2. Cities & Professions
Cities
Your City is your starting point in Wasteland Chronicle. It is your team, your home culture, your visual style, and the group your Survivor is expected to care about when everything goes sideways. You are not trapped there. You can trade with other Cities, make friends outside your walls, pick fights in the wasteland, and get tangled in stories that cross every border. Your City simply gives you a place to begin, people to stand beside, and a reason to give a damn.
Each City has its own aesthetics, symbols, resources, history, customs, and view of the wasteland. That means your City does a lot of work before you ever say a word in character. It helps define what your clothes look like, what the majority of your people value, what problems your community is known for, and what kind of trouble you are already tied into when the event begins.
Inside every City are three Factions. These are smaller groups with their own priorities, leadership, grudges, and ideas about what the City should become. They are on the same side in theory. In practice, theory gets messy when there is not enough food, fuel, medicine, or influence to go around. Factions compete for control inside their City while still needing each other to keep the whole place alive.
Factions matter because the story remembers what they do. Resources turned in during the weekend help the whole City survive, but they also count toward the influence of the Faction that brought them home. At the end of the event, the Faction with the largest contribution gains control of the City’s leadership going into the next chapter of the story. Cooperation and competition are happening at the same time, because apparently the apocalypse was not stressful enough already.
Your City and Faction also connect you to the larger narrative. They shape who asks you for help, who trusts you, who wants your vote, who wants your resources, and who may have a problem with you before you even meet them. Some stories are about your City surviving. Some are about your Faction gaining power. Some are about the Exchange, the Steward, and who gets influence over the trade network between communities.
Each City has its own full page with deeper lore, costume guidance, Faction details, and story hooks. Start here, pick the vibe that grabs you, then go read the City page that looks most like home or the place you would most enjoy ruining.
The Cities
The Redline
Road punk, fuel, convoys, and overland transportation. The Redline keeps vehicles moving, routes open, and goods flowing between communities. Expect patched road gear, goggles, crew markings, loud engines, and people who think hesitation is how you get eaten.
The Last Ward
Wasteland gothic decay, medicine, and knowledge. The Last Ward grew from hospitals, quarantine spaces, and mortuary work. They keep people alive, record the dead, study what killed them, and make hard choices with very steady hands.
The Brightworks
Psychobilly vintage apocalypse, electricity, and communication. The Brightworks keeps radios talking, lights burning, and morale alive through noise, style, spectacle, and barely functioning machines that absolutely should not still work.
The Breakwater
Rural salt folk, clean water, and preserved food. The Breakwater works the shore, watches the weather, keeps water moving, and preserves what people need to survive the lean seasons. Practical, stubborn, and very aware that everyone gets thirsty eventually.
Professions
Professions describe the kind of work your character knows how to do. They are primarily a role-play tool and a way for the event to recognize what your character is trained or experienced in. Professions become important when something in the world calls for them. A damaged generator may have instructions specifically for a Mechanic. A body may contain information that only a Medic can identify. A military weapon may require a Guard to operate it. A hidden route may provide an advantage to a Scout. The rules for that interaction will be provided on the prop, scenario card, or by the NPC running the scene.
You do not need a Profession to attempt normal actions. Anyone can fight, carry supplies, negotiate, help an injured person, or try to fix something through ordinary role-play. A Profession represents the point where your character has enough experience that the game may give them additional information, faster access, better results, or a unique way to interact with a scenario.
Every character chooses two Professions. They may come from the same category or from two different categories. There are no Profession ranks. Choosing the same Profession twice provides no additional benefit, so choose two different Professions that help explain what your character actually does within their Settlement. Professions are divided into three broad categories.
Field Professions
Field Professions are built around leaving safe areas, confronting danger, and operating in places where things have already gone wrong.
● Guard: Guards are trained for organized violence and defense. This includes settlement guards, militia, convoy security, hunters, gunners, bodyguards, and anyone whose normal work involves protecting people or territory.
● Scout: Scouts find routes, resources, threats, and opportunities. This includes scavengers, trackers, guides, explorers, couriers, and people who regularly enter dangerous areas before everyone else.
● Driver: Drivers operate and understand the vehicles that keep the settlements connected. This includes road crews, convoy drivers, sailors, vehicle operators, and people responsible for getting passengers or cargo through dangerous territory.
Work Professions
Work Professions keep people, equipment, and settlements functioning.
● Mechanic: Mechanics build, repair, modify, and maintain material goods. This includes mechanics, electricians, builders, armorers, carpenters, machinists, and other people who work with tools and infrastructure.
● Medic: Medics keep people alive. This includes doctors, nurses, field medics, herbalists, mortuary workers, caregivers, and anyone whose work primarily involves health, injury, disease, or recovery.
● Grower: Growers produce and protect the resources people need to survive. This includes farmers, cooks, water keepers, animal handlers, food preservers, foragers, and people responsible for turning the environment into usable food and supplies.
Community Professions
Community Professions deal with people, information, resources, and the organization of settlement life.
● Trader: Traders move goods and make deals. This includes merchants, quartermasters, brokers, smugglers, market workers, and anyone who specializes in knowing what something is worth and who might want it.
● Organizer: Organizers bring people together and get them moving toward a goal. This includes settlement leaders, preachers, labor organizers, diplomats, teachers, recruiters, and people who regularly coordinate others.
● Scholar: Scholars preserve and interpret knowledge. This includes researchers, archivists, investigators, technicians, historians, record keepers, and people who spend their time understanding things that others overlook.
How Professions Work During Play
When a Profession matters mechanically, the game will tell you with bright red cards and envelopes. These envelopes or cards will have the profession in bold, larger, letters with a simple out of character explanation of what you can do as a benefit of your profession during a scenario. A scenario card might read:
SCOUT: You recognize signs that someone has recently passed through this area. Take this blacklight to find where in the area they may have stashed some supplies.
A damaged machine might read:
MECHANIC: This mechanical puzzle in front of you must be completed to get the lights on the engine lit in the right order. If you are able to get the lights lit, the engine will start, and the garage door behind the engine will open.
An NPC might have instructions that say:
TRADER: This item is of special value to the NPC Von Perington. You can turn the item in, or, trade it with them for favor and potentially more money.
An encampment with defenses might read:
GUARD: As long as the two targets on the top of this guard tower are upright, you can ignore any ranged shots that come through the slot. If the sign falls down that says, “GET OUT” the tower has been breached and you have to leave.
This means you do not need to remember a separate Profession rules section while playing. The world tells you when your Profession matters and what advantage it gives you. Taking two of the same Profession provides no benefit, so choose two that you think might be fun for your style of play.
