What’s Going On document

Remember the title crawl at the beginning of star wars? How you were immediately brought into the world without any preparation and were able to jump on board with just that exposition? It’s a pretty great technique and I’m beginning to think every action game should start with one. Epic chronicles might not need to start In Media Res, but action thrillers do, and honestly epic chronicles are better for it as well. But if you just start out fighting how will your players have any emotional attachment to the situation?  Honestly how will they even have an situational context on how to act? They won’t. So I I’m trying prior to the first session, I’d say a week before, give your players a document clearing what’s going on right now where they are at, the overall local setting, and a quick breakdown of the overall world they would be aware of. This if my first attempt at one that I will give to my players as soon as we finish our current game and begin our fifth game.

What’s going on?!

The world is at WAR! But you aren’t The country of Mercaeas is at peace with Trollon for the first time in 350 years. It’s an uneasy peace, more of a cease fire really, which has been seen but a treaty has been signed. Trollon is facing an orc horde invasion like nothing the world has seen. Refugees are flooding the bloody pass trying to get to the safety of Old Gate.

However just because war doesn’t threaten doesn’t mean Merceas is safe. There have been rumors of dead rising in graveyards, far too many to discount all as false. One has even been confirmed in a small frontier village on the border of Xilocent, the Elves Old Forest.

Of course all of that is second in the minds of our heroes. They have been tracking the Baron’s son, Marcin, who went off without a word into the wild mountains where straggler orc tribes still prowl. They have his journal that they’ve use to find a starting point but when they go there he wasn’t what they found. A hunting party of Orc raiders descend from all sides to determined to turn the would be heroes into their evening’s meal.