anyone know of a published, well-framed skill challenge or even short adventure for 4E that models the PCs winning over the trust of a secretive organization, especially with the end goal of discovering the identities of leaders within said organization? Many thanks if you can point me in the right direction of a framework from which to pilfer!
The players are approached by a representative of an influential member of a noble family, who is secretly being manipulated by a member of The True (the organization that seeks to restore the Sorcerer-King's rule), who is a minor noble and close adviser to the noble. The noble has been convinced by this adviser that the Veiled Alliance is a threat to her aims of tamping down the popular uprising and democratic movement within the city and installing rulership by the nobility. In this scenario, the PCs would be engaged to infiltrate the Veiled Alliance to the extent that they discover the identities of some of its leaders. The noble can then use this knowledge to her political advantage (winning over more of the Templars to her cause, eradicating a threat to the nobles' authority, etc.) and the adviser can enact further vengeance against a group that aided the conspirators against the former Sorcerer-King.
It's this last scenario that I'm looking for aid in fleshing out some.
On general structures: have you looked at DMG 2 - the War By Other Means example is interesting if you have players who are taking opposing actions; and the Moving Through Suderham example, while it does have some issues (in my view), also has some interesting ideas around using failures to track the results of being discovered.
Turning to some details of your scenario - are you expecting the PCs to take up the noble's offer of work, or is that itself up for grabs? Because if the latter, then your skill challenge could end up being the PCs investigating the noble and learning about The True, rather than investigating the Veiled Alliance. That might still use a similar structure, but different content for who the people are who are being infiltrated and potentially exposed.
As far as the infiltration bit is concerned - I'd imagine you have an earlier stage, where the PCs are using Streetwise, Diplomacy, Bluff etc to gather information - say, 3 or 4 successes to get a lead to a secret society safe house/meeting. Failure at this stage involves being brushed off the first time, perhaps something more brutal the second time, and scorched earth against the PCs if they fail a 3rd time at this point, as the secret society decides to completely obliterate these would-be infiltrators (or perhaps contrives just to up and move completely, or have the PCs sent out into the desert, or places a false lead that takes the PCs hopeless to another city, etc).
Once that initial contact is made, you then have the meeting and ingratiation. From experience, the hardest thing here is to keep the pressure on the players so that they keep declaring checks. So you need to present obstacles, and put things in sight but out of reach of the PCs - eg they see some hint of an inner sanctum (whether literally - a masked leader steps into the meeting hall out of a back room - or more figuratively), and then they have to declare Stealth checks to sneak in, or Diplomacy checks to persuade someone to tell them about it, etc.
Suppose after another 4 or so successes (ie something useful from most if not each of the PCs) the PCs then infiltrate the inner sanctum in some fashion: you need a final, climactic bit here. If they're sneaking, someone confronts them - not necessarily a leader of the secret society (depending on whether you think that is too likely to force things to combat) but even another infiltrator, or a member of the secret society with a different agenda (eg wanting to recruit the PCs as double agents/counterspies). This is the stage at which the goal of the challenge should really crystalise, and remember that - if the players succeed - then
the PCs get their goal. I think finality of resolution is a big part of skill challenges, but sometimes as GMs it is easier to forget finality in this context than a combat context.
I would also add - assuming you want to maintain broader campaign/scenario momentum, PC success in the challenge can still drive things forward. Eg they learn the secrets of the veiled alliance, but also learn that perhaps the noble who hired them isn't such a nice person; or they learn the secrets of The True, and also learn that the Veiled Alliance are prepared to oppose the established order even if it means civic chaos and suffering (thing about the things O'Brien tricked Winston and Julia into saying in 1984). The players should have the satisfaction of their victory, but you want the game to go on.
If the PCs fail at one of these later stages, then the upshot seems likely to be either fighting (as they try to get out without being killed) or perhaps another skill challenge to see if they successfully escape (in which case escaping into the desert should certainly be an option - opening up Nature checks, group Endurance checks and the like as possibilities, but making surge loss an obvious consequence of failures or even a price for succeeding at (say) Easy rather than Medium on the group check).
And also, a tip I learned from [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] that I've found works well: when you start the challenge, set out two dice - one to track faiures (so a d3 if you have one; I use a d4 treating 4 as zero), and one to track successes (I've been assuming that, for this one, that's a d10 or d12). Because I also use Essentials advantages in my skill challenges, I use a 3rd die for those too.
I find using the dice to signal success failure is a nice way of communicating to the players the information they need to make sensible decisions about checks, resource expenditure etc, without distracting the focus of the
conversation of play onto the skill challenge structure rather than the fiction.
And a final comment: in my own experience, I love the satisfaction of having framed a situation so that the player of the dwarf fighter with the CHA 12 and no social skills can't help but declare an Intimidate or Diplomacy check (because, if he doesn't, the situation will unfold in some way he just can't tolerate); and you then see him spend resources (eg an action point for a re-roll, which is one thing we allow and that I recommend) to make sure his PC succeeds at that check. That sort of thing is a sign that the players have become invested in the fiction of the situation - which is what you're aiming for.
