So, recently, I have stumbled on old "Satanic Panic" videos for cops and concerned citizens from the 80s and 90s.

Law Enforcement Guide To Satanic Cults, circa 1994, that includes a speaker with a mullet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt_T5EF-uzU

In this 80s video, the speaker claims that studying Zen and ninjitsu lead him to dungeons and dragons, and the devil: https://youtu.be/oKzae5Vl20E?t=12m5s

It occurred to me that Shadowrun would be the ideal system to run a campaign set in the 80s where the player characters are cops, community members, or investigators, and there are these goofy cults afoot. The kicker would be that the cults would be real, so the cult leader would be an actual mage or shaman, and maybe post-ritual some of the cult members would temporarily get physad powers or something, so that they would be extremely dangerous. They would train in ninjitsu so that you could have devil-ninjas plaguing small town America; maybe their physad powers would be balanced by the fact they all decided to stop using firearms. The idea would be to attempt the blending of survival horror with absurdist comedy.

One thing that appeals to me is how something like an evil mage, in a game world where everyone is a mundane, would be a formidable but not invincible opponent. If the mage is ready for you, or is coming after you, you're probably toast, and his astral perception and projection abilities would provide him tremendous recon powers once he knows someone is onto him. But at the same time, statistically speaking he can be defeated, and if you were to succeed in outsmarting him somehow it wouldn't be particularly difficult to just shoot him in the back or something like that. In order to address issues of meta-gaming, as the GM I would simply say that books in the local library on the occult outline what the players already know about magic in Shadowrun. I see it as being an interesting role-playing challenge, kind of like trying to outsmart or defeat a powerful litch.

Since the game would be set in the historical 80s, that also opens up a lot of room for creative approaches and thinking. Instead of the game world being defined by limited sourcebooks, instead, history is the sourcebook. The player characters can try anything that plausibly could have been attempted in the 80s in real life. There would be room for horror-type storytelling, extremely challenging battles, and commentary on the absurdity of society.

Of course, whenever I do anything with Shadowrun, I can't keep my sense of humor out of it, so I've already imagined the following pieces of period equipment in SR3 terms:

80s Guns

Wondernine (5M damage, SA, magazine capacity as you wish depending on model up to 18 rounds or so)
Police departments across the US have been recently ditching their trusty service revolvers for various 9mm handguns of European origin, having been wowed by the novel concept of double stacked magazines. At first enthusiastic about the so-called "wondernines", eventually they would come to realize that these sidearms seem to lack stopping power, plus having 18 rounds in the magazine isn't always desirable from a PR standpoint if this seems to encourage officers to bullet spam suspects.

1911 (6M damage, SA, magazine capacity 7+1 rounds)
The classic military sidearm has a light, crisp trigger pull and a low magazine capacity, so it's not generally in use by government agencies anymore, although it's popular with collectors and civilian competitive shooters. That being said, it has a legendary aura about it, which counts for something in the world of magic. +2 power versus Communists and Fascists.

Big Revolver (8M damage, SS, cylinder capacity 6 rounds)
A trusty American institution, the police tactical revolver has reached a historical apex of elegance, accuracy, and reliability, since it has just been discarded in favor of the Wondernine. This particular revolver is named after a snake and is made with pride by a legendary manufacturer. When police departments were using it as an official sidearm, they didn't generally load magnum ammunition into it, but now that it's a civilian collectible, go for it! The damage code reflects magnum ammunition; if used with .38 special use the Wondernine damage code.

Plastic 'Nam Rifle (9M damage, SA, FA, magazine capacity 20+1 or 30+1 rounds)
It was designed by a Stoner so it could be used in the jungles of Southeast Asia while stoners back home protested. By now it's as iconic as Superman in representing truth, justice, and the American way, and it may have triangular handguards. With a cyclic rate of fire of 650 rounds per minute, a single Full Auto fire action taking place during a 3 second combat turn may discharge up to 30 rounds or so, instead of the standard 10 round maximum. To encourage cinematically appropriate failure of this weapon system, use a computer dice roller so that each round fired has a 2% chance of causing a stoppage requiring a Complex Action to clear. If this happens more than a few times in a given campaign, conduct a Congressional inquiry.

OPTIONAL RULE:
Once per campaign, a character with a background reference to 'Nam may gain an additional initiative dice when using the Plastic 'Nam Rifle. In order to do this, the player must play back an iconic piece of popular music associated with the Vietnam War such as Paint It Black or The End ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRwwUZLV-IE ) and the bonus is in effect only while the song is playing. (So everyone better get through their turn quickly to let you roll as many initiatives as possible!) This is meant to be a reserved as a dramatic and cinematic turn-around when facing seemingly hopeless odds.


80s Electronics

Giant Cell Phone
If you want to be able to call people without quarters, you must use this phone, deploying the giant antenna first. When swung as an improvised weapon inflicts STR + 1 M stun. Be sure to say, "Hello Moto!" when it makes impact with some ninja's face.

May be swung by the extended antenna one time to gain a +1 reach bonus, but this rips off the antenna and disables the phone.


Apple II C
Want to be an elite "cyberpunk"? Just carry around this computer in a giant camping backpack so you can set it up in the field and do all kinds of nefarious things with 64 kilobytes of fury. Provided you can find a power outlet. Enables use of the Computers skill in the field. Unfortunately you also have to carry around the CRT monitor for the system to be usable.

The CRT monitor may be swung as an improvised weapon for STR D stun, but this breaks the monitor and disables the computer until another monitor can be procured.

Since this computer boots from 5 inch floppies, if the person carrying the computer ever gets set on fire, the floppies melt and the system is disabled until they can be replaced.

