Utopia may conjure up the notion of a perfect society, or perhaps an apparently perfect society with a dark secret (so actually a dystopia, or anti-utopia). Within utopian thinking and practice, however, utopia is a much more flexible term. Sometimes it refers to communities that attempt a better way of life, or plans for such communities, or stories about such communities. But often it refers to something more like a method, a way of thinking about the world around us, and perhaps about how we live within its constraints, and what we can change in the short term as well as the long term.
Heist scenarios in TTRPGs involve players working together to plan and execute a high-stakes theft or robbery. Players will typically gather information, develop strategies to overcome obstacles, execute their plans, and then (when nothing goes according to plan) improvise. Typically each member of the caper crew is both exceptionally skilled in their field, and also a kind of eccentric and maverick; for Fredric Jameson, this is how the heist plot becomes a ‘distorted expression of the utopian impulse insofar as it realizes a fantasy of non-alienated collective work.’
There are plenty of variations on the heist model, including smuggling, spying, scouting, seige-breaking, hijacking, sabotage, kidnaps, rescues, jailbreaks and exfiltrations. A ‘reverse-heist’ scenario involves sneaking something into a secure location. Often, as in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010), it’s not enough to get in and out again safely, since the reverse-heist will fail if anyone finds out that the package has been planted. A red / blue team exercise is a sort of officially sanctioned fake heist (see Red / Blue Team Exercise). We might think of critical utopias, in the tradition of Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed (1974), as a kind of prefigurative red-teaming, seeking to improve the robustness of a system that has not yet even been built (see Critical Utopia).
One influential TTRPG centred on heists is John Harper’s Blades in the Dark (2015), where players are a crew of daring scoundrels seeking their fortune in a gritty, industrial-fantasy city. Many other heist-ready games spring from the shadows of its Forged in the Dark system; examples include John Leboeuf-Little and Stras Acimovic’s Scum and Villiany (2018), Kienna Shaw and Jamila R. Nedjadi's Songs for the Dusk (2021), and Andrew Gillis’s Girl by Moonlight (2024). Grant Howett’s Honey Heist (2017), at just one page, is another influential heist TTRPG, in which the players portray bears. Howett is fond of capers: in Royal Blood (2020), you effectively play a living Tarot card on a heist-like mission; One Last Job (2014) assembles a crew of washed-up criminals (or “WW2 commandos, ageing punk rockers, zombie apocalypse survivors, Wild West cowboys, and so on” (p. 3)), with character creation embedded in gameplay through improvised reminisces and banter. Jason Morningstar's Fiasco (2009) is another fiction-first game that lends itself to bungled capers of all kinds, and some of its playbooks are specifically heist-themed. Beyond the TTRPGs that revolve around heists, a heist episode may turn up in any campaign. San Jenaro Co-Op’s The Roleplayer’s Guide to Heists (2019), for example, an anthology of system-agnostic heist scenarios.
In fact, heists have a lot in common with a classic staple: the dungeoncrawl. Both dungeoncrawls and heists are a kind of breaking-and-entering. Both revolve around the central theme of embarking on a mission filled with mystery and peril, where the primary goal is to obtain something of value. They often feature complex environments with many opportunities for players to work as a multidisciplinary team of specialists, formulating and enacting cunning strategies. We might even imagine a kind of spectrum, or some other visualisation, of these two primary modes of tabletop thieving.
So what is the difference? Well, we might say that crawls place more emphasis on combat, and that heists are about stealing something in specific, rather than accumulating whatever treasure is lying around. Then again, heists frequently include or degenerate into bloodshed; moreover, dungeoncrawlers may well have a final treasure in mind (the Amulet of Yendor in the digital game Nethack, for example).
