So I may have a regular group again, which means I finally get some real tabletop 4th Edition play time. I'm developing a campaign now. I like to weave two or three larger story arcs that play out over the course of a campaign, to give the illusion of depth. Then I let character backgrounds supply me with recurring story arcs that I pull to the front now and then to keep folks on their toes. One that I'm considering involves destroying a man.

A powerful underworld boss calls on the runners to avenge his dead daughter. He wants it to be slow. The man that killed her has no clue who she was. She was just a girl in a club. There won't be any moral guilt trip from the GM here. This wasn't this guy's first victim. He's evil, and deserves what's coming to him. Here is what I've decided about the mark thus far:

He's the CEO and president of a very wealthy local corp, on the verge of becoming much larger. Larger corps have their eyes on this one, and the competition from comparable corps is hot and heavy. I don't know what he produces yet. The campaign is set in Baltimore, MD.

He has a wife and two very young children. I'll likely paint the family as innocents that should not be harmed.

This should not be a quick hit. The underworld boss wants this man to lose everything he cares about, one way or the other. He wants the man broken over time... and then maybe he'll kill him.

The runners aren't getting any financing. This run will be 'an offer they can't refuse'. A request for a favor from a very powerful figure in the shadows. They'll definitely get rewarded in the end, but they are expected to come up with their own methods and financing. I'm hoping this will lengthen the story arc, as they take other runs to finance this one or to do legwork for this one.


So... if you were my players, what questions would you ask? What sort of runs/actions would you plan? How would you go about destroying a man?

I'm hoping to get some idea as to what my players will throw at me, or what I might suggest, so I can be prepared once things start flowing.

How do you "destroy the man" and not harm his family?

A powerful underworld crime boss wants you to destroy a man for killing his daughter but doesn't want you to kill him or his family?

I call no way.

Why is that, exactly? Have you never seen The Godfather? The family is off limits in Family business.

Aris, I would think that destroying him in his family's eyes would be a good start. Stuff like hacking his accounts and putting in receipts for bunraku time, other "unexplained" bills. Maybe saddle him up with some less-than-virtuous debt to go along with it.

Destroy his business, or take it away, then destroy the man. Is there a rival in this mans corp they can get to attempt to take over the company? Can they get rival corps to screw up the mega takeover deal?

Besides, it's believable that someone may not want innocent bystanders harmed just because the jerk happens to live with them.

If someone did that to *my* daughters... I'd make sure they knew they were being destroyed and could do nothing to stop it. I'd take their family away from them, their success, their happiness, society itself would turn on them. I'd want to make the idiot suffer.

By that same token, the family of the idiot did nothing wrong except to be his family. My beef isn't with them unless they interject themselves into the problem.

==========

Yes, you can use that as some of the mindset of the guy who wants the idiot offed slowly.

The man will be killed, although the runners are more likely to witness that then do it themselves. It's too early to tell. If they want it badly enough, I'll certainly put my players behind the trigger.

As for the family? A lot of mafia fiction gives wives and children a pass, so long as they themselves haven't betrayed the organization. The don, in my opinion, is trying to put himself on moral high ground by not taking the children of the man who took his. If that is just too inplausable, I can tank the family. I expected that portion of his life to be "destroyed" early on anyway, while legwork is done on the man's one true love: his corporation.

I'm hoping the corp thing plays out interestingly. Physical and matrix runs to dig up dirt. Messing with accounts. Hijacking deliveries. I don't know what my players will come up with, hence this thread.

<edit> Moon-Hawk makes a good argument. I'll consider it. I've just come off as beating my players with the morality stick a little hard in the past (see my posts in the dirty GM tricks thread from a few months ago for samples) and was looking to free them up from it a bit.</edit>

You're sick old man.

I'm ith eidolon, in that ostrocizing the family first seems the way to go. Create the rift, then nurture a long time divide, and help the wife get remarried to a young gym instructor. Don't make it the central part of the campaign, but something they're working on as a side line to other jobs. Especially if they aren't getting paid. Remove them from the picture in a way that's painful to the mark and keep cutting away at him.

