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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.
The first point of dissatisfaction is that Shadowrun players have never been particularly keen on low-power games. Nobody wants to play the SR equivalent of a ratcatcher, and if they say they do they still find some way to justify giving their character extra initiative passes (fundamental to catching those rats, I suppose). Shadowrun is rarely ever "high tech, low life"--at best it's power fantasy poverty tourism. This isn't a dig at people who have successfully played Shadowrun games that actually achieve said ideal, it's just a general truism, and I feel like a major cause is that Shadowrun's rules always dangle so many shiny toys in front of you, and people justifiably want to play with them. So, ditch a lot of that.
The second point of dissatisfaction is probably going to sound silly to most people, but hopefully resonates with somebody else out there who isn't me (over the years I've seen this complaint repeated, in various forms, about not just Shadowrun but lots of traditional RPGs; I know I'm not the only one): it's the disconnect between interest in the specific setting(s) of Shadowrun and the potential for players to meaningfully pursue that interest in play. By "specific setting" I don't mean the Sixth World setting of Shadowrun in general, but the specific cities that the game's setting supplements take as their focus (Seattle, Hong Kong, Bug City, etc...), highlighting individual locales, businesses, points of interest, power brokers, and the like.
Historically, setting books have usually been treated as the sole purview of the GM, something that they alone are meant to mine for ideas and inspiration, because traditionally the important locations of an adventure have been relegated almost uniquely to the domain of the GM and their game prep responsinilities. When a GM introduces a bit of lore from one of these books, it's a crapshoot whether the players will recognise or appreciate it in the same way the GM does; and even if you have a lore-hungry player who likes to consume this kind of setting information, the traditional division of responsibilities and authorities in these sorts of games often prevent that player from meaningfully and productively utilising that interest for play.
One of the unique aspects of Satasupe is that it comes with a collection of maps of the various Osaka city wards, and which are meant to be used in play. They include keyed locations of interest in the city that the players can visit and utilise when playing out individual scenes, and which can correlate to various keywords that are part of the game's mechanical framework, list items that are available for purchase if the location happens to be a commercial one, and even possess unique abilities that the players can use to help them achieve their goals.
This attempt at encouraging the players to proactively use the setting is something that Shadowrun itself has always flirted with through the use of Contacts, but I've always felt that the idea was never really used to its full potential. And there's always the potential for a mismatch in Player-GM interest or knowledge, which may make an attempt to explore the setting more deeply through the usage of Contacts fall flat. Hopefully using something like Satasupe's system to more concretely inject the setting into the gameplay can help iron out those sorts of wrinkles.
(The third, hidden reason is that I think Satasupe is a mechanically fascinating game, like basically all of Kawashima's games, and I want a way to share it with people that doesn't involve distributing an unlicensed translation or having to take on the burden of being the one and only person running this game in English for anyone who is curious about it).
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.
The first point of dissatisfaction is that Shadowrun players have never been particularly keen on low-power games. Nobody wants to play the SR equivalent of a ratcatcher, and if they say they do they still find some way to justify giving their character extra initiative passes (fundamental to catching those rats, I suppose). Shadowrun is rarely ever "high tech, low life"--at best it's power fantasy poverty tourism. This isn't a dig at people who have successfully played Shadowrun games that actually achieve said ideal, it's just a general truism, and I feel like a major cause is that Shadowrun's rules always dangle so many shiny toys in front of you, and people justifiably want to play with them. So, ditch a lot of that.
The second point of dissatisfaction is probably going to sound silly to most people, but hopefully resonates with somebody else out there who isn't me (over the years I've seen this complaint repeated, in various forms, about not just Shadowrun but lots of traditional RPGs; I know I'm not the only one): it's the disconnect between interest in the specific setting(s) of Shadowrun and the potential for players to meaningfully pursue that interest in play. By "specific setting" I don't mean the Sixth World setting of Shadowrun in general, but the specific cities that the game's setting supplements take as their focus (Seattle, Hong Kong, Bug City, etc...), highlighting individual locales, businesses, points of interest, power brokers, and the like.
Historically, setting books have usually been treated as the sole purview of the GM, something that they alone are meant to mine for ideas and inspiration, because traditionally the important locations of an adventure have been relegated almost uniquely to the domain of the GM and their game prep responsinilities. When a GM introduces a bit of lore from one of these books, it's a crapshoot whether the players will recognise or appreciate it in the same way the GM does; and even if you have a lore-hungry player who likes to consume this kind of setting information, the traditional division of responsibilities and authorities in these sorts of games often prevent that player from meaningfully and productively utilising that interest for play.
One of the unique aspects of Satasupe is that it comes with a collection of maps of the various Osaka city wards, and which are meant to be used in play. They include keyed locations of interest in the city that the players can visit and utilise when playing out individual scenes, and which can correlate to various keywords that are part of the game's mechanical framework, list items that are available for purchase if the location happens to be a commercial one, and even possess unique abilities that the players can use to help them achieve their goals.
This attempt at encouraging the players to proactively use the setting is something that Shadowrun itself has always flirted with through the use of Contacts, but I've always felt that the idea was never really used to its full potential. And there's always the potential for a mismatch in Player-GM interest or knowledge, which may make an attempt to explore the setting more deeply through the usage of Contacts fall flat. Hopefully using something like Satasupe's system to more concretely inject the setting into the gameplay can help iron out those sorts of wrinkles.
(The third, hidden reason is that I think Satasupe is a mechanically fascinating game, like basically all of Kawashima's games, and I want a way to share it with people that doesn't involve distributing an unlicensed translation or having to take on the burden of being the one and only person running this game in English for anyone who is curious about it).