Cyberpunk Nomads: Aldecaldos, Wraiths, the Seven Nations and Life on the Road
The short version
Nomads are the road families of Cyberpunk: ex-farmers, ex-wage-slaves and their descendants who live in convoys and sell labor, transport and muscle. The biggest groups are the Seven Nations, including the Aldecaldos and Jodes, while the Raffen Shiv, including the Wraiths, are the outcasts everybody else hates.
On this page
How a nomad group is built#
Nomads sort themselves by size. A family can be two people or a hundred. Clans are several families, from a few hundred to over a thousand. Tribes are several clans, tens of thousands strong, and nations are the biggest, hundreds of thousands. The largest nation in the 2020 material has roughly a million members.
The pack is the home. It has teachers, medtechs, leaders and mechanics, and almost everyone is related by blood or marriage. The 2020 rulebook's nomad is a convoy kid whose family lost the farm to a corporation, then got fleet-sized by absorbing other homeless families.
The scouts are the front line. They ride bikes or fast muscle cars, check ahead for ambushes and find campsites. Every kid learns to use a rifle. Cops hate nomads, and nomads do not lose sleep over it.
The Seven Nations#
By around 2020 the United States had over 7 million nomads, and more than half had sworn to one of seven nations. The largest called itself Snake Nation. The smallest was MetaCorp, a nomad-owned company. In between: Blood Nation, Folk Nation, the Jodes, Thelas Nation and the Aldecaldos.
The Raffen Shiv, the nomad outcasts, are sometimes counted as an unofficial eighth, and the other seven would rather they were not. The nations themselves meet at the end of harvest, the biggest gathering of the year. At the peak, up to forty percent of North America's nomads came together for it.
Aldecaldos and Jodes#
The Aldecaldos formed in the 1990s as a vigilante protection group in Los Angeles, and they are described as the first true nomad family. They specialize in salvage and reconstruction of wrecked cities, work as farm labor, and run smuggling. Their caravans cross the West Coast Free States hauling passengers and goods in well-guarded convoys.
The Jodes take their name from the farm family in The Grapes of Wrath. In 1998 dust storms destroyed farms across Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, and the people who left were nicknamed Jodes by the press. After a night raid by locals in Colorado, 120 family heads met and wrote the Compact: protect your family, then your clan; steal nothing from the clan; hoard nothing that could help it. The Compact later became the basis for the Nomad Code.
When Los Angeles was hit by the Earthquake of '98, the Jodes talked their way into the rebuilding contract and let the more experienced Aldecaldos supervise it. Smart: you take the money, they take the stress.
The Raffen Shiv and the Wraiths#
Raffen Shiv is a nomad slur that became a gang name. In the 2020 material they are scavengers and sociopaths who prey on the weak, steal from or enslave anyone they can trap, and hire out for any job, at lower rates than other mercs. Normal nomads start fights if you call them Raffen by mistake.
The largest Raffen group is the Wraiths. In 2020 they travel mostly at night and hit the sleeping and unwary. By 2077 they live in the Badlands outside Night City, raid villages, hit small nomad groups and weakly guarded corporate transports, and have a long record of fighting the Aldecaldos. Panam Palmer has her own grudge against the Raffen.
Nomads across the editions#
In Cyberpunk 2020 a nomad's special ability is Family: you can call on the group for hospitality, protection and help, but if you do not give back, you lose status. The ability score is also your rank in the group. In Cyberpunk RED the Nomad is one of the ten roles, and the roles page covers how it plays.
After the 2023 bomb, around two million people around Night City were homeless. The city leaned on edgerunners and old favors, and recovery was led by the Aldecaldos and their ally StormTech, who knew city rebuilding from a Chicago project. Temporary housing came in by rail and sea, first shipping containers, later formocrete modules. Nomads went from road pirates to contractors.
By 2077 the Aldecaldos have a mobile camp in the Badlands outside Night City. In Cyberpunk 2077 Saul Bright leads the family camped outside the city, and the Nomad lifepath starts V in the Badlands. See the lifepaths page for how the start differs.
Spoilers Where the Aldecaldos end up
Finish Queen of the Highway, Panam's last main-chain quest, and the Aldecaldos will answer the call when V needs them. They bring a tunnel-boring machine through the maglev construction site down to the lower levels of Arasaka Tower, which is the route to the game's Nomad-flavored ending, The Star. Our read: the best use of a family that spent its life crossing the desert is a convoy driving under a skyscraper.
See the endings page for what each path costs.
Fixer's notes#
Common mistake: treating nomads and gangs as the same thing. Nomad and gang culture grew from the same roots in the Collapse. They clash over territory and money, but nomads usually avoid angering a gang, because their employers are not subtle about eliminating whoever disrupts the work. Treat them as union labor with guns.
Opinion: the nomads are the best faction to run a tabletop campaign with if your table dislikes Night City politics. They have a home, a code and a reason to go somewhere. Start with the Collapse for why.