The year is 1980.

Tensions are at a boiling point between the US and the USSR after a thermonuclear blast eviscerates a small US Air Force base in the rural town of Damascus, Arkansas.

The US are swift to respond, firing a retaliatory strike at the USSR, which is dismissed by a Soviet officer as a false positive by their early detection satellites.

As the American Titan-II missiles plough through the Soviet countryside, the USSR is only able to mount a meager counterattack from remote satellite locations before it is completely wiped off the face of the Earth.

China and France, in light of this sudden, and terrifying American aggression, launch strikes of their own against the US, and after a short but intense series of reprisals, the world is razed to the ground by nuclear arm fire, and human civilization along with it.

Yet mankind is not doomed.

During the Cold War, the great, the good, and the gilded invested heavily in next-generation bomb shelters.

Enormous, self-sustaining, subterranean cryogenic compounds designed to preserve life until the outside world becomes habitable again.

Compounds which, due to cost-cutting business measures in the name of competition and industrial espionage, failed to work entirely…

“Coolers.”

Bathed in lethal radiation, the greatest minds of the 20th century, and all living memory of culture, technology, and agriculture are lost…

...while on the surface, the very hardiest specimens of humanity cling to life, survive, then thrive.

From the ashes, a new world emerges, an ersatz, post-apocalyptic, stillborn 80’s continues indefinitely, populated entirely by the toughest, meanest, and outright dumbest of God’s creations...

The Wasters.

Years later - however many nobody can say, even those who can count - the barren desert landscape of the Western Wastes is host to bitter factionalized warfare.

The Wasters fight tooth and nail over the most precious of natural resources…

...a liquid from beneath the sands that fuels all of un-civilization...

Buried deep within the Cooler’s chambers, the very radiation that killed off society’s chosen few imbued their potable provisions with a sick green glow and a radioactive buzz.

“Booze”, it affectionately came to be known…

…and those dumb enough to weather its taste found themselves taking a sharp detour off the human evolutionary highway, mutating in strange and confounding ways, and acquiring both permanent brain damage and a ravenous addiction to the stuff.

Against this backdrop of organized chaos, the Wasters scrabble in the dirt looking for just a drop of the good stuff.

And the right guy in the wrong place at the right time with the wrong drink could be a major headache for those who seek power.


Join a team of other Wasters in a search for Booze, and end up changing the fate of the Western Wastes! Choose a faction your Waster originates from and decide their class and specializations, starting setup, and get ready to make a cooler run to change the destiny of everyone in what remains of California. Tabletop, modified 5e. Science fiction, post-apocalyptic, historical, western, futuristic setting with adult themes such as crude humor and references to drugs and alcohol consumption. Children, ye been warned!

Contact me in the private messaging system if interested! The campaign will be held over Discord.