It’ll be even worse than that for the main party In my smut version, I’m planning on a curse they’ll have to deal with. (Yes, it’s a fandom with magic, I’m just trying to keep it sufficiently nebulous here so that on the off-chance a reader is reading this post...spoilers and all.)
Small party’s influence will be more of unexplained events from the perspective of the main party; the main *won’t* be looking for the small party, because of how convinced everybody else will be of the small party’s demise. (ie, I’m splitting hairs with how a canon device works, and the interactions of another character with said device; such that everybody sees the small party come into contact and assume “dead”, which is why I might need to portray some of the small party’s happenings before the story climax.) At a certain points in the story, the small party’s actions will even lead the main party to believe they have a spy among their midst as the main party gets whittled away and things “leaked” to the enemy; this is because the small party will realize that going along with the villain’s plans will actually give them the best opportunity to vanquish the villain, at just the right moment.
Now, on a practical level, I am writing some scenes from the perspectives of the main party and the smaller party, this does help; and in that era of my writing, I did use spreadsheets too (unlike my originals where I’m using a database). I’ll be creating a database for the fanfic works too….