The Confidence Artists' Consortium

“The fundamental principle is that people give you what they believe they are getting in return. A mark who believes they are partnering with you to make money gives you money. A mark who believes they are helping you will help you. A mark who believes they love you gives you everything. We do not exploit weakness. We exploit the specific human tendency to believe that what we want to be true is true. This is a more sophisticated target and it produces better outcomes.”

• Lena Voss, Consortium Senior Member, Training Notes

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1. Setting Overview and Tone

The Consortium has seventeen members. They range from operators who have been running long cons for twenty years to newer members with two or three significant operations. They share intelligence (target profiles, current law enforcement priorities, useful contacts) and sometimes personnel (an operation may require a specific type of collaborator that one member can provide to another).

The Consortium is not a criminal organization in the hierarchical sense: there is no leadership, no dues, no enforcement mechanism. It is a professional network that functions because the shared value is real. When a member violates the informal code by creating exposure for others, the only enforcement mechanism is collective social pressure and, if necessary, collective action against the violating member.

Tone: Character-focused crime drama. The setting is more about psychology, performance, and professional ethics than about heist mechanics. The most interesting conflicts are internal: what the work requires versus what the people doing it can sustain.

Sensory Pillars:

1. Sight: The environments where Consortium members work: wherever the specific operation requires. Senior member Lena Voss is known for operations that take place in social environments (galleries, charity events, private clubs) where sustained character performance is the core skill. Junior member Declan runs shorter operations in commercial contexts. The performance of identity is always present: who a Consortium member is in a given context is a deliberate construction.
2. Sound: The specific cadences of effective confidence work: the way the most skilled practitioners match their speaking pace, vocabulary, and emotional register to what the target responds to. The internal coordination language between Consortium members working a collaborative operation: minimal, coded in ordinary social interaction, and practiced until it is invisible.
3. Touch and Smell: The physical props and environments of specific operations: objects that create context, environments that support the scenario. Lena Voss has a collection of props that she treats with the care of a stage actor’s personal wardrobe: each item chosen for a specific operational purpose and maintained precisely.

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2. The Consortium

The Intelligence Network is maintained informally by all members: target profiles (wealthy individuals in the region, their known interests and vulnerabilities), law enforcement priorities and current investigations, useful contacts (lawyers, document specialists, travel services). This shared intelligence is the Consortium’s core value and what makes membership worthwhile.

The Collaborative Operation Structure allows members to request support from each other. A request for a specific type of collaborator (someone who can plausibly be a doctor, a financial advisor, a European investor) goes out to the network, and members who can fill the role and are available respond. Payment is by arrangement. The collaborative structure allows more sophisticated operations than any individual could run alone.

The Code is unwritten but universally known: no operations that involve violence or threat of violence, no operations against Consortium members, no using Consortium intelligence in operations that create exposure for other members without notification, and no recruiting from operations while representing any connection to the Consortium. The last rule is the one the new member appears to be violating.

The Current Problem is Fen, a member who joined eight months ago. Fen’s first two independent operations were clean and showed genuine skill. The third appears to have used Consortium intelligence to run an operation that partially used another member’s established cover identity without permission, which creates exposure. The fourth is currently running, apparently using Consortium-shared target intelligence, without notification to the network.

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3. Factions

The Senior Members led by Lena Voss are the Consortium’s institutional memory. They have more to lose from exposure and more investment in the Consortium’s continued operation. Their response to the Fen situation is measured: they want to understand what Fen is doing before they respond, because uninformed response creates its own exposure.

The Junior Members are less patient. Three of them have independently flagged that Fen’s operations are creating the kind of attention that the Consortium’s code specifically prohibits. One of them has been directly affected: the cover identity issue. Their position is that the code’s informal nature does not make it optional.

Fen is the new member. Fen’s skill level is genuine: the operations have been technically sophisticated. Their violation of the code appears to be either deliberate (they are not invested in Consortium membership on the Consortium’s terms) or a result of misunderstanding the informal network’s actual standards (they have mistaken shared intelligence for operational license). Determining which requires understanding Fen’s current operation and what they believe the Consortium is.

