Ok i have a more complete draft now:
The yet to be named mastermind of the plot is an ambitious roman politican, whow works a lot with blackmail or character assassinations by bringing people in compromising situations. The fixer template from Rouges would be a good classification. He had some high stakes thing running in the flamen elections and he saw his stocks tumble and decided to take drastic measures.
Making a small private party for Ingrun via Helga should be easy for him. He'll have plenty of contacts to couresans, con artists and the like, that he uses for his other dealings and what they have to do here, is not very different from other missions they get. Pour that wine on her, don#t let anyone drink it, might be unusual but he will usually avoid to tell his minions the whys. They can afterwards leave Rome to spend some time on a latifundium of a relative.
They likely know too much, but with them removed they don't figure that out immediatly and they are no immediate threat while far away. If they are disposed of later, no one will connect their deaths to the flamen.
An other option would be that the party food or drinks contain a slow acting poison. Ingrun, Helga and propably other pcs that tag along would be poisoned too. If they die from a mysterious illness it would be good for the mastermind, because there will be less incentive to proove that they are not guilty. There is poison master NPC, who can save them, so as GM i have not problem with that either. However if a party goer smells rat, they can guess, why they have been poisoned and what to tell as revange, so it seems leaving them for later is the better option.
The actual assassin would be a former scout of the roman legions, who had taken part in a "kill some barbarian VIPs, while dressed up as other tribe barbarians" mission and in general had shown a lack of scruples. The mastermind had in the past helped him out of a tight spot, because sometimes you need someone with such talents. In line with the scout template in Warriors i'd build him with callous and Low Empathy.
The mastermind organizes a whig (blond whigs from the hair of germans were fashionable, so that is not that hard) and secretly does the neccessary hair dressing to make it an Ingrun whig. The assasin gets sent to a taylor in a seedy part of town, to buy himself the right clothes. German style clothes are somewhat unusual but there is a market for it, so what can go wrong.
The taylor figures out, that this is an Ingrun outfit, by some details he wants and because he recognizes that his customer carefully avoids referring to her, when describing, what he wants. The taylor figures he is a pervert or something and sends some street urchins to spy after him, because propably you can find valuable blackmail. He learns who the mastermind is that way, and figures that this likely is too political for him, to underst whom to blackmail with what and he is out of his league, so he abandons that project.
The assasin will attempt the hit by being stealthy at first, but urban catburglary is not really his forte, so we have the damaged roof. After the hit he throws his costume into the Tiber and returns to his master.
He definitly knows too much, so according to the first rule of assassination, (kill the assassin) the mastermind poisons him and dumps him somewhere, where someone, who drank himself to death is not particulary suprising.
A bum however has seen the dumping of the costume and rescued it from the tiber. He now wears a soiled Ingrun costume and declares himself to be avatar of Apollo, asking for a few sersterces, so he can by himself a lyre. He will be brought into contact with the pcs and they will with considerable effort be able to buy the clothes from him. There will be some trademakr of the taylor and eventually they will get the address of the taylor.
The taylor upon seeing them come, and especially once he sees the bloody clothes, will figure that "this pervert" had done something to upset the pcs and they had killed the pervert in revange and are not out to get him. He will seek the protection of the local gang, that he always pays for protection after all but eventually thoose misunderstandings can be resolved and he can be bribed to do the right thing and give up the neccessary informations to the right people.
Anyone spot any obvious holes or has ideas for improvements? One mans groundfloor is an other mans earthmissle @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Johannes Trimmel @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
