Guest Blog 2
With Christian Kessler from Moon Rat Conspiracy and Melsonia Arts Counsel
CK and I have been friends for what feels like a decade. He's one of my best friends, and we share many of the same interests and hobbies like comic books. I’d like to write and illustrate my own comics, and he always offers me advice, references, or listens. His latest release is a standalone superhero RPG based on Troika! I’m talking about Longshot City again!
Maybe you’ve seen CK on Discord using the name Captain Blowfish. Or perhaps you were at the legendary TTRPG convention Galgoricon and played a game with him or me. He started a rave there. We were definitely both drinking and the event organizer had to step in. There was a riot, and this guy was jumping across tables and rapping. His name was something like ‘lil snowball’.
Anyway, did you know that you can’t sell your books on drivethrurpgdotcom if you say things like ‘ACAB’.
That’s what CK’s new adventure for Longshot City is saying. Specifically to the cop city built near Atlanta (in real life).
(i just cut n paste what he sent me below)
IF YOU BUILD IT WE WILL BURN IT
A Longshot City Adventure
Playtest #4
CAST
New Guy Grant as Isekai
Young Angus as Tempest
Tony Jaguar as Delta Wave
Spooky Rusty as the Creature
The Longshot City Police Department has spent the past few years trying to build a Potemkin suburb where they can train to more effectively suppress free speech, brutalize innocent people, and terrorize the population in general. The official name for the proposed facility is the LSCPD Public Safety Training Center, but most people simply refer to it as Cop City. They’ve met intense resistance from local citizens both within and without the legal system, which has stalled the project considerably, and could conceivably put an end to it.
Our intrepid heroes had all heard of a massive festival planned to support the forest defenders, which is set to culminate in a protest march on the construction site. They met up in the packed parking lot and headed directly into the massive crowd (at least a couple thousand people). There was a big temporary stage set up—the act at that point was a hardcore band called Pelvic Chainsaw.
They engaged in some mingling and bit of light drug dealing, they realized there wasn’t much to learn from random festival-goers that they didn’t already know, and headed over to the combination information/medical tent. It was located at the near edge of a large tent city.
Isekai, having read parts of this ahead of time (see pregen description), knew that in addition to the protest march there would be a second squad-sized element, moving swiftly and silently to the construction site from another direction. The group asked about how to hook up with this second group. A moment of suspicion was relieved by a brief sizing up of these weirdos, who no self-respecting police force would ever hire. They pointed our heroes up a short trail toward what the activists called the Living Room, a wide clearing with a large fire pit and eating utensils stored on-site.
It couldn’t have been more than a few hundred feet from the stage, but the surrounding treeline blocked out the music in the Living Room, leaving only the sounds of nature. There was a large group of activists working diligently to feed around 2,000 people with hot dogs, burgers, and vegan chili. There was also a smaller group at the opposite edge of the clearing from the trail dressed mostly in a variety of camouflage patterns and wearing tactical backpacks.
Our heroes boldly approached, announcing that they were there to fuck up shit up and had heard these were the folks to talk to. A few of the forest defenders briefly discussed whether to trust them or not, one of them introduced himself as Skuzz and told them to meet back here at sunset. Before splitting up, the team asked Skuzz for some more specific information about the construction site—there’d been a recon of the site two days ago, and all that was there at this point was the clearcutting of an area the size of a small town, the installation of a double-wide command trailer up on the hill, a gravel road, and a couple foundations. Oh, and a sign reading “Welcome to the LSCPD Public Safety Training Center—”
They wandered back to the stage and took a bootleg recording of the current act, an EDM artist called Minister Prime. After that, a series of speakers took to the stage to get the crowd ready to march on Cop City.
The first speakers were there to share the history of the land. This wasn’t just a National Park, the land had also been sacred to the Cree Nation for thousands of years. By the mid-1800s, a plantation had been built there, and the new firing range was to be built atop a slave graveyard.
The next speaker had grown up in Longshot City and been influential in the Black Lives Matter movement for years. He spoke of police militarization, and led the crowd in Saying Their Names, from Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown to Sandra Bland and George Floyd.
Next up was a young lawyer, there to fill everyone in on the democratic and legal resistance efforts that had been ongoing since the project was first publicly proposed. A ballot initiative led to a wildly successful vote to ban the project from being built on public land, which was challenged in court by the police department. She explained that their goal was to keep the case tied up in the justice system for so long that they could finish construction before a decisive ruling was reached, and that this made extralegal delaying tactics essential. At the same time, it was crucial to make sure people understand that these aren’t just a bunch of angry kids lashing out blindly—the movement had already exhausted every legally sanctioned method of resistance available.
The final speaker spoke briefly and in legally short-of-incitement terms about diversity of tactics. The LSCPD had to work with civilian contractors to build Cop City. The contractors have all pulled out of their contracts, citing sabotage and the accompanying financial loss, and the police department’s failure to hold up their end of the bargain by providing security. The LSCPD found new contractors, and these new companies have also withdrawn one by one as they faced the same problem.
