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<blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2107092" data-attributes="member: 7240">I guess it depends on how &quot;modern&quot; you want your campaign world to be. In my opinion, the history that is presented to players is often uninteresting or not compelling because it is presented as a complete, coherent, inert whole. I love writing histories for my worlds and so I've evolved a presentation strategy that keeps me entertained and my players interested. I would therefore recommend this:1. Present a brief and highly generalized history in writing to everyone, the kind of general knowledge of history that one would expect an uneducated peasant to have. (Imagine the level of historical knowledge of a modern American 10 year old.)2. Present some primary documents from the past or about the past -- documents where someone with an axe to grind is making a case about a time in history based on their political views and ideas about the world. For example, a member of a particular religious cult might be writing a polemic about how a particular battle went and blaming another cult's members for it going badly.3. Continue having the characters run across more documents from both past and present that have an axe to grind about some historical event and are written in an antique style. Another example: a piece of crappy poetry about the new prince regent that everyone actually hates. 4. Make sure that these documents are (a) entertaining on their own (b) inconsistent with one another. In my view, this is a great way to do history. It gives you a wider variety of things to write. It takes less time at the start of the campaign and it keeps the players interested in the history because they aren't just passively receiving it, they are figuring it out. And that's what keeps players' interests -- anything in which they are a participant rather than a spectator.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="fusangite, post: 2107092, member: 7240"] I guess it depends on how "modern" you want your campaign world to be. In my opinion, the history that is presented to players is often uninteresting or not compelling because it is presented as a complete, coherent, inert whole. I love writing histories for my worlds and so I've evolved a presentation strategy that keeps me entertained and my players interested. I would therefore recommend this: 1. Present a brief and highly generalized history in writing to everyone, the kind of general knowledge of history that one would expect an uneducated peasant to have. (Imagine the level of historical knowledge of a modern American 10 year old.) 2. Present some primary documents from the past or about the past -- documents where someone with an axe to grind is making a case about a time in history based on their political views and ideas about the world. For example, a member of a particular religious cult might be writing a polemic about how a particular battle went and blaming another cult's members for it going badly. 3. Continue having the characters run across more documents from both past and present that have an axe to grind about some historical event and are written in an antique style. Another example: a piece of crappy poetry about the new prince regent that everyone actually hates. 4. Make sure that these documents are (a) entertaining on their own (b) inconsistent with one another. In my view, this is a great way to do history. It gives you a wider variety of things to write. It takes less time at the start of the campaign and it keeps the players interested in the history because they aren't just passively receiving it, they are figuring it out. And that's what keeps players' interests -- anything in which they are a participant rather than a spectator. [/QUOTE]

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