My favorite bit of the game is deciding “what” kind of campaign people are getting into from the get-go and making it part of character gen. It does make it very trad in the sense of session one will be character gen only as the GM can’t really have anything up the sleeve to go with.

You could always go super sandboxy and see what happens, but as you mentioned the on-ramp is steep with this one. As a GM, I would want a few days to digest the direction the players wish to go first.