I've always wanted to do a stealth game/campaign, but all my attempts to hack it into DnD have failed. Do you have any suggestions for a stealthy system? Not something as abstract as Knives in the Dark (tbh, I just have never been able to get into it) but something that hits the Assassin's Creed feeling of watching the target, making a plan, and then sneaking through the base taking out guards and hiding their bodies and such. Preferably on a grid map or similar, s we're terrible at theatre of the mind.
Hello there, so I did some digging and I found plenty of stealth games, although none of them seem to really require a map in order to play. That being said, I donât think that should stop you from providing maps to your players, even if theyâre abstract! Some of these games might ask you to sketch out a rough map of the town or building that youâre in, which may help you provide your players with some visual references as they sneak around, trying not to get caught.
When it comes to stealth, I think of three things: horror, heists, and spies.
Delta Green, by Arc Dream Publishing.
Born of the U.S. governmentâs 1928 raid on the degenerate coastal town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, the covert agency known as Delta Green opposes the forces of darkness with honor but without glory. Delta Green agents fight to save humanity from unnatural horrorsâoften at a shattering personal cost.
Delta Green comes highly recommended as a great way to play an X-Files type rpg, mixed in with the Cthulhu mythos. It uses a d100 system and is based in the modern day, casting your characters as former members of government agencies, recruited into a super-secret bureau that investigates supernatural things - and keeps those things hidden from the common public. The stealth of this game is mostly about covering up the eldritch and unnatural, even if it means framing someone else or condemning a beloved building.
Your characters in this game have some familiar pieces to them, such as six stats with the same titles as youâll see in games like D&D. However, youâll also have pieces like Bonds, which represent relationships that keep your character grounded, and a Sanity system that Iâm personally not crazy about (I do not recommend this game for a group that doesnât like trite mechanization of mental health disorders), but that gives you a way to incur penalties that arenât just physical damage.
This looks to be the closest to a traditional rpg on this list, and with all the elements to keep track of, I can see how a physical map would be helpful. However, keep in mind that there isnât a pace or speed stat attached to these characters, so things like line of sight or distance probably wonât be super granular - if you are shooting things you may have broad range bands to determine how difficult something is, but the final decision will be a GM decision, not something necessarily determined in the rulebook. Because the setting is a modern one, I think finding visual references for locations in this game would be very very easy.
If you want a taste of the game before you put your money down, you can check out the Free Starter Rulebook!
Minutes to Midnight, by Oliver S.
Minutes to Midnight is a game powered by Blades in the Dark about a crew of spies, trying to disrupt the balance of power in a modern cold war. They will have to stand strong in the face of their vicious opposition and handle a fragile web of untrustworthy informants, devious intrigues and deadly lies.
We play to find out if our agents can thrive in the cutthroat world of espionage. While the public may never know about their impact, their actions shape the political landscape and outcome of conflict. Will the players prevent the outbreak of a global disaster and use their influence to create a better future? Will they attempt to send the opposing bloc into a turmoil and establish a lasting hegemony? Or will their actions lead the world down a path of war and nuclear destruction?
The Forged in the Dark system uses a cycle in between missions and downtime, sinking your characters into the heart of the action as they pursue clandestine missions in locations built by the group in a session 0. Since the game takes place in the real world, using maps of real cities might be a great way to keep they players visually engaged, and using a city that the group has been to or is familiar with might also make it easier for the group to visualize the kinds of buildings and streets where their spies may be sneaking, scheming, and sleuthing.
Those who know magic exists at all are the rich and teams of breakers like yourself that go into the jartowns for the Archons. Jartowns are created by burning folk alive in a wicker man, in a ritual known only to the oldest jet-setting Archons.
A jartown is an isolated area of spacetime that was cut out of our reality. Most jartowns consist of a small amount of space (enough for a suburb or town) and a loop of several years. Jartowns become more magickal and horrific with each loop, creating madstones.Â
Madstones are small things, from actual stones to human organs, infused with concentrated, distilled magic. They're secretly coveted by the wealthy.
In this tiny 24XX-based tabletop RPG, players are breakers, desperate folk from the occult underground who find a way into the jartowns, hothouses for magick, to perform errands for the ultrarich Archons.
Play as a variety of roles, from sawbones to sinner to spook, and choose to hail from one of four origins, including jartown native.
24XX games are another toolbox that you can pick up and play around with to help you get started with creating your own experiences. Your character consists of a few skills and gear packaged together in a character class. In Madstones, these classes are various specialists, trained to deal with different elements that might pop up when you go delving into eldritch pockets of reality. There is both a stealth and a combat specialist in this game, but thereâs also classes for things like a getaway driver, a hacker, and an occult specialist.
24XX games also exist because of their OSR predecessors, meaning that combat is risky, and often deadly - and therefore finding other ways to solve the problem is implicitly encouraged. However, the openness of the system means that your players donât necessarily need to resort to stealth - they might prepare an elaborate ritual, create a unique piece of technology, or just decide to run away as fast as they can. In regards to maps, I think you could probably use a typical dungeon framework: leading the characters through various rooms or sections of the pocket dimension, and throwing horrors and weird environments their way.
Nightâs Black Agents, by Pelgrane Press.
The Cold War is over. Bushâs War is winding down. You were a shadowy soldier in those fights, trained to move through the secret world: deniable and deadly.
Then you got out, or you got shut out, or you got burned out. You didnât come in from the cold. Instead, you found your own entrances into Europeâs clandestine networks of power and crime. You did a few ops, and you asked even fewer questions. Who gave you that job in Prague? Who paid for your silence in that Swiss account? You told yourself it didnât matter.
It turned out to matter a lot. Because it turned out you were working for vampires.