Perhaps crawls have some affinity with epic fantasy settings, and heists with modern urban settings. Heists may involve a ticking clock, whereas crawls are more relaxed — ‘relaxed’ in the sense of dragging your bloodied bodies back to town for a long rest before attempting the next raid. Heist crews are often assembled by a mastermind, and might not have previously known each other (let alone trusted each other) — dungeon adventurers are often drinking buddies. Perhaps the dungeoncrawl also has a certain ideological tie with colonial conquest, which the heist does not: some dungeoncrawls are genocidal. But none of these are hard-and-fast distinctions either.
One difference is between the intricately interlinked challenges predicted in the heist plan, vs. the diverse and unknown dangers of the dungeon. This is reflected in subtly different kinds of division of labour. The heist and the crawl both demand a mix of specialists, of course. But the trope that only so-and-so can perform vital task x is more characteristic of the heist. Heist crews are made up of supremely respected workers. Should any one of them withdraw their labour (perhaps even for a few seconds), it could send out shockwaves like a general strike. In ‘A Global Neuromancer’ (2015), Fredric Jameson contrasts the familiar picture of the division of labour (à la Adam Smith) with heist-divided labour:
Jameson suggests that heist plots are therefore allegories of production (and he adds, a little mysteriously, that they are allegories of the inner divisions of the psyche too). Why then are there not more heist-like narratives about making things? Perhaps because it would be too on-the-nose. Jameson also offers another reason.
Why can’t the nature of the object have any real aesthetic necessity, except by turning it into a symbol of some kind? Because whether the fictional characters are creating chamber pots, or machine parts, or sausages, we know that “[a]nything that can produce a profit is equivalent when it comes to generating surplus value,” i.e. what they are really making is money.
This is a very Jamesonian preoccupation with large-scale material conditions constraining, and being reflected in, what artworks can and can’t do. Jameson does think that the heist plot gives it to us straight. It does this either by making the macguffin very macguffiny, or by simply making it a large sum of money. The score needs to be divisible, after all — the heist team wouldn’t share. In this way, for Jameson, the heist genre “short-circuits the search for a meaningful object by simply positing the cash, the gold, the bearer bonds, or whatever else. So this is, as it were, the negative or critical, the demystifying side of the caper form.”
There is a related factor that also distinguishes the heist from the crawl. It’s a controversial word within utopian discourse: planning. A heist is all about meticulous planning. The thrill of a may can come from improvisation as these flawless plans fall apart. But it can also come from things going off without a hitch. By contrast, the dungeoncrawlers just equip themselves as best they can, and venture into the unknown. They may even invent some mini-heists when they’re down there, but they haven’t spent weeks trapped in a planning montage.
It’s worth dwelling on planning for a bit. The word means a lot of things. In architecture, “planning” pertains to designing physical spaces to meet both functional and aesthetic requirements. With respect to political economy, “planning” might mean defining clear parameters for the production and distribution of goods and services. Broadly speaking, in a market economy, the interaction of economic supply and demand determines what goods and services are produced, and who gets to benefit from them; in a planned economy, these decisions are made by the government (if you want to make it sound sinister) or by the people (if you want to make it sound optimistic). The socialist calculation debate, which emerged in the 1920s, stemmed in essence from the attempts of various neoliberals (such as Friedrich Hayek) to prove from first principles that a complex modern economy is unplannable, and that any planned economy is a contradiction in terms and a catastrophe waiting to happen. Of course, the crude distinction between “market economies” and “planned economies” does not reflect the complexities of real-world economies, and is also heavily shaped by the ideological presuppositions of mainstream economics. Taking a more nuanced and interdisciplinary perspective, market economies also include plenty of planning, and planned economies have many elements of distributed decision-making.
For example, governments play a fundamental role in creating, maintaining, and shaping market mechanisms and forces. They establish the legal and regulatory frameworks that define the ‘rules of the game’ within which markets operate. These cover areas such as banking and finance, employment law, property law, contract law, competition policy, and sector-specific regulations. Governments also maintain markets through regulatory oversight and interventions to ‘correct market failures,’ such as monopolies, information asymmetries. They run themselves ragged trying to internalise externalities, including the greenhouse gas pollution driving climate change. Furthermore, governments shape market forces through their policy decisions, e.g. fiscal policy (taxing and spending) and monetary policy (e.g. interest rate adjustments by central banks).
