I always hate that interview question, because the only real honest answer is “I like money, food, and safety. Exposure is fine, but I don’t want to die from it.” But when it comes to “Why did we want to work on SHIVER: Corporate?” The answer is a little more complex.

So, like all good workplace presentations, let’s break the answer down into five steps!

If you’ve ever had the (mis)fortune of bumping into myself or Charlie at a convention, game night, or in the supermarket, we might have foisted upon you the story of where the inspiration for the first ever Shiver game came from. If that's the case, I won’t repeat the story here. Even if you haven’t I still won’t tell the story because that, dear friends, might be considered libel. But consider it safe to say, we know our sinister corporations.

The first ever story that would go on to shape what Corporate will be is one all Shiver players should be familiar with. I’m talking about the adventure from the core rulebook: “Corporate Risers”. It’s where we first meet our own shady capitalist entity, Cornwell Consolidated, and learn a little bit about their terrible underground research facilities. I remember playtesting that scenario (my original character is featured in the original and Corporate editions of the Quick Start, see if you can guess who I played) and thinking “I sure hope I don’t get eaten”, and also “I’d want to see more of this world.” It kicked me in the brain, creatively speaking.

The second most important adventure is actually going to be in the book, and it’s a fun little ditty called “Alien Autopsy Gone Wrong”. We’d just moved our workflow to Patreon, and were fleshing out Lance (longtime Shiver asset) and figuring out what CREEPS would be (at the time brand new, and the youngest of our three cornerstone organisations). Every month we needed two new adventures, written, tested, laid out… It was a lot of pressure for both of us, but more so for Charlie who had to plan elements of the schedule to reflect the ever growing lore of the Shiver world - and then lay them out all pretty and neat. 

Maybe I knew we needed something that Charlie didn’t have to worry about. Maybe I wanted to contribute to my own little corner of the world. Maybe I just had an idea that I laughed at once, politely, and then found that it wouldn’t leave me alone. Either way, I remember presenting this dumb little story where hapless interns get stuck on a floor with an autopsy specimen that (oh no!) isn’t quite dead. I remember telling him about how they would need to repurpose innocuous discarded items to fight off the monster, like irritating its eyes with a dangerously broken hair dryer*. I had a blast writing it, and it made an impression on both him and Brother Menzies Snr (“Barney”). 

A few months later, I had to pitch an entire roster of adventures for this weird little world. I’d pitch one note jokes in the vein of Autopsy, and then to my amazement they’d get approved. “Never mind,” I’d tell myself. “I’ll figure out how to turn ‘What if there was a really powerful entity they had trapped there, but he was just really annoying and loved puzzles?’ into a story later.” I was an idiot, obviously. But it all worked out in the end. Or it will, I hope.

Have you been outside lately? The world is fast dissolving into the strangest dystopia. Sometimes you need to look at the bleakness and find a way to laugh. That’s kind of what Corporate is. It’s therapy for a late-stage capitalist world. But I swear it is hard to keep up with it sometimes.

I wrote “Crashing the Stalk Market” (about the company making sentient ugly vegetables to take advantage of the conscientious consumer market) and it had a little gag about how Cornwell tried to copyright their own term of “Food”™ so that they could make their highly dangerous inedible slop without enticing any lawsuits. A few weeks later a corporation in the real world actually tried to redefine what the word “nutrition” really meant.

I wrote a whole section about how the companies’ intranet is powered by a dangerous entity in the form of a PC tower cooled by human blood. Not long after, a popular company offered a PC cooled by human blood. 

I made an AI that was hell bent on dominating all human life, and a company unleashing it untested into the world and - well, I might be getting a bit ahead of myself there. We’ll just have to wait and see what the world has in store.

Turning all the weird and wonderful influences we had into something that people can actually play with is what SHIVER is all about. 

There are countless movies, TV shows, novels, and even music that inspired the world of SHIVER Corporate (check out our livestream on May 16, 2025 at 5:00pm BST for more on those), and we wanted to contribute our own piece to the very niche work of corporate horror. But it's more than that, because more than anything we want *you* to play with it. Yes, YOU.

Corporate brings horror to the tabletop in a way many of us can relate to without being intimidated by. We can laugh along as the HR department legislates itself into a post apocalyptic revolution. We can cringe as the helpful workplace supervisor tries to vaporise the employees it doesn’t think it needs anymore. And we can rally our rage in a way that’s not only constructive, it might actually improve your standing at the company.

So, to answer the original (and frankly uninspired) question of “Why is Shiver Corporate the next expansion?”, I’ll just finish with this:

We honestly think it’s a ton of fun.

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