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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mad_Jack" data-source="post: 6985869" data-attributes="member: 6750306">As the above posters have mentioned, hand them a map and a page or two of brief descriptions of the major geography and societies, and then work with them to help place their character concept within your world. You don't need to give them a college degree in your world's history and culture, just enough bare-bones info to establish the general feel of the world and their place in it. (I.e., they don't need to know the name of the King, just that there is one.)All you really need is:- a list of all the character classes with a few suggestions for where each of them might be found or factions they might belong to- a list of the campaign's gods and their domains- a campaign map- a list of the major geographical areas, nations, larger factions and a couple major points of interest, with a few sentences or a short paragraph about eachYou could do that in a six-page hand-out. The players don't even need to read it all. If they already have an idea for a character, they can just go to the relevant section, scan a few paragraphs and have enough campaign information to start asking relevant, more in-depth questions for clarification.As Celebrim mentioned, it should take about five minutes per player to go around and say, "Okay, you want to play X race or class... They're usually found here, here and here.", "These two nations have large standing armies, so a mercenary ex-soldier might come from one of them.", or "Elves who live amongst humans generally congregate in the capitol city due to it's high culture and the universities, while dwarves are more commonly found in the trade city of Hull, which sits on the main road between the capitol city and their kingdom there to the north"...If a character's concept doesn't quite fit with what you have planned, just ask them to explain why/how the character's origins are different, within the context of your world. If they started from X, how did they get to Y? If they didn't start from X, what circumstances in their life or the lives of their parents brought them from X to wherever they did start from? Given a place to start from, it's pretty much child's play to come up with a plausible adjustment - if it even requires one.A character's place of origin doesn't necessarily need to be tied into their character class - a character who's spent their entire life on the trade roads isn't particularly from anywhere, a rogue could be trained by a thieves guild or be a military scout, and you can learn the same spells from a hedge wizard as you would from an academy-trained mage...Clerics or paladins might be devoted to a minor god or goddess who's a servant of one of the major deities. Small tribes of barbarians (which could describe any culture from stone-age cavemen up to Medieval Scots or Mongols) could live anywhere outside major population centers. Druids don't necessarily need trees - they can be found on the plains, in the mountains, on the seas or even be an urban druid living in the major cities (sometimes the alligators in the sewers are people, or vice versa). An elf or dwarf was raised in a human city because their ancestors were winemakers or brewers who did business in the city and seven generations of the family have lived there. Or perhaps they were orphaned when their parents passed through. If there's any form of widespread international commerce or even slavery practiced somewhere in the campaign world, it could well explain how a character or their ancestors got to someplace where they're not usually found. And if you can't just slot a character into the world as it exists, unless you've worked out every single last detail of that world down to an obsessive level there's almost always room to add in what the character needs to exist in the world or at least something similar enough to work.In short, unless your campaign world is something truly bizarre, it shouldn't take much effort or time to give the players enough general information about the geography and cultures of the world to give them a decent feel for the general parameters of the world and allow them to find a plausible place for their characters in it.</blockquote>

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