Let's Hit a Target (Night's Black Agents)

Hit. The agents must kill someone 

Briefly: the Bankhaus is an investment bank with a murky past and has offices in several major cities, of which the Conspiracy has control over the Paris and Zürich branches thanks to its control over Lisle Klingemann, daughter of the boss and a senior partner in her own right, and Albert Ahrens, controller of the Zürich branch and Lisle's devoted slave. The Bankhaus is mainly interested in software development companies, particularly in jurisdictions within Europe, though it has a significant sideline in mining, especially in East Asia, a holdover from its former interests. 

It has swanky offices, lawyers, a ton of assets on the book and off, and when it makes calls they get answered by senior politicians and members of the financial elite. It almost doesn't matter whether this is a Supernatural, Damned, Alien or Mutant game; all factions are going to want a piece of the Bankhaus whether to get access to its bottomless bank vaults or for more esoteric reasons. 

Day of the Jackal (1973)

Wetwork is one of the go-to plots for spy stories. It has drama, action, and an exciting goal. Added to that, there’s a wide range of options: will you opt for poison, a knife in the dark, a sniper’s bullet – or are explosive endings more to your taste?  

James Bond had to carry out two assassinations without a hitch before claiming the coveted 00 designation.  He did the first with a sniper attack, while the second was a much more up-close and personal approach. The Jackal, consummate professional, took on the assassination of Charles De Gaulle and intended to get him with a mercury-tipped sniper round at a distance of about 400 yards. Meanwhile Jason Bourne, inspiration for the Brainwashed Black-Ops Badass build, is a close combat specialist who dropped out of the program after a failed assassination in which he had to hide aboard a private yacht for five days to get close enough to the target to do the deed. Jason Statham’s Mechanic specializes in deaths that look like accidents, and goes to great lengths to make that happen. 

A Hit has a few things in common with Heists, in that the narrative is mostly about the Planning and the Aftermath, less about the Execution. As a general rule you want to make sure that your narrative is Thrilling, and it can be difficult to make the Planning stages of a Hit Thrilling. That’s doubly so if the agent’s intended hit strategy involves sitting at a distance of 400 yards and putting an explosive bullet between someone’s ears.  

No, for it to be Thrilling there needs to be stakes, action, consequences, and for that it’s worth going back to the Jackal – with a touch of Jason Statham’s Mechanic. 

In those stories it’s not about the moment when a finger tightens on a trigger. It’s about how difficult it is to get to a point where you can pull a trigger. In the Jackal the narrative is ultimately about the Jackal’s tortuous progress across France to reach a certain point at a certain time, and how often he comes close to being exposed or caught. In mechanical terms, the entire novel is an Extended Heat chase with the prize at the end being a President’s head.  

Mechanic: Ressurection (2016)

Statham’s Mechanic operates in very similar circumstances but the thrill is never in the kill itself. It’s in the climb across a skyscraper’s front to get to a point where he can make the kill. The narrative is almost entirely prologue with the sudden release of … water … being the climactic moment. Again, in mechanical terms the scene is an extended Thrilling Infiltration, to get to a point where the Bang-and-Burner’s prepackaged toy can do the most good. 

The actual killing takes seconds. It’s the minutes you spend getting to the point where you can kill that makes a Hit a Hit.   

In an RPG narrative you also have the option of the escape plan, which is usually hinted at in novels and movies but rarely becomes a significant part of the story. A Jackal may say that the ability to get away with it is all-important, and it is to him as a character, but it’s not important to the story of The Day of the Jackal. Similarly Statham’s Mechanic may get away without a scratch despite impossible odds, but the movie doesn’t spend much time showing you how he does it. What’s important is that he does it. 

