Nomad history has a long and complicated relationship with several key cities across the US, from Los Angeles to Chicago, Oklahoma City to Miami, and while history as we know it has died, the Nomad's legacy lives on in the oral traditions of the families that keep it alive.

Beyond the physical record of time, obliterated by the Arasaka virus, lies the heart and soul of the Nomad Nation that will not die until the last Nomad has long since departed the earth. Nomads have traditionally lived from day to day, never planning for the future, yet accumulating a past as each day passes. As the 4th Corporate War ended the Nomad's had already had a generation and a half to adapt to the lifestyle that most of America's population was now being faced with. A life of uncertainty, gypsies wandering from town to town, city to city, or simply suburb to suburb, looking for work, for a place to temporarily call home. Their banding together had given them a strength, a brotherhood, a sense of purpose that these new refugees of corporate warfare had been forced to abandon, along with the security of their daily lives. They had become the new doyens of civilization - adaptable, self-reliant, and free. America was now in an erratic state of flux, a state that was ripe for the evolution of the Alternate Cultures.

The man in the street was forced to exchange a life of being a corporate wage slave to a life of indentured servant, ruled by a new feudal lord whose power had been acquired through force, physical intimidation, or charismatic coercion. It was the law of the concrete jungle. The masses were like lambs to the slaughter, cowboys without a horse, singers without a voice. But society moved on. These feudal lords came from all strata of society, men and women who had led gangs, armies, churches, communes, colleges, corporations, under whose protection and guidance a New America would be born.

It was the great irony. Nomads had spurned statics and their way of life, but the war had enabled them to return to a life of greater certainty. They scavenged the technological scrapheap of society and developed massive Roller Cities with the help of Dr Richard Chiang's nanotech discoveries, and forged a new survival with the viral transformations of Richard Storm. Once servants to this way of life, they now ruled it as master. Some became intoxicated with this new sense of power. The Raffen Shiv, whose numbers before the 4th Corporate War had begun to decline, increased markedly as disaffected Nomad's who still bore grudges split from the main packs, recruiting not only other Nomad's but convicts and disillusioned gang members.

As Chicago fell again, this time to the viral contamination of chemical tactical denial weapons, the seven Nomad Tribes were beginning plans to make their stand. Disharmony and disagreements within the Tribes had hurt them, opening them up to the influence of the Shiv, and unable to care for and protect the growing refugee numbers that had been drawn to the prophetic words of their leaders like Santiago. Sporadic opportunistic night-time raids became on-going conflicts until the final stand at Kankakee. A day and a half into a bloody tribal war Richard Storm arrived with a private mercenary army to quash the Shiv and drive them west, where they disbanded and fled. The subsequent purge of almost 300 sympathizers healed the factional rifts, and the Nomad Tribes finally agreed to Unification, and became the Nomad Nation. From the Nomad Nation, the Rolling State culture was born.

"We were the outcasts, the first to be displaced, now we're the first ones everyone turns to
when they want the fraggin place rebuilt." - Tom "The Avenging" Angel