Setting Presentation as Big Mystery Seeding

I had a new insight about one of my favorite topics, worldbuilding for open-world, sandbox games. Think of it as another tool in the toolkit.

I want to focus on the initial presentation of your very own evocative snowflake setting to players. Here's an idea. When we share a "setting" or "background" with our players in an open world sandbox, we should think of ourselves as sharing actionable intelligence. Rather than painting an ornamental backdrop for the real action, we should think of ourselves as placing pieces to be engaged with in yet to be determined ways on a game board. But how can we build and convey a setting through actionable intelligence?

Now, there's a school of thought that one used to hear much more retro-gaming circles, that we should worldbuild "from the bottom up". Don't start with an info dump, or a half-realized fanfic novel; instead start small with a little corner of the world. Give people just what they need to know to get playing--and no more. Build the rest organically from there. Sensible advice for someone who gets overwhelmed by prep, or those whose past experience consisted primarily of scripted adventure paths. Forget all that and plop down a hexmap, with a few jotted notes about a town, select adventure hooks, and one or two little dungeons. Then go wherever the adventure leads!

While this works, there is a cost to doing things this way. One cost is that it's much easier to imagine small scale things if one has a working sense of large scale things. I can improvise more easily if I know what "feels right" or is "plausible" given the general way I've been thinking about things. Without a bigger context, it's hard for me to imagine things on a small scale.

But a more important point is that one of the great pleasures of sandbox play comes from the slow-burning long game. One feature of the long game is that you need to have it in view from early on, ideally before the first session. I'm talking about the tantalizing horizon of possibilities that lies off in the distance, igniting desire and curiosity among the players, drawing them in. If all you know is that the town is called Hofberg and there's a dungeon filled with salt ghouls in a mine nearby, you just can't play this kind of long game.

What this slow-burning long game is like will depend on what kind of a game you're running. It will likely involve the relations and intrigues of various major factions. These are the things in the setting that most directly correspond to game pieces, with which players may choose to interact. But if your game is focused on exploration and discovery, as mine usually are, then the long game should also be, at least in part, about the exploration and discovery of the unknown. Now discoveries come in all sizes. The slow-burning long game is about the really big ones, the mind-blowing mysteries that are tied deeply with the setting and world, the learning of which has the potential to change everything.

To build this in from the start, when presenting your setting, instead of conveying facts, try leading with the unknown. Go with the questions rather than the answers, the big ones, the slow-burning mysteries. Nothing says "this is a sandbox of exploration and discovery" like introducing a setting by emphasizing what facts aren't known. (Aside: it's fun to hold some questions back too, because it's also a slow-burn pleasure to have the players stumble onto a big mystery that's been there all along after a long time playing in the sandbox.) 

This WWII encryption device was literally called an "enigma machine".

I just did this with the intro to my players guide to Jorune: Evolutions. In recasting the setting of Jorune, I found myself replacing the perfectly fine narrative sci-fi info dump in the original (2nd edition) books with conflicting stories and outright mysteries. In essence, instead of saying, "Human colonists came to Jorune on such and such a date for such and such reasons, and here's what happened...Then their ships were destroyed in such and such a war," I replaced this with conflicting oral histories and cycles of myth that essentially said, "Some stories say they came because of this, other stories say this other thing. Nobody knows what the hell happened to their Ship and Earth-Tec!" Given that the discovering Earth-Tec is a major thing in the game, this ties the questions about the past directly to the heart of the action. Similarly, when I introduced my own new trippy psychedelic element, "the dream of the egg", to the setting, what I introduced was a blatant enigma almost literally calling out to be solved.

One thing that's fun about questions is that you don't need to have your mind made up about the answer at the start. Perhaps you'll have some idea about some of the answers, but perhaps others wait on the setting taking more shape in your mind through play. That fits with the sensible "you don't need to have thought this out before sitting down to play" ethos without giving up on the big picture. (But, if you're like me, you'll have answers to some questions in mind from the get-go, because it's the answers that will have made the questions alluring to you in the first place.)