Whereas an RPG story has the option of making the Aftermath the meat of the story, because the Aftermath can be Thrilling. It will definitely involve some kind of chase moment in the immediate aftermath of the Hit, and may involve a significant Extended Heat chase across the geopolitical landscape. This probably works best in Dust and Mirrors games, where betrayal and murky allegiances are paramount. However, it’s possible – and might be a lot of fun – to start the story with the target of the Hit collapsing in a welter of blood, and your agents then have to somehow get away with it. 

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

The Boys from Brazil (1978)

Marathon Man (1976)

The Three Days of the Condor is almost entirely an Aftermath narrative; there is a Hit at the beginning, and the protagonist has to deal with the consequences. The Boys From Brazil starts with a series of Hits, after which the protagonists have to unravel the complicated series of events that got to that point and discover the real reason for the Hits.  Marathon Man has a similar dynamic, with slightly more time spent in the Planning stage.  

All these are Dust narratives but they have one other thing in common: the protagonists of those stories aren’t the ones carrying out the Hit. They’re the ones that have to live with the consequences. This is because all these stories, and Dust narratives in general, are morality tales, and it’s difficult to make a killer the hero of a morality tale. A hero of a thriller, sure; but someone who pulls the trigger from 400 yards away is, at best, morally dubious.  

In that sense a Dust tale inherits the Noir mantle. Noirs are often morality tales as well, and the protagonist usually ends up getting martyred. 

All that said, let’s go to the Bankhaus. 

There are all kinds of targets here. Lisle and Albert are the obvious ones, but really anyone sufficiently interesting and plot-relevant can be the target. Or it could be a more crooked narrative where the subject of the Hit leads to the real Objective of the mission. Say, a crime carried out in such a way that it looks as if Lisle or Albert must be the killer. 

It’s generally the case in stories like these that the difficulty of getting to the target and carrying out the Hit provides the Thrills of the story. It’s one thing to smother someone in their sleep, something else to creep through a small army of guards, deactivate the alarm system, avoid the attack dogs and then smother someone in their sleep. That’s what makes Hitman’s Agent 47 the top of his class; not that he knows how to use a pillow, but that he can get to a point where the pillow is useful. 

So to spike the difficulty the Hit either has to take place in a difficult location, or be surrounded by difficult safeguards, or both. It’s not enough to get the door key; you need a biometric key set to one particular person’s keyprint. It’s not enough to walk into the nightclub; you need to get into the VIP lounge, and from there into the hidden VIP lounge. That’s not just a bodyguard, it’s a Renfielded rhoid-rage bodyguard with more points in Martial Arts than six Jackie Chans combined. 

Let’s say that the target is Lisle and that, for plot reasons, the Hit has to take place at an exclusive sex club in Berlin to throw suspicion on Albert. That knocks off two Node head honchos in one fell swoop. It has to look as if Albert did it and that means he can’t have an easily provided alibi, so timing is critical. It can look like a murder but it has to be his murder, and that means unless he’s suddenly discovered his inner Schwarzenegger it can’t be an overtly violent hand-to-hand killing. Poison, bullet, knife in the back, all these methods are on the table, but not something that would require more strength or skill than Albert has. Plus, if Albert is left-handed, say, better make sure you use your left hand too. Let’s also say that in order for this to work Lisle’s partner for the evening has to be distracted, so they don’t become an unexpected witness to something unpleasant. 

That’s a lot of moving parts, so there’s plenty of things for a team of agents to do. Someone has to keep Albert busy, someone else has to keep Lisle’s partner busy, there’s Infiltration, there’s probably also Digital Intrusion (either to control the security cameras or to wipe the records – perhaps both), all of which has to be timed perfectly which means someone has to be coordinating the whole thing. Not an easy job.   

What happens when we flip a Hit and make it so the story has to be about preventing a killing?

The trick there is, a lot of the things that make a scenario Thrilling happen to the killer, not the people trying to stop him. The hero of the Day of the Jackal is policeman Claude Lebel, but you wouldn't know it from the film and you barely know it from the novel, though I doubt that was author Forsythe's intent. It's just that the Jackal does all the eye-catching action-centric stuff. Claude makes a ton of phone calls and reports on the regular to the authorities in charge of the case, but in terms of directly affecting the narrative Claude has no role at all, except at the end.

