There's a forbidden thrill to works of fiction centered around daring criminals, like Arsene Lupin or the cast of Ocean's 11 hatching a spectacular scheme to steal something... and now with tabletop games like Blades in the Dark, role-players across the world can create their own heist stories. Nearly any roleplaying game can be used to tell a heist story in the hands of a talented GM, but the rules, themes, settings, and advice in these books are particularly well-suited for running games of criminal derring-do.
Robin Hood. The Sting. Ocean's 11. The Italian Job. Lupin the 3rd. The recent Spanish TV series Money Heist. For every TV show and movie about heroic enforcers of the law, there's also a story about criminals trying to break the law for the sake of profit, justice, or the sheer thrill of the challenge. These narratives of 'dashing outlaws' are particularly popular among people who live in troubled times, where justice and honest work feels hard to come by, particularly if the protagonists of these heist stories are "punching up" against upper-crust villains who earn their profits by manipulating the system.
The genres and emotional tones of the following "Heist" RPGs vary wildly, ranging from "Cyberpunk" to "Gaslamp Fantasy" to "Fractured Fairytale." In the end, though, the rules and settings of these games are designed to shape, guide, and encourage clever criminal activities. The character sheets and resolution mechanics are designed to evoke tropes of Heist stories such as planning, execution, flashbacks, and mid-plot twists, while the worlds of these games are (mostly) grim, ruthless places where the only way to win is to not play by the rules of society.
Shadowrun: Anarchy
The most popular cyberpunk RPG system out there, Shadowrun is a fusion of classic 80s Cyberpunk aesthetics with the creatures and magic of Dungeons & Dragons. In a futuristic world where dragons run world-spanning corporations, magic competes with technology, and hackers can "jack in" to virtual reality networks with their Decks. Groups of urban mercenaries, called Runners, live outside the bounds of society, taking on illegal missions of theft, espionage, assassination, and delivery for clients who all use the pseudonym "Mr. Johnson."
Shadowrun is famous for having an extremely rich and detailed setting saddled with a notoriously convoluted complicated character creation system. To make the Shadowrun world more accessible to players, Catalyst Games came up with a spin-off game called Shadowrun: Anarchy, which has more narrative-focused rules and a gameplay cycle where players take turns being the GM.
Fiasco
Unlike the other tabletop RPGs in this list, which focus on the exploits of the idealized super-thieves frequently seen in other heist movies, Fiasco is a game centered around roleplaying corrupt, fallible, and often moronic criminals. This Bully Pulpit Games-produced RPG has many expansions covering different genres of ambitious schemes gone wrong, but the base version of Fiasco is modeled after the criminal schemes seen in Coen Brothers movies like Burn After Reading or Fargo. In the first half of the game, players roll dice and choose options from storytelling charts to create a cast of greedy lowlifes and work on devising a scheme that will set them up for life. Halfway through the session, a "Tilt" emerges, a randomly rolled event which causes their criminal scheme to dissolve into backstabbing, chaos, and moments of delicious karma.
Blades In The Dark
Blades In The Dark, a dark fantasy heist game, uses a heavily modified version of the "Powered By The Apocalypse" system that has gone on to inspire its own sub-genre of "Forged In The Dark" RPGs. The players of this game take on the role of Scoundrels – represented by character playbooks with names such as Cutter, Hound, Leech, and Lurk – who reside in the city of Duskwall, a galvanic, ghost-haunted metropolis inspired heavily by dark fantasy video games such as Dishonored and Thief.
Within Duskwall's lightning barriers, fueled by blood harvested from demonic whales, crews of Scoundrels take on daring criminal operations of theft, assassination, smuggling, and revolution. A unique touch to the rules of Blades In The Dark is how the game encourages the use of flashbacks in the middle of heist scenes, letting players hop straight into the action and devise ways to by obstacles without getting bogged down in hours of planning.
Honey Heist
This two-page RPG is a thrilling heist game available to at any price on the indie game website itch.io. It also happens to be a game about criminal bears with a scheme to steal the motherlode of all honey from this year's "HONEYCON" honey convention. To create characters in Honey Heist, player roll six-sided dice and consult charts to see what species of bear they are, what role they fill in the heist crew, and what sort of fancy hat they're wearing to disguise themselves as humans.
The GM, in turn, uses dice charts to determine what the heist's target is, where the honey convention is located, and what obstacles lie in the way of the bear's attempts to steal the sweet, sweet honey. Besides being a game with a hilarious premise, Honey Heist's simple rules and self-generating plot make it a fun RPG for both roleplaying novices and veteran tabletop gangs looking to throw together a one-shot game on the fly.
Voidheart Symphony
On the surface of things, both Voidheart Symphony and Blades In The Dark have similar mechanics and themes: they're both city-based RPGs with "Powered By The Apocalypse" influenced rules for creating gangs of outlaws engaged with roguish schemes and operations. Rather than dark fantasy video games like Dishonored, though, Voidheart Symphony's setting is heavily inspired by the Persona 5 JRPG, with a dash of Castlevania thrown in.
In a city being tainted by the incursion of a supernatural castle of evil, a group of citizens from all walks of life decide to fight back, stealing portions of the Castle's power in an act of rebellion and taking down the "Vassals" who've sworn fealty to the Castle in exchange for the power to oppress their community. In true Persona game fashion, the narrative roleplaying rules in Voidheart Symphony are steeped in both Jungian psychology and tarot card symbolism, with characters drawing on the symbolic strength of their personal bonds to resist corruption and become their ideal selves.
