Serious games are powerful tools for providing direct experience and concrete contexts in military training environments. They depend on stories, or narratives, to provide the basis for effective, engaging learning experiences. However, there are few research-based guidelines to support design of learning narratives or account for why they include specific characters, environments, or activities. While the fundamentals of good instructional design and learning are enduring, narratives for serious games require careful design to leverage the great promise and inherent power of the serious game. This paper proposes an inclusive model for understanding and designing serious game narrative. The paper starts with a working definition of serious game narrative and continues with a distillation of a review of the literature to propose the components that make up an effective narrative for serious games. The paper continues by proposing specific design considerations based on a review of learning theories and best practices for each of these components. This is intended to recommend to serious game designers and developers a common lexicon of terms to describe narrative and to enable a purposeful process for designing the game narrative and experience. The paper concludes with recommendations for implementation and future study.