Breaking/Sneaking into a secret chamber

[Gwaihir]

In my next session my PCs will have to break into the lead church of one of the PC clerics order - Think St Peters in Rome. Fortunately the PC is the equivalent of a Roman Catholic Cardinal, so he should be able to talk his way a fair way in.

The setup is that church has been hiding a secret for several millennia in a secret archive in the crypt. Ideally the party needs to get in a discover the secret and get out without killing anyone, and optimally without being noticed.

I had thought to hide the secret under a crypt, with traps and locks and anti magic zones and I had thought of trying to pull off some National Treasure style hijinks, but would welcome any suggestions.

Also, is there a better way to run this than straight up open lock and move silently checks?
Im running 3.5 FYI.

G.

 

[Koloth]

Sounds like the PC Cleric is NOT the cardinal of this particular building. So his rank will buy him some latitude but he has no real authority over the building employees. Especially the ones guarding the secret.

How did the PCs come to learn of the secret? If from a building employee, maybe he/she also has a way to get to the secret. If via PC divination, did the divination provide any clues on how to obtain?

Is the PC Cleric willing to sacrifice his career over this? If not, maybe he shouldn't be part of the infiltration party in order to maintain plausible deniability. Does trying to steal this secret violate his vows to the church? To his deity? Has he sought guidance from his deity over this? If not, why not?

Why does the party feel they need to steal the secret?

One non-thief skills approach is to try to bluff their way in by having one of the PCs pretending to be an Arch-Cardinal on an inspection trip. The PC-Cleric would lend some believability to this.

Maybe the knowledge of the secret was leaked to see what the PC-cleric will do. Sort of a loyalty test.

 

[Janx]

I would probably try to set things up so the problem has jobs for multiple PCs.

The PC Cardinal shouldn't be able to do the whole job by himself. heck, he's a cleric, his value is his rank and access to more parts of the building to smuggle the other players in for the heist and talking to church NPCs. He's the inside man.

The trick is to not plan the heist for the PCs, but to design the content that would require/enable a party like yours to be active in the heist.

So I'd look at the PCs you have, and envision at least one layout of guards, building, security that would require using the whole party (like Leverage or Ocean's 11 would use all of its actors) and then present the info of what's where so the party can come to their own conclusion on how to run the heist.

 

[GMMichael]

The trick is to not plan the heist for the PCs, but to design the content that would require/enable a party like yours to be active in the heist.

Well said.

How big is the secret? If it's BIG, someone will know about it, and that someone can be found and interrogated. If it's not big, and it hasn't been found for millenia, then it's located somewhere where no one will stumble across it. Even accidentally.

And if it has traps and locks and anti magic zones, well, these need rearming and recharging, and of course, a map of these things so that the owner of the secret can get through them without hurting himself.

 

[MarkB]

The other question is: Is this secret just sealed up to be kept away from everyone? Or is it something that those who are in on the secret will actually visit, regularly or occasionally, to inspect or study? A crypt that's simply sealed up for the long term has different security requirements and vulnerabilities than one which will be visited periodically.