Check out the Arcverse's first novel
Faelvur, the dark elven god of fire
Check out the Arcverse's first novel
Role Play Games for Beginners
Discover Worlds. Tell Stories. Create Legends
Welcome to the Arcverse
Your gateway to tabletop roleplaying games — whether you’re starting with Dungeons & Dragons or exploring new systems and genres.
We offer expert RPG advice for beginners, Game Master tools, and worldbuilding guides to help you create and run unforgettable adventures. Whether you play fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, horror, superheroes, or post-apocalyptic settings, the Arcverse is your home for creativity, storytelling, and game-ready inspiration.
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Nomad Nations: Riders on the Storm
The Nomad Nations are the lifeblood of the highways, wastelands, and fractured hinterlands of the Time of the Red. Descended from the displaced, disillusioned, and disavowed, Nomads are more than wandering families — they’re organized clans, mobile cities, and logistics empires on wheels.
Originally born out of necessity during the collapse of the U.S. infrastructure in the late 1990s, the first Nomad packs began as desperate migrants and truckers forced off-grid. Over decades, these groups coalesced into powerful, structured families with their own laws, routes, and values. By the 2040s, the Nomad Nations are a network of convoys, airships, salvage operations, and smuggling rings. Some operate with the legitimacy of small governments; others run like outlaw biker federations.
Not all Nomads are the same. Some serve as couriers or haulers for hire, moving cargo across the Badlands and city-states. Others run mobile tech repair units or pop-up settlements. Many refuse corporate interference. Most distrust static society.
To the people of Night City, Nomads are a mystery — rolling through with souped-up rigs, encrypted comms, and armor-plated vehicles bristling with history. They're feared, admired, and occasionally welcomed — especially when the goods need to get through and no one else will take the job.
The Nomad Nations are an answer to the world that collapsed. When governments failed, corporations seized territory, and infrastructure crumbled, people who didn’t belong anywhere began forging new identities on the road. The Nomad movement didn’t start as rebellion. It started as survival.
Over time, these scattered families and transport crews grew into a complex, evolving society. Not a nation in the traditional sense, but rather a loose confederation of packs, bands, and caravans who share codes of conduct, ancestral loyalty, and access to territory. Their clans are often blood-bound but operate more like unions or syndicates — efficient, tightly organized, and pragmatic.
There are seven great Nations recognized by Nomads themselves: the Snake Nation, the Aldecaldos, the Blood Nation, the Jodes, and others. Each has its own culture, tech preferences, and degree of interaction with outsiders. Some are deeply family-centric. Others lean militaristic, aggressive, or cyber-religious. Internal politics among Nations can be just as cutthroat as between corporations.
Most Nomads don’t live in one place — they live in convoys. These are rolling fortresses: trucks, tankers, command cars, sometimes even mobile labs or biorefineries. Some are built for speed, others for defense. All are packed with gear, tech, supplies, and history. Within a convoy, Nomads live their lives, raise children, repair vehicles, and run businesses.
Economically, they serve vital functions. Nomads haul goods between fractured city-states and settlements. They salvage old tech from the ruins. They smuggle, pirate, protect, and build. They also serve as information traders — carrying hard media, gossip, and whispers of corporate movements across state and corporate borders.
Culturally, Nomads are fiercely independent and deeply tied to their clan legacies. They often view city-dwellers as soft, naïve, or enslaved. However, they will work with anyone — for a price. In Night City, Nomad crews are sometimes hired for high-risk extractions, convoy protection, or supply runs through radioactive zones.
For GMs, Nomads are versatile. They can be mysterious allies, hostile raiders, smugglers with hearts of gold, or the last line of defense in a world gone corporate. They’re mobile, difficult to pin down, and often carry secrets with them — in data, memory, and blood.
Adventure Hook: “Ghost Convoy”
An encrypted radio signal interrupts the crew's comms with a distress call from a long-lost Nomad convoy — the El Sol Naciente, believed to have vanished five years ago while hauling a top-secret biogenics payload across the Badlands.
The voice on the message claims to be a child survivor of the convoy, now grown and hiding in a forgotten transport bunker. She says the convoy was ambushed by Militech defectors, who took the cargo and left the survivors to rot in the desert.
Now the Edgerunners are hired to track down what remains of El Sol Naciente, retrieve the survivor, and locate the still-missing biotech. The route cuts through ghost towns, raider-held territories, and shattered highways. Along the way, they begin encountering abandoned vehicles — still powered, still armed, still guarding something… and with logs suggesting someone, or something, has kept them running.
Is the girl a trap? Is the convoy still out there? Or is someone trying to finish what Militech started?
The closer the crew gets, the more they realize: this isn’t just a convoy. It’s a rolling tomb — and someone doesn’t want the dead speaking.