The thing for the GM, if not the players, to keep in mind is that anyone with that much money and resources can and will (eventually the corp security will if he doesn't) bring in people with real skills. Forensic mages, People to throw up 8+ point wards, hackers to take apart data trails and look for bugs, PSD to keep people away from him, the family, his office, and the house, etc. All of whom are the best money can buy and many more than the typical group of players.

If they don't peel off the resources early they won't get to do it later.

If the corp is in Balmer, there's a good chance it'll be involved with import/export or biomedical, I'm thinking. FDC was expanded in part so it could keep all those federal contractors in around the same place, and I'm not aware of any serious number of contractors up here right now anyway. In general, weapons contractors like to be farther from the city. Lower costs, less complaints from neighbors. Currently Baltimore is one of the biggest ports in the US and the biggest employer is Johns Hopkins (also does a lot of work in chemical engineering, if I recall, but not as much as those two other industries). Both of those tie in nicely with organized crime, and organized crime would DEFINITELY big a big player in the area (again, port city, great position for smuggling, very close to a lot of political big wigs).

How would I destroy the man? First generate (or find) evidence that would lead to a painful (and expensive) divorce. Prove that he's cheating, that he threatened the kid, something like that. That hits several birds with one shotgun; it takes away his family painfully, takes a bite out of his cash, and keeps the family out of the way for later stuff.

Once his family life is ruined, you clearly take away his other nice stuff. Your goal is to end with his most critical psychological handholds (generally the dog). If you kill his dog THEN work on making him lose his job, he won't form the psychological connection to his work, so losing his job won't hurt as much. On the other hand, if you make him lose his job THEN kill his dog, during that time between the two events he'll likely turn to the dog more for emotional support and having the dog die will hurt more.

The exception is the family, because if you start pulling out other stuff and he becomes more needy, his family is likely to feel more obligated to support him, and then you'll need to kill them to take them out of the picture. That is worth noting, as you pull out supports, make sure the last ones there you don't mind killing, since they're less likely to come out gently.

So what you want to get from the Johnson is firstly a psychological profile, secondly a statement of assets, thirdly a social network diagram. You want to prioritize his connections by those of most value to him, most damaging, and those he may turn to as other things disappear (plus security stuff, of course. They can't make him lose his job without knowing more about his job. Can't burn down his house without knowing the local security.)

Unfortunately, this job, to be done right, will require either a very lenient GM, or a lot of unusual tools and social networking.

A Free Man for a Free Man, A Slave for a Slave, a Woman or a Woman, and a Child for a Child. Justice should always be proportional.

Although, to be perfectly reasonable, the mafia boss should just charge the corp manager a sum of money equal to that which is necessary to replace the dead daughter.




But, since we're destroying him here, I have two suggestions that are quick and nasty.

First is a favorite of one of my more sadistic characters, but it can cost a great deal of money. Pluck out his eyes, cut out his tongue and his teeth, remove his lower jaw completely, puncture his ear drums, cauterize his sinuses, and cut off all of his skin off from head to toe and amputate his arms and his legs. Then, take him to an extraterritorial hospital. Explain to the doctors with a wink, a nod, and an absurdly large bribe, that he's your brother and due to his religious convictions he does not want any sort of medical treatment other than the bare minimum required to keep him alive, nor does he want any pain killers of any sort, and he doesn't want to use any sort of magical or DNI communications to confirm these wishes, preferring that you handle all of his medical decisions.
And thus he lives, for as long as a member of his metatype can live, with no sensation other than excruciating physical pain and no communications with the outside world.

Or. Take him to a bodysculpter and have him turned into an exact replica of the woman whom he killed. Use Genetech to alter his DNA such that he is unidentifiable. Hit him (now her) in the head with a blunt object (or use psychotropic IC) until she develops total amnesia. Take her to the mafia boss and have the mafia boss treat her as if she were his daughter with amnesia. Give the victim no idea that anything is wrong. Treat her with complete kindness and love, untill she grows to love her apparent family. In the meantime, replace him with a bioscultped genetically altered persona-fixed actor with all of the target's memories on the P-fix chip and all of his personality traits except for his murderous proclivities. Bonus points if the genetically modified p-fixed replacement is also a flesh-form spirit.
Then start with a mysterious faux assassination attempt and leave a complex trail of clues for her to determine her real identity. Once she learns the truth about her past and regains her memory along with the understanding that another person is living her former life while she wears the face of the woman whom she killed and there is no way that she can ever go back, give her a choice between continuing to live as the woman whom she killed when she was a man or taking a bullet in the back of the head. Or, better, don't give him the choice at all and P-fix him so that he'll know the truth but be unable to ever act on it, for all outward appearances believing himself to be the mafia bosses' daughter while being internally tortured by the knowledge that his real life was stolen from him.

