Honey Heist / Die Hard Crossover for Christmas

For my D&D group as a festive treat we decided to run a one shot, in our regular game the characters had just levelled up, so it felt like a natural place to pause given the disruption Christmas and New Year can have on our schedules.

We often do something far more silly, very rules light, and much more roleplay heavy for our one shots and I personally love perusing the work of Grant Howitt.

In 2020 I ran ‘Honey Heist’, in 2021 I ran ‘Jason Stathams Big Vacation’, this time I fancied something more Christmassy!

I had a quick google and look around and nothing immediately came up, there were plenty of D&D christmasy one shots, but I wanted something super light on rules and that I could get done in 3 hours max, with a break. I find most D&D based one shots to be in the region of 4-8 hours.

I have run Honey Heist before for the group, and so felt there was something I could do with that, given its setup for a heist style scenario, so what if … we merge one of my favourite one page rules games with one of the best Christmas movies. Honey Heist + Die Hard = Awesome.

You could actually almost roll Die Hard on the auto gen scenarios in the one page pdf!

You can get Honey Heist here

"A drawing of a bear in a pink hat wearing bondage gear."

Honey Heist 2: Bear Hard

You wanna play fast and loose with Honey Heist, so I put together the following ‘bear bones’ structure:

Welcome to Bear-atomi plaza. After months of planning, nothing stands between you and a vault full of honey. Well except maybe a Christmas party full of revellers … but theyll be easy to manage… With your crack team of bears not even the FBI can stop you! Ho, Ho, Ho!

The use of flash backs is encouraged, so I set the scene for my players getting to introduce their bears whilst they are planning the heist, and then telling them they can always flashback back here through the heist, to get them into the flow I then say, ‘so how do you arrive at Bearatomi plaza.

For the story, I wanted our bears heist to sit alongside the main story of Die Hard, so I created a list of the main plot points of Die Hard:

  • When bears make it to vault, the REAL terrorists arrive
  • Truck arrives in garage and they shut down the elevators and lock the garage down
  • They go and take hostages
  • They start interrogating joe takagi
  • They send a small team to the vaults
  • They go about breaking in to the vaults
  • Small teams are all about the other floors, setting things up and preparing weapons
  • Meanwhile, depending on whether the bear have run into john mclane, at this point, john alerts the authorities by sending a body through a window and shooting up a police car
  • Police and fbi arrive
  • Try and negotiate
  • Police cut the power
  • Police storm the building,from the bottom floor, are all killed unless the bears get involved
  • The terrorists take all the money, and the honey
  • The terrorists start taking all the hostages to the roof
  • The FBI start shooting at the terrorists
  • The roof of the building blows up
  • Depending on what has appended the terrorists try to escape
  • John kills Hans

Now the point of this isn’t to hit all these, its just there to remind me what happens in Die Hard incase I need to move the plot along in game. You should of course be reactive to the chaos your players are causing and adapt accordingly.

As ever with Honey Heist I’d encourage you to do the ‘extra bits’ like roll for your bear clothing and human beliievability score, it all adds to the feel of the game :)

How did it go?

Really well, my players wanted to do ‘all the die hard things’ … climb through vents, murder John Mclane for having an affair with Holly Bear-nero, walk over smashed glass, murder terrorists, jump out the Bear-atomi plaza riding a sports car careering towards the ground missing the bouncy castle you placed to catch you… all the usual stuff.

"A drawing of a car falling beside a skyscraper."