- Causes: Nuclear war is the most popular and archetypal reason for why these settings are like this, the idea generally being that a devastating nuclear exchange destroyed civilization, irradiated the land, and mutated the survivors. Modern versions tend to branch out to various degrees — biological warfare, naturally-occurring plagues, asteroid impacts, alien invasions, resource shortages, and ecological meltdown (from industrial pollution and toxicity in older works, from climate change in newer ones) have all gained a good deal of popularity — but nukes remain a mainstay. The bygone societies that caused it all will often be cast in a negative light, typically being portrayed as greedy, trigger-happy, overconfident fools whose belief in their superiority and invincibility ruined the world.
- Society: Post-apocalyptic civilization consists of scattered holdouts of survivors leading hand-to-mouth existences in the ruins, hopeful iconoclasts seeking to restore the ideals of bygone times, cynical lantern-jawed heroes with hardened hearts, opportunistic Wasteland Warlords and despots ruling over downtrodden masses of refugees, and bands of Desert Bandits and vicious techno-barbarians who raid and pillage everyone else while dressed in dubiously-efficient armor cobbled out of bits of metal, leather, and junk. Most settlements are crudely-built affairs made out of scrap metal and bits of ruins, with intact buildings and industrial facilities serving as prime real estate. Mutants are often common, and their acceptance in society varies — they're often shunned outcasts if they're seen as people at all, but may make up a very large portion of humanity. This is almost invariably a Points of Light Setting, where enclaves of civilization are small, scattered and isolated things in a vast sea of wastelands and lawless territory.
- Technology: The fall of civilization has come with the end of industry included, and there's going to be a dearth of factories, fresh technology, or the manufacture of anything more complex than crude melee weapons. Thus, the setting will often be a Scavenger World full of Schizo Tech where the survivors rely on scavenging for dwindling supplies of pre-war goods. Working factories and refineries, where they survive, will be highly sought after, and the people who control them will wield considerable power. The actual processes by which these things work and can be repaired will not generally be remembered very well, and some societies may become full-on Cargo Cults. Nonetheless, people will be extremely cavalier about expending tinned rations, bullets, and fuel that they have limited ability to make more of.
- Monsters: This is more optional than the other categories, and many post-apocalyptic works don't do this, but it's common to have wastes that are populated with a great variety of monstrosities, twisted descendants of animals and people mutated in the fury of the war. Most are good old-fashioned Nuclear Mutants, but in modern works it's also common to see feral Bioweapon Beasts running around. Particularly common variants include Big Creepy-Crawlies of various sorts, diseased and mutated versions of common wildlife, and perhaps a Formerly Sapient Species or two whose ancestors used to be human. Zombies are an especially popular monster for this kind of setting, oftentimes portrayed as the cause of the apocalypse in their own right, though in some settings they're among the mutants that were created by it instead.
- World: There are two different types of wasteland one could use here: the Outback style, and the Pripyat style.
- The Outback style: The world is a vast, scorched, brown wasteland dotted with stands of burned trees and the occasional dust-covered highway, possibly jam-packed with abandoned cars. Interspersed in this expanse are the ruins of cities, usually taking the form of great fields of wrecked, leaning skyscrapers, crumbling suburbs, mazes of streets choked with rubble, and other Ruins of the Modern Age. These will sometimes be inhabited by holdouts of survivors, but may also be infested with horrors and shunned by right-thinking people. Sometimes, both will be true at once, with the survivors barricading themselves in secure buildings or neighborhoods. Living plants are all but unheard of, and it's very rare to see so much as a blade of grass — which may explain why nobody seems to eat anything but old canned food. When areas with living plants still exist, they'll either be a fabled Last Fertile Region everyone wants to get to, or a Garden of Evil filled with mutated and bloodthirsty plants and wildlife. They may be both, if the seekers aren't fortunate.
- The Pripyat style: Again, a wasteland of ruined cities, abandoned highways, and survivor holdouts, but the big difference is in the geography and climate. Instead of a scorching, infertile desert, this wasteland is cold, blasted by freezing temperatures, massive snow drifts, and bone-chilling winds. If nuclear weapons caused the destruction of civilization, then they probably caused this as well, unleashing a nuclear winter that plunged the world into a new ice age. Unlike in the Outback style, plants, water, and wildlife may still be plentiful here and may in fact have reclaimed the ruins, with the ecosystem often resembling the boreal forests of Russia and Canada. However, Nature Is Not Nice, and it will be just as likely to kill you as the bandits and mutants.
