Lore & Setting
In the year 2325, the Midwest has become one of the most complex and dangerous regions in the post-nuclear United States. A century and a quarter has passed since the Brotherhood of Steel marched across the region during the campaigns chronicled in Fallout: Tactics. In that time, industrial knowledge, recovered technology, and organized labor have allowed the Brotherhood to build what many call the jewel of the Midwest—the City-State of New Chicago. Where once the ruins of pre-war Chicago burned, now towers of steel rise under the Brotherhood’s banner. With reclaimed factories, rebuilt rail lines, and a population drawn from across the wastes, New Chicago has become both a fortress and a thriving metropolis, its influence stretching for hundreds of miles. Yet prosperity brings its own challenges, and the Brotherhood’s iron grip is not without controversy.
New Chicago thrives because of industry. Brotherhood scribes and engineers successfully restored pre-war assembly lines, energy infrastructure, and even limited robotics manufacturing. Trade caravans bring raw materials from the far reaches of the wasteland—scrap steel from ruined Detroit, lumber and ice from the Frozen Rapids, and salvaged electronics from old military bunkers—and return with manufactured arms, armor, purified water, and fusion energy. For the first time in centuries, the region has the trappings of a working economy, though the Brotherhood hoards the most advanced technology. Civilian industry flourishes under their watch, but every citizen knows the price of protection: loyalty to the Brotherhood comes before personal freedom.
Despite New Chicago’s prosperity, danger is never far. To the east, the ruins of Detroit remain a nightmare-scape of collapsed factories, irradiated rivers, and sprawling raider clans. Entire warbands prowl the broken motorways, armed with jury-rigged vehicles and heavy weaponry stripped from the carcasses of old auto plants. Worse still are the mutants: ghouls, Super Mutants, and abominations born from unregulated FEV experiments left to fester in the shadows of the old Motor City. Detroit is a prize too dangerous to ignore—its factories still hide technologies the Brotherhood covets—but to claim it outright would mean constant, bloody warfare against both the city’s warped denizens and the scavenger lords who treat it as their kingdom.
North of Chicago lies the land once known as Minnesota, now called the Frozen Rapids. A damaged Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK), deployed generations ago in a desperate attempt to restore the devastated forests, malfunctioned catastrophically. Instead of lush greenery, the land was locked into an eternal tundra, its rivers and lakes choking with ice, its vegetation stunted and twisted. The survivors there have adapted to the cold, building nomadic societies that rely on hunting mutated beasts and trading rare pelts and frostbitten resources. The Brotherhood sees the Frozen Rapids as both a cautionary tale of misused technology and a frontier worth watching—its resources are valuable, but the land itself is cursed by what locals call the “White Winter,” a blizzard season that can last for months.
To the southeast lies a scar on the earth itself: Fort Wayne. Once a bustling industrial city, it was obliterated in the war by a direct ICBM strike. In the centuries since, it has become a burning hellscape much like Boston’s infamous Glowing Sea. The ground is cracked and molten in places, storms of radioactive ash whip through the crater fields, and the few creatures that inhabit it are mutated beyond recognition. Only the most reckless scavengers or Brotherhood patrols in sealed power armor dare to cross into Fort Wayne’s wasteland. Rumors persist of hidden bunkers buried deep beneath the glassed earth, containing weapons or technologies too dangerous to leave untouched. But most dismiss these tales as suicide bait, meant to lure desperate treasure hunters to their doom.