Sherlock Holmes has a better option. His antagonist Colonel Moran is a sniper and game hunter without peer, who carries out his hits with an air-powered rifle that kills with a lead bullet, not a million miles away from the Jackal's bolt-action rifle with its mercury-tipped bullets. The idea being accuracy, plus an exceptionally lethal payload.

Holmes pulls it off by making himself the target and ambushing Moran - and no, that's not a spoiler, it's a Holmes story. If you haven't worked out that Holmes (nearly) always wins by now, you never will. It's a bit like expecting a Bond villain to triumph. The minute Bond steps into the ring the only question is how the villain will lose, not when or if. Make it so the agents aren't reacting to someone else's action but are themselves taking action, and the narrative becomes Thrilling again.

So in a reverse Hit story your best bet is to allow the agents to be the targets, either because they willingly put a target on their backs or because this is a Conspyramid reaction to something the agents did. Pit them against the best of the best. That way the narrative becomes personal, and if you're doing your job right the agents will become deeply paranoid.  Channel your inner Mike Pondsmith. Make them check under the bed and avoid all windows. If they can't bear to drink anything other than bottled water on the off-chance you've poisoned the martinis, you've done your job well.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Heath Robinson Assassination (Night's Black Agents)

 From the Guardian, concerning the recent assassination of scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Iran:

“The operation was very complex and took place using electronic devices, and no one was present at the scene,” [Ali Shamkhani, secretary for Iran's supreme national security council] told Iranian media ... 

A [Fars news agency] report said Fakhrizadeh and his wife were travelling in a bulletproof car along with three vehicles for bodyguards when gunfire hit his car. Fakhrizadeh exited the car to check the damage, the report said, speculating that he may have thought he had hit something.

“At this moment, from a Nissan car that was stopped 150 metres away from the martyr’s car, several shots were fired at the martyr from an automatic remote-controlled machine gun,” the [Fars] report said, adding that one bullet hit his back.

“Moments later, the same stopped Nissan exploded,” it said, adding that the owner of the car, which it did not identify, had left the country a month ago. It said the weapons may have been controlled by satellite.

The Iranian state-owned broadcaster Press TV cited unidentified “informed sources” as saying remnants from the attack showed Israeli arms had been used to kill Fakhrizadeh.

My first reaction: that seems needlessly complicated. 

Think about all you'd have to arrange for this to happen. You'd have to smuggle in some fairly sophisticated equipment, get someone with above-average technical expertise to put it all together (don't forget whoever-it-is needs to be a demolitions expert as well as a mechanical genius), transport all that kit to the hit site and pray Fakhrizadeh chooses exactly that route. Since he's an assassination target you've got to figure he changes his driving route constantly to avoid becoming an easy target, so good luck with that. Hopefully your sources on the inside can give you Fakhrizadeh's route so you don't have to rely on blind luck. 

You probably can't afford to leave the Nissan in place for longer than a few hours, so this all has to be done quickly as well as discreetly. Presumably you have to have a Plan B in case this doesn't work and you have to retrieve the Nissan and its gear to try again tomorrow. You'd then have to remotely control all that sophisticated equipment and do it in such a way that you can adjust the kill shot in case Fakhrizadeh doesn't obligingly stand exactly where you want him to. You then have to carry off the operation flawlessly and extract whoever it was that put all that equipment together. As assassinations go, this technical masterpiece makes the aerosol murder of Kim Jong-nam look like amateur hour.

Incidentally, jolly good luck on the shooter's part that not only did Fakhrizadeh get out of his bulletproof car and stand out in the open like a complete fool, but also his bodyguards didn't immediately intervene and drag the idiot under cover. Three vehicles, assume four people per vehicle - that's twelve bodyguards, any one of whom could have saved his life. Did Fakhrizadeh habitually bail out of his protective vehicle? Is that why his bodyguards weren't quick off the bat - were they used to his antics? Was he deliberately lured out? Otherwise this seems like an incredibly lucky break, worthy of Gavrilo Princip.

