The Dust Fields
If The Drag is the town square of the Boomlands, the Dust Fields are its wild and lawless frontier. The nukes baked the already dry landscape into a wasteland where the dust is the only thing that grows without irrigation. There are little greenish spots here and there with enough water to allow farming, but most of them barely feed the people who live there, rarely leaving any surplus for trade. Since that water barons who control these farms rarely put much concern into worker morale and safety, most Dust Fielders earn their living either by salvaging scrap from the cooled-down edges of large cities or by ambushing those scrappers and taking their stuff.
Geography
The Dust Fields stretch from the western edge of the RRVFPA to the coast of Lake Mojave in what's left of Arizona, though most people consider Mojo World to be the gateway where the relatively civilized part of the Boomlands ends, giving way to the wild frontier of the Dust Fields.
Climate
Even though the seasons don't really change here--unless you count from "warm and dry" to "hot and dry," that doesn't mean there's not plenty of weather that will try its best to kill you. Dust storms--some of them carrying fallout--blow up out of nowhere, the radiation lightning that continuously rumbles above the craters of dead cities sometimes hitches a ride with a passing storm, creating a mobile disaster zone that obliterates everything in its path, and tornados are common in the spring and earl summer.
Fauna & Flora
Aside from desert scrub and a few scraggly fields, there's not a lot growing in the Dust Fields. Animal life is sparse and often mutated. Small herds of sickly cattle and horses that went feral after the bombs dropped can be occasionally spotted, though most have either died off or been rounded up and moved to wetter territory to the north. Without a doubt, though, the most famous critter found in the Dust Fields is Cooter, the giant armadillo who roams the Texas/New Mexico border.
Natural Resources
The Dust Fields are still littered with the rusting hulks of old oil derricks. These were mostly ignored in the early years after the Boom because nobody needed a lot of crude oil that they didn't have a way to refine into more utilitarian liquids. Now that the RRV has a refinery up and running, things have changed, with camps of pre-Boom roughnecks popping up around old derricks and pumping out crude destined for Fort Sill.
The cities of the Dust Fields were mostly incidental in the Russian's nuclear plan, which means many of them received lighter bombardment than the more strategically important cities elsewhere. As a result, the hottest parts of the fallout zones are more spread out than in other places, leaving mazelike corridors of mostly safe ruins running through the larger zones. This has led to the rise of scrapper gangs who prowl the edges of the former cities--often in jury-rigged radiation gear--looking for scrap that's cool enough to trade.
Dust fielders who don't survive by farming, pumping crude, or scavenging typically make their living by raiding those how do.
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