Most skirmish games are about firepower. Deadwake is about firepower and the slow collapse of your operatives' minds under the weight of everything the battlefield is doing to them. The Deadwake Miniatures Combat Rules is a complete, standalone skirmish wargame set in the post-apocalyptic science fiction universe of Deadwake: 96 pages of fully developed tactical rules, three faction rosters built around radically different combat philosophies, nine ready-to-run scenarios, a complete campaign system, and a force-building framework, all built around one core truth: the operative who loses their nerve first loses the battle. This is a game of small squads, hard choices, and a battlefield that fights everyone simultaneously. Three Ways to Play: Play it as a pure tactical wargame, completely standalone with no RPG required. Play it as the combat resolution layer of a full Deadwake narrative campaign, where the wounds your operatives take on the tabletop carry directly into the story sessions that follow. Or play it as a hybrid experience where narrative choices create the conditions for each skirmish and the outcome of each battle rewrites the next chapter of your campaign. One book, three complete experiences, all using the same rules. The Resonance Roll: One Mechanic, Every Action Every action on the battlefield, from an Audit Executioner advancing through difficult terrain to a Gen-hanced Warden performing Overwatch as a free action to a CAD operative flooding an enemy's systems with a Data Spike, is resolved with a single unified dice pool mechanic. Build a pool of d6s equal to your relevant attribute, roll, and count successes. A result of 6 generates Overload, giving you a choice: take the clean result, or channel the Overload for a powerful benefit and make a secret Threadlock check to see what the psychic feedback costs your operative. The same risk-reward tension that drives the RPG lives at the heart of every exchange on the tabletop. The Cohesion System: The War Inside the War: Every Agent on the battlefield has two health tracks. Vigor measures physical damage. Cohesion measures psychological stability, tracked separately and fluctuating constantly as the battle grinds on. Witnessing a squadmate destroyed within six inches costs Cohesion. Failing a Threadlock check when channeling Overload costs Cohesion. Taking fire from weapons with the Terror quality costs Cohesion. When Cohesion breaks, the consequences range from a unit becoming Suppressed and losing its offensive capability, to Faltering and losing actions, to suffering a Psychological Fracture where the Facilitator may force the unit to freeze completely or attack the nearest model, friendly or enemy. This is not flavor. It is the game's central tactical problem. The faction that ignores its operatives' psychological stability pays for it. The Psychic Battlefield: The Environment as a Third Player Every battlefield in Deadwake has an Anomaly Severity Index rating, from ASI 0 in a sterile corporate Clean Network to ASI 5 at the epicenter of a psychic cataclysm where reality has stopped following its own rules. In an ASI 2 zone, every Agent makes a Threadlock check at the end of each Resolution Phase. At ASI 3, all Command actions become harder as the Static interferes with coherent thought. At ASI 4, a natural roll of 1 on any die triggers an immediate result on the Resolve Malfunction Table. At ASI 5, the Facilitator introduces Mass Hallucinations, Identity Scrambles, and Sensory Deprivation effects that can turn your own operatives against each other. Locus Points pulse with concentrated psychic energy, damaging minds but offering devastating temporary abilities to Psy-Sensitive units willing to risk the exposure. Static Storms drift across the board on random vectors. Psychic Echoes left by destroyed operatives raise the local ASI and force Threadlock checks on anything that enters their radius. The terrain does not wait patiently for you to solve it.

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