What's a good way to introduce the players to the lore/history of your campaign's world, especially in cases of homebrew?
DM Tip: Loredumps
I was going to write a whole into about how everyone knows that the fantasy genre is rightly lambasted for long, indulgent tangents ( sometimes from the very start of a work), but then I realized I was just repeating things that everyone who's picked up more than a single genre novel knows. SO, instead we're going right into storytelling mechanics, and what I've found is the best way to deliver world information to your players over the course of a campaign.
The first thing that any aspiring loremaster needs to keep in mind is immersion: the emotional bond your audience has to your work. You can have the most finely crafted, intricate lore possible but unless the players/characters already care about the subjects that the lore pertains to it's going to sluice out of their heads like water through a sieve. This is why long prologue info dumps are so generally awful, because the audience not only has no emotional connection to any of the events going on, but a longer infodump actively distances the time between the audience starting and a work and an audience caring about a work, and the longer that it takes them to care, the more likely they are to check out.
Compare and contrast the dual prologs from the extended edition of LOTR: Galadriel's distant, detached, history that deals with events so far in the past that most people have forgotten it. Vs. Bilbo's "Concerning Hobbits", a folksy little introduction that is framed as a character we can see remarking about the world he lives in, making jokes about his neighbors and endearing us to Hobbit kind.
Bilbo's prologue is an exercise in what I call "Table Setting", when the storyteller gets you up to speed on the information you NEED to know for the scenes that are about to follow, both in terms of world details all the characters know about, and in properly tuning your emotional dials to be in sync with the characters who are about to experience the story first hand.
You can sneak in details about the world this way, but through the filter of "Everybody knows", in that there is common information about big events and how they directly contrast with things that're present in the character's lives.
"Hobbits have been living and farming in the four Farthings of the Shire for many hundreds of years. Quite content to ignore and be ignored by the world of the Big Folk — Middle-Earth being, after all, full of strange creatures beyond count. Hobbits must seem of little importance, being neither renowned as great warriors, nor counted among the very wise."
THERE, we've just set the stage for the fact that this is a big world full of magic and mystery and also given the audience the emotional context that the shire is a safe and slightly boring place, the exact emotional context we'll be taking with us out into the larger world.
You can keep the lore/world information in your back pocket as a storyteller, and continue to divy it out as you come up with more " Everybody knows" information during your moment to moment narration. Everybody knows that there might be war looming soon, we know that because the king's tollmen are collecting at the bridge we're trying to cross, and traffic has totally backed up. Everybody knows there's a dragon in yonder hills, we passed a burnt out old farmstead that's been there since you were a kid, and that cute gal at the tavern you've been drinking with has drunkenly boasted that she could sneak into its lair and tie it's tail in a knot. Oh yeah, everyone knows the mages of Sul-Sifga rule the world from their seven crystal spires atop the Otol Mountains, Their sigil is printed on a stout stone in every town square and seeing them reminds you of the time your watched your brother get executed. There's no reason to bring these things in advance, when they can be whispered in as your players/audience experience the world, slowly building on their investment until they're as much experts in your world as you are.
Hope that gives you something new for your DM toolbox, Below the cut I'm going to talk about how to do loredumps the RIGHT way, and how by being clever you can actually just babble out random facts you made up and have your entire party hooked.
