Publication Day: Wonder Vault Heist

I have released my second Cypher System adventure, The Wonder Vault Heist.


If you've read my posts on heist adventures, this was the adventure I was designing that got me thinking about them.

This is a heist adventure designed for a science fantasy setting, but which could easily be converted to other settings/systems.

The heist revolves around a mechanical/mystical vault, left by the ancients, which can bend space and time, and the sinister group that controls it. As the players get closer to the wonder vault itself, they learn more about their enigmatic employer, and about the events of the past which tore a rip in space and time where the vault now stands.

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/197242/The-Wonder-Vault-Heist

If you haven't checked out my posts on running heist adventures and are interested in making/running your own, see the posts below:


Heist Adventures 1: 5 Challenges


Heist Adventures 2: Tips and Advice


Heist Adventures 3: Heist Campaigns

Heist Adventures 3: 3 Heist Campaigns

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Because I've been working on a Cypher System adventure based around a Heist, The Wonder Vault Heist, I've been writing about running Heist Adventures in Tabletop RPGs.

If you haven't seen the other articles in the series, check them out here:

5 Challenges

6 Tips and Pieces of Advice

These articles have been focused on individual adventures. However, sometimes players and GMs will want to have an entire campaign based around heists. There are a few different perspectives to take with this, depending on the sort of game your players want to have.

Notably, heist-based campaigns tend to be more episodic, with each heist being a part of a separate job. However, sometimes there can be overarching plots or threads that connect the varying heists.

1. Independent Group

Your player characters are on their own. They have no one backing them and no leadership outside themselves. This is the most commonly portrayed option in television/movies. This is Ocean's 11, Leverage, the Italian Job, etc.

This group can be motivated by selfish/personal reasons, as is the primary case in the Ocean's movies. Maybe it's profit, maybe it's just independent ambition. This is sort of like an evil campaign, just with probably less death. Player characters in this sort of campaign have pretty loose morals and don't care if people get hurt from what they do.

They could also have a more Robin Hood type dynamic, fueled by some sort of moral driving to steal from the rich and powerful in order to right some sort of wrong. This is more or less the premise of Leverage.

An important part of determining how the campaign progresses is determining how the group will receive jobs. One of the easiest/best ways of doing this is by giving the player characters contacts who can pass word of opportunities to the group. However, it could also be done through player characters doing independent research or seeking out opportunities on their own.

2. Thieves' Guild

In a Thieves' Guild campaign, the players work for a larger group or guild which is designed around thievery and crime. The extent of the influence of the group may vary depending on your setting and the campaign outlook you have.

Usually, the primary goals of a thieves' guild are profit and infiltration/control, with motivations and moral ranges similar to the selfish/personal group type motives.

A thieves' guild campaign has the added benefit of having a structure from which the missions can be given to the group.  This makes things nice and orderly and allows for moving things forward easily. Also, it provides an easy way of having knowledgeable NPCs who can help the PCs plan heists or gather information about their targets.

A potential campaign arc might involve having the PCs start as fledgling members of the thieves' guild, and have to work their way up the ranks. Possibly, there is inter-organization competition and politics which the PCs have to wade through and eventually overcome. This could all eventually result in the PCs rising to become leaders of the group, or even potentially start their own.

3. Spy Agency

Spy fiction seems to have almost as many heists going on as crime fiction. Oftentimes, this is breaking into an enemy base of some kind, but sometimes it's even more convoluted than that. Spies seem to sometimes even need to break into places controlled by allies or even neutral parties to gather intelligence, technology, research, or some other McGuffin.

Having a spy agency allows for all/most of the benefits and opportunities of a Thieves' Guild campaign with none of the moral ambiguity. Well, to be perfectly honest, spy stuff does tend to have a lot of moral ambiguity involved in it. However, usually a spy agency is committed to some purpose or goal other than wealth/selfishness. This could be dedication to a country, opposition of an enemy, or something else depending on your setting. This provides an advantage if you want to have heist adventures, but have players who don't want to play selfish/evilly motivated characters.

A spy agency also lends itself more readily to ongoing plots, with each heist revealing more about something sinister and convoluted going on, with recurring enemy factions, and with a structure that mixes investigation and thievery together.

Hopefully, if you're looking to run a heist campaign, one of these ideas will be helpful to you.

If you'd like to see a heist adventure that I've put together, check out The Wonder Vault Heist when it comes out next month.

What other ideas or suggestions do you have for running a heist-based campaign?

Heist Adventures 2: Tips and Advice

Planning a heist adventure for an RPG can be difficult. I discussed the difficulties of this in my last post: Heist Adventures 1: 5 Challenges

In planning my upcoming adventure, the Wonder Vault Heist, I had to think through some of these issues. I'll share some of my thoughts with you on how to overcome them.

As you recall from the Challenges post (or, as I'll tell you now if you haven't read it), a majority of the challenges to planning a heist adventure have to do with how to present the planning of the heist to the players. Much of the advice below will have to do with those challenges. Some of these ideas can be used together, some are best used separately.

