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Bearing a distinctly ancient Eastern feel with a hodgepodge of old Eurasian cultures, the All-Gobi Desert is home to lone wandering swordsman, lizard-mounted Cossack raiders, pirate ports along the shore-line, quiet solitary bath houses and tea rooms, and roving herds of mutants. Straw hats, floral kimonos, saris and rusalki are common throughout the region, though the global stance on shorts and bikinis is still most prevalent, especially in urban environments and territories such as Cardinal and Calico, and the Western vibe of New Mojave has bled into coastal regions like Cardinal, The Freemen Commune and The Jam Gardens. Towns built around solar charging stations are still often wood-built and frontier-like in nature, but often have the architectural flavor of East Asia. Beastman packs and mutant herds have a much more pronounced presence in the All-Gobi region, though Kaiju are suspiciously rare.
The All-Gobi has ever been a land of tumultuous conflict, with too many nations packed into too small a space, and supposedly, the longest lived civilizations in the world once having taken root there. The climate wars and the great relocation lead to the death of billions as they fled north, through treacherous mountains and terrible warzones. As desertification took hold, spreading from the south up, the various powers that be found themselves entrenched in a growing series of wars that eventually exploded into the genewars, and then died in fire. Only the megacorporations, in the sanctuaries of the earliest megacities, managed to survive the conflagration.
Unlike in New Mojave, the bunker program was not quite as all pervasive as it was in their sister continent across the ocean. Instead, datacenters became the far more common form of underground architecture, given the pervasive existence of the megacities and the built up architecture of preexisting cities. There was a bunker program, and it did link the entirety of the northern All-Gobi, but it wasn't quite as labyrinthine as the one in New Mojave. The creation of multiple datacenters of varying sizes has more than corrected for that difference however, and travelers in the underground of All-Gobi are more likely to run into techncults and datafiends than they are to run into mutants, at least outside of Slyth & Jabber. On the surface however it is a different story, mutant herds are quite pervasive on the surface, striking through Czarina Jungles, and making life hellish for all who travel on the surface.
The All-Gobi is the more geographically diverse of the two continents. Desert dominates enormous portions of it, but in the central and north-eastern regions, the mountainous conditions of the southern portions of the continent create enormous rainshadows to the north, catching the wet and humid airs of the great arctic sea and the hurricanes it blows off, and dumping those waters back into the large, formerly permafrost tundra plains of the northern All-Gobi, especially in the regions of Saraswati Virtue and Czarina Tropical Agriculture. This creates vast jungles and savannah like plains in place of true desert. That said, desert remains pervasive in such regions as Cardinal Holdings, Calico Redistribution, and Soon-Bok, with Slyth & Jabber being far too war torn to ever properly find out if it would naturally be desert, or also become jungle like it's neighbor Saraswati Virtue.
There is no single overriding administration or governing influence in the All-Gobi, nor even something approaching that of a coalition or single dominating authority. Instead, outside of corporate controlled land, there are organized bandit gangs, enormous mutant herds, beastman throngs, and pirate crews on the coastal regions (the last of which usually at least roll up to Calico Redistributed and the pirate queen Mad Maggie). The bandit gangs, while fractious, have always had a certain sense of unity, forced to cooperate to survive in a land dominated by mutants and beastmen. In recent decades, this unity has only grown stronger as the gangs of the central and western portions of the all-gobi have been drawn into a series of alliances, spearheaded by the jerboan biker gangs into a single 'khanate' like set up of protection rackets and concentrated banditry. This rebellious movement has only grown fat with the refugees from Schwebenwagen Industries, taken in by the bandit clans and eager to get back at the fat cats who blackened the skies and automated all of their jobs.
The All-Gobi Desert has a diverse economy that is primarily driven by land trade between the various holding companies that live there. Banditry, rather than piracy (despite being home to Calico Redistributed) is by and large considered the more pervasive threat, though that threat pales in comparison to that of the mutant packs and beastmen throngs that, while significantly less organized, are by far more common. All caravans in the new world tend to run with a heavy escort, but it is a rare All-Gobi caravan that doesn't have at least one Atlus walker laden down with weapon systems instead of cargo. It should also be noted that the All-Gobi is famed as being the 'land of relics', especially the western regions. Ancient ruins and relic sites from before the great relocation dot the desert, and draw adventurers from across the world.
The All-Gobi, outside of the corporate regions, has a hodgepodge of different races, their exact numbers in flux depending on where you go. In the few tropical locations uncultivated, Wukong by far make up the majority, whereas the largest population of Jerboans anywhere in the world can be found in the deserts of the All-Gobi. Over all, the All-Gobi tends to be far more mixed race of the two continents, with pervasive genetic engineering both during the genewars, the great relocation, and since the invention of the splicer treatment leading to humans being the largest of minorities, rather than a true majority of the population.
The culture of the All-Gobi is hard to categorize except in broad, cosmetic trends. These cosmetic trends draw on vaguely eastern and eastern european influences, coming from russian, chinese, japanese, and indian cultural roots as well as a hundred more only remembered by the most dedicated of scholars, and diluted by 400 years of mass migration and cultural integration. Beyond this, it is hard to pin down the cultures of the All-Gobi, with each desert tribe, each bandit gang, each wukong enclave, each having their own take on both the local territorial culture and the evolved and transformed post-migration cultures drawn from the ancient past.
List of Special Locations Types
List of Organizations
List of Settlements
List of Major Figures
List of Historic Events