Nuclear Wasteland

In the year 2038 the world was turned into a nuclear wasteland after a huge world war raged over it. Most of the animal and human population died immediately. Of the few survivors most died shortly after from the radiation. This was year 0. In the following years the survivors tried building up new villages, but bandits kept attacking them. So in the following years two types of people emerged. The first ones, the nomads, didn't bow down to the bandit, or raiders, as they call themselves, and lived on the road surviving on whatever they find in old ruins or hunt on their own. The other group are the settlers, who realized they couldn't fight the raiders all the time, so they found an arrangement. The raiders don't attack the villages and in return the villagers have to give up most of their produce and sometimes even agree to let the raiders take people with them. Some of them get trained by the raiders, what happens to the rest only the raiders know. The few villages that tried to fight back were all erased from the map to set an example, and nowadays, after 245 years, settlers have mostly accepted their fate.

Raiders

The Raiders started off as a group of bandits, most of them former criminals, apprechiating the now lawless world. They armed themselves any way they could and went around raiding whoever they found. But over the years they have grown more organized, now having control over multiple villages. A group of raiders, consisting out of anything between 20 and 70 raiders, normally controls anything from 2 to 5 villages depending on the population density each of which is populated by up to 100 settlers. They have complete authority over the villages and take whatever they want from there. Although the original agreements only included any produce from the villages, raiders often take away most of the technology, all weapons and sometimes even people. They actively hunt Nomads in their area, but most of the Nomads don't let themselves get caught and even try to kill Raiders themselves. Generally a group of raiders is led by one person with absolute power. If there are disagreements they get resolved with raw violence so the leader is most of the time not the smartest raider, but the strongest.

Settlers

Most of the people living in villages have accepted their fate and give the raiders whatever they want whenever they want. Which can often be more than just most of the last harvest. Some settlers aren't satisfied with their situation and start uprisings, but after about 200 years their chances of success are slim to say the least. The best chances the stonger ones of the settlers have is getting taken by the raiders and becoming one of them. Even the ones that get taken, however, aren't guaranteed to get accepted. Most just vanish never to be seen again. No one knows what actually happens to them. Very few settlers also try to escape and find a group of nomads to take them in in the hopes of a better life and maybe even revenge. But most of those are found long before they get near any nomads and get executed in front of their village in very gruesome ways by the raiders.

Nomads

The Nomads started wandering the world when the raiders started to oppress the villages in the hopes of a better life elsewhere. Since then the Nomads roam the world in search for a way of freeing villages from the control of the raiders, but the longer they take the smaller are their chances of success. Most Nomads don't care about the raiders anymore these days, they just try to live their lives without getting caught, maybe taking in some runaway settlers, which is a risky thing to do since Raiders started disguising themselves as settlers to find Nomads and kill them as they see them as a threat. A small group of Nomads hasn't forgotten their hate of the Raiders yet, though. These small groups are wandering near Raider camps trying to pick of one or more inattentive Raiders, hoping to defeat all of them one day. There are many stories about those Nomads, some real, some imaginary. No one really knows which ones really existed and which ones didn't. They are the heroes of the Settlers, their only hope of freedom.