You’ve learned the rules of the cage. The districts, the law, the daily grind. Now it’s time to talk about the endless, frozen hell that lies outside of it. This section is your guide to the Amber Wastes — what the Outlanders and a handful of grizzled runners just call “the Pale.”
The city is loud, but the first thing that hits you when the gates of Rust groan shut behind you is the silence. Not an empty silence, but a heavy one, a pressure that feels like the whole world is holding its breath. This is the boneyard of the old world, a vast, frozen ruin littered with the skeletons of 21st-century cities and new, impossible structures that grow according to a terrible, alien logic .
The stories in this section are your survival guide to a world that wants you dead.
- First, we’ll cover the basics of Surviving the Pale. You’ll learn how to read the color of the snow, why the silence is more dangerous than any sound, and how to accept the fact that the poison you’re hiding from is in every breath you take.
- Next, we’ll show you the few Settlements of the Wastes, the scattered points of light in the overwhelming dark where you might find a moment’s rest, trade for supplies, or get a knife in your back.
- Finally, we’ll take you into the heart of the rot itself with The Story of Atomic Wonderland, the theme park at Ground Zero where the world broke and the past is still screaming.
The Bastion will grind you down, but the Wastes will swallow you whole. The articles that follow aren’t meant to make you brave; they’re meant to teach you the proper respect for a world that has already died once. Read carefully. Your life depends on it.
