EXERCISE NARRATIVE AND INJECTS CHAPTER 3 EXERCISE NARRATIVE AND INJECTS EXERCISE NARRATIVE An exercise narrative drives the story. It should provide participants with a description of an imaginary situation in a geographic environment and at a given time. The scenario usually escalates from simple incidents to more sophisticated ones. The point is to let some serious further consequences and implications occur. The role of the background story is to create a linking element that encompasses the entire exercise. It also delivers the scenario context to get the game started smoothly. The background story may be divided into several clusters:       the geopolitical context including geographic location/map, political and historical considerations, a list/description of the main actors, an initial kick off scenario including a description of past events and current starting position, scenario timeline running through the exercise and showing the temporal chronology of events/attacks, technical background information, media / press-release / news / background information etc. 14/29 Figure 4: Example of a map used in the Cyber Czech 2017 exercise. When it comes to the geopolitical environment, the level of realism may vary from complete fiction to reality. The scenario of a table-top exercise based on a hypothetical situation can be fully fictitious. Nevertheless, the more fictitious the storyline is, the more background information should be given to the training audience (including history, politics, demographics, foreign relations, armed forces etc.). Otherwise, a fictional scenario might be difficult to grasp in the limited timeframe and may become more confusing than helpful. On the other hand, if real geopolitical environment is used, it is expected that basic facts are known (or “google"-able). Thus, exercising a reality-based scenario allows