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.