“If there were a word to sum up Cornwell Consolidated’s relative power on the market it would be “Gargantu-monumento-nious”. And if you needed a word to sum up their moral standing - it’d be hard to put that word into print without running into libel claims, or with your dear author coming up on the wrong end of a highly experimental brain laser.”

Sometimes when you’re coming up with a multitude of stories in the same narrative world, you just need a “bad guy”. Someone to be “responsible”, plain and simple, in ways both big and small, as the story requires. Cornwell Consolidated are Shiver’s big boogie man in the shadows. With a briefcase and a retirement plan equal to some countries' entire GDP.

A sinister mega corporate entity, they’re not quite the dragon of our dungeon, but they certainly have several scaly beasts on their employment plan. 

If we need an abandoned research base tampering with inter-dimensional anomalies, guess who can foot the bill? A secret submarine missing in the briny depths with experimental suits on board? Cornwell’s logo is slapped proudly on the side. And if you need someone to invest in anything from slashers to sycophantic cults, or psychopathic A.I. Squirrels to the world’s ugliest (and sentient) fruit and veg? Hell, they’ll try anything once. That’s dedication to innovation!

They (and their lawyers) just won’t ever admit to any of it, obviously.

“Cornwell Consolidated are… how do we put this in a way that won’t leave us open for massive legal repercussions? Cornwell are… a very large company… who specialise in… everything… both above and below board. Dang! We got so close there. I’ll let the legal team know.”

They are, in simple terms, an endless supply of money, power and influence to bankroll any insane scheme you want to incorporate into your Shiver world. But they are so much more than that. 

Cornwell has a rich history, lore and culture. Over the many years they have been in operation, they have had the time to hone and perfect a complex internal ecosystem that not only allows for extremely dangerous experimentation within its own workbase, it thrives on it - it’s the norm. 

Take the HR departments across all their different facilities. At first it might have appeared to be the company making a small acquiescence to the needs of its flesh and blood workforce. In actual fact these departments were originally created to explore how to best utilise, undermine, and otherwise keep in check their most abundant (and frustrating) resource at their disposal: humans. Everyone wants to work for the big company, and they aren’t going to just leave (no-one ever leaves Cornwell, unless it's in a body bag or mop bucket), and HR helped create the environment that makes that employee retention dream a reality. 

Of course overtime the higher ups realised that a department of despotic bureaucratic obsessives could become a threat, or even just an annoyance, and so the departments changed. It turns out all you need in a powder keg of rule following, back biting, office bound sociopaths is to introduce a small element of conflict. Some contradictory codes of conduct, some ancient eldritch abomination of order and regulation, and maybe just a stolen lunch or two, and you have your own little apocalyptic terrarium. 

But like all Cornwell facilities, no two HR departments are the same. The one you’ll explore in the SHIVER: Corporate expansion shows a floor completely divided, a post-apocalyptic wasteland of authoritarian Pizza Party Police, stuck at war with the cronies of the Lawful Discriminators. It’s a world where office supplies are deadly weapons, water coolers are like gold dust, and the sands stretch as far as the eye can see (left over from the office “July 4th Beach Day” motivational party - but that’s a totally unrelated disaster).

The HR department you’ll see in the Cornwell set novel is different. In Parable Games’ first ever published Shiver fiction book, you’ll see glimpses of a HR department that’s fallen into complete control of a singular demagogue-like figure - the man with the most employee of the month awards in the whole department. Severed ties are hung below office photographs to mourn those who perished in the regulation revolution, or to warn others of the price of mutiny. It’s a department of order, of big dreams and dark fantasies. Just what those dangerous aims are, you’ll just have to wait and see…

Cornwell Research Facilities are the bread and butter of both the company, and the expansion book. Eclectic mixes of floors, departments, and secrets, make up each secret research facility all around the world. 

Be they deep underground or in the void of deep space, each facility harbours its own potential for stories, career progression, and absolute catastrophes. 

Cornwell runs on its INTERN program, and those unpaid ragtag teams are the ones who get to see the most of (and likely suffer the most in) Cornwell’s endless pursuit for the outer reaches of science - and capitalism.

Departments like “Unimportant Alien Autopsy” and “Unique and Incurable Diseases (Non-Profitable)” are all covered in the expansion book, but there’s a few that are only hinted at. Departments like:

“At Cornwell, we make dreams. Nightmares are a kind of dream, so that statement is not undermined in any way by the horrors you will experience working here.”

Wondering why we didn’t cover “Why”? Follow the project to see the rest of this post and explore some lore!