Another thing that's fun about questions is that factions and NPCs may have theories or think they know the answer. Allow theories to proliferate! Maybe everyone has a take. This is especially appropriate for a setting where baseless speculation, psychic visions, wooly tales, and "metaphysical" extrapolation of drugs experiences are bread and butter. But actually, I think it could work for any sandbox game where exploration and discovery are core activities and a lot actionable intelligence is unknown.

So, there's one more tool for your tool kit. When presenting your setting, lead with the mysteries and enigmas. Emphasize the questions without answers. In a game about exploration, knowing what you don't know is actionable intelligence.

Daydreaming with Karlman

In this post, I want to talk about my favorite podcast, Judd Karlman's Daydreaming About Dragons. Karlman is the creator of the Dictionary of Mu, a super evocative setting book for the Sorcerer RPG. He's also one of the hosts of a very early RPG podcast called Sons of Kryos, which I've only started listening to. You can check it out on Youtube.

In Daydreaming About Dragons, Karlman spins out a topic freeform. The episodes are very short, generally reflecting on one thing that happened in a game, or one topic, e.g. "setting research", "the power of names", "ecology of the undead". The effect of his generous demeanor and his meditative tone, combined with his garrulous faux rambling is entrancing. Karlman often has something interesting to say, but my favorite episodes are ones where he spins out a fragment of a setting by riffing on a theme or illustrating his techniques in the moment. His imagination is wild, and to see it in action is a pleasure. Over time one gets a sense of his whole approach to gaming, which is probably the most valuable thing of all. Another thing I like about the podcast is that Karlman plays both retro and story games. As someone who is interested in that liminal space,  but is more on the retro-gaming side, I find his approach congenial.

It's about 50 (short) episodes in by now. If you haven't given it a listen, I can tell you where to get started. The order of episodes is a little chaotic on some platforms (Apple Podcasts, I'm looking at you!), since Karlman has "reply shows" that are not numbered, where he replies to listeners who have called in (using Anchor) between episodes. You should listen first to Episode 3. If you like what you hear, next listen to Episode 6.

Episode 3 is titled "Everything is Worldbuilding", by which Karlman means: everything is worldbuilding if you approach it in the right spirit. A corollary of this, dear to my heart, is that you can do all the worldbuilding you need without info dumps or walls of lore text, simply by making things players care about interesting and evocative aspects of the world. His main example in this episode is schools of magic and spell lists. Spell lists raise metaphysical and cosmological questions about the nature of magic and reality, and Gygax handled this by imposing his typical obsessive principles of order by repurposing grandiose synonyms for the sake of taxonomy, dividing the spell list into categories of evocation, abjuration, enchantment, etc.

Karlman's idea by contrast is to use the historical source of the spells as the principle for carving up the list. Karlman says at one point that he wants finding spells to be like finding arrowheads on an ancient battlefield and wondering, "What happened here?" In other words, they should point to history and draw players into the past conflicts of the setting by evoking wonder. Here are his spell types: (1) Hidden Caches of the Mage Wars, (2) Gifts from the Fey Queen ("when the fairy realms were in Spring, her laughter was like rain--she just threw off gifts, but now the fey realm is in Autumn"), (3) Fiendland's Relics (the spell books of ancient order of knights who worshipped devils), (4) Black Market Hobgoblin Cantrips (military camp spells, like boot polishing and potato peeling), (5) The Old Queen's Druidic Tomes, and (6) Gnomish Family Country Illusions.

Just from the titles of the spell types you learn something about the world, the factions, and powers and potentates, and historical conflicts. If I were playing a magic-user in this game I would instantly be hooked. Can you imagine how much fun it would be when you find that first Fiendland spell book, and learn about the infernal knight who had it, and about his devil liege?

