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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8769703" data-attributes="member: 29398">Could be any or all of the above, depending on the situation.  The patron might let something slip or do something to arouse suspicion (obvious example: a vampire pulling back from walking past a mirror on the wall), but more useful would be the leveraging of (and, in the case of a new campaign, the making of!) contacts and allies.  Class abilities could also come into play, again situationally dependent.But they key thing is: the players/PCs have to a) be or become suspicious and b) act on it!  And for a), they sometimes need to be or become suspicious even if there's no obvious reason to do so, as in "this is too good to be true".It's a game in which I prefer to try and simulate real-life interactions where possible.There's two very different types of trust at work here, one of which I care about building and the other of which I'm quite happy to destroy.1. Out of character, do the players inherently trust me-as-DM to run a good, fair, and fun game?  Ideally, yes.2. In character, do the players' PCs inherently trust anything I-as-GM put in front of them in the setting or fiction?  I don't care.These two things should not impact one another.Beforehand, none, as this was the very start of the campaign.  And I'll pull in [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER]'s post here, as it'll save typing the rest of this twice. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />It would take ages to present the whole story, but the basic scenario was that a long-lost but famous adventuring Company was in town and holding what amounted to a job fair for neophyte adventurers.  Each of the players had to, during roll-up night, come up with why their PC(s) would be at this job fair, and the campaign began at the start of a big meeting of all the "applicants".The applicants were all signed in, then divided into parties (with of course all the PCs being assigned to the same party).  Each proto-party was then given what seemed like a simple field-trial mission, and sent into the field; the PCs' party's mission was just to explore and map a supposedly-empty castle/dungeon complex not far from town.The betrayal: the "Company" was all fake (the real Company disbanded years ago, a long way from here), and the "missions" had been set up as thinly-disguised suicide runs.  The complex the PCs had been sent to map wasn't empty at all (a major hint that all wasn't as it seemed!), but they persevered and managed to (mostly) clear it out.On getting back to town it soon became clear things were a bit off.  Of the seven parties sent out, only theirs and parts of one other had returned, and their contact was (blatantly!) surprised to see the PCs when they arrived.  On this they started asking questions etc. around town and fairly quickly realized they'd been had.  A very long story then followed........Reason for the betrayal: the "Company" had grand plans for the near future (including overthrow of the throne) and as part of their long-range preparation wanted to strip the city and region of all its neophyte adventurers before they could grow up to become significant threats.Thing is, even if those pages and pages of notes never come into play, their existence provides a sound framework for those parts which do.  Further, what isn't used now can always be saved for later, particularly in a long-running and-or sprawling campaign.</blockquote>

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