Crater Desert

The Crater Desert, also known as the Barren Desert, is a circular-shaped desert region within the northeastern parts of the continent of Amerlersa, where the Great Incident had placed Travis Jefferson High School. It is inhabited by mainly creatures of the Permian and Triassic periods, including the carnivorous Gorgonops. It later became under control of the Cult of the Whitehand, led by Jesse Roselorwenn, also known as the Red Queen.

Geography
The Crater Desert is located within an area that had once been a western part of the US state of New York before the apocalypse. It is a scorching desert with very little vegetation and filled with Permian and Triassic animals, although some animals such as Stegosaurus use it as a crossing from surrounding area to another while facing exposure to danger. East of the region lies the Blackwood Forest, to the north the Plains of Virtue, the Dread Marshes, and the Hollowclaw Valley, to the west the Barren Wastes and the Iron Lands, and to the south the Scaleblood Forest. It is part of the Taragoth Craterlands, home to a collection of regions surrounded by small chains of mountains.

Early History and Colonization
Before the arrival of Travis Jefferson High School, it was but an uninhabited area in which no settlement besides a few ruins were present. By the time of the Great Incident, however, all that had changed when Travis Jefferson High and a few neighboring buildings had emerged and thus marked the region as its territory. Under Principal Richards's leadership, the residents of the settlement began to quickly build up wooden walls in order to provide protection while trading with Davis Harrison High School. However, when Eli Winterstein returned with news of the capture of Barrick Matterson and Sandy Hopkins, the settlement eventually became divided into competing political factions and, eventually, led to the rise of the Whitehand, which would later come to conquer the Crater Desert. Later on, with the return of Eli and Sandy, along with the establishment of contact with Kamiyuko, a Japanese-speaking colony far north of the Crater Desert, the principal eventually decided to declare a crusade upon the Sauroids to the east. However, within the Scaleblood Forest, Principal Richards and a few of his supporters were killed while tracking a rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex responsible for terrorizing Davis Harrison High School and the Shining Star Republic.

Eventually, the vice-principal Mrs. Stewart, took over and framed Eli and his followers for the death of her predecessor, sentencing them to be inprisoned within the gym. Her dictatorship was short-lived and ended with the Whitehand replacing it violently and declared its leader, Jesse Roselorwenn, the Red Queen herself, as its reigning monarch.

Under the Whitehand
With Mrs. Stewart overthrown, along with the support of her dwarven mercenaries, Jesse made sure that the society of Travis Jefferson High would become a theocratic-polythenistic kingdom under her rule with a hierarchal structure and a slave-based economy. In this new order, no one could rise above nor go below their place in society and all symbols and technologies of modern civilization were forcefully replaced by a more primitive, yet highly efficient culture (with the exception of guns, light bulbs, surveillance systems, robotic laborers, alarms, tools for anatomy and biology purposes, and explosives). However, some regions that were under the control of treacherous generals, including General Agrona's formation of the independent nation of Avalonia, along with Boudica and her Great Rock Tribe claiming control of Davis Harrison High, the Whitehand faced territorial conflicts that often led to civil war within its domain. Later on, Scott Grimm murdered Toby Brown, who had been bullying him even after the incident, and eventually led to the Grimm Crisis, a series of race riots between the black minority and the rest of society that led to violent skirmishes, the looting of Caucasian homes by African-American rioters, and public hangings launched by white supremacists. The crisis continued on for only a few days in the form of small skirmishes outside of Travis Jefferson High including a raid upon a small makeshift village called Shantytown near the border between the Crater Desert and the Barren Wastes.