Welcome to the Commonwealth
October 23, 2287. Two hundred and ten years after the bombs fell, the Commonwealth is a ruin of red brick and rust — and it is very much alive. Four powers pull it in four directions: the Minutemen rebuild, the Institute harvests, the Railroad smuggles, the Gunners march. Winter is coming and nobody is ready. You are the variable none of them planned for.
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: bartering at Diamond City's market gate, picking a lock in a flooded metro 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, cost half as much to improve, and are marked ◆ on your card.
What a session feels like
You wake in a cryopod, or walk a ruined highway, or push through a market crowd — the world is already moving. Factions are acting, rumors are spreading, and pressures are ticking whether you're there or not. The clock is running: it's October 23rd, the first frost is in the air, and the choices you make move the Commonwealth 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.
