4. Event and Story Design
Your Two Characters
At Wasteland Chronicle every participant has two characters: who you play during the event and your zombie NPC. During the event, there are two “field battles” in addition to smaller scenarios. Each Settlement will have a time where they will be teamed up with other settlements to go do a shift as zombies or other forms of event specific threats.
Every participant is required to bring two “kits” or costumes for the event. You have the character that you spend the majority of your time portraying who is a Lineage that is a member of a Society, and then you have your threat. Threats will be defined by each event months in advance. Each participant brings costume, makeup, and visual tools for their antagonist persona.
The Staff leaders of each settlement will organize the participants, lead them in the field, and will be coordinating with the event organizers for the scenario that occurs.
This provides a scenario where twice during the event half of the participants are playing their characters, and the other half and event staff are playing antagonists.
A - B Scenarios
During an event there are a number of small scheduled “A-B” scenarios where each Settlement will send a specific number of participants at a certain time to engage in a smaller “module”. These “modules” will have two settlements with their representatives competing for resources, fighting for narrative influence, or otherwise engaging in mental or kinetic challenges.
During these scenarios the two teams may narratively not competing with each other. Team A may have a mission to defend a waterway from inbound Raiders, Team B may have a mission to clear cannibal highwaymen from an ambush. To Team A, Team B will be the invaders. To Team B, Team A would be the cannibal highwaymen.
Another example may include the two teams actually competing against each other in a combination of mental and kinetic challenges to achieve a single goal. In this instance both Team A and Team B might have an obstacle course with genre and narrative appropriate puzzles that as a team they must complete to be the first to raid food supply resources at the end.
The settlements survive because none of them can meet every need alone. The Redline moves goods. The Last Ward keeps people alive. The Brightworks powers and coordinates the network. The Breakwater feeds and waters it.
The trade system connecting them is known as the Exchange. Most trade happens through regular markets, scheduled convoys, and direct agreements between communities. Major projects require resources from several settlements. A new clinic might require medicine from the Last Ward, power from the Brightworks, transportation from the Redline, and clean water from the Breakwater.
A small independent organization (NPC only) is the Exchange. The Exchange facilitates trade and communication between the settlements, preventing outright war between the factions. While providing an in-character engagement and purpose, the players of The Exchange also facilitate the narrative and meta-mechanics of the event.
In the world, once each year the settlements gather to assign a Steward of the Exchange. The heads of each sect within a city can compete to become a Steward. The potentials may present their candidate, offer agreements, make public commitments, and seek the support of the other settlements. At the end of the event each society / sect within a city declares who they support for Steward and all of the resources from that group count towards the total support of the Steward. The chosen Steward becomes the Seat of the Exchange until the next gathering. The Seat of the Exchange is a personal goal for some of the different society leaders within each city, and it has a massive impact on the following year’s narrative. It should be noted that societies / sects are not required to vote for a Steward within their own city. They may vote for a Steward outside their city and maintain their resources for themselves and their City totals (see the Meta-Game at the end of this document). This could be used as a leverage point for trade for resources, favors, or intrigue.
As a general concept the Steward oversees common convoy schedules, trade tolls, emergency reserves, disputes between settlements, and the order in which shared projects receive support. The Steward does not control the internal laws of another settlement and is not in charge of the Exchange. The position provides influence over the network and the narrative going forward, not the ownership of the people within it.
The Meta Game: Settlement Resources
The Meta Game is the resource economy that runs underneath the rest of Wasteland Chronicle. While characters are fighting zombies, taking journeys, completing scenarios, making deals, and robbing one another in the woods, they are also gathering the supplies their Settlement needs to survive after the gathering is over.
These resources are represented by physical props placed throughout the game. If you find them, earn them, trade for them, steal them, or drag them home, they are real resources within the Meta Game until they are turned over to the Exchange.
What happens to those resources matters beyond the event. The final totals determine how well each Settlement survives the coming months and which Faction within that Settlement has gained enough influence to lead it.
● Clean Water represents safe drinking water and the means to transport or store it.
