Red Shift
Contents
RED-SHIFT is a tabletop roleplaying game of hard choices in a dangerous future.
Its perspective comes from nearly three decades of experience working inside large, powerful systems—first in defense contracting, and later in criminal justice. Those years shaped how I think about institutions, authority, bureaucracy, incentives, accountability, and the people who have to navigate systems much larger than themselves.
My work in criminal justice also convinced me that systems are not immutable. I support criminal justice reform because institutions should be judged not simply by whether they function as designed, but by whether their rules, incentives, and consequences produce fair and useful outcomes. RED-SHIFT takes that same interest in systems and pushes it into the far future.
This is not a game about helpless people trapped by bureaucracy. It is a grounded science-fiction RPG about ordinary, skilled people doing extraordinary things—not because they’re invincible, but because they have to.
You travel. You work. You negotiate. You take contracts. You manage limited resources. You deal with governments, corporations, laws, markets, debts, technology, and other people pursuing their own interests.
Sometimes the system works for you. Sometimes it works against you. Sometimes the system itself is the problem.
You still have to decide what to do next.