Desert Rangers

Overview

A group of highly trained survivors that can trace their roots back to a company of pre-war US Army engineers. They explore the wastes helping those in need. Their headquarters, Ranger Center, is located in a desert on the California - Arizona border.

In Wasteland the player would control a group of 4 or just 1 ranger as they explored the wastes. Players could take 4 preset rangers or create new ones, this means rolling their attributes, assigning skills, nationality, gender and names.

In the first game Ranger nationalities included

• U.S.
• Russian
• Chinese
• Indian
• Mexican

History

The origin of Desert Rangers traces back to 1998 when the tensions between the United States of America and the Soviet Union reached a new high. In that year the Soviet Union made claims that the U.S. made Citadel Starstation was merely a military launching platform, this claim led to several non-aligned nations becoming alarmed.

Many of the South and Central American governments (created by the United States during an event known as The Drug Wars 1987-1993) pledged their support to the United States and its allies, including NATO countries. This series of events forced the non-aligned nations to join the Soviet block, by this time only 3 countries remained neutral, Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland.

Some time before the Starstation was fully operation it sent out a distress signal and in a short amount of time almost all the satellites that orbited earth were swept from the sky, leaving the superpowers in blindness. In an all-out panic, the superpowers of the world released 90% of nuclear arms, effectively creating the apocalypse. However this was not the end, many small communities survived, some having no idea what had transpired.

On the very same day that the US and Soviet Union sealed the fate of the world a company of US Army engineers were building bridges over dry riverbeds somewhere in the southwest of the US, south of the engineers there was a newly built federal prison, home to death row inmates. When nuclear war began the engineers took shelter within the prison, expelling the prisoners to the wastes, and thus completing their sentences.

Over the next few weeks the engineers began inviting small communities that survived into the federal prison that became known as Ranger Center. In short time it became one of the strongest settlements in the wasteland, the Rangers even managed to defeat many bandit attacks. Their success convinced them that they should attempt to help other survivors. Toward this end, the Desert Rangers, in the great tradition of the Texas and Arizona Rangers a century before, were born.