Saturday Night Shadows (a Game Design Pitch)

Before I can talk about Saturday Night Shadows, I need to talk about Satasupe.

Satasupe, short for "Saturday Night Special", is a scenario-driven procedural sandbox RPG designed by Kawashima Touichirou and Hayami Rasenjin and about a dozen other people. Inspired by Iwai Shunji's 1996 film Swallowtail specifically, and by an entire zeitgeist of late 20th century Asian crimesploitation dramas more generally, players take on the role of "Asianpunks," petty criminals who band together and do what they can to get by in the slums of a multi-ethnic, alternate-history Osaka.

So what is Saturday Night Shadows, then? If you haven't already guessed, it's a port of Shadowrun's setting over to Satasupe's ruleset. There are two main reasons (plus one, special, hidden reason!) why I would want to do such a thing, and like basically every attempt ever to play Shadowrun using anything other than one of Shadowrun's seven different official rules editions, it's because of a fundamental dissatisfaction with those rules.( Read more... )