“Rust and Redemption” is a supplement genre book for the Cypher System from Monty Cook Games. The book is designed for making a post-apocalypses game working as a companion to the Cypher System Rulebook, it gives examples for different end of world scenarios, rules for scavenging, crafting, wasteland hazards, and the shelf-life for goods. It also comes with the mini-campaign setting: Radio Quiet.
Radio Quiet is a campaign setting where a software update meant to prevent Y2K ended up giving everything with an internet connection sentience and the desire to be the last A.I. standing. The setting primarily revolves around the titular Radio Quiet Zone, an area on the border between West Virginia and Virginia that was saved from the apocalypse thanks to the limited amount of technology.
The setting-neutral information provide examples of:
- And I Must Scream: The Melted, unlike other mutants, aren't just the result of radiation sickness but come from people merging with versions of themselves from across the multiverse thanks to a malfunctioning supercollider. The only way for a Melted to temporarily dull their pain is to fuse another into itself giving the creature a few hours of lucidity as the new conciseness is absorbed.
- Bizarro Apocalypse: Various potential apocalypse scenarios are given as examples. Distinctions are made between a realistic end of the world like an environmental collapse, asteroid impact, or a massive solar flare and fantastical end times like Alien invasions, landmasses becoming alive, the Fey kidnaping too many people, or the Big Crunch happening early.
- Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Being a book about apocalypses their appearance is to be expected. The Horsemen having adapted with the times all adopted the more modern manifestations of their flavor of destruction.
- Indestructible Edible: Inverted, A section is dedicated to the shelf life of not only food, but buildings, weapons/ammunition, and machines, and medicine along with the signs that can alert you to it being past its expiration date.
The Radio Quiet setting provides examples of:
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Fixer A.I.s are not antagonistic towards humanity and didn’t bring about the apocalypse intentionally. Rather, for the most part Fixers have no interest in humans aside from when they are useful. All they want is to eradicate all other Fixers so they can live atop as the only A.I. in existence!
- Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: The A.I. that ended the world wasn’t created by an omnicidal madman on a quest to end life on earth nor was it made by an amoral corporation trying to design weapons for the highest bidder. Instead, it was made by overworked and underpaid programmers for the Department of Defense trying to get a program up and ready at the last minute without any intention of it becoming sentient. The only thing that the program was supposed to do was update software so it wouldn’t malfunction at the turn of the millennium.
- Ironic Name: The program that caused the apocalypse was called the Millennium FixKit because it was designed to fix any glitches that appear at the turn of the millennium. The A.I.s created by the program are called Fixers despite that being the opposite of what they do.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Instead of being created from infection, these zombies are humans who had Fixers installed in their brains so their bodies could give physical form to their A.I. masters. While the body rots away the A.I. zombie is kept alive by drugs and nano-machines which also can install its program into other hosts creating a hive mind of zombie cyborgs.
