Fallout is the next big show coming from Prime Video, in collaboration with video game studio Bethesda, and will debut on the 12th of April. Much like The Last of Us or Arcane before it, Fallout is seeking to be a quality TV show and step away from the dreaded video game curse, which saw so many game adaptations miss the mark completely and become generic and forgettable films for the sake of cashing in on a popular IP. Fallout features some pretty dense lore and while I’m sure the show will get non-gamers to speed, we figured we’d offer a quick primer on the world of Fallout to help bring you up to speed if this is a show you’ve been a bit on the fence about.

Fallout comes to us from co-showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner and is developed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, perhaps best known as the showrunners for Westworld. Nolan, who co-wrote The Dark Knight with his brother Christopher, will also direct and write the first three episodes. Todd Howard, game director on Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout New Vegas, serves as executive producer. Howard has stated that the show is canon to the events of the games, but this game isn’t an adaptation, but rather a wholly original tale set in the Fallout universe.

“What exactly is going on here?” That’s possibly a thought running through your head if you’re unfamiliar with the game world after seeing footage for the first time. Giant suits of armour are fighting radioactive bears called Yao Guais, chipper robots are harvesting human organs, ghouls are bounty hunters and people live underground in vaults. It’s pretty wacky, so let me try to break it down for you. The world that Fallout takes place in is not our own, but it does share some of the same history more or less up until the Second World War, when the atomic bomb was created.

From that point on, the timeline differs wildly, with society adopting a very retro 1950s futuristic lifestyle for many decades. The United States reorganized itself from 50 states to 13 Commonwealths in 1969, right when the moon landing happened. While society never left that post-war aesthetic, it did make great technological advances, such as in the field of robotics and fusion power. There were even hovercars! Utopia, right? Well…

By 2051, oil is in short supply, causing, shall we say, tensions, which only got worse after the US annexed Mexico. What followed were the Resource Wars (and plague!), which resulted in Vault-Tec being commissioned by the US government to create underground bunkers to house survivors of a potential nuclear war with the intent of building a new tomorrow once the, ahem, fallout, is gone. At least that’s the marketing pitch, there’s a far more sinister reason for the creation of the vaults that I’ll omit in case it’s important to the plot of the show. There are 122 vaults scattered across America; this show’s protagonist Lucy (Ella Purnell) is from Vault 33. After years of war and conflict, which included the creation of Super Mutants and thus, even more tension between nations, in 2077, the US and China unload their nuclear payloads on each other, and the world is burned to radioactive crip.

So what’s the world like in the year 2296, when the Fallout show takes place? To quote Mad Men: “Not great, Bob!” Radiated and mutated creatures roam the wasteland, such as Walter Goggins’ The Ghoul and giant insects, society has crumbled to the point where it uses bottle caps as currency, and dozens of factions vie for control of what’s left. Some of these factions featured in the show include The Brotherhood of Steel, The New California Republic (their flag can be seen briefly in the official trailer in a conflict against the Brotherhood), and Vault-Tec, while other factions out in the games include The Minutemen, The Enclave, and Caesar’s Legion. These are just some of the other factions and most of them are nefarious in some way shape or form, but most have humanity’s best interest at heart; just it has to be done their way according to their own doctrines.

As the Brotherhood plays a major role in the Fallout show, here’s a quick primer on them. They’re very obsessed with technology, as evident by the giant Power Armor suits they use, and their whole ideology is the preservation of said technology, most of it pre-war (don’t forget, this timeline was powered by fusion tech) for the betterment of humanity. But they also have a tendency to not share that tech, so if you’re not part of the Brotherhood, you’re considered an outsider and untrustworthy of such advanced knowledge. In short, they’re known to horde that power for themselves but are overall seen as a paragon faction in this world. The New California Republic, on the other hand, seeks to keep the pre-war status quo in check and are staunch defenders of law and democracy but their tactics can be seen as imperalistic and overtly militaristic. So each faction has its own gray zone.

So that’s your quick introduction to Fallout! Will you be checking out the show and have you ever played the games before? Let us know in the comments!