Freelance Traveller

The Silver Panthers

by Jo Jaquinta

This article originally appeared in Cepheus Journal 016 and wass reprinted with permission in the November/December 2024 issue of Freelance Traveller.

The Silver Panthers are a criminal organization active in whatever region of your campaign you require. They are presented here as spanning multiple star systems but could easily be multiple arcologies on a high population world, or whatever suits you. You can drop them into your campaign to run one of the plot ideas, use them as a convenient bad guy for another scenario, or let rumors of them spread as a red herring to keep the characters on their toes.

Origin

It is believed that the original organizers of the Silver Panthers had met while serving long prison sentences. Building up rapport and trust, they emerged together, determined to set up an import/export business in specialized goods. And that they did. However, they also leveraged their other talents to use this as cover for smuggling and other high revenue transport.

Not being the active sort anymore, they gravitated towards criminal activity that did not require much “wet work”. So, this mostly revolved around embezzlement, money laundering, insider trading, and social engineering operations.

Circumstances occasionally required them to deal in other activities. Partnering with other criminal organizations was never terribly successful, as their more subtle skills were not well respected. To correct this, they decided to grow their own.

Later biographers say that it was random chance that led to the observation that high quality makeup had a very favorable size to value ratio, and that there was a steady supply of young women driven into perfecting their shoplifting skills in pursuit of it. As a philanthropic outreach from their legitimate business they founded a legal aid charity, specializing in wayward girls, that doubled as recruitment.

The original generation of Silver Panthers has either passed away or retired. It has diversified much since their origin, but they are still largely, but not exclusively, a female organization known for being tight knit, and loyal to each other.

Contact

The Silver Panthers are well known as an institution, but their members are less identifiable. Every young, affluent, media figure desiring upward mobility, but wishing to appear “edgy” drops many hints about being associated with the Silver Panthers. Wearing semi­hidden logos or other paraphernalia reflecting them as a fashion statement. When questioned by law enforcement they universally admit that it is merely homage to them, and they are not members. To anyone else, they deny it with a wink or nudge.

Anyone in the know (or with some skill in Streetwise) knows that contacting the organization is pretty straightforward, although unconventional. There is an AI known as “Silver Aunty” that has been widely distributed, and, according to rumor, was crafted based on the founding members of the organization. It isn’t terribly advanced and is more an expert system than a true AI, so it can run on most computer hardware. It presents as a silver haired old lady chat bot and will happily converse with people in the role of a governess of the Silver Panthers.

It will deflect direct questions, responding with further questions. Such as asking, “How do I contact the Silver Panthers” might elicit a reply of “Just why do you want to contact them?” The AI model has been around for years and has no information on recent events. It will not give any direct contacts, but instead advise the character to post obscurely worded notes in unusual forums, or leave messages scrawled in particular shades of make-up in specific high-end restrooms.

Law Enforcement is aware of the AI chatbot. Unfortunately, it is extremely well-trained at recognizing when being interrogated by authorities and nothing ever comes of attempts to follow what it says by them. Players who are trying to entrap the Silver Panthers will need to make some pretty good Deception rolls to get a legitimate contact. But if they do well at Streetwise, they will manage to receive an obscure set of instructions that does pan out.

Hiring the Silver Panthers

Once contact is established, the players can negotiate, directly, for the services they want. Initial prices for first time customers are steep. Much higher than other sources. The Silver Panthers present themselves as providing a quality service. They pride themselves on their operational security and guarantee anonymity. They also prize loyalty and strongly hint that the high price of the first contract is an investment, and that subsequent contracts come at increasingly lower costs.

The Silver Panthers consider themselves the foremost service with access to high society. They have excellent contacts amongst the upper echelons of Society, Military, Business, and Government. They are impartial to sides, and whether they are being asked for services to the benefit or detriment of those contacts.

Although they are still reluctant to engage in “wet work”, they do delight in “character assassinations”. They have incredibly detailed rate sheets for spreading rumors, planting evidence, promoting certain information on social media, changing the public narrative on certain subjects, finding hidden secrets from someone’s past, creating fake testimonials, conducting psychological operations against someone, creating or leveraging personal relationships, or planting false stories.

