Session 1

So the first game session has come and gone, and I believe it was a success. The players are eager to return to the wasteland and were seemingly captivated for 7 hours.

The first session is the probably the most important, in my opinion, for any campaign. It encompasses character creation, covering setting rules, and setting the stage for which all other acts will stand.

So first thing is to set the stage. It is important to know that the group I am running for is not all hard-core Fallout fans, in fact two of them had never played the game in any of its incarnations, just watched others play it. So to ensure everyone had a similar concept it is important to lay a solid foundation that all other items would build from. To this end I decided to leverage some modern technology; a combination of You Tube, an iPod, and TV.

First, from You Tube, some kind souls have created videos of the introductions from Fallout 1, 2, and 3, as well as, captured other classic game footage. So after searching around I found a video converter that will translate YouTube videos into MPG4, for play on an iPod (The tool I am using is Any Video Converter). Now that the video is in MPG4 I am able to then push it on to my Video iPod. Then after purchasing the right video adapter cables, I am able to play these videos on any TV that has the White, Red, and Yellow adapters. So we went to the hosts TV and played the introduction from Fallout 1. For those that had played Fallout, you could see their smiles, for those that had not, listening to Ron Peralmans voice saying "War..war never changes" I think set the stage perfectly. It is my intent going forward, to show the videos that have the intro at the beginning of each session. In fact, because I think they set the stage so well, I have linked them in on the Videos page.

Then upstairs we went, creating the player characters. There was lots of discussions of what rolls were needed and dividing up who would do what. So we have in our group 5 players. We have our Doctor, our Gung-ho killer who calls himself public relations, our Face man, a weird scientist inventor, and a two-gun infiltration specialist. Or in classic D&D terms, a cleric, a fighter, a bard, a wizard, and a rogue. It is funny how the roots of one of the core game systems creeps even into a post-apocalyptic setting. I will visit each of these characters later on, but for now I will refer to them as Doc, PR, Face, Geek, and ninja.

The next step is probably the most delicate, it is setting the hook deep into the flesh of the characters, it is the motivation of why they want to comeback to the table time and again. You mess this part up and the game will get off on the wrong foot and the players will have no interest in playing other than the social interaction. I must confess, this is the part that I wrote and rewrote time and again, it is the introduction to the whole campaign that is to follow. It needs to convey the setting, communicate the reason they players are even in this world, and setup what they must do.

So here is what I read to the players - probably, and hopefully the longest monologue that I will do during this campaign, because going forward it should be about what the players are doing, vs. what the rest of the world is doing, so here it is:

Imagine a life completely indoors, with no windows to the outside. A life in steel halls, recycled air, recycled water, and probably recycled food. Imagine a life being told about the sun, but never seeing it except in holotapes. Told about the sky, but to only look up and see the ceiling above your head. Told about the rain, but only feeling water on your skin during your daily rationed shower. Told about the wind, but only feeling a breeze if you stand in front of an air duct. Now imagine you only get to experience this for four years at a time, then you spend the next 8 in cryogenic sleep. This is the life you were born into in your home, Vault 33. Your parents were lucky, you guess, to have been able to make this vault their home when the bombs fell on October 23, 2077. Their gift to you is clean water, clean air, palatable food, and most importantly your life, if you call this living.

For you see, Vault 33 was only built to hold 300 active living people, but in reality there are 900 people "living" in Vault 33, they get rotated out every four years. Of course there is that crazy month at either end of your four years, where one group gets "thawed" and the other gets ready to "sleep." This is your sixth time in your life of going in for the long sleep, the deep chill, the icebox.

At least this time you will not be going to stuck in your cryo pod in within your parents and siblings, instead you get to go in the last group with your friends, giving you just a couple more days to relax with your friends and chat with some people from Group C who have been only out of dethaw a few weeks.