Episode 6 is about setting research. I'm not going to expound on it much, although it's my favorite episode, so you can experience it for yourself. I'll just say that in it Kalrman spins out two glorious settings in this episode, one from a single sentence, "The world is made of ash and blood," and the second from a single idea, "There is a city called Rose that was colonized by sorcerer kings." In the one case he starts with the magic system, and the other with the pantheon. His idea is that what you need to do in worldbuilding is not exhaustive research or interminable cataloging of "setting information", but rather you should find little evocative nuggets, which he calls "your apple pie". You can spin out this little evocative ideas into a badass setting through daydreaming and riffing on a single theme.

This rang true for me, because it's basically how I came up with Zyan. I had one post where there was a single entry on a random table I had written for my home game about what appears in a tear in reality leading to other worlds. This single entry said that the portal opens on an inverted alien jungle that hangs from the bottom of a flying city in the dreamlands. When I turned this into a campaign premise, I had just one other evocative idea (my apple pie): that a door to this city of the dreamlands had opened a century ago, and that everyone knew about it through the fairy tales told to frighten children. So I daydreamed about this city of the dreamlands seen through the lens of children's fear. Naturally, I hit upon the idea that everyone in the city wears a mask, and that they use puppets to punish people for being naughty. I then asked myself questions like: what kind of a pantheon would they have in a place where ordinary life was a masked carnivale? What would the law be like in a place where there was punishment by puppet? Is there a puppet deity? So Zyan was born.

So anyway, check out the podcast if you want. It's cool. I got myself a honking Blue Yeti microphone that looks like a prop from a Call of Cthulhu larp. So maybe I'll start a podcast myself one of these days. Who knows?

Downtime Activities: Non-magical Research

I came up with a system I like for non-magical research in OSR-type games and I want to share it with you.

One of the player characters in my dreamlands game has a longstanding interest in the Treaty of the Farthest Shore, an ancient contract between the spirits (demons) of the Endless Azur Sea (i.e. the sky) and the Sky Singers, the ancient mariners who founded the monarchy of Zyan. Her interest was peaked by two things: having read the passages about the making of the treaty in the classic history of Zyan by "the utmost chronicler" Medes, and having perused a considerably less reputable diatribe titled, Secrets of the Treaty of the Farthest Shore Revealed, That All May Learn of The Treachery of The Demons of The Air, and Power May Be Gained to Overcome Our Present Troubles! by the wide-eyed Zamore Zuft. These texts suggested to the player that this treaty could, theoretically, in some way, be weaponized in the party's long struggle against the Hidden King of Zyan.

Disputations of the Squamous Jurists. Or is it the Talmud? You be the judge

In a remarkable turn of events, the party recently slew the Prince of the South Wind, a potentate of the spirits of the air, and looted his library, where they were finally able to attain a complete 20 volume set of The Disputations of the Squamous Jurists. This text contains the treaty of the farthest shore as well as copious surrounding commentary from the titular Squamous Jurists, the greatest antique legal scholars of the spirits of the air.

I was now confronted with what appeared to be a nightmarish problem of explaining what was in this impossibly dense and alien legal treatise. Since the player, Nick, was clearly intending to go all the way down this rabbit hole, I needed a way to handle this.

Studying this vast, alien legal text was going to be difficult. So I didn't want to hand out information so easily. But nor could I even if I had wanted to, since the 20 volume commentary of the Squamous Jurists so far outstripped anything I could possibly know. This situation militated against my simply answering at length whatever questions the players posed about the contents of the book: it would be too easy for them and too hard for me. It also would be the mother of all information dumps, which would turn the fun of discovery into a kind of setting homework for both me (to produce) and them (to read). Uggghhh.

But, luckily for me, I had been recently reading Meguey and Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World, and it's roguish stepchild, John Harper's Blades in the Dark, both justly famous story games. Among many other innovations, Apocalypse World introduced us to "Clocks". The idea of a clock is that you have something that will happen: an objective, or a condition, or a looming event. And there's a certain amount of "progress" that has to occur before the objective is reached or the event occurs. This progress is abstracted into "ticks" of the clock. So if something requires quite a lot of progress before occurring, we might set the clock with eight ticks; if less, four ticks, and so on. In Apocalypse World, clocks are used for approaching hazards.

