Heist

My daughter really loves anything involving heists. So I went looking for a module that was based around one. I found this one on the Roll20 Marketplace and decided to take a chance on it. It is a little off-brand adventure that has a real homemade look and feel to it. But it's very well put together, features a collection of very nice maps, and the story is an exciting, three-dimensional jaunt. Kudos to Andrew Cohen on this one. At some point, I'll probably try his other adventures. While this can easily be run as a stand-alone, it is part of a four-part collection that can be run in order. Only reason I didn't do that was because I wanted the heist part specifically.

The hook is that an old wizard send the players to a tower that a cult is using for an outpost to retrieve a MacGuffin, in this case, a shard of a powerful relic. 

The tower is a nearly impenetrable tower several stories high, guarded on top by a small dragon. Inside, a cult has posted a small militia. The shard is somewhere inside the tower. The players are tasked with breaking in, finding the shard, and escaping with it.

What makes this module different is that the wizard has compiled some intelligence on the place, which he will freely share with the players. He will also equip the players with a collection of magical and mechanical items to help them with their assault on the tower. What the players do with this intel and these items is entirely up to them. They will devise their own plans for how the adventure is going to go down. 

Each floor of the tower has its own well-appointed map. However, I am a notorious over-builder when it comes to this stuff. And I like to be extremely organized on the front end of any game I run so it runs as smoothly as possible. So because each floor has its own map page in Roll20, and because the guards (and the players) will move up and down between floors on either the stairs or the EXCELLENT fireman's pole, I duplicated character tokens and placed them in specifically labeled corals on the GM layer. That way, if guards chased the players down the stairs to another level, or came running when they heard noise, I'd already have those tokens ready to go when I swapped maps out. (This came in really handy when Stephanie and Taijisu turned invisible, snuck up on one poor schmuck sitting at his desk, and used the desk as a bulldozer to push him down the fireman's hole, causing him to plummet, howling, to the bottom.)

I suppose once a party got into the tower, they could simply murder-hobo everything that moved, but it wouldn't be nearly as fun and going the sneaky, creative route. Using the wizard's toys and the fun set up of the environment is the entire point of this one. 

So far, I have only run this one for the Riverport Rebels. I may upgrade it to a higher level adventure at some point and run it for the Class of 81 at some point. It is definitely a fun one!