You could even throw in shapeshifters with the caveat you yourself set down awhile back.

liking the Satanic Panic angle...

are you thinking 1980s in SR cannon timeline, or just a game set in the 1980s using the SR rule set but not the SR timeline?

in the case of the former, aside from some immortal elves quietly doing there thing, you have a 1984 yakuza shake-up that didn't happen in our timeline, Chief Justice Warren Burger not stepping down in 1986 (setting the stage eventually for the Shiawase Decision when it's President Lynch appointing his replacement in 1994), at least one elf spike baby in 1987 (Liam O'Connor, later becomes a leader of the elven wing of the IRA, which forms Tír na nÓg), and the indictment of Vice President George H.W. Bush for Iran-Contra, leading to Michael Dukakis being the winner of the 1988 election...

SR cannon doesn't go into further detail, e.g. who the 1988 GOP nominee was, but in our timeline, 1988 GOP primary was a three-way race between Papa Bush (67.9%), Senator Bob Dole (19.2%) and the Reverend Pat Robertson (9.0%), imagine that if you really had indicted Papa Bush for Iran-Contra in 1987, there would be a lot more establishment Republicans besides Dole jumping into the fray, and Robertson would do better... and he's pretty much the poster child for 1980s-style Satanic Panic

the existence of magic-that-actually-works, before the awakening, could be hand waved away as a localized "burp" in manna akin to what causes the spike babies

(one other idea... if you want to tie your campaign to the canonical SR... a Lovecraftian cult that believes there are sleeping dragons lying around the Earth...)

My original idea was to set it in 80s reality and just take the existence of a real mage or physad for granted, as the basis for the scenario.

That being said, there's no reason it couldn't be done with the SR timeline, or with blending real and SR events and situations as you suggest. I appreciated your thoughts on the setting!

Fair enough, sometimes I feel so overwhelmed with the SR cannon (especially as I'm a 2E holdout and now have to contend with players googling and filling their heads with 3E, 4E and 5E drek I'm not using) I'm tempted to just take the basic idea of a cyberpunk-fantasy hybrid in the 2050s, but otherwise wholly my own setting, maybe using GURPS instead of the SR rules

Shadowrun owes so much to the late 1980s cyberpunk aesthetic though that a 1980s campaign makes more sense

Amusing campaign idea. I was reading your weapon damages and it wasn't until I got to the melee weapons that I realized it was 3rd ed damage codes (or maybe 2nd ed, they are basically interchangeable). I've been playing this game too long I think.
Are you going to dig up some of those old christian comics that are supposed to reveal the dangers of RPGs as an in game prop? Chick tracks I think they were called. Would add to the absurd comedy element I think. Might even offer you some campaign ideas as what is portrayed in the comics could actually be happening.

Naturally!

Dark Dungeons: http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0....asp?Store=True

You forgot MAC-10s and Uzis, especially among the drug dealers who happen to hang out at the parties where your youths congregate.*

Also, pretty much anyone can have the bonus trait PI (0 points) where police suddenly believe you. Patricia Pulling filed to be a PI in like... Indiana? where there are basically no requirements to meet. She used that as a club in pushing her findings to police departments.

For the rigger character, the VCR is implanted in the vehicle, and represents how much it can provide witty banter (as well as the TN bonus).

Mechanically the only big issue I've had with 'turning back the clock' is low initiative + few combatants generally makes pools a one-time dice drop and really shifts combat (I'm assuming you're using 2nd/3rd here). Probably the easiest fix is to limit dice pools to certain actions (like dodging) or lower the cap on how many dice can be used at once.


*I'm assuming here the cultists are teenage satanists rather than kindergartners. Or not.

Brilliant.

Also, 1980's portable computers: http://www.oldcomputers.net/ibm5155.html and http://www.oldcomputers.net/ibm5140.html

Add in some 80's futuristic uses for computers (Wargames, Electric Dreams) because reality isn't quite dumb enough.

I'm assuming only teenagers can use computers properly, and badassery is measured by how terrible your haircut is.

His Mullet is over 9000!!!

Yeah, I ran out of time and couldn't complete the MAC 10 and Uzis. They're definitely iconic and appropriate, though!

So, in terms of dice pools, I was thinking that since this would be kind of an experimental campaign anyway, instead of giving everyone a certain number of points and having them build a character, I'd rather ask them to make a plausible character for the setting but not worry about points. So, if someone decides they want to role play Patricia Pulling, they're not going to be rocking Quickness 6 and Submachineguns 6, or Exceptional Ability: Improvised Weapons. Like, that would be hilarious. The idea also being that if the evil mage incinerates everyone with a fire elemental that looks like the devil because the characters wrongly decided they could take him on toe to toe, people can just write out new characters and pick up on the story where they left off instead of spending lots of time doing build point accounting and having to assign themselves $20,000 worth of gear in historically accurate 80s items.

The only character type I can think of off the top of my head who might plausibly have something like Rifles 5 or Rifles 6 would be some kind of disconsolate Rambo-type drifter, and I imagine that such a character would also plausibly have a lot of flaws to compensate, and also probably wouldn't start the game in possession or a rifle. Maybe if the party got TPKed by a fire elemental the next batch of characters could be FBI agents investigating the bizarre crime, which would also be like a difficulty level adjustment by giving the party more combat skills and resources, but even then I might just expect for them to have Unarmed Combat 1-3, Pistols 3-5, and Submachineguns 3-5, and some soft body armor, if they're investigators and not the FBI HRT. So, if most of the skill levels initially seen in the game are lower, maybe more around 3 or so, then that caps the amount of pool dice that can be applied in any case.