Deep Dive Sneak Peek: Global Quality Capital (Patreon)

Today I'm sharing what's likely to be the last of my first drafts of conspiracy write-ups for Deep Dive (although I still have lots and lots of sample characters, so don't think this place will stop having regular updates). This one is a sort of conspiracy nesting ground, capable of spawning temporary conspiracies that last long enough to do its dirty work before disappearing - assuming no cohort of Renegades destroys it first.

As always, I must include the caveat that this is a first draft. There will be plenty of changes as I begin the process of redlining (i.e., marking up first drafts for revisions) and even more as it goes through second drafts, development, betas, editing, post-editing development, and so forth.

Global Quality Capital

GQC is a venture capital conglomerate with a vast and diverse portfolio of businesses. It regards the conspiracies of the Web of Pain as assets to be acquired and exploited just like any other, and it has seized control of several with promising Divergence technologies.

GQC is a privately held company founded by its current owners’ grandfather 83 years ago. The founder was the scion of a Gilded Age robber baron and inherited a vast fortune from his father. His own success soon eclipsed his parents’, and the family has been expanding its influence ever since. The conspiracy currently operates under hundreds of trade names to capture as much market share as possible in the spheres its influence touches. Oftentimes, of the five brands of product on a store shelf, three of them will be manufactured by GQC or contain one of its microchips.

The conspiracy freely mixes ruthless business practices with a company culture that exploits the local traditions and religious leanings of anywhere it has operations. In areas dominated by Evangelicals, for example, it preaches a prosperity gospel that emphasizes its owners’ Christian faith. In countries where people are expected to center their lives around work, GCQ exploits workers’ desire to be seen as loyal to convince them to work long hours and overlook toxic practices in the name of maintaining office harmony. The company lavishes praise on top performers and encourages an almost slavish devotion to one’s bosses, with the implied promise that should they work hard enough to earn a promotion, they can demand the same loyalty of their own underlings.

GQC didn’t set out to dabble in Divergence, but they acquired several progenitor conspiracies several years ago. At first, they didn’t know what to make of these strange and often ethically reprehensible organizations, but they were canny enough to recognize the profit potential of producing Remade. Although most of their holdings aren’t related to the Remade, they are now one of the fastest growing conspiracies in the Web of Pain.

Conspiracy Traits

Standing: 9

Principles: Greed is good; deny, delay, defend; you are your net worth

Virtue: Loyal

Vice: Possessive

Attributes: Power 7, Finesse 2, Resistance 15

Conspiracy Actions: 5

Association: 27

Hierarchical Node: Quality Cults, Quality Control, Quality Ventures

Temporal Node: Acquisitions, IP Thieves, Quality Collections, Quality Confections, Quality Hospitality, Quality Lifestyles, Quality Transportation

Exploitative Node: Mystery Religions

Structural Node: Adulteration, HR Department, Legal Department, For-Profit Charities, Market Manipulation, Multi-Level Marketing, Quality IP, Quality Semiconductors

Icon: Charity Washing, Dismissal with Prejudice, Hostile Takeover, Quality Control Chip, Spin-Off

Nodes

Quality Cults (Hierarchical): GQC has acquired countless corporations, small businesses, and non-profit organizations over the years, and that has included any number of fringe religions. Although each was once distinct in its theology and practices, syncretism has drawn them closer together, and an overarching system of beliefs has emerged that elevates and glorifies the conspiracy’s business interests, making it a kind of religion in itself. Conspirators ascribe spiritual significance to their position in the organization. Promotions don’t merely mean more pay and better benefits; they entail induction into the higher mysteries of GQC. Demotion is rare but likewise accompanied by measures to prevent the fallen cultist from revealing or benefiting from the knowledge they gained at a higher rank.

Privileges: +2 to Send Agents

Quality Control (Hierarchical): This arm of the conspiracy focuses on controlling costs by any possible means. This includes the usual means of laying off staff, selling underperforming assets, and renegotiating with vendors for lower prices, but Global Quality goes several steps further than that. Their arrival in a new industry usually heralds the swift enshitification of all products in that line of business as GQC squeezes out, acquires, or conspires with competitors, ensuring a race to the bottom. Long-time players in this Node often joke that GQC actually stands for “Global Quality Control”, as the organization quickly sets the standard for the quality of a type of product worldwide – one that pushes it as low as the customer will tolerate and then even lower than that as the consumer finds they have no better alternatives.

