The Drag

The Drag is bounded by The Rez in the north, the RRVFPA in the south, the Rocky Mountains to the west, and the Omaha-KC-Wichita fallout zones to the east. It's flat, sparsely inhabited, and usually some shade of brown, with just the occasional silo or grain elevator to break up the monotany.

The tedious landscape of the Drag has given rise to a half-serious phenomenon called "The Nothing." It's the feeling hits when you're driving a long stretch of road with nothing behind you and more of the same nothing in front of you. People hit by The Nothing shift between irritability and despondency, but regardless of their mood, their only desire is to break free of The Nothing. When presented with any kind of detour or diversion that offers even a momentary break from The Nothing, suffers will jump at the chance to break the monotony, no matter how dangerous or ill-advised the opportunity. The Nothing can strike at any time, but tends to be worse during the daytime, especially during the parts of the year when there aren't even any amber waves of grain to provide a little color and movement.

The drag gets the full temperate climate experience, with ice and snow in winter and scorching heat in summer. Being nuked did nothing to reduce the number of tornados that tear through the area in the summer, but the twisters don't have enough sense to go around the fallout zones. As a result, tornados sometimes carry fallout, radioactive debris, and sometimes even fire with them from the slagged cities.

Just like before the Boom, The Drag serves as America's breadbasket, with co-op farms growing wheat and other food crops giving way to cattle ranches as you move south. During the first few years after the Boom, a lot of nomadic camps looking for a place to plant roots settled here on land that was unclaimed or made deals with landowners who had more than they could farm on their own.

As the clean land has filled up, some settlers have moved into the large swaths of western Kansas where wind and rain often come with fallout. Most of the farmers here rely on greenhouses to keep their crops safe, but some also farm open fields, throwing tarps and plastic sheeting over the fields when the dust comes. Since there's no way for an outsider to know how much fallout crops from "West Drag" have absorbed, most people only buy from them when there are no other options and there's a Geiger counter on hand.

With plenty of clean land and not many people, The Drag has enjoyed a reasonably bloodless existence since The Boom. Early on, the locals consolidated in towns or large farms, leaving plenty of clean land for refugees who drifted in from other parts of the Boomlands. As long as settlers didn't cause any trouble, the locals were happy to enter mutual protection agreements and help them defend their claim. By the time the clean land started to dry up, word had already spread throughout the Boomlands that causing trouble for a camp in The Drag had a good chance of bringing down the wrath of several neighboring camps of well-armed neighbors.