I ran a session of my custom Fallout RPG, based on the Delta Green system. You can find the rules I used here if you're interested.
The time was 2270, seven years before the first Battle of Hoover Dam. The place: Vault 24, just outside Tucson Arizona. The protagonists: four vault dwellers, about to be exiled into the wasteland.
- Mabel Abernathy, Scientist (Crime: Mentat addiction, corruption of public morals)
- Dr Hernando Beckenbauer, Physician (Crime: Drug dealing, banging the Overseer's wife)
- Wilbur "Spider" Webb, Odd Job Man (Crime: shiftiness and general criminality)
- Alex Bradshaw, Technician (Crime: misuse of vault resources, careless handling of explosives)
The Exiles waited in the vestibule while the Overseer fussed over some bureaucratic irregularity, giving them a chance to talk to old Dan Watanabe. Dan had been exiled three times, every time returning with something so valuable the Overseer had been forced to let him back inside. He was an experienced wasteland survivor, and it was obvious he didn't fit in at the vault anymore. But nobody wanted to try exiling him again, until he felt like leaving. Watanabe gave the exiles his map of the wasteland, showing the locations and factions he'd discovered on his travels. He warned them about the Legion, a powerful raider tribe that had taken over the city. He also mentioned an encrypted Vault Tec radio signal he'd picked up from the mountains North of the City. Then the Overseer showed up and kicked the players out of the vault.
They found themselves in a cave. Colossal Cave, Southeast of Tucson. Mabel stole some eggs from a few cave swallow nests, intent on isolating the cholin from the whites and eventually brewing her own mentats. Leaving the cave was easy - they just followed the tourist signs and railings to the visitor's center on the surface.
Concept Art, I looked for the artist but Google would only give me Pinterest results
They waited for their eyes to adjust to the light, then stumbled inside to see if there was anything to loot. Years of exiled vaulters (they were far from the only people to get kicked out) had picked the place clean, but they extracted a few interesting mechanisms from the empty soda machines. With their combined scientific knowledge, they easily decrypted the encrypted transmission: a repeating broadcast from Vault 25, somewhere in the mountains North of the city.
They set out into the wastes.
Their first stop was a golf course at Rancho Del Lago. They found some worthless scrap metal, but also an intact golf cart engine, which Mabel hid buried in a sandtrap for later retrieval. Alex searched the wrecked cars in the parking lot for electrical components, but was scared off by something banging around in one of the trunks. They waited for the midday heat to subside, then set out along the road again. Their destination: Global Solar.
Spider scouted ahead of the group, and spotted a pack of wild geckos before the lizards got wind of the group. The exiles waited until the funny lizards got distracted by a bloatfly and ran off after it, leaving the path clear. The next obstacle they encountered was a checkpoint: a single man in red-dyed athletic equipment and wielding a shotgun, talking to a caravan of traders: four merchants and several funny looking hogs, loaded with paniers. After a few minutes of dialogue, the sentry allowed them to pass. Spider noted several similarly attired and armed men hiding in a nearby swale.
The team decided to play it straight. They rolled right up to the guard and introduced themselves as traders, looking to enter Two Sun. He warned them against taking any chems into the city, on pain of death. Alex nodded sagely, and made a show of removing his stash of Med-X and leaving it in a nearby building. This satisfied the Legionary, who didn't think to search Dr Beckenbauer's bag for his stash.
The exiles traveled along the railroad track, then broke West for Global Solar. Peering through their binoculars, they saw a big field of solar panels, tended by slaves in collars, guarded by armed Legionaries. A pair of the red-clad sentries knocked a slave to the ground and pummeled him, but were stopped by a foreman with a circle cross armband, who angrily shouted at them. The thugs stopped short of raising a hand to him, and the players waited for them to wander off before intervening.
The foreman introduced himself as Barry Wurst, of the Followers of the Apocalypse. He didn't have the time or energy to deal with strays from some vault, but they could go into the building and ask for Yvette. Inside, the players found her working a set of terminals, regulating the electrical output of the solar plant. She gave them a basic rundown of the situation: the power station was run by the Followers, who had been conscripted by the Legion to provide technical assistance in exchange for not enslaving or massacring them. She had been the leader of the mission, before they put Barry in charge.
Dr Beckenbauer administered basic concussion protocols and a stimpak to the injured slave, and Yvette repaid his kindness by giving the exiles less conspicuous clothing to replace their vault suits. She warned them to stay away from the Pima Air and Space Museum to the West, which was guarded by a pre war automated defense system that nobody wanted to deal with. Somehow it still had ammunition after hundreds of years. Alex took a look at the electronics readouts on the terminals, but there wasn't anything he could do that Yvette had already done. She also warned the exiles that if the Legion caught them scavenging in pre war buildings without a pass, the soldiers would break their legs.
The exiles suited up in their new clothes and left for Two Sun. The I-10 grew more crowded as they drew closer to the town. Traders, legionaries, slaves, and tall men on giant roadrunners, wearing blood red headbands over their braids and carrying lances. They passed by an old medical center, which had been reactivated by the local Followers chapter to serve as a free clinic. The city itself was a big open air slave market, military camp, and irrigation project. The hill to the West was dotted with crucified victims in various stages of death from exposure. They decided to obtain a prospecting license from the local Legion government, so that they could scavenge with impunity. The issuing office was the old convention center downtown. On the way, they passed a group of Legionaries beating a junkie to death in the streets.
