Blue Shift
A downloadable game
BLUE SHIFT
Humanity was obviously not meant to explore the stars. Short lives versus centuries of travel, hard vacuum versus soft tissue, indefinite isolation versus creeping madness. And what is there to explore? Ice, gas and barren rocks irradiated by alien suns.
And so, naturally, a ship of humans departs the solar system.
~
Blue Shift is a tabletop space travel roleplaying game that's more about the crew than what they find in the great unknown: what tears them apart, what might bring them together and how they deal with crisis. It's designed with single-session play in mind: a good game of Blue Shift should be like a tense, dramatic science fiction film or short.
The game consists of instructions for play and detailed sheets for roles to guide your play. The game is available free of charge but donations are welcome if you would like to support future games or add-on playsheets.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Hi, I ran Blue Shift three times yesterday at Dragonmeet. Each session was about two hours. Excellent game!
Thank you, I'm really happy to hear people enjoying it!
If you feel like it, please feel free to send me any more specific feedback, its always interesting hearing the experiences and thoughts of people who pick up the game directly from the pdf.
Sure, here goes.
The prompts are very well constructed. They have the correct level of openness. Prompts that are too open make starting the game too much of a job for the players, I feel, and can result in stylistic dissonance. Prompts that are too closed block the players from participation.
With that being said, some of the choices were more popular than others.
- In all three sessions, the players chose to have a slow ship.
- In all three sessions, the players would have chosen to have a restricted area on the ship. The third session was with friends and I didn't allow that choice, for my variety, so they had an ecosystem instead.
- In the first two sessions, the Scientist became quite religous.
Maybe give each player character a prompt that adds a location or system to the ship, instead of the one about ship equipment.
I could see these types of prompts being useful for other games, as a way to set the style and setting.
Cheers, Jim
Is there an average play time or do we just play until it feels right?
It's intended as a one shot, more or less. How many hours exactly is very group dependent.
But the most crucial tracker for how far through the game you are is how many boxes are ticked off on character sheets, especially the scene boxes. If everyone has a couple scene boxes checked, it's probably time to start steering for a conclusion.
In Blue Shift, you play as humans on a spaceship, setting off to a long voyage that the current crew probably won't see the end of. It is designed to tell a tense, dramatic science fiction story in a single session.
Any examples or guide for the GM to come up with a small story/conflict?
Yes - soon! I am planning an updated PDF with more specific GM guidance and a quick example of play. One note though, while it is very much possible to pre-plan any amount of story for Blue Shift, the scene prompt format is intended to make it equally possible for the table to improvise/discover the story as it unfolds.