What if your players had an innate knowledge of your setting?

[cmanos]

Anyway, what prevents a DM to ask the players that they read the campaign setting book?

DM's can ask. If the campaign setting book costs money it comes down to the DM saying "All of you go out and spend $35 on this book and read it." If your DM is kind enough to give you a handout of all the pertinent information that takes care of the money issue, but very few people will sit there and create a campaign booklet for their players.

Getting the people to read it once they have it is another thing. Not everyone has the time or the inclination to spend hours and hours reading a book for the campaign. Some people are casual gamers and don't have the time to put into reading one sourcebook for a game, let alone all the possible ones you could be using for your game.

Things you can do...when you are talking about some country, add in something like "....which is the country directly north of the coutry you are in...divided by a great wall of mountains.." or"...the country with which your country is at war with and has been at war with for the pasy 100 years...". Some people just forget the details of things.

 

[Woas]

It has been my experience that going "over-board" on game size is one of the major factors in players getting lost. I see many maps on the internet and in books of entire continents or even worlds. These maps will sometimes have dots for cities every half-inch and detail every single thorp and village across the entire world. Although it is realistic plascement of the towns, it can often gets confusing quickly.

Basically what it comes down to is KISS (or the 1st Rules of Dungeoncraft). For my campaign world I only created a map of the kingdom that the players would be directly involved in, instead of the entire world. This gives the players only 13 different towns/cities to know which has seemed to help out and keep the players focused.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

It would be great if somehow the players had innate knowledge of the world. My main issue with using NE is separating what the characters know from what the players do and the amount of world knowledge the players probably have that PCs may not (OK, maybe that isn't all that big a problem when you have people like my 40 year old cousin who was worried about her parents in Florida because of the Gulf War - since they lived right on the Gulf!).

A homebrew campaign that I am hoping to get off the ground tries address these problems another way. I've been writing up very detailed information of the town the players all come from and will give that to them. They know the nearest other towns somewhat and will be given some information about them. Beyond that, they know the names of the major geographical landmarks, cities and nations and the general direction and distance to those places (things they would have heard about from travellers). I will give them a sparse map with that info and some write-ups of what the overall political and economic landscape is like. The further from their home, the less detail they will get.

My hope is that they will read the information, keep it with them for reference and slowly fill it in as they learn more. It is pretty ambitious and I don't have any idea if I can pull it off, but I am going to try.

 

[SWBaxter]

I heard about a GM who had a terrain map of Mars, put oceans in all the low-lying areas, and made that his map. I always thought that was a cool idea for an organic-yet-not-Earth map.

It's much easier nowadays, with Google Mars to provide the basic maps. Make the light green area on the elevation map roughly sea level, and that'd make for an interesting world.

Doesn't really help the OP's issue, though. I find it's a matter of figuring out what a given group's priorities are and catering to them. If the group isn't really interested in learning about the setting, then I as DM tend to stick with a setting that's relatively simple and ultimately not very important to the group's adventures. OTOH if the group likes immersing themselves in details, then I try to provide them. As in so many things, there's no one right answer for all groups, and knowing your players is pretty key to finding the best solution for a given group.