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Ok, so I want to run a Changeling: the Lost game, but I realize that C:tL is a very foreign setting compared to typical D&D or typical SciFi settings. The players are hardly even heroes as they are fundamentally broken or recovering from their previous trauma. All of my players are new to role playing and I don't think they will want to read the whole setting before we start playing.

Does anyone have experience revealing the C:tL history and setting stuff in game? It seems like it could work extremely well and naturally (via a freehold), but I've never really tried this before, so I was hoping to hear if others had tried it successfully.

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So long as you can establish the basics — you were abducted and taken to another place, where you were made into something strange; you're back now, and something else has been living your life in your absence — I think it's pretty safe to explain the intricacies of the setting as you go. My suggestion would be that, when people are making up characters, they should at least consider which of the four Courts they might want to sign up with when the opportunity arises. Making characters with inclinations toward desire, anger, fear or sorrow would be good.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Yeah, I was thinking that; I was also thinking it would be kinda cool to make it so that joining the court subtly changed that character's emotions to actually start feeling such emotions. \$\endgroup\$ Aug 24, 2011 at 17:17
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I run plenty of games where the characters woke up without memories. Exposition is central. You need to give them enough so that they feel a rich world around them and want to continue exploring it. However, you must avoid having one character with all the answers that they can quiz.

Zelazny did just that with Corwin in the first Amber book -- Nine Princes in Amber. Corwin wakes up, has no memory, and has to work out what happened to him. Of course, as soon as he walked the Pattern, he gets it all back. But by that point, the reader is hooked.

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