Some of John B.'s clocks 

Blades in the Dark turned clocks into a versatile mechanic for all situations. Suppose the PCs are involved in a heist, looting a well-guarded mansion. The DM might say, "I'm setting a clock for you alerting the guards. It has four ticks." Then if the PCs make a loud noise, or in some other way draw attention to themselves, the DM will advance the clock one (or more) ticks. When the clock is filled, the guards show up. Blades in the Dark uses this mechanic almost everywhere, for combat with an especially tough foe, with the relation between gangs, etc.

So I decided to use clocks to solve my problem, but I took it an OSR-ish direction. Here's a slightly more systematic and developed version of the clocks-based solution of I've been using in play.

Research

To research a topic in downtime, the player character must have access to a trove of information. In the most straightforward case, this will be a library, or a difficult grimoire, or an archive of some sort. But the trove could actually be any source of information (e.g. contacts in the criminal world, a method of divination, etc.). The trove always has a subject matter (it can have more than one). The player formulates a question they would like to investigate that falls within the subject matter of the trove. This is called opening a question.

The DM then writes up a clock for that question in advance. This clock is kept secret, since it represents the revelation of information through the progress of the investigation. The clock works like this: each tick is an entry that reveals progressively deeper information in answer to the question. The final tick for the question is the deepest layer of information that investigation will reveal. Once all the segments of the clock have been ticked, the question is closed.

For any open question, a PC can spend a downtime action investigating the topic to see if they can make progress on it. Ideally this will be a cost that would involve forgoing other downtime actions. (For full use this would require a system of downtime actions--a kind of resource mini-game happening in the deadtime between sessions.) To see whether they make progress, I am using the "reaction roll" mechanic that Apocalypse World lifts from early D&D. You roll 2d6 and add your intelligence modifier. The results are the following:

2-6 No progress
7-9 Shaky progress: the DM reserves the option to introduce a falsehood along with the truths uncovered, or to slightly distort the truths, or make things a little ambiguous. Note that the DM doesn't have to do this, but they can if they want to. Don't do this so much, or in a way that nerfs and discourages research.
10+ Progress

For the purposes of this system the DM keeps the size of the clock secret. The players don't know if this is a shallow topic, quickly exhausted, or whether it leads to hidden vistas. But the DM does NOT conceal whether the question is closed or open. If the question is closed after completing a tick, the DM tells the player "You have exhausted this question." If the question is still open after a tick has been completed, the DM tells them "You feel that there are further depths to plumb here."

For this mini-game to work, the ticks need to be interesting, enticing, and promise at least perhaps some actionable intelligence. If the answer to the question is quotidian or irrelevant to their interests, then the DM should make it a 1-tick clock and give them the full answer to the question they are investigating with a single 7+. Save the multi-tick, real deal clocks, for things it's fun to reveal in bite-sized bits.

When done right, my limited playtesting suggests that this turns a homework assignment into a tantalizing, tension building, slow burning reveal. Along the way, the players will form theories and speculations that race ahead of what they have revealed. The urgency of investigation will increase. And maybe, just maybe, something big will come of it in the end.

There are some nice twists you can put on this.

For example, you can have branching clocks, where a tick of one question opens another question for the party with its own clock. (Players will also do this organically as further information suggests other lines of inquiry that they might initiate by spending a downtime action to open a new question.)

You can also set up walls that require the players to acquire new sources of information in order to make further progress. For example, the text being consulted might refer to another text, and the DM might declare that to make further progress (check the next tick) on the question, the party will have to consult this other text. Or the wall might be one that can be circumnavigated by locating and consulting with a known expert. Or, perhaps, the only way to surmount the wall is having undergone a certain experience, as one might have the meaning of a certain religious mystery revealed to one only if one has been initiated, or has taken the right drugs, or communed with the strange writings on the black obelisks in hex 04125, or whatever. For this to work, the DM should simply tell the players what their research reveals they have to do if they want to make further progress on a question.

