The Third Party
I am always looking for ways to enable GMs to be lazier. Too long the lie of GM prep having to be long and laborious has ruined many a new GM. So I collect advice and ideas to integrate into my process. One of the greatest bits of GM advice I found was in the Cyberpunk Red Corebook, the beat chart (which is also in a free pdf of R Talsorian’s website 1). It enables you to slap together a set of plot points for a session from basic building blocks. The only problem is you still need to come up with a story idea to start assembling those blocks and make a fun session, and to that I have a solution.
This advice is kind of Cyberpunk specific but can probably be applied to other settings. Just use your head.
The idea
First we just need a basic job, the basest part of a crime story. Some examples:
- PCs have to steal from a gang
- PCs have to kill a guy
- PCs have to win a street race
This introduces 2 parties to your story immediately, whoever is hiring the PCs and whoever the PCs are victimising. Already this can make for a great straight forward session, but straight forward doesn’t make your players think you are a genius (which you obviously are because you’re reading this blog). We need to add a twist.
Introducing the third party. A metaphorical (and potentially literal) truck ramming into everyone’s plans and making shit complicated. That thing your PCs are meant to steal, some other bastards are already there. The guy they were supposed to kill is being kidnapped by another crew. The street race is already being rigged by a gang! The point is there is now another opposing faction with its own goals.
On it’s most basic level this introduces a set of new combat encounters to stretch time. In its best form you now have a whole new set of potential options for your PCs to explore. The right player will start asking questions about this third party and might even align themselves with them. To illustrate this lets take a look at
An Example
This story is from a real session I ran with only an hour or so of prep the night before
The crew (a Medtech, a Nomad and a Netrunner) were looking to get an invite to 3-Piece’s Night Market. In order to foster this relationship 3-Piece hired them to handle an exchange with a Nomad clan for stock for his Night Market. This exchange took them to a small settlement in an abandoned railway yard.
When the crew arrives there is already tension in the air. The locals want the Nomads the crew is meeting here gone, and the Nomads themselves are on edge. Never the less the exchange begins, with the Nomads bringing out the crate full of rare cyberdecks. Then suddenly smoke grenades go off, a small specially made drone takes the crate, and all hell breaks loose.
Suddenly this simple exchange turns into a chase to catch the cargo, with the crate disappearing into one of the abandoned rail buildings. When the crew enters they are taunted by a child’s voice on a tinny speaker, saying they won’t get back what they stole. The Netrunner leaps into action and hacks the speaker system, finding a map of the rail facility and its maintenance tunnels.
Talking with the Nomad clan, an agreement is reached. Split up, find the crate and have the deal proceed as planned. The Medtech uses the map they found to deduce the most likely hiding place for the crate, nailing it down to the wheel houses turn table, which could hide a larger underground space.
The crew arrives at the wheel house and finds a hatch into the space beneath. Before they head in they inform their Nomad friends about the space. Inside they find not only the crate, but children and adolescents. Budding techs and netrunners throwing together scavenged gear into their own creations and rigs.
Talking with the kids, the crew learns that the goods they came to buy were stolen from them. They even have video evidence. So the crew decides to strike a new deal, pay the kids for the cyberdecks and deal with the Nomad clan.
And deal with the Nomads they do, springing a trap on them and blowing the leaders hand of before she got away. The crew returns to Night City a few eddies richer, and with an invite to 3-Piece’s exclusive Night Market.
The Point
If it wasn’t clear from my lacklustre prose this session was a hit. The players got a decent twist and an opportunity for great roleplay in how they dealt with the hacker kids. A more unscrupulous party might have taken the goods back by force to maintain the original deal, though they would have had to deal with the kids own Nomad protector (who I wrote up but never came up in that session).
By taking something straight-forward and adding this extra faction, with very little effort, you have a compelling night of roleplay. That’s my point, that’s all. I don’t think it is terribly sophisticated but not all wisdom is. Let me know how this works out for you.