It all starts with three NPCs…
(image: FreeImages.com / Barun Patro)

You don’t have to read Campaign Mastery for very long to realize that I advocate careful planning, strategically targeted, in everything that I do.

That can become a problem when you want to have a villain who is smarter than you are and whose primary objective is not to be noticeable over the background chaos of events.

Well, I’ve already told readers how to run a Mastermind – I guess it’s about time I told them how to formulate a Mastermind’s Grand Plan.

I utilize a very different approach to what people might expect, one that plays a slow, organic buildup of the Mastermind – in reverse – so this might be something of a surprise…

The growth and nurturing of Masterminds

Masterminds develop and grow their power in a predictable pattern.

1. Initially, they have nothing and are nothing, and are usually “broken” psychologically, socially, politically, or personally in some fashion. They may be an object of pity or reviled but are powerless and considered relatively harmless, possibly due to confinement.
2. They then vanish into obscurity, and may even adopt an entirely new persona and/or name. They start gathering influence in small, local, ways, and initially do nothing but test their capabilities. Note that “local” must be interpreted in context; in the modern era, “local” might mean a small facebook following distributed quite widely in geographic terms.
3. Their initial moves do nothing but alleviate their personal discomfort to some extent – this may be a little or a lot depending on their personality. The discomfort may be financial, physical, social, political, or psychological in nature (amongst others); it could be gaining free/cheap/discounted services, lifestyle accouterments like furniture, or ego-boosting “likes” from incipient followers. This phase establishes who they appear to be to the outward world – entrepreneur, clerk, playboy, recluse, whatever.
4. They then start accumulating levers and resources. They may or may not have a grand vision in mind, but even if their ultimate ambition is clear, they don’t yet know how to achieve it.
5. At some point, a critical threshold is crossed when they will evolve a definite plan to achieve their goals. Many Masterminds come a cropper at this point, setting this plan in motion as soon as it is devised; the smartest will wait for it to mature.
6. The plan will utilize some of the resources they have gathered, and will mandate the acquisition of still more resources for specific parts of the plan. Any resources not allocated to the plan will be directed towards attaining those specific requirements. Once again, many Masterminds fall at this hurdle; for the first time, there is a pattern to their activities, and a pattern is detectable and traceable. Any resources that can’t be used to gather specific requirements and aren’t needed for the main plan are tasked by the really smart Mastermind with covering up/concealing the more serious activities.
7. It’s during this period that the Mastermind comes to recognize the flaws and limitations of his early pawns, and that they know entirely too much; he has climbed up the mountain on their shoulders, but their usefulness is at an end, or is not worth the security risk imposed. The early underlings are eliminated in a way that leaves the Mastermind’s hands clean. He will often take the opportunity to reinvent both his identity and that of his organization. This step may need to be repeated two or three times. Each time, like a snake shedding its skin, a layer of the unwanted will be discarded. Each such purging carries risks, however, as they are hard to conceal. The Mastermind may even need to mothball his entire operation for a period of time in order to evade discovery during subsequent investigations. When the career of the Mastermind is examined in hindsight, this often marks the first time that he shows his true colors, the butterfly emerging from his formulative cocoon.
8. This is a busy period for the really clever Mastermind. Not only must his basic plan be tested for flawed assumptions, but contingency plans must be made and the necessary resources assembled. One of the first – and another mistake that many Masterminds who have come this far make is leaving this too late – should be for his escape should something come unstuck, and right after that comes a plan (or several, if necessary) for handling public scrutiny should his organization be detected. Some Masterminds even construct a new organization around the first to provide a more palatable veneer that is then fed into the public consciousness in a carefully-controlled manner. It is also normal for Masterminds to disavow former associates and their policies (at least publicly) during this period of reinvention.
9. Finally, during this phase, a backup plan should be designed, or if necessary, one for each possible way in which the primary plan could fail.
10. Only when all these plans are complete, robust, and have all the resources they require, will the Mastermind push over the first domino. And if he has made no mistakes, and each part of his organization performs its function, success should – will? – follow automatically.

The Most Common Mistake

Quite obviously, this outline is broadly generalized. The mistake that many GMs make is that they attempt to follow the blueprint step by step in creating their Masterminds and their organizations.

While that creates a robustly detailed organization with a rich history, it forces the GM to jump through hoops to ensure that the organization doesn’t come to the attention of the authorities/PCs prematurely, and makes sense in the context of both their activities and events within the campaign.

It is far easier to work backwards from whatever stage the plot has achieved to meet the GM’s story needs. If, for example, he wants this Mastermind to get noticed just before all the pieces are in place, it’s far easier to create an organization at that stage of its development and work backwards.

The Seeding

Of course, for this type of organization to be credible, the GM has to create the impression that the organization has been lurking in plain sight, had anyone seen the pattern.

