What's a good way to package and present campaign setting

>>53967236
Give them the relevant information in bullet point form. Condense and summarize as much as possible.

>>53967236
Give each player a shortened version of what their character should know. Everything else they can find out by playing.

>>53967261
It sounds very cold, boring and formal when I've done that, like a powerpoint presentation about accounts receivable.

>>53967236
Get gud at writing so that your players (and random strangers on the Internet) eagerly read it all and ask you for more.

That's how I do it.

I actually used a Twitter account to some success. I was able to justify it as an in-canon news organization because SciFi, but I just tweeted one to four times a day with some plot-relevant stuff, some random fluff, and some jokes all in the format of news headlines. The condensed format makes it easy to digest and forces you to condense information to just what is needed, but allows you to get across a lot of information over a long enough time whIle keeping players engaged.

However, I don't know how weird it will be to read about fantasy stuff in such a modern way; may be immersion breaking.

>>53967344
This.
It's very similar to the show don't tell style of storytelling. Helping dole out information "organically" will add the feel of exploitation and adventure.

>>53967583
Yeah, that wouldn't work for fantasy but good idea for scifi/cyberpunk.

>>53967588
>Add the feeling of exploration and adventure.
Stupid autocomplete

I have a dossier of my setting for if I have a player who's into it. It's presented as a fifteen-page setting book that talks about all the different nations and organizations, as well as some of the more notable locations.

If a player isn't interested, I ask them their character concept, and give them information that would be relevant.

"Show, don't tell" is almost universally the way to go, but it's good have your info accessible in case you get a lore buff.

Give out the information organically ingame.

>>53967371
Can I read it?

>>53967236
They won't read it. If you say it's mandatory, they won't read it and will lie about it to your face.

Read it to them, do a powerpoint presentation in simple language if you need to, hand it to them printed out at session zero, and start session one with an exam on the material you provided. No pass mark? No play.

>>53970987
That sounds quite harsh.

>>53967236
Build a wiki, you might actually get one person in the group to read it.

Otherwise, I have to give Paizo some credit, as far as making adventures goes. Gazetteers and Player's Guides can be really helpful and if they are properly sized -- 20 pages or so total -- your players might actually read it, especially if you take the $10 hit or so to get it printed at Staples or something as a nice ringed booklet. Of those 20 pages, you don't want to just vomit up fluff, either, so blend in some crunch that your players can take advantage of, some pretty pictures, and a map. The Curse of the Crimson Throne one is a pretty good example. It's 17 pages of useful content, divided up as...
>2 pages of maps, one regional and one of the city the majority of the adventure takes place in.
>6 pages on the city of Korvosa, with overviews of the districts and important locations, as well as the various groups of people and notable citizens.
>4 pages on making adventurers that fit the city, from what the races are like to what different classes might be doing. Thanks to clerics, you get an overview of deities. Thanks to races, you get a look at the population statistics.
>2 pages of equipment, which allows you to distinguish the region slightly by the inclusion of the weapons of local ethnicities -- maybe you have a lot of pirates so you get some new pirate weapons and gear, or maybe you have a bunch of barbarians that fight with strange weapons and magic pastes to inspire rages.
>3 pages of Traits which also double as giving players ways to involve their character in the upcoming campaign while also giving them a minor mechanical benefit to draw help bait in interest.

Within those 17 pages, you've managed to get across a nice pitch of what the setting is like and various individuals they might meet or have met in the past. You've also sprinkled it with... 5 different feats -- or their equivalent in your game, since hopefully you aren't playing Pathfinder.

>>53974730
Compare that to their 69 page Guide to Korvosa, and guess how many players actually read through the entire thing. I generally find this approach to be the best, as it has a couple of nice little benefits.

One, I've already got this information for the setting in my head or notes, and placing it up on a wiki can help me organize and check myself. Maybe something doesn't make sense, maybe I have a weird gap in organizations, whatever. Actually processing through it and organizing it can help reveal things you might have overlooked. Secondly, cutting through a large chunk of content to get it down to a nice 15-20 pages of easily digestible content helps you focus yourself as you're basically coming up with a pitch for the setting or adventure, and that forces you to consider what's really important. Third, giving them a smaller pitch and a larger repository online allows the players that inevitably aren't super invested to still get tricked into getting slight familiarity with your setting in order to get to the crunch hidden inside like a tasty nougat while also allowing those that are more interested to be able to read at their leisure.

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>>53974730
>>53974816
That's great advice, thanks.

>>53967236
One method that you see in a lot of old school materials is similar to some of the approaches in >>53974730 - turn it into mechanics.

Rather than a list of "here are the things that live in the Forbidden Woods", putting things in a random encounter table (optionally with percentages) says a lot about a region. If the Forbidden Woods has an encounter table full of undead and plantmen, this says something very different than an encounter table of goblins and spiders. You can alternately have players pick this up in play - either by direct experience or through rumours gleaned in taverns.

>>53976224
Happy to help. And while it might sound harsh, >>53970987 is pretty fucking spot-on about players. Most of them really don't care as much about your world as you do. That's pretty natural. Out of the... 9 or so people that I've run in my setting, two have actually read the wiki. But all of them read the hand-out, because inside was tasty nuggets that were relevant to character creation.

Take this doc I found a long time ago. It's a pretty nice template, and the world sounds quite interesting. But there's some things that I'd tweak. For one, by putting all of the crunch in an appendix at the end, he's basically given those rascally players an easy way out. Some might still flip through, but plenty will just give it the lightest skim and get their stats and move on. Also, a little too much art and a lot of it was stored at the very end instead of being sprinkled in. Shit doesn't even have to be commissioned, just something to help break up the pages of text and keep their interest.

The level of depth here would probably be best served by getting put on a wiki, and then the fat trimmed and turned into something injected with a little more crunch to be handed out for players making characters. System agnostic works for the Wiki, it will hurt you in the handout.

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>>53976410
Derp, forgot the pdf.

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>>53976410
>>53976692
I'll try something similar. Cool PDF and world there too.