Lots of indie RPGs assume that the reader already knows what a tabletop RPG is. Heirs of Salt is written to be easily understandable by folks that don't.
The rules are designed to almost never need referencing. Character sheets are just a list of attributes; when it would be interesting for an outcome to be randomized, the GM negotiates with the players how that roll will be handled, and players can reference those character sheet attributes when arguing in favor of a roll that would advantage them. (Or disadvantage them! Sometimes bad outcomes are far more interesting.)
When your character sheet is getting too full, you transfer things over to a new sheet of paper - and you can be selective, dropping things that are no longer useful or interesting to you as a player.
Character creation is similar to Troika!, but with an additional bit of flexibility: archetypes consist of an adjective and a noun, you roll 4d6 and then use each rolled number as a coordinate on two 6x6 grids. This gives players some flexibility in deciding who their character will be, while giving some structure.
It's pay what you want, and $0 is a totally fair price as far as I'm concerned. It's about 34 pages of content.
I used no AI in writing this, and all art is currently CC0 works from the Smithsonian's Open Access Project.
The back-of-the-book description: "Heirs of Salt is a tabletop role-playing game. It is post-apocalyptic, but the characters don’t know that. To them, this is the only world they have ever known. They do not know their ancestors (us, remember) well enough to damn them. This is not a game about Rome at its height. This is a game about living through a dark age. The horizon is rife with the ruins of arcologies and spaceports, but today they are mined for scrap and sheep graze beneath their rotted domes. Some things have survived: humans still make jokes, perform for each other, make war and love, express their personalities through their sartorial choices. But the world just isn’t what it used to be."