As you get fitted for your chamber, you look at your friends, hoping they all make it out of the sleep. You put on your mask, knowing the gas that will soon fill your lungs and will put you in a deep slumber before the chamber supercools. Goggles are placed over your eyes to protect the sensitive tissue within from bursting as the temperature drops. The scientists have explained that in reality, you are physically about a year older than you really are because the CSS unit does not freeze you entirely, it does not completely stop the aging process, that in those 4 years in storage you age about a month and a half.

The good news is the Overseers, the people responsible for the Vault, believes that in just 3 more cycles the Vault can be permanently opened based on what the "Straws" have been reporting. The "Straws" are the people who have to leave the vault if there is more than 300 people alive at the beginning of each sleep cycle. "Straws" have always been volunteers who have either lost family during a failed dethaw, or have grown old and tired of this life in the vault and are willing to take the risk of life beyond the vault door. Of course this is a one way trip, those who leave never come back inside the Vault, sworn to never reveal the location of Vault 33. Some have returned to tell what they have learned. Fortunately the last time anyone had to be sent out from Group B, your group, was 24 years ago, or 3 cycles back.

You watch the other chambers slowly raise into the ceiling one by one. Each carrying family and friends to another 8 year snooze. Doctor Rigsby checks your vitals one more time, as some techs from the latest thaw are messing around with some wires going to your pod. As the door closes, you hear one say "Yeah, had to move this one to group C's isotropic backup generator due to the new piping, but otherwise the main power line is the same for the rest of Group B." You take one last breath of stale vault air and slipping on your masks for the start of your sleep.

You of course have dreams, dreams of people you know, dreams of one day walking in the "outside." These dreams give way Nightmares of people dying, people you loved and people you never even knew before fading into mostly blackness and rest.

You awaken to the red and white strobbing of klaxon lighting, your eyes feel like they have been glued shut but you still know that light. You feel the warm air of the vault knowing that your chamber door has opened correctly. You wait for a little bit for the hands of the dethaw techs to pull you out of your chamber to begin your return to normalcy. And you wait, and you wait a bit more. You then realize some things are missing, the laughing of people meeting old friends, the chatter of the physicians, in fact the only noise is your breathing, the hum of the machinery, and the murmuring of a few voices nearby, voices you recognize as your friends.

Forcing your eyes open, you see your friends and fellow poddites staring across at each other, the klaxon light silently strobbing, but as for the rest of the chamber what you see makes you sick to your heart. For while there is no one around, but the chamber looks like it had been used for a military exercise or target practice for 10 year olds with automatic weapons. The walls are pock marked and scorched, the normally bright lights of the vault have been replaced by emergency lighting and the air has something new to it, something dusty and coppery.

You open your dry mouth to speak, tasting that muck that you only get if you don't brush your teeth before going to bed, and wonder what the hell is going on.

What do you wish to do?

----

So from here the players "explored" their vault finding clues that eventually led them to conclude that a Straw named Harold Davis had betrayed the vault to some slavers. That these slavers damaged the power supply and that Group A was taken, Group B was all dead except for them, and Group C was in peril as the backup power supply was going to fail in about 60 days. This exploration got the party some guns, knives, food and meds, and fulfilled some group Hinderances (one had a vendetta, this intro gave him a target - Harold Davis). The exploration taught the fundamentals of combat as they fought giant rats and radroaches that had infiltrated the vault through a broken vent. From here they exited the vault and we left them stepping outside and getting their first glimpse of the outside world.

Some of the fun things that were put into play: I had obtained through RPGNow a couple of 2-D sci-fi Tile sets and made those into the vault layout. The problem is I printed them with Adobe PDF with Auto Rotate and Center on and it shrank the images so that the 1" squares were .75" so that was a bummer as I did not discover this until after I printed, cut, and pasted them on to matt board. Still the players seemed to enjoy the terrain.

Another was in the Savage Worlds rules there are items called Bennies that can be given to players as impromptu rewards. These bennies can be anything from poker chips to gummy-bears (not recommended as they get eaten before used). I went and made my own for the Fallout setting. I got a mostly clean Nuka Cola logo and sent it to Crafty Caps (http://www.craftycaps.com/brewers/) and for $15 + s/h, I got 50 custom bottle caps. Totally worth it. Now for those not familiar with the fallout universe, the coin of the world is no longer federally issued money, but Nuka Cola bottlecaps, so to make these into Bennies was a huge hit amongst the players familiar with the setting.

