Setting Overview

The campaign is set in the Black Hills of South Dakota, 225 years after the Great War of 2077. The present day is 2302. Players are clones grown from templates preserved in Vault 44, woken at age 18 (their pre-war template was 13 at the time of the Jamboree). The clone batch has a 98% stability rate — good enough to work, imperfect enough to matter.

In the decades leading up to the Great War, Rapid City grew into a boomtown. Multiple oil pipelines from Canada were routed south and deliberately centralized there, forming a single major depot rather than leaving fuel flow dependent on any one pipeline as a point of failure.

South Dakota's location made it a defensible choice — deep enough into established US territory to be secure — and its proximity to the state's nuclear missile silos meant Rapid City developed as both a military and industrial hub, expanding rapidly right up to the war.

The same period also saw internment camps in the region holding Chinese and Canadian Americans.

In the war's aftermath, the Black Hills became a refuge for wasteland survivors, its terrain offering shelter that the open plains around it didn't. But the region wasn't spared evenly. The northern Black Hills were hit particularly hard by nuclear blasts, despite no obvious military target ever having been there. Rapid City itself was devastated, and so was the land to its east, where many of the missile silos and internment camps had stood — ground that's stayed scarred and difficult long after the fires went out.