Shifters - trans-dimensional occult horror

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.

USING SHIFTERS WITH YZE

Shifters sits very comfortably alongside the Year Zero Engine, particularly the modern, grounded survival-horror lineage seen in Twilight: 2000 (4th Edition) and Micro2K. The design heritage is close enough that the game can be run with minimal conversion, while still preserving the tone of fragility, attrition, and existential risk that defines the Gloom.

There are only two meaningful mechanical differences to account for. First, the target number shifts from 5 to 6, in line with standard Year Zero practice. Any die showing a 6 counts as a success, with additional sixes providing extra effect as normal. This slightly narrows the success window, which actually reinforces Shifters’ themes of uncertainty and marginal survival.

Second, the Nudge mechanic is replaced by Pushing. Instead of a subtle metaphysical adjustment, characters may Push a roll in the familiar Year Zero manner: re-rolling failed dice at the cost of stress, damage, or narrative consequence, as appropriate to the situation. In Shifters, Pushing represents desperation, overextension, or forcing the self to stay coherent in an environment that actively wants you to dissolve. Pushing in the Gloom should almost always carry a price, whether physical harm, Anchor strain, or unwanted attention.

In all other respects, the game can be played directly using the Year Zero framework found in Twilight: 2000 (4th Edition) or Micro2K. Attributes map cleanly, skills function as written, and conditions like stress, fatigue, and injury translate naturally into the slow erosion of Heart, Flesh, and Mind. The result is a version of Shifters that feels harsh, grounded, and brutally consistent, where survival is possible, but certainty never is.