Our Blackmoor campaign came to a hiatus. The heroes defeated the evil wizard and magic was messed up because of an eldritch horror, the usual. The grand majority of that campaign involved two styles of adventure: The Dungeoncrawl and the Pointcrawl, along with Hexcrawling and Five Room Dungeons. These styles of play, and the genre of fantasy roleplay in general I would say, inspire exploration from different scales. Exploration in a dungeon is easy to understand, the mystery of what could be beyond the hallway and what the PCs may discover. Even with a dungeon crawl with an objective, for example, venturing down the dimensional labyrinth of the wizards tower to kill said wizard; is a clear defined objective, but the players still get to explore, one 10’ square a time. The same can be said for PointCrawls or Hexcrawls, what is beyond the next road? What can be beyond the other side of the Elven woods? Exploration is what drives the play style for these games; it is in its DNA.
However, I came to a strange realization that not all genres are about this. Case and point, Cyberpunk RED the system I am using to run a campaign and will document the sessions in a future post. The Cyberpunk genre is defined in fiction by several things: Neo-Noir, Techno Babble, Style over Substance, Transhumanism, Low Life – High Tech. Not to mentioned but these style of stories can be face-paced, or at least, faster than a crawl. Cyberpunk RED itself, in the first few pages tells you that Edgerunners live life hard and fast and are always pushing it to the edge. The game itself reinforces this idea with how adventures are structured in the book using Beat Charts. Adventures should be about the Edgerunners going from scene to scene with a healthy mix of Development (not shooty bits) and Cliffhangers (usually shooty bits) And although this structure can be linear, this is no different than a pointcrawl without a map, just create branches between scenes. Not only this but even though an adventure can be linear, the choices do not have to be…but I am getting ahead of myself…
Therefore, I developed a few adventures using the beat charts as a very loose guideline and everything was going swell. Until I wanted to make a Heist, an iconic type of adventure in many works of fictions in different genres. I have never ran one. Of course, if this were D&D or any other Elf Game, the process would have been simple, just draw a map, key it, and add adversaries and we are done. However, that was not going to work with what I had in mind, I wanted them to steal something from a rather large structure, a building with 12 floors and a penthouse. Soon it dawned on me “I can’t make a location-based adventure for a 13 floor building, that’s almost a megadungeon!” and even then, what can be soo interesting about exploring a mostly normal office building? Cubicles…monitors…break area…offices, repeat for 13 floors. I know how I wanted to make the heist; I did not know how to execute the interactivity of the players and their involvement in the heist. Maybe the beat chart could have helped but that would have felt a bit too linear for this style of adventure although perhaps a work around would have been okay, but it didn’t sit right with me. So I searched the internet for answers, found mostly high-level overview answers which is in incredibly common in the TTRPG space, no one will tell you exactly how they do things, they don’t tell you their procedures. Except for one person, Justin Alexander and his blog, The Alexandrian. I like him, he breaks down actually applicable procedures one can follow to make prepping for TTRPGS actually fun and enjoyable.
Going through his blog, I find exactly what I was looking for “Sector Crawls”. The Sector Crawl allowed me to design a large space to explore but still let the players interact with it instead of going from scene to scene or the slog of a crawl going through 13 floors of paperwork and water filter chatter.
Preparing the Heist
For this, I wanted to plan several details before adding the mechanical challenges. I needed the Objective, the Fortress and the Dragons, I believe I heard this from Youtuber, Seth Skorkowsky. The objective is exactly what the Players are looking for, the whole reason why they are risking their lives. Just insert a McGuffin and you are done. Maybe the objective is irrelevant to the PCs but the patron hiring them is willing to reward them for the McGuffin. This can be literal treasure, gear, information, a person, a thing, anything really.
Now onto the Fortress. Here I will be detailing where exactly the Objective is located, a Stronghold, a Moon Base, a Crystal Palace, Atlantis, anywhere. Here I will be writing down most of the Sector Crawls concepts: How many sectors, how many entrances, how these sectors connect, which sectors are off limits, which ones are a secret. Each Sector should have one point of interest as a minimum and maybe a maximum of three. Just one feels rather small and more than three is just overwhelming for the players and the GM
Finally, the Dragon. This is where you are detailing the security and protocols in case of a breach. The reasons why your PCs might not want blow their cover and also the things that could blow their cover: You have the guards stats ready, maybe a big Nemesis boss like Resident Evil 3 that is way beyond the players league, want add cameras, possible traps, alarms; any security measure you think would fit the place. Try to think logically but also, try to leave a few gaps for the PCs.
So let us put this into practice: Let’s make an Arasaka Research Facility.
The Objectives: The PCs were hired by shady businessmen to infiltrate an Arasaka owned building, enter their labs on the top floor, and steal their data base of information into a memory chip. The reward? 2,000 hard cold euros, choomba.
The Fortress: The building is 12 floors high and has a penthouse type location at the very top where the labs are located. Ill divide the building into sectors. There is the ground floor with reception, floors 2-6, floors 7-12, and the labs in the penthouse. There are three ways to get in, front entrance, side and back entrance, and terrace on the 7th floor. Elevators only from the 1st floor to the 6th; 7th to 12th requires Access Keys. The lab also requires a separate Access Key handed only by the Exec who runs this facility. The side and back entrance require a pin pass to enter without tripping the emergency exit alarms. There are stairs that has access to all the floors except the labs but its locked.
The Dragons: Front desk has security that searches you for weapons, you also need an appointment to enter the facility or fake IDs to prove you work there. There are cameras on every floor; PCs need to roll for stealth for every sector they travel if they are sneaking around without notice or if they are doing something out of the normal in the office if they are infiltrating. The building is jam packed with Arasaka Security Agents. If they are caught, every time they enter a sector they will meet with a group of 6 agents. Every guard has the Access Key to the elevators and the actual keys to the stairs. Entrance to the lab is trapped, a special camera will scan anyone for the access key, failing to have one on person will cause wall turrets to emerge from the walls and shoot the poor victim to a fire red dust. No one who doesn’t have access enters this area and is always avoided. The building has a NET architecture but also has a NETRunner, you wanna access their info thru the NET gotta hit the NETRUNNER in meat Space first.
Add any small mechanical touches like bypassing locks, lockpicking, NET architectures, hacking, library searches. Insert game here and we are done. We have a dynamic location, with several ways to tackle it, leaving it entirely in the hands of the players and how they handle the situation. This also still gives the player the option to get creative and try something you didnt think about but YOU KNOW how to handle because of how the adventure is laid out.
The Adventure I just laid out will also be included with this blog post In its entirely (with grammatical errors and everything for sure) to demonstrate exactly how I lay out this heist and you can use it too if you want or be inspired by it.
Saka Bad Blood: Adventure for Cyberpunk RED
https://lairofthelich.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/saka-bad-blood-1.pdf
Lair of the Lich 