In the chaos following the Fourth Corporate War, entire districts were written off — deemed too costly to rebuild, too radioactive to risk, or too politically dangerous to control. What the corporations abandoned, however, others claimed. This is the domain of the Reclaimers — engineers, builders, and tech-scavengers forging the future one brick at a time.

Reclaimers are not a unified faction, but rather a loose profession that spans everything from rogue municipal workers to anarchist collectives, nomad engineers, and freelance scavengers. What binds them together is a philosophy: restore, rebuild, repurpose. They believe the world can’t be saved by new tech alone — it needs the old world’s bones.

They work in teams or “cells,” often highly mobile and minimally equipped. They use salvage rigs, modded cyberdecks, and survey drones to scout viable recovery sites. They know how to detect structural instability, strip copper from collapsed towers, and reboot pre-Collapse generators. Some maintain illegal archives of forbidden blueprints — plans for structures, systems, and devices that the corps buried long ago.

Their work is dangerous. They face radiation pockets, feral gangs, automated defense systems, booby-trapped ruins, and occasionally, corporate kill-teams sent to prevent the recovery of proprietary tech. Some Reclaimers disappear and are never found. Others return with prototype cyberware, encrypted mainframes, or crates of forgotten tech that fund an entire settlement for months.

In Night City, Reclaimers operate mostly in the deep ruins of Old Downtown, the Dead Edge, and the outer fringe of the Combat Zone. They are known to barter with fixers, sell parts to ripperdocs, and sometimes help Nomad packs build mobile infrastructure. Many live in modular compounds made from repurposed shipping containers and prefab walls — structures they can pack and move quickly if a job goes bad.

Politically, Reclaimers occupy a strange space. Some are tolerated by city authorities or small corps who benefit from their work. Others are hunted by property-rights enforcers or targeted by megacorps who see their independence as a threat. The Freehold Movement, a fringe Reclaimer ideology, seeks to build self-sufficient, corporation-free urban zones — micro-cities built from ruins and powered by off-grid tech.

For GMs, Reclaimers offer versatile gameplay. They can be mission givers, tech allies, dungeon crawlers, or radical agitators. They can provide access to blueprints, old-world data, or even custom equipment. They are living memory — scavenging the past to build the future, often at the cost of their lives.