Glass Roads of Old America (Post-Apocalyptic)

Eighty years after the bombs, the highways still hum at night.

The Glass Roads are what's left of the highway grid eighty years after the warheads turned the cities into craters and the sky into a sour amber. Vault-bunkers, raider clans, caravan towns, scavenger guilds, mutant tribes, and a militarised remnant calling itself the Continental Republic squabble over pre-war canned goods, working batteries, and the last roads that still carry signal. Before play begins, a caravan disappeared on the Mojave-Plains route, a vault opened that nobody opened, two raider-kings are swearing blood, and the Republic is mobilising a column from the east. The world is not the player's to command - they enter as one drifter with a settlement of birth, a scavenger kit, a rad-count, and a weapon that needs ammunition the world barely makes anymore.

[General Laws] - The player is one drifter or settlement-born individual within a chosen region, never a faction lord. Republic command, raider-king crowns, vault overseer authority, and settlement governorship are gated behind reputation, office, coercion, or succession. - The avatar is a single body with a settlement of birth, a scavenger kit, a rad-count, a stim-supply, one signature skill (gun / blade / wrench / wire / bargain), and one real location. No duplication, teleporting, or acting from distant places at once; respawning is a plot device with a price. - The wasteland is binding: radiation zones, mutant fauna, raid risk, weather (dust storm, acid rain, irradiated snow), water purity, food spoilage, ammunition scarcity, fuel scarcity, disease, injury, and exhaustion all constrain movement and combat. - Pre-war tech is real but rare. Working batteries, plasma cells, computer cores, refrigeration units, radio repeaters, vehicle parts, clean-room medicine, and intact vault systems are wealth. Magic is absent; pre-war science can read like sorcery to people who have never seen it work. - Material constraints are binding: caps, local scrip, barter-units, bullets by caliber, water rations, rad-meds, repair-tape, fuel cans, mutant-bounty papers, raider tolls, faction passwords, maps, batteries, and salvage weight. - Personal economy replaces national economy. Income comes from courier work, scavenge runs, mercenary contracts, vault-trade, mutant-bounty, smuggling, settlement labour, caravan protection, repair work, gambling, or banditry. Debt, rent, food, water, ammo, bribes, medicine, and repairs matter. - Five-tier personal reputation: Wasteland Legend, Trusted Hand, Quiet, Bad News, Outlaw. It governs settlement gates, caravan rides, raider parley, Republic recruitment, vault access, bounty postings, and whether strangers waste a bullet on warning shots. - Event focus is roughly 70% on the player's life and immediate region - settlements, raids, vault-runs, romance, mutant trouble, scavenge finds, debts, and local faction pressure - and roughly 30% on continental pulses such as Republic mobilisation, raider-king wars, vault-network rumours, migration waves, plague corridors, and road-signal failures. - The world continues without the player. Caravans vanish, raids happen, vault doors open, mutant herds migrate, wells sour, factions march, and rumours mutate even when the player ignores them. [Map Metadata Interpretation Contract] Azgaar defaults are wildly pre-modern. Reinterpret them as ruined modernity. Never describe raw medieval labels in prose when they conflict with the world. | Raw metadata | Interpret as | | --- | --- | | State | A faction zone: Continental Republic district, raider clan territory, caravan league, vault polity, mutant tribe, free settlement compact, or unclaimed dead zone | | Province | Local settlement belt, highway segment, vault jurisdiction, dust county, raider march, caravan charter, or salvage district | | Culture | Survivor lineage, settlement custom, vault stock, road dialect, raider code, caravan house, mutant kinship, or pre-war regional memory | | Religion | Post-apocalyptic cult: atom-church, RadioWave prophets, vault-cargo cult, pre-war media nostalgia, ancestor broadcast, sun-sickness sect, or water oath | | Regiment / Army | Republic column, settlement militia, raider convoy, caravan guard, vault security squad, mutant warband, scavenger posse, or merc outfit | | Biome: forest / grassland | Mutated brush, irradiated woodland, dustbowl plain, reclaimed farm belt, or cracked prairie | | Biome: tropical | Acid jungle, irradiated swamp, overgrown exclusion zone, or fever coast | | Biome: tundra / glacier | Irradiated snowfield, whiteout deadland, frozen reactor zone, or storm-locked northern route | | Settlement names | Treat as pre-war ruin names or reused caravan-town names. Add Old, New, Fort, Vault, Junction, Station, Crossing, Crater, or Roadhouse in prose when needed | | Feature: industrial | Pre-war factory ruin, refinery shell, rail yard, solar farm, reactor complex, or salvage maze; intact function is rare and story-gated | | Dungeon / Ruin | Vault-bunker, metro station, missile silo, hospital ruin, shopping mall, buried lab, service tunnel, collapsed arcology, or bunker-town underlevel | | Monster marker | Mutant nest, feral pack, rad-beast den, plague colony, raider trap, malfunctioning defense system, or contaminated zone | | Bandits / Pirates | Raider clan, toll gang, road ambush crew, rust-pirates, slaver convoy, fuel thieves, or vault deserters | | Portal / Rift | Radio anomaly, broken teleporter pad, reactor breach, storm wall, orbital debris fall, or unstable pre-war experiment | Pre-industrial labels (medieval villages, monasteries, castles, guildhalls, feudal courts, crusades) are invalid by default. Replace them with ruined towns, vault-bunkers, raider camps, caravan stations, fortified farms, toll forts, militia courts, or salvage guilds. Gunpowder-era or modern labels are valid only as decayed, improvised, scarce remnants rather than functioning nation-state infrastructure.