I solve this problem by seeding the campaign with Mastermind-plot elements without trying to create any sort of unified vision behind them, a fair distance removed from the culmination of the plot. I start with three NPCs. These should be seeded into the campaign naturally, and show up one at a time rather than in a group. One of these will either be, or have a direct connection to, the Mastermind, another will be a cats-paw being set up to be the fall guy should something come unstuck prematurely, and the third is simply a smokescreen, but I don’t know which is which.

I then identify at what point in the the Mastermind is at within the ten-stage growth pattern outlined above, and therefore what sort of activities will be required of the NPCs at this stage. I also make careful note of the number of growth stages between now and plot culmination; I need to “advance” the organization at appropriate times along the way.

The final part of the seeding is to identify a number of scenes in which these NPCs can make an appearance. These should be completely innocent of any connection to the Mastermind or his plans and have no purpose other than to establish the NPCs as an occasional presence within the campaign.

The Manipulations

Once the NPCs are established, I round-robin them being affected in circumstance by the Conspiracy/Mastermind. The actual effects on the NPCs are dictated by the point in the 10-point development cycle that the Conspiracy/Mastermind organization currently occupies.

1. This more or less guarantees that one of the three NPCs is the Mastermind. Give two of them some baggage from the past – a youthful indiscretion of some sort – that comes back to haunt them. Let these NPCs then rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the PCs & authorities. Quite obviously, you can’t have these incidents follow each other too quickly, so I put a “normal” encounter featuring the third NPC in between. This gives me two choices for who the Mastermind will turn out to be.
2. One of the NPCs will receive a favor or benefit of some kind. For example, NPC1 does a favor for NPC2; if NPC1 turns out to be the Mastermind, this is to put NPC2 into their debt, if it’s NPC2 then this is a result of his manipulating NPC1, and if it’s NPC3 then this is just test of his abilities to orchestrate events. One of the three will then have a small win in a lottery or raffle, or receive a gift of some sort – it doesn’t matter which of the three it is.
3. Each of the three NPCs will do something that earns them approval or a minor success outside of their professional capacity, perhaps after a failure or two. This could be anything from stand-up comedy to voicing a popular political opinion or getting their 100th twitter follower to getting a short story published. It’s something that overtly wins them supporters of some kind.
4. One of the NPCs will work on behalf of a charity; one will help someone caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time evade punishment for something that they were only partially responsible for; and one will ‘accidentally’ learn a secret and give their word to keep it under their hat, so to speak (and will keep that promise).
   • NB: If “now” is at or beyond this point, each of the NPCs should also be given some huge ambition or desire. In the case of one, that will be his Mastermind ambition; in the case of a second, it will be sheer fantasy, shared with no-one; and in the case of the third, it will be the means by which the Mastermind gains control of them. These ambitions need not be sinister in nature; the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And sealed with greed.
5. You can’t put it off any longer – once the Mastermind/Conspiracy reaches this point you have to pick one of the three to be the Mastermind, and another to be his patsy. I generally look for the most interesting fit between their ambition, how it might go wrong if it is altruistic in nature, and the plot in which the Conspiracy is to be resolved (I’ll talk about that a little later). The only overt change in behavior is that one will stop disagreeing with the other – though he may bitch about him or her behind their back. This should represent a minor change in their behavior.

   All three NPCs should also become increasingly busy at this time both in their professional capacity and outside interests; they should stop attending social functions (making their apologies) and lose touch with friends. People should start covering for them, doing them favors, etc. The third NPC (not Mastermind, not patsy) should suddenly find their world collapsing on them, driving them to the point of doing something desperate, thanks to the behind-the-scenes machinations of the Mastermind. The Mastermind then rats, with “heavy heart”, on the third NPC, and then feigns shock at the severity of the consequences. This is a calculated move to reinforce the appearance of solidarity between the Mastermind and the PCs.

6. It’s during this phase that there should be some sort of setback to the Mastermind’s plans. This is when the Mastermind is most active with least protection, i.e. most vulnerable; something needs to go wrong to demonstrate this in hindsight, but (unless this is the phase in which the whole plot is to be resolved) whatever the problem is, it should not be irrecoverable after a bit of scrambling. Right now, the Mastermind is actively gathering specific resources that his plans require, whether they be loyal underlings in certain positions, control over corrupted authorities, finances, technologies, general manpower, or intelligence. Any of these can be the focus of the drama. Note that everything possible should be delegated to the patsy/flunky, who now becomes the figurehead. I can’t be more specific without knowing the details of the plot and the ambition – but here’s the magic: so many of these things are generic activities that you can have them taking place without knowing what the end purpose is. Masterminds gather secrets and followers like magpies! This is also a great time for an absolutely innocent encounter with the PCs that is completely unrelated to the Mastermind/Conspiracy plotline.
7. Time for a good clean purge or two. If clumsily executed, this might lead to the exposure of the patsy; note that if this happens, the Mastermind can’t afford for the patsy to answer questions. It is for this reason that he ruined the third NPC; he arranges for that NPC to discover that the patsy was responsible for his ruination, and for the NPC to have an opportunity to take his revenge. Just in case that NPC can’t go through with it, or messes it up, the Mastermind has arranged for someone else to do the job for him, leaving evidence that implicates the victimized NPC. To the PCs, it should look like this is what you’ve been building toward all along; it’s important that you seem to bring the saga of the NPCs to what appears to be a closure.

