First and foremost I asked my players to specifically not come up with characters for the campaign until yesterday's session - I'm well aware that some of them have been rarin' to play certain things and that's fine, but I didn't want any characters built in a vacuum like they usually are.

The session started off with some pretty intense explanation and history of the Eberron setting, some of my players being completely unfamiliar with it. Doing this I was able to get something of a read as to what parts people got jazzed by and what they didn't. I laid out the map on the gaming table and using it to illustrate the different countries, the history of the continent, the culture of each, the disaster of the Mournland (Eberron's own Hiroshima), but mostly in general terms.

Then I pointed to the player's starting country (Aundair) and start getting more specific. With a stack of post-its handy, I started laying out some of the elements of the campaign that might be relevant to a character's story, I could quickly jot a name or description of it down, and then stick the post-it near it's "location" on the map, like so:

• "So down by this village are the floating towers of the Arcane University, and you can see them from miles around."