I... wow... *no words*

Yes, there are some sick and twisted people in this world.

Aren't you glad that many of us play here on Dumpshock?

This is almost off-topic, but I highly recommend that anyone interested in a fantastic revenge story read The Count of Monte Cristo (or see the movie with Gerard Depardieu, though it's in French).

While harming the family directly should be mostly off-limits (and I can see why the mafia boss might endorse it though ;)), it might be necessary to involve them.

Find out what he values, and take it away from him. Framing them for something is especially handy, or embroiling them in scandals.
- friends?
- money?
- respect?
- a non-criminal SIN? :rotfl:

Bonus points for making it all happen in a rolling stream of bad karma, where he just feels like the world is out to get him. And *then* tell him what happened. (That genesculpting thing is pretty crazy too. Why not just cyber/biosculpt them and then sell them to a bunraku parlor? ;))

The Marks Values...
(in approximate order)

1. His company
2. Money/Power
3. Gaining the acceptance of the elite
4. His wife and kids


I'm not going to list his crimes. They provide him with a sense of control that he craves in all of the aspects of his life that he truly cares about. He definately gets a rush, but at the same time he is a little ashamed of what he is doing. I don't care what caused him to become a killer. I don't expect it to come into play.

As the runners add additional stress, I expect he will seek the comfort of the hunt more often.

BTW, I realize it's bit prosaic, which I guess is the reason no one has brought it up, but in the context of deeb dark secrets that could cause the loss of reputation, family, friends company and so on.. Well there is the part about him murdering young girls. I think that's frowned upon in polite society. The only down side is that it's a bit to fast. I mean you tape it release it on the internet and he's history. Still it could be of use. Either for closing the deal or leaking it selectively. You know show it to the board and they'd probably fire him to distance themselves, or showing it to his wife might make her leave him. If he knows you're out to get him coming home to the TV running a recording of one of his murder might freak him out a bit.

I'd just go with control actions, and make him beat his own kids and wife to death, give the mage enough time to erase the signature of the spell before you tip off the cops via a "neighbor" who heard some screaming and was concerned. He gets arrested, loses the family, loses the company, and his money, and as a bonus, gets thrown in jail (pull strings to avoid the death penalty if you have to).

Obviously the main angle of attack against a serial killer is his crimes.

Bear with me a moment.

He 'likes' his family, certainly, and he 'loves' his job. But the real passion in his life, for whatever reason, is his hunts, his kills.

You suggest he is a control freak, and his murderous hobby is related to that? Then he probably thinks he is in control of his murderous impulses.

Disrupt his hunts a few times, keep him from killing, seemingly by accident. The frustration of having to restrain himself will drive him increasingly to losing that valued control, to take greater risks to get his thrill.

And he can't tell anyone what is bothering him.

Then, once he's on edge, start ratcheting up the paranoia. Make him feel like he is going to be explosed, caught out. Serial killers usually keep tokens, trophies. Sometimes these are not obvious links to criminal activites (photos, articles of clothing), other times they are (visiting body dump sites regularly). If the former, find his trophies and remove one piece. Make sure someone (wife? Kid? These work very well) finds it at home, in his pocket, where ever.

If he visits his dumpsite (or if you can find it) remove a recent kill and arrange for it to be discovered, for his MO to be uncovered publicly (but not his identity...). Make him scramble to cover his tracks, make him feel the heat. If Lone Star doesn't have him as a suspect, the PC's can impersonate a detective to ask probing questions.

Again, the idea isn't to actually catch him or expose him, its to thwart him, to frustrate him, to challenge his self control. And when he finally loses his control, you punish him for it.

