Hello! I recently purchased your game and my friends and I are eager to get started, were just having a little trouble understanding it. The concern is that without some kind of concrete facts about the mystery we are going to have trouble forming a cohesive narrative. Do you have any suggestions? I'm willing to trust that it will all work out if we just jump in but my players aren't as ready to jump in.
Hello, and thank you for your interest!
Writing initial letters is undoubtedly the most difficult part of the game, and I can understand your friends' concern. However, human minds are usually incredibly good – perhaps too good – at drawing connections between apparently unrelated events. For a fun game that illustrates this, try performing an image search for "stock photo" and choose any two adjacent images. Your mind will immediately try to fill in the blanks and tell you a funny story about why the two are related.
I'm confident that when you receive your first letter, the same thing will happen: you will immediately try to connect it to the letter that you just sent. And once you receive your first reply, you will then have information about three of the initial Intrigues that were presented (yours, plus your two contacts'), and you can start thinking about how they might be related.
You don't need to connect everything immediately, of course (and you shouldn't!) but your mind will naturally try to tie everything together. The investigation mechanic works to shake things up a little, to force you to reconsider ideas or begin new avenues of thought.
Here's some advice, though: I do think that it's important to establish the setting and tone of your game before you begin. Make sure that everyone wants to tell the same kind of story, and rule out anything that doesn't fit. There might be specific things that you can think of (aliens? time travel? ghosts?) that you want to rule out before you start.
And as always, set your boundaries and rule out anything that would be upsetting for any of your players.
I hope this helps. Have fun, and good luck!