OTHER DUST

Roleplaying afteR the end

By Kevin CRawfoRd

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©2012, Sine Nomine Publishing.ISBN 978-1-936673-11-7Written by Kevin Crawford.Cover art by Nicole Cardiff.Art by Tamas Baranya, Pawel Dobosz, Gary Dupuis, Earl Geier, Eric Lofgren, Shaman’s Stockart, and Skortched Urf Studios.Character sheets inspired by the work of John Harper.Maps created with Hexographer and Dungeonographer: http://inkwellideas.com/

taBle of Contents

the woRld is in ashes .......................................................................4

ChaRaCteR CReation ..........................................................................7

Mutations ..................................................................................... 29

systeMs ....................................................................................... 37

a histoRy wRit in dust ................................................................... 51

CReating youR wasteland ............................................................... 59

adventuRe CReation ........................................................................ 95

gRoups and enClaves .................................................................... 115

equipMent and aRtifaCts ............................................................... 129

a post-apoCalyptiC BestiaRy ......................................................... 153

the Bonelands ............................................................................ 171

gaMeMasteR ResouRCes ................................................................. 183

index ......................................................................................... 206

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Our ancestors knew marvels in the days before the Scream. The cities of Old Terra stretched to the heavens in pillars of glass and light, their numbers greater than their children have words to name. The Terran Mandate ruled them from above, the Directors and their armies of officials to oversee the peace and harmony of human-ity’s mother-world. They sent the wicked and rebellious away, casting them off into the darkness of the skies to find fresh worlds where they could trouble the good no longer.

To aid in their work, the Directors fashioned the Mae-stros, minds of crystal and energy to think the great thoughts that would encompass all of Old Terra. They gave the good citizens the mark of the Link as a sign of love and favor, and the Maestros were ever close to hand to help those who bore the Link. No one ever lacked food or clean water or companionship in their loneli-ness. The Maestros knew all things, and placed all things in their right order.

But the Mandate and the Directors were still saddened by the suffering of the exiles in the sky, and took pity on their hunger and misery. They cut doorways in the heavens through which they could send swift aid, great portals that opened a speedy path to the far worlds. No longer was it necessary to send the slow ships, for the Jump Gates made a journey of years into a single great step.

The servants of the Jump Gates were men and women called “psychics”, ones cursed with a terrible change by their passage through the sky. In their head was a mad-ness that could sicken the world, and many died from it before the Mandate taught them ways to channel it well. They powered the Jump Gates, opening the doors with the strength of their minds. Many other psychics labored in many other ways for the Mandate, accomplishing deeds beyond those of ordinary men and women.

Some say that Old Terra was not as beautiful as the stories tell. They claim that the Mandate was cruel and selfish, that the Maestros plotted against their creators, that the wicked who were sent forth were actually war-

riors who only sought freedom and a better life. Who is to know the truth?

But we know that Old Terra died ten generations ago. Our ancestors told us of the Scream, a terrible power that swept down from the sky and broke the minds of all of the psychics. They raved and slew and destroyed, tearing open the belly of the world with their madness. They opened many doors and broke many laws. They made the Slow Fire burn the cities and cast down stones from the sky to break the houses of men. They cursed us with the Black Dust and made some among our children come forth misshapen and sickly, and made hunters who go in bad places return as things terribly changed. The doors in the skies no longer opened, and we were alone.

We call these old ones the Crazed now, and some still live in the waste places of the world. Old Terra gave long life to its children, and the Crazed do not die as ordinary men die. They sit and they hate, always laboring to find new ways to hurt and to ruin, to finish what their madness began two hundred years ago. Some wretched ones worship them as gods, praying to be spared their madness and to profit by their cruelties. Some even say that the Crazed have taken apprentices from them. For this reason and many others we kill the psychics born among us. They are cursed, and they bring only curses.

It is the New Earth we dwell in now, we ragged children of a fallen world. The leavings of our ancestors sustain us with their tools of fire and light and their knowledge captured in glowing glass words. We struggle against the Black Dust and the Highshine and the Slow Fires that burn on the green glass plains. We war upon the twisted beasts of the wastelands and struggle amongst each other for the few places of safety that remain to us. With each generation, it grows harder. Each year we have less.

But this world is ours. Our ancestors ruled here, our fathers and mothers lived and dreamed and died upon its earth. Perhaps it is our destiny to be mingled with their bones. Perhaps someday the exiles will return to find only our dust. But though we are fallen from our thrones, O my ancestors, let them find the dust of kings!

the woRld is in ashes

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a glossaRy of teRMs

#d#: As in “1d6” or “2d20” or “2d8+1”. This simply means to take that many dice and roll them together, adding them up along with any static bonus listed. “2d4+2” would mean to roll two four-sided dice, add two, and total them.

