ideas for infiltrating or getting info on a crime syndicate?

[fba827]

My players stay out.

You hear me? My players stay out.






So... the PCs are on the verge of needing to infiltrate a crime syndicate and need to find and confront its leader.

So far all I have in mind is a very difficult skills challenge as a way to narrate/abstractly go through the investigation and infiltration. with success: you find the crime boss. failure: the crime boss (with backup) finds you!

But I want a little more build up before getting to that skills challenge.

Any ideas?

I'm toying with the idea of having a skills challenge before that to get them involved directly, specifically with a specific crime activity. and it is the success/failure of that which starts them on the trail of the other/main skills challenge.

To give a little more frame work, I basically have around a dozen or so merchant houses in a big city. a good third-to-half of them is either controlled by or intimidated/influenced by the crime boss (extortion, direct control, etc). So there are some merchant houses that are with the crime boss, some that are with him through force, and some that would be against him but would have no way of knowing how to directly confront him... and maybe some that are so naive they don't know the crime boss is there just that the competition is able to always crush them.


But anyway, any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

 

[gamerprinter]

Not that it will help you infiltrate one, but there's some third party rules for Pathfinder in how to create a Yakuza gang that might be excellent for building a crime syndicate based off the city stat block for PF. Although the rules themselves is a subsystem so could easily be incorported into any edition, 4e included. Even if you setting is not "Japanese", you can easily file of serial numbers and reflavor everything as European. It might help develop your concept.

 

[pemerton]

I want a little more build up before getting to that skills challenge.

Any ideas?

I'm not sure about detailed ideas for build up, but the general approach I would suggest is using the build-up events to introduce the NPCs and the stakes that are then the focus of the big skill challenge. A skill challenge tends to work best when the players are engaged (via their PCs) and have a reason/motivation to declare actions that aren't necessarily mechanically optimal, but that push the story forward. The build-up events create the opportunity to develop these sorts of connections/player investment.

 

[fba827]

Not that it will help you infiltrate one, but there's some third party rules for Pathfinder in how to create a Yakuza gang that might be excellent for building a crime syndicate based off the city stat block for PF. Although the rules themselves is a subsystem so could easily be incorported into any edition, 4e included. Even if you setting is not "Japanese", you can easily file of serial numbers and reflavor everything as European. It might help develop your concept.

Thanks! I'll read it over and see what can be used with some reflavoring.

I'm not sure about detailed ideas for build up, but the general approach I would suggest is using the build-up events to introduce the NPCs and the stakes that are then the focus of the big skill challenge. A skill challenge tends to work best when the players are engaged (via their PCs) and have a reason/motivation to declare actions that aren't necessarily mechanically optimal, but that push the story forward. The build-up events create the opportunity to develop these sorts of connections/player investment.

Thanks! I was avoiding too much background to keep the post from being too long.
But the gist of the campaign is this: some high level criminals escaped, and each PC has some personal connection to one of the convicts. Thus they were organized together by the king's court to work together to bring them all down, leveraging their personal connections if/when possible in finding where they might be, etc.

For _other_ convicts the party has been dealing with second-in-commands peppered throughout their adventures. So they have had more build-up and tease for those convicts (i.e. for the necromancer convict they haven't yet taken down the necromancer but have had to deal with the necromancer's vampire and skeletons a few times so the party as a whole is really ready to get that guy), in addition to specific PCs having specific ties to a given convict.

For this particular crime boss that i am asking about, his methodology has been very "behind the scenes manipulation" so even though he has put some obstacles in the party's path up until now, it is because he is so behind the scenes that the party hasn't really figured out that he is definitely the cause for those particular troubles for them (just theoretically that he is involved in some of it).
So for him, I have one PC that is totally invested from the get-go in tracking down this criminal because it is the PC with a personal history connection to that enemy. But the party as a whole hasn't had any real "concrete" teases.


But taking away from what you've said here, I'll try and work on some NPCs for them to interact with first, maybe some businesses affected by this crime boss activity and use that as the spring board into the skills challenge.

 

[pemerton]

Thanks!

No worries. It sounds like an interesting set-up.

I've run quite a few social skill challenges, with varying degrees of success and quality. Here's a link to a write-up of the one that I think went best.