With the update of Savage Worlds Adventure Edition Science
Fiction Companion (mouthful), I have everything set to start on my Fallout
Savage World adaption. Joining the twenty other people who have done so or are
attempting to do so.
But my tastes run a little counter to the modern Fallouts. A
little ironic considering my favourite is New Vegas and I have never played
Fallout 3 and 4. But the classic Interplay releases have a sense of scale that
isn’t captured by spending all the game around one city and it’s outlying
suburbs. Having to squash the far-flung regions like Raven Rock and Little
Lamplight into a box to make them fit. Fallout 1 and 2 took place in a landscape
so worn down by decades of radioactive dust that the number of surviving pre-war
settlements could be measured on one hand each game. Leaving room for new
places to emerge.
But there is no use just slapping this down, Interplay made
Wasteland 1 before the Fallout series. So there should be enough information to
come up with some rough rules as to what makes a good Fallout setting.
Gamewise, besides just cribbing premade material off other
Savage World Creators. I was going to adapt the Half-Giants from the Fantasy
Companion as the basis for super mutants and make up ghouls based on the
template process. The only downside was coming up with enough Racial Edges to
cover Pure-Strain Super mutants and the several different variants of ghouls.
Power Armour and maybe Radiation were going to be from the Science
Fiction Companion, if not treating Fallout’s B-Movie Radiation as a disease or
something. Didn’t need to change guns but certainly would have added a bunch of
Deadlands edges for that frontier feel. Maybe some Fantasy edges to keep melee
combat more relevant.
Wasteland 1
Out of 13 locations; 3 are real life places: Las Vegas, Quartz[site] and
Needles
And 10 are fictional locations: Highpool, Ranger Center, Desert/Rail
Nomads, Darwin, Sleeper Base 1, Sleeper Base 2/Base Cochise, Guardian Citadel, Agricultural
Center, Savage Village and probably Mine Shaft.
Mineshaft is a probably as there are a lot of silver mines out there, but it’s
not named.
That’s quadruple the fictional over real locations. However,
there is a significant distinction between pre- and post-apocalyptic sites.
Only the Desert/Rail Nomads and Savage Village are not transformations or
continuations of preceding sites.
Talking this to Fallout 1
All the locations in Bakersfield (Necropolis), Barstow (The
Hub), Los Angeles (Boneyard/Cathedral) and San Diego (The Glow) are real and
transformed.
Of the fictional places, only Junktown, the Raider Camp and
Shady Sands are post-war. Leaving Vault 13, Vault 15, Mariposa Military Base
and The Lost Hills Bunker as transformations.
The real vs fictional is 5/7 and the pre vs post war is 9/3.
Still keeping around 12 locations maximum.
For Fallout 2, the last time Interplay managed to get an RPG
Fallout game off the ground we get a bit more.
Real life and transformed: Reno, Redding, San Franciso,
Modoc, Klamath (Falls by the loading screen but the squashed map puts it in
California) and the Sierra Army Depot. Though only San Franciso and the Sierra
Army Depot have been transformed significantly from their real-life
counterparts.
Of the fictional locations: Navarro, Poseidon Oil Rig,
Gecko, NCR, The Den, Arroyo, Vault 13, the False Vault, Mariposa Military Base,
Broken Hill and the Ghost Farm. Only the NCR, Arroyo, and the Ghost Farm are
post-war.
6/17 are real but 3/11 are post-war. Still very few new
settlements.
- There should be many more fictional locations than
real-life ones. Up to four times as many.
- For how large the maps are, there should be vast stretches
of emptiness, with real-life locations scattered to the far reaches and fictional
locations in-between.
- If there are real-life locations, they should be
transformed in some way. While Fallout 2 breaks this somewhat with Northern
California, it holds true in 2/3 Interplay RPGs.
- The number of post-war locations should be very low.
Now with all this in mind, let us see how well my Cascadia Region stands up to these rules.
