Pyramid Pick: Demon City Shinjuku: Role-Playing Game and Resource Book

Pyramid Pick

Demon City Shinjuku: Role-Playing Game and Resource Book

Published by Guardians of Order

Written by David L. Pulver (with Mark C. MacKinnon, Jeff Mackintosh, Karen A. McLarney)

150 pages, $19.95

In 1988 the anime feature film Makai Toshi Shinjuku was released in Japan. Based on a novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi (a Japanese SF/Horror author), Shinjuku told the story of Kyoya, a young student of the mystic combat art of Nempo.

Ten years before the film begins, Kyoya's father (a Nempo master himself) attempted to prevent Levih Rah (a Nempo master who had turned to evil) from summoning demonic powers to conquer the Earth. He dies in the attempt, but not before he disrupts Levih Rah's spell. Instead of conquering all of humanity in a single blow, Rah is only able to summon his demonic horde to a localized area . . . the Shinjuku district of downtown Tokyo. A massive earthquake wreaks devastation across dozens of city blocks, and Rah begins to prepare for the day when his dreams of conquest will reach true fruition. Now, a decade later, Kyoya must venture into this modern city of the damned, and finish what his father started . . .

Several years after the film's original release, Central Park Media translated it into English as Demon City Shinjuku. In America, as in Japan before it, Shinjuku quickly became a classic of both its medium and genre. And now, twelve years later, Guardians of Order has presented us with the Demo n City Shinjuku Roleplaying Game . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.




Article publication date: September 15, 2000


Copyright © 2000 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.