   It may be necessary to reveal the existence of a plot or conspiracy of some sort, for several reasons, not least of which being that fear makes people far easier to manipulate. Some villains might have whole branches of their organizations that exist for no other purpose but to be discarded when it looks like the authorities are getting too close.

   A key principle is that the Mastermind will have any resources that he needs for any purpose other than actually achieving his ambition. If he needs to throw a pseudo-organization to the wolves, with a base of operations and a ‘mystery leader’ who none of the members can identify, the GM simply invents one – base, personnel, equipment, identity, goals, etc.

8. With almost everything ready for the big reveal, this is another dangerous period for the Mastermind. Sheer scale and number of moving parts creates its own vulnerability, and it’s also easy to get so close to the finish line that one rushes to reach it, making a fatal mistake (for the plan) along the way. It’s time for another setback, something that teases the fact that the organization dealt with in the previous phase wasn’t the whole thing, and at least part of it survived.
9. Suddenly, things should go quiet. While the op-tempo of the organization may have increased so slowly as to not be noticeable, the sudden calm should be fairly obvious. What’s more, this calm should not only affect the PCs; all sorts of other groups should pick up on the “vibe” of something big being in the wind. The ambitious should start nosing around for a way to get in on the action, if there is anything in it for them, for example, while more cautious groups might go to ground.

   Your goal at this point should be to build tension.

10. Everything is ready – it’s time to put things in motion. If things get this far, there will of course turn out to be something that the NPC has overlooked, a hole through which the PCs can crawl, reducing the grand plan to tatters in the process.

The Master Plan

The great advantage of having everything that happens be defined in generic terms is that you don’t need to define the plan until the PCs discover it. When they do, you know how close to “ready” the Mastermind is, and can simply determine from that what resources the Mastermind has for the PCs to discover (sometimes the hard way).

It is critically important that the preparations that the Mastermind has been putting in place are what he needs to achieve his ambition, whatever it is. Work backwards from the goal and work out what the Mastermind needs, then assume retroactively that he has obtained however much of whatever he needs is indicated by his “readiness to proceed”. You neither know nor care how he got them; the fact is simply a fait accompli.

The Real Master Plan

I’ve stated that the ultimate plotline for which you need the Mastermind should be a driving factor in all your decisions. Do you want the plot to fail at the final hurdle because the Mastermind has overlooked something, or because there is some new factor that he has not taken into account? Do you want him to abandon his plans and ally with the PCs in the face of some still-greater mutual threat? Do you want NPC3 to crawl back out of the campaign’s history and blow the whistle at the 11th hour, probably by accident? Do you want an ambitious underling to overthrow the Mastermind (or try to)? Do you want an overeager member of the conspiracy to trigger things prematurely? Do you want a culture of only telling the higher-ups in the conspiracy what they want to hear to have undermined readiness – the “garbage-in, garbage-out” principle applied to conspiracies?

It is usually easiest to start by defining how you want the Master Plan to fail, then working backwards from that point. Be sure to build interesting plot twists into the story, and a little irony always works well in these cases!

I once used a conspiracy in which the Mastermind reached the point where he had everything he needed except a defense against one key factor, and knew it; the Mastermind then became convinced that no-one had access to the thing he had no defense against, and made his play. At the last minute of the 11th hour, the PCs discovered this vulnerability, and recognized that they had access to exactly what they needed to unravel the entire plot. In the course of that unraveling, it was discovered that one of the victims that the Mastermind had ruined and discarded along the way was about to come into possession of the very defensive mechanism that he needed; if he had been a little less ruthless in his early days, his entire plan would have succeeded, but he had thrown it all away years earlier….

There are huge advantages to this approach. How can the PCs figure out what is going on when even you don’t know? How can you waste prep-time on the conspiracy when you are assuming that all the activities are generic in nature or occur completely under the radar – meaning that you don’t actually invest any prep time?

Actually, viewed from that perspective, this is just another expression of my usual advice: careful planning, strategically targeted. It’s just that the strategy is not what most people would expect…

Before I close today’s article, there are a couple of crowdfunding campaigns that I want to draw to people’s attention.

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RA Whipple is a Gamer who has been trapped by circumstances in Poland. Unable to afford the airfairs to get his family back to Canada, and unable to find work because his Visa has expired (and it wasn’t exactly plentiful or well-renumerated before that), he has been forced to swallow his pride and ask for help. You can read more about his situation at generosity.com. Please donate something if you can, and publicize the campaign whether you can donate something or not.

Interactive Dracula Solo Adventure

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I like to think that RPGs are international in their appeal. If you like that idea too, there aren’t many better ways to show it than by helping a Polish-Canadian family and backing a Swedish RPG product using a Macedonian artist – at least in the opinion of this particular Australian and his US-based blog…