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When I sat down to run modern Cthulhu-style games, I kept running into the same quiet problem: everyone played “an investigator,” but almost nobody knew what their role actually did in the fiction. The job title changed—soldier, journalist, analyst, fixer—but in play, they all behaved like the same vaguely competent person with a flashlight and a gun.

That can carry a one‑shot. It doesn’t give you much to hang a campaign on. It doesn’t tell you who drives the action, who holds institutional power, who has the most to lose, or what the world looks like when the horror isn’t on‑screen yet. And for pulp, where you want genre to hit hard, “generic modern investigator” is a thin starting point.

Modern Operatives Occupation Kits grew out of wanting something sharper: roles that feel like characters with a job, not just character sheets with a label. I wanted occupations that bring their own weight—people who belong to institutions, have obligations, are watched by enemies, and leave clear fingerprints on every scene they walk through.

The first wave focuses on contemporary roles that naturally intersect with mythos‑scale trouble: people used to violence, information, surveillance, security, and secrets. They’re written to fit into black‑ops horror, media‑driven investigations, street‑level occult campaigns, conspiracy games, and all the other “modern pulp” spaces where Call of Cthulhu and Pulp Cthulhu often end up.

There was also a Keeper prep problem I wanted to solve. Too often, character creation in modern games is a “pre‑fiction” moment that doesn’t pay dividends once you start playing. The occupation choice becomes flavor instead of scaffolding. My aim with these kits was to make choosing a role part of prep. If you pick one of these occupations, the page itself should hand the Keeper scenes, relationships, and pressures to build on—without needing another notebook full of notes.

So Modern Operatives Kits 1–6 are my attempt to turn “I’m an investigator” into “I’m this kind of operative, with these pressures, these institutions, and this relationship to the mythos.” If you want your campaigns to lean hard into pulp tone and feel genuinely modern, that’s the gap this first wave is meant to fill.

Find out more at Applegarth Games!

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Keith

The Heist Tool Kit is out today.

It’s a system-neutral set of 18 printable, fillable worksheets for planning, running, and paying off tabletop heists. If you’ve ever watched a carefully built score wobble because the structure underneath it was too thin, this is the prep architecture I built to keep the job honest.

Inside you’ll find:

• Job Brief & Crew Angles to align the table on what the job actually is and why it matters.
• Target, Security, and Intel stacks to turn locations and information into living situations instead of vague backdrops.
• Legwork and Operation sheets to structure casing, phases, heat, and pivot points.
• Factions, Complications, and Fallout tools to keep the world moving, twist the knife when it matters, and track what the job changes after the dust settles.

It’s completely system-neutral: no stat blocks, no dice notation, no required mechanics. Open the pages in any browser and type directly into them, or print them and lay them out at the table. Everything is black-and-white friendly and built for actual play, not just pretty screenshots.

If you run heists in Blades in the Dark, Shadowrun, fantasy campaigns, spy thrillers, or any game where the crew is taking something that isn’t theirs, this kit is built to sit underneath your existing rules and make the job feel like it has bones.

You can pick up The Heist Tool Kit here:
The Heist ToolKit on DriveThruRPG

If you use it at your table, I’d love to hear how your scores go—what worked, where it broke, and what kinds of trouble your crews get themselves into when the scaffolding holds.

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A heist feels dead when only the crew moves.

If the guards are just hit points, if the rival crew never shows up, if nothing in the world shifts because the PCs acted, then even a successful score can feel like a puzzle the table solved once and forgets.

Three parts of The Heist Tool Kit exist almost entirely to fight that:

Factions & Timers (06A–B)
These sheets ask a simple set of questions for every interested party:

• What do they want?
• What resources do they have?
• What are they willing to risk?
• What’s their timeline?

You turn those answers into agenda clocks. Maybe the rival crew is already making a move on the same prize. Maybe the security firm is in the middle of a quiet audit. Maybe a crime boss is about to pull their funding if this job goes wrong.

Between scenes, you advance those clocks. You don’t need to script everything. You just need to know who is about to step into the frame and why. The heist stops being “the PCs vs. a building” and becomes “the PCs in a live situation.”

Complications & Twist Engine (08A–B)
“Make something go wrong” is easy advice to give and hard advice to follow when you’re staring at a blank page.

The twist engine gives you structured options:

• Light complications that nibble at resources or position.
• Serious twists that bend the plan.
• Major disasters that reframe the job entirely.

Each band is tied to prompts that hook into your existing sheets: intel gaps, faction moves, untriggered defenses, or consequences from earlier scenes the crew thought they dodged.

Instead of rolling purely random trouble, you ask:

• Who hasn’t moved yet?
• Which assumption just proved false?
• What defense did they never actually neutralize?

Then you deal from that stack.

Fallout, Payoff & Future Hooks (09A–B)
After the score, it’s tempting to close the notebook and call it done. But that’s where campaigns get their spine.

Fallout sheets ask:

• Who got what they wanted?
• Who lost something they can’t get back?
• What new leverage, enemies, and debts did the crew create?
• What changed in the setting that won’t quietly reset by next session?

Maybe the crew got paid, but in the process they accidentally humiliated a powerful patron. Maybe they exposed a security weakness that someone else will exploit. Maybe they left a witness who now owes them—or wants them dead.

Those notes become the seeds of the next job. The world remembers what happened. The heist leaves scars.

One wek from now, The Heist Tool Kit goes live. In the final post, I’ll share the release details, where to get it, and what you’ll find inside on day one.

Find out more here: https://games.akapplegarth.us/comingsoon.html

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