The Outside Chance

When Vegasia's expansion dream collapsed, the trade routes leading out of the city did not vanish. They simply stopped being maintained. The settlements that had grown along those routes, outposts and way stations built to service the commerce of a growing empire, found themselves cut off when the ruling families turned their ambitions inward. Most of these places were abandoned. A few families looked at the desert, weighed the odds, and decided to stay. The Outside Chance is what they built: a scatter of surviving communities in the scrublands and deserts surrounding Vegas City, each one persisting through some combination of stubbornness, niche utility, and the kind of luck that only the wasteland provides.
  The settlements that endure here serve purposes that the city proper either cannot or will not fill. The Altar of Scars stands as a Final Knights encampment, its faithful maintaining a presence that Vegasia's crime families tolerate because the alternative is confrontation with true believers. The Last Chance Roadhouse operates as neutral ground for Dieseljocks, a bar and test track where grudges are set aside in favor of fuel and speed. Madam Mumsy's Nursery takes in orphans and trains them for lives the wasteland will demand of them. The Heart Break Hotel offers merciful endings for those who have decided their story is finished. Each of these places exists because someone chose the desert over the city, and the desert, for once, chose them back.
  The Outside Chance is not a region in any governed sense. No authority claims it. No faction controls it. The settlements answer to themselves and trade with whoever arrives. They are the leftovers of an empire that never formed, communities that survived because they were forgotten, and they have made peace with the fact that no one is coming to remember them.