A Survivor's Introduction to the Wastes

It started with a conspiracy. In 1988, a cabal of the world's wealthiest began a program called Rocksalt: a deliberate contamination of the global food supply designed to cull the population they considered excess. GMO famines followed. Then the governments that remained responded to the rising dead by nuking their own cities. By 2003, The Infection had crossed into insects and there was no stopping it. The Fall was not a single moment. It was a century-long unraveling: warfare, famine, nuclear fire, and the dead refusing to stay dead.
  Generations have passed. The old world is barely a memory. What remains is something different.
 

The Infection

  The Infection is not a disease to be cured. It is the fundamental biological reality of the post-Fall world. A fungal force threaded through the mycelium of the earth itself, it exists inside every living person. It is what raises the dead. It is also what brings survivors back: when you die, the Infection pulls you through the Mortis Amaranthine, a liminal space woven through the fungal network, and deposits you back among the living. Everyone who dies returns. Until the Infection inside them is spent; then, finally, the death is permanent.
  This is not magic. Necrology, the post-apocalyptic science of studying and manipulating the Infection, is the one technological advancement that has pushed civilization beyond the early industrial revolution baseline. Necrologists enter the Mortis to perform procedures, harvest materials, and craft grotesque but functional technology that blends biomatter with crude machinery.
 

The Merican Wastes

  The continent once called North America is the Merican Wastes: irradiated deserts, mutant jungles, fortified settlements, and hundreds of miles of nothing between them. The old nations are gone. Dozens of independent settlements govern themselves, trade when they can, and fight when they must.
  Some regions built something that lasted. Dominus Columbia, a buried ring city beneath the ruins of the old capital, unified the eastern settlements through the Unification War and became a seat of governance, research, and necrology. Then the Omni Plague breached containment from its deepest vaults. The city fell in sequence, layer by layer, and is now an active hazard zone that no faction claims.
  The Ironworks forged a manufacturing empire across the rust belt, feeding its furnaces with the labor and resources of vassal settlements. Its Fall left a power vacuum that the region is still filling. The Rum Coast thrives on sea trade, salvage, and the kind of opportunism that keeps port cities alive. The Overgrowth swallowed entire cities in mutant vegetation so dense that the canopy blocks the sky; inside it, something called the Forest of the Unmaker consumes everything it touches.
 

The People

  The survivors of the Fall are not one species anymore. Generations of exposure to the Infection, radiation, and the pressures of survival produced distinct lineages: Homo symbioticus, humanity adapted through the Infection's influence. Some, like the Natural Ones, show no visible mutation and pass for pre-Fall human. Others are unmistakable. The Lascarians carry luminescent fungal growths beneath their skin. The Semper Mort are visibly dead: grey-skinned, slow-healing, already partway through the Mortis at all times.
  Every lineage carries the Infection. Every lineage returns from death. The differences are in how the Infection shaped them and what they lost along the way.
 

The Faiths

  Religion did not die with civilization. It mutated. Nine major faiths compete for the souls of the living, each with sub-sects that push their theology toward different ends:
 

Church of Darwin: evolution is not a process to observe but a mandate to accelerate. Their sub-sects range from flesh-sculptors to machine-integrators.

Sainthood of Ashes: keepers of the dead and guardians of funerary rites. They ensure the deceased are honored, remembered, and put down properly when they rise wrong.

Final Knights: zealous warriors who hunt the undead with holy fervor. Eight sub-sects, each with its own doctrine on what constitutes righteous violence.

Cult of the Fallow Hopes: believers in law, order, and the restoration of structured civilization. They build courts, codify rules, and enforce them.

Light of Hedon: seekers of experience, beauty, and sensation. When death is temporary, they argue, the only sin is a life unlived.

Kings and Queens Court: preservers of music, art, and the oral tradition. They believe culture is the only thing worth saving.

Tribes of the Seasons: nature worshippers who read the turning of the seasons and the health of the land as divine text.

Nuclear Family: devotees of community, conformity, and the sanctity of the household. Underneath the smiles, their enforcement of belonging can be suffocating.

Church of the Telling Visions: prophets of the flickering screens, interpreting the fragmented broadcasts of the old world as scripture.

 

The Threats

  Three categories of threat define life in the Wastes, and none of them sleep.
 

The Dead

Everyone who dies comes back. Most come back wrong. Shamblers are the most common: slow, mindless corpses that overwhelm through numbers. But the dead diversify. Hook Corpses lie prone along roadways, clinging to anything that passes. Iron Corpses lumber at three times the size of a person, using their bulk as a weapon. The dead are not rare encounters; they are the permanent background noise of the Wastes.
 

The Raiders

Raiders are not simply bandits. They are Homo insurrectus: a divergent evolutionary branch that rejected the Infection symbiosis embraced by the lineages. Raiders are biologically hardwired to hate and destroy anything carrying the Infection. The Naturally Born wear war masks descended from respiratory protection during the Fall, now wielded as instruments of psychological terror. The Aberrant types are worse: Berserker Raiders are unrestrained savages. Haze Raiders weaponize the air itself, producing clouds of radioactive vapor from internal glands. Dread Surgeons harvest body parts from living victims with cold, clinical precision.
  Most Raiders die permanently. Unlike the lineages, they cannot pass through the Mortis. They are not misunderstood. They are an existential threat.
 

The Organizations

Murder Inc is the largest criminal empire in the Wastes, with tendrils in every major settlement. They do not conquer. They insert themselves: running protection, controlling vice, arbitrating disputes that no one else will touch. Other cross-regional powers rise and collapse; Murder Inc persists because it makes itself necessary.
 

Notable Settlements

 

Old York: the largest surviving city, a vertical maze built into the ruins. Factions stack on top of each other and violence is a form of commerce.

The Big AC: a casino resort turned fortress on the coast. The lights still work. The odds are still terrible.

City of Lost Angels: the western coast's sprawling survivor city on the Shattered Coast archipelago.

Under Sea: a subterranean settlement beneath the waves, where the pressure keeps certain things out and certain things in.

Bahlsmore: a fortified port city that was once the military heart of Dominus Columbia. It outlived the nation it helped build.

 

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  This guide is assembled from the accounts of travelers, traders, and the occasional scholar brave or foolish enough to document what they found. Accuracy is not guaranteed. Survival is not guaranteed either. Welcome to the Wastes.