Changing the setting in-game

[garapata]

Okay, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the game EXALTED, published by WWGS.  Now, for those unfamiliar, the game is more High epic fantasy than Dungeons and Dragons.  You got characters that do Wuxia movies, blocking thousands of arrows with a sword and the like as a norm.  Inspirations for the game range from Kung Fu movies, Wuxia novels, and games such as Final Fantasy (Squaresoft).

Now, my group has been playing for a while and now that the powerlevels have risen to really high levels, I've opted to give them a twist they didn't expect... just as they did in Final Fantasy X and in Chrono Trigger, I have placed all the PCs in a state of stasis (one was torn into millions of atomic particles, still alive but reforming only after many many years, another was suspended in a timeless place for a time.  The last was trapped by a demon it failed to please.)

What I plan to do is have them return to the game and find the world a few hundred/thousands years forwards in the future.  Where once there were carts, horses and rice paddies, now there are steampunk cities and the likes of Final Fantasy 7.  

How would you recommend I give them info on the new setting without overwhelming them during the game play with too much to read?

[garapata]

In case you're curious.
Here's the link to the game's chronicle archives so far.

http://www.geocities.com/toma_tob/tabletop/exalted/eoas/index.html

[Mike Holmes]

How did you prep them for the original setting?

Mike

[garapata]

The thing was, for the original setting they read the books. Basically, before playing the game, they had a grasp of the setting.

What I was thinking of doing was suprising them that in those years that passed, the world changed.

But at the same time, I don't want them to feel too out-of-place that the game ends up being a narrative of what changed each and every turn.

[Mike Holmes]

Seems to me that if the characters are out of place and don't know their surroundings that it's perfectly cool for the players to be so uninformed (indeed this is a conciet that a lot of GMs and games use to match character lack of info to player lack; see Multiverser).

Have one early scene that dramatically imparts the difference to the players soon after arrival (something like a panoramic overlook of their home city with lots of flava text). Then when it's time to move on from that scene say, "From now on things you find will have similar differences. If you want a description of whether something is different, or clarification about some noted difference as your character encounters them, ask. Otherwise I'll only be informing you of differences that are important to the plot."

That ought to cover it, no?

Mike

[iago]

Yeah; before, your players were digesting information about the world because their characters as inhabitants familiar to that world would have a lot of innate understanding of it.  Now you've put them into a situation where they don't need to do that, because their characters have no innate understanding.

That said, if you're worried about them being overwhelmed with new information as it comes to them (i.e., you think you're going to run into an "info firehose" issue), then take another cue from the final fantasy games.  They start the characters out in a limited geography, only able to learn a small area at first.  When that area's "unlocked", then they move onto a larger one, and then a larger, and so forth. If you can manage the same effect in-game, you could potentially use a setup like this to slowly introduce new information and concepts to the players in helpfully bite-sized chunks.  In the video game, geography tracks to character knowledge tracks to player experience -- it's all really one thing, cannily presented.  You can do the same.

[garapata]

I actually realised that iago before I read your post.

I was running the game last night and I realised how in Final Fantasy games, world information is given in small necessary doses to move the plot forwards.

Thanks!