Longshot city – Saving something, one hex-sized part of the city at a time

I’m always in the market for a neat superhero game, and Longshot City, based on Troika, seemed to tick most of my boxes. Simple system, yet diverse archetypes is what the game seems to promise, and it delivers pretty much from the get go. But first, let’s talk about the book.

The book feels good and well produced, the hard cover giving the thin book an air of luxury. The colours on the cover pop against the black frame, and the illustration promises a lot of action. The book is 71 or pages long. Inside the front cover is a map of Longshot city, showing places like Shadyside, Harbor, Ryder stadium, Old town and Bayside mall. At least my imagination starts ticking away straight away when I see it.

There’s a really short intro with safety tools, and then it’s straight on to character creation, which takes up roughly 30 pages of the book. The possible archetypes are richly illustrated in full colour and black and white, splash pages, quarter pages, full pages, you name it, the book has it.

The rules section takes up another ten pages, followed by three pages about running the game.

The rest of the book, twenty pages or so, are filled with Rogues, and the damage and K.O. tables at the end.

I really liked the character creation. Letting the players have two choices on archetypes (rolling a d66 and deciding which is which after the roll) laid a reasonable amount of decisionmaking on my players, while still creating a weird as hell party. Origins are decided on a matrix, and if you are a bit unlucky with the dice like we were, you can get a bunch of people with the same origins. Or you might like it, we ended up deciding that the two characters had trained with the same hermit.

The system itself was quick and neat, combat was decently fast paced, but I was not a fan of the initiative system. Pulling chits from a bag just led to a bunch of feel bad moments with players not getting to act for a long time, so I started fudging those. But other than that, the system helped carrying the story forward, and kept out of the way when it wasn’t needed.

What I would have appreciated a bit more help with in the book would be a template of some sort to create a rogue, and a way to kinda understand their relative power level at a glance. As it is now, just looking a description paired with an image fails to give an immediate understanding if this is someone that looks cool and sucks, or looks like a derp and is actually a monster in combat.

All in all I did enjoy the short campaign I ran, and look forward to picking Longshot city up again sometime in the future and run another game.

But I’ll probably prep a bit more if that’s the case.