Privileges: +2 to Manufacture Complication

Spin-Off: GQC occasionally grants one of its businesses a degree of independence to accomplish a goal or provide the conspiracy with a degree of plausible deniability. As a Narrative Project, the conspiracy may create a temporary conspiracy with a Standing based on the Effort expended – 3 Effort for Standing 1, 5 Effort for Standing 2, 7 Effort for Standing 3, and 9 Effort for Standing 4. This temporary conspiracy can only have one Hierarchical Node, which is always relevant to an active Node at GQC (and which can be found to be linked to that active Node. GQC cannibalizes it at the end of the story; if it is destroyed before this happens, GQC suffers lethal damage to its Association equal to the temporary conspiracy’s Standing.

Quality Ventures (Hierarchical): This arm of the GQC focuses on expanding the conspiracy’s reach, primarily through mergers and acquisitions. Although it mostly does so through the expedient of buying up stock or buying out the current owners of the target organization, not all are susceptible to this tactic. Sometimes, GQC finds a religion, school, or other non-profit organization that has something it wants and moves to draw it into the conspiracy’s orbit. This usually involves making a large donation when the target is financially fragile (or its leaders have gotten greedy) with the stipulation that a GQC representative (or several of them) be allowed to sit on its board of directors.

Privileges: +2 to Manufacture Complication

Acquisitions (Temporal): GQC learned about Divergence only a decade ago and has determined that it is the most promising technology humans are currently developing – one that will contribute substantially to their bottom line once the bugs are worked out. Developing Divergence methodologies from scratch is a daunting notion, however, so they have solved that problem by seeking out and acquiring organizations that have already developed a means of producing Deviants. Their potential partners are not always so willing to divulge their secrets, however, and their occult resources equip them to resist ordinary methods of persuasion. To counter this, GQC has designated a team of Devoted to pursue aggressive acquisition strategies, targeting (and, if necessary, eliminating) key holdouts.

Hostile Takeover: GQC doubles the impact of any effort it spends to subvert a rival conspiracy’s Node. It may safely use this Icon once per story; each additional use inflicts a point of lethal damage to the conspiracy’s Association.

IP Thieves (Temporal): GQC engages in corporate espionage to identify emerging technologies before they can be patented or released to the public. This allows the conspiracy to produce knockoffs before the original product can be manufactured or to secure patents before the original inventors do so. It then uses litigation to squeeze its victim out of the market or target them for acquisition.

Quality Collections (Temporal): Debt collection is a distasteful but necessary part of any large business, whether it’s squeezing cash out of a recalcitrant customer or compelling a vendor to deliver a promised product or service. Although many organizations outsource this to debt collection companies, GCQ prefers to handle this inhouse. Most of the time, they use standard tactics of endless phone calls, text messages, and emails to intimidate debtors into coughing up what they owe. For large amounts or old debts, however, the conspiracy takes things several steps beyond legal methods, straying into tactics that would give mob bosses pause. Bodily harm and threats to loved ones are standard, as is violent confiscation and casual liquidation of everything of worth the victim has. Increasingly, debtors can get GCQ off their back by agreeing to participate in one of the conspiracy’s experimental procedures.

Quality Confections (Temporal): GQC manufactures and distributes candies, snack foods, alcohol, coffee, tea, and recreational drugs. Their products are always ones that are legally sanctioned in the place they’re being sold.

Quality Hospitality (Temporal): GQC owns and operates hotels and restaurants all over the world – from roach-infested roadside motels to luxury suites and from fast food franchises to haute cuisine.

Quality Lifestyles (Temporal): GQC manufactures and distributes health foods and nutritional supplements, as well as operating several gym franchises.

Quality Transportation (Temporal): GQC operates several popular commercial and private airlines, rideshare services, trucking companies, and delivery/courier businesses.

Mystery Religions (Exploitative): The conspiracy has agents embedded at high levels of hundreds of fringe mystery religions. Most are small, localized groups, which GQC manipulates into throwing themselves at the conspiracy’s enemies.

Adulteration (Structural): GQC’s experiments with Divergence often involve exposing some of its customers to various compounds, which they introduce through the conspiracy’s many products.

Privilege: +2 to the Shock Troops effect of Send Agents

HR Department (Structural): Like any company of at least moderate size, GQC employs human resources professionals to oversee pay and benefits, provide training, ensure compliance with labor laws, and set performance goals. However, the conspiracy also uses this term euphemistically to refer to those people its agents abduct as Divergence candidates and hold against their will, often within facilities overseen by temporary conspiracies produced by GQC’s Spin-Off Icon.