Adventure: A situation in which the PCs are in danger or seeking to accomplish something risky and difficult. Scavenging the badlands for salvage, hunting a raider chieftain, and convincing a local enclave to call off an anti-mutant pogrom all might qualify as adventures. PCs in Other Dust spend most of their time adventuring; lounging around the village is for lesser souls- or more prudent ones.

GM: Game Master. The GM is responsible for running the game. He or she creates the region in which play will take place, builds the situations that the players will encounter, and referees their efforts with the help of the rules in this book. GMs have a great deal of responsibility but they also the antics of a table full of adventurers to entertain themselves during play.

NPC: Non-Player Character. Any monster, mutant, or bystander not played by a player. The GM usually has a host of NPCs around, ranging from the nameless bandit who gets shot six seconds after their first encounter with the PCs to long-running patrons or nemeses.

PC: Player Character. Players of the game create characters, fictional figures through which they engage the world, pursue their own goals, and get devoured by mutant panthers. A single player may have a number of different PCs, though usually only one is played at a time.

if you’Re new to Roleplaying gaMes....Congratulations, because you’re one of the remarkably few people reading this who hasn’t already entered the hobby through other games. Pen-and-paper roleplaying games are a lot of fun, and it’s likely that you’re already indirectly familiar with them.

In brief, an RPG like this is a pen-and-paper version of a genre of modern computer roleplaying games such as Fallout, Wasteland, and other post-apocalyptic romps. Where a computer game might rely on internal algorithms and hardcoded rules, Other Dust relies on a human referee- the game master, or GM. A GM and up to a half-dozen or so other players get together in person or online to play out the wasteland adventures of the fictional avatars that the players create.

Why not just play a computer game? Because RPGs like Other Dust leverage the one thing that a computer game can’t provide- intel-ligent human responses. If you think of a solution to a problem facing your character, you don’t have to worry about whether the game engine is going to handle it- you just tell the GM and they tell you the results or the odds you’re facing. Players have unlimited freedom in paper RPGs because they’re dealing with a human mind.

Don’t be intimidated by the thickness of this book. The actual rules for running the game fit in about twelve pages in the Systems chap-ter, and the bare-bones summary is on a single sheet of paper. The rest of the book is all about making characters, the fabulous plunder you can find in the wastes, and tools for helping a GM quickly and easily make fun places to explore and people to encounter. Every-thing about this book was designed to make it as easy as possible to GM a game of Other Dust.

So turn the page and dive in. Once you see how to make a character, check out the Systems chapter for the rules, and you’ll be well on your way to blasting mutants and looting the lost treasures of a fallen world.

if you’Re a veteRan gaMeR.......then we can skip the preamble and get to the things that make Other Dust worth your attention.

Other Dust is based on classic old-school gaming mechanics familiar to almost everyone in the hobby. It’s fast to pick up and you won’t be spending much time relearning how to make a character, get in a fight, and use your talents to solve problems. Other Dust is not here to dazzle you with brilliantly novel mechanics.

Other Dust is designed as an industrial-strength toolkit for post-apocalyptic sandboxing. The tools and techniques in this book are applicable to almost any system or post-apoc setting, and they’re meant to make it as easy as possible for a GM to brew up a waste-land and let the players rip. I’m confident that you’ll find the game’s systems to be an excellent match for that goal, but the resources here will work just fine with whatever system you do like best.

More than that, Other Dust is completely cross-compatible with my other sci-fi sandbox game Stars Without Number, currently available in free PDF form. Everything in both books will work perfectly well together, and the tools you’ve got in hand complement the ones you can get online for free, or in hardback for a reasonable price.

Other Dust is not meant to proselytize. Yes, I think sandbox gaming is wonderful fun and provides the GM with a constant stream of surprises that are sometimes much harder to find in other play styles, but it’s not the only way to play an RPG, and it’s not the best way for everyone. Still, even if you’ve had hesitations about sandboxing before, I encourage you to just give the tools a read. Creating and running a sandbox doesn’t have to be as hard as it’s often made out to be, and the rewards of a good session of no-walls gaming can be wonderfully refreshing.

There’s plenty here for you to take and more afterwards if you want to grab Stars Without Number. With that said, let’s start this off...

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The first step in entering the world of Other Dust lies in creating a character. Character creation is quick and straightforward, but it works best when you’re able to talk to the GM and the other players and coordinate your choices into a group that works well together. Grim loners do poorly in the merciless wilds of the New Earth, and even the toughest badlander has a much longer career with friends around.

