The Age of Ruines

Around 400 million humans remain worldwide, with 50 million living in the area shown on this map. Populations are unevenly distributed, and clans range from tiny groups to veritable micro-states. Electricity, engines, firearms, modern medicine, and computers still exist in places, but are largely relics that their possessors do not necessarily know how to reproduce. Libraries, servers, archives, and practical knowledge have survived in scattered pockets. Former metropolises may serve as tombs, sources of relics, or hubs of emerging civilizations. Migration, trade, warfare, and social transformation are gradually reshaping Europe and the surrounding regions.

On January 1, 2054—twenty years after the Third Nuclear War of 2034—humanity lives amidst the ruins of a vanished industrial civilization. Hundreds of independent communities struggle to survive, preserve the last vestiges of useful knowledge, and rebuild societies based on law, faith, science, force, or novel combinations thereof.

Possessing a technology never guarantees the ability to produce or repair it. Advanced technologies require knowledge, resources, specialists, and production lines—all of which can vanish. Wars and mass migrations depend on available resources, population, organization, and means of transport. Diseases and epidemics occur sporadically and spread based on contact patterns and local conditions. Surviving nuclear arsenals remain difficult to deploy without adequate knowledge, infrastructure, and technical support chains. Knowledge can be preserved, lost, copied, recovered, or rediscovered. Major events occur only occasionally, and their consequences are not predetermined. At the start of the game, the player chooses between Survivor, Founder, Clan Leader, and Anomaly; this choice alters their starting point, resources, and available options.