Scipio, the Censor in charge of issuing the permits, told the exiles they had two choices: wait six months for a slot to open up, or do him a favor and get it right away. He had three jobs that needed doing, and any one of them would earn his favor.
- A cazador nest in the old botanic gardens that needed clearing out
- A drugrunning operation selling amphetamines in the city
- A bootlegging operation, smuggling tequila into the city
The exiles decided to investigate the drug runners. They persuaded Scipio to hand them temporary lictor badges - lead pins that would identify them as law enforcement if they got caught handling the contraband drugs. Then they got to work.
Their first stop was the Followers' clinic, to find a junkie. The volunteer doctors were treating injured soldiers and slaves brought in by their owners, and were extremely suspicious of the exiles' request to talk to a drug addict. Dr Beckenbauer was able to slip away and find a methhead, who told him that he could find a fix at the Coyote Bed and Breakfast on the West side of town. The team sent Spider to get a sample of the drug. He drew on his criminal experience and had no trouble persuading the inkeeper to sell him a hit: an old spray can loaded with the mystery drug "jet". He passed on the canister to the team's scientists, who identified it as a synthetic amphetamine mixed in with fumes from cowshit. Whoever was making the drug had access to a vast stockpile of manure. The feedlot in Hollywood Barrio fit the bill.
The exiles pestered the head of the brahmin operation, but he didn't know anything about any manure operation. The excess cowshit was piled up in the parking lot of an old schoolhouse near the pens, where farmers occasionally showed up to cart it away. By watching the pile from a concealed position, the exiles noticed workers discreetly moving cartloads into the school building. Spider snuck inside and found a group of slaves loading shit into a fermentation vat made from the school's old boiler tank, decanting the pressurized fumes into spray cans and inhalers, watched over by armed guards. The exiles had found the source of the drug.
The group debated whether turning over drug dealers to a fascist bandit tribe who would immediately kill them was a good idea. They decided they wanted the scavenging license more than they wanted to protect a group of strangers who were in their way. They gave Scipio the tip on the schoolhouse, he sent a runner to the lictors, and wrote up scavenger passes for the whole group. He warned them to return any chems they recovered in the ruins for destruction by the Censors, and sent them on their way.
(The Legionaries murdered the slaves, and crucified the guards who didn't die in the raid. And the feedlot owner, just in case he knew about the operation. The exiles agreed they would not be collaborating with them again)
The group pushed North, through the suburbs outside the city and toward Pima canyon. They found some leather jackets, a bottle of vodka, and a double barrel shotgun in the houses. They had a close encounter with a group of tribals carrying shields and crescent shaped blades, but both parties backed off by mutual agreement before a fight broke out.
The trail up Pima Wash was overgrown, clearly not patrolled by the Legionaries from the Temple of Mars to the South. The exiles hiked up the trail for half an hour, before a series of strange bird calls from the surrounding hills gave them pause. They unslung and loaded their weapons, but were interrupted in their preparations by a blue-hooded man wearing scraps of a vault suit dyed brown with coffee, who seemed to rise from the sand itself and insinuate himself in between them. He told the exiles he could hear their pip boys humming - he had one too, though his had no screen. He was happy to see them, and to escort them to Vault 25. The Overseer would be delighted to have visitors from another Vault.
The blue hood led the exiles down a crevasse in the rock, which opened into a hidden canyon. The path was scattered with crunchy gravel and cans on strings, which alerted sentries in hidden positions to their approach. The valley beyond was green and verdant, with tomatoes, bananas and other plants growing on trellises over rich fields of grass. The vault dwellers weren't wearing hoods, revealing smooth planes of skin where their eyes should have been. A number were tended by servants with functioning eyes and bare feet, bearing scars, piercings, and other indicators that they came from wasteland tribes. The exiles descended into the lightless tunnels of the vault below, to meet with the Overseer.
Blue Hoods, visual inspiration
Or rather, the almost-lightless tunnels. A hideous but very-much-sighted ghoul was hard at work on a terminal in a brightly lit room, debating the finer points of a coding problem with the Overseer. The blind leader of the Blue Hoods explained to the exiles that this was Ron, a wastelander who they brought in to do some coding work on software that didn't work with the assistive technology in their pip boys. Thanks to his hard work, they'd been able to get the basic functionality of their GECK up and running, producing the gardens outside. But the GECK's advanced features (matter fabrication, fusion) couldn't be activated using the computers in the vault. They needed some pre-war computer components to make it happen, and the exiles were well placed to make it happen. The Overseer offered them a place in Vault 25 if they went and got it, along with some better equipment to survive the wastes. The players agreed, and began planning the job.
The most likely place to find the necessary hardware was the flight computer of a B-52 bomber. The nearest place that had one was the Pima Air and Space Museum. The museum was a no-go zone thanks to some pre-war defense systems that annihilated anything which came in line of sight of the building. Witnesses from the tribal population (which the blue hoods kept as "servants" to do things that required eyesight) described it as a noise like a giant cloth ripping - indicating to the exiles that the defense systems had miniguns or some other fast firing weapons. They debated a number of approaches to the problem, including burrowing beneath the museum, welding armor to a vehicle, and using radio signals to hack the automated defenses.
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