Longshot City is Live (and i am not dead)

I’m finally at the end of the last project I posted about back in 2019—Longshot City, a stand-alone superhero RPG built on the chassis of games like Troika! and Fighting Fantasy.

The Kickstarter is currently underway (funded in 20 minutes!). The box set contains everything I wanted for my own home game—paper minis, GM screen, custom dice, a sick patch for my vest, and plenty more with a box to put it all in.

That’s been the theme of this whole process. This isn’t the game I thought people would want (though I hope they do), it’s the game I wanted. I ran an open table playtest campaign for close to three years, trying out the different archetypes and NPCs, seeing what works best for me and rewriting powers as I went. At this point Jarrett Crader of Space Penguin Ink was still editing at Melsonia, and helped with early development. This game is fine-tuned to keep me grinning like an idiot at the table.

As anyone who’s tried to turn a binder full of houserules into a cohesive game knows, the hardest part is translating your work into something anyone can use. To that end I’ve gone back and forth on the wording with Jared Sinclair until my eyes bled. I also included advice on running the game including how to set up and run three different campaign structures, all of which can be used with any open-ended RPG. 

I also filled the role of art director for this book. In this case that mostly means two things; supervising Meredith Silver’s layout work and providing her with a style guide and any needed guidance, and hiring and assigning illustrations to artists.

This game is designed not to emulate any particular tone, but to embrace the variety and weirdness of the superhero genre, and it was important to me that the art reflect that. I hired three artists with wildly different styles: JeCorey Holder who I worked with on Academies of the Arcane, Evelyn Moreau who I’ve been wanting to work with for like a decade, and Boson Au who I’ve never worked with before and definitely will again. There were times when I was worried about tying it all together, but I honestly couldn’t be happier with the end result.

I recently did an interview about the game for Logar the Barbarian’s (of Wizards and Wobblies) new podcast, the Hobos Collective, that just got posted today.

I’m also set to do a Q&A on the RandomWorlds Discord server that will be posted in a bunch of places in a couple days. Links to appear when it happens. EDIT: yeah this happened like a week ago now here it is.

If you want to talk about Longshot City or Troika! or whatever really, the easiest place to find me online is Melsonia’s Discord server.