● Foodstuffs represents preserved food, agricultural goods, livestock products, and other supplies capable of keeping a population fed.
● Medical Supplies represents medicine, bandages, chemicals, surgical materials, and the consumable supplies needed to keep people alive.
● Fuel represents gasoline, diesel, alcohol fuel, lubricants, and other expendable materials needed to keep generators and vehicles operating.
● Munitions represents ammunition and the consumable military supplies necessary to defend a Settlement.
● Salvage represents useful materials recovered from the old world. Metal, electrical components, building materials, machine parts, and other materials that can be turned into something useful fall into Salvage.
Individual props may look very different from one another. What matters mechanically is the identification sticker placed on the prop. If the sticker says FUEL, then that object represents one Fuel regardless of whether the physical prop is a gas can, oil container, or strange piece of machinery. Do not remove, alter, cover, or transfer resource identification stickers.
Keeping Your Settlement Alive
Every Settlement needs a minimum of 12 of every Resource by the end of the event. That means a Settlement needs at least 12 Clean Water, 12 Foodstuffs, 12 Medical Supplies, 12 Fuel, 12 Munitions, and 12 Salvage to reach its basic survival needs.
Reaching 12 in five categories does not make up for failing the sixth. A Settlement with mountains of Salvage but not enough Clean Water still has a water crisis. A Settlement with enough Foodstuffs to feed everyone but no Medical Supplies is going to spend the coming months burying people who could have survived.
This means the Meta Game is not simply about accumulating the largest number of objects. What you have matters. Where a Settlement contains three competing Factions, an even contribution would mean each Faction securing approximately 4 of every Resource. Nothing requires the Factions to cooperate that evenly.
One Faction may carry another. One may refuse to help. One may spend the entire gathering hoarding Fuel while expecting someone else to find food. Those are political decisions, and they will shape the flow and experience of your event.
Finding Resources
Resources can enter play in many different ways. They may be discovered in Resource Stashes hidden around the site. They may be rewards for completing challenges, surviving journeys, or succeeding during scheduled scenarios. NPCs may offer resources as payment. Characters may negotiate trades with other Settlements. Some resources may simply be sitting somewhere dangerous waiting for someone willing to go get them.
And, of course, you may steal them. There is no requirement that the person who finds a Resource must be the person who eventually turns it in. Until a Resource reaches the Weigh Station, ownership is a matter of what happens in character.
Physical Resources Are Actually in Play
Every Meta Game Resource has a physical representation marked with an official Resource identification sticker. If you encounter one of these props during play, it is part of the game. You may pick it up. You may carry it away. You may put it in a wagon. You may drag it across the ground. You may give it to someone else. You may sell it, trade it, hide it, ransom it, or lie about having it.
If nobody is actively holding the Resource, somebody else can take it. If the Resource is in someone’s hands, you cannot force it out of their living hands. Putting a Resource beside your chair does not make it safe. Putting it behind your Settlement sign does not make it safe. Building an impressive pile of supplies and then walking away from it means that you have built an impressive pile of supplies for whoever finds it next.
Touching one container does not give you magical possession of every Resource sitting around it. If you want to protect your supplies, protect your supplies or turn them in to be safe.
Personal Spaces Are Never Part of the Meta Game
Meta Game rules never give another participant permission to enter someone else's personal space. Resources may not be hidden inside tents, sleeping areas, changing areas, personal luggage, or other locations being used to store real world personal possessions. Other players are not expected to search through someone's belongings to determine whether a game prop is hidden there.
If you want to keep Resources somewhere, they must remain somewhere other participants can reasonably interact with them. Your personal property is out of play. Official Resource props are not. Do not use one to protect the other.
Stealing Resources
An unattended Resource can be taken. There is no special theft call, skill, timer, or permission required. If an official Resource prop is sitting somewhere that you are allowed to be and nobody is holding it, you may take it.
You may not grab a Resource out of another participant's hands. You may not wrestle over a prop or use physical strength to determine who keeps it. If someone is carrying something, they are carrying it. That does not necessarily mean they are going to keep it.