Ideally, you put a 'perfect victim' in his path. A PC who fits his profile to a T, who looks like an easy kill, one with no strings, but one who has to be taken 'RIGHT NOW'. Only, this victim will whup his ass, challenge his superiority by beating him instead, then escaping.

Meanwhile, engage in his paranoia everywhere he goes. Leave clues, preferrably ones he might naturally leave by accident, around his house, his family. Make them suspicious of his activities, his wherabouts when he's out hunting. Innocent calls from a 'co-worker' asking for him when he's supposed to be working late, that sort of thing.

Do the same thing at work. Leave newspaper articles about the killer, or the killer's victims on his secretaries desk (and ideally, his crimes should draw more attention due to the players activities as the job progresses). Have relatives of the victims stop by, or call, following up on mysterious leads that the PC's fed them. One or more PC's, if they are inclined, can even get jobs at the office and arrange to have banal, yet disturbing conversations in his hearing. You know 'Did ya hear, some girl went missing from Club X last week. Didn't Joe go to Club X?' type things.

Thwarted and stressed long enough he will eventually snap, lose control and just butcher someone (or ones) in some way he can't hide from. Even in 2070, serial killers are not tolerated. The PC's won't destroy him, he'll destroy himself.


Just a thought.

Seeing the list of priorities, I'd probably turn the man vs family thing around. Plant things and create data trails that show that the wife is cheating, spending too much money. Do a suggestion to the wife that she and the kids are more deserving of his time. Then cause him to divorce his wife, and make sure the prenup from his attorney is lost/scrambled so it can't be proven that they had signed one.

Then, get some evidence from one of his kills, enough to scare him, start a black mailing operation (you gotta pay for all this work some how ). Then when he starts taking money from the company to pay the black mailing. Work at getting the interested corps into doing audits to see where all the money goes, and when they find the money is silently dissapearing, they'll want little to do with the company.

A lot of good stuff here. I'm still rereading through the thread and collecting info. I also have to balance between what makes sense and what will make for good gaming at the table. Thanks to those who have participated thus far.

I think I could sum up what I would do (as a player) to destroy a man in three movies:

Face Off (switch his identity)
Disclosure (ostracize him amongst peers)
The Game (getting him to the brink of offing himself)

That could certainly be long and drawn out...I guess, as a player, my big question would be, why would I put all this effort to do this? I mean, they don't have any emotional ties to this man, so being an integral part of planning his demise...I just have a hard time feeling the players having this motivation.

Now, if someone else does, and just hires the runners to do different jobs, similar to Harlequin, then that is one thing, but to do this on their own, I wouldn't think most would be able to build up the intense passion to follow through with it, with just a promise of being rewarded once its done...

The other, much cheaper possibility is make a custom BTL and plug him into it. Let him braindance for a few years. Sure, not as entertaining for everyone else, but it gets the job done cheap.

It is a simple solution, slightly more simple using a Shadow Spirit with Astral Gateway to send him to a metaplane where he will be sodomized by green midgets with pitch-fork-shaped penises for one hundred trillion years before returning to his body and learning that only a tiny fraction of a second has passed on Earth.

But, transforming him into a duplicate of the dead daughter has other advantages, most obviously letting the mafia boss have his daughter back, sort of.

Hook him up to a simsense rig, and mutilate/torture him, recording the whole thing through his eyes. Then, through the magic of BTL, make him relive the experience over and over again except with heightened sensory feedback. If you were a really sick puppy it'd be easy to kill off his family and then have him experience their final moments. Then again, ShadowSnuff doesn't exactly sound like a very fun game to me, so perhaps it's a suggestion best left unexplored.

If the city is controlled by organized crime and they have evidence linking this chump to multiple murders, then why are runners being brought in? The organized crime would do better to leak this to the media and law enforcement at that point.

Runners would be better utilized much earlier - if mafia man doesn't know who killed his daughter or, even better, if she's just 'missing' and the runners have to find her. Let the runners discover the connection to other murders, throw in some complications, but when the story is out, so are the runners - they just aren't the most effective way to ruin such a man.

This is coming from someone with a disastrous social life. I don't know if that makes it more or less useful in terms of destroying someone's life. But here goes.

Be his friend. And then don't be his friend.

