Greater Rivertown
Greater Rivertown (aka the Greater Rivetown Area) is the geographic region surrounding the-once bustling city of Rivertown.
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Greater Rivertown spreads primarily to the west from Rivertown, which lies on the shores of Lake Lawrence, one the world's largest fresh water lakes.
Historically the region was known for industrial manufacturing and, in the rural areas, agriculture; later it became home to a thriving biotech industry. The areas economy largely relied on the port of Rivertown, where goods from all around the planet were shipped and distributed throughout the region.
The Greater Rivertown area was marked by very different ideologies between the conservative-minded suburban and rural areas versus the more progressively-minded city. Despite this tension, thousands of people commuted to and from the city on a daily basis, a fact that led to the devestating superflu hitting the outlying areas just as hard as the densely populated city.
The Greater Rivertown area was crippled by the superflu, social unrest, and string of terrorist attacks in the years 2088-2090. It is speculated that the Greater Rivertown area suffered on a catastrophic scale similar to most other regions of the country.
Most of the suburban and rural areas did not suffer the same degree of social unrest, vandalism, and property destruction as the major cities in the run up to the superflu, they were ravaged during the years of looting and scavenging that followed.
At its peak in 2088, the Greater Rivertown area had a population hovering around 3,000,000. Initial estimates were that half of the population contracted the first strain of the superflu and died within the first six weeks of its spread, and several thousand others were killed in the violence and looting in its wake. While no numbers can be verified, it is suspected that the second strain of the superflu--slower acting but more easily contracted and less people with a natural immunity--depleted the population by another 60-80% in the following five years, not including the high death tolls from a series of seemingly coordinated terrorist attacks, violent crime, fires, building collapses, starvation, and exposure.
The current population of Greater Rivertown is unknown.
The Rivertown Compendium draws from the much larger Rivertown Chronicles, a wide assortment of personal narratives and catalog entries of people, places, and things.