Well, consider John P’s scenario we were playing last weekend, which if we hadn’t all been experienced and paranoid gamers might have gone rather more the way he’d planned…
I was finding it difficult at first to think of things for Mirek [my PC] to do (rather than to react to), but he’s now developed a grandiose and impractical goal so that seems much more viable.
I agree that the thing we’re guarding hasn’t come up much, though (not knowing the setting) I’ve been assuming it will become relevant on its own terms (via visions etc.) rather than as a target for other people.
The impression I get from hearing about other Vampire games is that a lot of the time both PCs and NPCs go straight from “I want the thing” to “I will take the thing”. Of course, if your schemer knows people who work like that, he can rely on them jumping when presented with bait.
(As a side note: because of the way I run games and the games I’ve run, I now have mental models of several senior Nazis available in the part of my head where NPCs live. It does get a bit disconcerting when I hear about something current and an emulation of, say, Himmler pops up to say “oh, right, that’s that old trick”. Which is obviously just my subconscious putting things together, but…)