Carnath 11: On Running a Heist in Mothership

After my players escaped Prison Station Echo (seriously, go get this module+sandbox because it has so much great stuff in it), we spent quite a bit of time on Carnath as they picked up various threads and hooks. One such hook was from Sylvia 2-Alpha: she wants the original genetic codex for her line.

SPOILER ALERT: Light spoilers for some of the Cleaning of Prison Station Echo content ahead.

Table of contents

The hook and a bit of context

At the prison, the players were able to take the AI core for themselves. They escaped before the military cleaning crew got to the prison and made it back to Carnath. They brought Susan and Jimmy along for the ride (and these NPCs are now part of the crew). They weren’t about to hand the AI over to TeraTek. They successfully rolled to have AI Echo transmit fake data to TeraTek and to hopefully buy time before anyone (other than XeroCorp) found out what had happened at the prison.

In the sandbox part of the module, one of the jobs that Sylvia 2-Alpha offers is: “Break into Teratek’s clone vats and steal the master codex for the Sylvia series.” And then the map of the TeraTek Enclave has in the description for the New Clone Education Center: “Contains a master codex for all genetic lines, past and present, including the Sylvia-37 models.” There is not a detailed map of the facility, so I made one up.

How my players concocted a double heist

Seriously, these folks will find multiple angles on anything, which is so much fun. Since they had “successfully” gotten Amara access to a datastream from Echo, they were on his good side. After they had accepted the job from Sylvia, they immediately started conniving on how they could also get something from Amara, but didn’t necessarily want to betray Sylvia since she and her girls had been good to them. So they came up with the idea of pitching a security audit to Salba as another sort of service they could provide. They had just escaped a maximum security prison, after all. We rolled for it and he accepted the deal. He would pay them to do this audit, which would be them trying to break in to evaluate security. To prove they had gotten into various locations inside the building, they would leave little plastic tokens.

Earlier on in the game, they had expressed interest in the clones and said their company, TRG, could be interested in investing, so Amara had extended them the offer of a tour (especially since their TRG handler, Brighton, was with them). One of the characters also wanted his genetics to be used to create a new line of clones. Amara had humored this idea because, in his mind, he might have a need for disposable clones again in the future; so he allowed this player to come in and have his biological material sampled. Remembering this, the players decided that the tour would be their cover for getting some people in the door. They also came up with the idea that they needed to have one of their party get caught, specifically in trying to access the Amara and Amaranth codices (since those are probably more important to the CEOs than the Sylvia line) as a way of throwing everyone off and providing a distraction for what was really stolen.

Running the heist

I did a fair amount of looking around the web for information on how others have run heists and this is how I came across Blades in the Dark. I had been reading about how people end up in planning hell for a long time for heists, so this system was very appealing as a way to help prevent that. I pitched the concept to the players and there was a bit of hesitation on completely ditching planning, so I sought to find a middle ground - a limited amount of time for planning and info gathering paired with the use of flashbacks, progress clocks, fortune rolls, the idea of position, and information gathering from Blades in the Dark.

Borrowing from Blades in the Dark

I did not have a lot of time to watch actual plays of Blades in the Dark so I picked through the rules and looted what looked useful. Any fundamental misuses or misunderstandings are my fault, so keep that in mind as you read on.

I gave them 10 minutes to come up with their overall strategy for the heist: are they splitting the party? if so, who is doing what? what are people taking inside? Mostly just the outline of the plan, no details. I then gave them 15 minutes to gather information. For common information, I would simply answer, but if they wanted uncommon information they needed to roll. Before the session, I created tables of uncommon information - poor, mixed, good, and exceptional - with 5 pieces of information. For example, there was a piece of information about the keycard readers in each table and here is what the info is:

I also told them they could gather information in flashbacks, but I limited them to 1 flashback each since I let them gather information ahead of time. The flashbacks would incur stress based on the level of complexity. Players could use flashbacks to help themselves or other characters.