Subtrope of After the End. This very often overlaps with The Apunkalypse. Compare the Standard Fantasy Setting and the Standard Sci Fi Setting.
Examples
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- Crazy Food Truck has the outback variant, where the entire world seems to have become a desert wasteland, with weird mutant animals and safe settlements few and far between. The cause is left as an Unspecified Apocalypse.
- Fist of the North Star is set after a devastating nuclear war that drove nearly all living things into extinction and left the Earth a barren waste where evil warlords and vicious gangs roam the land, killing and subjugating the weak. Thankfully, there are heroes ready to defend the people and make these villains pay with their mastery of a mysterious but horrifying Pressure Point-based martial art.
- Now and Then, Here and There ticks almost all the boxes, with the desert environment, scarce technology, giant sand-dwelling monsters, and a Wasteland Warlord in the form of the evil King Hamdo. It's set billions of years in the future when the Sun has become a red giant.
Comic Books
- Judge Dredd: A nuclear apocalypse left an Earth where, outside of a few giant city-states and a Lunar colony, the entire world is a barren radioactive desert filled with bizarre mutants.
Comic Strips
- Axa is set in a post-apocalyptic world, after "the great contamination". Small enclaves of humanity survive in domed cities, surrounded by shambling mutants, giant mutated fauna, and scuttled ruins being Reclaimed by Nature. Axa escapes her Domed Hometown and discovers other tribes of humans, most either scraping by as lawless savages or living under the leadership of a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
Fan Works
- Fallout: Equestria, along with the countless Recursive Fanfics it has inspired, takes place about 200 years after a magical-nuclear war between the zebras and ponies destroyed almost the entire world and left behind a barren waste dotted with ruined cities and home to mutated monsters and small survivor holdouts, and of what it takes to try and bring light back to the wasteland.
- The New Order: Afterlife
brings the setting of The New Order: Last Days of Europe into the year 1997 and beyond, and has a localized version of this in the form of the fate of the former Greater German Reich and Holy Russian Empire, both of which collapsed into civil war and anarchy in the late '60s that ended with their arsenals of WMDs being used prodigiously. From the Meuse to the Urals, much of Central and Eastern Europe is a blasted wasteland where the rampant use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons has destroyed the biosphere and caused a mass extinction that left behind barren, polluted landscapes that are toxic to most life, left many people facing life-threatening mutations and birth defects, and caused civilization to devolve into raider bands, most of them following bastardized, extremist versions of the twisted ideologies that destroyed their nations to begin with. Some of the mutations have produced outright monsters, known as Nosferatu, while the chaos and collective trauma of the collapse seem to have birthed more supernatural entities called Nephilim. Even the ozone layer over the affected regions has started to break down, causing droughts and blistering heat waves. Only a few outlying regions, such as Austria and Siberia, have even started to rebuild. The warlords and raiders from the wasteland have managed to convince the Balkans, a notorious powder keg of ethnic and religious strife, to put it all aside and join forces, building a chain of World War I-style fortifications on their collective northern border.
Film — Live-Action
- The Book of Eli: What little we see of the world is a washed-out pale desert where the survivors of an event called "the Flash" (presumably a thermonuclear war) need goggles to see outdoors. Civilization is reduced to small towns run on barter trade, and hijackers roam the highways preying on travelers.
- Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: In the pilot movie, much of the Earth has been reduced to a desolate wasteland by a nuclear holocaust, inhabited by mutants. The surviving humans (or rather, their descendants) live in isolated, high-tech cities. The series, however, depicts it as much more habitable.
- The Mad Max series is the Trope Codifier for the aesthetics of this setting. After a peak oil-induced collapse of society that culminated in a nuclear war, Australia is a land of vast, lifeless deserts dotted with scattered communities built around the few surviving factories, refineries, and clean aquifers that remain. Most survivors are either amoral, cynical survivors, opportunistic despots and warlords tyrannizing communities held under their thumbs, bands of raiders who lurk in the wastes and prey on both surviving holdouts and anyone passing through their lands, and desperate refugees trying to survive the madness while maybe building a better future. Mutation from the fallout is a serious problem, and many characters are afflicted with physical deformities and handicaps of various sorts. Through it all moves Mad Max himself, wandering joylessly around the world when he's not getting roped into helping to defeat the warlord of the day.
- The DC Extended Universe has the “Knightmare”, a Bad Future glimpsed in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Zack Snyder's Justice League. After Darkseid takes charge with the aid of a corrupted Superman, the world is left as a ruined, sandy wasteland patrolled by Parademons and human soldiers in the service of Superman, while Batman gathers a band of surviving metahumans and humans and searches for weapons to defeat the evil Superman.
