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.