In February 2026 we presented the all-new Human Gorilla Heists Bundle featuring system-neutral tools from Human Gorilla Creations that help you create fantasy adventures of thieves and thievery. Whether your players are contract burglars plundering an Arkenstone, young barbarians scaling the Tower of the Elephant, or swordsmen dodging cultists in Lankhmar, use these system-neutral tools to generate clients, targets, and loot – the Stage, the Catch, the Hitch – devious rivals, clever escapes, cool payouts, and the final (inevitable?) double cross.
With these sourcebooks, treatises, and ready-to-play adventures you can run your own gritty “World of Thieves” swords-and-sorcery campaign in any fantasy RPG from D&D 5E to Blades in the Dark. Purloin a dwarven necklace from a swindler who has diplomatic immunity. Infiltrate Bramblewood Cemetery to find the wererat king’s skeleton key. Make 12 casks of Seasonal Direbrau disappear during the Market Auction at Direwood Farm Brewery. Play out The Italian Job in Westeros, Leverage with liches, or Mission: Impossible but you’re all kobolds. It’ll all go without a hitch! Has the Human Gorilla ever steered you wrong?
Human Gorilla Creations is Texan Mark Finn, who has a decades-long career in nonfiction, fiction, and more recently game design. In the late 1990s Mark co-founded Clockwork Storybook, an online shared world of urban fantasy fiction. In 2006 he wrote a respected biography of Conan the Barbarian’s creator, Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard. Mark has participated for decades in the Howard Days gathering each June in Cross Plains, Texas, and he contributed to the Modiphius Conan RPG rulebook (2017).
A lifelong fan of genre film, Mark has spent the last few years bringing heists a la Ocean’s 11 and The Italian Job to fantasy roleplaying, first in an August 2022 Kickstarter for Ogre’s 11: 13 System-Neutral Audacious Heists and then a Zine Month campaign (Feb 2023) funding four issues of Polite Society: The Zine for Thieves, Rogues, and Scoundrels. In the 21st Century “we’ve seen an uptick in heists and capers in fiction and film, and not just stories set in the modern era,” Mark wrote in “Stealing the Shire,” his introduction to the 2025 Baen Books anthology Swords & Larceny. “Any time period or setting that has an excess of wealth, a few haves and a lot of have-nots, and some enterprising folks with an utter lack of regard for the law – that’s a situation ripe for a heist. […] Heists and capers have moved out of the genre of crime fiction and become a type of story told in whatever genre the author is working. Fantasy, in particular, is enjoying a bit of a Renaissance in that respect.”
“You might or might not have museums in your fantasy world, but you do have castles and they have treasuries,” Mark writes at the start of Ogre’s 11. “There are thieves’ guilds, running legal or otherwise gambling halls. You’ve got temples and churches, their reliquaries dripping with expensive offerings. Corrupt nobles, foreign governments, you name it – there’s lots to steal in a fantasy setting, and plenty of people to steal from.”
Where heist-based indie games like Blades in the Dark streamline the prep to a quick precis of target, plan, detail, loadouts, and engagement roll, the many system-neutral jobs in this Human Gorilla Heists Bundle flesh out the whole sequence of events: the heist overview, the catch (as in, “What’s the catch?”), legwork, particulars of the heist itself, the inevitable hitch, payouts, and likely outcomes based on “successful or not” and “identified or not.” With these detailed plans and maps, which drop easily into any existing urban campaign, your players will soon be heisting the Purple Lotus from the tower of Archmage of Hellfire Hokksileusis Vulcuss – and then, maybe, wishing they hadn’t.
There were eight titles in our Gorilla Heist Collection (retail value $59) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including Ogre’s 11: 13 System-Neutral Audacious Heists, plus its colorfully named mini-supplement Gobshite; Tools of the Trade: A GM’s Guide to Creating & Running Fantasy Heists, a useful treatise with a heist generator; the Unusual Suspects Omnibus, a compilation of three volumes of nonplayer characters that debuted in this offer; and four 48-page issues of Polite Society: The Zine for Thieves, Scoundrels, and Ne’er-Do-Wells – Polite Society issue #1, #2, #3, and #4.
