Every continent on earth was deeply affected by the events of The Collapse, but perhaps nowhere more than in North America has it meant such a great change from what went before.

For a start, the continent is no longer dominated by the United States as a sea-to-sea superpower. The U.S. is still the most powerful political unit on the continent, and still the most militarily powerful in the world, but it now occupies roughly half of what it once did – the Eastern half, with a bunch of new Free States and Free Cities, along with the unclaimed and ungovernable Badlands, occupying what remains of the Western U.S.

To the North too, Canada has been split, if not on as drastic a scale as the U.S. Following the turmoil of the Collapse, and in the absence of a British monarch as a uniting symbol, the Republic of Quebec has seceeded from the the new Socialist Republic of Canada and the two glare at each other mistrustfully – but nothing more, for now. Global warming has meant that both have plentiful land for crops and to expand their populations, for now, and the nations to the South are more of a threat to both than either to the other. meanwhile, the Free State of Alaska isn’t all that free after all – practically a province of Canada, and certainly a protectorate entirely within its bigger neighbour’s orbit.

It was that same climate change that dictated the growth of the megacities in the U.S. and it’s children states. The South West is parched, and only massive fusion-powered desalination plants can provide enough water for the population, huddled in their great cities now. The same weather changes created the Badlands – a vast expanse of arid and semi-arid land in the center of the continent, dividing one coast from another. There, massive dust storms and tornadoes roll across ghost towns and barren sun-baked rocks, a home for only a few Nomad bands, bandits, the lost and the desperate. The only bright spots are the Free Cities and the buried tunnels of the Continetal Maglev, kept safe by brutally efficient private armies.

Mexico and the lands of the Panama isthmus have suffered even more. Baking hot, and either starved of rain or constantly washed by hurricanes and monsoons where they haven’t been flooded completely, these nations are all failed states in truth, governed only locally by warlords and drug cartel leaders who parlayed their wealth into political power. The Free State of Texas has been trying, without success, to impose order on the resentful lands to it’s South for years now.

Finally, there’s the Caribbean. There, those islands which didn’t lose almost all their land to the rising sea are not even failed states. Barely civilized tribes, pirates, and tiny feudal feifdoms are the order of the day, mixed with a few self-contained corporate facilities for secure research and development.