The setting is based on the failed proposal for Fallout
Extreme, a squad-based action game featuring local rebels vs an Evil Brotherhood
of Steel. Proposed to Interplay by 13th Degree but rejected. The Brotherhood are oppressing the region to conscript anyone into an army to
eventually invade China and fight the resurgent Communists. As the one thing
Fallout clearly needed was an End-Justifies-The-Means plot which also resurrects
the spectre of the dead pre-war world. It feels like proto-Bethesda, but at
least they took enough of Fallout 2 to copy the Enclave hypocrisy rather than
Rah Rah American Power-Armour.
They merely devolved into Brotherhood fanboyism, but about that later.
I think this should be somewhere between Fallout 1 and
Fallout 2, about the same time as Fallout Tactics. Long enough for an event to
occur but not so long as to affect the games. The expansion into the Pacific Northwest
but a small group of Brotherhood members who become a radically different
offshoot is pretty much what happens in Tactics. We can see this as a darker
version of the same dispersion. The Midwestern Brotherhood becomes more open as
it recruits weirdoes and the Northwest Brotherhood becomes more evil as they
recruit and impress raiders.
Starting from the top of the map down and going west to east
Kodiak Base - From Fallout Extreme, it was labelled as
part of the Pacific Northwest region, but the Kodiak islands were part of
Alaska. Which in the draft were the Bering Region. As no map was provided, who
knows. If it must be included and wasn't an error. I’d say either Vancouver
Island or the San Juan Archipelago counts as a remote enough island group,
while not being too far from a Cascadia adventuring group.
The Sound – Another map to seize control of against
the Brotherhood. The sound could refer to anywhere in Puget Sound, so I chose
to interpret it as the survivors in all the flatland, tidal ways and to the
west of Seattle and of course the massive Olympia National Park, which could
support survivors willing to live a more “tribal” life.
Some Fallout material, especially Honest Hearts, makes a fair
amount of hash out of how to define a tribal lifestyle.
Command Forward Depot – A single line from the
dubious Operation Anchorage about supplies coming from Oregon. As there is a
big navy base and depot there, it seemed to fit. Not necessary, it could be
tied to making friends with The Sound to obtain a cache the Brotherhood knows
nothing about or how The Sound defend themselves.
Capitol Hill - A neighbourhood in Seattle. While
Seattle was going to appear in the never off the ground Project V13 by
Interplay, a MMO set in a re-ruined world. Fallout Extreme has no details
either. Probably the Brotherhood occupies the are as their central command and
it’s the final region.
Seattle Underground – Another Fallout Extreme mention.
I think it was inspired by the network of underground streets in the Pioneer
District, left behind when Seattle built over them due to fire and flood. With
all the other ruins, it might be a massive network running the length of the
city and a hotbed of anti-Brotherhood resistance.
Issaquah – While a forested suburb of the Great SacTac
(Seattle-Tacoma) area. It would have appeared in Extreme as the Issaquah Nation, home of Hawk man braves, violent shamans and controlling the inland regions. Hawk
man braves almost suggest to me they are wearing sports gear of an old team,
like Caeser’s Legion. Whatever they are doing, they might be a threat to the
Brotherhood outposts with numbers, or the Brotherhood might have struck a deal
with them for not having any technology. I lean to the former.
Issaquah Vault - I didn’t think of this one, it came
from trying to match up all the vaults in a still from the TV show. While I had
labelled it for Issaquah, it could just have well served all Seattle, though
only 1,000 and assuming it was benign. It’s ultimately not relevant and if the
Brotherhood hadn’t looted it, surely it belongs to the Issaquah.
Although convincing/forcing each tribal confederation to gain
access their ancestral vault would be a fun McGuffin race vs the Brotherhood or
working for the Brotherhood.
Vault 6 – One of the few Extreme locations to get an
actual location, Vault 6 has the dubious authority of appearing on the TV show
maps as well. While being built inside Mount St. Helena was always a dumb idea,
the deliberate radiation exposure has turned them into aggressive ghouls.
Troll Warrens – A super mutant community apparently built underground. From Extreme but somewhat hard to place. Clearly there must be large caverns and it’s popular to associate super mutants with FEV or radioactive areas. Since nothing was happening in Portland and it was close enough to Mount Hood. I set it there.