Literature
- "Autofac" is set after a five-year nuclear war destroyed human civilization, leaving cities as fields of ruins, the environment devastated, the landscape an alternating field of badlands, overgrown tangles of vegetation, and craters filled with irradiated water, and the remaining human settlements either entirely dependent on automated factories or reduced to a Stone Age existence.
- City of Bones (1995): The Ancients brought about a catastrophe that reduced most of the known world to a desert wasteland that's populated with isolated human city-states, bio-engineered "krisman" enclaves, and cannibalistic bandit bands. There is a thriving trade in Ancient cultural artifacts and in the few surviving scraps of Magitek.
- The Fall Of The Towers: Hundreds of years have passed since the legendary "Great Fire", which left most of the world an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. Most of the surviving habitable zones are on islands.
- The Road is one of the archetypal examples of the Pripyat style. Set as the world is plunging into a new ice agenote , civilization and the biosphere have completely collapsed, what's left of humanity is mostly bands of cannibal bandits, and the protagonists are heading south to reach a place where it might be warmer.
Live-Action TV
- Into the Badlands has the Badlands, an area of post-nuclear Earth ruled by Barons and their Cutters. Guns don't exist anymore, so the Cutters learn swordsmanship and other martial arts to enforce their Barons' will, but cars and motorcycles can still be found alongside other bits of surviving technology. However, there is one big variation in the setting: the Badlands are lush and green, not a desert.
- Primeval: In Season 3, Earth in the Bad Future — which has a sepia-like visual effect distinguishing it from other time periods — is littered with modern-looking ruins, infested with Megopterans and Future Predators (implied to have been genetically engineered by humanity), and there's no trace of any humans remaining. Even Helen Cutter, a woman who places about as much value on individual human beings as you would on an ant, is horrified by the disaster that humanity apparently create.
Video Games
- Ashes 2063 at first appears to have a traditional Outback-style wasteland. The scenery is mostly made up of dusty ruins, sandy barren soil and grimy-looking water (muddy on the surface, algae-infested underground); that said, the farther one goes away from the impact sites, the more vegetation is on display. The places not settled by humans are all infested with cannibal mutants, bug-dogs... and in more intact locations, sometimes worse things.
- Chrono Trigger: The Future era is a wasteland of ravaged cities and highways under a permanent cloud cover and populated by aggressive robots, hideous mutants, giant bugs, and talking rats. Humans survive in the ruins of domes thanks to machines that keep them healthy (and the party can use them to fully heal for free) but don't prevent them from being hungry. In this case, the apocalypse wasn't caused by the robots or the AI known as Mother Brain (who operates a factory rendering humans down to their component parts) but by Lavos awakening, and visiting the era is what prompts the cast to prevent the Bad Future by defeating Lavos.
- Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time: The Hazardous Wasters, a dimension in the not-too-distant future, is a barren desert wasteland populated by metalhead punks and cyborg sand sharks and filled with rusting, wrecked industrial infrastructure.
- Destiny: The Dark Age was this, by all accounts. Taking place between the destruction of human civilization by a Sentient Cosmic Force and the City Age that saw it re-established under the Last City, this was a period where people lived hardscrabble lives in scattered towns and villages, dominated by feuding warlords armed with guns and Functional Magic. Also there were alien raiders in the mix razing such settlements whenever they could. This period ended when the Iron Lords, a warlord faction with greater vision, resources, and morals than the rest, told the others to Join or Die, curbing their abuses and pooling their resources. The Iron Lords were one of the major contributors to the founding of the Last City.
- Fallout: The franchise is at its core an homage to this trope. A devastating nuclear exchange between the despotic governments of China and the US left the world a scorched, barren wasteland, roamed by horribly mutated animals and humans, rogue war robots, genetically engineered bioweapons that breached containment and went feral, and bands of barbaric raiders with few ambitions beyond killing, stealing, and wasting their lives on alcohol and drugs. Plant life is mostly of the scattered, sickly, and barren sort; lush growth mostly exists in sites where the old government ran biological experiments and is rarely safe to be around. Surviving settlements tend to be insular and shoddily built, and often rely on small-scale agriculture and scavenging for survival; by the later games, however, larger nations and trade networks begin to form. Not all of the emerging governments are very benign, however, and numerous areas and cities are under the rule of ambitious warlords, criminal syndicates, and large neo-barbarian hordes.
