Villainous friends: using Red Teams in your game

tl;dr: How-to notes on using red teams for campaign set up to create day zero motion in your world.

What are red teams and why bother? From a recent campaign start-up I enlisted some friends to take charge of some larger factions and power-players within the start region to create a sense of the world around them being in motion. These notes are expanded with advice from recent discussion on the discord of The Adventuring Party (thanks to Mr. E, evilrobotshane).

Three reasons to do this
- it gives an instant sense of the guiding intelligence behind the different factions: knowing the sea-devils currently eating coastal shipping are being run by Mary lets me rapidly guess how they are likely to react to intrusions from others - in this case with massive, immediate retaliation. If Charles had been in charge, the response would have been observation and later assassination to remove the nuisance.
- some of the factions offered to the pool of Red Team players were not picked up so in the game those factions had minor or disorganized leadership and were incapable of projecting power and influence beyond their own home turf.
- Red Team factions will be hard-nosed and play to win where you as a DM may be inclined to pull your punches or go easy on your players; this adds to the realism of the world.

In motion it resembles a slow play-by-email world building game.

As parts of the world are fleshed out through PC interaction or independent world-building, points arise where the factions guided by Red Team players could be interested, involved or present. The Red Team player gets asked what they want to do. This can range from 'how much do you care that this group is trying to rebuild this set of bridges' to 'who would you sell this piece of information to?' Then you as the GM take the response of the Red Team player and see how that would turn into actions that affect the players.

Three examples of red team play:
The head of a thieves guild hears that someone has attacked his operations - suspecting action by rivals he goes to the mattresses and puts out feelers to spot the culprits; the PCs skip town and the Red Team player tails them, scrys on them and tries to seek vengeance for the damage done.
The chief of a covert organisation monitoring the supernatural gets some leads on weird activities; he implements a couple of programs to investigate and uses a random code-word generator as short-hand for these different sub-efforts. The players pick-up on chatter from this organisation and go half-crazy trying to decipher the meaning of these code-word operations, assuming they had obfuscated meanings.
The head of the big bad enemy decides that the internal faction that had set them on the path to evil decides to back off and seek redemption; but to do this needs to weaken their worst internal groups and so sends all of them to the front-lines, significantly jacking up the immediate threat that group presents to the players encountering it.

Setting up
I tapped players from old campaigns I have been involved in; there is a small board devoted to it on Reddit - Long Distance Villains. The important point is to be very clear what will be involved: I highlighted that the base-game with PC's played around a table was happening on a low frequency (~monthly) and so the 'tick' of the game clock would be slow. This meant low demand in time and input for Red Team players but also slow feedback cycle and infrequent updates.

I took a two stage approach; first identifying which factions I wanted a red team player for and which others were nice to have
1) A pool of potential red teamers were emailed, asking who wanted in. All who replied were asked their preference between urban or wilderness and direct or sneaky factions.
2) Each red team player got a list of three options matched to their preference, each with a brief description. The list was started with the factions I wanted guided by red team players and then expanded to meet the preferences from the replies.

Mechanics to pull it off: Two levels can be run - with factions statted up and integrated mechanically or just taking in character orders and decisions from the red team player and using them to prep your session as a GM.

I prefer to run Red Team rules light so I don't have to balance all my factions or do book-keeping that does not directly impact the table. To the players in city X the different factions will appear as broadly equal forces in their day to day but on a macro scale, one is a local thieves guild, one is a national level trade consortium and one is the special operations group of the evil empire over the southern border - the last has orders of magnitude more 'stuff' at their disposal... but at the party level it looks like 'small group up to something in the underworld'. Mechanically this looks a lot like the Dungeon World 'Fronts' model which is as far as I usually tend to go.

If you want to add more crunch, the FATE system can represent different levels of backing and influence using Aspects and Stunts. This would be my second favourite way to do things; particularly for building city campaigns. These can enable actions or grant bonuses to downtime or in session actions which gives a good framework of crunch but adds a block of book keeping for the GM. The Dresden Files RPG has great examples of how to do this in practice - if you want to go huge you can work in Microscope as well.

Ironsworn's Oracles and their clocks are also a great way to track extended action progress.

I played a number of Birthright games and the advice from the DM's of those was 'preparation, preparation, preparation' and to note it is a non-trivial system to run. As a player it was fun but for the GM it was a lot of work.

Overall I find Red Teams offer great return on your effort as they put another set of eyes onto events and inject fresh ideas and energy into your campaign. I find it helps my prep a lot by diversifying the motivations, goals and focus in the gameworld. You just have to be clear that for the Red Team player it is likely to be 'lumpy' with periods of quiet followed by bursts of activity as the PCs collide with their operations, do stuff and then bounce off on their merry way once more.