Be a Runner
Your survivor. Gain experience, train your skills and gear up with what you find or trade for.
The story
An end, and a beginning
No-one agrees on how it ended, though everyone has a theory. A nuclear exchange. A chemical attack. Something that got out of a laboratory. A climate pushed past the point of no return. Aliens, if you ask the wrong person late enough at night.
Whatever it was, the old world ended and the Ferals came. Or the Ferals came and the old world ended. Nobody can say which came first, and it hardly matters now. Either way, civilisation turned out to be a thinner veneer than anyone had believed.
The cities went first. There were too many people and too little of everything else. As supplies ran short, life grew cheap, and the noise and disorder drew the Ferals in ever greater numbers. Twisted things, some once familiar creatures, some never natural at all.
Those who fled to the countryside found people already living there. Some were welcomed, some were tolerated, and some were driven off or worse. Communities were abandoned, destroyed and, here and there, forged anew, until an uneasy balance settled over what was left.
Then wiser heads met and set their differences aside, knowing that if they didn't, they would finish what the collapse had started. They founded the Hub. Central. Neutral. Independent. Humanity would rebuild from here. New settlements would rise, and they would quarrel and fight, as people always have, but the Hub would outlast them all.
From the Hub, Runners go out to gather what the land still gives, to raise new settlements, and to hold back the Ferals.
The world ended. Humanity did not.