The year is 2023. Nine years ago, in 2014, ninety-five percent of the world's population was incinerated by nuclear war in the course of an hour. Now humanity struggles on, trying to make a living in scattered communities in a world blighted by radiation.
Many of the communities are both protected and oppressed by the World Defense Initiative, also know simply as the Power, made up of the remnants of the US, UK, Japanese and Russian governments, some of which were at war with each other in 2014, and the organization itself was created in 2008, but, okay, whatever. They are opposed by the Brotherhood of Freedom, otherwise known as the Raiders, who are about thrice the size of the Power and want to replace the power since they're the ones who fucked up in the first place. But the Raiders can't do this since they have no good leadership and their dudes are poorly trained, so they're at a stalemate. Oh, and also Japan made some some sort of nuclear-powered war-bots before the war called the Xavior series that are now operating out of control. So that's a thing.
Although none of this will probably matter to you, since you'll just be trying to survive in a world where the sun blocked out by clouds of fallout. If you don't don't die from starvation or radiation induced sickness, maybe you could do something about all that stuff in the paragraph above. Or you could accomplish great deeds and be known as a Legendary Character. Or you could try to leave the sodding wasteland and head for South America or Africa, or possible Australia or Antarctica, as these are said and rumored, respectively, to be places least affected or even unaffected by the radiation.
But before any of that happens, you have to live through character creation.
You can download rules
here. Follow character creations rules as written. You may also use any of the official supplements, if you want. Use any diceroller program you like (I would probably recommend against trying to use actual dice, from what I've read of this game). You can keep making characters until you have one that survives, but I ask that you share your failures, at the very least noting some highlights. I will let you play anything that lives through character creation, no matter how over-powered or weird it is. We should probably limit this to six characters.