some of those topics, as they expand on some things I'd prefer to surprise them with. This group is the kind of group which simply can't resist the urge to go read up on the stats of a specific monster in the MM if they think they are going to fight one, so this is part of the reason I want to begin play in a new world with them. While they could go out and buy the ECS just to spite me, I think it'll do them some good to play in a world where they don't know everything.

 

[barsoomcore]

I think it'll do them some good to play in a world where they don't know everything.

Spoken like one who can only be satisfied running a homebrew campaign setting.



The web is a great way to introduce your players to your setting. Even if you don't want to give them the Wizards link, you could create a couple of simple pages and host them somewhere. I taught myself HTML doing exactly that for my campaign, Barsoom. You can expand it as you go (I started with only a couple of pages, and look where I am now) and use it to seed rumours and other goodies as time goes by.

It's good fun.

Now, about that homebrew...