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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1276674" data-attributes="member: 812">I remember when the Greyhawk campaign setting first came out and I heard about it and scratched my head and wondered who in the heck would ever buy it?The first twenty years I spent playing D&D, both I and everybody I knew ran homebrew campaigns. There WERE no published settings. Then Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance and Dark Sun...And I'm still kind of scratching my head.Isn't the WHOLE POINT of DMing creating the ENTIRE WORLD out of your head?Well, it kind of is for me. Sometimes I think I run games only in order to justify my obsessive world-building.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />As for HOW -- when I started Barsoom, I knew I'd be providing a LOT of background material, but I also knew big handouts would never get read -- so I created the Barsoom website and put everything up there -- the maps, the country descriptions -- the basics a person who lived on the planet would know.First of all, that gave me an infinite canvas to paint on -- I could provide as much detail as I wanted without having give out reams of paper. I could add illustrations that evoked the spirit of what I wanted.Secondly, it let me structure the material in a way to suck in readers -- the Barsoom website deliberately doesn't have much in the way of useful navigation. You have to go into the pages and read the text and find the little links to other pages -- there are pages buried way down underneath tons of detail that only somebody very determined is ever going to find. This accomplished three things:1. It kept the amount of information at the "top" level small, so as not to intimidate players not yet committed to working hard on the campaign2. It rewarded players who read carefully and spent some time going through the material.3. It allowed me to expand the site limitlessly as the campaign progressed and player knowledge increased. Without a structured navigation system to keep consistent, I could add pages without worrying about updating the whole site.When I started creating the Barsoom website, I literally knew NOTHING about HTML, Internet technology, design, browsers, servers, any of that stuff. I poked around and taught myself how to do it, made a LOT of mistakes and kept it simple until I'd learned how to do more complex stuff. Now it's got PERL scripts loading in journal entries, CSS styling throughout, and in my not-so humble opinion, totally ROCKS.And it makes my campaign so much richer.Thirdly, it gave me an answer to all PC questions and complaints. If somebody said, "But what races are there," I said, "Look at the website.""Why can't I play a druid?""Look at the website."Players had to go to the site to get their questions answered, and they ended up poking around and learning stuff even if they didn't intend to.You've probably got a friend somewhere who could offer you webhosting -- or there's any number of free or inexpensive options around the Web. Browse around and find some HTML resources, throw together five or six pages describing your campaign and put them up. Tell your players to read them. Make it important for them to read your site -- update it frequently (I used to post "Barsoom Rumours" in the early days so players who checked the site could get a little extra info) and make sure players get rewarded for knowing stuff.Remember that a big part of a DM's job is balancing what a player WANTS with what the story NEEDS. Letting players be what they want can make for a dull campaign in a big hurry.</blockquote>

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