The Desert Rangers (Team Alpha and Recruits, Team Echo and Recruits, Team November and Recruits) - Major Antagonists
The Patriarch and the Buchanan Family - Other Recurring Characters
—— Factions and Settlements ——
Arizona and Nevada - California
Colorado (Colorado Springs, The Plains Gangs, Other Factions and Characters in Colorado)
This is a character sheet for the canonical player party of the original Wasteland and their subsequent appearances.
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Team Alpha / The Cochise Team
Snake Vargas
General Hernán "Snake" Vargas
- Voiced by: Marc Graue
Appears In: Wasteland, Wasteland 2, Wasteland 3 (mentioned only)
The leader of the Cochise Team, who saved the Arizona wastes from Finster and the Cochise AI in 2087. In the 15 year interim, Vargas rose through the ranks and became the leader of the Desert Rangers. While he's a skilled tactician and a devoted leader, some of his decisions have been called into question by other high-ranking Rangers, and doubt is settling in about his ability to lead.
Vargas is the radio operator for the Arizona portion of the game, relaying information to the team and providing field promotions (level-ups) when necessary.
- Ascended Extra: Started out as one of the default names for the first game's starting party that the players could alter at their discretion. Come the second game, he's a fully realized character who plays the role of the Rangers' leader, and whose presence is still felt in Wasteland 3, even after his death.
- Big Good: He's the leader of the Desert Rangers after all, and is the one who sends you out on all your missions to help spread law and order across the wastes.
- Book Ends: Both his first and last mission deal with him stopping the Cochise AI from eradicating what’s left of humanity.
- 11th-Hour Ranger: He can join the squad for the final battle, putting his years of experience to use one last time.
- Embarrassing Nickname: He reveals how he got the nickname of "Snake" in the first tie-in novel: he's a snakebite magnet.
- Four-Star Badass: He's General Vargas in Wasteland 2.
- General Failure: Played with. He's undoubtedly a good tactician, and he knows the ins and outs of the wasteland, but many of his decisions are called into question by his Lieutenants, who believe he's not focused enough on securing the Rangers' territory.
- Guest-Star Party Member: He can join Team Echo during the final battle of 2.
- The Gunslinger: According to the scrolling text, whenever he fires his pistol, he opts for a Quick Draw and fires from the hip.
- Handicapped Badass: He retired from field work due to a lame leg. However, he still trains new recruits, and initiating combat with him will show that he's still quite capable.
- Heroic Sacrifice: He volunteers to stay behind and detonate the nuclear bomb in the Ranger Citadel to stop Cochise if Kekkabah or Corran Cain aren't in the group at the end of the game.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Also Cutting Off the Branches: in Wasteland 3, his canonical fate is revealed as having sacrificed himself by staying behind to ensure the nuke in Ranger Citadel went off and destroyed the Cochise AI once and for all.
- Mission Control: He takes over as radio operator for the Rangers during the Arizona portion of the game, and characters level up by calling in progress reports to him. The role is given back to Wade Woodson, the Rangers' usual operator, for the second half of the game in California.
- Old Soldier: He's considerably older than most of the Rangers. But if anything, he's even more deadly than he was in his youth.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo: He was one of the default player characters in the first game, along with Angela, Thrasher, and Hell Razor.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: In his character portrait, fitting with his cowboy aesthetic. Of course, he uses a 1911 (which is referred to as a pearl-handled revolver in the dot matrix printer text) when he's actually seen in battle, so...
- Suddenly Voiced: As with most returning characters in the sequel. Justified, considering the original was released on the Commodore 64, MS-DOS and Apple II.
- Unknown Rival: Vargas has no idea that the leader of Red Skorpion Militia has a bloody vendetta against him, that started all the way back to the first game when he shot Bobby and his dog in self-defense.
- Wasteland Elder: The Big Good of Arizona in 2, and those last fifteen years have not been kind to him.
