Heist - Roleplaying Game

What’s your score?

A hotbed for criminal activity, the city is only a shadow of its former glory. While it once was a beacon of hope and freedom, it now offers great opportunities and serious money  to shady people of all sorts.

You and your crew of misfits have specialized in thrilling and dangerous heists, hoping for the big score that will set you up for life.

Heist is a roleplaying game about a crew of criminals in a city filled with illegal opportunities.  The zine comes bundled with A Job for Kings, a demo adventure for use with the game.

About the Game

There are many inspirations for this game, starting from classic heist movies like Ocean’s 11, over any criminal-with-a-golden-heart action flick, TV-Series like Better Call Saul, to video games like the Grand Theft: Auto series. The feel and scope of all these influences varies, much as the way you and your group will play this game.

Heist is set in the modern world. You collectively create the setting for your game world, however, which starts with picking a city to play in, tweak its background a little, add major players as well as places of interest. Your crew will be connected and invested in this setting, and have an impact on the stage you designed together.

The game comes with a rules framework designed to help you tell a story and develop your characters. Heist provides as much room for interpretation as possible to avoid the rules getting in the way of telling an exciting story, so you can bend and interpret them to suit your group’s individual tastes. From conflicts to vehicle chases, Heist promises thrilling capers and deadly action!

Task and conflict resolution is built on a simple system using two ten-sided dice, where you try to hit a target number or less on each die. Success and failure are rated by how far off you are from the target number, accompanied by beneficial or hindering side-effects. So you might just make it ... at a cost.

About the Characters

A character’s qualities and abilities, whether natural, learned, or earned, come in five general groups of traits: Description, Attributes, Characteristics, Abilities, and Resources. These traits are first determined when creating your character, and are used throughout the game when your character acts or interacts with others. They also change over the course of your adventures, as your character grows in expericence.

About the Zine(s)

Heist has been designed to be as compact and useful as possible at the game table. This zine contains the core elements of the rules, and all processes required to run the game.

The text has been carefully edited and layouted to contain all the facts you need to know about a topic on a single page or double-page spread. Everything else—clarifications, elaborations, examples, and additional info you will probably only read once—will wait for you online (a QR code is provided).

The zine contains 46 pages of content (48 including the covers), illustrated by the talented JEShields. Layouted in a quadratic format, so that a staple-bound zine would lie flat on the table for easy reference. 

Layouting the game in this way was a challenge as well as an experiment: I wanted to provide a full roleplaying game with all the bell and whistles rules-wise, but also keep the amount of page-flipping down to an absolute minimum. The result looks a bit dense at first sight (there is a lot of information on each page), but turns out to be immensely helpful when running the game.

About the Adventure

A Job for Kings is a demo adventure for Heist, showcasing how the game works and providing an exciting first job for your crew. This 16-page zine is included as a separate PDF.

We use a four act structure for Heist adventures: The first act sets up the score, the second act is all about preparing and plannning your heist, the third act puts the crew right in the middle of the action, and the last act deals with the aftermath of the job. We also provide a set of tables to generate ideas for new jobs. Use the provided rules to create your own security schemes, new gamemaster characters, additional gear, and anything else you need for your own adventures.

Physical Copies

Prints of the zines are available and ship worldwide. Check our store if you're from within the EU, or contact us directly for an international orders (no worries, the postage is actually pretty reasonalble for this one).