How to Heist: Creating Blueprints and Plans for Fantasy TTRPGs

There’s something between you and your goals. The large, nigh-impenetrable fortress that holds wealth, power, and secrets. All you need to do is sneak in, avoid detection, and take what you need. We’ve all been there: we have a problem - perhaps you require an artefact of incredible power, plans for something secret and dangerous, or just an enormous amount of gold - and in order to solve that problem, you need to turn to breaking-and-entering. Now you need to know how to heist.

In fantasy novels and role-playing games. (Not in real life. For legal purposes, I will state explicitly that I do not condone theft, burglary, or crimes of any kind. Even against the immorally rich.)

Welcome to this week’s topic: How to Create Heist Maps for your Fantasy World. In this post, I will be going into the methods that I use to create a heist map, the details that I include, the tips and tricks that will elevate your writing and gameplay, and why I go to the effort of making a map, when you could really just write all this down. 

I’m Ryan of the Red Quills, and I come out with videos like this weekly: designing realms, kingdoms, buildings, towns, and maps of all kinds for your fantasy world, mixed in with worldbuilding and writing tips for your creative assistance. Accompanying this post, I will release a series of Shorts on my YouTube channel and social media with further insights and specifics on the topic, so you can check those out as well. 

As always, you can also take a look at the other posts on mapmaking and worldbuilding in the Red Quills Journal.

Now, last week we discussed drawing town and city maps, and as a part of that I did linger briefly on the topic of creating large buildings and complexes - like palaces, museums, gaols, etc. There were a few more questions, and some excellent points in the comments, so I’ll try to address those as I go through this today.

Filling the Building

I will add another disclaimer here: I’m not an architect, despite my parents’ objections. I have a vague understanding of how to design a building, but things like structural supports and plumbing should be left to the professionals. Generally, though, you won’t need to worry about things like that in a fantasy world. 

When you’re planning a building for your world, the first thing that you should start with is the topic sentence for your building: when it was first conceptualised in your world, what did the patron say to the architect? ‘I want a palace to inspire awe in my friends and dread in my enemies?’ or ‘Make me a fortress that none can escape from?’ 

Starting with a clear concept will make things flow much more smoothly: other practicalities have to be added in later anyway to make it functional, you don’t need to worry about those at the initial stage. 

It’s also important to be aware of the context of the building: if there are stylistic, cultural, or social conventions that should be included in the building. Perhaps a household shrine, a prayer room, a bell tower, or separate wings for genders. 

Main Rooms

What are the main rooms in your building? Once you know what the topic sentence of your building is, you know what the main rooms are. In a palace, they will be a throne room or a ball room. In a goal, they are the exercise and muster courtyards. In a bank, like this, the focus is the vault, and the desk. 

In my case here, I have three levels to my bank - the Bank of Indusaal - for the three functions of a bank. The basement level is the vault itself, which is the core of what the bank does. It has a main vault, and a few minor vaults. The ground level has the main entrance, the atrium with the front desk, the entrance to the vault level, and the exchanges and transactions chamber. The upper levels has the board’s chambers: their meeting room and library. 

Secondary Rooms

But as you can see, these are far from the only rooms in the bank. The basement level also has a stairwell and a ramp to the ground floor, and an engine room. The ground level has an array of staff rooms and meeting rooms. The upper level has a kitchen for the board’s working meals.

Secondary rooms come from the questions that you ask yourself about the main rooms. If I have a vault, how do I get to it? How do I monitor it? How do I secure it? In order: stairs and ramp, guard post, and the engine room for the doors and security systems. 

Any building large enough to require staff or host visitors needs to have an array of practical rooms orbiting the main chambers: people always need somewhere to wait, and to eat. They need restrooms. The staff must be kept separate from the clients. The visitors must feel comfortable, but still be monitored. 

A rule of thumb with large buildings is that you must have a separate entrance hall - its function is to contain any disturbances from outside - as well as amenities. A dining area, a waiting area, a restroom or two, and at least one private office or meeting area. If you have staff, they will need their own versions of each of those. If you have staff fulfilling different functions, they may need separate offices. If they have different levels of authority, they will definitely need different offices. 

Corridors and Stairs

You can see that I’ve used the grid as a guide, and I would definitely recommend a grid, not only because it allows you to keep your lines straight and parallel, but also because it gives you a guide to stack the levels on top of each other and make sure that all of the stairwells and columns line up. 

Most of my rooms are connected to each other via a corridor: I’ve created this building in a similar way to how I would have designed a town. Check out my video last week for a few more details on that, but the gist of it is that I placed the major rooms, then made the secondary or ancillary rooms near to them, and then connected them with corridors and stairwells. 

Now, this is not - strictly speaking - what you should do as an architect. If you’re watching this as an architect, turn away. This is a barren wilderness, in terms of actual architectural practice. 

But in terms of designing a building for people to explore, this is a good way. I have found this with practice as a dungeon master and a writer. You can create whole complexes of any type based on this method. 

