The SHIVER Files

The Mass Incursion Anomaly changed everything. It cracked the fabric of reality in such a way that dimensional incursions were reported around the world. Creatures, beings, and other things entered the world and made the supernatural, long derided as superstition and ignorance, an undeniable reality. In response, the United Nations passed the United Nations Paranormal Act in 2020 and adopted a previously secret British organisation that had been investigating and dealing with the supernatural since the nineteenth century. This is the ‘Legion Against Nefarious and Clandestine Evils’, better known as L.A.N.C.E. Today the organisation is better funded and better equipped to fight the unknown and the uncanny like never before, but where it once operated in secret, now it is a publicly known organisation, forced to act in a transparent fashion. Some of its files remain classified and there are some things about the Mass Incursion Anomaly and some of the supernatural threats that mankind faces that L.A.N.C.E. continues to keep secret to avoid worldwide panic. With the change in its remit and with it becoming a public-facing organisation, the tenets of L.A.N.C.E. have also changed. These are to ‘Protect’ the innocent; to ‘Learn’ about the supernatural secrets and so be better able fight evil; and maintain the ‘Secrecy’ necessary to protect the world.

This is the setting for SHIVER Classified, an expansion setting for Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown, the horror roleplaying game published by Parable Games. It consists of two volumes, SHIVER Classified: Agents of L.A.N.C.E. and SHIVER Classified: The Unseen War. The first of these supplements introduces the setting and L.A.N.C.E. itself, explains its mission and its organisation, including its various departments and sub-agencies, and standard equipment carried by agents of L.A.N.C.E. It also provides guidance on creating agents of L.A.N.C.E. as Player Characters and investigations and case files that the Director can run as part of a SHIVER Classified campaign. The second supplement expands the setting with a complete timeline for L.A.N.C.E., details of its allies and enemies, a trilogy of adventures, and more case files. Where SHIVER Classified: Agents of L.A.N.C.E. focuses on investigative horror in a very familiar style, SHIVER Classified: The Unseen War goes to war with the Player Characters as members of Point Guard, the elite para-military arm of L.A.N.C.E., dedicated to fighting evil in all its forms, whether that is Doomsday cults, spectral killers, or malicious aliens. 

The set-up and support for both the Director and her players is relatively light. It includes a standard guide on how to use a SHIVER supplement, most notably the Classification Board, which categorises each scenario as if it were a film passed by the British Board of Film Classification, and the Doom Clock, which tracks time and triggers certain events that intensify the terror of any scenario as it is played through. This will, of course, be familiar to the Director and fuller details can be found in the core rulebook. The advice for the Director is short and to the point, emphasising that the Player Characters, that is, the agents of L.A.N.C.E. are there to do a job—investigate, exterminate, contain, or carry out the orders of the agency to protect mankind, rather than simply survive the horror. In other words, play in SHIVER Classified is focused and proactive rather than reactive. Given the familiarity of its set-up and style of play, it is fair to say that SHIVER Classified is not really a setting that needs a great deal of advice for the Director. The background to the setting is more of a detailed overview than a complete guide, since more information is provided in SHIVER Classified: The Unseen War. This is slightly disappointing since the Director might not be interested in the anti-supernatural Special Forces campaign in SHIVER Classified: The Unseen War, but still needs SHIVER Classified: The Unseen War to access that information. That said, SHIVER Classified: Agents of L.A.N.C.E. has more than enough information to run the scenarios and case files it contains.

In terms of Player Character options, SHIVER Classified: Agents of L.A.N.C.E. suggests several options from the core rules. Thus, a Scholar could be a research agent, a Socialite a public liaison, and so on, but added to these are new options in terms of what a player can roleplay as well as their abilities and flaws. For example, the ‘Livestreamer Star’ captured an otherworldly encounter on film, but it was denounced as fake and the star as a fraud. After L.A.N.C.E. cleaned the situation up, it recruited the now disgraced ‘Livestreamer Star’. This Player Character type has the ‘Evidence Capturer’ Ability, which enables him to capture information even in the most dire of situations and perhaps be able to learn a vital piece of information about whatever threat L.A.N.C.E. team is facing, but also the Flaw of ‘Disgraced Star’, meaning that he might be recognised and his reputation means that he is not trusted. The other new roles include ‘Archaeologist’, ‘Research Scientist’, ‘Ex-Military’, ‘Police Officer’, ‘Firefighter’, and ‘Paramedic’. The strangest though are the ‘Sole Anomaly Survivor’ and the ‘Recovering Cultist’. As the name suggests, the ‘Sole Anomaly Survivor’ is only survivor from an encounter with the supernatural and whilst he knows he can survive them (his ‘I Will Survive’ Ability restores Hit Points when a Doom Event is triggered), he suffers from ‘Survivor’s Guilt’ and is penalised when an ally is killed. The ‘Recovering Cultist’ is physically marked and imbued with occult power making his unarmed attacks dangerous to all, but as the messiah for a prophesied apocalypse, is a ‘Doom Magnet’ and can add minutes to the Doom Clock! Of course, many of these roles could be used in other SHIVER settings, not just SHIVER Classified. In addition, new equipment includes the hands-free torch, shortwave radio, stab vest, standard agency pistol, and unmarked agency car.