Anyway, that ends my recap of session 1

We built this city on rock and roll!

So building communities in Fallout is one of my favorite tasks, why, because it allows me to creatively think of how people would recycle their surroundings. Look at Megaton from Fallout 3, they took parts from a nearby airfield and used the crater left from an unexploded bomb to build a defensible community.

One of my favorite books growing up was "The Girl Who Owned a City." In this tale of a plague apocalypse that killed everyone over 13, this girl first tries to make their neighborhood a safe refuge from bully gangs, and it fails, so she moves everyone into a private school that had a wall around it, and it worked (sorta, I don't want to spoil the book). The book really makes you look at the structures around you and think, if I was stranded here during a war, what I would I use to make my home.

In my first Fallout Campaign I really didn't have much in that kind of thought. People lived in adobe walled compounds, much like Shady Sands, or in scap-piles like Junktown. The next campaign that was set in North Dakota I had them living in the Hockey Rink in Grand Forks, the bad guys in Fargo taking over that stadium. The university was the home for those living in Valley City. And I had one community living in the tall concrete grain silos along the train tracks.

For this campaign I have a community that was started by railroad passengers using a switch yard as their home, with box cars filled with rubble for walls and sleeping in the passenger cars. Cattle cars are where Brahmin are stored for the night, some what safe from the various critters of the wasteland.

It is from this that I am then able to color the community. For this railroad town (called Railyard) I am able to make the leader known as the Yard Boss, the local guards are called Bulls. The head of the towns working train reactor is known as the Engineer and he leads a group known as conductors whose job is to make sure everything is running smoothly. Citizens are known as Passengers and strangers are known as Hobos. It is this kind of detail that I love dreaming up.

Of course, in an open world campaign the players could completely skip all that thought. So I only make a skeleton paragraph or two for the community (Name, what it looks like, character notes - who is in charge and what do they do), and a few notes about what it looks like (so the stuff I spouted above).

Now the thing about all the Fallout games is every community has quests and rumors. So this is one area I do put some extra effort into. I think about this community and what it would know about the world around it and make rumors, some obviously false, others subtly true. The other thing is I think up about 3 one sentence quest hooks that I can approach the players with. I try not to make them time sensitive so the players can come back to them (like they can in Fallout 3).

So with a background, a flavor, a few names, a grip of rumors and a few side quests: a community is done.

Extras that sometimes creep into my creations: What a community eats and drinks. What do they make for trade, if anything. Since slavery is a big issue in most fallout, I also throw in their thoughts of slavery.

Now once I know my players are going to head to a location, then I start putting together a simple map for them and myself. You may recall the maps from Fallout 1, they looked like postcards or simple maps, so the important thing is just capture what places are important in a community and roughly how they relate, distances are not important for such small communities.

So that is how I build my communities, which leaves me more time for the really fun stuff - miniatures and terrain.

What makes Fallout a hard campaign to write.

Over the years I have had the pleasure of Game Mastering (GM) many games over many systems and have watched the evolution of what good GMing entails.

In the early days it was running published adventures, reading gray boxes of text and thumbing through the rules for monster and treasure stats. Then came the over planning days, where every inch of land was mapped out and every NPC needed stats. Calendars were created, weather patterns were made real, holidays, coins of the realm, all the extraneous details that could be used to bring the world to life...as if the players cared.

Then came the latest trend in GMing - improv. Where you only build as the players explore. Sure, you set up what could be found in a one or two day journey from where the campaign begins, but beyond that you wing it. The advice is never put anything on the map until the players get there, that way you can ensure that whatever encounters you want to have happen, just happen to be in the direction the players go. NPCs are randomly generated and then documented as they are encountered. Adventures are hooks that are flushed out once the PCs commit themselves to it. In essence you put maybe one or two hours into preparation and then build after each session a bit more of the world.