Then he gave a brief rundown on logistics for the protest itself, after which all the other speakers and performers got up on stage to lead the massive crowd in a chant of “IF YOU BUILD IT WE WILL BURN IT!” But the sun was beginning to set, and the group headed back to meet the forest defenders in the Living Room.
They set out on a series of narrow game trails, following a fast-moving stream up to a waterfall, going out of their way to find a safer, smoother slope around it. Isekai, presumably on drugs, was wearing glowsticks and dancing the entire time.
Unsurprisingly, he was the first to be targeted by the sniper who was lying in wait.
He was saved by the dance as it turns out, since the bullet hit the tree behind him, right where his head had been, as he limboed under some low hanging branches.
The Bloodhound fired a single shot, momentarily revealing his position, but immediately faded back into the foliage. Delta Wave charged him but he was gone by the time they got to where they’d seen the muzzle flash. Creature took a bullet. Finally Tempest activated his elemental form power, grabbed the Bloodhound and flew about a hundred feet into the air. The Bloodhound drew his 1911 and fired a couple point blank shots into Tempest’s side, but was dropped from a height no ordinary human could survive. Isekai stripped him of his body armor and pistol.
Skuzz and the other activists were incredibly into this. None of them had been hit and the supers had taken the sniper out in less than a minute, so their morale was especially high at this point.
They passed the shredded remains of a tent city from the year before. Skuzz informed the heroes that this was a forest defender encampment a year ago, until the police found and destroyed it. They killed someone for allegedly shooting at them first, but an independent forensic investigation found that the dead activist had never fired a shot. The party stopped for a bit here so that the forest defenders could prepare the less stable explosive compounds that wouldn’t have been safe to hike through the forest with.
The group left the safety of the woodline to find themselves in a suburban backyard, with a half dozen houses arranged in a cul-de-sac layout. The neighborhood was deserted except for a squad of police dressed in SWAT gear breaking into one of the houses and a senior instructor evaluating them. The cops took no notice of the PCs or the forest defenders, as if they couldn’t see or hear our heroes. When they were all inside the house, Tempest grabbed a molotov from one of the activists and threw it into the living room, which burned but was not consumed. The cops continued their training exercise, taking no notice of the fire.
At this point Tempest decided to check out the light in the second story room of one of the other houses. Peeking in the window, they saw a meticulously groomed man with long blonde hair—Luke Apostle, son of John Apostle the psychic televangelist. Delta Wave and the other heroes rushed up the stairs as Tempest and Luke started fighting. Luke Apostle seemed to split into 5 mirror images, but Delta Wave used their psychic ability to detect the real Luke and attack him directly. At this point he seemed to blink out of existence, as if he was teleporting away.
As the only flyer in the group, Tempest did a quick recon of the area. The entire training facility had apparently been completed in the two days since the forest defenders had last been there, defying all reason. There was a main street with a variety of businesses, a high school, an apartment complex, an outdoor firing range (this was built directly on top of a slave graveyard), and a command trailer up on the hill.
When the by now very confused group moved west to “Main Street,” there was another squad of officers gathered near a coffee shop, modeled after one in town that had provided sanctuary to protestors during the crackdowns of 2020. The cops, wearing gas masks, smashed the faux business’s front window and fired a volley of tear gas grenades through it, before charging in and arresting everyone inside.
Isekai, who had the ability to manipulate luck and shape reality due to having been sucked into a CYOA-style book about the event, called Luke to meet them where they were. Apostle used a pistol combined with a variety of illusions—mirror images, tricking PCs into attacking their own allies, turning invisible, inflicting vertigo and blindness on the PCs. They still managed to kill him with solid teamwork and some lucky rolls in just a couple of rounds. As his life faded, so did the illusory training facility. The PCs helped the forest defenders destroy what remained—the command trailer, the foundations, and the construction equipment that had been left on-site.
Over at the main protest, one hundred and fifty people were arrested and charged with terrorism, and the festival itself was shut down by even more police, including a giant artillery robot. Maybe a larger group of heroes could have split up and protected more people, but that didn’t happen this session.
“Here’s my character sheet from testing playing,” rusty said in Gchat.
True Life TTRPG. TLTTRPG.
I recommend having people guest post on your blog. If you’d like to guest post or have me review your zines, by all means, shoot me an email: contact@spookyjaguar.com
I’ll be covering the new Liminal Horror Twizted Classics Jam hannen on itch and specifically covering the best new albums to Jam to Liminal Horror to of 2024 next time. adios
hehe - rusty
my unsolicited writing tip for the day is to write one full page about whateverthefuckgamethingyoubeenthinkingaboutbutneverhaveyouwrittenanythingforityet without lifting your pen once. escape.