The Great Salt Lake
A stretch of land in the southwestern deserts of Northern Amerigo, the Great Salt Lake is wrapped in a mystique born from its impenetrability. Not guarded by walls or guns, but simply by nature's wrath, many expeditions and caravans make the journey into its expanse. Hoping to make a fortune off of the ruins that are known to be in its borders. Very few make it out again.
Fewer still, the same as they went in.
Besides the heat and lack of survival resources, vehicles above a certain tonnage don't seem to work within the lake's borders. Troop carriers, VTOLs, copters, trains, tanks. All simply stop functioning completely. They won't start nor stay running within the border of the Great Salt Lake, but if someone moves a vehicle just outside of the border, it will work like nothing had ever happened.
In a similar vein, satellite images do not turn out for the region, becoming fractal patterns containing nothing of the target area.
Wireless communication, radio or satellite, cannot enter or leave the Salt Lake. Even though it will work between points on the inside.
Despite its peculiarities, this effect is something that cripples the region, unless small vehicles are used exclusively. The Shire is a popular method to get around, though even the smaller breeds are bordering on the size limit of the Great Salt Lake.
Despite this, the region's wealth is a siren song to anyone who wants to make money or even a living. Bunkers, Labs, and the skeletons of cities all being subsumed by the salt like the bones of some great beast sinking into the mud.
A veritable feast for scavengers, Aces, and governments looking to pick those metaphorical bones for something never seen before.
To truly take advantage, they would have to stop disappearing into the wastes, and no one seems close to figuring out a solution as of right now. If it was simply the inhospitable weather, more expeditions would succeed if they were simply better equipped.
No.
Something or somethings are out there, and no one has even seen them yet. Some think it's just a sort of Tech-horror, others the spirits of the old world. Some stories even posit that an Angel wonders the Great Salt Lake, sobbing at what has been done to the world that was its charge.
A cracked landscape of white for miles around, broken by nothing. Not even a slight rise in elevation. Not to the naked eye, in any case. The heat shimmer is so intense that even with such a flat landscape, it is still impossible to see to the horizon the distortion is so bad. The sun beats down constantly, leeching the moisture from the land and anyone who crosses it. That isn't mentioning the towns and tribes that attempt to cut a life out of that bleached earth. Some are fine, hard working people. It's the others you don't want to meet. Others still just vanish into thin air. Whole towns gone, all the way to the foundation. One time, I had just left a town calling itself Crowchapel. Nice people, if a bit weather worn. I got 300 yards away, before turning back for one final wave. They weren't there. Like the town hadn't existed in the first place, just cracked earth where roads and buildings and a great big wall covered in armed guards had been. I had been sweet on a girl from there... The thought still keeps me up at night, shivering. Her smile, so bright it could light up the middle of the night, just...gone. Along with more than a thousand other souls as real as you and I right now, without so much as a scream.
-Henkjan van der Meiden, Ace, regularly operated in the Great Salt Lake area between 8910 and 8902
Geography
Flat, dry, and inhospitable.
The exact population of the Salt Lake is completely unknown, as no entity with the resources to monitor the comings and goings
Alternative Name(s)
The Vehicle Graveyard,
Type
Badlands
Location under
Included Locations
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