Western Wastes
The Western Wastes is a name for the large undeveloped countryside west of Rivertown.
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The Western Wastes (or Wastes) have no definitive boundary but rather exist to the west of where the Northwest, Western, and Southwest Reaches end. It is a generic, dismissive term not meant to indicate a specific geographic area, though it includes most of the Greater Rivertown area.
The area got that name during a discussion between the Four Families regarding possible MPD expansion. One proposal was to send out small survey parties to explore the surrounding areas, looking for intact structures with scavengeable goods. Exploration to the south to Sauklund was ruled out as word of the Kaukauno nuclear power plant disaster reached Rivertown before the communication network shut down; the north had little to offer, east was the lake, and the region past the Western Reaches, for Barrett Lukwoski, was "a giant f------ waste with Sweetwater at the center."
Thus the name "Western Wastes" stuck: it was a waste of time and a waste of space. Some of the younger generation think that it is an actual wasteland, having never traveled further west than the Juneau River themselves.
The Western Wastes is mostly undeveloped land and untended, overgrown farms. Unlike the broken urban landscape of Rivertown, a person can make good time walking through the wastes and travel miles without seeing another soul. Most farms remain small in order to produce enough food to sustain only a small group of people.
The Western Wastes are dotted with small, self-sufficient communities of usually no more than a dozen or so people. These communities are, almost without exception, at best wary of travelers and, at worst, actively hostile, shooting before asking any questions.
The Rivertown Compendium draws from the much larger Rivertown Chronicles, a wide assortment of personal narratives and catalog entries of people, places, and things.