Outside of the downtown area, normal combat rules remain in effect. If someone is walking through the woods carrying the Fuel your people desperately need, you are perfectly capable of deciding that their continued possession of that Fuel has become unacceptable.
Engage them according to the normal combat rules. If they beat you, congratulations on your educational experience. If you incapacitate them, the Resource is no longer being actively carried and can be taken.
Do Not Play the Border
The ability to attack someone in the field does not mean participants should spend the event camping the entrances to downtown waiting for people carrying Resources. Do not sit at transition points looking for easy victims. Do not hover around the edge of protected areas waiting for someone to cross an invisible line. Do not exploit bathrooms, sleeping areas, medical spaces, parking areas, or other out of character necessities as opportunities to steal Resources.
Go into the world. Follow people. Set ambushes along actual routes. Make deals that become bad deals. Become a highwayman. Become the reason someone suddenly realizes they should have hired guards. Create play.
Do not turn the edge of downtown like it was a video game spawn point. Staff may remove Resources from individuals or Factions that repeatedly exploit the boundaries of the system instead of engaging with its intended play. Particularly dedicated offenders may also discover that zombies have strong opinions about rules exploitation.
Trading and Bartering
Resources are fully tradeable until they are turned into the Weigh Station. A Settlement may trade its extra Fuel for somebody else's Clean Water. A Faction may sell Medical Supplies to another Faction within its own Settlement. Someone may promise five Salvage tomorrow in exchange for three Foodstuffs today.
The Exchange does not guarantee private agreements. If someone makes a bad deal, that is their problem. If someone breaks an agreement, that may become everybody's problem.
Resources can also be used for story purposes before they are turned in. An NPC may want payment. A scenario may require supplies. A player may decide that handing over desperately needed medicine right now matters more than having that medicine counted at the end of the event. Once spent, traded, stolen, or surrendered, those Resources belong wherever they went next.
The Weigh Station
The Exchange operates the Weigh Station in the center of town. The Weigh Station is where Resources stop being loose supplies and become part of a Settlement's permanent event total.
When Resources are turned in, the Exchange records which Settlement and Faction receives credit for them. Once recorded, those Resources are considered packed onto outbound caravans and sent home.
They are gone.They cannot be stolen. They cannot be traded. They cannot be withdrawn because somebody realizes three hours later that they made a terrible decision. Turning something in is permanent. This creates an important choice throughout the event. A Resource sitting in your camp can still be traded or used. It can also be stolen.
A Resource turned into the Weigh Station is safe, but it can no longer solve a problem happening in front of you.
When the Weigh Station Closes
The Weigh Station is not open for the entire event. When it closes for the night, no additional Resources may be turned in until it reopens. Anything that has already been recorded is safe. Anything that has not been recorded is still in play.
The closed Weigh Station is not a storage area. Leaving six crates outside the door does not count as turning them in and does not make them protected. If you decide to hold Resources overnight, you are accepting the risk that comes with still possessing them. Protect them. Hide them somewhere legal. Trade them. Assign someone to watch them. Or wake up the next morning and have an extremely uncomfortable conversation about where all the Foodstuffs went.
Settlement Survival
At the end of the event, staff totals every Resource delivered for each Settlement. The first question is whether the Settlement reached its minimum survival requirement of 12 in all six categories. Any shortage becomes part of that Settlement's continuing story.
A Foodstuffs shortage may mean hunger during the coming months. A Fuel shortage may reduce travel and power. Missing Medical Supplies may make disease or injury harder to manage.
The actual consequences become part of the narrative between events rather than disappearing when everyone leaves the site. Players will receive information showing what happened to their Settlement because of what they accomplished, and what they failed to accomplish, during the gathering.
The resources are therefore not just victory points. They are the future condition of your home.
Faction Influence
Settlement survival is only half of the Meta Game. The Factions inside each Settlement are also competing with one another. Every Resource turned into the Weigh Station is recorded for both the Settlement and the Faction receiving credit for it. All of those Resources help the Settlement survive, but they also demonstrate which Faction was responsible for bringing the greatest amount of wealth and support home.