Come to him as like-minded souls. Offer him a place where he feels he fits in, and at the same time make him feel like he DOESN'T fit in anywhere else. Walk him up to a lot of lines, and encourage him to cross them. Then one day, totally sell him out. Provide him with the resources and support network he needs to do the heinous things he's always wanted to do, but hasn't been able. Then when the chips are down, be the mirror he looks in and realizes that it was all him the whole time.

It should end up being an end-of-campaign sort of thing. This plan wouldn't make his life gradually worse, or at least as he saw it, but instead he'd think everything was absolutely fine right up until the very end when the players turned their backs on him. But in the meantime, the players could create an environment where the target does all sorts of destructive things. If he has friends, he might not think he needs his family, and get careless about their safety or letting them find out about all his hobbies. And if he's hanging out with people outside of work, people AT work are going to feel alienated from him (and office politics can often be so subtle you don't notice it going on). I'd say the trick is to let everything he does be HIS idea, or at least make him think it is. Give encouragement, and make him feel like the PCs are really THERE for him.

The big hangup here is that it may or may not be possible to befriend the guy. On the one hand, if he's an evil bastard, maybe he doesn't care enough about anyone else to ever make friends. On the other hand, maybe he's an evil bastard because he's trying to fill a void. It all depends on how you want to play the guy. I've dealt with a lot of people with various mental illnesses, and I'd say just about ANYONE can be befriended, if you approach it from the right angle.

So I live in Candyland because I think it's more vicious to destroy everything someone loves and force them to watch it crumble than to just dump a bullet in him?
Right.

The obvious direct approach is to use physical mask and trid phantasm combined with effective editing to act out the last murder. You don't have to get it all right, just enough to make it believable and to hold up to quickie investigation. Then send it to his board of directors with a note that it goes to the press and they have 5 days to fire his ass first.

Once the board sics PIs with a big expense account on it they should be able to dig up enough supporting data to strongly suggest that he is in fact guilty. If the PCs are really clever, steal a copy of the report and forward it on. There isn't a single reporter on the planet that wouldn't sell her soul for a story like that that comes with seriously strong evidence.

At which point his world collapses on him. They fire him, his wife and kids flee, the cops arrest him. . . .

Sadly, if i were to run a similar scenario for my game, i know how my players would react

Ghost: I rape his wife and kids. I make a copy of it for simsense, and fry his brain with it. Nah, just kidding, I made all that up with Edit and a bunraku parlor. Sounds like a fun guy though. So, with the sim of someone doing the nasty to his family ready, i upload it to his workstation, alter the logs so it looks like he accesses it all the time, especially when he's "working late" or when he killed someone, and flag the workstation with security for childporn.

Six: I sneak into his house at night, and shoot him in the head with a sniper rifle. Thats a 23P hit.

Jan Chow: I stalk him. In heavy combat armor. I catch him in the act and tape it, but save the girl. I chop off his arms and legs and make a torso in a box. Then i kill the mob boss for no apparent reason, and drive my motorcycle through the statue of liberty, get it all on tape, and sell it to Harold to be made into a movie.

Harold: I convince my bosses to buy his "early retirement". He can come work for Atzlan, we love that rape and murder shit. Its called Tuesdays around here.

D: I make myself the perfect target, knock him out, erase that he met me and implant the memory of him being raped to death in his mind linked to a trigger. Then make myself the perfect target, and use the trigger.

Tango: I bore him to death with chaos theory. Quantum tunneling is a bitch.

Tavar: i shoot him and his family till they die. Reload. Repeat.

Fridge: (my old char before i took over) Fake his death, kidnap him and take him to my home sweet home in Aurora (dead wireless zone). Beat him unconscious. Have a doc change his dna just enough that he looks, sounds and reads differently on a sin test. Then i don't care. He's gone from corporate manipulator to sinless jerkass in Aurora.

Or maybe sell him to a bunraku parlor

These plans are so damn elaborate. Why not just use mind control spells on him to make him rape a close relative? It's simple, guaranteed to be traumatizing for everyone involved, and would turn his life upside down even if everyone knows he was magically controlled.

Once that's done then you can go on with incredibly elaborate bonus points plans.

I bow to the superior evil exuded by those in this thread! (then I run like hell)