Another possibility, is to modify the roll based on a set of conditions. For example, you could apply a penalty for anyone who hasn't consulted a certain other text, or give a bonus for those who had. No doubt further variations exist.

An example will help to illustrate the method. Unfortunately I can't use the real example from my game, since all the questions they are investigating are still open.

Example: The Puzzle Scrolls

Suppose the party has liberated an artifact known as "the Fourth Puzzle Scroll" from the manse of Vermagin Eleazar, leader of the Withered Nightingales. It is written in an inimical eldritch code, and it seems both dangerous and powerful. The party suspects that to unlock the full power of the Fourth Puzzle Scroll, they will have to acquire a full set. Luckily, the PCs have access to a trove of information on magical subjects, since the party has access to the library of a certain obsessive collector of arcane wonders having added to certain delicious and irreplaceable items to his inventory in the past. The party's magician decides to use this trove to inaugurate a line of investigation by opening the question: "Where can the other puzzle scrolls be found?" Since this is a major artifact with a long history, I decide that the it will be a five tick clock.

"Where can the other puzzle scrolls be found?" five ticks

Tick 1: Most references to the puzzles scrolls are offhanded and obscure. But in certain very old texts you find some useful information. There were seven puzzle scrolls in total. As to their location, a chain of textual references lead you eventually to the section of the Testimony of the Senses that discusses the wonders seen by Balzabo the Theoricus in the legendary Library of Worms at the Monastery of Larsa. He describes in detail a complete set of the Puzzle Scrolls, unfortunately dwelling more on aesthetics than substance. So it seems that a complete set existed at the Monastery of Larsa two centuries ago.

The Ignotaur

Tick 2: Your researches inform you that a century ago, the Monastery of Larsa was looted by the People of Ash, fire worshipping minotaur berserkers. It is said that in those flames were consumed the knowledge of a thousand thousand generations, and that the oily smoke of the slaughtered tomes was a pleasing sacrifice to their burnt gods. However, Captivity Amongst the Savage Bulls, an account of Umut, a librarian who served for 10 years under their harsh dominion, testifies that certain treasures were rescued from the fires by the Ash Scholars, including all the puzzle scrolls but one.

Tick 3: Later, some say under a curse, others from paranoia, the Ignotaur turned the power of his nomadic empire to building the Labyrinthine Ziggurat, a maze of dizzying volcanic glass hidden in the Desert of Shifting Sands, near the ancient city of Qaz. The Ziggurat is said by Nabi, the court poet of the Ignatur, in his Songs of the Ziggurat, to be guarded by the ghosts of fallen minotaur warriors, and the crimson demons of his flaming deity. According to the poem, the Ignatur hid all his greatest treasures here, safe from his enemies. As it happens, the Withered Nightingales were rumored to have recently returned from an expedition to the region where the ruins of Qaz are said to lie. Perhaps if you consult your underworld contacts, you could open a question on what happened on the Withered Nightingales' Recent Expedition to Qaz. (Branching clock.)

Tick 4: You strike gold: a lead on the puzzle scroll that did not make it into the Ignotaur's collection. The missing scroll was not burned! Twenty years before the burning of the Library of Worms, the wizard Alangstrum, Piercer of Veils, quietly removed the fifth puzzle scroll from the library. Some say that he did it in the conviction that the world was not ready for the terrible hidden wisdom of the fifth scroll, others that he wished to seize its powers for himself. But here the trail runs cold. Several of the texts you have been consulting refer you to Alangstrum's introduction to Priaducts and Other Ways Hither and Yon, a book sadly not found in the collector's library. Perhaps you could make further progress if you could locate a copy of this exceedingly rare text. (Wall)

Tick 5: In the introduction to Priaducts and Other Ways Hither and Yon, Alangstrum obliquely suggests that he opened a priaduct to Wishery, the dreamlands. There he placed the fifth puzzle scroll in a shaded grotto on the Hooded Isle in the Sea of Palimpsests, where the veil of reality wears thin, and four worlds flicker through like flames behind a thin parchment.

