Secret Societies by Sean

One Powerful game tool is the Secret society. When the pc's don't know who they are up against, they tend to fear the unknown, and jump at every Shadow. When the party begins to suspect everyone of being in on a certain plot, you have the mistrust of everyone. Then you can play on that. "Don't you trust me" the town blacksmith will say. Now is he saying that because we SHOULDN'T trust him or because he's hurt because we DON'T. Now, this is a desirable state to be in, but how do we get there. Well, at first it can come from subtle seemingly unrelated attacks. Maybe the assassin who tried to kill one party member and a random goblin both had 10 gold pieces in one pocket. Some kinda symbol that you should let your party begin to notice. Do not force this information on them, let them gradually realize this. When they start to dig around for information that it begins to get interesting and you can have the kind of intrigue parties love. If people have heard of this group, they may show fear at the mention of its name. Maybe several people the party asks for information wind up dead the next day. Now this kind of current information is not going to be available in books, and the gather information skill is not going to turn up any information unless its a roll of 30 or higher, maybe even higher than that depending on how secret it is.

Now while the information on who this society is is unknown to the pc's, you as the dm should have an idea of what kind of group this is.