The Basics

The Basics
You are one of the people who walks in knowing roughly where you are, and you would give a great deal to be somewhere else. You are part of a crew that argues, covers each other, and will not leave a body behind if it can be helped. The dead are everywhere, but they are not the point. The point is the place you are trapped in, the machine behind it, and the two voices still arguing over who deserves the leash.\n\n## What a session is\n\nA session is a string of scenes at a site. You arrive, you look around, you find the power, you hold a room while a count climbs, and occasionally one of you touches something that should not be touched. Between sites you spend downtime — resting, arguing, drinking, keeping the record. The game moves forward on two rhythms: the threat level of the place you are standing in, and the exposure that is slowly working its way through everyone who stays too close to the source.\n\n## What you need\n\nEach player needs a character sheet. The GM needs the rule set the table agreed on, a world state to keep the reckoning, and one thing that separates this from a shooting gallery: a place with a history and secrets that does not care about you.\n\n## The loop, plainly\n\nYou are probably repeating this. Not metaphorically. The fiction of this book assumes the crew has versions of itself that ran this before and left records — sometimes in their own handwriting. This is not a mystery to solve so much as a trap to recognize. Nothing you do has to end the loop to matter; some of the best sessions are the ones where a crew stops trying to win and starts trying to remember.\n\n## Whose voice this is\n\nThe rules in this book are the default pulse of the system — 2d6 plus a skill against a target, a wound threshold instead of hit points, exposure instead of a doom meter. The specific bands, costs, and conditions in the rest of the book come from the Attrition Protocol rule set, which is tuned grim. If your table plays under a different rule set, its numbers win. Treat every number printed here as the shape of the thing, not an argument.\n"
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