I ran a Fallout conversion of FFG's Rogue Trader Rules for many years. This is my write-up for one of the main three factions of the setting, the others being the Prairie League and the Great Lakota.
Wheel
Clans
The scourge of the Mid-Wastes, the Wheel Clans have their origins in
the raider groups which first arose from the ruins of Detroit and
it's Metropolitan area. The high concentration of Automotive Workers, Gear-heads and Greasers aspected the local raider culture heavily
towards vehicles and gave them unprecedented mobility in comparison
to typical marauders of their ilk. Over time their obsession with
vehicles of all sorts developed their cars, motorcycles and more
exotic forms of transportation into status symbols and primary means
of enrichment, eventually culminating into the faith of the Growling
Metal, a screaming, mechanical god of cylinders, pistons and gears
who watches over the Clans and decides who is worthy to roll forever
on the Endless Highway. The Clans are one of the three largest
polities in the Mid-Waste, a tripod that they share with both the
Sioux and the Prairie League, but calling the Clans united in the
sense of those Nations would be doing the concept a disservice, the
Clans fight, conquer and kill among themselves just as frequently
as they do among outsiders, the only exception to the rule being
the Holy City of Detroit, where differences are settled only through
(still excessively deadly) ritual contexts.
The basic structure of the Clans is meritocratic; factors such as
gender, lineage, liberty and mutations matter less than possession of
a vehicle and fighting or technical skills. Clans generally refer to
ranks within their society based upon a rough facsimile of feudal Europe, with Slaves being known as Serfs, Free-folk are known as
Peasants, raiders without vehicles of their own known as Squires,
vehicle owning slavers and raiders known as Knights and leaders named
after some noble title such as Duke, Count, Baron or Earl, the title
of King being exclusive to the current holder of the Growling Metal
Factory in the Holy City of Detroit. Another peculiar aspect of Wheel
Clan society is their propensity towards Old World music; the close
proximity of several major record labels in their heartland may have
something to do with it. Regardless, a cappella groups, cover bands
and especially recordings of Old World music are seen as status
symbols and individual tracks sometimes eventually begin to act as as
a sort of cognomen among successive inheritors of the title. Titles
in the Clans are almost never hereditary in nature, the only way one
becomes a Squire is by fighting, becoming a Knight requires that one
owns a vehicle and can fight, the only way that one can become a Duke
is through dominating other Knights. The Clan's ideal is to brook
neither weakness nor cronyism, they want to respect only violence and
vehicles.
Despite their great range and population the Wheel Clans have never
been able to achieve any long-term power due to their lack of unity;
each Clan is a government unto itself, with raiding, slaving and
opportunistic theft common between different Clans, the only thing
linking them together being a shared reverence for vehicles and
similar cultural values. Their mobility, along with their mechanical
expertise forms the basis of the Wheel Clans' trade, in spite of
their status as brutal bandits, no one is better at constructing,
repairing and retrofitting vehicles as the Clans, and their products
can fetch massive amounts of food and weapons. Beyond selling their
beloved rides, the Clans are prolific slavers who are talented at
carting off their unfortunate victims off to some far-flung locale
after their capture, the distance allowing them to sell their stock
far away from any chance of reprisal or attempts at rescue from the
new serf's family or friends. Most of the day-to-day work in their
societies is done by Serfs who are relatively well-fed, tend to be
well treated by slaver standards, and have some chance of advancement
into a better state if they show a flair with skills which the Clans
value. Specialized tasks like medical work, construction or
non-vehicle related industrial tasks fall to Peasants, who can amass
a large amount of unofficial power through their positions. The most
wretched tasks are given to the newly-captured Serfs, the worst of
those jobs being that of Road Crews, who are needed to repair the
endlessly deteriorating highways upon which the clans' power is
dependent.
There can be said to be two basic divisions in the Clans' approach,
they are either Sessile or Nomadic. The Sessile Clans are generally
in choice areas; rivers, vehicle factories or dealerships,
relatively untouched cities and abandoned Vaults, having rushed there
in the early days after the Fall and using their superior mobility to
harry any approaching enemies afterwards. Sessile clan vehicles are
generally larger, better armed and armored and with a focus on
defense or salvage over long-distance travel or speed. Nomads on the
other hand emphasize smaller, quicker vehicles like Cars and Motorcycles (with perhaps a larger rig used as a mobile base) that are
able to travel long distances very quickly. Nomads generally are
either associated with a friendly Sessile Clan, or they have some
hidden base where they keep their loot and slaves yet to be sold.