Vampires exist. What can they do? Who do they own? Where is safe? You donât know those answers yet. So youâd better start asking questions. You have to trace the bloodsuckersâ operations, penetrate their networks, follow their trail, and target their weak points. Because if you donât hunt them, they will hunt you. And they will kill you.
A combination of modern spy fiction and vampire intrigue, Nightâs Black Agents uses the GUMSHOE system, which is an investigative roleplaying system that provides your characters with resources they can spend to get into secret locations, compete against vampiric agents, and pick up information to help you put together the details of a conspiracy. In Nightâs Black Agents, finding clues isnât left up to chance - you will always get information as long as you tell the GM that youâre using a relevant skill. The obstacles in this game are more likely going to involve getting in and out of sticky situations - and if your opponents are vampires, well, stealth is likely going to be a more appealing than trying to slit their throats.
GUMSHOE games donât need grid maps either, but a rough map of the city or country is probably very helpful, and it might be fun to draw the floor plans of various buildings that your players investigate in order to help them determine what areas may be the most interesting places to search for clues.
The Breathing, by Fistful of Crits.
You reside in The Archive, an unending and depthless structure spiralling deep into the dark and misty depths, devoid of life and presided over by a being known only to you as The Archivist.
The Archive is made up of windowless rooms and halls that vary greatly in their height, size and danger. All these spaces house numerous shelves containing the collected knowledge of the world outside of The Archive; a place you have been told you must earn your access to. The price of your freedom comes from the discovery of new or forgotten knowledge that can be found in the deepest parts of the structure.Â
You, and a few others, are known as The Breathing, in a place full of creatures who were once like you but ultimately failed in their bid for freedom; now known as The Breathless.Â
The Breathing is just an example of a broader style of game, using a system called Breathless. Breathless games use a series of polyhedral dice that deteriorate as you use them, with different dice attached to different skills. Throughout the game you pause to âtake a breathâ, and re-set your skills, bringing your dice back to their threshold. However, pausing to take a breath also gives the GM a chance to introduce a new trouble or complication, creating a cycle of mission, rest, mission, rest, etc.
As a game system, Breathless is pretty light and is fairly easy to hack. But the lightness of the rules also allows for creativity and add-ons, which could include rules for movement or placement. Since the game rewards finding ways to solve problems without having to resort to direct conflict, I can see games like this encouraging characters to think carefully about when to use their resources and when to just⌠sneak around the problem. If you want to include maps and a grid, you could provide a blueprint of a room inside The Archive and watch the players try to navigate it using their limited resources, with designated ârest areasâ that they would have to get to in order to take a Breath.
This certainly isnât a solution in a box, but it might provide some interesting tools to help you build the experience youâre looking for.
Night Reign, by Sinister Beard Games.
Night Reign is a roleplaying game of stealth, guile, violence and devilry for a GM and one or more players, set in a quasi-Edwardian metropolis perched on an inhospitable peninsula beset by toxic black rain and ruled by a corrupt cabal of Noble Houses.
You take the role of members of The Red Right Hand, a conspiracy loyal to the recently deposed royal family, using your talents in assassination, infiltration and dark sorcery to strike out at your oppressors.
A game all about the things you do in the shadows, Night Reign uses cards to resolve conflict, rather than dice. It also uses a token system to help you overcome obstacles without having to resort to violence - loud, messy, dangerous violence. The Ruled by Night system (which has an SRD that you can download for free) is about balancing the suspicion youâve already raised against an increasing cost to being stealthy. You spend Shadow tokens in order to be able to attempt to do something, and try to get a hand as close as possible to 21, or at least higher than whatever the GM draws. Your characters will also have powers that can be very effective, but are likely to draw a lot of attention, so using them is risky.
Because of how this game runs, things like movement and speed are not likely to be tracked. However, I donât think mapping out a location so that the players can understand where things are or what kind of space theyâre in is going to hurt the experience. The SRD describes something called City Conditions, which appear to be elements of the fiction that might result from the charactersâ choices, or provide obstacles to the players. If you have a map of the city in front of you, you could draw symbols on the map to indicate whatâs happening as the story progresses, and even cross out places that have been destroyed.
Heist, by Hark Forsooth Games.
HEIST: Get the Crew Together is a cooperative RPG where you and a group of suave, savvy and slick fellow crooks plan and execute capers, grabbing the fanciest loot from the world's wealthy elite.
Heist is great for fans of shows like Leverage or movies like Oceanâs 11: youâre going to steal something shiny from someone who certainly doesnât deserve it, and youâre going to do it with style. While combat is an option, your characters will also have to deal with suspicious marks, security systems, laser grids and bank vaults. The characters are composed of special talents and personal flaws, and the GM has the task of designing something the game calls Murphyâs Gun - a major twist that will reveal itself midway through the heist.
It can be tricky to determine what to prep for a game like this, but one thing that you can for sure prep is the location. Design the building, draw the floor plan, and come up with obstacles for the different areas - thereâs not really movement tracking in this game but having the layout will certainly help your players come up with ideas about how to get in, get out, and get rich.
Another thing to considerâŚ
Mothership doesnât have any stealth skills, but what it does have is the incentive to be sneaky. If an alien horror is moving through the ship, youâre more likely to try and stay out of itâs way - and having no stealth skills means that the players have to describe what theyâre doing to stay hidden; climb into vents, squeeze yourself into cupboards, and try to wriggle into the space suit. However, this doesnât mean that youâre not rolling - you might roll to clamber over something or to fit yourself into something, or you might roll to scope out a location to find an exit or suitable hiding place. Itâs also excellent in terms of maps - plenty of adventures will provide at least a blueprint of the space station or ship that youâre exploring, which you can use to spook your players with fresh horrors.
