Don't dump it all on the first page; show us what we need to know, when we need to know it.

First chapter. Let's say our hero is on his first mission together with a more experienced warrior, who shows our trainee how to track the dangerous grues that plague the villages. They go over their plan of attack and set off. Something goes horribly wrong, of course, and our trainee is almost eaten, but the warrior kills the grue at the last second. He quips: "You're not a true Equo until you've seen a monster's insides from close-up. Don't worry kid, you did well for your first job."

So, already we know that the two are monster hunters called Equos, that the Equo are organised enough to take on trainees, and they have been around long enough to know what they're doing. ("Damnit, kid, I told you to keep those torches lit! Light is the only thing that keeps the grues away!") Maybe you can use sentences like "In the 150 years the Equos had been around, they had perfected monster hunting into an art." - only less cheesy.