Remember that your corridors and stairs should all be a sensible width. In this case, my corridors are fairly narrow: only 120cm across. This is for security reasons: it makes maneouvring through the bank difficult for someone carrying anything illicitly, and forces any group to march in single file. 

That’s a tip that I actually got from the designs of the British Imperial prisons in Australia. If you want to learn more about defensive and surveillance architecture, there is a lot to learn there. 

Practical Concerns

Only then, when we’ve placed the main chambers, their secondary rooms, and then the corridors and stairs, do we finally ask ourselves about the practical concerns. As far as I’m aware, that’s actually not too far off what architects do in real life, but I was told that by an engineer - and there is an infamous divide between architects and engineers, so take that with a pinch of salt. 

In this case, practical concerns can be split into two categories:

• The Structural concerns involve the placement of columns, load-bearing walls, buttresses, and other trifles to ensure that the whole thing doesn’t collapse around your ears. You can choose to ignore these in your fantasy world, if magic has more of a say than the laws of physics, but cathedrals or mosques, gaols, and parliament houses generally have fairly good case studies. 
• The Functional concerns involve the main function of the building and making sure that the practical concerns don’t make them obsolete. In my case, with a bank, the addition of a lot of secondary rooms and staff mean that security needs to be taken into consideration. I added several more surveillance and security features into the structure and patrolling of the building to counteract this. 

Entering the Building

Now we’ve placed all of our rooms, we can get into the fun stuff: the first question that anyone asks themselves when they are considering breaking-and-entering is, of course, where to break-and-enter. You’ve placed all of the rooms, corridors, and stairs. Now you decide where the doors and windows are, and what they look like. 

Doorways 

I have a great many doors in this building, of which there are three kinds, so we’ll discuss that one first. Doors are defined by their function: the most common is a simple door, which is generally roughly 80cm to 120cm across (or 32 to 48 inches). You can have decorative doors, which are generally larger, and often doubled. They can be as wide as you like, but be aware that if they are metal or larger than about 180cm wide (70 inches or so), they will need a counterweight to stop them from sagging or catching. And you can have security doors. They are reinforced, barred, or locked, and are generally less wide across than the functional doors. 

But there are other options for doors as well. This building has three doorways which lead into the building. There is a guard entrance on the north side, leading directly to the guard room, which presents its own problem. There is a staff entrance on the southeast side, which leads into the staff area at the transactions and exchanges chamber, which is easier to enter but will not be easy to get through without being noticed. And there is the main entrance, which is the obvious entry and therefore the most heavily guarded. Instead of a door, it has two weighted portcullises, and an entry hall to monitor everyone coming in and going out. It is the simplest, most direct line into the building and towards the vault, but the whole building is designed around monitoring it. 

Another point to remember about doors is that they generally open inwards to a room: this is so that the hinges cannot be tampered with from the outside. It also means that no one can barricade someone inside the room.

There is another kind of door in this building: the vault doors, of course. They are extremely heavy, and have intricate locks built in. 

Windows

Windows are much more up to your imagination. Larger, single-plane glass windows are very modern: most fantasy windows will be wooden shuttered or multi-panelled glass. In the case of this building, I have not marked the windows on the map, because they are 15cm across and have an iron grill across them. 

Remember that windows have functions other than letting light in: often, in a world which uses candles or gas for light, they are an exit point for the heat and the fumes. They allow airflow into and through the building, maintaining the temperature. Building designed for luxury will have large windows, buildings designed for security will have minimal windows. 

Other Entrances

It’s always best, when designing a building that you intend to have someone heist, that the whole construction is a puzzle. Design it so that there are options other than the obvious ones. Doors and windows are the obvious ways into a building, and you will need to give thought to them so that the subjects of your heist have a starting point. But ideally, you will give them several possible sites of entry: several doors, all with different problems to overcome; some windows; and possibly a chimney or exhaust vent through which a slender or tiny person can enter. 

Any building will have to let things in and out in order to be functional: the longer that an architect wants a building to stand for, the more they must account for the building to shift and breathe and let the world flow around and through it. Air and water must have their points of entry into and out of the building: if they are not built, they will be carved by the elements or kill the occupants. 

So, here are some questions to ask yourself: 

• Where does air enter and exit the building? If a building is airtight and has people inside it, they will suffocate. Even extensive enough mines have a problem when they are not airtight, and this applies to any complex, if the complex is large enough and has an insufficient air intake. They will need to be scattered at regular intervals: windows are the most practical option for this, but there can be other exits for gas, such as vents, chimneys, or valves. 
• Where does water enter and exit the building? Any building with toilets, baths, or showers has this problem. Otherwise, buildings generally try to encourage water to move around them rather than through them. But every roof has a leak somewhere. 
• How do they allow light in? Candles are expensive, and the sun is not. A high-security building will do everything it can to make itself safe, but sometimes one has to think about their wallet. What’s more, anyone who wants to write things down will need the light of several candles in order to see without strain. 

Once you’ve figured these out, you’ll have several backup options for entry into your highly-secure building. 