As you can see from this clock, a mix of history, possible adventure locales, the names of tomes, and so on are all introduced slowly over an extended period of time, perhaps mixed with the occasional rabbit hole or canard on a shaky roll. I think this is a player driven way to make a fun, sandbox oriented downtown minigame out of lore in your setting.

World Building and Old School Games

Old school blogs are full of excellent advice about how to run a game in an open world, with sandbox style play, and jostling factions. OSR types regularly sing the praises of a style of gaming where narrative emerges as a kind of byproduct of the choices people make and the chaos of chance. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to assume that you already know how to run an open game like this. What I want to talk about is how to do this with a crazy, over-the-top, snowflake of a setting. I want to talk about how you engage in high concept world building while also running a game that is focused on hex crawling, GP for XP dungeon trawling, and faction play, all with total freedom of player choice, and emergent story telling.

There are real challenges to putting these two things together. One challenge comes from the mental perspective that goes along with emergent storytelling. Players in OSR games are often not investing their characters, initially, with a lot of backstory or thought. They prefer it to come out, over time in bits and bobs, as it's relevant, and fun. They want the story to accumulate moving forward, and they don't want to be doing homework. Since they don't view themselves as creating a narrative around their character, they also don't want to read thinly veiled fan-fiction, or massive setting documents. They want to sit down and start playing a game without having to do too much thinking.

Another challenge is framing meaningful player choice. For an OSR style game to be fun, the players need to be making tactically meaningful choices constantly. They need to know what they're dealing with, or have the fact that they don't know be part of the tactical situation they confront. They need to be making real choices about where to go and what to do, with real consequences. This is connected to the fact as well that PC death is an always looming possibility. (It's not fun to die if you aren't dying as a result of the risks you knowingly accepted.) It's also connected to the aversion to adventure paths and railroads of all kinds. This means the players have to know more or less what they're getting into when they choose to do that. The more alien the world, the less tactical information the players start with.

The last challenge is, I think, more general. Brendan S. talks about it very well here. The idea is that the extraordinary pops in part by starting from a baseline of what is known. If everything is wild and out there, then nothing stands out. This is partly an aesthetic point, and partly a point about information overload. If everything is always new and far out, then, in a sense, nothing feels new and far out. Also, it's hard to absorb and keep track of new information without a baseline of normal. What we remember are deviations from normal.

And yet, for all these challenges, my experience is that serious worldbuilding can jive with old school sensibility in play. Indeed, there is a special kind of joy that comes from combining high concept world building with sandbox style play in a tactical old school mode. For two and a half years, I have been running a game where players are dungeon and hexcrawling their way through the dreamlands. And its pretty far out there. They've explored the inverted jungle that hangs from from the bottom of a flying city in Wishery. In that inverted jungle, they've visited the shores of Lake Yannu that hangs like a suspended tear drop. They have opened the first two of the metaphysical locks of the Abyssal Dungeon created to hold the dread crown of the Hidden King, where they've battled the punishment puppets of the Inquisitor's Guild, stuttering nightmare automata made to entertain and terrify. Right now, they're getting into faction play with Phantamorians, travelers from the dreamlands of the dreamlands. This world is a snowflake's snowflake. TRUST ME.

Now I'm going to tell you how I do it. Here are some techniques for overcoming the challenges of combining high concept worldbuilding with old school play.

So You Want to Run a Snowflake Setting in an Old School Style Game?
Try These Techniques!

(1) Home Base in The Known

The first technique involves creating a home base where the players know more or less what's going on. The idea of "town" in D&D has always operated this way to some extent, as a safe place that operates on known principles, as opposed to the unknown howling wilderness or mythical underworld or Caves of Chaos, where reality might operate on different principles, and struggle with unknown foes, strange magics, and cunning traps, is to be had. In a game that employs a setting that is evocative and alien, the presence of this known quantity and safe zone becomes that much more important.

