72 Sci-Fi Heist Challenges (Part 1)

One of the best resources for Blades in the Dark is Andrew Shields' Heist Deck. It's a print and play collection with obstacles, people, and treasures. When I ran Blades, the deck made it easy to elaborate on a target and generate new jobs for the crew to choose from. 

Since +1 Forward's recently looked at Scum & Villainy, the excellent sci-fi Forged in the Dark rpg, I thought I'd present pieces of a Heist Deck for that genre. This can also be used for other sci-fi games and for some cyberpunk rpgs like The Sprawl and The Veil. This is the first half of the obstacle list. I may work up "treasure" list, but a set of people may be harder as they need to be plugged into the specifics of the setting. 

---

1. ​Absolute Secrecy: The task has to be completed without anyone knowing. Perhaps noisy actions will be met with overwhelming force or the team will simply see their pay cut based on the attention they generate.
2. Adrenal Mutations: When guards or other staff hit a certain level of agitation, their body mutates into a wild, weaponized form. Nearly undetectable before that.
3. Ambush: The old classic—someone’s been tipped off and now they’re getting jumped. Or was the whole job a set up? Team has to decide whether they want to push through to complete the objectives or bug out.
4. Animated Coils: Millipede-like bots which can join together into larger creatures. Who knows how big they can get. Able to slip through small spaces—and locations they're guarding are often fitted with these.
5. Anti-Optics Field: Not exactly invisibility, just an inability to focus or process exactly what’s going on in that space. PCs can see and target where the field is but they don’t know exactly what it is or how it’s reacting.
6. Assessment Disruptor: While within range of this device, you cannot accurately judge distance or time. Affects balance and movement.
7. Biomorphic Vegetation: Plants which sense intrusion and biochemically create counter measures like acid sprays, neurotoxins, or caustic webbing.
8. Body Doubles: The target has a number of body doubles which are nearly impossible to distinguish from the real thing.
9. Brain Modded Drones: Defenders have been brain-spiked to be fanatical and relentless. Pain and fear centers have been cut off and a singular purpose put in its place. These guards will need to be restrained, knocked out, or killed—or they keep coming.
10. Change of Objectives: When they get on scene, the situation changes dramatically—now they have to decide if it’s worth it to push through and finish the original job, complete the new job, or just get out.
11. Change of Route: As they arrive on scene, the situation on the ground changes, compromising their original entryway or path. Is this a trap? Has someone been alerted? Or is this just bad luck?
12. Chronoclamps: Object to be taken is locked in a sphere of non-time. They have to disarm or remove entirely system.
13. Coordination: Timing is crucial for getting through certain systems or alarms. Operative must be connected to act at exactly the same split second.
14. Contaminating Cyberlimbs: Defenders have been outfitted with the lowest quality enhancements, resulting in a danger of nano-virus or hypertensile oxidation when facing them in close quarters.
15. Countdown to Detonation: The place is going to go up and the crew knows it. They have to get in and out before destruction takes their target and them as well.
16. Cyber-Weasels: Highly mobile microbots. Often used for cleaning, but also make a nasty defense. Can roll up into an armored form, scuttle along all surfaces, and squeeze through tiny gaps between spaces. Horrible rows of cutting teeth.
17. Double-Booked: The Client has hired a second team to accomplish the same task, out of distrust or the theory that two teams are better than one. Alternately the second team is simply jumping in to try to close the contract and get paid before the crew.
18. Drone Swarms: It starts as a small collection, with a tiny buzzing sound. But soon a collection of microdrones appears on the scene. They’re modular, assembling into larger and more weaponized defense systems. They get smarter as they grow in size.
19. Empath Orphans: Psychic children abducted from care facilities have been turned into living scanners. They can perform psychic sweeps, project their presence, and even create illusionary constructs. If attacking the Orphan’s manifestations causes them feedback, the team will face an even more challenging choice.
20. Escape Route Compromised: Midway through the mission, the extraction plan falls apart. Someone’s been spotted, a location has been cut off, or a transport has been destroyed. The team has to decide if they can carry on or bug out now. In any case they must come up with another way to get out of the target facility.
21. Fugue’d Converts: The site employs a kind of cultic brainwashing. To make it easier for them, all of the initiates have been reprogrammed with the mental template of a single fanatical devotee. They all possess the same skills and answer to the same name. When one falls, another’s right there to take their place.
22. Genocolony Foliage: They look like decorative ornamental plants, but they’re not. Hybridized plants infested with a shape-changing carnivorous parasitic organism. When activated they can rapidly grow, entangle, and consume targets. The worst of these can use victims as fuel to create more defenses.
23. Gravatic Oscillators: When activated the defense system shift the flow and intensity of the gravity within the facility. While they can’t maintain the shift to, for example, completely immobilize targets, they can disorient and disrupt.
24. Hostages: The target has uncovered something about the operation and has taken several prisoners of value to the client or to the team itself. The question will be how much does the target actually know?
25. Hunter-Seeker Assassin Needle: This flying dart senses motion, hanging in the air quietly until activated at which point it fires itself at high velocity to deliver whatever sinister payload has been embedded in it.
26. Hyper-Dimensional Passcoding: The system uses simple key code entry points, but they’re spatially encrypted. In order to actually punch those codes in, the team needs a means of accessing that higher-level space.
27. Hyper-Octopi: Jam a basic AI brain box into the body of a cephalopod, give it cybernetic limbs, and let it loose to keep a sector secure. Even small ones of these can be super dangerous, hiding in vents and dropping down from the ceiling.
28. Incoming Storm/Natural Disaster: The timing couldn’t be worse and now the team has to deal with dangerous fallout from the environment: flooding, collapsing sections, power overload, toxic overflow. While it serves as a distraction, it may overwhelm the unprepared.
29. Innocents Involved: Contrary to early intelligence the site has a host of innocents and bystanders. They’re potential witnesses, but even more importantly causing too much collateral damage may anger other forces like state security and even the client.
30. Kelvin Manipulation Chambers: The temperature in this area can rapidly be modulated up or down as a defensive measure. They can even contain the changes to a limited portion. Even more dangerous is the system’s being operated remotely rather than automated.
31. Linguistic Inhibitors: This system creates a field affecting the language centers of the brain, making it nearly impossible to understand written or spoken speech. Victims can still express themselves but anyone caught with them cannot parse what’s being communicated.
32. Micropressure Sensor Arrays: Every good facility includes sensors to detect changes in the environment, but this one has been calibrated to the Nth degree. The slightest change can activate defenses and alerts.
33. Mindraven Flock: Not actual ravens, but the idea of ravens—manifested in flocks of ideoweapons which can target individuals, pecking away memories and conscious thoughts.
34. Modulating Crowd Overlay: Augmented reality projectors have been calibrated to continually fill sectors with crowds of people, obscuring the scene. In this case these have been combined with additional projectors to mimic heat and other signatures. Some may use brief force field projections to make discerning real people that much harder. 
35. Molecular Recompositor: This system can increase or reduce the intrinsic strength of materials—solidifying things to make them immobile or distrupting them to make them more fragile. More sophisticated systems can create rapid-fire 3D printed objects.
36. Monofilament Vampire Wires: These dangerous razor sharp lines are deadly on their own, but this new system combines that with a blood and essence draining sub-system. More cruel than practical, it expresses much about the target’s ethos.