After Sundown 1e

We're here to see a man about a thing. He'll know what it's about.

One of the motifs that works best for getting a group of diverse characters to work together in a single story is to introduce the story element of a job. A complex, difficult, or merely remote task that several characters are contracted to perform. This gives things clear direction and bypasses many "what do we do next?" style arguments for as long as the job hasn't been completed yet.

Are we looking at a stand-up fight or a bug hunt?

The Bug Hunt is so venerable that indeed it was the assumed mission for all Role Playing Games back when the default adventure was to go into a dungeon and clear it of dragons. The basic premise is that some area or building is full of monsters and the player characters are wanted to clear them out. Bug Hunts generally at least start out like the beginning of Aliens or the end of Evil Dead 2, and they can provide a good time to those players whose characters specialize in brutally murdering things they don't like. But they can become more complicated at any time. Were the people who wanted you to clear out the monsters completely honest about the contents? Are there innocents or valuable property that the characters are supposed to protect while taking out the monsters? Are the characters supposed to take one or more of the monsters back alive (or in the case of zombies: animate)? Is there a bigger problem that is creating the monster infestation in the first place, such as a gate to another world or an evil sorcerer?

While the proximal goal of a bug hunt is combat driven, they are great starting points for suspense and character driven role playing. The hunters can become the hunted, and the mission itself may be more than it seems from a number of angles. In After Sundown, it is usually best to use non-playable supernaturals as the nemeses for a bug hunt game: it's kind of weird to be hunting "werewolves" when one of the players may themselves be a werewolf. But the same basic plot structure takes over when taking out a renegade band of vampires that is threatening the Vow of Silence or attempting to conquer the worlds or something.

I need this to be delivered to Mount Doom.

The Courier Run is at its core merely an obstacle course. The characters are asked to go from where they are to somewhere else, possibly by way of a series of intermediary locations, possibly any way they want to. The catch of course is that the characters are intended to take a MacGuffin with them. Maybe it's a valuable painting, or a secret letter to a Covenant Bishop. Sometimes it's even alive or otherwise hard to transport. Maybe it's a Mantrap being taken in for study, or a suitcase with a woman in it. Save for the fact that some MacGuffins are physically harder to move without attracting attention than others, it doesn't much matter.

The key to the mission and the reason it's the foundation of some of Western literature's greatest works, is that there is no real limit to how much stuff can be "in the way". Burdened as the player characters are with whatever the MacGuffin is, it is generally not unreasonable that enemies who don't want the MacGuffin delivered can get ahead of the PCs again and again. Nor is it unreasonable that there would be obstacles and enemies already there along any particular route the player characters choose to take. We're looking at classic works like The Odyssey and Lord of the Rings as well as contemporary works like The Transporter.

Lots of things are valuable, but there's no replacement for this.

The Fetch Quest is a time honored time waster in which the player characters are asked to go somewhere, get something, and bring it back. While you will sometimes see this in video games where the players are literally just walking to point B and back, all the memorable ones involve going somewhere that is guarded, dangerous, hidden, or in some other way hard to get stuff out of. Basically, a Fetch Quest is like a Courier Run where you don't even start with the MacGuffin.

Fetch Quests can very easily escalate into dungeon crawls if the thing being fetched is under heavy guard or lock-n-key (or both). They can also become Reconnaissance if the actual location of the MacGuffin isn't known. But you're probably going to see a lot of the same kinds of plot twists as a Courier Run - hostile interference, missing MacGuffins, and so on. Remember that in a Fetch Quest, it is very likely that someone wants the MacGuffin to stay where it is, and it is also likely that someone thinks that they have a legitimate claim with the law to enforce that desire.

In Auto-Recon 2, you get to have a boat.

The reconnaissance mission is the simple directive to go to point A or track down person B, find out what's going on, and escape to report about it. This can be a simple stealth, talking, or even research task; or it can be a bit more complicated if that's what is desired. In fact, since the entire point of the job is to find out what's going on, the mission can extremely plausibly turn into any other kind of mission. The player characters are essentially going into a black box mission. They don't know what's going on behind the curtain and then they go behind the curtain and then... anything you want.

A common method of spicing up recon work is to have the characters uncover something that is "time critical" such as a bomb plot, a scheduled human sacrifice, a growing zombie army or something else that the team is encouraged to interfere with immediately upon arrival rather than going back and giving a report. A good example of this is pretty much any of the Indiana Jones movies. Another good trope is to have enemies found during the recon which then come after the player characters. Most haunted house stories operate on roughly this premise, where once the characters get in the new mission becomes escaping with their lives.

Honestly? I don't care what you do or who you do it to. I want to see my daughter again.

Rescuing people (and in some cases animals or objects of art) can be one of the clearest objectives available. The thing that the target is being rescued from need not be a hostage situation, sometimes it's just a dangerous situation or even a loveless marriage or exploitive contract. There are plenty of ways to spice or gum up such a scenario. The most obvious of course is by having people who don't want you to rescue the target having more power at their disposal than expected. But you can also have additional groups competing to "rescue" the target or even have the target not want to be rescued.

The best part of a rescue mission from the standpoint of an MC is that it both has a definite end and leaves a clear path for additional stories. Once a target has been rescued (or not) and brought to a safe and agreed upon location (or not), the characters' interest and job is demonstrably over. On the other hand, you've just introduced some NPCs who demonstrably have enemies and the PCs have crossed swords with those enemies. So rescue missions can serve well in either a one shot role or as a stepping stone to further stories.

Remember also that the inherent goal of a rescue mission is to get the target out safely. Thus, while it is often an option to go in guns ablaze, there is legitimately nothing in the job description that would necessitate using physical violence at all. Stealth, social subtleties, and arcane magic can all be highly important in a rescue mission. Indeed, some of the best rescue missions from history involve absolutely no one on either side dying.

The second kill is considerably easier than the first.

Sometimes the entire goal of a job is just to straight up murder someone. Sometimes the reasons for doing this are totally noble, and there are a lot of those reasons to go around in After Sundown. Sometimes it's just a purely mercenary deal. Sometimes you get to have a little bit of both. African warlords, Columbian drug bosses, and ancient vampire royalty all often control fairly large amounts of resources, and it is not inconceivable that someone might be willing to pay another person some resources in order to free those resources up, completely aside from their relative worth as moral agents.

Just walking up to some guy at Pizza Hog and stabbing them in the face isn't much of an adventure, so generally speaking it's best to send the would-be assassins after people who have compounds full of guards, ancient castles filled with magical traps, or undisclosed locations that are possibly in other worlds. The actual act of killing a dude is kind of an anticlimax in that basically you ram something sharp into their chest and they stop moving. So it's advisable for most Wet Work assignments to have the adventure be getting there through secrecy and obstacles rather than the final fight itself.