1. NPC Mastermind

One way to bypass the opportunity for PCs (Player Characters) to have bad plans, and possibly even the information gathering phase, is to have an NPC present by the plan and the information to the PCs.

This strategy cuts out a lot of the advance legwork for the PCs, which many players find tiresome anyway, and allows them to get right to the heist, which is what a lot of the PCs want to do.

The only issue with this strategy comes if the PCs question why the NPC Mastermind isn't involved in actually carrying out the heist. If the NPC does accompany the PCs, he/she should only have a minor role in the heist. Remember, the PCs should be the protagonists of the story, and the spotlight and action should revolve around them.

2. Pre-planned Plan

Rather than having an NPC plan the heist, it can be assumed that the player characters planned the heist, but that the adventure is starting after that point.  As GM, you should either provide handouts to the players detailing the plan, or review the plan in advance of getting into the adventure.

As a whole, this strategy provides many of the same advantages of the NPC Mastermind. It cuts down on the roleplaying opportunities of having a scene where the mastermind lays out the plan, but it does get to the action much faster. It's all a matter of what your group enjoys the most.

If you are reviewing the plan, you can do it in stages, as the PCs progress through the heist itself. This way there is not just an infodump all at once, and it also creates the feel of other heist movies and tv shows where scenes of the plan discussion are cut and intermingled over scenes of the characters actually carrying out the plan.

In The Wonder Vault Heist, I use an NPC mastermind, but I still have a method of intermingling the planning scenes with the heist scenes to effectively create this feel. I don't want to give too much away about how this works in that adventure, for fear of spoiling the fun for potential players in the future. I will say that while it works well in fantasy settings, it would not work as well in a non-magical setting.

3. "Yes, but..."

If you do let the players plan the plan, or even if you don't and they are just adapting to circumstances as they arise, they are going to have the most fun if their ideas work. Players can (and usually will) come up with things that you, as the GM, have never thought of. As a GM, notably, you might have plans that oppose these ideas, but if you can be flexible and think on your feet fast enough to allow for the player plan to work or at least be enacted, they will have a blast, even if something else goes wrong right afterward.

And it probably will, and should. Especially if they have already been told about some security measure that their plan neglects. In letting the player's idea/plan bypass one area of security, another might be triggered. Whatever the complication, it should be something that doesn't cause the whole heist to fail, and still allows the PCs to keep moving forward. This allows the PCs to succeed where they want to, and feel that victory, but it also immediately ramps up tensions and it establishes consequences for neglecting information that has been given.

4. Things go Sideways

There are often two types of heist-type scenarios in shows and movies: The first are the ones where the main characters pull off the heist perfectly and according to plan, where any perceived failure is revealed to actually have been a part of the plan itself the whole time. The second are the ones where things go wrong for the characters and they are forced to adapt and come up with a new plan in order to pull it off.

Do you know how to know which is going to happen? As a general rule, the more the show/movie shows you of the planning in advance, the more likely it is that something is going to go wrong. This is because there's no tension, and therefore interest from the audience, if they know exactly what is going to happen. When the audience is given the plan and it works, it's boring. When the audience is given the plan and can see things go wrong, it becomes exciting to see how the characters will get out. When the audience doesn't know the plan, everything that happens is a clever surprise.

Likewise, for players in an RPG, if they have a detailed plan, follow it, and it works, then in the end the adventure tends to be a bit flat. Especially if the plan was handed to them in advance and not even their own idea.

So, keep things interesting. Have complications arrive. Maybe the guards changed their shifts. Maybe some other team of thieves is trying to steal the same thing. Maybe someone at the heist location recognizes one of the characters from some shared past. Maybe a person of importance is visiting the location. Any number of things can happen, but have one or more unexpected complication that the PCs have to figure out in the moment on their own.

But, don't forget to follow the next bit of advance. It is in the moment, but it should still be something that the PCs can (and probably will) overcome, not something likely to ruin the whole heist, even if they think for a moment that it might.

5. Keep it Simple

This is true of complications, as well as the known complications for the heist itself. Especially if the players are the ones planning the heist.  Make there be straightforward paths and easy solutions to the problems at hand. Chances are, the players will come up with a complex plan anyway. Just putting in people and security measures, and saying they're advance, the players will think that they are dealing with something complex.

Make it simple so that the players can solve it. Give them a genuinely complex heist to handle, especially if they don't have a lot of experience with heist adventures, they'll never manage. It is something they can be worked up to, but in truth, let them solve a simple heist with easily solved hurdles, and they'll think they are criminal masterminds.

6. Think of it as a Normal Dungeon

There are rooms, there are NPCs, there are traps. It's not actually that much different from how dungeons would normally be laid out. The biggest things are that the PCs probably won't be killing everyone, and that they'll be trying to be sneaky. Having traps and alarms in more abundance than normal is probably a good idea. Still, it can be laid out as a normal dungeon and you shouldn't over complicate things for yourself at the GM in thinking about it otherwise.