Angela Deth
Captain/Colonel Angela Deth
- Voiced by: Rachel Robinson (original), Sarah Anne Williams (Director's Cut)
Appears In: Wasteland, Wasteland 2, Wasteland 3
The second member of the Cochise Team from 15 years ago, Angela played a key role in defeating Finster and the Cochise AI. Born in an extremely religious community, she ran away in an act of rebellion, and would have gotten herself killed if the Rangers hadn't taken her in. Because of this, she considers the Desert Rangers to be her family, and is willing to do anything to protect them. She was especially fond of Ace, and her desire to avenge his death is part of what convinces her to join Team Echo.
She's on the first chopper to California, which crashes shortly upon arrival with no known survivors. In Wasteland 3, it's revealed she not only survived the crash, but managed to make it back to Arizona. The game begins with a second team of Rangers being sent to follow up on the first — led by Deth, they dropped out of contact and their current status is unknown.
- Anti-Hero: She wants a freer wasteland, but prefers short-term, often violent solutions and dislikes compromise.
- Anti-Villain: The aforementioned qualities that make her an antihero can turn her against Team November in Wasteland 3 if they decide to support the Patriarch. Angela is opposing an admittedly tyrannical regime, but she refuses to see the damage her revolution will cause and needs to be put down.
- Affectionate Nickname: She calls Team November "cowboys" while contacting them over radio.
- Ascended Extra: Like Vargas, she was just one of the default names in the player's starting party in Wasteland that the player was free to change. In Wasteland 2, she has an actual face to go with her name, a personality, and serves a more active role in the narrative when she temporarily joins your party. In Wasteland 3, she's one of the most important characters in the plot, with the choices surrounding her being the biggest factors in determining how it ends.
- Big Good: Subverted in Wasteland 3. You can opt to side with her and follow her plan to depose of the Patriarch. However, this is a very bad idea as her plan leaves open a power vacuum in Colorado that erupts in anarchy and deprives Arizona of the supplies it needs to survive. Getting a more positive outcome from ousting the Patriarch requires Team November to do a number of things independent of Angela's influence.
- Black-and-White Morality: Her view of right and wrong leaves little room for compromise or incremental change. Dips into Black-and-White Insanity at times given how she doesn’t seem to notice or care about the consequences of her actions.
- Bus Crash: Her helicopter crashes shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, and finding the crash site is part of a sidequest. Her body is not found there, but her ultimate fate remains a mystery... until Wasteland 3, where it's revealed that she did in fact make it back to Arizona at some point during the last few years, though it's not explained how or what happened in the meantime.
- But Now I Must Go: In Wasteland 3, most endings where she survives end with her departing eastward. She might depose of the Patriarch, but she can't show her face to the Rangers in Arizona anymore as she deserted. You can potentially convince her otherwise, or you can choose to follow her.
- Cowboy Cop: Even among Rangers, who are given a fair amount of leeway in the field, she has a reputation for disobeying orders and relying on her own judgment. In Wasteland 3, Team November is sent in after her latest antics end in her team failing to check in, seemingly having vanished. She's gone rogue and is planning a coup to remove the Patriarch from power. When you finally meet up with her in person, two-thirds of the way through the game, Team November has the option of siding with her, trying to talk her down, or trying to arrest her or put her down.
- Crutch Character: In Wasteland 2. She asks to join Team Echo at the very beginning of the game. She's pretty high-level, and doesn't drain other characters' experience gain, making her a must-have for first-time players. This is more prominent in the original version where she is Level 14 when she joins your party of 1st level recruits, compared to the Director's Cut where she's only Level 8 or so, but she's still very useful.
- Declining Promotion: Cuts both ways — she hates the idea of becoming a Desk Jockey, but she's also such a loose cannon that it's implied she's been deliberately Passed Over as well.
- Defector from Decadence: A minor example — she grew up in an extremely religious community, but ran away in an act of rebellion when she was a teenager. She now considers the Rangers to be her real family.
- The Exile: She hints at this in Wasteland 3, saying that she and Woodson don't see eye to eye. In a November Reigns ending where the party stays in Colorado, she approves, and thinks this will ease the hard feelings between the two.
