The Zone

There are four possible options for actions taken in downtime. Each one takes up a week of time and they can all be chosen multiple times.

Wound Cards sometimes require bed rest to fully heal. Each card will have a number of weeks of bed rest required to fully heal the injury. Each downtime point represents a week of bed rest. If you do not take the full amount of required bed rest you will start the next event at -5 health per week of bed rest missed.

Many residents of the Zone spend a fair amount of their time between contracts poking through old ruins, abandoned campsites and bunkers, looking for items of value. Every point spent on scavenging will yield an amount of loot randomly determined by the referees. It may also provide plot hooks, items of significant value or data that could feed into a later project.

The various bars and hubs employ a lot of people as guards. They do bring in some of their own from outside, but in the main they rely on freelancers. Each downtime point spent on guard duty pays 200c. Whilst scavenging has the potential to bring in a high value lucky find, guard duty provides a solid, reliable income that is on average better than scavenging.

Characters may wish to dig deeper into scientific data, analyse intelligence they have gathered or speak to friendly NPCs. It can also be used to do guard duty or favours for a faction that the character wishes to join. Anything that players wish to do to advance the wider plot or their personal plot in downtime comes under this category.

After you have selected Project Work for one or more of your downtime points, you should fill in the text box describing what you hope to achieve and what resources you have. If what you want to do is not feasible you will find out within a week and you will be given the chance to reallocate the rest of your downtime if you wish to abandon the project.

It should be noted that downtime activity must be zero risk. Anything that carries even a tiny degree of personal risk must be done in uptime at an event. Downtime activity should be restricted to things like poring over data, maps and journals that would be a bit tedious to do at an event. If you are in any doubt, just ask.

If you are working as part of a team on a project you should all note down all the names of the team on your downtime form.

• Establish contacts within a faction, do them a few favours, work towards joining the faction.
• Find a suitable spot to set up a workspace of some kind like a laboratory or gunsmithing workshop.
• Spend more time picking through data you have acquired in uptime to arrive at more detailed conclusions.
• Speak to NPCs at the Bar to learn more about the various factions, how anomalies work, freelancer gossip and so forth.
• Work on a specific scientific or technical project (build a new gun, analyse a weird pill etc). This will require access to a suitable workspace.

You can dedicate one or more downtime slots to crafting items for use in game. Please see the Crafting page for more details. Some items require multiple weeks to be completed, with others you can make several of them in one week.