The Cause – Based on Mount Hood, these were the protagonists of Fallout Extreme. A unified group of campers, survivalists and refugees from the surrounding sites and new settlements. The Fallout TV show puts a Vault there which very clearly explains how a chunk of them got there and their technological abilities.
Griffon Airfield – This was tricky because it was Extreme’s
proposed demo and demo locations don’t always exist. The only real idea I had
to go on was it should be near the starting area for the game (Mount Hood) and
it was an enclosed area with a few outbuildings and a missile silo. Now Seattle
had missile defences scattered through Washington in random towns. But they are
all too far away. So, I imagined Portland might have had some in the increasingly
militarised Cold War forever future of pre-war America and plunked it at Aeroacres
Airport-OG30 in Oregon City. Being the closest sealed airport to Mount Hood that
wasn’t big enough to have a terminal.
Fort Willamette – Extreme reference, sounded like a Brotherhood
stronghold but where? I originally placed it at the Highway interchange in
Eugene, to guard the southern end of the Willamette Valley. But the TV show’s
placement of a Vault almost opposite Salem seemed interesting enough. So, I
move it up. I wanted to have it in the Vault itself, but that would put it in
the middle of nowhere.
Looted Vault – Somewhere east of Salem was a vault, placed
by the TV show. At the time I had made that section of the map, I think I
baulked at the idea of having a Vault just in the middle of a plain. In
Interplay’s Fallout, Vaults were mostly extremely isolated and rare. 13 and 15
were in remote regions of California. Vault 8 (Vault City) was in a corner of
Nevada far from anything else. Vault 12 however breaks that pattern and maybe
was a sign I should have just accepted a vault can be built under the city that
would be hit. The vault was looted by the Brotherhood and accessing these vaults
was part of the reason for splinter faction to come up here.
Certainly, it would have simplified Salem into a single pin.
Oregon State University – Interplay took a lot from
Dav Brin’s The Postman (especially the NCR), but maybe not quite as much
as they did from A Canticle for Leibowitz and The Earth Abides. To fill space,
importing the supercomputer managing survivors was obvious. The Brotherhood has
probably ransacked the place and killed or impressed everyone. But a quest hook
could be gathered here to right those wrongs. Of course, alternatively for
space, this could just be a passing mention and needs not actually appear.
Gun Tribe – Another The Postman reference. A
tribal society in the truer sense, being a fusion of Native American US Army
personnel and the local rural people of the Umpqua River Valley. I was
originally going to have them be based in Florence, but I ended up moving them
to Reedsport as Florence would be ruined if the other Fallout material about
Coos Bay had that ruined. Though frankly I could have pushed them further up to
Scottsburg or even Rosburg. They have kept their humanity and their training by
constantly fighting with the cannibals to the south. They ambush Brotherhood
patrols and like the book people, are a vital if haughty potentially alliance.
Cannibal Shrine – Fallout 2 had hostile cannibal
bands roaming around Arroyo, indicating they lived in the forests of Oregon and
maybe Northern California. I took that as another The Postman reference.
In that book, what really sent America back to the dark ages was first nuclear war, then plague,
famine and mostly hordes of fascist survivalists called Holnists, attacking rebuilding
and reconnection efforts. And they form the final threat of the book. Forced
north into the Rogue River region by a California polity despite their
augmented super solider bodies.
The Rogue River Valley had quite a population of survivalists
and probably still does. These cannibals in Fallout 2 were very strong and
tough but carried simple weapons. So, from that, this new culture must have
some sort of horrible idol somewhere, with an attached quest to rescue someone
and destroy it to demoralise them. They keep Cascadia separate from New California,
reachable only by heavily armed caravans along I5. Or by running the desert
from Klamath.
The Haunted Place – One of those unnecessary Fallout
2 style gags. The Oregon Mystery Vortex is a famous tourist trap where it’s
claimed gravity behaves weirdly. In Fallout’s pre-war mania, the government
built a research bunker nearby and below to study the military applications. It
was a massive bit of fraud on behalf of the construction company but maybe the scientists
found some superscience there. Creating a dungeon to explore. Regardless the
Cannibal tribes don’t go near it, making it a safe place for a while.