- Fallen Hero: She can end up this way in Wasteland 3 if Team November refuses to oust the Patriarch from power. She still insists on overthrowing him, and her rebellion causes chaos to erupt all over Ranger HQ and Colorado Springs. The ending slides imply that the Rangers Unpersoned her thereafter.
- A Father to His Men: She's good to her soldiers and cares about them deeply, which is often enough to secure their loyalty to her. If Team November can convince her to surrender, she'll willingly give herself up to the Patriarch on the condition that he lets her boys go.
- Fiery Redhead: She's been a troublemaker since a young age, and joined the Rangers after they threw her in the drunk tank when she was 19. She's still pretty fiery today, despite having reached middle age.
- Good Is Not Nice: She means well, wants to help as many people in the wasteland as possible, and is willing to work with a team of inexperienced rookies, but Angela's a hardass who prefers to use force to get things done (and fittingly, has the Hardass skill at the start of Wasteland 2, which is about forcing people to submit via intimidation).
- Guest-Star Party Member: She offers to join the new recruits at the beginning of 2, but is called away for another mission — following the trail of Ace's killers, which now leads to California — around halfway through the Arizona portion of the game.
- Handicapped Badass: By the third game she has scars on her face that make it difficult to talk and a prosthetic leg. It doesn’t slow her down at all.
- It's All About Me: A variation — her idea of doing right is essentially selfish, disregarding what others want in her zeal to bring freedom and justice to the wastes. In 3, while she claims to fight for the people, her motivation seems more rooted in her belief on how she thinks the Rangers should act, even if it means splintering Colorado, letting Arizona die out without the much-needed supplies and unleashing Ironclad Cordite on Kansas. Assuming you saved them you can even talk to the Hoons, the kind of people she claims to fight for, and they make it clear the Patriarch's death could very well just make things worse for ordinary folk on the ground.
- Knight Templar: She's so determined to remove the Patriarch from power that she refuses to consider the chaos she's unleashing or the starving people at home in Arizona she is failing. Her personal crusade is the only thing that matters, and there's nothing Team November can do to talk her out of it.
- Last of Her Kind: In 3, she's officially the only original member of Team Alpha left alive.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Take a look at her surname. Angela herself lampshades it in one of her battle quotes:Angela: Who is stupid enough to fight someone named Deth?
- Never Found the Body: Her body is never located after the helicopter crash in California, and the Rangers eventually held a funeral for her anyway. It's revealed in Wasteland 3 that she survived.
- Obliviously Evil: She's so utterly devoted to her personal crusade against the Patriarch that she fails or even outright refuses to consider the long-term ramifications that rebelling against him will entail for the people of Arizona and Colorado. Siding with her completely without making the prior moves to allow for a peaceful transfer of power afterward leads to a Downer Ending in Wasteland 3 and a worse situation for everyone.
- Overrated and Underleveled: In Wasteland 2 she doesn't have even a tenth of the gear she would have had at the end of the first game, like Power Armor or a Proton Axe, and in the Director's Cut she's only Level 8. Handwaved by saying she's slowed down in her old age. Averted by Wasteland 3 where she’s as strong or stronger than you’d expect a veteran and experienced Ranger to be, with thousands of hitpoints, able to take out multiple party members with a single Puncturing Shot.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo: She was one of the default player characters in the first game, along with Vargas, Thrasher, and Hell Razor. In 2 she's a Guest-Star Party Member before her Bus Crash in California. In 3 it's said she made it back to Arizona, but took the original mission to Colorado to escape her ghosts before falling off the grid. She's gone rogue and is out to take down the Patriarch's corrupt regime, Woodson's orders be damned. The player can ultimately either help her bring the old man down or fight to stop her.
- Punny Name: She's the angel a' death. Implied to be her real name.
- Rank Up: She goes from Private to Command Corporal to Captain to Colonel over the course of the games.
