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Old 08-05-2020, 08:59 PM   #581
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Hiring you to "Fail to Assassinate the King, with many witnesses, and then escape unidentified"...
A similar scheme: Hired to fail convincingly at a fraudulent transaction (or create the false impression that a fraudulent transaction took place).

Basically, the idea is to convince the target that their assets are potentially compromised, so the employer can monitor their activity and see what accounts they check.
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Old 08-05-2020, 08:59 PM   #582
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The Pepsi Empire:

Due to an odd trade deal with the USSR that landed them 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer, Pepsi briefly became the 6th most powerful navy in the world... Until they sold their navy to be scrapped. Or at least, that's the official story...

What if Pepsi had a history of such shady deals, and this was just the one time they got caught? What if they accumulated an arsenal over the years, and hired PMCs for personnel to invade 3rd world nations? And while the nations of the world would easily crush them on the battlefield, all it would take is one military defeat, and you would be forever known as the nation with the military that suffered a military defeat at the hands of a soda company, and your country will never live that incident down... No one wants to be the country that will forever be known that way... And we do fear ridicule more than we fear death, so a long protracted cold war of black ops sabotage and spying by deniable assets has just begun...
Begun, the Cola Wars have...
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Old 10-04-2020, 08:41 AM   #583
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After a serious pandemic (as unlikely as that sounds) legislatures change rules allowing remote participation. It brings about an era of the political recluse. Secretly, some of those are digital creations - S1m0ne* style - designed to be ideal candidates but under the control of someone with an unknown agenda.

*S-one-m-zero-ne.
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Old 10-14-2020, 06:35 PM   #584
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After a serious pandemic (as unlikely as that sounds) legislatures change rules allowing remote participation. It brings about an era of the political recluse. Secretly, some of those are digital creations - S1m0ne* style - designed to be ideal candidates but under the control of someone with an unknown agenda.

*S-one-m-zero-ne.
In real life the danger of someone making a digital Mary Sue can be counteracted by making it procedural that all candidates be inspected face to face (that could make the procedural council an Oligarchy but I suppose no worse than party heads of Parliamentary democracies). Of course every candidate tries to make themselves a Mary Sue anyway. And voters know little about them unless they do something stupid which is not uncommon.

That is just chewing the cud of course though someone might even get something off of that. The fact is it is a pretty good idea on it's own. Scary, kind of like those nasty stories of someone who finds some one to exploit by making a digital Mary Sue for vulnerable teens the way they are always doing on crime shows. Except this could be a potential Mussolini.
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Old 10-15-2020, 05:07 PM   #585
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In real life the danger of someone making a digital Mary Sue can be counteracted by making it procedural that all candidates be inspected face to face (that could make the procedural council an Oligarchy but I suppose no worse than party heads of Parliamentary democracies). Of course every candidate tries to make themselves a Mary Sue anyway. And voters know little about them unless they do something stupid which is not uncommon.
Are we using the same definition of Mary Sue? Because I'm not sure I'm following.
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Old 10-15-2020, 08:49 PM   #586
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Are we using the same definition of Mary Sue? Because I'm not sure I'm following.
The point is that it is building a perfect character.
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Old 10-16-2020, 07:40 AM   #587
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Occupiers

The party are invading soldiers in either a non-nuclear WW3 or a civil war - the threatre is a (former...?) TL 8 first world country (circa 2030s), even, but the PCs are not familiar with their assigned mission territory.

Long story short, the big mission that the campaign revolves around is the party taking over and securing an important town in enemy/disputed territory. They face many dangers; partisans, scummy collaborators using you as cat's paws, rebels, spies, riots, assassins, their own side going "cowboy", deserters, disrupted supply lines, small town intrigues fermenting into threats to public order, sabotage, culture clash, and actual opposing modern military forces on the same footing as their side.

The soldier PCs will go on patrols, investigate rumours, set up outposts, ferret out enemies, impose order on an unruly civilian populace, and grow increasingly worried that they are the baddies.
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Old 10-16-2020, 11:50 AM   #588
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Occupiers

The party are invading soldiers in either a non-nuclear WW3 or a civil war - the threatre is a (former...?) TL 8 first world country (circa 2030s), even, but the PCs are not familiar with their assigned mission territory.

Long story short, the big mission that the campaign revolves around is the party taking over and securing an important town in enemy/disputed territory. They face many dangers; partisans, scummy collaborators using you as cat's paws, rebels, spies, riots, assassins, their own side going "cowboy", deserters, disrupted supply lines, small town intrigues fermenting into threats to public order, sabotage, culture clash, and actual opposing modern military forces on the same footing as their side.

The soldier PCs will go on patrols, investigate rumours, set up outposts, ferret out enemies, impose order on an unruly civilian populace, and grow increasingly worried that they are the baddies.
That would be a good one for Traveller Interstellar Wars
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Old 10-16-2020, 11:55 AM   #589
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That would be a good one for Traveller Interstellar Wars

That's also where my mind went as well. Something about that book really drove home the difficulty and scope of invading and conquering a planet with a few billion people on it, even after you've taken space.
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Old 10-16-2020, 01:52 PM   #590
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That's also where my mind went as well. Something about that book really drove home the difficulty and scope of invading and conquering a planet with a few billion people on it, even after you've taken space.
In a lot of cases they just fudged it by saying the inhabitants were indifferent which is realistic enough: they often are, not least because empires don't like having a politically active populace in the first place.

If you are going to use ISW, cause the trouble to come from primarily from nativist leaders rather than the Ziru Sirka. That is not necessary as there was at least one Imperial Loyalist revolt recorded in the book somewhere. It fits better just the same.
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