Toxic Caves – Just as they were in Fallout 2, full of
Golden Geckos and some military salvage. Can be cut without issue.
Crater Lake – Beautiful and sacred to people now and likely
to the survivors after the bombs. But ultimately unnecessary unless you want
some sort of contrast.
Klamath - The furthest south and represents a weird
realm or order and sanity. Klamath (Falls) cares for money alone and thinks no
one north of them is a civilised person. Here is a rest stop and a reminder of
a wider world.
Rivertown – Built on and in the bend of the Columbia
River, out of scrap that has floated from ruins further up. Rivertown is a new
place by a tribe which just wants to live and grow again. They have some pre-war
abilities and is more a rest stop towards the middle of the map. Their quest
would be resolving who controls the town, an Issaquah-allied government or a
Montauk-allied government. The other side will not take kindly to losing access
to the bank.
Montauk Preserve – This one is tricky. Montauk was a
native American tribe from the East Coast, at the tip of Long Island. Unless
they were some sort of weird hippie people who merged different beach house
styles together. They don’t really fit. But the Fallout TV show added a vault
around Spokane.
Spokane is reasonably close to a few Native American
reservations. So, I merged them. The Vault was a place where select reservation
members were granted access but not anyone with storytelling knowledge, trying
to see if a hybrid culture could from memory alone. For good or bad. They sort
of did.
Most of their quests revolve around connecting regional communities to stave off the Issaquah Nation’s expansion. They give the quest
to deal with the Deathclaw Nest.
Montauk Vault – The vault needs to be mentioned. It
might not actually appear but could be a dungeon, completely emptied except for
something awful that crawled in there. The TV show map has the vault directly
on the Washington/Idaho border, but that’s flat land and at the time I wasn’t
willing to accept that vaults could be built without natural protection like in
Interplay’s games.
Deathclaw Nest – This is just a big dungeon that is there
to test the combat ability of the players. The idea is that communications across
the dry Columbia plateau have gone silent. The quest takes players from the
Cascade ranges to the Montauk, who tell of monsters in the desert. Redirecting
the players to find and destroy the nest. Its location is just a space filler.
You could put the deathclaws in a vault like the Montauk or Boise Vaults to
save locations.
Boise Vault – I wanted this to be in the mountains nearby,
but the map is clear it’s dead centre in Boise. This vault would be theoretically
untouched by prospectors. The primary drive for the Brotherhood to go east and
loot it for either general parts or some sort of McGuffin piece. The idea of a
base to impress raiders, tribals and communities into their army sounds a lot like
Caeser’s Legion and the Fallout Van Buren plot about Dog Town/Denver.
Mountain Home Airforce Base – A major base and command
centre in real life, the ruins would be literal ground zero for strikes in Idaho.
The radioactive ruins could either be a ghoul dungeons like Bethesda/Obsidian Fallout
games would do, or just a glowing crater like The Glow was in Fallout 1. If
there is some pre-war military technology required, it could easily be here. Otherwise,
it just restricts travel through the Snake River region.
Menkey Butte Mine – A location from The Armageddon
Rag, a short-lived newsletter about Project V13. Supposedly a silver mine
people are trying to find, it is assumed to be Butte, Montanna and a reference to
the mines that crisscross the hills around and beneath the city. This is a
little odd, for while Butte has silver mines, they like the original gold mines
were played out. Now precious minerals occur as a byproduct for Butte’s other colossal
mining projects.
Buit that’s never stopped Fallout from adjusting the game
world for a better story. It could maybe Butte County California, which did
have gold, silver and gemstone mines in the 1800s and would fit better with the
“narrow” range of continental USA Interplay’s Fallout takes place in.
Fallout New Vegas suggest there are active coal mines in Montana, but the coal
beds are far away from the western ore mountains and play no part in this game.
Helena Vault – To the east of Helena is a lake, the
western side is a low range of rocky hills, and the eastern side has mountains.