- Played straight in Far Cry: New Dawn in all respects except the world. A nuclear war destroyed civilization in the canonical ending of Far Cry 5, the protagonists are a post-apocalyptic community in Montana, the villains are an apunkalyptic gang called the Highwaymen, and there's lots of Schizo Tech and mutated wildlife... except, seventeen years after World War III, the burned-out wastelands have started sprouting new life, giving way to a "superbloom" of flowers and color across the landscape. The developers deliberately wanted to avoid the stereotypical image of the post-apocalypse as a barren desert devoid of life, feeling that it had become a cliché.
- Mass Effect 2: The planet Tuchanka is this IN SPACE!. More than four thousand years before the game, the krogan started a nuclear war that ravaged their planet. In the game, it's a blasted wasteland. The surface of the planet is known for deadly radiation, scorching heat, and virulent plagues. Most of the animals species and more than a few of the plants are carnivorous. Krogan live in the remains of old ruins, their social groups are clans that are in a near-constant state of war with each other over what meager resources they can find.
- Metro 2033 and its sequels depict a post-apocalyptic Moscow, and later Novosibirsk and Vladivostok, ravaged with mutant wildlife lurking both on the surface and in the Metro tunnels of the former two cities. In Moscow, at least, the surface is so heavily irradiated and toxic that wearing a gasmask is mandatory. As if that weren't enough, there's numerous hostile human factions still out there, ranging from various bandit groups to militant factions of Dirty Communists and Those Wacky Nazis, and even a Cannibal Clan and Evil Luddite group at separate points.
- Scribblenauts: Implied to be the case in some levels involving similar themes, such as human characters battling aliens, cyborgs, or monsters in a flaming, run-down city, with crumbling brown buildings as the backdrop. The time machine can sometimes transport you to one of these stages, which is marked by a gas mask in Super Scribblenauts. The goal is usually to help your allies in battle or to avoid the fighting and rescue the starite.
- Shin Megami Tensei I takes place in the ruins of Tokyo, 30 years after nukes hit Japan. The radiation isn't a problem, but the settlements are constantly under attack by demons. Mutants don't appear until Shin Megami Tensei II, though.
- Wasteland: A spiritual predecessor of sorts to the Fallout series, set in the deserts of the Southwestern U.S., decades after a global nuclear war between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union. The protagonists are the Desert Rangers, The Remnant of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that survived the cataclysm and reorganized themselves into a paramilitary force dedicated to protecting fellow survivors from the various mutants, monsters, and punk-like raiders prowling the wasteland. By 2087, civilization is slowly rebuilding itself, with functioning settlements found throughout Arizona and Nevada (and California and Colorado in the sequels). However, a new threat emerges when the Desert Rangers encounter a pre-war artificial intelligence that is raising an army of robots intent on wiping out the last remnants of humanity and repopulating the planet with cyborgs. The sequel Wasteland 3 changes the setting up a bit compared to the others by swapping out the barely-livable deserts of Arizona, Nevada and California to the barely-living tundra of Colorado.
Web Original
- "Taerel Setting'': Taerel is a pretty standard post-apocalyptic setting, started by a vampire outbreak claiming many civilizations, and civilizations consists of scattered tribes and cities of zu'aan (human-like aliens), technology has gone back to levels varying from the stone age to the iron age, depending on specific groups and locations, and the zu'aan have to deal with the kin'toni (vampire-like monsters). The world is a Pripyat style wasteland in the north and south due to the incoming ice age, and plants have reclaimed the ruins.
Webcomics
- Weapon Brown: A series of devastating wars, using everything from nukes to plagues to hordes of Bioweapon Beasts, dashed civilization to tiny little pieces. The world after the end is the usual scarred landscape of brown wastes and shattered cities, mostly inhabited by vicious and mutated animals and zombie-like feral humans, while human society — such as it is — consists of disaffected survivors and quite a lot of mutants, and is firmly ruled by the Syndicate, a mix of a capitalist corporation and a medieval feudal society. The lack of plant life is a major plot point — one of the plagues killed anything with chlorophyll except for a strain of kudzu that adapted by becoming carnivorous, and the Syndicate rules in large part by controlling all the remaining pre-war ration packets. The fact that these are a finite resource is a major problem, and La Résistance plans to bring them down by keeping the last replenishable food source on the planet well out of their hands.
Western Animation
- Final Space: In Season 3, Earth has shades of this after being physically dragged out of the solar system and into Final Space: the continents and oceans are visibly muddy-brown and dead, the survivors Kevin van Newton and a horde of KVNs are living in a bunker all dressed like Mad Max-style scavengers, and it turns out the wastes aboveground are inhabited by a few giant mutants.
