The American Southwest

Lore & Background

When the nuclear exchanges ended the old world, the American Southwest—already arid, already a patchwork of highways, military installations, and sprawling suburban sprawl—became a graveyard of infrastructure. The Los Angeles basin, once a megacity of millions, was reduced to a skeleton of collapsed freeways, irradiated zones, and half-buried overpasses. What remained of the population scattered into the desert, forming small, often hostile enclaves around whatever water source they could claim: a broken aquifer, a cistern, a dried-up reservoir. Over the following centuries those enclaves hardened into factions with their own codes, hierarchies, and grudges. Some hoard water and trade it at ruinous prices; others raid, burn, and kill. The desert itself becomes a character—its heat a constant threat, its silence a kind of judgment. The old laws of the pre-war world are remembered only as stories, and the Courier, a relic of that vanished order, is the last living thread connecting the present to a past no one quite believes happened the way the old records describe. Wasteland 2 pushes this history further: twenty-five more years of entropy have deepened the divisions, and the ruins of Los Angeles now hide not just bandits but organized power structures with ambitions that reach beyond the basin. The Southwest's geography—its canyons, its hidden military outposts, its long straight highways cutting through featureless scrub—becomes a chessboard on which the Courier's choices ripple outward, reshaping which communities survive and which are swallowed by the sand.

Reader's Guide

The narrative arc across Wasteland and Wasteland 2 follows the Courier as they traverse the Southwest, delivering water to settlements while uncovering a larger conspiracy tied to the region's pre-war military history. The player's central dilemma is allocation: which communities receive aid, which are left to wither, and which factions are empowered or undermined by those choices. Key decisions include choosing which faction to ally with during the water distribution, whether to investigate suspicious military installations hidden in the desert, and ultimately confronting the source of a threat that could destroy what little remains. Each path reshapes the political map of the basin—some alliances become permanent, others collapse into violence. Characters involved include the Courier, various settlement leaders, and faction commanders whose names and loyalties shift based on prior choices. Major locations span the ruined Los Angeles urban core, desert highways, hidden underground facilities, and scattered rural outposts. [MAJOR REVEAL FLAGGED: The true origin of the central threat and the Courier's personal connection to it are late-game revelations best experienced without prior knowledge.]

Did You Know?

• The original Wasteland (1988) was one of the earliest post-apocalyptic role-playing games and helped establish the genre's core tropes: scarce resources, moral ambiguity, and a ruined American setting.
• Tim Cain, a key designer on the original Wasteland at Interplay, later founded inXile Entertainment, the studio that developed Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3.
• The American Southwest setting in Wasteland 1 and 2 is distinct from Wasteland 3, which shifts the action to the Colorado high plains in the American Midwest.