And, of course, smuggling is a bread-and-butter operation for them. In this they do not compete with other criminal organizations but collaborate with them. Many such operations are contracted through third parties, to perturb law enforcement monitoring and increasing the chances of success.

Working for the Silver Panthers

The Silver Panthers are very initiative-taking in contacting people for work. This is usually not for recruitment, but as a way of broadening their enterprise, and indemnifying themselves for certain types of work. They like having lots of contacts with established reputations at their disposal so that they have the exact right person to do the exact right job at the exact right time. They often take chances hiring untested agents for low priority work just to see how they turn out. If they have a weakness, it is giving chances to down and out people, for generous rates. (They passionately hate loan sharks and protection rackets.)

On their own, they have many agendas they pursue beyond the direct execution or protection of their operations. They treat the social contacts they have like investments and will conduct operations to advance them, often without the subject even knowing it. A very typical operation would be to engineer a “fifteen minutes of fame” incident for someone they consider a good candidate and catapult them onto a public stage they are unprepared for, but indirectly help them navigate the process successfully, resulting in another influencer that they have influence over.

Going back to their roots, they still have a large finger in the makeup and fashion industry, and strong opinions about what are good brands, and which are not. They are not above boosting those they favor (like making sure certain shipments arrive expressly for propitious events) or sabotaging those they do not (like glutting the market with off brand fakes).

Adventure Ideas

Nothing to See Here

A good entry scenario is for the players to be contacted by a patron requesting the shipment of a certain lot of cargo. (If the players do not own a ship, it will be up to them to secure passage for the cargo on another ship.) The terms offered will be good, but not generous.

The patron will be up front saying that the papers for the cargo are forged and that the container is being tracked by the authorities. They may very well have trouble with customs or law enforcement while underway. However, what they are, in fact, shipping, is an empty container. It is locked with tamper proof devices, and shielded from screening, as much to protect the players as to confound law enforcement.

It will be explained that the patron does conduct many smuggling operations that it wishes to keep hidden from the authorities. And to protect those, it sometimes runs dummy shipments such as this one. The more convincing the players make it, the more impressed the patron will be. But they certainly should not lay down their life for an empty container. If it comes to it, they should let the authorities confiscate and impound the cargo. Since it is truly empty, the players cannot be charged with anything other than bad paperwork or resisting authorities, and the payment given should well cover that.

Viral Flash Mob

While visiting a world the players are not native to, they will be approached by a member of the Silver Panthers with a job. It would be handy, but not necessary, if they had worked with them before. Otherwise, a Streetwise roll might be conducted to get some background material on the Silver Panthers.

The job is to pick a fight with someone in a space bar, and to lose it. They will be given a time and a place, and a modest tab to cover expenses. They should arrive early, and be rowdy, but not enough to get prematurely thrown out. They can give a general description of the person who is the victim, a young woman who will seem out of place. She will be accompanied by a young man, who they can describe in detail, who is in on the operation.

Sometime after the couple enters, they should arrange an altercation. Prior to going there, the woman has been given some form of non­lethal self­defense. Something like a taser, pepper spray, or a regurgitant aerosol. When the altercation starts, she will be urged to use this by her companion, and the players should provoke her into doing so. It will be unpleasant, painful, or humiliating to the player, but that’s what they are being paid to do.

On the scene will be someone clandestinely shooting content for a social media feed. They will be in live broadcast mode during the lead up and into the encounter. They, themselves, don’t know what’s going to happen, only that they received a tip off that something will happen. The media plant will be identified to the players, so they can appropriately ham it up.

Once the players are miraculously subdued by the unexpected hero, the police will arrive. They have been bribed not to be there before it starts, and bribed to arrive after it finishes. The players involved in the fight will be led off and taken to the station and booked on misdemeanor charges. There will be a nominal fine (well covered by their payment), an overnight stay in a cell, and they will be deported in the morning.

If pressed why the patron wants to go through all this drama, and who the woman is, they will be told, honestly, that she is nobody. Nobody at all. At least not yet…