Likewise, even if we take the example of the “material balances” planning of the early Soviet Union — as close as you’ll get to a textbook planned economy — what the central agency Gosplan did, strictly speaking, was to calculate interactions of supply and demand in order to produce and distribute goods and services. It is not normally described in these terms, but it should be. Yes, these determinations of supply and demand via demographic data, statistical calculations, political priorising, and other non-monetary means, were often wildly out of touch with people’s real needs, desires, capacities, risks, and so on. But the same can absolutely be said of supply and demand determined by financial allocations in a market economy.
Then there is “planning” at the organisational level, which will typically be differentiated from “strategy,” “governance,” “management,” “risk management,” as well as future-oriented processes like “horizon-scanning,” “anticipatory governance,” “Research & Development,” “stakeholder engagement,” “investor relations,” “cost-benefit analysis,” and so on. It will also be differentiated from vaguer terms like “commitments,” “promises,” “vision,” “ambitions,” “scoping,” and so on, whose meanings tend to be less specified by legal and regulatory practices. Planning tends to imply relatively detailed thinking about implementation of pre-given goals; it might be thought to sit “below” strategy and governance but “above” more day-to-day management. Nonetheless, despite effort at differentiation, planning overlaps with all of these. Perhaps what is most striking, at the organisational level, is the the division of anticipatory labour. Does this fragmentation of anticipation imply that, just like a party of adventurers can achieve more than the sum of its parts, an organisation is able to imagine possible futures more boldly and precisely than it otherwise would? Or, in line with the old adage “never split the party,” is such fragmented anticipation more restricted in the futures it can envision and steer towards? Probably both things are true, in different ways. There are also intriguing questions around what a different division of antcipatory labour might accomplish.
Then there is urban planning, which is particularly entwined with utopian discourse (along with architecture). Urban planning is inherently transdisciplinary, drawing on many strands within public policy and social science, and in this sense may have some affinity with the sometimes totalising aspirations of utopian thinking. Urban planners may consider issues of sustainability, development, health, economic growth, quality of life, crime and policing, social cohesion, and so on. But these are clearly all contentious terms — and some contemporary planners may well be interested in postgrowth rather than growth, or postdevelopment rather than sustainability, or police abolition rather than crime and policing. The history of urban planning is also the history of a variety of practical utopian experiments. For example, in the postwar period in the United Kingdom, the ‘new town’ movement embodied a similar mix of energies to the emerging welfare state. According to Rosemary Wakeman, these new towns, garden cities, cities of science, etc., were
To this rudimentary survey of planning discourse — planned economies, planning within organisations, urban planning — we can add heists and dungeoncrawls. Heists and dungeoncrawls make implicit claims about what can legitimately be planned for and what cannot, about how to do so, and about how and why the best-laid plans often go awry.
The degree and type of organisation within the target stronghold is also worth mentioning. Heist and caper crews, despite their superlative skills, are often framed as underdogs. The players’ power comes from stealth, deception, and cunning: they are unlikely to succeed at blasting or hacking their way into that stronghold. But a party at the dark mouth of the dungeon stands on another kind of threshold. True, they are also underdogs, in the sense that the army of monsters massed down there could probably easily overwhelm them. Except that it is not really an army. Unlike the guards in the stronghold, the dungeon denizens are typically fragmented. They may be antagonistic or indifferent to one-another, and their interests and activities do not constitute a joined-up defense of the territory. Perhaps to the extent that the dungeon does mount a dynamic, coordinated defense, the crawl becomes less like a crawl and more like a heist, raid, or siege.