Moving Once Inside

Let's talk about what to do once your subjects are inside the building. We have the layout of our building now, and we know where the entrances are and where the important rooms are. Hopefully, they are not right next to each other, so that there is at least some kind of obstacle between your protagonists and their target. And you’ve asked yourself where the water and air enters and exits the building. So now we can talk about moving once you are inside the building. 

Moving Unnoticed

Once inside, remember what we said earlier about the different areas of the building: there will be an area for the public, an area for staff, and an area for the owners or the inhabitants. For the first, you can move around without too much suspicion. For the second and third, you will need a disguise or remain unseen. 

Another issue you can encounter is guard patrols. This a complex and intricate part of designing an encounter, and I don’t have too much time to explore it. My advice for anyone designing these is to strike the same balance that the owners of the building would try to strike: you want your building to be as cheap as possible, and as secure as possible. Leaning too much either way sacrifices the other, so you need to make compromises. If you find a balance there, then your protagonists will have some difficulties and some opportunities. 

The Occupants

We talked about it before: any complex has three different kinds of denizen: the public, the staff, and the inhabitants. So lets go into them more in detail:

• The Public will only be allowed into certain areas of the building, and will generally be monitored or have some kind of oversight while they are inside. Moving through or around them is fairly easy, but they can panic or snitch if they see anything out of the ordinary. 
• The Staff move around with much greater freedom. They will be uniformed and will possibly be able to recognise each other by sight depending on the size of the staff. There may be different levels of authority, which comes with access to more and more of the building. 
• The Inhabitants come in two kinds: willing or unwilling. Most inhabitants of a building are willing: in my case, no one lives in the bank, per se. But that role is filled by the board members, who have absolute authority and intricate knowledge. But a prison or gaol will have unwilling inhabitants. They have no authority, but they do have intricate knowledge. 

When your protagonists are moving through the building, they will at some point have to deal with or avoid the occupants of the building. They will need different strategies for each to avoid conflict or notice. 

The Content of Chambers

When I design any building, I use the same rubric that I apply to dungeon generation: the chambers contain one of the following: ambience, environmental danger, puzzle, dead end, or conflict. You can flavour these to the context of the building that you are designing, but the different flavours allow you to make a building that is interesting and varied. 

Chambers can also be a combination of two of these, as well: a trap is an environmental danger and a puzzle. A patrol is ambience and conflict. Work them together to make more intricate problems for your protagonists to encounter. 

Puzzles and Mysteries

The reason that we’re all here: the core of any heist is the puzzle of it. It’s a difficulty to encounter, and what we enjoy, as observers, players, readers or writers, is the solving of the puzzle. How to best overcome the obstacles and react to the unexpected. So before we finish up, it’s only right to talk about how to create a dynamic puzzle.

Obviously this is a topic that I could talk about for hours. It’s the core of any game: people love puzzles, and we love solving them. As the worldbuilders, we have to design things that can be solved, but not with ease. It’s a hard balance to strike. 

Here’s the different kinds of puzzle that I create in my world and encounters:

• Contextual. These are the mysteries that need to be unravelled. The puzzle here is in the understanding of them, not in the disarming or the avoidance. We long to comprehend the world around us, and these are about figuring out what is right. The focus is the truth. You can create these as elements of history, character, and culture. In this map, the mystery is the nature of the sentient vault at the core of the bank and the history of the board of directors. 
• Mental. These are physical or logical problems that have a definitive answer. They generally lie as an obstacle between you and your goal: they can be a doorway that requires a riddle, a trap that can be avoided, or a maths problem. The focus is the answer. You can create these as needing a key or a combination for a lock, set patrols to avoid, or requirements to fulfill to reach the goal. In this map, the mental puzzles are the patrols, the locks and combinations, the alarm bells and weighted plates needed to enter the vaults. 
• Moral. Honestly, my personal favourite. I enjoy adding consequences to answers of my puzzles. It works for some protagonists and not for others. They are choices between one path and another. The focus is doing the right thing. You can create these as being making your heroes’ lives easier at the expense of an innocent, providing the opportunity to punish an evil person at greater risk to their safety, and other opportunities. In this vase, the moral puzzles here aren’t specified: they could be the opportunity to disrupt the plans of the board to help the poor, needing to steal a key from a staff member who will be arrested as complicit when the theft is discovered, and things like that. 

There are so many nuances to puzzle making, so I will simply leave it there for now, but I would be very keen to hear what puzzles you like and tend to use.

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So, after you’ve done all of these steps, you have a monument that you can heist from: you’ve built your building, filled it with chambers, thought your way through all the myriad different ways that your protagonists can break-and-enter, and the different kinds of obstacles and puzzles that they can encounter on the inside. 

And we have our map in the post earlier this week: the Bank of Indusaal, the resting place of the most valuable and rare items in the world, guarded by a sentient vault and overseen by the sinister board of directors. As always for the maps that I draw specifically for these videos, this map is available here.

There is so much more detail that went into this that I have not had time to discuss, and as always please comment if you found this helpful, if you want me to talk about anything else in upcoming posts, or if you have any questions. Thank you so much to my supporters, I will see you next week for our next tutorial.