“I am a policeman,” said the Professor with his first broad smile, and beaming through his spectacles. “But as you think policeman only a relative term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I am in the British police force; but as you tell me you are not in the British police force, I can only say that I met you in a dynamiters’ club. I suppose I ought to arrest you.” And with these words he laid on the table before Syme an exact facsimile of the blue card which Syme had in his own waistcoat pocket, the symbol of his power from the police.

— The Man Who Was Thursday by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

For one tabletop RPG one-shot scenario I played with my group, I prepared a social deduction game, a type of game that involves players being assigned to one of two (or more) opposing factions, with the goal being that each of the faction acts towards eliminating the other group. The game is usually played in a way that there is a good (innocent) faction, and a group of traitors. The identities of each player are kept secret, with speculations on who is who being the core part of the gameplay. One thing worth mentioning is that the number of traitors is usually smaller than the number of the innocent players. Most notable examples of such games include Mafia, or – a more recent example – Among Us.

While those games work very well as party games, I never really considered them to be useful for tabletop RPGs. Until this one time when I kinda “discovered” this type of game from scratch, and embedded it into an RPG. My own twist is a little different from the usual Mafia-like game, as it has a couple of differences:

• The roles are not black or white, most of the players can change their affiliation.
• There are external threats that require cooperation, even among opposing factions.
• We are playing an RPG, where most of the players can expect the party to be cohesive. This is not the case for this scenario.

I will be laying out the principles I believe are important for this kind of story, with a concrete scenario later on.

The Setup

For this scenario to be successful, let’s define a couple of assumptions we would like to follow:

1. There must be two opposing factions.
2. Both factions must have the same (or similar) goal they compete towards.
3. One faction is deemed to be the Good Guys, while the other faction is known to be Evil – by default the Player Characters are either members of the Good Guys, or pretend to be one of them.
4. There must exist an external threat, that forces the party to make decisions together.

The Setting

With the above theoretical work done, here’s a concrete example, set in the post-apocalyptic (think Mad Max & Fallout 1-2 post-apocalypse) world of a Polish RPG, Neuroshima:

The world was struck with an atomic war initiated by a rogue AI that reached Technological Singularity. Most of the countries collapsed, and remaining humans are scrambling to survive. What remains is:

• The AI itself, systematically expanding in an ever-growing mass of machinery (The AI).
• A group of human military forces that keeps fighting the AI (The Guard).
• Everyone else, a tiny fraction of world population, humans that just want to survive.

From the above description of the world, we can quickly identify the factions for our game. The Good Guys are the members of The Guard, while the Evil Guys are recruited by the AI itself.

As for the goal both factions compete for, we can imagine that The AI’s robots and cyborgs have hi-tech parts installed, that would be very useful for The Guard. So the opposing goal of both factions is: Retrieve valuable components from The AI’s destroyed units.

The Roles

Now, in a traditional Mafia-like game, each Player Character would be assigned to one of the factions, and Players would stick to their roles until the end of the game. In this scenario, though, most of the Players can change their affiliations. This is done by specifying the roles in the game similarly to those below:

Role A

You are a double agent – you work both for The Guard, and The AI. The Guard ordered you to track down and retrieve valuable components from The AI’s destroyed units. Some time ago The AI contacted you and offered to pay much more cash than The Guard for those components. Do not let anyone know about that. The Guard severely punishes traitors.

Role B

You are an impostor pretending to be a member of The Guard. In reality, you are The AI’s agent, working undercover to retrieve valuable robotic components before The Guard has a chance to reverse engineer them. There are also double agents in the group you are travelling with, but you don’t have the information who is who. Do not let anyone know about who you are. The Guard severely punishes traitors.

Role C

You are a member of The Guard on a mission to retrieve valuable robotic components from the AI’s destroyed units. You suspect there are traitors in the group you are travelling with, undercover agents that seek to hand the components to The AI. Due to the lack of proof, you can’t really convince anyone. Besides, exposing a potential traitor could be a trigger for them to attack you.

You can see that there are at least 3 players required for this scenario, but it worked best with 5 players. I assigned the roles in a way that Role A is the most common in the group:

• 3 Players are assigned Role A
• 1 Player is assigned Role B
• 1 Player is assigned Role C

Roles B and C seem to be important, because they introduce a balance in the group. With those roles, it is a bit more difficult for players with Role A to align on the goals, with B and C we create additional internal tension. Players with Role A can decide which side they would like to be on.

The Threats

We are almost done with the setup. One last thing I added, and I found it working very well for this scenario is some external threat (i.e., something dangerous in the world itself). I think any form of threat would be fine here, but for my games, I introduced two types of potential threat:

• Lack of supplies – the only potential source of food is a town with its inhabitants being potentially hostile.
• Dangerous environment – high mountains, hostile wildlife.

Playing The Game

In my scenario I informed my Players that their Characters are on a long journey seeking robotic parts as the members of The Guard. They have tracked down a wounded cyborg, a member of The AI’s forces somewhere in the mountains they are heading towards. They have bigger problem, being that they are running out of supplies, and it’s going to be extremely dangerous for them to proceed without food and water.

As the characters start their hike up the mountains, they encounter a small town named Hellview, currently inhabited by unusually pale-skinned humans that act incoherently. They offer some food and water to the PCs, provided that the party solves a problem with a “metal human” up the trail. As it later turns out, the metal human is actually the cyborg the group was after, and it is found in a cave, badly wounded, begging for mercy. It is advised that the group has a chance to scavenge the cyborg’s parts, so that they can retrieve robotic components, which would be the fuel for the internal struggle.

In case of my games, this point was the beginning of the unspoken tension among the Players, and it was very entertaining to see them debate what to do with the part they had just found. With this tension the GM can provide opportunities for both factions to act, most notably during fights (e.g., with a hungry bear nearby), where Players can try to discretely sabotage the fight in their favor (e.g., helping the threat reach the suspected members of the other faction).

Final Remarks

I ran the scenario as a horror, where the pale-skinned humans from Hellview turned out to be a deadly threat in the end.

The one problem with this scenario is that it works somewhat because the Players don’t know the exact formulation of the roles (so that they cannot game them), I did not try to re-run the scenario for a group that has already played it (even in a different form).

Apart from the replayability issue, I think it’s scenario that is very engaging for the Players. All the Characters have clearly defined goals, so even novice Players know what to do.