From the introduction:
In Deadline, characters resist a future that elevates mobility and machines over people and the planet. An autonomous transportation network has tapped into run-away climate change to power the cars, planes, and ships of tomorrow. Biofuels from farms, from weedy subtropical forests springing up in the margins of an ever expanding road grid, from corpses rendered soylent green style, allow goods and good consumers to continue to circulate even as CO2 levels mount higher and higher. Players control characters who have stepped back from the whirl of circulation to realize that the cycle of life on their over-paved world has gone wrong. They try to withdraw and subvert. Players gain dice during scenes by referencing characters' personal reasons for rebelling and topics players are interested. The most valuable dice are earned by introducing visceral, at-the-table play aids, sound effects, and the like that reinforce the sense of a future that is even hotter, louder, faster, and more redolent of hydrocarbons and pollution than our own time. Success at player defined scenes lowers the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, but background CO2 elevates between stages, making the game a race against an unalterable climate catastrophe.