A SHIFT Compendium

I’ve once again come back to the game of SHIFT, and although it’s not fully completed yet (the Kickstarter is still ongoing for another three weeks), I just can’t seem to get enough of how easy this system is to customize… and obviously play! Maybe it’s the intuitive shifting mechanic, or the fact that I get to use all, most of my dice? But let’s talk about World Sparks and what my newest plan for world domination includes, shall we?

World Sparks: A Seed!

A world spark, is an idea that’s ready to be played. It has a number of sections that have already been fleshed out so that a Game Master can directly insert the world spark into his or her campaign! Or said another way, a world spark is simply the seed idea of a campaign.

So a World Spark begins with a concept, or several paragraphs describing the setting of the idea, or world. There’s also several building blocks that consist of the names of the Core Traits that will be used (yes, you can change and even add or subtract the number of Traits (Stats) the game uses!), the ease of travel configuration, and how easy it is for resting and recovery of Traits. Next we have one of possible several locations that are defined, complete with landmarks and important Non-Playing Characters and some plot hooks.

But we’re not done yet, because world sparks also have their own Focus Traits, or rather, examples of Traits that Characters could either use directly or Players could modify these to to fit their own character concepts within the World. There’s also Pack Traits, something like a backpack full of equipment that a character might receive. Vehicle Traits can also be added, because who wants to just walk around everywhere? Keep in mind that these aren’t just pieces of a vehicle, but could be entire cars, jet planes, or advanced high-grade militarized assault mecha!

There’s just two more things that a World Spark requires, and that’s Techniques and Adversaries. A technique is like a special ability. These are designed to automatically work, but have an extremely limited number of times they can be used. Some techniques can have multiple options to choose from, and a technique can be either mechanically operable or influence the narrative of the story. Adversaries are the Big Bad Boss foes of the World. These are defined to have a Power and Scale as well as a lengthy description of their motivation and personality— if they’re even a living being. Adversaries are simply challenges. So a Bad Storm could be considered an Adversary, or even Aunt Mildred’s Sour Krout Soup…

Let’s grow an Imagination Forest!

So now that I’ve explained what World Sparks are, allow me to ramble on about my idea. Creating World Sparks is actually kind of relaxing! I know that I’m going to eventually get around to playing with myself in a solo play environment someday on the subway or bus, or maybe even get lucky and score a couple of like-minded friends to play together with.

My plan is to create a book of World Sparks. And originally, as a shower thought, I was going to make a book. But then as I was drying my hair this morning, I thought, but I’ve got this SubStack thing, I can just publish my Sparks there! And because the creators of SHIFT have an implementation of The Open Gaming License for their product, I’m allowed to monetize this project.

What I’m going to do is start publishing out a fully completed World Spark— my hope eventually is once per week. When I’ve reached a significant number of them, I plan on taking the best ideas and adding some awesome artwork to them and combining them into a published book. I will admit that starting out, it’s a lot of work, only because this is something pretty new, and there is a pretty strict template that needs to be adhered to, but once the full rule set comes out, there will be less fumbling around and I should be able to crank out a World Spark weekly. At least, that’s my thinking.

And that’s not all I can do with this concept. Each world spark currently appears to be around four to five pages long— a good Spark has a lot of content contained within it! I could go on to fully create main Player Characters to fit into this world— granted, most people would probably use these characters as examples, but… I’d have a ready made adventure all set up so that a group of friends could sit down and play within five minutes of meeting up!

Finally, there’s always the possibility of mixing things up. Have a cast of 37 Adversaries? Grab ‘em from the book! This could lead towards all sorts of mischief and chaos. The point is to go have some fun!