I tracked 2 progress clocks in the game: 1 mission clock and 1 danger/alarm clock. The mission clock was a 1-2 in-game hour clock that was roughly representative of the length of the tour. Since the players were using the tour as cover (and, later, as a distraction), I decided that they were probably going to need to pull off the heist in roughly this time period if they were going to avoid being caught. The danger/alarm clock was to track the number of risky actions they failed, in essence. The more times they failed, the more likely that there would be a large security response. I was also periodically rolling fortune rolls to determine things like whether people in the facility noticed them or what they were up to, or whether the security guards on each level were roaming or at their station.

Mini games

I knew there would be various obstacles to throw at the players, so I decided on bringing in some mini-games as a way to overcome them. I got the idea from one of my players, who had told me about seeing some actual plays where the GM used mini-games. I think the key takeaway I can share is to choose games that are easy to play and have fast rounds or resolutions. Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit would not be good choices here, for instance.

Which games I chose to use

The players chose to split the party - one group would be on the tour and the other was infiltrating in a laundry truck posing as workers (they had been successfully able to bribe a couple of laundry workers). The group who infiltrated in the laundry truck were able to get past the security guards on that level by drugging them. They next wanted to go into the security office in order to (1) patch in the Echo AI so she could run a video loop and (2) to override various security protocols and get a bunch of doors open. I ruled they needed to hack in and no one had the computer skill, so we used the A Game of Cat and Mouth as our mini-game to simulate hacking into the system. This ended up being a perfect game for this purpose and probably more fun than if I had had the time to come up with a network map and done various checks.

The group on the tour needed to make sure to buy as much time as they could to give the other group time to pull of the heist. The character who really wanted his own clone line decided to put on a display of his athletic talent in the atrium for the docent, workers, and other clones. For this we used the Toss Across Travel mini-game. The player succeeded and also rolled a critical success, so the facility was quite enthralled by this display of talent.

Finally, the players who were trying to get the Sylvia codex needed to put various pieces of information together in order to find the correct place to locate the codex in the vault. I used Pling Pong as a mini-game to simulate putting all of the information together. The players were ultimately able to find the codex and steal it, despite the two-headed gigantic clone that I put in the vault as a guard.

Conclusion and retrospective

Because everyone played smart and rolled well, they pulled off the heist/“security audit”. They handed over the codex to Sylvia, gave Salba the audit on security holes, then promptly left Carnath before all of the corporations starting putting the pieces together. It was a fun way to end our time there and could add complications for them in the future if they stay in this sector.

What worked

I wasn’t sure about having mini-games in the middle of a session, but they were actually a lot of fun and added tension to the outcomes. The players enjoyed them (and I got to play a bit, too), people laughed a lot, and all of these things made the effort worthwhile. Since I usually had one of the players play for the Warden’s objective to win, I had half the table or more engaged at any given time during the challenges and the other half were cheering the others on. This kept everyone involved, which created good energy at the table and a lot of buy-in.

I could see other games or even some puzzles fitting in well. Like, a 100-piece puzzle (without giving them the reference picture so they don’t know what they are looking at) with a timer might be a fun way to simulate searching through a bunch of files to synthesize the coherent story from all of them. If they complete the puzzle in the time limit, then you can give them a dossier/document that nicely lays out the conspiracy or whatever. If they don’t, you could give them an assortment of hints that they will have to do more work later on to connect together.

What didn’t

Some aspects of how I used pieces of Blades in the Dark worked fine, but I think I gave them too long to plan even though I had a time limit, which makes me think that I should have committed to running the entire heist like a session of Blades in the Dark. The reason I didn’t was the players were a bit hesitant to go in without planning and couldn’t see how that would work in play, so I split the difference and gave them limited time to plan and then ran the rest of the heist more like BitD.

I think things might have gone smoother if I had had time to watch some actual plays - or actually play - Blades in the Dark to truly get a sense of how it plays out at the table. Then I would have been able to make better decisions about what to use from the system and how to integrate it into our session.

I also tend to be too generous as a GM/Warden, so I could have done more checks and thrown more obstacles at them during the heist. They had come up with such a great plan to do the “double” heist, though, that I kinda wanted to reward that sort of creativity. They also rolled so well that they were able to overcome nearly all of the obstacles I did put in their way. They have leaned into - and gotten good at - the ‘survive’ and ‘solve’ parts of the game.