Annoying, the TV show put the vault on the western side as far as my eyes can
tell. Whatever this vault does, it’s probably a valuable place of salvage, if
not a focus of a community.
Vault Location – Really everything I said about the
Helena Vault applies to thing one as well. I guessed it to be under Mt. Baldy,
one of many peaks with similar names in the region. Probably designed to save/experiment
on people from Idaho Falls.
Granite Peak/Montanna Chapter Bunker – This was a
case of expedience from me. There is an unused bit of dialogue from Fallout 3
about there being a Montanna Chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel. The Fallout
TV show seemed to place a Vault directly in the huge massif that is the Beartooth
Mountains. This would be remote even for Fallout and would, be so far east to be
closer to the Midwestern Brotherhood of Steel. But the fact Elder Lyon, a man
who abandoned reinforcing the Midwestern Brotherhood due to their divergence
quoted them means they aren’t quite so odd.
The remoteness gives a natural plot for the area. The Montanna chapter took over a vault, maybe after the experiment killed/hurt everyone. They guard and scout Montanna from the ruins of Helena, the coal towns of the north and south, maybe into Yellowstone. The Northwest Brotherhood wants to convince them to ally with them. The Montanna chapter isn’t sure. The players can influence the discussions taking place in let’s say the Helena Vault to see if the Northwest Brotherhood can be curtailed from going east.
I have:
Kodiak Base? – Fic/pre
The Sound – Fic/post
Command Forward Depot –Fic/pre
Capitol Hill – Real/pre
Seattle Underground – Real/pre
Issaquah – Real/pre
Issaquah Vault – Fic/pre
Vault 6 – Fic/pre
Troll Warrens – Real/Post, although my terminology
keeps breaking down here, it’s a transformed real-life location but it’s
post-war construction.
Like San Franciso being the domain of the Shi, it sits
somewhere in between. But if so, would move the ratio for Fallout 2 to 4/11 post/pre-war.
The Cause – Real/post? This is where the
classification clearly breaks down. It’s a real-life location, with fictional
elements built pre-war and a post-war group of settlements because no one lives
there normally. Unless everyone lives in the modern surrounding towns, but then
are they really descendants of scouts and survivalists?
Griffon Airfield – Fic/pre
Fort Willamette – Fic/post
Looted Vault – Fic/pre
Oregon State University – Real/pre
Gun Tribe – Real/pre maybe post, but I’m leaning pre
Cannibal Shrine – Fic/post
The Haunted Place – Fic/pre
Toxic Caves – Fic/pre
Crater Lake – Real/pre
Klamath – Real/pre
Rivertown – Fic/post
Montauk Preserve – Fic/post, though based around
Spokane, I don’t think they would be in the ruins themselves, maybe in the
forested highlands. I put the marker on Spokane for the general area.
Montauk Vault – Fic/pre
Deathclaw Nest – Fic/post, maybe pre if it’s a
transformed Vault
Boise Vault – Fic/pre
Mountain Home Airforce Base – Real/pre
Menkey Butte Mine – Real/pre, unless you consider the
fact it is not explicitly named, in which case it would be Fic/pre
Helena Vault – Fic/pre
Vault Location – Fic/pre
Granite Peak/Montanna Chapter Bunker – Fic/pre
Ignoring the edge cases where I have realised, I could reclassify
things. I have:
13 Fic/pre
6 Fic/post
9 Real/pre
2 Real/post
That’s 19 Fictional Locations to 11 Real locations. Somewhat
low by the standards of Interplay.
And 15 Prewar locations to 8 Postwar locations. Still pretty
high.
Curbing all the optional places becomes
Eight Real vs 9 Fictional
No doubt Bethesda could do a Pacific Northwest Fallout, but
it would Fallout Seattle and The Cause would be on Mount Rainer. They could do
a regional Fallout, they certainly managed to create widespread space in Elder Scrolls
and Fallout 76. And they have distinct spaces in Starfield by necessity. But I think their devotion to mapping out every corner of a
downtown area would do them in. Fallout 76 got away with it because West
Virgina was so rural, there was no city to minutely detail.
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