- Rogue Protagonist:
- Without ever losing the desire to help others that made her a hero in the first place, she can become the Final Boss of 3 — her moral absolutism leaves little room for compromise or forgiveness, and also blinds her to the damage her own actions can cause.
- Hinted at in 2 — when she beats Samuel Haas to death with Ace's wrench for leaving Ace to die at the hands of the synth. Cowardly though it was, it's not like Sammy killed Ace himself, and given how easily Tinker dealt with a veteran Ranger, which Haas wasn't, running might have been the only chance either of them had to survive.
- Rugged Scar: The burn scars along the left side of her face and neck when she appears in Wasteland 3. Seemingly a souvenir from her time in LA.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: In Wasteland 3, she disobeys orders from General Woodson and goes rogue along with the rest of her team to topple the Patriarch, whom she views as a tyrant. That said, it's debatable if Angela really is doing the right thing because she's abandoning her mission to save the people of Arizona to oust a dictator from power without considering a way to fill the ensuing power vacuum his death will cause.
- Suddenly Voiced: As with most returning characters in the second game. Justified, considering the original was released on the Commodore 64 and Apple II.
- Tragic Hero: Angela has always had good intentions and she helped save the world in her youth, but her staunch refusal to compromise her values or look at the bigger picture is what can lead to her downfall in Wasteland 3. She's so determined to end the regime of what she views as an irredeemable tyrant that she fails to see the long-term harm that doing so will cause to both Colorado and Arizona, and in the end needs to be put down by the Ranger organization she used to serve.
- Tragic Keepsake: She carries Ace's wrench as a melee weapon after his death, which she refuses to unequip.
- Two-Faced: The left side of her face is a mess of burn scars in the third game. In keeping with the sinister connotations of this trope, it could be taken as a sign that she may not be the heroine you think she is anymore.
- Vocal Dissonance: Has had three voice actors between the original version of Wasteland 2, the Director's Cut, and Wasteland 3. Her spoken dialogue in the original version was very sparse and she was voiced by Rachel Robinson. Come the Director's Cut, in which all the major characters have full voice acting, rather than Rachel coming back in to record all the previously silent dialogue, either because of scheduling conflicts or refusal or even not asking her to, they brought in a new voice actress to dub it instead. The difference is rather noticeable, since they use both the original audio and the new audio: Rachel's version has a huskier and harsher voice, while Sarah's is softer and more emotional. In Wasteland 3, she's voiced by Erica Cain.
- Walking Spoiler: In Wasteland 3. Figuring out where she is, what she's doing, and why she disappeared in the first place is part of a secret set of orders from Ranger high command that gets passed down to you.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: She absolutely wants to help the people of Colorado, but she's completely convinced that nothing short of removing the Patriarch from power will accomplish that. The problem is that, for all his many crimes, the Patriarch really is holding Colorado together and Arizona needs the supplies he's offering. While it's possible to accomplish a peaceful transition of power that doesn't utterly destabilize both Colorado and Arizona, it's in no way easy.
- Wrench Wench: Her weaponsmithing skill aside, in 2 she carries Ace's monkey wrench and uses it as a melee weapon. It remains competitive until she leaves the group shortly before the mission to Damonta.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: A tragic example in Wasteland 3. Angela thinks she's in a story about a noble La Résistance rebelling against an evil empire. She's not; she's in a gritty, post-apocalyptic story where right and wrong are often a lot harder to discern, including the fact that her well-intentioned rebellion is doing more harm than good.
Thrasher
Staff Sergeant Gilbert "Thrasher" Sagarra
Appears In: Wasteland, Wasteland 2
The third member of the Cochise Team. Thrasher lost a leg in the assault on Base Cochise, despite receiving medical attention for it. After retiring from field duty, he took on the role of the Desert Ranger cartographer. His leg was recently replaced with an advanced cybernetic prosthesis by a woman named Dr. Kyle, who currently operates out of the Canyon of Titan.
- Artificial Limbs: He got an advanced prosthetic leg from Dr. Kyle, a traveling surgeon.
