The perfect heist.
Getting in, getting out. The disguises. The smooth talk and careful bluffs. The stealth, the hacking, and—when the moment requires it—the quick action. And above all, the beautiful plan, so carefully researched and crafted.
Oh, you’re good at it. You and your friends, you do the impossible. It’s never as easy as it seems (not like it ever seems easy), but you pull it off—every time. And you look good doing it. Bond? Ocean? Neo? Yeah, they’re OK. You’re the real deal.
Because you’re not just master thieves. You’re master thieves from the future. And better yet: you’re liars—a special kind of liar, a kind whose lies come true. When you lie to reality, you change it. A door where there wasn’t one before. A lock someone forgot to check. A fault in the camera wiring that kicks in at just the right time. If the mission isn’t going right, you fix it. You change the rules. You take control of reality itself.
Someone else is telling lies, and they’re big ones. Like, end-of-the-world lies. Pushing-reality-to-the-breaking-point lies. Punching-holes-in-the-universe lies. It’s not clear who they are, what they want, or how they’re doing it, but if it isn’t stopped, it’s all over. As in, all over.
Who’d have guessed you’d be the ones saving the universe? But hey, you always find a way to come out ahead, and this is no different. Because it turns out that each time you fix a little bit of reality, you get to take a touch of its essence for your own uses. Powerful stuff. Grabbing that juice? We call that…
Designed by Monte Cook, Stealing Stories for the Devil is a fast-paced tabletop roleplaying game in which you save existence as we know it by bending reality to carry out the perfect heist.
When you play Stealing Stories, you pull off the perfect heist, every time. Unique mechanics and structure ensure players and PCs are competent and cool at every stage of the adventure, and always have a trick up their sleeves. A collaborative scenario-building process alleviates GM prep as the group formulates its elaborate plan while creating the adventure scenario at the same time. Unique mechanical elements such as mission cards hand the initiative to the players, turning crisis into opportunity just when it looks like there’s no hope of success. And, as reality-shaping liars, PCs can reshape their situation in literally any way they can conceive of. And lies always succeed. (While success is never in doubt, the price may be steep.) Throughout play, unprecedented player agency ensures the PCs create and pull off amazing feats, completing their heists against incredible odds and looking great while they do it.
None of this means it’s easy—pulling off an awesome heist is just as challenging as any other feat in tabletop gaming. The GM brings the unexpected to the table, adding challenges to the scenario and plan, plus twists and turns to the plotline. A unique adventure structure inspires the GM’s deviousness and prompts plot twists at just the right time for maximum effect. The players will need to be crafty, quick, and careful, and make great use of their resources—but Stealing Stories for the Devil sets them up for success.
And, speaking of the GM, Stealing Stories for the Devil is a zero-prep RPG. A gaming group that’s conversant in the streamlined rules will spend literally no time preparing for the game—not even the GM. The boxed edition contains everything you need to play. It’s filled with GM resources making it easy to layer your heists with loads of detail—maps, locations, organizations, names, everything the GM needs to turn a heist concept into a fully realized scenario right there at the table.
Want to check it out? When the Kickstarter launches, you’ll be able to immediately download the free rules primer to see how this innovative game works. (Sign up below to be notified when it goes live!)
Stealing Stories for the Devil is perfect for a fun and exciting one-shot, but it also contains a twelve-episode “season,” or campaign, that digs into the reasons behind the decay of reality, and contains just as many exciting and unexpected twists as any individual heist. And like most RPGs, it can be run as an open-ended campaign, with characters growing their skills and abilities as they face increasing challenges.