Hopefully these pieces of advice are helpful.

If you missed the first post of this series, check it out here: Heist Adventures 1: 5 Challenges


For the next post in this series, check out: Heist Adventures 3: 3 Heist Campaigns



To see a heist adventure that I've made, be sure to check out The Wonder Vault Heist when it comes out next month.

In my next post I'll be talking about campaigns structured around heist type adventures, so be sure to come back and check it out.

In the meantime, what other advice or challenges do you perceive for heist adventures?

Heist Adventures 1: 5 Challenges

A couple days ago I finished the draft of The Wonder Vault Heist, my upcoming Cypher System adventure.  I'm pretty proud of it, and am very excited to playtest it. In the meantime, I'm working on formatting it and working out the kinks (as well as finishing editing on the first episode of Heroism and Other Lies, getting cover work done, and planning for my next novel).


In planning a Heist adventure, I was thinking of some of the great fiction I've encountered before that either includes or focuses on heists: Leverage, Alias, Burn Notice the Ocean's movies...


In addition to this, I recently had a conversation with a friend who was trying to plan a Burn Notice one shot for Hero System, and we talked about some of the challenges associated with running that sort of adventure.


The biggest challenges all have to do with planning.

In heist movies, there are usually cool scenes where the characters discuss the information they've gathered and use it to make a plan for how the heist will go about. In order to hold audience attention, these scenes may be interspersed with the heist itself so that the events are seen and experienced by the audience as they are discussed. Oftentimes, the thing that makes heist fiction so appealing is the cleverness of the main characters and their plans. For translation to RPGs, there are several hurdles to this.


1. Gathering Intel

A lot of times, heist fiction doesn't really get into how the characters find out about their potential target. There's a research phase before the planning phase that often happens off screen, or is handwaved with hacker-magic. This generates information about people who connect to the target as well as about the target's security systems and the like.


When I ran the Firefly RPG, I had put a lot of thought into how players might look for information and so I created people and places where the PCs could go to try to get information. The PCs didn't really seek these contacts out on their own unless I made the path very obvious, in which case they didn't feel particularly rewarded for finding the information. More likely, they tried to rush in and take things blind, which was sometimes frustrating for everyone.


2. Character Knowledge

In a lot of heist fiction, different characters are experts in different things. In Leverage there are the clearly defined roles of Hacker, Hitter, Grifter, Thief, and Mastermind. Each of the characters has extra knowledge about things based on their specialties (and their backstories). For example, if they are dealing with mercenaries or military units, the hitter usually has some extra knowledge about how those types of people operate and what their procedures are.


Unless a character has a really long and detailed backstory and/or the adventure is designed around this, the player likely doesn't have the specific character knowledge. To a degree, this is what Knowledge skills are for, but in some cases characters may not think to make these rolls.


3. Planning the Plan

Characters in works of fiction have the best Hollywood minds writing for them, and doing so without the same time restraints the characters have. A portion of the plan that a character might think of in a second may have taken the writer hours, days, or even weeks to think of.


In real life, planning is difficult. Ideas and dialogue don't flow freely, and people don't all contribute in a sensible fashion. Many players tend to get frustrated in long planning discussions, debating between hypotheticals. Oftentimes, these plans will fail to address certain elements of a heist, and/or focus on entirely the wrong details.


Most likely, your characters are not criminal masterminds. This will make it hard for them to think in the way that criminal masterminds think.


4. Boredom

In addition to the frustration of debating hypotheticals, many players like getting right into the action of things. They see forming or debating plans as separate from the "fun" part of actually pulling off the heist.  I've had numerous times where a player, getting bored of the discussion, just says "Okay, my character goes and does X" even though X is impulsive, impractical, and often directly opposed to the interests of the character. The player just wants the story to move forward, and doesn't see a planning discussion as doing that.


5. Bad Ideas

As I said already, it is unlikely that your players are criminal masterminds. You may think that the path to success is obvious, but players are unpredictable things. Inevitably, they will come up with plans that are far more complex or convoluted than necessary. They will come up with ideas that are unreasonable and illogical. They will fail to account for particular security measures or obstacles, even if you tell them about the obstacles, give them a note with them written in all caps, and circle them in bright red.


This can make things go wrong, and not just in the "oh, the plan went sideways, what will we do now?" interesting drama wrong. It can make things go "oh, there is no sensible way the PCs get out of this without being dead or captured" wrong.


So, what do we do?

Don't fear! I have several suggestions for how to overcome these challenges and more, and I'll post about these in my next blog post.

See the post here: http://goalworlds.blogspot.com/2016/10/heist-adventures-2-tips-and-advice.html


For information on running a campaign centered on heists, see this post: 3 Heist Campaigns




In the meantime, what other obstacles do you think there are to planning a heist mission? Do you have any thoughts on how these can be overcome?