At the end of the event, the Faction with the largest total contribution gains control of the Settlement's leadership going into the next chapter of the story. This means cooperation and competition happen at the same time.
You may desperately need another Faction to find four more Clean Water so your Settlement survives. You may also know that giving them those four Clean Water could provide enough influence for them to take control of your Settlement. You might steal from within your own Settlement across factions, but that sort of activity causes bad blood and conflict (which makes a good story). You may decide survival matters more. You may decide you would rather control a struggling Settlement than serve under your rival in a prosperous one. The game will not make that decision for you.
The Story Continues After the Event
Meta Game results become part of the continuing narrative of Wasteland Chronicle. Settlements that return home with healthy supplies may grow, repair infrastructure, support larger populations, or become more influential within the Exchange. Settlements suffering shortages may face unrest, sickness, lost territory, or increasingly desperate choices.
Faction leadership will also influence what that Settlement does next. Different leaders will have different priorities, allies, and ideas about what should be done with the resources their people fought to bring home.
These results may appear in short stories, setting updates, videos, rumors, and other material released between events. When players return the following year, they will not be returning to exactly the same world they left. The things you carried home mattered. The things somebody stole from you in the woods definitely mattered. And sometimes the most important Resource in the wasteland is the one you were absolutely certain nobody knew you had.
The Meta Game: Narrative Transparency
Wasteland Chronicle is designed to give players a clear understanding of how story is delivered without telling them what the story is. We are not going to publish the secrets of an event, explain who can be trusted, reveal what is waiting in the wasteland, or tell you how any conflict is supposed to end. We do want players to understand the structures that create story so that they know where to look when they want more engagement.
There is no single plot that everyone is expected to follow from beginning to end. Instead, the weekend uses several overlapping narrative tools. You may spend most of your time deeply involved with one of them, move between several, or ignore a few completely. These tools are designed to collide with each other so that something you discover during a mission may affect a political decision, a resource shortage may force an unwanted alliance, or a near death experience may suddenly give your character a very personal reason to interfere with someone else's plans.
1. The Resource Meta-Game
The largest shared narrative tool is the Resource Meta-Game. Every Settlement needs Clean Water, Foodstuffs, Medical Supplies, Fuel, Munitions, and Salvage to survive after the gathering ends. Resources can be found in the world, earned through scenarios, received as payment, traded between groups, stolen, or taken from someone after a fight. Until they are turned in at the Exchange's Weigh Station, they remain physical objects that can continue moving through the game.
This means gathering resources is not background bookkeeping. It creates reasons to leave downtown, hire protection, negotiate with rivals, make promises, and decide how much you are willing to risk for your people. The resources eventually turned in determine whether your Settlement meets its survival needs, while the Factions responsible for those contributions gain influence inside their own Settlement.
2. The Exchange and the Steward
The Exchange is an independent NPC organization that keeps trade and communication moving between the Settlements. Once each year, the Settlements choose a Steward of the Exchange, and the chosen Steward's community head becomes the Seat of the Exchange until the next gathering. The Steward gains influence over matters such as convoy schedules, trade tolls, emergency reserves, disputes, and shared projects, but does not gain authority over the internal laws of another Settlement.
Who should hold that position is part of the story. Not every Faction leader wants the responsibility. Some desperately want it and may be exactly the people everyone else believes should never have it. Others may decide their best political move is supporting someone from another Settlement entirely. Each Faction enters the weekend with its own interests surrounding the Steward, creating negotiations, campaigns, alliances, and reasons to interfere with one another. There is no assumption that the "best" candidate is supposed to win. The result should come from what the players actually do.
3. Internal Settlement Drama
Every Settlement contains multiple Factions that share a home but do not necessarily agree about what that home should become. They may disagree over leadership, how resources should be distributed, who can be trusted, or what sacrifices are acceptable. Those disagreements are intentional.
The Resource Meta-Game makes those relationships matter mechanically as well as narratively. Resources turned in help the entire Settlement survive, but they also establish which Faction was responsible for bringing that wealth home. A Faction may therefore need its rivals to succeed while simultaneously knowing that every success makes those rivals more politically powerful. You should expect allies inside your own Settlement, but you should also expect problems that cannot be solved simply by saying, "We're on the same team."