The line between the two is quite fluid on the whole, with some
communities essentially fielding Nomadic groups made of their
youngsters, who eventually grow rich, old and become the mechanics
and guards of the Sessile community that the Nomads range from.
On the whole the Wheel Clans are headed towards what could be termed
a civilization, in that the more violent elements of their society
are on the decline, at least random, external violence. As the
various societies of the Mid-Waste begin to coalesce into organized
polities capable of defending themselves, the Clans find less
purchase for their blitz-style raids and must engage in either
protracted sieges of entire communities or comparably smaller sorts of
banditry. In either case, the flow of slaves, vehicles and booty has
slowed to a crawl, necessitating a more predatory stance among the
various Clans against one another; the titles such as Duke, Earl and
Baron have begun to take on more meaning as delegation of authority
(and not the simple, violently autocratic sort that most Clans
possess) becomes necessary. As the Clans alternatively conquer,
annihilate and unite with one another, the surviving ones attempt to
grow in size and power enough to become a menace to the larger
settlements once more.
The
Dukedom of Earl
Typical of smaller Sessile Wheel Clans, the Dukedom of Earl, which
is at least what it was called when The Duke ruled, has changed hands
at least a dozen times in the last five years. Relying primarily on
its combination of proximity to Gun-Ho to the North and to the larger
Springfield metropolitan area to the South for their merchant-raiding
needs, the Dukedom is situated in the blasted out remains of the city
of Peoria on the Illinois River. Unable to field a large force, the
Dukedom relies primarily on lightning tactics, ambushes and being
too little of a nuisance to stamp out completely. The only notable
features of the Dukedom is the fact that it's leader, the eponymous
Duke being assassinated by recently by an Enclave agent that was sent
to destabilize the local area and that it is often used as a cats-paw by Gun-Ho to indirectly attack Merchants they'd rather not deal with.
It's future after the burning of it's Great Hall shortly after the
death of the Duke leave the settlement's future in a state of doubt.
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The
Holy City of Detroit
The
cultural heartland and military center of the Wheel Clans, the City
of Detroit was absolutely devastated on the outset of the Great War,
being one of the largest industrial centers of the Pre-War United
States, but even that wasn't enough to extinguish the factories and
foundries of Motown. Having fallen to the looting, riots and madness
that typified America before the End, the city of Detroit was already
well on it's way to embracing Raiding culture, but the End
accelerated that tendency to the point that any attempt for
'civilized' authority to take hold once more was crushed by the
hordes of vehicle mounted raiders who were the Ancestors of the Wheel
Clans; it didn't take long for the rest of the area to come under
their complete control and the violence they unleashed forced others
for leagues in each direction to adopt their brutal way of life or
die.
For
the next few decades the city was a war zone of a dizzying array of
different Clans allying, betraying and destroying one another until
the Motown Knight clan, led by the charmingly named Warlord, Joe
Boot-Party, managed (with rumored MWI assistance) to get the General
Motors Detroit-Hamtramck Robotic Assembly Plant operational once
more. The massive increase in their number of vehicles and the
Warlord's ability to ring-give temporary usage of the Plant's
assembly line to other Clans gave them an insurmountable edge,
eventually allowing them to utterly dominate the city within a few
years after reactivating the Plant.
The peculiarities of the Motown Knight's internal structure was soon
exported to the nearby raider gangs, their quasi-medieval rank
system, their predilection towards music and their combination of
autocracy and violently meritocratic society. The Slaving and
Vehicular Focus was already there, and the culture underpinning the
two soon spread like a prairie fire across the Eastern and Upper
Mid-waste. This turned Detroit into something special, central to the
soul of the newly minted Wheel Clans, and gave the renamed Motown
Kings a great deal (if nowhere near absolute) influence over the
Clans as a whole, with a nearly unassailable rule in the Holy City
itself.
As
part of their never-ending quest to retain control of the GMD-RAP
(and Detroit itself) Joe the Third required that all visitors to the
city pick a color upon arrival, Red, Blue or Green; that is to be the
Team that they are assigned to during their stay, and a colored arm
band must be worn at all times to denote their persuasion. Open
violence within one's color is strictly forbidden, as is violence
against the other colors outside of Duels, Melees, Death Races and
Carnages, all of which require sponsorship from a member of the Kings
for smaller events, but with larger ones requiring the blessing of
the God-King himself. The stability that this has given the Holy City
allowed the former heartland of industry to become itself once more,
if only a shadow; the majority of vehicles in the Waste comes from
the
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