Occasionally the desire to serve up the dungeon in digestible chunks may become an absurdity, something we are expected to suspend our disbelief about, as a convention of the genre. Monsters may even chivalrously attack one at a time (“It’s called class, Rick, it’s called class,” as one self-aware comic puts it. TTRPGs in which dungeon dwellers acquire a kind of class consciousness could be interesting to explore). Many TTRPGs, such as Grant Howitt’s TTRPG Goblin Quest (2015), as well as Grunts! (1992) by Mary Gentle, Dungeon Crawl Inc. (2021) by Dakota Krout, Dungeon Keeper Ami (2005-ongoing) by Pusakuronu, Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018), The Order of the Stick (2003-ongoing) by Rich Burlew, Henchgirl (2015-2017) by Kristen Gudsnuk, etc., explore the inner lives of mooks and minions, sometimes highlighting these convention.
A few other distinguishing features are worth considering. Heists often involve an insider; a less frequent trope for a dungeoncrawl, although one with considerable potential.
Another common feature of heist narratives is the twist: the double-cross, the mole, the apparent slip-up that was actually part of the plan all along. Maybe the thing we thought we were stealing is really something else, or never existed in the first place. The improvisational nature of TTRPGs might present challenges for such storytelling, insofar as a truly impressive twist is typically carefully prefigured. Of course, the significance of past events can always be retrospectively altered, in service of a twist. Moreover, a Blades in the Dark mechanic allows most of the heist planning to take place ‘off screen’, and to be revealed when it is narratively salient via a flashback:
Heist scenarios in TTRPGs involve players working together to plan and execute a high-stakes theft or robbery. Players will typically gather information, develop strategies to overcome obstacles, execute their plans, and then (when nothing goes according to plan) improvise. Typically each member of the caper crew is both exceptionally skilled in their field, and also a kind of eccentric and maverick; for Fredric Jameson, this is how the heist plot becomes a ‘distorted expression of the utopian impulse insofar as it realizes a fantasy of non-alienated collective work.’
There are plenty of variations on the heist model, including smuggling, spying, scouting, seige-breaking, hijacking, sabotage, kidnaps, rescues, jailbreaks and exfiltrations. A ‘reverse-heist’ scenario involves sneaking something into a secure location. Often, as in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010), it’s not enough to get in and out again safely, since the reverse-heist will fail if anyone finds out that the package has been planted. A red / blue team exercise is a sort of officially sanctioned fake heist (see Red / Blue Team Exercise). We might think of critical utopias, in the tradition of Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed (1974), as a kind of prefigurative red-teaming, seeking to improve the robustness of a system that has not yet even been built (see Critical Utopia).
One influential TTRPG centred on heists is John Harper’s Blades in the Dark (2015), where players are a crew of daring scoundrels seeking their fortune in a gritty, industrial-fantasy city. Many other heist-ready games spring from the shadows of its Forged in the Dark system; examples include John Leboeuf-Little and Stras Acimovic’s Scum and Villiany (2018), Kienna Shaw and Jamila R. Nedjadi's Songs for the Dusk (2021), and Andrew Gillis’s Girl by Moonlight (2024). Grant Howett’s Honey Heist (2017), at just one page, is another influential heist TTRPG, in which the players portray bears. Howett is fond of capers: in Royal Blood (2020), you effectively play a living Tarot card on a heist-like mission; One Last Job (2014) assembles a crew of washed-up criminals (or “WW2 commandos, ageing punk rockers, zombie apocalypse survivors, Wild West cowboys, and so on” (p. 3)), with character creation embedded in gameplay through improvised reminisces and banter. Jason Morningstar's Fiasco (2009) is another fiction-first game that lends itself to bungled capers of all kinds, and some of its playbooks are specifically heist-themed. Beyond the TTRPGs that revolve around heists, a heist episode may turn up in any campaign. San Jenaro Co-Op’s The Roleplayer’s Guide to Heists (2019), for example, an anthology of system-agnostic heist scenarios.
