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WORLDBUILDING 1o1
All of this information is readily available in the library at the Cave for your character to discover if they are studious enough to dig for it. If you need any sort of assistance figuring out how to convert canonical characters into the setting, this is the post for you. If you have questions (or would like to look for other characters to fill your City history), please feel free to comment here or on the FAQ. We're always willing to help! For specific buildings within the City, check Locations.
Places
Overworld / Other Cities Before the Disaster, the Overworld was a single, central continent, as any other landmasses on the planet were made up of terrain too rough to inhabit. There were nine major city-states with eight of them on the cardinal and ordinal directions (the Diamond City being the capital of the southeastern city-state) and the ninth in the center. Each city-state, along with the surrounding smaller towns, would be equivalent to a part of Earth where people might get their accents and cultures from. The Center was similar to the UK. It was the largest of the city-states, known for being tolerant but militaristic and not very welcoming. Much of the land surrounding was boggy and often rained out. The North was similar to Asia. It was located on a peninsula and was the strongest seafaring culture as a result. The Northeast was similar to the Arctic. This land had very many different subcultures, being much like the different Native Americans and the First Nations. The East was similar to Canada. Its city was settled on top of a large mountain, which why it experienced very cold winters despite its location near the center of the continent. The Southeast was equivalent to the United States of America. This is the where the Diamond City is still located. Many of its towns and villages sat along the coast, while the rest took advantage of the plains and farm land. Any swamps or mountains were shared on the northern border with the East. Most of its inhabitants were descendants of immigrants who were interested in the equal opportunity the City boasted. The South was similar to Russia. Their city was located south of an inland sea that separated it from the other city-states. Like the East, the South suffered from cold weather due to its naturally high location. The Southwest was similar to Spain. The West was similar to Africa. The Northwest was similar to the Middle East. An exact date for the Disaster itself is difficult to discern. The most anyone can come up with from looking into archives would be that it happened sometime in the year 4543 (when all archival stopped), making the current year supposedly somewhere around the 4690s. The Diamond City The Diamond City is a large circular city. Prior to the Disaster, it was divided in two different ways: the first split consisted of four districts dictated by the cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west), while the second was made up of rings leading inward toward the Spire (outer, middle, inner). The districts were segregated by nationality while the rings were segregated by income. Income obviously made a bigger difference than ancestry: the further into the City you went, the more living conditions improved even within the rings themselves. The outer ring was where the poorest of the poor lived. This section was very much like the dystopian cities in cyperpunk fiction with dark, dirty streets and buildings, brightly colored advertisements high in the sky, and people cramped together in tight quarters. In the middle ring, conditions were of a vastly higher quality. Almost like the suburbia of the 21st century, this ring was where the middle class lived in both tall apartment buildings and single family homes, which tended to be closer to the inner ring. Architecture was more highly advanced and utopian than the outer ring, being cleaner and brighter as you continued inward. Unlike the outer and middle rings, the inner ring was mostly occupied by corporate and government buildings. There were few places to live there and only the richest did so, with the exception of some high-ranking government officials. The buildings here are the best and most grand in all the city, the tallest being the Administrative Spire with its Diamond at the top. Although the cultural district boundaries are not entirely set in stone (and, in fact, got less and less distinct the further out you went), they match the cardinal direction of their home ethnicity for ease of remembrance. Centralists were peppered just about everywhere because nobody liked them enough to give them a whole district. Natives to the Southeast were met with a much less severe prejudice and could go anywhere that was convenient to them. Feel free to mix and match, as this segregation was much less strictly enforced in the City than the income caste. Most of these cultural stigmas are no longer relevant after the Disaster, but the makeup of the City has hardly changed and remains important to decide where a business or home should be located.
People
Relations Friends and family are very large parts of what shape a person. Just as a person's canon and City histories should not match every single point, neither should their relationships. Perhaps your character has a best friend in canon who supported them as they grew up and gave them inspiration at a key point which helped them grow into the person they are today — they can still have a person like that in their City history! However, we very strongly recommend being vague about this, even if you mean for them to parallel someone specific from canon. If someone else would like to insert the canon character there to fulfill the role, then they are absolutely free to do so. If not, do not force the issue. Other players and their characters are not obligated to make their City histories intertwine with yours, even if they are canonmates. On the other hand, characters from completely different canons who have never met before could end up as friends, siblings, parent and child, or significant others in their City lives. It's a great way to make a sort of pre-game CR with characters who would otherwise not interact. This is something that requires permission from both players before carrying it out. In the case of OUs, AUs and bodydoubles, most often we will require communication between players depending on how you wish to go about it. The simplest in-character explanation is to claim that the characters are twins, which means that synchronization of City histories will be necessary along with mutual permission. Another option is to say that one character is a clone of another, made for whatever reason you think would be appropriate (servitude, taking the place or acting as a younger sibling of the original, etc.). Your last option is another easy one, and requires no pre-contact with another player: genetic code donated to the hospital at birth, later used in a cloning process by an unrelated couple to raise their own child under entirely different circumstances. Clones can be made at any point in the timeline that is convenient to you, as they can either be raised at a normal rate (to explain age differences between body doubles) or aged up soon after birth to maintain the proper age. They are generally given rights equal to naturally-born humans in society, though exceptions and exploitation may still happen. History Life in the City can vary as much as its people can. While many, many of the survivors of the Disaster were born and raised in the Diamond City, plenty of others moved there at some point in their life or simply managed to visit the wrong place at the right time. How they got there doesn't matter — it's a foregone conclusion that they were in the City at the time the world went to pot. What we want to know is how characters lived their lives up to that point. Using the above information about the culture of the City and its layout, what we would like to see is the life your character might have lived under these conditions. This is not the place to convert canon histories wholesale, but it should be a life your character would have led. This does mean that, yes, similar events may take place just because that's how a character is, and we encourage figuring out what may or may not stay the same. While Sleepers will not remember anything of their City lives, it should be noted that any physical differences between the Sleeper and Cityself will be in favor of the Cityself. Even if the Sleeper remembers having a limp, if no event causing such a disability occurred in the City history, then the Sleeper will wake without a limp. Accents are a little trickier, as they are more a mental conditioning than physical, and follow the reverse principle: whatever accent a Sleeper had in their dream would trump any differences in accent due to their City life. This same principle means that City histories should not include any sort of supernatural power; they are, as you may have guessed, aftereffects of the apocalyptic event.

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♢ WORLDBUILDING 101

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