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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5252586" data-attributes="member: 3820">I'd also encourage you to tip your hand. The surprise value of playing through the order being shattered is probably not worth having to overcome players' initial reluctance to the hook. I've actually run a scenario like this, only I told the players flat-out "You'll be the remnants of a mercenary group that's been betrayed and demolished." They built their characters from that premise, we began the game with a description of how Things Went Down, and the first stuff they were doing was scouring the battlefield for survivors and dealing with... scavengers. The game lacked the element of surprise, but I think that was a good thing: everyone knew that their real character concepts would be people who were in a mercenary group and now must figure out how to get revenge/rebuild, rather than people who are in a mercenary group and were without dramatic hooks they could trust.Surprise can be a very good thing, but it's exceptionally hard to surprise people with the truth of what your latest long-running game is really about and have it come off well.</blockquote>