- Badass Bureaucrat: What he became after his leg injury. Don't be mistaken, though — he can still kick your ass.
- Badass Long Robe: Subverted — it's a bathrobe.
- The Big Guy: Described by Angela as being built like a bear. He certainly fits the bill, being 6'6" and on the heavy side, with a mustache and Carpet of Virility.
- Career-Ending Injury: He lost a leg in the final battle at Base Cochise in the first game. At the beginning of Wasteland 2 it's just been replaced by a cybernetic prosthesis, but he's been retired from the field for the past 15 years and won't join you in the field.
- Cartography Sidequest: He offers the player rewards for finding new locations that he doesn't have on his map yet.
- Cigar Chomper: His portrait depicts him smoking a cigar.
- Commander Contrarian: He's always got stern words for the player, since he's a cynic that tends to look at the big picture. You can get on his good side, but it's tough.
- Desk Jockey: After losing his leg, he discovered he was actually pretty good at drawing, and took up a post as the Rangers' resident cartographer.
- Handicapped Badass: Despite the loss of his leg, he can still get around due to an advanced prosthesis... and can still knock around new recruits if need be.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo: He was one of the four default player characters in the first game, along with "Snake" Vargas, Angela, and Hell Razor.
Hell Razor
Hell Razor
Appears In: Wasteland, Wasteland 2
The final member of the Cochise Team. Like Ace, he was sent to investigate the strange radio signals being transmitted to Arizona, though they were apparently tackling the problem from different directions.
- The Berserker: He is described as this by his comrades, fitting with his name.
- The Faceless: His face is never revealed, as he is killed shortly after the game begins, and he uses the same generic recruit portrait as Snake and Thrasher in the first game. He is described in the tie-in novels, though: lean wiry build, black hair, and a face like the joker in a pack of cards.
- Killed Offscreen: He dies shortly after the game begins, killed by Tinker, the metal priest.
- Posthumous Character: By the time you track him down in Rail Nomads in the second game, he's already been killed by Tinker, his body dumped near the Hobo Camp in Rail Nomads.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo: He was one of the default player characters in the first game, along with Vargas, Angela, and Thrasher.
- Punny Name: Hell Razor is a hellraiser.
Recruits
Ace
Ace
Appears In: Wasteland, Wasteland 2
Not originally a ranger, but a mechanic who the Cochise Team rescued from Ugly's Gang in Quartz. He was sent there from Vegas by the "Legitimate Businessman" Faran Brygo to recruit soldiers to fight against the robot invasion, and the Cochise Team was just the group for the job. Skilled with a gun and good with cars, he was deputized by the Rangers on the spot, and eventually became a full member. He died investigating the strange radio signals from the west, and Team Echo is tasked with continuing his work.
- Ascended Extra: Originally, he was a slightly above-average recruitable who had the unique ability of being able to fix and drive a Jeep (which was pretty useless, since you could just as easily walk from place to place). In Wasteland 2, however, he is stated to have been a valuable member of the team who aided in the Battle of Base Cochise and was in a relationship with Angela Deth.
- Posthumous Character: His death kicks off the plot of the second game.
- Promoted to Love Interest: With Angela Deth, entirely offscreen for the 15 in-universe years between the first and second games. It's why his death hits her especially hard.
- Starts with Their Funeral: The opening narration of 2 is Vargas giving his eulogy, and the game begins immediately after the funeral.
- Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: The second game begins with his funeral, and investigating his death is the first quest of the game.
Other Hireable Recruits
Jackie
A Highpool resident who can be recruited.
- Bare Your Midriff: Jackie's avatar is one of a redheaded child with a bare midriff.
- Child Soldier: Jackie is obviously an adolescent who can, nevertheless, be promoted and fight with the rest.
- Dropped a Bridge on Her: Jackie's remains are buried outside the Citadel by 2102.
- I Owe You My Life: The Rangers recruit her by saving Jackie from the rabid dog, Bobby.
- Lethal Joke Character: Jackie is a child lost in the caves that can, nevertheless, still become a trained soldier.
