A Blades in the Dark style heist RPG is coming from the co-designer of D&D 3E

Pull off the perfect heist with Stealing Stories for the Devil, an upcoming roleplaying game designed by the co-designer of Dungeons & Dragons 3E - Monte Cook.

Stealing Stories for the Devil is an RPG set in a world that’s been wracked by interdimensional anomalies. As passengers on a spaceship set to return to 31st century Earth, the player characters instead find themselves in the 21st century - wherein strange objects are causing the world to literally tear itself apart. The player characters must use their wits, skills and lies to gain access to these strange objects and perform the heist required to fix their reality.

During the sci-fi roleplaying game, players work together to conjure up an ingenious plan at the same time that they’re collectively imagining the challenges they’re going to face during the heist. In a similar fashion to the RPG Blades in the Dark - where players can initiate a flashback mid-mission to explain how they’re going to overcome a current obstacle - players are encouraged to think on the spot whenever they come up against a roadblock in their scheme.

In Act One of the game, the players and the games master come up with the scenario and the plan at the same time, with the GM beginning the mission briefing by stating a particular place and the object that the player characters must steal. The players then suggest the potential options that they could take for infiltrating the location, which the GM can respond to by proposing an obstacle that will complicate the groups’ plans. Once both the players and the GM have formulated their respective scenarios and plans, they proceed into Act Two - wherein the heist actually plays out.

Despite having devised a scheme for getting in, getting the object and getting out, the players may still not be entirely capable of anticipating everything that might happen - as the GM is also allowed to propose last minute hiccups that no plan could ever anticipate. In response to these, the player characters are able to use their abilities to “lie to reality” in order to present an alternative situation. For example, if a player character is a Plotter, then they can lie to the past to suggest things that already happened to change the scenario and allow them to continue on their heist. Other types of liars can lie to people in the moment to manipulate them or even to objects or places to alter their very being. Players succeed if they manage to pull off the heist and restore their reality to a stable condition.

Besides co-creating D&D 3E and designing Stealing Stories for the Devil, Cook is also known for other tabletop titles such as the Heroclix miniatures series and several roleplaying games such as Ptolus, Numenera and Arcana Evolved.

Stealing Stories for the Devil is set to be released by Monte Cook Games, which is responsible for publishing the previously mentioned Numenera and Ptolus, as well as fantasy RPG Invisible Sun and No Thank You, Evil!

The Kickstarter campaign for Stealing Stories for the Devil is live until August 14th, with a pledge of $30 (£22) getting backers a copy of the softcover rulebook estimated to arrive in August 2022. Alternatively, a PDF version of the rulebook is available at a pledge of $15 (£12).