The prevalent technology in any given area of the wastelands varies, depending on who’s in charge, and what the inhabitants can build and salvage. In a lot of places, it’s limited to what the inhabitants can build from scratch. The enclaves are the greatest bastions of old technology, but even they don’t use the most advanced methods and devices possible. This raises many questions, but as usual, history provides the answers.
Humanity had come a long way by 2160. Electronics, medicine, safe nuclear power, and the safe and easy use of nanotechnology helped make life easy for those privileged enough to live in advanced countries. Unfortunately, most of this technology wasn’t built to stand up to the raw blast of electro-magnetic energy unleashed by nuclear weaponry. When the bombs started falling, it changed the atmosphere, and disrupted much of the infrastructure. Changes to the ionosphere also disrupted the broadcast microwave power that fueled the amazing devices of 2160, and made broadcast power infeasible beyond the very shortest ranges. In a single night, the advances of the last century were lost. Those that weren’t lost usually tended to be inefficient, or required finite resources to operate.
Now, after fifty years, the return of magic, and much social upheaval, humanity is starting to figure out new ways to get the job done and rediscovering old ways. Lost technology is still worth a good penny to the right buyer, as a curio or for research purposes. Working lost technology is rare, and usually priceless. There are no factories left outside of the enclaves, so most goods have to be made by hand. The corporations make tools available that can be used to produce advanced goods, but they are unusable by all but the most skilled craftsmen.
One of the few surviving disciplines is nanotechnology. Some people argue that nanites are the only reason that humans survived the apocalypse… By 2160, nanotech was in use throughout the medical and industrial fields and most hospitals, laboratories, or factories worthy of the name had storerooms full of sealed jars of nanite strains. When the bombs started falling, forward-thinking survivors grabbed the more useful stores of nanite strains, and cultured them, sharing them between groups to the best of their ability. Doctors made sure that other medics had access to healing strains, craftsmen passed around strains that were designed to work metal. And the corporations got in on the act as well, gaining public recognition and influence by trading crucial strains to communities that lacked their own.
Most surviving nanites in the modern day are biological, and can reproduce given the right materials to feed upon. They’re kept in cool, dark places, and keep for decades as long as they’re fed a little biomass every now and then.
Thanks to nanotechnology, healing traumatic injuries is much easier, even within the space of seconds or minutes. Also, treating things like blood-borne toxins, and even radiation sickness, becomes possible. Many diseases remain untreatable, and birth defects like mutations are usually not affected by nanites, but short of that, modern medicine can truly work miracles.
The following items and effects are things which no starting PC will have encountered. Odds are likely that they are impossible and you will never see them in-game, but this is NOT a 100% certainty.
Easy Energy Weapons: Various corporations have been experimenting with energy projection weaponry for decades, with mixed degrees of success. Lasers, particle guns, sonic blasters… All these things are possible, but the amount of raw power needed is prohibitive. Most energy weapons are only fit for emplaced cannons, or vehicular weaponry… The few man-portable lasers known to be in the field require heavy backpacks to power them, and are reputed to be good for less than a minute of use, even with heavy backpack-carried power cells.
Faultless Lie Detection: Back in the twentieth century, various government agencies experimented with electronic lie detectors, and truth serums. This didn’t work out too well, and though other methods have arisen since then, none of them are very reliable. With the widely varying personal biology and psychology of the average wasteland dweller, all reliability is gone. There is simply no technological way to guarantee that someone is telling you the truth. Magic can help with this a little bit, but not much. Higher level mental effects can make a person friendlier to the magician, and that MIGHT loosen a subject’s tongue on some matters, but there will still remain things the subject will lie about, or refuse to speak of. Mind Control spells CAN be utilized to get someone to tell you the truth as they know it, but even then a controlled subject can twist the wording, and give evasive answers. There is NO guarantee of absolute truth.
Long-term Memory Destruction: The mind’s a funny thing, and brain-chemistry tends to be hard to influence. It’s possible to use rare nanites, exotic torture techniques, or specialized drugs to temporarily blur someone’s short-term memory, but nothing will guarantee that the memories won’t return at some time in the future.
Resurrection without a cost: Dead is dead, in 99% of all cases. Some corpses have been rumored to be animated through dark magic, nanite usurpation, or parasitic control, but never with anything like their original personality intact. It may be possible to restore life to the dead, but whatever method is used, it will probably be grisly, and come with a hideous price.
Teleportation: No one’s figured this out yet. Experiments were making significant progress with photonic tracing back before the fall, but the EMP pretty much wiped out any chance of this becoming a usable scientific application. Magic doesn’t seem to be capable of teleportation either... All attempts at developing teleportation spells have resulted in the test subjects becoming large, messy piles of goo not far from their starting location. Spirits can SEEM to teleport sometimes, but really they’re just dematerializing and moving through astral space. Spirits that do this can’t carry anything physical with them during the trip, either.
Time Travel: There have never been any proven cases of individuals going back in time, either through science or magic. While occasionally individuals claiming to be time travelers surface in the wastelands, these people are usually found to be deluded or frauds. Neither science nor magic seems to be capable of altering the stuff of time itself, though one could argue that with the use of cryogenic suspension, or long-term magical imprisonment, a subject could travel forward as long as his methods of achieving stasis held out.
True Cloning: It’s easy enough to clone a metahuman or animal, as long as you have the right equipment and nanite cultures. What ISN’T easy, is making it an exact duplicate of the original. In fact, it seems to be downright impossible. A good clone of the subject will have the same genes as the original, but it won’t be the same age, and it won’t have the same personality. In effect, it’s pretty much another member of the subject’s species. The clone also will age at the regular rate for its species, so dreams of making dopplegangers and spare bodies remain only dreams. There’s also no way to “overwrite” a clone’s mind with the original’s personality.