In fact, heists have a lot in common with a classic staple: the dungeoncrawl. Both dungeoncrawls and heists are a kind of breaking-and-entering. Both revolve around the central theme of embarking on a mission filled with mystery and peril, where the primary goal is to obtain something of value. They often feature complex environments with many opportunities for players to work as a multidisciplinary team of specialists, formulating and enacting cunning strategies. We might even imagine a kind of spectrum, or some other visualisation, of these two primary modes of tabletop thieving.
So what is the difference? Well, we might say that crawls place more emphasis on combat, and that heists are about stealing something in specific, rather than accumulating whatever treasure is lying around. Then again, heists frequently include or degenerate into bloodshed; moreover, dungeoncrawlers may well have a final treasure in mind (the Amulet of Yendor in the digital game Nethack, for example).
Perhaps crawls have some affinity with epic fantasy settings, and heists with modern urban settings. Heists may involve a ticking clock, whereas crawls are more relaxed — ‘relaxed’ in the sense of dragging your bloodied bodies back to town for a long rest before attempting the next raid. Heist crews are often assembled by a mastermind, and might not have previously known each other (let alone trusted each other) — dungeon adventurers are often drinking buddies. Perhaps the dungeoncrawl also has a certain ideological tie with colonial conquest, which the heist does not: some dungeoncrawls are genocidal. But none of these are hard-and-fast distinctions either.
One difference is between the intricately interlinked challenges predicted in the heist plan, vs. the diverse and unknown dangers of the dungeon. This is reflected in subtly different kinds of division of labour. The heist and the crawl both demand a mix of specialists, of course. But the trope that only so-and-so can perform vital task x is more characteristic of the heist. Heist crews are made up of supremely respected workers. Should any one of them withdraw their labour (perhaps even for a few seconds), it could send out shockwaves like a general strike. In ‘A Global Neuromancer’ (2015), Fredric Jameson contrasts the familiar picture of the division of labour (à la Adam Smith) with heist-divided labour:
[...] specializations are certainly present—we need someone to open safes, someone acrobatic enough to get through windows, someone capable of neutralizing the alarm system, someone to drive the car, someone to secure the plans on what is probably going to be an inside job, and finally the brains or the mastermind, who is also the political leader so to speak. But each of these characters will be idiosyncratic: it is a collection of interesting oddballs and misfits, all of them different, and many of them in serious personality conflict with each other. The technological features of the object have thus been humanized and personified if not altogether sublimated [...]
Jameson suggests that heist plots are therefore allegories of production (and he adds, a little mysteriously, that they are allegories of the inner divisions of the psyche too). Why then are there not more heist-like narratives about making things? Perhaps because it would be too on-the-nose. Jameson also offers another reason.
Here I think we face the dilemma of any literary or artistic representation of labor: it is very rare indeed that the content of the industrial product can have any necessity. The production process itself is always interesting: but [...] the nature of the object cannot have any real aesthetic necessity without turning into a symbol of some kind.
Why can’t the nature of the object have any real aesthetic necessity, except by turning it into a symbol of some kind? Because whether the fictional characters are creating chamber pots, or machine parts, or sausages, we know that “[a]nything that can produce a profit is equivalent when it comes to generating surplus value,” i.e. what they are really making is money.
This is a very Jamesonian preoccupation with large-scale material conditions constraining, and being reflected in, what artworks can and can’t do. Jameson does think that the heist plot gives it to us straight. It does this either by making the macguffin very macguffiny, or by simply making it a large sum of money. The score needs to be divisible, after all — the heist team wouldn’t share. In this way, for Jameson, the heist genre “short-circuits the search for a meaningful object by simply positing the cash, the gold, the bearer bonds, or whatever else. So this is, as it were, the negative or critical, the demystifying side of the caper form.”
There is a related factor that also distinguishes the heist from the crawl. It’s a controversial word within utopian discourse: planning. A heist is all about meticulous planning. The thrill of a may can come from improvisation as these flawless plans fall apart. But it can also come from things going off without a hitch. By contrast, the dungeoncrawlers just equip themselves as best they can, and venture into the unknown. They may even invent some mini-heists when they’re down there, but they haven’t spent weeks trapped in a planning montage.