For those keeping score, the effective range of a heavy machine gun is well over 150m, so no problems there. An SMG would have an effective range of about 200m, so accurate shooting's getting a bit complicated and in any case an SMG would have next to no chance of penetrating the bullet-resistant car. An assault rifle's effective range is about 400m more or less, but has a similar problem with bullet resistance - and remember this all has to happen in a matter of seconds, because the target will rabbit as soon as the threat's obvious. 

So if this happened at all the Nissan presumably had a mounted HMG of some description, since the shooter couldn't count on Fakhrizadeh getting out of the car and the HMG has the best chance of being able to eat through the car's resistance to hit the target. Even then, the odds aren't great - unless the target gets out of the car and obligingly provides the perfect opportunity.

Video sourced from JerryRigEverything

Incidentally I cry bullshit on that claim Israeli armaments were used to carry out the attack. It might have been the Israelis, but if it was not even the most idiotic of spies uses easily identifiable home-manufactured equipment. It'd be like James Bond parachuting in with a Union Jack chute. 

Spy Who Loved Me clip

I can't help thinking it would have been easier to smuggle in a couple gunmen, purchase equipment on the ground, and hit the target the old-fashioned way. It sounds more like something I'd see in an NCIS Los Angeles plotline than a real-life Iranian assassination. After all, if your whole plan hinges on the target being kind enough to get out of the car and present you with a kill shot it really doesn't matter whether you're using Robocar or someone with a reasonably accurate rifle.

If you're wondering whether I can get past that, no, I really can't. This whole scheme would probably have gone down the crapper if Fakhrizadeh hadn't gotten out of the car. So why the hell did he? People do stupid things, but you've got to figure he'd been told again and again that staying in the car was the best policy - he's a prime target, after all. Did he really care that much if the paintwork on his company car got dinged?

That said, if the Wire Rats in your Night's Black Agents game aren't paying close attention to this theory then they just aren't trying hard enough.

Heath Robinson was a cartoonist who specialized in ridiculous, over-complicated mechanical devices; his American equivalent, and spiritual successor, is Rube Goldberg. The NBA support book Double Tap gives Achievement rules, in which:

• when an agent meets the criteria for an achievement
• and the player provides a colorful bit of roleplaying or hot-dogging
• the agent gets a 3-point refresh of whichever General ability seems most appropriate

From that:

Heath Robinson Assassination. Carry out an assassination completely remotely, by using remote-control equipment of some complexity. No fair just exploding a bomb with your cell phone; get creative with your kill shot.

The Double Tap cherry Trapmaster is the closest equivalent to any cherry I might devise to cover this situation. I'm not about to reinvent the wheel.

However there is another possibility: Distance Shooter. The Wire Rat can use Mechanics pool for Shooting tests when using a remotely controlled rifle or similar weapon. I'm a little leery of this. It requires some prior assembly, and it kinda feels as if the Wire Rat's stealing the team sniper's thunder, but it does have that quasi-Cyberpunk feel that the best Wire Rat ought to be able to manage.   

If I were assigning Difficulty to this task I would add 3 for every element of the task, on the presumption that the more moving parts involved the more opportunities there are for failure. So in this instance there are at least three elements of the task:

1. Placement/assembly of the assassination weapon. (You could split that into two elements, for greater Difficulty).
2. Remote control of the assassination weapon.
3. Remote viewing of the target.

That makes the total Difficulty 9. Tag-Team Tactical Benefits or Tactical Fact-Finding can help reduce that Difficulty to an acceptable level, or add in points to help the Wire Rat hit the difficulty. 

Enjoy!

