Welcome to the Wasteland

Somewhere, at some point after the bombs, in a region this compendium deliberately doesn't name. That blank is the first thing your GM fills in — a desert frontier, a drowned coastal city, a mountain valley that got lucky, the ruins of somewhere you grew up. The rules in this book run any of them.

This book is how the game is played. It's short on purpose: the rules live under the fiction, not on top of it.

What you actually do

You play a person in this world — what they say, what they try, what they're willing to do. The GM narrates the world around you and plays everyone in it. Together you build scenes: haggling at a market gate, picking a lock in a flooded tunnel, talking a raider down instead of shooting him, or running from something that doesn't intend to let you run.

The system is built on soft mechanics. Most of the time you don't roll dice at all — if your skill clearly handles a task, you just do it; if it clearly can't, you can't. Dice come out only when the outcome is genuinely uncertain and the moment matters. Roleplay is never gated behind a roll: what you say and decide is always yours.

The numbers that matter

Your character sheet carries a few things you'll touch constantly:

• S.P.E.C.I.A.L. — seven attributes (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck) rated 1–10. They define what you're capable of and feed everything else.
• Skills — 13 skills rated 0–100 (Guns, Melee Weapons, Sneak, Science, Speech, and the rest). Your skill value is what gets compared to a task's difficulty.
• HP, AP, Fatigue, Willpower, Rads — health, action points for V.A.T.S. and sprinting, exhaustion, mental resilience, and radiation. These rise and fall every session; the card lets you adjust them in one tap.
• Tag skills — the up to three skills you specialized in at creation. They start higher and cost half as much to improve.

What a session feels like

The world is already moving when you arrive. Factions are acting, rumors are spreading, and pressures are ticking whether you're there or not. The clock is running, the season is turning, and the choices you make move the region along with you.

You don't need to know the whole rulebook to start. This chapter is the map; the rest of the book is the territory you'll actually walk.