It’s worth dwelling on planning for a bit. The word means a lot of things. In architecture, “planning” pertains to designing physical spaces to meet both functional and aesthetic requirements. With respect to political economy, “planning” might mean defining clear parameters for the production and distribution of goods and services. Broadly speaking, in a market economy, the interaction of economic supply and demand determines what goods and services are produced, and who gets to benefit from them; in a planned economy, these decisions are made by the government (if you want to make it sound sinister) or by the people (if you want to make it sound optimistic). The socialist calculation debate, which emerged in the 1920s, stemmed in essence from the attempts of various neoliberals (such as Friedrich Hayek) to prove from first principles that a complex modern economy is unplannable, and that any planned economy is a contradiction in terms and a catastrophe waiting to happen. Of course, the crude distinction between “market economies” and “planned economies” does not reflect the complexities of real-world economies, and is also heavily shaped by the ideological presuppositions of mainstream economics. Taking a more nuanced and interdisciplinary perspective, market economies also include plenty of planning, and planned economies have many elements of distributed decision-making.
For example, governments play a fundamental role in creating, maintaining, and shaping market mechanisms and forces. They establish the legal and regulatory frameworks that define the ‘rules of the game’ within which markets operate. These cover areas such as banking and finance, employment law, property law, contract law, competition policy, and sector-specific regulations. Governments also maintain markets through regulatory oversight and interventions to ‘correct market failures,’ such as monopolies, information asymmetries. They run themselves ragged trying to internalise externalities, including the greenhouse gas pollution driving climate change. Furthermore, governments shape market forces through their policy decisions, e.g. fiscal policy (taxing and spending) and monetary policy (e.g. interest rate adjustments by central banks).
Likewise, even if we take the example of the “material balances” planning of the early Soviet Union — as close as you’ll get to a textbook planned economy — what the central agency Gosplan did, strictly speaking, was to calculate interactions of supply and demand in order to produce and distribute goods and services. It is not normally described in these terms, but it should be. Yes, these determinations of supply and demand via demographic data, statistical calculations, political priorising, and other non-monetary means, were often wildly out of touch with people’s real needs, desires, capacities, risks, and so on. But the same can absolutely be said of supply and demand determined by financial allocations in a market economy.
Then there is “planning” at the organisational level, which will typically be differentiated from “strategy,” “governance,” “management,” “risk management,” as well as future-oriented processes like “horizon-scanning,” “anticipatory governance,” “Research & Development,” “stakeholder engagement,” “investor relations,” “cost-benefit analysis,” and so on. It will also be differentiated from vaguer terms like “commitments,” “promises,” “vision,” “ambitions,” “scoping,” and so on, whose meanings tend to be less specified by legal and regulatory practices. Planning tends to imply relatively detailed thinking about implementation of pre-given goals; it might be thought to sit “below” strategy and governance but “above” more day-to-day management. Nonetheless, despite effort at differentiation, planning overlaps with all of these. Perhaps what is most striking, at the organisational level, is the the division of anticipatory labour. Does this fragmentation of anticipation imply that, just like a party of adventurers can achieve more than the sum of its parts, an organisation is able to imagine possible futures more boldly and precisely than it otherwise would? Or, in line with the old adage “never split the party,” is such fragmented anticipation more restricted in the futures it can envision and steer towards? Probably both things are true, in different ways. There are also intriguing questions around what a different division of antcipatory labour might accomplish.