Ripped from the Headlines (Night's Black Agents, Dracula Dossier)

Just a quick one this week to highlight a few newspaper articles that intrigued me, and may prove useful to Night's Black Agents Directors.

First the inspired and somewhat quixotic theft of two million quid's worth of books. I really hope the thieves aren't going to cut the things apart for their illustrations. That would be a tragedy,  but as a heist it has all the hallmarks of greatness. Whoever carried it out knew the target's security measures and knew exactly what to steal; that takes planning as well as flair. Plus there's a decent chance this was a theft to order, and that sort of thing is meat & drink to a Night's Black Agents Director. A group of thieves and ne'er-do-wells are gathered by some shadowy well-heeled sociopath to steal a small fortune in unsellable manuscripts? You couldn't ask for a better start to the campaign.

Next, a Dracula Dossier connection: The Harker Scene-Painting Studio is about to be turned into flats. Bram Stoker, when he worked at the Lyceum, became great friends with Joseph Harker, a scene painter and theatrical chandler, hence Jonathon Harker the Dracula character. Harker's studio survived until the 1980s when it was bought by Flint's, another theatrical chandler which still manufactures the signature color Harker's Red. Now the Grade II listed building is to be sold off, and several of Harker's descendants visited the studio to find Joseph's scrawled name, along with those of several of his family who went into the family trade, carefully preserved on the studio wall.

As a Director you could do many things with this information. To begin with it adds a hidden layer of depth to Billie Harker, Lucy Blythe and J.Q. Harker if they happen to be part of this grand theatrical tradition. Billie in particular could do with a switch from law student to RADA grad, perhaps working as showrunner or scriptwriter for a BBC epic about horror movies. Perhaps Lucy Blythe's name is up on that wall with all the other Harkers, or maybe J.Q. wanted to make a switch from a military career to an artistic one only to be badgered into submission by his domineering father.

As a location it has all kinds of benefits. A Grade II listed building that's seen out Dracula, the original vampire hunters and all their progeny, preserving the history of the generations? Was some secret hid in those brick walls, or stored for safekeeping under the floorboards?

Even as a Cool site the grand backdrops on their massive frames loom overhead like memories blustering in an empty head, and the weight of history hangs heavy on visitors. Some of the names on the wall are recognizable as Edom cut-outs or friendlies. Is that peculiar stain all that's left of a pool of blood spilt decades ago, or an old Harker's Red accident? If anything's still here, it's at best a minor artefact, or even a fake; or perhaps the Conspiracy hid a red herring here for foolish spies to follow straight into a trap.

As a Warm site it's probably used as an Edom safehouse-cum-meeting place, nice and anonymous. People come and go all the time, and nobody remarks on it if a stranger arrives here to never be seen again. That unmarked white van isn't at all suspicious, not when dozens like it are here every week. Perhaps Edom keeps the studio active out of some sense of family history, or because Billie agreed to become an Edom asset only if it helped keep the business alive. Maybe there's a temporary holding cell somewhere in the basement for Renfields captured in the course of an operation, somewhere safe, secure and anonymous for short-term stays before being moved on to better accommodation elsewhere. Probably last used in the 1970s, but even so if those walls could talk ... It's also a great hiding place for old artefacts, like the 1890's Cryptic Lockbox, or Aytown's Photographic Studies. Perhaps Harker's cameo is hanging, long forgotten, not far from the framed section of the wall protecting all the family signatures.

Last up is the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, half brother of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The 45-year-old exile and gadabout was apparently sprayed in the face by an aerosol poison, while walking through an airport shopping concourse. The alleged assailants, two women, say they thought they were taking part in a comedy reality show. Their brief was to convince businessmen to close their eyes, at which point the two would spray them in the face with water. Except in Kim Jong-nam's case it wasn't just tap water, and he died shortly afterwards.

Let's say the women's story is accurate on its face. If so, kudos to their shadowy employers for coming up with a scheme that Bugs Bunny would have been proud of. This is the kind of lateral thinking I'd expect to see at the gaming table, but never in real life.

