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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spyscribe" data-source="post: 1308939" data-attributes="member: 5808">Coming late to the party, but thought I'd add my bit.I think one key thing to remember about world intro exposition is that your readers need to know much less right off the bat than your players do.For example, our game takes place in a homebrew setting with a couple of distinctive quirks.  One of them is that arcane magic is relatively new and not everyone likes it very much.  All the players need to know this starting out because our characters are going to meet spellcasters (or our characters are spellcasters) and we have to know how they feel about the subject.But the story hour had been going for a good six months at least before the DM wrote a sidebar about "Arcane Magic in the Halmae."  There had been clues earlier that might have been picked up by attentive readers:  Why is the party sorcerer so darn paranoid?  Why is it so hard to get help countering a plot against the mage's academy?  But the nitty gritty is only interesting to know once it becomes relevant to the plot.Think about the intro to Star Wars.  It can't be more than 300 words long.  Nothing about the Jedi Knights, the Force, zip.  These are huge, vital parts of the mythology, but not necessary for the audience to know right away.The prologue on Fellowship is longer, but it's also not straight text.Which is a long way of saying I'm not a fan of long expository posts as a way to begin a story hour.As noted in the first post of my storyhour, I am compulsive, so before I started writing I copied and pasted into Word a couple story hour posts from threads I read and ran word counts on them.Posts getting up to 1,100 words just feel long to me.I usually aim for 800-1000, although I do go longer if I'm coming to a good place to stop.  Much shorter than that starts to feel more like a scene or vignette than a real update.  Which is sometimes exactly what you want. *shrug*Like the pirate code, word counts are more like guidelines. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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