Because in the end, only one “team” rules a settlement. Everyone else serves.
4. Cross-Settlement Drama
Your character's relationships do not stop at the borders of their Settlement. Factions and individual characters will have relationships with people from other Settlements before the event begins. Some may be allies. Others may have debts, rivalries, broken agreements, old romances, professional relationships, or reasons to distrust one another.
These connections provide story that can happen anywhere during the weekend. You may need another Faction's help even though your communities are political rivals. Someone from another Settlement may owe you something they have no intention of paying. A person you trust may belong to the community your leaders are currently trying to undermine. The Settlement gives you a team. It does not tell you who all of your friends and enemies are.
5. Secrets, Research, and the Unknown
Some parts of Wasteland Chronicle are designed for people who enjoy pulling threads and following how far they go in a story. Research, coded messages, hidden records, strange objects, partial histories, and information held by NPCs or other players form another major narrative layer. These stories often cannot be solved by one person or even one Faction. A clue found by one Settlement may only become useful when combined with something discovered somewhere else.
Progress may require decrypting information, exchanging research, questioning NPCs, trading resources for access, or attending specific A/B scenarios. Profession cards may also provide additional information when the right character encounters the right problem. This is where much of the deeper mystery of an event lives. You are not expected to uncover everything. In many cases, nobody will.
6. The Wasteland
Sometimes the story is considerably simpler: You left downtown. Now someone wants your shit.
Outside of the protected areas, the wasteland is dangerous. NPC threats may hunt travelers, Raiders may attack supply routes, and other player characters may decide that the crate you are carrying would solve one of their problems. The existing Meta-Game specifically allows Resources to change hands through normal play and combat once characters are out in the field.
This creates a constant low-level reason to plan your movements. Travel with friends. Hire guards. Hide what you are carrying. Make a deal before someone decides robbery is easier. You cannot permanently lose your character simply because somebody jumped you in the woods. You absolutely can lose your resources, lose the fight, and have a very bad evening. Which brings us to the next tool.
7. Near Death and the Mortis
Being beaten nearly to death is not simply a reset timer. Characters who reach Death's Door enter a liminal Mortis experience after the conflict. These scenes are personal, psychological, and intentionally separated from the normal physical problems of the wasteland. They are opportunities to explore fear, memory, regret, obsession, or whatever else the Mortis decides to put in front of your character.
Coming back also creates story. A character who returns from a near death experience may receive a personal secret goal. These goals are designed to push the character toward new behavior, relationships, or decisions during the remainder of the event. They are often inconvenient. Some may encourage choices that are unhealthy for the people around you or place your character in conflict with people they previously trusted. The goal is not to punish someone for losing a fight. The goal is to make nearly dying matter and to give more story.
8. Workshopped Personal Relationships
Not every relationship needs to begin when the event starts and they can be negotiated and discussed well before game. Before Wasteland Chronicle, staff will provide opportunities for players to build personal connections with other characters before they ever arrive on site. These workshopped relationships give you a framework to start from so that your first conversation with another character does not always need to be your characters' first conversation with each other.
You are welcome to create these relationships yourself with people you already know. Friends can arrive as siblings, rivals, former partners, old traveling companions, people who survived something terrible together, or whatever other connection fits their characters. The workshop process exists for players who want those same kinds of relationships but do not already have the people to build them with.
Staff may help connect players who are looking for compatible story. You might establish that someone from another Settlement once saved your life, that you owe another character a serious debt, that the two of you used to work together, or that your characters have spent years blaming each other for the same disaster. The goal is to provide enough shared history that both players have something meaningful to work with while leaving the actual relationship free to change through play.
These connections are collaborative and voluntary. Nobody will be assigned an intimate, romantic, hostile, or otherwise significant relationship they did not agree to play. The purpose is not to hand players a scripted story. It is to help people arrive with friends they have not met yet, problems that already exist, and reasons to care when they see a familiar face across the wasteland.