Then there is urban planning, which is particularly entwined with utopian discourse (along with architecture). Urban planning is inherently transdisciplinary, drawing on many strands within public policy and social science, and in this sense may have some affinity with the sometimes totalising aspirations of utopian thinking. Urban planners may consider issues of sustainability, development, health, economic growth, quality of life, crime and policing, social cohesion, and so on. But these are clearly all contentious terms — and some contemporary planners may well be interested in postgrowth rather than growth, or postdevelopment rather than sustainability, or police abolition rather than crime and policing. The history of urban planning is also the history of a variety of practical utopian experiments. For example, in the postwar period in the United Kingdom, the ‘new town’ movement embodied a similar mix of energies to the emerging welfare state. According to Rosemary Wakeman, these new towns, garden cities, cities of science, etc., were
both a reflection on and a critique of mid- to late twentieth-century society. A steadfast belief in physical determinism was shared across the architectural and planning professions. An ideal social atmosphere could be achieved by carefully planning all the physical elements of the city. Designing the physical fabric would change individual behavior, social relations, civic life, and community. The assumption was that the ideal city could be mass-produced for a mass cultural age. Life would be balanced and harmonious.
(5)
To this rudimentary survey of planning discourse — planned economies, planning within organisations, urban planning — we can add heists and dungeoncrawls. Heists and dungeoncrawls make implicit claims about what can legitimately be planned for and what cannot, about how to do so, and about how and why the best-laid plans often go awry.
The degree and type of organisation within the target stronghold is also worth mentioning. Heist and caper crews, despite their superlative skills, are often framed as underdogs. The players’ power comes from stealth, deception, and cunning: they are unlikely to succeed at blasting or hacking their way into that stronghold. But a party at the dark mouth of the dungeon stands on another kind of threshold. True, they are also underdogs, in the sense that the army of monsters massed down there could probably easily overwhelm them. Except that it is not really an army. Unlike the guards in the stronghold, the dungeon denizens are typically fragmented. They may be antagonistic or indifferent to one-another, and their interests and activities do not constitute a joined-up defense of the territory. Perhaps to the extent that the dungeon does mount a dynamic, coordinated defense, the crawl becomes less like a crawl and more like a heist, raid, or siege.
Occasionally the desire to serve up the dungeon in digestible chunks may become an absurdity, something we are expected to suspend our disbelief about, as a convention of the genre. Monsters may even chivalrously attack one at a time (“It’s called class, Rick, it’s called class,” as one self-aware comic puts it. TTRPGs in which dungeon dwellers acquire a kind of class consciousness could be interesting to explore). Many TTRPGs, such as Grant Howitt’s TTRPG Goblin Quest (2015), as well as Grunts! (1992) by Mary Gentle, Dungeon Crawl Inc. (2021) by Dakota Krout, Dungeon Keeper Ami (2005-ongoing) by Pusakuronu, Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018), The Order of the Stick (2003-ongoing) by Rich Burlew, Henchgirl (2015-2017) by Kristen Gudsnuk, etc., explore the inner lives of mooks and minions, sometimes highlighting these convention.
A few other distinguishing features are worth considering. Heists often involve an insider; a less frequent trope for a dungeoncrawl, although one with considerable potential.
Another common feature of heist narratives is the twist: the double-cross, the mole, the apparent slip-up that was actually part of the plan all along. Maybe the thing we thought we were stealing is really something else, or never existed in the first place. The improvisational nature of TTRPGs might present challenges for such storytelling, insofar as a truly impressive twist is typically carefully prefigured. Of course, the significance of past events can always be retrospectively altered, in service of a twist. Moreover, a Blades in the Dark mechanic allows most of the heist planning to take place ‘off screen’, and to be revealed when it is narratively salient via a flashback:
A flashback isn’t time travel. It can’t “undo” something that just occurred in the present moment. For instance, if an Inspector confronts you about recent thefts of occult artifacts when you’re at the Lady’s party, you can’t call for a flashback to assassinate the Inspector the night before. She’s here now, questioning you—that’s established in the fiction. You can call for a flashback to show that you intentionally tipped off the inspector so she would confront you at the party—so you could use that opportunity to impress the Lady with your aplomb and daring.
