Easing Into Extensive Setting Backgrounds

I saw the Degenesis: Primal Punk post-apoc book in the DriveThruRPG newsletter today, which is a funny coincidence, because I downloaded it last April and have only recently gotten around to reading it. It is 368 pages of beautiful art, 500-ish years of history, seven regions spread across two continents, and 13 "cults" (some of which are cults, but they would be better thought of as "factions", and even then, that's too specific for some of the broad groups described), and a whole bunch of references to aliens/mutants that are somewhat related. Whee doggy, that's a lot of reading, and as you might have guessed, and it's hard to get a handle on the setting without at least some idea of what every single thing is. The first read through is like drinking from a firehose, and until I was about halfway in, I just resigned myself to understanding that some of the names just weren't going to mean much until later. This does look like a very interesting setting though, and it would be a shame to think that it is essentially unplayable without every player in a group having the buy-in from the outset of reading not only this book, but the second book in the system (Degenesis: Katharsys) as well, entailing another 368 pages of art, game mechanics, and more background material. But there is a better way! 

 Anyone who was gaming back in the 90's (and probably most people who started since then) should be aware of the World of Darkness. Every major game in the series had a huge, fat book just crammed full of background material, and more splatbooks followed padding it out further. (Reading through the 20th anniversary edition of Changeling: the Dreaming is a big reason I'm only now getting around to reading things I downloaded 10 months ago.) They also required some pretty massive buy-in from players, and their main saving grace was the huge popularity of the WoD at that time. Even at that, it certainly helped if players could make some meaningful decisions in building a character without having the read the entire canon first. Fortunately, the WoD games (at least a few of them) had some decent tools, even if they weren't clearly pointed out to the poor Storyteller trying to get his players up to speed. 

 Mage: the Ascension has Nine Mystick Traditions to choose from, and they are given a decent overview in the 73 pages dedicated fully to background material. That's still a lot to read for a player brand new to the setting, though, even if it is a significant drop from the two page spread each Tradition gets once the rules start being discussed. The method I settled on for easing new players into the sweeping background of M:tA (and I will point out again, that none of this was laid out for the Storyteller, I had to come up with it myself) was to turn to the two page character creation summary (pp 138-9 in the 1997 edition) and have them read over the one or two sentence descriptions of each Tradition. Then, once they have a couple of interesting leads they can go back and read a couple of paragraphs for each Tradition in the background section of the book, and THEN once they've decided which Tradition they want their character to be, they can read the whole two page spread in the rules section. They can go look at the splatbook if they need to while making their character for the last few needed details. The almost 300 pages of the main rulebook are cut down to as little as five pages to get a decent grasp on a character concept, and the rest of all that massive canon can be spoonfed in-game as needed. 

 Similarly, in Werewolf: the Apocalypse, characters each have one of three different Breeds, one of five different Auspices, and one of 13 different Tribes. The best way to get a new player spun up on the intricacies of werewolf culture is to go straight to the character creation overview and let them look at the bullet point summaries for each one, going on to the short paragraph discussions to help choose their interests, and going to the full description once they've nailed down their character concept.

Degenesis could have used such a system, even a halfway hidden one like WoD had in these two books.  And a lot of homebrew game settings that I've seen, and even that I've made, could stand to have something similar.  A game setting that you've dumped thousands of hours into is probably going to be pretty cool, taken as a whole, but unless you can get, not just one or two people, but a good sized gaming group, hooked on at least a part of the idea, the grand scheme will never get its due appreciation.  

I think I'll give a go at writing up some one-line descriptions as well as short paragraphs for the different factions in Degenesis once I finish reading at least the first book, not only to provide an easy slide into a game, but to showcase a setting that seems too intimidating to get the recognition it should have.

EDIT: I would be remiss not to include some links.  You can download Degenesis: Rebirth edition at https://degenesis.com/downloads/books/degenesis-rebirth-edition.  This is one 720 page book, and appears to contain all the information in both books (Primal Punk and Katharsys) I downloaded last year.

It can be downloaded from DTRPG at https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/344920/DEGENESIS-Rebirth.