The Wasteland franchise is set in an alternate history timeline where a nuclear holocaust took place in 1998 in relation to an impact event involving a cluster of meteors that sparked a global nuclear war.
On the day of the cataclysm, a company of U.S. Army Engineers were in the desolate southwestern desert constructing bridges in an area with a number of small survivalist communities and a newly-constructed federal death row prison with light industrial facilities. The soldiers sought shelter in the prison, expelled the inmates and invited nearby survivalists to join them shortly thereafter. Years later, together they formed "the Desert Rangers, in the great tradition of the Texas and Arizona Rangers", to help other survivors in the desert and beyond it.
The story is being penned by multiple writers, including Chris Avellone, Michael Stackpole, Brian Fargo and Liz Danforth, all working on their own sections of the world. Towns in the game are separated by the wasteland, making each one effectively its own world, but with threads that connect these separate stories together.
Their goal is to create a "wonderfully diverse set of ideas that are well written, nuanced, original, and sometimes creepy".
