City of Mist Fortune Row: a heist in 18 pages
Fortune Row is an 18-page PDF district for City of Mist, sold by Son of Oak Game Studio at 9.95 dollars. It is a casino quarter where luck is a commodity somebody is hoarding, it ships with one playable heist and a generator for building more, and it does nothing on its own: the core game is a prerequisite. Buy it if you already run City of Mist and want a heist arc. If you want more than this one district, the pricing section below explains why the standalone purchase is the wrong door to walk through.
What 9.95 dollars actually buys
Eighteen pages, digital only. There is no standalone print edition.
Son of Oak lists the contents as several explorable locations, a one-shot case, a heist generator, a set of Mythoi built around fortune and cunning, and a cast of allies and antagonists. Two locations are named in the product copy: the Zodiac Casino Hotel, described as lavish and magical, and the Snake Eyes parlor, where a character can bet on anything in the world. Two NPCs are named: Madam Bellwether, and Xaviar Perez, billed as the ever-surprising Wild Card.
The Mythoi span, in the publisher’s own framing, runs from pickpocket gremlins to manifestations of the zodiacs. That range matters more than it looks. A gremlin lifting wallets and a walking constellation are not the same size of problem, and a district that holds both gives an MC somewhere to escalate to across a run of sessions instead of burning the setting out in one evening.
The premise is the best thing in it
The pitch is that luck itself is being hoarded and regulated in Fortune Row. That single conceit is what you are paying for, and it is a genuinely good one.
Most gambling settings in tabletop games treat the casino as scenery: a place where a scene happens, with dice standing in for dice. Making luck a controlled substance turns the scenery into the plot. If somebody owns the supply, somebody else is being starved of it, and the question of who is unlucky this week stops being flavour and becomes a thing players can investigate, steal, or redistribute. The one-shot case included in the book runs on exactly that logic: a casino heist pulled to avoid literally running out of luck. That is a heist with a clock built into its premise rather than bolted on.
The surrounding texture holds up too. The district reads as low-crime and lightly policed, which is precisely the cover that lets con artists work the floor and lets heist crews case a Mythically-secured casino without anybody official noticing. A neighbourhood that looks safe because the dangerous people have agreed to keep it quiet is a better noir setting than one that looks dangerous.
The generator is the reason to buy, not the case
At eighteen pages, Fortune Row cannot compete on volume, and it does not try. The most valuable thing in it is the heist generator, a tool both the players and the MC can use to build their own jobs.
This is the correct design decision at this page count. A single written case is one evening; if the group enjoys it, the book is spent. A generator is a renewable source of the same kind of evening. Judge the product on the tool and the district, not on the one-shot, because the one-shot is the demonstration and the generator is the thing you keep using.
That framing also sets the honest expectation. Fortune Row is not a campaign. It is a location plus a procedure, and if your group wants a written arc with a plotted beginning and end, this is not the shape of book that delivers one.
It also leaves the MC holding some work. Eighteen pages covering a district, a case, a generator, a bestiary of Mythoi and a supporting cast means none of those five things is exhaustive. Two named NPCs is a seed, not a population, and the moment players adopt a bartender or a pit boss who was never written down, the improvising is yours. That is normal for a supplement at this size and price, but it is worth knowing before you count on the book to carry a session unaided.
You need the core game
Fortune Row is a district supplement and nothing else. It assumes you own City of Mist and know how to run it.
If you do not, the entry points from the same publisher are The Starter Box at 39.95 dollars and The Player’s Guide at 44.95 dollars, with the larger Core Set at 139.95 dollars and the Ultimate Set at 219.95 dollars for groups buying the whole line at once. The core game is also carried by the usual retailers.
The system, if City of Mist is new to you
City of Mist runs on Powered by the Apocalypse. Players describe an action, the MC decides which move it triggers, and the outcome comes off 2d6: 10 or higher is a clean success, 7 to 9 succeeds with a cost or complication, 6 or lower hands the MC the initiative.
What distinguishes it from other PbtA games is that characters have no numerical statistics. They are built from tags, which are short descriptive phrases covering abilities, gear, relationships and flaws. Relevant power tags add to the roll, relevant weakness tags subtract from it, and the total decides how much a character can bring to bear on any given problem. A character is therefore good at whatever their description makes them good at, in every kind of scene, rather than good at a column of numbers that only applies in combat.
Layered on top is the Mythos and Logos split. Every character is a Rift: an ordinary person carrying a mythological power that is slowly taking them over. Leaning into the Mythos makes them stronger and less human; holding onto the Logos keeps the job, the flat and the relationships intact but caps what they can do. That tension is the engine of the game, and it is why a district book works here at all. A neighbourhood in City of Mist is not just a map, it is where the Logos side of every character lives, which means anything that threatens the district threatens the mundane half of the party by default.
Fortune Row sits well against that. A district where luck is rationed is a direct attack on ordinary people’s ordinary lives, which is the register City of Mist is tuned for.
The pricing is where the decision actually gets made
Standalone, Fortune Row is 9.95 dollars for eighteen pages. Taken alone that is fair, in the range these small PDF supplements normally occupy.
The complication is that Fortune Row is not sold only as a standalone. It is included in Local Legends, which collects multiple districts and costs 29.95 dollars as a PDF or 44.95 dollars in print, and it is included again in the Vigilante Set at 99.95 dollars.
So the sum only works out one way. If Fortune Row is the single district you want, buy it on its own and stop. If you expect to want two more districts later, buying them one at a time costs about the same as the collection that already contains all of them, and you end up with fewer. Work out which of those you are before spending anything, because this is the sort of purchase people make three times without checking.
Against Blades in the Dark
The obvious comparison, now that the heist framing is on the table, is Blades in the Dark. Both are narrative-first, both are supernatural, both are about crews doing crimes in a city with something wrong underneath it.
They divide on structure. Blades hands you a crew as a unit with an operational identity and a full apparatus for planning scores, managing heat and fighting factions. It is a heist game top to bottom. City of Mist gives you individuals bound together by mythic coincidence and neighbourhood ties, and a heist is something that can happen to them rather than the thing they are for.
That difference is the whole recommendation. If your group wants heists as a way of life, Blades already does this and does it better, and an eighteen-page district will not close the gap. If your group is running City of Mist and wants one heist arc inside a game that is fundamentally about identity, Fortune Row is a cheap and well-aimed way to get one.
Verdict
Eight out of ten, with the caveat that this is a small supplement judged as a small supplement. The premise is sharp, the generator earns its place, the two named venues and two named NPCs give an MC enough of a foothold to start, and 9.95 dollars is the right price for it.
The marks come off for scope rather than quality. Eighteen pages is one district and one demonstration case, it cannot function without the core game, and the bundle pricing means most buyers who like it will end up paying for it a second time inside Local Legends. Worth it if you run City of Mist and want a heist. Skip it if you are shopping for a heist game, because that is a different purchase entirely.
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