SUBURBAN DEADFIELD MANUAL Cordon Authority · unclassified Run the Drill ▸
A wet, empty suburban high street under heavy cloud, dead cars at the kerb.

Cordon Authority · arrival card

The first five minutes

You are dropped into a suburb with no tutorial and a clock already running. This is the order that keeps you alive to see the second night.

Plate street Cordon Row, looking north. Sixteen hundred hours. No movement recorded.
Standing order 1

“Off the street by dusk. The Authority does not conduct searches after dark.”

A run is 7 nights over 7 real days — a night every evening, dusk at 20:00. Nobody can pause it, including the person who started it. What follows is what to do with your first tank of action points, whenever you arrive.

If you got here in the afternoon you have hours of light. If you got here at half past seven, you have one job, and it is step one.

1. Get inside

You start on the map at street level. Streets are where the dead walk, and at nightfall they walk with purpose. Press E, or use the Enter button, to step into the building you are standing on. It costs 1 AP. Walking back out is free.

You can climb into anything barricaded to level 4 or below — 6 if you have Free Running. Above that you have to knock, and someone alive has to be inside to let you in. Knocking is loud.

2. Claim it

Standing inside a building, Claim costs 5 AP and does five things at once: it boards the section you are standing in up to at least 4, boards every other section of that building up to at least 2, shuts all the doors, clears any ransacking in your room, and marks the place as a safehouse — which makes it a revive point, a shared stash, and somewhere wandering survivors will come to.

You are not assigned a building. Nobody is. Where you hold is the first real decision of the run, and it deserves its own page.

In game The first-night checklist. Three objectives, and the current one carries its hint. It disappears once the chain is done.
In game The actions rail. Every verb you could take here, whether or not you can take it now — the ones you cannot say why on their own line rather than hiding.

Searching costs 1 AP and only works indoors. What you turn up depends on the building type — a pharmacy has first-aid kits, a police station has pistols and ammunition. Power helps: a lit building yields noticeably more, and an unlit one at night yields about half.

Two things are worth having before dark: something to hit with, and a first-aid kit.

4. Look up

The day banner tells you what is coming tonight — how many, and from which direction. It is free, it is published before dusk, and it is accurate. People lose their first run by not reading it.

If you are hosting: roll a character before you wander off. The first night cannot fall while there is nothing in the district to attack — no claims and no living players means the flip is retried for ever, and the run sits on day 1 until somebody exists.
In short
  • Get indoors. The street is where the night finds you.
  • Claim somewhere — 4 levels of barricade for 5 AP, plus a floor under every other room.
  • Search until you have a weapon and a first-aid kit.
  • Nothing pauses. Dusk is 20:00 and it does not wait for you.
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