This approach is great for most games, especially Fantasy ones. But when it comes to Fallout, this improv approach has it's limitations. First and foremost, any Fallout campaign is based on a world that is similar, yet different, than our own. Second, Fallout is about interconnectivity of communities, be they raiders or a town of children, what is happening in one area affects all. Lastly, Fallout is based on a version of our reality, meaning real places on the map. So the task of drawing a map is automatically solved, just pick up a map of where you want to play and go from there. The hard part is populating the map after the apocalypse.

For me, the first place I start is my Morrow Project RPG rule book, which kindly lists all the primary targets for a nuclear strike by the Russians and why and what mega-tonnage would have been lobbed there if the year was 1990. This then enables me to blow the crud out of the cities and towns that should be nuked.

Then after that, I start imagining the survivors, where would they go? What would the people that are already there do in response? Personally I hold to the fact that people are like locusts in the face of disaster, looting and taking everything they can as they travel, so stores, crops, animals, goods, buildings would be destroyed in the wave of humanity as they fled the aftermath along well known paths. So I then have small towns of low population erased from the maps consumed by locusts.

I also, at this point, imagine where I will put vaults. Places slightly off the main escape routes yet close enough to primary targets that people could get to them in time. Vault design does need a bit more explanation. I hold to be true that vault-tec was compromised by a conspiracy to use Vaults as testing grounds for various psychological and physical tests to enable man-kind to build a spaceship to another planet should Earth become uninhabitable due to a war. As such each Vault was responsible for testing "something." So as I build the vaults onto the map, I ask myself, what was this Vault's "test."

Now I flash forward 50 years and imagine a world under the physics of the Fallout Game, not nuclear winter but dry and parched. I pick on infrastructure first, causing dams to break, reservoirs to empty, and roads to vanish beneath shifting sands. Only major roads remaining, choked with rusting traffic jams.

Then I imagine which communities would have survived and why. Community building is where I have the most fun, and something I will detail in a my next Post.

Where to begin?

War...war never changes.

Such powerful opening lines so many years ago sucked me in completely into the world of Fallout. A dedicate fan of the Fallout franchise from version to version (except for Brotherhood of Steel for the console) and vision to vision.

But after playing through Fallout, I wanted to share the game in a group setting, I wanted to have a Role playing game in the Fallout universe.

So in 2001, I ran my first Fallout game for a group of 5 players using the Big Eyes Small Mouth (later to be called Tri-Stat) system. Set in the foothills of the Eastern Rockies from Denver to Santa Fe, the story was loved by the players and a good time was had by all. It is also where I learned to love miniatures and minimalist rules.

In 2005 I resurrected another Fallout game, this time for a slightly different group of players, but with the same rule set. Set along the Eastern Edge of North Dakota from Grand Forks to Bismark. Here I expanded my miniatures collection and a great time was had by all.

Now it is 2009, Fallout 3 has taken the gaming world by storm. I am in a completely different group when over a game of Dark Heresy, I told the other players that I have run and could run a Fallout based game, if there was interest.

The interest was immediate and strong, but I had several months to prepare.

So I choose the Oregon Willamette region, for the time frame of after Fallout but before Fallout 2. The choice put the players off any official map, but still close enough to the region of Fallout 1 that such things as Super Mutants could be wandering around.

So I delved into the process of populating the region with all sorts of crazy things.

So I discussed this with yet another group of players I game with, and they wanted their own Fallout mini-campaign (6 session limit), so I pondered and created yet another Fallout campaign. Fortunately this one was going to be very limited in scope as this second group has a rule of 6-sessions limit, and as it only meets once a month it is in many aspects a rail-road campaign.

Comparing that to the first group, which wants open world exploration and deep thought challenges.

So after a few months preparation I feel I am ready to start running these campaigns. Models have been obtained and painted. Terrain has been obtained and painted/assembled. So I am feeling pretty good. Of course, like in all things, no campaign survives contact with the enem...er.. players.

So we will see how it goes.