QQ&A: Playing as the Secret Service
Here’s a question for you:
Most of the time, the parties are the aggressors or they’re defending themselves. For example, if they’re not being ambushed, they’re probably kicking in doors and busting heads.
What’s a great way to flip that around and make them play the defence?
Consider a party that needs to stop saboteurs from breaching a wall, or protecting a noble from assassins. The standard combat encounter doesn’t work, since there’s no enemy to fight for most of it. That said, the enemy can come from anywhere and at any time.
What’s a better approach to them just waiting for the bad guys to show up?
The problem with waiting and protecting against unseen threats is it’s passive. The PCs won’t do much until their enemies show themselves.
That’s boring.
Rolling Perception checks here and there doesn’t help.
What’s more active – and therefore more fun – is to investigate.
Consider the Secret Service. They don’t just stand around the President, waiting for assassins to show up. They plan ahead, they investigate threats and they proactively move against any potential danger.
The first step is, as the GM, to have a plan. Give your assassins/saboteurs a sneaky (but reasonable) plot to fulfil their mission.
Since it’s a secret, this plot can follow the rules of a murder mystery. Where a murder mystery might be about figuring out what happened, this is about figuring out the enemy’s plan. Even so, it works the same way:
Come up with 3-5 details or steps in the plan.
Come up with 3-5 clues for each of those.
The perfect plot is one that’s nigh impossible to stop if you don’t know it, but trivial to stop if you do.
An example might help. Despite fears of an assassination attempt, a noble duke is hosting a party in his castle. He has hired the party to protect him.
Let’s say a goblin occultist (Detail 1) plans to kill the duke using a ghost (Detail 2) tethered to a gem hidden in the duke’s pillow (Detail 3). The duke will go to bed at the end of the party and die, unless the PCs discover the plot.
What clues might you have that point to this plot?
Detail 1 – a strange goblin in dark wizard’s robes is one of the many suspicious people seen near the castle. Goblins refused to attend the party, either as honoured guests or as servants, because they know the occultist is planning something. Someone broke into the kitchen, climbing through a tiny window.
Detail 2 – the PCs find the remains of a dark necromancy ritual. The bedroom is cold, despite a fire burning. Someone sleeping in the room next to the duke’s complains of terrible nightmares.
Detail 3 – Someone has administered a mild sleeping potion to the wine – too subtle for anti-poison spells to notice, but enough to make the duke weary. Someone has entered the duke’s room during the party (the lock has been picked or the doorknob has been smudged). The royal soothsayer has a vision at the party, warning the duke he may never wake up again.
There – quick and simple to put together. A lot more fun that the PCs making Perception/Insight checks until run-of-the-mill combat breaks out. This gives them a lot to do and a lot to uncover.
The key to a good mystery/plot is to remember that everything leaves clues. Nothing can be in this world without marking it in some way.
That’s the logic behind Footprints. A goblin clan, a kobold den and a bandit camp might all share the same woods, but they’ll each affect it in different ways.
Bring your worlds to live and reward your clever players by leaving clues for them to find.
You’re reading my articles and you’ve made it to the end of this one and you like making your characters think, so you’ll want to buy Footprints here: