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From: Ross Payton
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2015 14:00:58 -0500
I have an idea for running a two to three part game about a group of thieves robbing an art museum for ancient artifacts and getting into supernatural trouble. I'd like to implement modern security practices for the museum without going overboard with the research - I want the PCs to plan the heist and let them really design the heist themselves.
1. I know I want to implement security guard tokens ala Deggy http://www.deggy.com/howitworks.html - if the PCs want to impersonate a guard, they'll have to keep moving throughout the museum as part of their cover.
2. The museum will be in a rural mountainous area of the United States and seemingly a vanity project of an eccentric billionaire
3. The fixer who gives the PCs the job will tell them that the security systems are only wired to a nearby building that has 12 armed private guards at all times - police will not arrive for at least an hour if not longer. This gives the PCs the option of going loud by taking out the guards and then just looting everything they can find.
4. The job is to steal 1 particular artifact from the museum but the fixer will fence anything they can bring back. The artifact is supernaturally tied to a creature so they cannot physically take it too far from the creature but they don't know that. They will have to kill the creature to steal the artifact.
5. There will be at least one other supernatural defense in place that will be a total surprise - PCs have zero chance of detecting it ahead of time. Not sure what that will be.
6. System will be Night's black Agents - I have not determined if this will be explicitly mythos or not - my players always expect mythos so I may use something totally different just to mess with them.
From: Shane Ivey
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2015 16:27:04 -0500
Make the guards interesting. Consider their morale and attitude. For a rural mountainous area an hour from the nearest civilization, that's a LOT of guards on site. Unless they're gung-ho for some reason (they're all in the billionaire's magic cult or brainwashed), the guards realize full well that this is a weird situation. Each has done the mental math: "My salary and benefits are worth about THIS much risk. Beyond that, this rich idiot and his museum can fuck off." Acceptable risk will not rise to the level of dying like an NPC drone unless a given guard is particularly deathwishy.
Private security technically is there to protect people and property, not to have shootouts. Acting on behalf of the owner of the property, they have a responsibility to call the cops if there's trouble and to take lethal action only to protect another from deadly harm. If they're paid really well, they probably are drawn from the ranks of professionals and have some sense of their responsibility, liability, and risk.
From: Joe Citizen
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2015 20:26:29 -0400
Just from my knowledge of Security Systems for Jewelry stores, they commonly use electronic alarms that alert private security or police, they use an after-hours Infrared system that detects the presence of body heat in restricted areas (hard to disable without killing the power completely) - hidden security cameras, encrypted networks, that kind of thing. If any of that helps.
In museums they usually have alarms keyed to glass cases individually. ID Badge scanners are appropriate, I remember when my Father worked for a couple high-security locales, they had ID cards with a constantly changing password on a LCD screen. That number would change every hour and if you didn't have the ID card, you didn't know the new code.
From: Jay Dugger
Date: 28 Jun 2015 02:52:12 -0700
In museums they usually have alarms keyed to glass cases individually. ID Badge scanners are appropriate, I remember when my Father worked for a couple high-security locales, they had ID cards with a constantly changing password on a LCD screen. That number would change every hour and if you didn't have the ID card, you didn't know the new code.
Depending on the model and age of such devices, these keypads will wear over time, giving keen observers a guess at any patterns in the ever-changing sequence. Back-tracking from that to a combination in the real world probably won't work, but the plausibility might prove dramatically useful in play.
Other cipher locks might have deeply recessed keypads with switches intentionally hard to see from most angles.
Other high-security locales will have lockers outside the border for personal effects, such as (and in particular) cell phones.
Other real-world practices, which might not apply to your case.
Security badges will not be worn in town. (In a small town, every local will know who the guards are anyway.)
Some financial monitoring will be done.
Guards might be subject to polygraph tests. (Questionably legal, questionably effective.)
Loyalty tests might be made. (Pretty and friendly stranger buys a guard a drink, will the guard talk too much?)
From: David Reed
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2015 11:27:21 +0000
Lots of great stuff so far. Doubly so for Shane's perspective on guards in the middle of nowhere. Humans get bored easily and entertainment is more interesting than watching over things that never change.
The museum idea did strike me as odd given the remote location. Why not lock up your precious(es) in a sealed vault instead of putting them on display in fragile glass cases? Unless crowds of cultists wander the site with some frequency, a paranoid owner would lock up his treasures in a bunker under layers of reinforced concrete, steel, and magical wards. Much easier to secure, contain, and control. Having a good reason for open display will help you lay out your security plan.
What I haven't seen yet was a perspective on audio/video. Cameras have become ubiquitous for security at all cost levels. TV heists always presume dead spots or the ability to hack/loop video feeds, but for a paranoid billionaire it wouldn't be hard to lay down a couple extra cameras and eliminate the dead spots and make it that much more tedious to loop them all. Depending on the sophistication (if any) of the automated a/v scanning computer (humans are notoriously bad at paying attention for hours on end), embedded timecodes and repetitive sounds become easier to trigger on. Add-in multispectrum cameras (infrared, UV, visible), and they become harder to spoof. Of course, if the cameras are wireless (and hackable) and the infiltrators have days to do their prep and recording, it's not impossible.
Also, nobody's mentioned guard dogs. Or guard "things." =) They tend to be much more loyal, attentive, and aggressive than humans. It could be amusing to have fearful rent-a-cops doing nothing but watching cameras, afraid to patrol, on one hand and super-aggro guard "things" that prowl the compound after dark (especially if they stick to the shadows or just don't show up on camera). Having watched Jurassic World with the kids yesterday puts me in mind of raptors-on-patrol… The guards would be afraid to patrol while those "things" are out.
Having done security and law enforcement for years before the lure of software money pulled me away, I can tell you that most security in the US, even in high establishments, is a joke. It's an insurance palliative measure. As Shane pointed out, there are very few places with guards who are trained and willing to engage deadly force unless given no other option. Most law enforcement are trained to be expert witnesses of crimes in progress, not interventionists without backup and overwhelming odds—although so-called "active shooter" training and public expectations are encouraging a comeback for the "lone cop hero" mode.
Decide how paranoid the owner is and how much he's willing to spend on equipment, maintenance, and constant training and that will give you a good idea where to place yourself on the spectrum of security from SuperMax to yawn. Something that looks like yawn but has hidden gotchas sounds like where you're headed. I approve.
From: Rob Shankly
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2015 22:19:29 +1000
Given the remote location, it is also reasonable to expect security in depth. At the most basic level this should be a fence and a guardhouse at the gate, but "the most basic" is boring. Pressure plates, laser tripwires, remote camera systems and microphones should all be present as well - but they should be failure-prone and considered unreliable. Snow, rock falls and animals will all give false positives. On the other hand, high end game cameras are comparatively cheap and can be purchased in abundance. There's also no reason why they have to be monitored locally.
Active security testing should be ongoing - outside expert are hired to test the "museum" security and report any holes. If it is likely that intruders might attempt covert reconnaissance, it is likely that security experts might have already identified likely staging posts and lines of approach. These can then be patrolled or monitored.
If the "museum" is not open to the public, it would also be possible to create dummy sites - given four identical blockhouses, how do intruders know which one to crack?
From: Shane Ivey
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2015 09:33:29 -0500
Active security testing should be ongoing - outside expert are hired to test the "museum" security and report any holes.
Unless the owner refuses because of secrecy. In which case there may be gaps and malfunctions that PCs can seek and exploit.
From: Christian Spainhour
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2015 11:05:15 -0400
Look at the The Templeton *Library* near Mont Eagle, Tenn. for some ideas. I was in school when construction was started and it has a bad history including the death of a trespassing student during construction.
https://uncomelyandbroken.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/an-empty-library-a-tower-of-wind/
From: Ross Payton
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2015 12:04:10 -0500
Great notes so far! Some things I've decided on for the scenario:
1. The museum is an ego project for the billionaire and as a tax shelter. He also trades a lot of smuggled/dirty art work and artifacts, so he does not want the authorities looking too close at the collection and its provenance.
2. The guards will be mercenaries from around the world, chosen for their ability to kill without compunction. He will own a PMC and rotates mercs in six month assignments at the museum.
3. The billionaire is directly connected to the supernatural elements surrounding the museum - I'm not sure if he will be supernatural himself or merely a servant/worshiper/ally
4. I think one of the supernatural defenses will be the museum guestbook - every visitor is asked to sign it, which can then be used to create a sympathetic link for ritual magic/scrying. It is likely that the PCs will visit to case it, but if they refuse to sign it, it will be noted by museum staff.
From: Kenneth Scroggins
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2015 20:18:01 -1000
1. I know I want to implement security guard tokens ala Deggy http://www.deggy.com/howitworks.html - if the PCs want to impersonate a guard, they'll have to keep moving throughout the museum as part of their cover.
Tour Confirmation Systems such as this will not be regularly monitored. The site commander will probably download the button or token hits for a cursory review once a week or even once a month. They'll certainly review them in greater detail after a burglary of course. Failing to hit a button (or even all the buttons) is not likely to cause any immediate reaction.
3. The fixer who gives the PCs the job will tell them that the security systems are only wired to a nearby building that has 12 armed private guards at all times - police will not arrive for at least an hour if not longer. This gives the PCs the option of going loud by taking out the guards and then just looting everything they can find.
12 guards on site 24/7 is a LOT for a conventional site. Assuming three eight hour shifts, and five day work weeks you'd need a minimum of 36 full time guards plus 36 part time guards to cover weekends. That's 72 people who know the full details about your site security rotated in and out every six months for a site you want kept quiet from the authorities. Cutting back on total personnel while still maintaining a presence of 12 guards means that people will be working 12-16 hr shifts with consequent lapses in alertness due to fatigue and exhaustion.
Also…
http://www.museum-security.org/
From: Kenneth Scroggins
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2015 20:29:53 -1000
If this were my supernatural artifact, I would put a dummy artifact on display in the museum with very reasonable, minimal security (no one is expected to rob a rural museum). Then I would keep the actual artifact and the creature in two separate gigantic bank vaults in an area designed to use or contain the creature. The Artifact Vault would have one door leading to the Creature Vault and one door leading away as an escape route/private entry. There may or may not be a third entrance to the Creature Vault depending on whether or not it's necessary to send the Creature out on missions.
This Vault area would have the armed security guards and be disguised as a backup remote data processing/storage center to explain the double fences and barbed wire.