Also, it can be an instructive and frightening few minutes to research potential bioterroism agents that can be deployed via aerosol. "There is no vaccine or prophylactic immunotherapy available for human use." Oh goody. That'll help me sleep at night.

But from a Director's POV it does open up some interesting possibilities. Can Vampires deploy a spray agent to create Renfields? Or even just make a target more vulnerable to special abilities like Cloud Men's Minds or Mental Attack? Even a bog-standard hallucinogenic would be a reasonable attack agent, something to incapacitate without leaving significant traces for CSI to follow up later.

Of course, you'd have to come up with a scheme that allowed you the perfect shot. Simply breaking into someone's hotel room armed with a spray canister probably isn't going to get you what you want. Clocking someone in the face with a spritz of perfume would do it, especially in a crowded place where such an action might go without comment. A similar moment provided an inciting incident for a West Wing episode, in which POTUS secretary Debbie Fiderer thought she'd been spritzed by a couple sitting next to her at a public event.

"I thought they were guests of Leno's, but it turned out they weren't," Debbie says. "While they finished with the party ahead of us, I didn't even see the woman get in her bag and sffh! She spritzed right into my face." "You say this aerosol got on you?" the military doctor asks. Without waiting for a response, the doctor immediately shuts everything down and calls for a full decontamination process. And that's how you immobilize the White House for the evening. It's the sort of thing that might happen anywhere; in a restaurant, at a gala event, on the subway. Totally innocuous, totally deniable, and the ones who make the attack - if it is an attack - vanish into the crowd like ghosts.

Or you could go whole hog and spray an entire room or building with the stuff, like a Batman villain with zero restraint and a flair for the dramatic. But this only works if you don't mind the media fallout that will inevitably follow.

From a rules perspective, aerosol toxins are thoroughly covered in the main book, p78-9. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say whatever was used to dose Kim Jong-nam was a +6 damage aerosol attack agent. Almost all [toxins] will reliably kill or incapacitate all but the most dramatically robust of NPCs - human NPCs, that is, says Ken Hite. Too true, says Kim Jong-un.

Edit 21st Feb: I see the Malaysian Police are now saying that the women did know what was going on, and that there's been an attempted break-in at the morgue to steal the body. This is a story that just won't quit. In fact if someone in  Hollywood isn't already working on a comedy film treatment, they really should.

That's it for now! See you next week.

Guns for Hire: Night's Black Agents

The Guardian recently published an article about academic investigations into the murky world of hitmen, which I highly recommend. Though it naturally has a British focus, it's not unreasonable to extrapolate a similar situation across Europe. In brief, the study divides hitmen into four distinct groups:

• The Dilettante. This killer is a complete novice, who until this point never had any criminal record. Circumstances - usually financial pressure - have forced this person to kill for cash. Like any novice, the dilettante is prone to mistakes, and may lose the will to carry through with the deed. Paul Cyrne, holder of the Guinness World Record for longest 24 hour underwater swimming, is one such. Penury persuaded him to fall in with Graham Birchwood's scheme to murder Birchwood's wife Sharon and collect the insurance payout. 
• The Novice. This killer knows about as much as the dilettante when it comes to murder, but does have a criminal record. The novice has almost certainly participated in some kind of violent crime before taking up killing, but has never killed for cash before. The novice is very likely to leave some evidence behind at the scene of the crime.
• The Journeyman. This is an experienced assassin with several kills to his credit. The journeyman knows enough to clean up after himself, but may make mistakes. When gangster David King aka Rolex Dave was gunned down outside a gym in 2003, his killers were of the journeymen type. Though the operation was meticulously planned and executed, the killers were traced because one of them left a plastic glove behind in the getaway vehicle. The palm print inside the glove led the police to one of the shooters, and after that tracing their movements before and after the attack was straightforward.
• The Master. This is an experienced killer with an unknown number of kills to his credit. The master is identified as such because of the care taken in carrying out the attack, and the lack of evidence left behind. Glagow gang boss Frank McPhee's killer is identified as a master. McPhee was sniped at a distance by someone using a .22 rifle, and his killer has never been identified. 

