A post-apocalyptic RPG where what you carry runs out
Two generations after the Burn, the roads belong to whoever holds the water. You guard a caravan, and the thing you are actually guarding is a child several people would very much like to find.
No account, no card, nothing to install. The world's lore is already built, so it starts in seconds.
Scarcity only works if something is counting
Exhaustion, cold, thirst and injury are tracked as conditions that worsen or ease between turns by arithmetic rather than by mood, so a hard march costs you something on the far side of it instead of being forgotten by the next scene.
The world
The world ended in fire and forgot itself. Now a lone caravan crosses the ash-wastes carrying one passenger the Ember Lords have torched three towns to recover.
The Burn cracked the sky and salted the earth. What remains is a wasteland of rusted highways, scavenger towns, and water worth more than gold. Old-world tech still works for those who can read it, and reading it makes you a king—or a target.
Who is in it
- Ember Lords
- warlords who hoard the last working machines and the fuel to run them.
- Wayfarers' Guild
- the caravans that keep trade—and news—alive across the waste.
- The Greenkeepers
- a hidden community trying to coax life back into the dead soil.
Where you go
- Rust Hollow
- a scavenger town built inside a toppled overpass.
- The Glass Flats
- a desert fused to glass where the Burn struck hardest.
- Wellspring
- a rumored valley where water still runs clean.
What already happened
- The Burn
- the cataclysm that ended the old world forty years ago.
- The Sacking of Tallow
- the Ember Lords' destruction of a town that sheltered the child.
Who you can play
-
Cass Ryder Caravan guard
A laconic, weather-beaten guard who has buried more friends than she'll admit.
At the start: hired muscle who didn't ask what she was guarding until too late.
-
Tam The hunted child
A solemn boy whose strange talent makes him the most valuable thing in the waste.
At the start: a passenger who understands machines no child should.
Or write your own character — the setup form takes a name, a background and what you are good at, and the game master works from that instead.
How a turn works
- You say what your character does, in your own words.
- What you attempted is weighed against your character sheet and the state of the scene — and the outcome is settled before the scene is written, so the part telling the story does not get to decide that you succeeded.
- The game master narrates what happened, grounded in the world's own characters, factions and places, and remembers it for the rest of the run.
Start playing Dust and Ember →