Let's Plan a Heist (Night's Black Agents)

Heist. The agents must steal something

Briefly: the Bankhaus is an investment bank with a murky past and has offices in several major cities, of which the Conspiracy has control over the Paris and Zürich branches thanks to its control over Lisle Klingemann, daughter of the boss and a senior partner in her own right, and Albert Ahrens, controller of the Zürich branch and Lisle's devoted slave. The Bankhaus is mainly interested in software development companies, particularly in jurisdictions within Europe, though it has a significant sideline in mining, especially in East Asia, a holdover from its former interests.

It has swanky offices, lawyers, a ton of assets on the book and off, and when it makes calls they get answered by senior politicians and members of the financial elite. It almost doesn't matter whether this is a Supernatural, Damned, Alien or Mutant game; all factions are going to want a piece of the Bankhaus whether to get access to its bottomless bank vaults or for more esoteric reasons.

The League of Gentlemen (Criterion)

A heist plot is about the planning, execution and aftermath of one large robbery and most heist films tend to spend more time on the planning and aftermath than they do the execution. 

Not that the execution isn’t fun. It’s often the most thrilling part, but in terms of time spent on screen the execution is perhaps 10% of the runtime. The balance is spent on planning and aftermath.

How much is spent where will depend on the kind of story told. In The Asphalt Jungle, a significant chunk of the screen time is devoted to the aftermath because the narrative is noir, and the whole point of noir is the characters not the action. Usually, the aftermath is about the characters’ death spiral or some similar gloomy end state. But the aftermath is where the meaty character drama is hiding, so that’s where the plot spends most of its time. A Dust or Mirrors game will probably follow this pattern.

Whereas a thriller narrative spends the majority of its time on the planning because the planning stage is where the thrills are. The League of Gentleman follows this pattern; the vast majority of its screen time is spent gathering, training and equipping the heist crew. The actual heist is perhaps a few minutes long, and the rest of the film – all twelve minutes of it - is its aftermath. A Stakes game the best fit for a thriller narrative.

One of the tricks of this particular genre is the gathering of necessary materials, effectively a pre-heist before the main event. This plot device assumes there is a species of McGuffin that’s needed before the characters can forge ahead and take the main McGuffin. It almost doesn’t matter what this is; it might be plans, materials, getaway vehicles, but whatever it may be it’s vital to the success of the operation.

In The League of Gentlemen, the bandits need equipment they can only get from the military. Being ex-military themselves they opt to disguise themselves as soldiers, sneak onto a base and steal everything they need right under the garrison’s noses.

In Night’s Black Agents the Preparedness ability is sometimes used to skip past all this on the assumption that the actual breaking-and-entering is the main event. It can be, but it’s just as much fun to play through the various bits of pre-heist preparation so long as the pre-heist involves action of some kind. 

If it’s just sitting in a smoke-filled room drawing sketches on the back of a beer mat, don’t bother. If it’s about breaking into the prestigious offices of a world-renowned architectural firm to steal the plans of the vault, or whatever it may be, then go for it.

The shorthand is this: if you can develop a Thrilling version of the pre-heist, whether that means Digital Intrusion, Infiltration, Interrogation or similar, then run the pre-heist. If there’s no way to make the pre-heist Thrilling, then hand-wave with Preparedness.

Much the same principle can be applied to the aftermath. The Italian Job spends little time on the heist itself, but the final moments of the film – the bits that everyone who’s ever seen it remembers – is the aftermath. That’s not because the Italian Job is a psychological character study. Nobody ever hired Michael Caine because he could act; they hired Michael Caine because he looked good on film. The aftermath of the Italian Job is one extended Thrilling Chase sequence followed by what can best be described as a typical British triumph.

From your perspective as Director, play through the aftermath if one of two things apply:

• Either you can make it Thrilling, or
• You’re playing a Mirror game and now’s the time for the grand betrayal.

The final point to bear in mind is this: it doesn’t matter what’s in the safe you’re trying to crack. The audience doesn’t care. What the audience – the players – cares about is getting into the safe and getting away with the loot. So long as you make that process interesting it doesn’t matter whether the agents are getting away with millions of dollars in Nazi gold, the plans of the fort, or the contents of Donald Trump’s closet at Mar-a-Lago. What matters is the planning and the aftermath, not the whatever-it-was they stole.

With all this in mind, let’s go to the Bankhaus.

Bankhaus Klingemann has offices in Paris and Zürich. Let’s say the target is the Bankhaus’ offices in Paris, near the Place de l'Étoile aka Place Charles de Gaulle. Even if your players don’t know Paris all that well it’s a pretty good bet they’ll recognize the Place de l'Étoile, as it’s been in so many films. 

