The Shifters ashcan is going live in a few days. Free for Patreon subbers but otherwise available on DrivethruRPG and itch.io

Shifters is a modern occult horror roleplaying game about people who can step sideways out of reality and into the Gloom, a decaying, fog-choked layer of existence that presses against our own world like a bruise.

The world everyone knows is not a lie, but it is incomplete. Beneath streets, homes, hospitals, and offices lies another version of the same places, rotted by memory, trauma, and unresolved human suffering. This is the Gloom. It remembers everything we try to forget. Some people discover, through accident or obsession, that they can cross into it. They become Shifters.

In the Gloom, ordinary objects unfold into nightmares. A door becomes a mouth. A phone becomes a choir of unsent goodbyes. A pedestrian crossing button beats like a heart. These are Residues, indestructible wounds in reality that quietly ruin lives in the real world and draw the attention of vast, alien entities known as the Infadha. When the Infadha arrive, they solve problems by erasing entire regions of existence, with catastrophic consequences back home.

Shifters hunt Residues not because they are heroes, but because no one else can see them, touch them, or survive their destruction. Each hunt risks exposure, injury, and the slow erosion of identity. Stay too long and you become a Wight, something hollow that belongs to the Gloom more than the world you came from.

Shifters is about urban dread, moral cost, and existential horror. It draws inspiration from Silent Hill, Night Watch, The Langoliers, and the intimate body horror of Clive Barker. It is a game about walking through familiar places that no longer recognise you, making impossible choices, and deciding what parts of yourself you are willing to lose in order to keep the world from tearing itself open.