The Law Enforcement Interest is the background pressure. The Watch’s financial crimes unit has noticed a pattern in three recent operations in the city: similar methodologies, similar target profiles. They have not yet connected it to specific individuals. The Fen situation is the reason they might.

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4. Unique Mechanic: Mark Investment

Track each operation’s Mark Investment from 0 to 6.

Building Investment: Each interaction with the target is an opportunity to build Investment. A successful Presence roll increases Investment by 1. A failed roll maintains current Investment. A critically failed roll decreases Investment by 1 and creates a flag that must be addressed.

Investment milestones:

Investment collapse: If the target identifies any element of the operation as deceptive, Investment immediately drops to 0. Once Investment collapses, the target is not just a failed mark: they are an active threat who knows some or all of the operator’s cover identity and has a specific grievance.

Managing collapse risk: Actions that build Investment quickly often carry higher collapse risk. The most sustainable operations build Investment slowly using consistent, low-risk contact.

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5. Character Archetypes

The Senior Operator

You are Lena Voss. You have been running long cons for nineteen years. Your longest operation ran twenty-two months. You have never had an Investment collapse because you have never put an operation past the point of comfortable sustainability. You are currently running a nine-month operation that is at Investment 5 and approaching its culmination. You are also managing the Fen situation, which is consuming professional attention at a moment when you can least afford distraction. Your position on Fen is that understanding their current operation is more important than responding to the code violation, because response without understanding creates new risks.

• Drive: “Complete your current operation cleanly, understand Fen’s situation fully, and respond in a way that either brings Fen into alignment with the code or exits them from the network without creating exposure.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 1 | Finesse 4 | Mind 2 | Presence 1

The Affected Junior Member

Your established cover identity, a wealthy European art advisor named “Marcus Bellingham,” was partially used in Fen’s third operation without your knowledge or permission. You discovered this when a contact mentioned meeting “Marcus Bellingham” at an event you did not attend. The cover is not blown: the operation appears to have been run by someone else using a similar but not identical version. But the cover is now in a more fragile state than before, and you are angry, and you want the Consortium to address it, and you are aware that being angry about it publicly is itself a risk that you need to manage.

• Drive: “Determine the extent of the cover identity damage, assess whether Marcus Bellingham can be continued or needs to be retired, and ensure the Consortium addresses the Fen situation in a way that prevents recurrence.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 1 | Finesse 3 | Mind 2 | Presence 2

The Investigator

You are Bren, financial crimes. You have identified a pattern in three recent operations. You are good enough at your job to know the pattern suggests a small, sophisticated network. You are also good enough to know that the pattern is circumstantial and that you need more evidence before you can move. Your current approach is passive intelligence collection: mapping the social environments where the operations occurred, identifying recurring contacts, and building a picture of the network before anyone in it knows you are looking. You are close to a specific identification. You are also aware that when a sophisticated operation becomes aware it is being investigated, it changes.

• Drive: “Develop the passive intelligence picture to the point where you have a specific identification, without alerting the network and causing it to disperse before you can act.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 1 | Finesse 3 | Mind 3 | Presence 1

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6. Starter Scenario and Why It Matters

Fen’s Current Operation: Lena has identified that Fen’s current operation is targeting a wealthy businessman named Carrell who is also on the target profile list shared through Consortium intelligence. Two other members had Carrell in their research as a potential future target. Fen’s current Investment on Carrell appears to be at 4, which means the operation is in active phase and cannot be cleanly extracted without collapsing. Lena must determine: whether to let Fen complete the operation (accepting the code violation), extract Fen from the operation before collapse (at significant personal risk), or contact Carrell in a way that collapses Fen’s operation cleanly without creating exposure for the rest of the network. The financial crimes detective has placed a surveillance asset in Carrell’s social environment as part of her pattern investigation. The characters must navigate a situation where every available action has significant downside risk.

Why It Matters: The Confidence Artists’ Consortium is about professional community and professional ethics in an industry that operates outside the law. The Consortium’s code is informal because it has to be, but that does not make it optional: the code is the mechanism that keeps the network’s members safe. Fen’s violation is not just a personal problem; it is a test of what kind of institution the Consortium actually is, and whether informal professional norms can function as a real standard.