The Rick and Morty episode ‘One Crew over the Crewcoo's Morty’ (2019) satirises contemporary Hollywood heist cinema with a Heistcon, a heist-off, and the trivial automation of the supposed novelty and surprise of heist-style twists and turns. It plays with various ways of extrapolating heist norms beyond their usual scope. One scene imagines what might happen if everyone (hundreds or thousands of people) were part of a heist crew. Another scene is a long back-and-forth between the Rick and the Heistotron machine devised to automate heist design and delivery. This scene lampoons the imaginative poverty of at least one kind of heist ‘twist’: I knew that you would do A, so I did B, except you knew that I would do B, so you did C, except I knew that you knew that I would do B and you would do C, so I did D, and so on. There is a certain psychological unbelievability to this kind of twist. It takes a style of thinking characteristic of ruminative, anxious obsession, and imagines it having purchase on social reality. We also might detect a kind of neoclassical economic logic, one which emphasises the utility-maximising behaviours of individuals given the the information available to them, behaviours conceived of as relatively independent of institutions, norms, cultural practices, and so on. The messiness and uncertainty of how others desire and act is removed, and all it takes to understand what someone will do is to have enough information about the information they have access to. Yet I knew that you knew that I knew is also a kind of quasi-erotic fantasy of cognitive intimacy, albeit antagonistic, which resonates with utopian themes, and stands in some tension with such neoclassical logic.
Dystopian societies, including fake utopias, are obvious targets for heists. But what about other types? Is utopia ripe for a heist? What is there to steal? Clearly it depends on the utopia. Many utopias have abolished money, or perceive value according to some novel scheme. In Voltaire’s Candide (1759), Candide leaves El Dorado with a hundred pack-sheep, fifty of them laden with gold and jewels, materials which are not prized in El Dorado. It might be considered an extremely easy heist. Unless it is an extremely difficult one: did Candide fail the heist by deciding to leave this blessed place, partly motivated by love of arbitrage? Was Candide a victim of a kind of switcheroo?
Many classic utopias have a quasi-heist-like structure, in that utopia is very difficult to get into, and contains something very precious (a set of marvellous institutions and norms) which the visitor takes away with them … or do they? In a twist, the priceless haul of Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), or of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), may evaporate when you try to unpack it back at the den. There is plenty of narrative potential in the notion that the same thing might have a very different significance within a utopia or outside of utopia (see Doug Geisler’s interview in this volume).
A crew of daring scoundrels might attempt to steal the source or secret of a utopian society’s flourishing and happiness. But norms and institutions are nonrivalrous, that is, taking them from utopia does not mean depriving the utopians of them — right? Perhaps this is not always the case; the functioning of norms and institutions may sometimes depend, in subtle ways, on their material scope, on their borders, their neighbours, their rivals, their others. Or imagine if the task of the players were to ‘steal’ their entire worldview and mode of societal organization, requiring the group to fully immerse themselves in another way of life to understand and to embody its functioning … and yet somehow not stay there forever.
There is also the theme of contamination of utopia, e.g. as explored in N.K. Jemisin’s ‘The Ones Who Stay and Fight’ (Lightspeed, 2020). There is perhaps resonance here with the reverse-heist or inception: the visitor who brings a catalyst of catastrophe, usually in an anti-utopian fable about the supposed frailty and perhaps futility of building a society substantially better than whatever the author is using as a baseline.
The emphasis on stealth in Doug Geisler’s union organizing game Beat the Boss (2020) gives it a somewhat heist-like aspect. More broadly, TTRPGs offer a space for creating dialogue between heists, crawls and a range of politically-inflected models of taking what you want: enclosure, expropriation, seizure, occupations, squats, appropriation, liberation, recuperation, arrest and de-arrest, incarceration and decarceration, wage theft, rights erosion, extraction of surplus value, mass trespass, or leaving the country you live to go set up a new country. What would it mean to crawl the means of production? To claim the right to roam within the framework of a heist narrative?
