OK, so part of the problem is the underlying question of how you prepare for something when you don’t know what will happen?
How I tend to force feed setting material to the players, even if I normally have a game mastering style that is more considered collaborative storytelling.
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Choose one from a list during character generation. The important part isn’t that they are choosing something, but reading through the list. (Again, this is my designer’s goal should be part of the players’ interaction design philosophy.) I really like games that drop setting material in power, feat, or skill explanations. Let the title be “mysterious”, so the player needs to read the description (read: the setting material).
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Present a setting list to use during the session. Just hand out a bunch of one sentence setting material and tell the players that they can use that during the session.
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Show more the more they do. Every time that the players do something, reward them by showing things from the setting. This means that you need to prepare by reading a lot, but also planting stuff in the characters that they can use, like goals, places and people that they know, reusing previous happenings, and dangling hooks in front of their faces. Like, if you describe a room, you don’t describe everything in the room apart from the very essential (function, light, size, creatures) in very broad strokes. It’s not until they start moving in the room that you fill it out with more details. Do the same thing for the entire session: broad strokes, then use a finer and finer brush to give more and more details.
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Let the adventure form around them. I’ve been experimenting with pseudo roles (and pseudo clues) for the last year, where I have a bunch of information waiting to be released whenever the players do something. They may make up a bunch of stuff on the spot, but I can always build on that and then plant setting material. Sometimes the players’ ideas will contradict the preparation, like if you have a map, but why having a map in the first place? Just have a bunch of places and then place them out as the players move through then environment. Because if it’s not established to the players, it doesn’t exist. See the bits of the setting as tools that you can respond with whenever the players do anything. I used “places” as an example, but you can do this with groups, people (don’t make a person - make an idea of a person), customs, architecture, etc.