For most games, you’re going to need a person willing to take on the role of the GM and three to five players. It’s possible for a single player to play multiple characters, but this can be difficult for new-comers to the game, and it’s often preferable simply to have the GM run a number of allies or hirelings.

what you need to Know aBout this gaMeOther Dust is inspired by the classic role-playing games of the seventies and early eighties, and owes a deep debt to designers like Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Tom Moldvay, Marc Miller, Zeb Cook, and others too numerous to mention. If you’ve played those games, many of the mechanics and style choices made here will be familiar.

In Other Dust, you take on the role of a denizen of a post-apoca-lyptic far-future Earth, working alongside your trusted teammates to scratch survival and eventual glory from a hostile planet. You explore the radioactive dust and seething nanite jungles of the wastelands in search of salvage, fellow human survivors, and relics of the glorious lost age of Old Terra. Those heroes who survive such expeditions- and many will not- may yet become tribal chieftains, culture-restoring sages, master scrapsmiths, and other legends to lead their people back to the light of understanding.

Other Dust is not about story lines or pre-designed plot arcs. Those things are admirable and there are many games that use them to excellent effect, but that’s not the kind of play that Other Dust is meant to best enable. This game is meant to help a GM create their own ravaged patch of the desolate New Earth and stock it with intriguing foes, interesting enclaves, and rewarding ruins. Once created, the game then helps the GM and other players explore it in a free-form, “sandbox” style of play.

The GM and players may have a good idea what a particular game session will be about, but the specific outcome or focus of events is never determined in advance. Each session is a chance for you and the other players to make your own choices and choose your own ambitions. The world responds to your actions and in time you see the consequences of that which you have done and that which you have left undone.

Understanding this “sandbox style” of play is crucial to enjoying Other Dust. The story of a campaign is the story of what you chose to attempt. There is no fated destiny awaiting you, no surety of survival or certainty that your grand dreams will ever come to frui-tion. There is only your own luck, prudence, and cunning to arm you for a destiny that is to be wholly your own.

what you need to Know aBout new eaRthYour character is a denizen of the New Earth in the year 2850, a dweller in the savage wasteland left behind by a cataclysmic di-saster two centuries ago. Nanomutated abominations, radioactive badlands, amoral raider tribes, and the sheer unrelenting strain of survival all conspire in an attempt to make your life a short and brutal experience.

Old Terra was ruled by the masters of the Terran Mandate, the shadowy Directorate that ensured that the nations of mankind’s birthworld maintained a peaceful and harmonious stasis. Change was an enemy to the Directorate, and troublemakers were exiled to the frontier colonies around distant stars. With the help of their psychic enforcers and the AI godminds known as the Maestros, the Directorate maintained an iron grip on the core worlds.

Common citizens had access to marvelous medical and commu-nications technology, including the nanite Dust that wove Old Terra’s atmosphere into an omnipresent network. Communications were under the unblinking eye of the Maestros, channeled and restricted as appropriate to “social harmony”. Malcontents received sympathetic care from AI social services or midnight visits from Directorate security forces. Few persisted in their discontent.

This utopia under glass ended in 2665 with the Scream. A massive pulse of metadimensional energy washed outward from the depths of the void, searing the brains of humanity’s psychics. The teleport-ing Jump Gates that connected the core worlds were wiped out of existence when the choirs of psychics that operated them were oblit-erated. Most psychics perished in this otherworldly fire, but some survived in a haze of savage madness. These Crazed included some of the most powerful psychics on Old Terra, and they lashed out at their masters before a shattered world even understood its peril. All over Old Terra, precognitive nanocoders struck at the failsafes on the Mandate’s massive power plants. Red blooms of nuclear fire erupted to spew crimson death and black ash into the hostile sky.

Elsewhere, the emergency Highshine disaster recovery system engaged to pour torrents of stabilization nanites into Old Terra’s atmosphere. The Crazed twisted the Highshine system, altering its function from medical stabilization and decontamination into ter-rible, flesh-warping violation of its sickened victims. Nanomutants rose from the wastes, forbidden easy death by the Highshine’s grip.

Two hundred years have passed since the Scream, and the world of Old Terra has been lost forever. Modern descendants of the survi-vors of those end times now huddle in small enclaves, struggling to resist the terrible corrosion of the badlands, the incursions of mutated beasts, and the pangs of their own privation.

Your character is a native of one of these enclaves, equipped by experience and nature with the gifts necessary to survive the savage wastes. It may be that the dangers outside will claim them young, or it could be that their fearless deeds will yet herald a second dawn for their people. Only time and your choices will tell.

ChaRaCteR CReation

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