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View Full Version : How would YOU steal a priceless artifact?



Marcelinari
2015-04-08, 09:39 PM
I'm preparing a D&D 5e game to run in a few months, and part of my (admittedly sketchy) plot involves the players hunting down a rival group of adventurers who stole a priceless artifact/powerful magic item from a well-secured vault in a populated city. However, by the time the players discover the need to hunt down these felons (they may or may not be coerced into doing so by the city officials), the rival party will have fled town, having passed off the item to their employer.

Now, I'm fairly well-versed with Shadowrun, so naturally that's what I've mentally categorized this background-event heist as. However, I need to reveal some useful clues to my players in order to allow them to actually track down the culprits. So, as with all good shadowruns, something had to have gone horribly wrong. I just need to figure out what.

So I'm asking for help figuring out how this group of D&D-runners managed to pull off their heist, and how their plans failed in a way that my players can have clues. If it were just a perfect run, this would be fairly easy to plan out... but something has to have gone wrong, and that's where I'm drawing blanks.

I don't have any clue as to the defenses the D&D-runners had to have breached. That's all fairly malleable, and can be changed as suits the narrative. I have the NPCs capabilities, though, which will be useful in determining what happened in the event.


The Hitter: A half-elf barbarian with a great-axe and connections to the criminal underworld. He's rough, he's tough, and he has a surprisingly good singing voice.
The Hacker Overwatch: An adorably dangerous forest gnome ranger. An accomplished sniper with spells to help her slow pursuit, kill efficiently, and harass crowds.
The Grifter: The Hitter's sister, a half-elf bard with an established false identity. Has magic suitable for putting people to sleep, suggesting them into other courses of action, and rendering people invisible.
The Thief: A grizzled ex-military assassin, and a half-orc no less. Specializes in finding and disarming traps. Not a big talker.


So, how would this play out? The mechanics don't really matter, except as a measure of their capabilities. The goal is for the D&D-runners to succeed, but with a twist that allows my actual players to discover their location and/or identities when they are brought in to recover the stolen item.

Setting details - the item is the Orb of Tsunami, their employer is a high ranking member of the Cult of Calamity, and they're stealing it from a government controlled building in the Fuller Empire - an Empire founded and run by halflings. They don't know the first two, though.

EDIT: For those of you waiting for the Leverage reference to get completed, I'm the Mastermind. Or you are. One of those.

Maglubiyet
2015-04-08, 11:04 PM
A double cross would be good. The Hitter and the Grifter decided to cut the other two out. After singing them to sleep, the pair made a run for the border on their own. The guards apprehended the two very pissed off conspirators, who would now be very happy to rat out their former partners.

For extra points make it the Grifter and the Thief. They've secretly been lovers the whole time and the Grifter was just using her brother to get the loot before ditching him.

Laughingmanlol
2015-04-09, 03:08 AM
The team was headquartered in a tavern on the outskirts of town. Nearby is a ruined temple of the cult, with access to the city's ruined catacombs/sewers. With sewers, the ranger ensured the usual giant mutated vermin didn't attack, while with catacombs they bought a lot of holy water from a local good temple and cleared out the undead along their path with brute force prior to the run. They used the sewers to reach the vault's building, and from there broke in. When they were leaving, though, a guard raised the alarm, so they had to return through the sewers rather than use their getaway carriage they had prepared, and had to leave on horseback after stealing the mounts from the stable of the tavern.
If the players are called in while the trail is still fresh, such as the morning after, they can try and follow their path through the sewers. The route would have less enemies than the thieves dealt with, which could be shown with the corpses of all the ones they encountered recently killed and pushed to one side. That allows you to show their martial strength and perhaps describe some axe wounds or unusual identifying arrows from the ranger.
Otherwise, the party will have to investigate each major sewer entrance in turn, of which one could be a red herring if it's used for smuggling by the local criminal syndicate.
Either way, they can find the ruined temple and identify their possible affiliation - the way to open the secret door could only be known to the faithful, for instance. Their footprints would lead along a trail to the tavern, where the staff could have all sorts of clues for the players.
If they fail to turn up any leads, when they return to the vault you could mention how the (getaway) carriage is still there for some reason. If they investigate, they can find that it was rented by people matching the description, using strange foreign currency, or by searching it find a map out the city to their rendezvous point.

Surpriser
2015-04-09, 04:52 AM
I am all for starting a campaign with a big bang, and here is the chance to take this literally:
The PCs are in the city nearby, when suddenly the wall next to them erupts in a fireball. The runners crit-failed while disabling some traps and blew a hole through their plans and the building. As they were already on their way out, they decide to get out as fast as possible.
It should not be hard to find lots of clues for the PCs (who have an immediate incentive to investigate). There might be witnesses, the already mentioned getaway carriage, the PCs might even notice a sniper on the rooftops slowing down the guards rushing in.

If you want to give the runners a time-advantage, don't make it immediately clear what happened. Describe the explosion as some kind of alchemical or magical accident and have some civilians in the building or nearby that need to be rescued. While the PCs are busy with that, the runners escape. Later, they are sought out by the watch who are looking for witnesses.