A good use of this technique comes from M.A.R. Barker's classic "Barbarians in The Foreign Quarter" set-up for playing Empire of the Petal Throne. That was a snowflake of a setting if ever there was one: a sword and planet world with highly-mannered cultures that are a melange of Indian, Egyptian, and Meso-American influences, all organized around a baroque religion worshipping alien intelligences.  Barker's fix for the epistemic difficulty this posed for players was simple. The PCs start as barbarians fresh off the boat in the city of Jakalla. They are staying at an inn in the Foreigner's Quarter, a kind of polyglot neighborhood full of Conan type rubes, all working as gladiators or doing jobs for shadowy patrons. It's basically a classic sword and sorcery neighborhood lodged in a bizarre Tekumel metropolis. It is assumed that the PCs start knowing nothing about the complexities of the society and religion when they start. But they need to learn quickly in order to survive the ensuing intrigues, so they can make a buck and advance in station and experience as they venture beyond the known boundaries of the Foreigner's Quarter into the cultural unknown of native Jakalla.

I use a structurally identical gambit in my game. The home base of the players is a homebrewed sword and sorcery city-state in the Wilderlands. It operates on normal D&D type principles. But this is not the main place where adventure is to be had, at least not at first. For a door to the dreamlands has opened in the back of Ultan's print shop, and the PCs are the very first people through. This door leads directly into a dungeon in the sewers and catacombs beneath a flying city in the dreamlands. At first I had every session begin and end outside of Ultan's door with a potentially shifting group of players. (Over time this evolved into a more relaxed and organic style of play, with longer and longer forays through the door and a more stable group of players.) The fact that the players had no idea what they were getting into--what kinds of foes were on the other side of the door, who the relevant factions were, or by what principles things operate there, is part of the explicit fun and challenge of the game. Their lack of knowledge is part of the tactically relevant situation they confront, an obstacle that they have to overcome through play like other obstacles, as they foray from the known waking world into the unknown country beyond the vale of sleep.

(2) Setting Information Only in Connection with Game Objectives

People absorb and retain the information that is practical relevant to them. If you are playing an old school style game, it follows that you shouldn't introduce setting material through narrative or info dumps, since the game is not directly about narrative or information gathering. Instead, always tie evocative setting information to the kinds of hooks that move old school games: to sites of adventure, or to potent artifacts, or to rival factions. For example, suppose you want to get a little further into the alien religion of the city of the dreamlands. Well, why not put an inter-dimensional temple to the Unrelenting Archons on the map as a dungeon the party can explore? When the players finally choose to go there (if they do), they'll learn a certain amount of dreamlands theology in a fun dungeony form. Believe me, crawling into a new wing of the dungeon through the hellish portal born from the belly of a statue of Vulgatis, the Archon of fecund and unseemly growth, will make a greater impression on your players than three pages of text wall. Or again, suppose you want to develop the idea that this flying island in the dreamlands is surrounded by the Endless Azure Sea, a reimagining of the sky as a boreal, half aquatic elemental space. Then why not introduce a Prince of the Air as one of the major faction players in the wilderness hanging from the bottom side of the island? The party is bound to tangle with him in one way or the other eventually, and when they do they'll want to know where he comes from, and what his sources of power are. Because they'll want to kill or swindle or avoid him. They'll need to know.

(3) Lavish Descriptions Only Once

When the party first gets somewhere mind blowing, or first sees something amazing, especially if they've been trying to get there for a long time, they have a greater appetite for listening to a description than they normally have when in tactical game mode. They want to hear about it and immerse themselves in an experience of it.  When this is likely to happen in a session, you should think about how you're going to describe the place in detail--you should think of this as an essential part of your prep. And you should think of this as your one shot to give such a description. Every time after that first time, you should have at most a couple of sentences to remind the players of what the environment is like they are moving through. Anything more than that will be boring--no matter how cool the environment is they are moving through, or how amazing the appearance of the NPC is they're interacting with, and so on. Seize the opportunity while you have it, and don't overplay your hand on later occasions. This has been very hard for me to learn, and I still stumble from time to time.

