When GMing a game with a weird setting, how do you prevent the players from being completely lost...

When GMing a game with a weird setting, how do you prevent the players from being completely lost, but also avoid large swathes of exposition or wall-of-text loredumps?

Hard mode: The PCs are not foreigners

Use them to help build the world.

If they participate in the world building it'll make things easier on you and help them be more invested in everything.

Make it an every session kind of thing. Knowledge checks (or whatever related kind of check) can be used to give players opportunities to make stuff up about whatever the check is for.

This. Declarative knowledge checks and shared authorship are the best.

I really like this concept, but I never thought to tie it to knowledge checks.

My three pieces of advice are

>Most important/obvious information first
>Dripfeed lore when relevant
>Start in least weird area

So OP pic for example I would describe that it's a marketplace, that there's a large amount of different looking creatures, the overall structure in simple terms, and mention the large masked thing in the back. If the players ask about what's being sold, then you describe the different stalls in broad terms. If they choose to go to a specific stall, then you describe the appearance, what's being sold, a couple of the people nearby, etc.

This. You can even use it to ask loaded questions if they get a high result. "Okay Pardue, you've visited this town before, what happened?"

Otherwise Trim it down to 2-3 useful pieces of information. "It's a market town, in a hollowed-out cliff, known for its unusually large mind flayer population."

It's how I run most of my games now.

It doesn't make sense for the PC's to now know a lot about the world they've grown up in, right?

I use it for perception checks about npc's and places and all sorts of shit.

Knowledge checks for rumors, facts, bits of history, whatever.

Most players won't be very good at it at first, but improvisation is a skill that can be developed.

Oh and when I say "start in least weird area" I mean in the broader sense of the campaign as a whole. Morrowind is a good example of what I mean, the environment where the game starts is still unusual but it's full of standard medieval looking buildings and has a strong Imperial (ie human and Roman) influence.

If there really isn't a "least weird area" that you can start in then just not focus on the weird elements at first, then gradually introduce them.

Exactly.

Or, you see smoke rising in the distance. Roll perception. Okay, Theial got a 19, what does she think it is?

"Theial thinks the smoke could be from a few stove-fires in a small village"

Okay, Orboir, got a 17, what does she think?

"Orboir can smell roasting meat on the air and burning metal, something is wrong."

So this is basically Vampire Knight Requiem, but shittily drawn?

No stupid, it's Kill Six Billion Demons.

>shared authorship

Narrative ''''''game'''''' concepts need to die. If you can just make shit up then you can abuse the fuck out of that.

That's only a problem if you play with shitty people.

>Start in the least weird area
That's how it works for new players who have no idea about how a relatively normal setting works.
Introducing a new player who's never played an RPG in their life and can't tell a basilisk from a dragon? Start them out in the last civilized city on the border with a quest to escort a merchant to an outpost. Start with human villages getting raided by orcs. Start with dwarves and elves hating each other. You can do all the same things with your weird setting, just feed them more stuff as it becomes relevant.

There's a solution to that- Don't play with assholes.

You can already abuse that in terms of game mechanics.

Playing a 5E ranger? Use Primeval Awareness. If the GM says there are no aberrations, celestials, fiends, fey, etc. within 6 miles of you, he's not allowed to improvize them appearing. You've essentially warded yourself against dozens of creatures whether it's a random encounter, a plot point, or a whim of the DM.

Also your character is from a religious town, so you can go there for healing spells.

>Play with people who are actually interested in discovering a world and immersing themselves.
>Keep a strong sense of people acting like people, familiar needs and motivations.
>learn to weave exposition into things happening and dialogue that is not an info dump
>communicate archetypes clearly
>don't let them walk into gotcha moments their characters would know about, build trust for the things presented
>express the weird in familiar terms

That is like saying you abuse things by your character having low light vision or eyes in the first place. That is just information your character can determine. Knowing what the GM placed is different from deciding yourself what is placed.

I don't enjoy it as a GM or player.
As a GM, the character of my world gets muddled by players that by necessity don
't share my vision for the game.

As a player I get less discovery and am not confronted with something new in those instances.

Do you play with people who are focused entirely on winning?

Some people just prefer playing tabletop games to win. Other's play it for the story.

I prefer the latter but it doesn't make the former people asshole. They just enjoy their games differently.

Normally, I very strictly enforce what kind of contributions my players can make. If they're making things easy for themselves, I'll twist it around on them.

Not everything they contribute is canon truth and set in stone.

I like to keep some wonder and discovery in the games i run.

>Knowing what the GM placed is different from deciding yourself what is placed.

Unless it hasn't been decided yet.

Random encounters are a classic staple of D&D. So the rogue says, "Hey this is my favored terrain, any undead within six miles?"
The DM checks, "Uh, nope."
Then it comes to rolling random encounters, he gets zombies. Either it's some bullshit class-feature-proof zombies (undermining the class feature), or zombies just don't happen (meaning the class feature renders the party immune to zombies).

Even the official adventures have tables for random encounters or wandering monsters.

Class features like that are yet another reason why D&D is a terrible system.

It's a neat idea, it should just be worded differently.

"For the next hour, you can't randomly encounter undead within six miles" or something. Don't expect the DM to be psychic. And don't pretend it's not a game. We all know it is.

why the fuck would you tell him there are no zombies if there clearly are zombies in the encounter table?

For crying out loud, that's not what it does. If there are monsters within 6 miles, you become aware that there are monsters within 6 miles. It doesn't ward you against them any more than it guarantees an encounter.