The Backstage Heist

By Inkblot Gibberling
Self Published
OSE/5E
"Low Levels"

The Bragazzi crime family runs the Backstage, an illegal casino and mushroom-juicing drug laboratory hidden behind an opera-costume shop. Steal their stuff.

This fourteen page adventure presents about twenty locations in an illicit gambling establishment. It wants to be a heist movie. It doesn’t provide you the tools needed to be a heist movie. It’s also clearly 5e.

I’ve got a lot of issues. And ten also this adventure is a mess. It’s going for some Oshean 11 vibes. It doesn’t know how to pull that off. It’s got a couple of tone issues. It’s trying to get fancy with the formatting and not pulling it off. And it is not OSE.

Let us start with this statement from the adventure “This module attempts to be system-agnostic. Where relevant, combat statistics are offered for” Someone clearly has written a blog post recently about how 5e and OSE are the same power level because I’ve seen a recent trend of adventures being listed as 5e and OSE and generic/universal all in the same breathe. I guess, yes, it’s generic/universal in the same way that every adventure is generic/universal if you just ignore the stats and skill checks. There’s a reference to both a 5e monster and an OSR monster (fighter 4 or Tough Boss MM25.) In other places we get things like “Safe: Locked with an arcane lock to increase lockpicking difficulty [+10].” I guess that 5e? I’m not morally opposed to a fantasy gambling location that is roughly universal and stats thrown in as examples, but the skill check thing throws it off every time. Also, one of the guards is invisible, and drinks a potion every hour to stay invisible. This says something about the game world and is perhaps the most jarring. You can reskin cat-people to be humans but something like the prevalence of magic, and relying on it for a core part of the adventure, just throws things off. (To be clear, there are no cat people in this adventure, or any other ren-faire tropes.) 

The core conceit here is a heist. It’s in the title. One of the hooks involves getting a bank teller out who is currently being coerced by the mob, by punching him in the face, to give the gang the security features of the bank. You’re told, by your patron “The rescue can’t involve any bodies and can’t involve any Bragazzi seeing anything suspicious. His escape must appear to be a series of plausible coincidences.” This is one of the hooks. Another hook is just a straight up robbery. The heist, the plausible deniability, these imply some things that the adventure should have that it just lacks. You want to case the place, right? The classic heist involves a casing. Scoping it out and then coming up with a wacky plan to execute that will inevitably go wrong, as these things do in D&D. The guards are noted on the map, which is good. A few have a routine (with two dudes taking leaks with a frequency that makes my BPH look like a dream.) This is about the extent of the support you get here. Working against this is the current goings-on in the gambling den. The teller is actively getting the shit beaten out of him. The NPC’s, the notable other gamblers, are, I guess, just always there, in your case and during your heist. There is a degree of randomness as well, for people present in hallways, that works against a heist. Sure, things can go wrong. “Oh no, I wasn’t expecting the wine delivery!” but there needs to be some degree of consistency that the degree of randomness in the people present in locations, randomly, works against. This makes the adventure much less of a heist and much more of the usual “lets just try something and start hacking when things go wrong” sort of loosy goosy approach that most adventure raids have. There too much in the writing that frames it as HAPPENING RIGHT NOW instead of COULD HAPPEN DURING THE HEIST. And the entire premise of the “coincidences”, I think, works against the level range here. It would require a lot of skills and magic items and spells that just are not going to be present at low levels. 

Tonally this is off also, in places. I’m not thrilled that the old ‘italians are mobsters” thing is relied upon. There’s no reason for that in a generically fantasy rpg. Pulp Fiction was fine without relying on these tropes. Further, there is, I think, generally a more light-hearted tone to a heist. And that is pretty consistent throughout this. After all, these are gamblers, right? As far as things go, screwing the tax man is a time honored tradition. But then, in the drug den upstairs, we get the gang doing some weird vivisection/bleeding of people to drain juice from them as a drug. This is probably a bridge too far. We have crossed the boundary from simple gambling and drug dealing to torture. We’re not even soylent greening here, more to the point of Thorns prediction about being raised as cattle.  We are now in the “muder every last one of them” category, even in my skewed murder hobo vision of D&D. It’s not that either tone is wrong, but it’s the mixing of them. You CAN discover something more evil afoot in an adventure, but then you have to be prepared for the consequences. And they here for a zany madcap ending in which you free them and they run around every which direction in some kind of 1930’s madcap comedy manner. You can manage finding the EVIL HORRIBLE THING in the pickpockets house, but then the adventure needs to support that. And this doesn’t. 

There’s a page or so up front that tells you how to read the formatting being used. Nothing too special here or weird; bolding, room names, etc. I would note though that if you need a page to describe your formatting them its probably not intuitive formatting. In practice, though, I think the formatting has issues. It’s hard to see room breaks, or sub-area breaks, and things tend to seem to run together. I think some line breaks are really what’s needed here in order to provide some additional separation between different sub-areas of room and concepts. The bolding tends to run together otherwise and the sub-areas get lost. 

I don’t think it’s a heist, as least not with the content provided. The tone stuff, with the mushroom, seems off to me and not supported either. 

 This is free at DriveThru. The preview is the entire thing. I would maybe look at page seven of the preview for an idea of the jumble. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/571925/the-backstage-heist?1892600