For example, the first time the party descended into the inverted White Jungle that hangs from the bottom of the rock of Zyan, I thought in detail about how I would describe the profusion of life, the sights of the foliage, the sounds of animal life, and the fragrant smells of this alien jungle. I thought about what it's like to move in space through it, on a system of ropes, descending ever deeper, walking on lattices of branches that can give way at any moment, and so on. And I shared that with them, because I knew they would be into it. I knew they would want to know what it is was like to be moving through an inverted white jungle in the dreamlands, in part because they worked so hard to get there, and in part because the wow factor of this setting bit. Every time after that that I made the mistake of launching into rich descriptions of the jungle, I watched their eyes glaze over. They were thinking, "Now is not the time for that; now we are trying to get from point A to point B." And they were right. This is a hard but important lesson for someone who wants to do rich world-building in an old school game. 

This is part of the answer to Brendan S.' worry about the baseline of normal. The first time I described the jungle it popped. After that it was the new baseline of normal that operated in now familiar mechanical ways. Everyone knew what was what, and that meant that there was now room for the next thing to pop as new and exciting, when its moment came.

(4) Information Gathering in Optional Downtime Threads

If you're going to go into a more discursive mode with setting information, it's crucial that you make it optional for folks. One way we handle that in my game is that if some members of the party want to do research in a library, or to extract information by questioning an NPC about some setting element, then instead of stopping the action in our hangouts game, we save that for later in a "downtime thread", which is basically a social media play by post. This gives me time to figure out answers to their often unanticipated questions. But it also allows a division of labor among the players. Whoever finds it fun to engage in these downtime threads does so, others don't, maybe perusing them before the next game, or maybe not. The basic principle here is that you don't ever force players to learn about anything in a discursive mode.  No one is ever forced to undergo excruciating (to them) setting information extraction (e.g. an info dump delivered by NPC monologue). To be sure, sometimes the PCs need to learn about the setting to get what they want to get done (or just because they're curious)--in those cases let a division of labor work where those who enjoy that kind of thing shoulder the burden of it. Memory and knowledge is a collective possession, a pooled resource, in a party of adventurers.

(5) Polished Canon Only After The Fact

If you're into worldbuilding, then chances are you like to keep records. You probably take more notes than most DMs, and may even write down canonical versions of things. This blog exists in order for me to do that. Speaking for myself, creating canonical, polished versions of my own private snowflake is one of the joys of worldbuilding. I want to write things up, I love doing it. There's a special aesthetic pleasure that comes from dressing up my fever dreams so they are presentable for company. What makes worldbulding fun is dwelling with something drawn from your fancy over an extended period of time, until it has a kind of life of its own in your imagination. Writing something up slowly, building it in prose, gives it that kind of reality on the page, and so partakes of the very same pleasure.

Of course, if you have a canonical version of things, you want to share it with your players. And you should! But yet, I just said that you don't ever want to force them to read anything. So here's how I handle that. I try to only put polished content on the blog after the fact, when my players have already learned the relevant information in game. This means that the players are never forced to read my canon, since they already know what they need to know by playing the game. I'll just post a link to it in the community for the game, and say "Here's a polished canonical version of that thing you guys learned about a while back. It has a little bit more backstory. Look at it if you want." Some people do, and some people don't as suits their taste. It's also handy to have those blog entries when, during a game, someone says, "Wait, what did that super-powerful Poem say that we picked up a year ago? Didn't it talk about this dungeon?" and as a DM I can just drop a link to the blog entry on In the Light of Other Moons.   

Using these techniques you too can combine your desire to dwell to absurd degrees in castles spun from the spiderwebs and stardust of your fancy with your desire to run open world, tactical old school style games. You can have your fucking weird cake and eat it too. It's delicious.