Privilege: +1 to Send Agents

Legal Department (Structural): GQC retains an army of lawyers who defend it against wrongful death allegations, class action lawsuits, and regulatory action. The department’s vast resources virtually ensure that any attempt to seek legal remedies for the conspiracy’s malfeasance will fail. They also wield this in the defense of other conspiracies in the Web of Pain through amicus briefs, both because it helps shield themselves against similar legal action (they can use cases that failed against other conspiracies as precedent for cases targeting GQC) and as a means of gaining leverage over the conspiracy they aided.

Privilege: +2 to the Resource Denial effect of Manufacture Complication

Dismissal with Prejudice: As a Narrative Project, the conspiracy may cause the closure of a legal case against it or another conspiracy. The scale of the legal entanglement determines its Effort cost – 1 Effort for those that affect fewer than 100 people, 3 Effort for those that affect thousands, 5 Effort for hundreds of thousands, 7 Effort for millions, and 9 Effort for a billion or more. The conspiracy benefiting from this protection suffers bashing damage to its Association equal to the Effort cost.

For-Profit Charities (Structural): GQC is very public about its charitable contributions, which include sponsors of medical research and care for the poor and vulnerable members of society. They fundraise for these causes aggressively, never missing an opportunity to burnish their philanthropic credentials. In fact, the vast majority of the donations the conspiracy takes in go into overhead expenses of various kinds, and these nominally charitable endeavors return a small profit beyond the positive PR they generate.

Privilege: +1 to Focused Action

Charity Washing: For the purposes of calculating its Association, the conspiracy increases its Resistance by its Standing.

Market Manipulation (Structural): GQC brings a huge volume of financial traffic to the economy wherever it operates, which grants it considerable clout with the markets. They can tank a company’s stock simply by cancelling a contract or send it soaring by inking a new deal with it. If the conspiracy tells a payment processor or other service provider to deny service to an individual or class of people (or to refuse to deal in a specific product), that company is unlikely to refuse.

Privilege: +2 to the Resource Denial effect of Manufacture Complication

Multi-Level Marketing (Structural): To move more of its products, GQC relies heavily on sales through MLMs that blend almost religious fervor with naked greed.

Privilege: +2 to the Weight of Numbers effect of Send Agents

Quality IP (Structural): The conspiracy’s holdings include a number of notorious patent trolls. It also files patents for any successful Divergence methodologies it learns of. Most conspiracies aren’t willing to share their methodologies with rivals (much less the authorities) for fear that it will invite regulation or worse, and they’re more interested in harnessing the occult potential of the Remade they create, not the intellectual property they represent.

Privilege: +1 to Manufacture Complication

Quality Semiconductors (Structural): GQC is a leading manufacturer of microchips used in a wide variety of consumer electronics, appliances, and vehicles. In point of fact, they’re not the best nor the least expensive chips on the market, but they’re popular among manufacturers for one key reason: they can be programmed to cause a device to fail at a set point in the future, which their partners typically use to ensure that durable goods stop working shortly after they are no longer under warranty. If a customer purchases an extended warranty at the point of sale, it is an easy matter to disable or delay this feature.

Privilege: +2 to the Sabotage effect of Manufacture Complication

Quality Control Chip: The conspiracy enjoys a +3 bonus on the Sabotage effect of Manufacture Complication actions, which counts as a Privilege. This is instead +5 and doesn’t count as a Privilege if the sabotage disables an electronic device that could conceivably include one of the conspiracy’s microchips.

Optional Nodes

For each additional player connected to this conspiracy, add one of the following Nodes:

Broken Investments (Hierarchical): GQC’s aggressive acquisition of small conspiracies brings it fully into the Web of Pain, as the study and production of Remade becomes a major component of its day-to-day operations.

Privilege: +2 Power

IPO (Structural): GQC goes public and raises billions of dollars to expand its Divergence operations.

Attribute Increases: +1 Power, +1 Finesse

Privilege: +2 to the Armory effect of Send Agents

Private Army (Temporal): The volume of physical threats against its interests from rival conspiracies and vengeful Broken convinces GQC that it needs to beef up its security. They raise an army of PMCs.

Attribute Increases: +2 Power

Private Islands (Structural): GQC acquires private islands in remote parts of the world where it can conduct its own experiments with the Divergence on those it abducts for the purpose.

Attribute Increases: +2 Power

Privilege: +1 to Focused Action

Quality Excursions (Temporal): GQC goes on an aggressive buying spree in the tourism, cruise, and timeshare markets. This trend is a little out of character for it – assets that are neither distressed nor likely to experience explosive growth – because profit isn’t the main purpose of these. Rather, this line of business gives the conspiracy access to places frequented by tourists, which GQC then targets and abducts for its experiments.

Attribute Increases: +1 Power, +1 Finesse