Editing LeviathanTempest:ChapterTwo (section)

=== Storytelling the Prelude ===

''The door was worth pretty much what you paid for it, bursting inwards in a small storm of splinters as a hastily-moved minifridge and bookcase tumble out of the way. Still, it bought a couple of seconds before your company arrived – and from the shouts in the hallway and the sound of footsteps coming up the hall, it sounds like quite a bit of company. Not to mention the sirens. You figure you've got, what, ten seconds before they're in the room with you.''

''Which is why you're perched half-in your shattered window, glass shards on the ground below, trying to figure out whether you can make the pool if you jump from here. Or whether it might be easier to just aim for the concrete, given the way your day's been going.''

''How did you end up here?''

The Prelude should serve primarily as a method of getting players and their characters on the same page. While it's not such high art that people have to treat it like a chore, a big part of a game of Leviathan involves dealing with the mixture of the wondrous and the unfortunate, and that balance is most easily struck if everyone has a feel for the cast. Determine whether you want to run Preludes individually or as a group. Individual Preludes are sort of the expected norm for Leviathans, as their relative rarity means that members of a Cohort likely didn't meet until later in life, but this shouldn't be binding – after all, people in the same situation often end up in the same place. A group Prelude has the advantage of being a bit like a game session, and gets everyone used to working around a table together – it can be played either as shared scenes or alternating stages, with each character being presented with similar scenarios. The latter method in particular offers a way for other players to get a feel for someone's character – it places their reactions to various events in relationship with the rest of the cast. 

A strong Prelude ought to balance elements of the fantastic and the relatively mundane. Members of the Tribe are often rootless and jobless, but they still have to eat, and it's the everyday that trips them up the most – if all problems could be solved by turning into an eldritch abomination, they'd have an easier time of it. It doesn't hurt for scenes to appear somewhat disjointed – a Leviathan's life is unstable by definition, and the comfort of a familiar situation is something that they have to actively cultivate.