New Ability Scores

Each character has eight different ability scores:

• Strength (STR): Measures physical strength. Primarily used for calculating melee attack rolls and damage.
• Agility (AGI): Measures speed and quickness. Primarily used to determine AC, to calculate ranged attack rolls and damage, or to steer or pilot a vehicle.
• Vitality (VIT): Measures endurance and body's ability to withstand pain and harsh conditions. Primarily used to determine hit points.
• Intellect (INT): Measures mental ability and knowledge. Primarily used for casting spells or similar abilities, or for applied knowledge.
• Willpower (WIL): Measures the ability to resist external influences. Primarily used to calculate saves against mental and psychic attacks.
• Awareness (AWA): Measures one's ability to perceive the environment around them. Primarily used to analyze the environment, search for hidden items, and see things others may not.
• Personality (PER): Measures one's physical demeanor and appearance in social situations. Primarily used in non-combat situations.
• Luck (LCK): Measures one's extraordinary ability to turn things in their favor when its least expected. This ability grants you a pool of Luck Points you can use to adjust attack rolls or saving throws in your favor.

NOTE: Regardless of how you choose your other attributes (roll dice, point buy, or fixed array), your Luck attribute is always based on a die roll (4d6, drop lowest).

See Skills for a listing of all the skills available.

Fully Customizable Genotype

Rather than choose a single "race" for your character, you have the option to customize your genotype to be the type of character you want to be.

• Choose your "nature". Are you organic, synthetic, or a hybrid (cyborg)? This defines your base resistance or immunity to psychic or electromagnetic damage.
• If your character is organic in nature, you choose your classes subtype as humanoid, insectoid, plant, or reptoid. If your character is synthetic or hybrid, you are humanoid by default.

Choose your frame, which defines what type of body you have. You can be strong, tough, agile, light, aquatic, avian, crawler, or generic.

An "anthro" - short for "anthropomorphic" - is a subtype of humanoid where you have animal characteristics; you character can look however you want, but what abilities you have as an anthropomorphic humanoid/animal mutant is based on the type of frame you choose.

See Genotypes for a listing of all the avzailable genotypes and how they are structured.

Diversity in Classes

Each of the six classes has mechanics and features that are specific to that class. This makes some classes - like the Marauder or the Scout - extremely easy to use for newcomers, while the most complex classes - the caster classes, such as the Channeler, Engineer, or Psion - have slightly more robust mechanics that are still reasonably easy to understand by someone familiar with d20 roleplaying games.

The classes available in this manual are:

• Channeler: You are able to control powerful elemental forces to damage your foes.
  Favored Attributes: Intellect (INT), Willpower (WIL), Personality (PER)
• Engineer: You are an expert in technology and can use your specialized engineering interface ("deck" for short) to execute programs that can change the world around you.
  Favored Attributes: Intellect (INT), Agility (AGI), Awareness (AWA)
• Marauder: You are a brute, born of the wasteland, and show your foes no mercy.
  Favored Attributes: Strength (STR), Agility (AGI), Vitality (VIT)
• Psion: You have harnessed the power of your mind to shape the world around you and manipulate the will of others.
  Favored Attributes: Intellect (INT), Willpower (WIL), Personality (PER)
• Scout: You are an expert in surviving and navigating the wasteland.
  Favored Attributes: Agility (AGI), Awareness (AWA), Strength (STR)
• Veteran: You have been expertly trained in the ways of combat.
  Favored Attributes: Strength (STR), Vitality (VIT), Agility (AGI)

See Classes for a listing of all the avzailable classes and how they are structured.

Character Features

Each character has a variety of features they gain as they level up:

• At 1st level, every character chooses an archetype, which is similar to a profession and defines additional features and ability for that character based on the class they have chosen. This archetype grants the character additional abilities at 3rd, 6th, and 9th levels.
• At 2nd, 5th, and 8th level every character chooses a Class Talent
• At 4th, 7th, and 10th level every character is given the option to improve their character. This can be done either by increasing attributes or by gaining a feat, mutation, or implant.

Bonus/Penalty Dice Mechanic

This system has a mechanic added on to d20 rolls: the bonus/penalty dice.

When you gain a bonus die on a d20 roll, you roll an additional d6 and add that to the d20 to get your final result. If you have more than one bonus die, you roll that many d6s but you only add the highest result of all the dice.

When you incur penalty dice, the mechanic is the same except you subtract the value of the highest d6 from the d20 roll.

See Dice Mechanics for more information on the dice mechanics in Atomic Age.

Equipment Demystified

This system does not have overly complex weapon tables, where there are fifty weapons with differing damage types and amounts.

Weapons are categorized by their nature: small, light, or heavy. And, depending on their type, it deals a certain amount of damage (assuming you come to an agreement with your GM, that is). This allows for some creativity in your choice of weapon: in a post-apocalyptic future, if you want to use a rusty stop sign as a weapon, you can do that: i's a heavy melee two-handed weapon that deals 1d10 bludgeoning damage.

Armor is also simplified: there aren't twenty different types of armor. Armor is either light armor or heavy armor, that's it.

Guns, Lots of Guns

This system provides an entire section on guns and how to use them. Guns follow the same principle of weapons in that they are grouped by category (small, light, or heavy) followed by the type of gun (pistol, revolver, sub-machine gun, assault rifle, shotgun, or sniper rifle), which in turn defines how much kinetic damage they cause.

There are also rules provided for weapons that have "select fire" firing modes, such as burst fire or fully automatic fire.

Exploration and Discovery

Although the system has a strong focus on combat, there are additional options provided for handling situations and events outside of combat. For example, there's the "montage" that gives players and GM alike the ability to narrate a series of events without complex die rolling or excessive use of rules. Create the story you want to create!

Vehicle Combat

We have an entire section on rules and guidelines for operating or piloting vehicles and having exciting car-on-car action.

We also provide a variety of sample vehicles taken from pop culture, such as Mad Max's V8 Interceptor or Furiosa's War Rig.

See Vehicles for some more details on vehicle mechanics as well as a few examples.

Hacking

Even though the majority of the world is a ravaged wasteland, technology still exists. We provide a new mechanic for hacking into computer system and bypassing their security measures.

Although anyone can theoretically hack, the Engineer class excels at it.