It's remarkable how little cash is involved. A novice can be had for just £200, while a more experienced hand might cost as much as £15,000. As a point of comparison, you can buy a decent used car for something like £5,000, more or less.  

What does this say about the world of Night's Black Agents?

Well, for one thing, if gunmen can be had so easily, it's probably fair to say that assets of any sort can be classified in a similar system, and at a comparable price tag.  The dilettante/novice/journeyman/master model could as easily apply to hackers, for example, as to killers. Or thieves, or spies, or any other variation on the human asset theme.

That includes the kind of occult assets a conspyramid might do business with, as well as the sort the protagonists are going to be hiring. For there will be times when the players say 'this job doesn't need our direct involvement; we can contract it out. But to who, and how much?'

The conspyramid will be interested in disposable assets for all sorts of reasons, both organized and disorganized. By that I mean that there are times when the conspiracy deliberately sets out to hire outside help for a definite purpose - organized - and there are also times when elements inside the conspiracy hires outsiders for reasons of its own. This is most likely when, as per Double Tap, the conspiracy is breaking down and it's everyone for themselves. At that point a node under threat may well pay off a few contract killers to take out its immediate rivals. It's reasonable to assume that an organized effort is disinterested in anything less that Journeyman class, while a disorganized effort takes what it can get.

With all that in mind, consider the same classification, applied to occult assets:

• Dilettante. This asset has no real knowledge of the nature of the conspiracy or horror in general, except for what it has seen in the movies. From a stats perspective, it's comparable with the Civilian in the main book, with Hand to Hand 4, Shooting 2 and slightly higher Health, also 4. This kind of asset it most often used by level 1 or 2 Nodes, and then only as fire-and-forget drones. However the advantage of the dilettante is twofold: first, it is usually desperate and thus willing to do anything. Second, it can turn up anywhere. The police and military stand out, but a civilian doesn't; often, a civilian with the right connections, or just the right key card, can get into any building, bypassing security. Can usually be bought for peanuts.
• Novice. This asset has very limited knowledge of the conspiracy. It may or may not appreciate the true horror behind the mask; perhaps it accepts the conspiracy at face value, as a drug smuggling organization or whatever the conspiracy's selling itself as today. This asset has carried out operations in the past, and is eager to qualify for the inner circle. From a stats perspective it is comparable to Militia, though often with a specialty - like Driving - at 6. Unlike dilettante, the novice usually stands out, and lacks the dilettante's go-anywhere-do-anything quality. The novice makes up for this with slightly better skills. It can be bought cheaply, perhaps for a few thousand.
• Journeyman. At this point and up, the asset is less and less likely to be human. The asset is aware of the conspiracy, and its true nature. It may be a feral, ghoul or Renfield that works outside of the conspiracy, either for cash or other rewards. It is careful not to get too close to the conspiracy, for fear of losing its independence, but at the same time it needs whatever the conspiracy is offering. This level of asset may, or may not, have had special training, perhaps as a government operative. It can be bought at a fairly high price.
• Master. These independent operatives are almost certainly vampires, or possess equivalent power. They are aware of the nature of the conspiracy, and don't much care. Their primary concern is prolonging their own existence at a comfort level that they find soothing. The value of these assets is their experience and power, but the risk to the conspiracy is that, if the asset is not loyal, it might betray the conspiracy. This is especially likely if the asset's safety is in any way threatened, and at that point it might decide to forward that dossier of special information it's been gathering to whoever might be interested. For that reason the conspiracy prefers to keep Masters at arm's length, or further. The characters might not be so picky, but Masters have no loyalty to anyone, and can prove fickle allies. Masters can be hired at an exceptionally high price.