This is something you should be striving for. Make the heist location a character in its own right. It can be as fantastic as a Transylvanian castle or an alien spaceship, as historic as the city center of Milan or as Dusty as a racetrack while the horses are running. What matters is, the location is always larger than life. It's a place the agents want to spend a little time in - at least long enough to clean out the safe.

Let’s add a couple layers of difficulty and say that this heist has to go undetected for at least 24 hours after the heist, and that it has to take place within a relatively short time window. Say, between the hours of 4pm to 4.30 pm, Friday evening. It doesn’t matter why; adding extra layers of difficulty ups the challenge which in turn ups the Thrilling aspects of the heist. Maybe Lisle is in the middle of a meeting and can't be disturbed. Maybe there's some kind of supernatural conjunction, or a change in the guard patrol or what-have-you. The thrills are what matter; everything else is gravy.

Already you’ve got a visible, memorable location and the added pressure of special conditions. That’s vital. It’s not enough to be thrilling; you have to be Thrilling. Making it take place in a memorable location helps the players cement the action in their minds. 

Now, the final step: add an unexpected dilemma. 

The size and scale of the dilemma will depend on what kind of game you're playing. Dust and Mirrors games can have dilemmas which either are small scale or seem small scale at first glance. The League of Gentlemen has a moment like this during the heist planning phase, when a policeman unexpectedly calls at the (fake) garage they've set up to build the heist cars they need. The policeman pounds a regular beat, this garage is on his beat, and as it's new to him he stops by to introduce himself and chat to the owner. Simple. Explicable. Exactly the kind of thing that might happen, but because it's a policeman calling at the one place the Gentlemen would rather he didn't call, it's a problem.

Whereas a Stakes game by default plays big, wild and dramatic. A mere policeman stopping by isn't anything like the scale or noise of a Stakes game. This is the kind of thing you might see in a Grand Theft Auto Let's Play, where some rando is dashing down the street on foot with a five-star rating. This is when you hear sirens.

 American Heist

The exact nature of the dilemma will depend on the specifics of your campaign. This is where you want to tailor a specific challenge to meet agents' Drives or test their specialties. If someone is an ace Driver, this is when the Thrilling Chase plays out, and so on. If someone's Drive is Atonement, this is where you put that moment of truth where their sin can be expiated. Or made infinitely worse ...

Let's say that the Heist in this specific example is at the offices of Bankhaus Klingemann near the Place de l'Étoile and the heist has to take place between 4pm to 4.30 pm, Friday evening because that's when Lisle is out of the picture and your agents are trying to manufacture a scenario in which Albert suspects Lisle of being in on the heist. If Lisle can't explain her whereabouts, that creates a problem for Lisle which your agents can exploit. It doesn't matter really what the McGuffin is; what matters is where it is and when it can be had.

As a complication let's say that the Conspiracy has sent an unscheduled audit team to Paris to check the Bankhaus' books, and the head of audit is a Renfield. The agents will have to be clever or sneaky to get past the audit team and grab the goods.

Let's further say that because of the audit team the McGuffin isn't where the agents thought it was. Lisle moved it, or changed the locks, because she didn't want the audit team finding it. It's still at the same location, but it's more challenging to get. That ups the Difficulty of any tests to get at the McGuffin. 

OK, that's what happens in a Heist. What about the reverse?

Well, the Reverse is challenging. A Heist has three components: the planning stage, the actual heist, and the aftermath. The agents are trying to prevent the heist or catch the heist crew.

By default the planning stage takes place off-stage. The NPCs are doing all the planning and the agents don't know what they're up to; at this point they may not know the NPCs exist. So that's not when the scenario starts, from your players' perspectives. 

That means your options are to step in during the Heist, or in the Aftermath.

If this is during the Heist then it's either going to be a kind of counter-infiltration scenario where your agents are caught in the building as the enemy breaks in - a Die Hard situation - or the agents arrive just in time to bottle the enemy up in the building and the scenario becomes a hostage negotiation problem.

Both have their merits, but it might be more interesting to play this as an aftermath or Munich situation. The awful thing has already taken place. The agents now have to track the perpetrators across the planet and find out what they were hoping to accomplish, or who they were working for.

In theory you could play an entire campaign this way, each session being about another target, then another. "We found three more names ..."

The Dracula Dossier has the most obvious McGuffin for this moment, the Dossier itself. It's gone missing, Edom will pay a fortune to get it back. and the agents are either freelancers chasing a dream or employees of one of the shadowy espionage groups interested in knowing what the Dossier contains.

That's it for this week! Enjoy.