This is a game about a world that could once have been our own.
No one knows for sure, but there might have been bombs. There might have been explosions that flared snow white and wiped everything clean, even the skies. No one knows. It was so long ago that no one remembers.
Since then, whatever it was that happened, we have been living here.
There were many more of us once.
This is a game about us. About who we are or who we think we are. How we survive. How we live and how we die. What we know and what we think we know.
Step carefully.
RATS is a role-playing game
set in a post-apocalyptic world vaguely similar to our own, but underground. In RATS you play roles that each of you, the players, make up. You play them in a story that you make up as a group. This wiki should give you the information you need to get started and have a lot of fun.
You need to choose one player to be the Game Master, or GM. She will run the world for you and play all the characters that you, the players, do not play. These are called NPCs (Non-Player Characters). The rest of you will play one character each, and these characters will be the heroes in your story. Or the villains, if you prefer that.
In RATS we use numbers for how good the characters are at doing different things. We use eight-sided dice (abbreviated to d8) to decide how well they do. These kinds of dice can be bought at your local gaming store or online. You should get dice in different colours to help you distinguish which die is for which aspect of the roll. You could for instance use a red one for Stat, a blue one for Skill, and a green one for Sourcery.