Fallout: Yellowstone Masterpost

Berann

 

Your prairie village in the Montana wasteland has been struck by plague. A burrowing creature with a glowing belly bit a child, who fell ill a few days later. By the time the town doctor noticed the swelling in the kid’s lymph nodes, the disease had already spread among the populace. You were spared the ravages of the plague. You’ve been sent south into the seething cauldron of Yellowstone to find medicine to save your town.

Brigador Killers Demo On Steam

I haven't written a ton of RPG stuff in the last month or two because I'm doing some guest writing on a video game called Brigador Killers. The devs have been hard at work on the game for almost a decade and just released a demo on Steam. You can play it here. Have fun!

Fear & Hunger: Singing Sand Masterpost

David Roberts

 

In the year 1913, archaeologists, scholars and financiers from across the Old World descend on the Valley of the Gods in Songhai, Abyssonia, where researchers from the Temple of the Sun Amon have just unearthed the tomb of the legendary New God Djoser Parahu Daoud. 

 

An adventure in the style of The Mummy and Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in the world of Fear & Hunger. Contains the rules and mechanics necessary to play, along with the pregens, scenario documents and maps.

• Scenario Folder with all necessary files
  
• Playtest 1
• Part 1
• Part 2
  
• Playtest 2
• Part 1
• Part 2
  
• Bonus: Music Post

Unknown Armies NPC - Peppino Spaghetti

By McPig

Serious occultists call the ‘03 conflict the Whisper War. For Peppino Spaghetti, it was the Pizza War. He was just some schlub working the kitchen at his dad’s restaurant. He wasn’t ready to take on Nico Ambrosio and his crew of Sicilian-American hoods when the Sleepers turned the Five Families loose on the mages of New York in a desperate rearguard action. He wasn’t prepared to fight his way up the Empire State Building and put the hurt on Death Wish, the last handful of Sleepers holding the line against a new generation of mages flooding into the city.

He hasn’t been right ever since.

Unknown Armies NPC - O'Saa the Yellow Mage

Based on the character of the same name from Fear and Hunger 2: Termina.

By orange

Baron Samedi and Papa Gede. Kali and Shiva and Yama. Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The Gods of Death. The Destroyers of Worlds. Every pantheon has ‘em, but there’s no ascended archetype to match. Someone should work on that.

O’saa is a Yellow Mage, a member of a decentralized avatar cult created by an unknown Motumancer who wanted to uplift the archetype of the Destroyer to the Statosphere. You get this type of Motumancer singularity sometimes - guy spends a major charge to inspire other flagburners to do something. They flame out fast, because by definition they can’t constructively participate in a social movement without losing their powers. Yellow Mages get around it by being an antisocial pyramid scheme. It never rises to a real community, just a shared bad idea that the “members” pursue for personal reasons. Everyone wants to be the Destroyer.

Nobody knows why they're called Yellow Mages. Whatever meaning the name had to the original founder of the sect has been erased by time and distance.

Delta Green Play Report: Eight Folds to Infinity

You stand on a vast red plain, which extends to the horizon. Mountains are visible in the distance, silhouetted red by a green haze that filters upward into the darkness beyond. The plain is red, ankle deep in blood.

Before you is a massive desk, like a judge would use. It towers above you. On the desk is written:

 

Sitting at the desk, peering down at you, is a gray little man in a green accountant’s visor and red vest. He squints, and asks, in his dusty voice: How many people have you killed?

Unknown Armies NPC - Joel

Another character from LISA the Pointless, this time adapted for Unknown Armies. Portable version here.

By Edvinas Kandrotas

Joel is a fulminaturge with a Major Charge burning a hole in his pocket. He’s got a custom pistol and a single custom .476 caliber bullet, both of which he forged with his own hands from materials scavenged out of the trash. He doesn’t know what he’s going to spend it on, just that it needs to be something… big.

Joel could make good money with a square job as a machinist, or spend his Major Charge on something that would make him a powerful underworld figure. Truth is, he’s addicted to life as a vagabond. Rolling into town, getting stuck in the nightlife, making friends and enemies, then moving on to his next adventure. The unspent magick potential flowing through him makes him a magnet for weird shit.

Joel has never personally killed anyone, but has helped his friends do so. He has never fired a shot in anger, and a couple times he has paid the price for not doing so.

Clean Living - a Resident Evil Adventure

Resident Evil! It's not my favorite series - in fact the only one I've ever played is 4. The setting is kind of bloated with too many prequels and spinoffs and retcons that create a ridiculous Metal Gear style pileup of conspiracies.

But I saw a thread on the traditional games board that captured my imagination: what would it be like living in a world where anyone with a grudge could turn over a rock and find thirty new bio-organic weapons. And it reminded me of one of my favorite settings of all time: the B.P.R.D.

By Guy Davis, the best of the B.P.R.D. artists

So I wrote up a rules hack for Delta Green, along with an adventure and some pregens to play with it. You can read them here.

Here's a play report of how the playtest went.

THE UNITED STATES IN 2021

Since President Adams’ assassination in 2013, the United States has been in a permanent state of emergency - a police state in an endless struggle against yearly bioterror attacks. Wild mutants breeding in the woods for decades, filtering out into population centers. Cults and militias brewing new strains of viruses bought on the black market. Zombies staggering into crowded malls. Secret military tribunals. Bodies in sealed bags, tipped into an autoclave.

That’s been the new normal for almost a decade. And it’s not all bad. The biological revolution that unleashed neverending horror on the world also opened a treasure trove of medical and pharmaceutical discoveries. When’s the last time you heard of someone dying of heart disease, or cancer? So people live around the shortages and empty shelves, the long lines, the endless checkpoints manned by guards in full MOPP gear, pointing flamethrowers and rocket launchers at families in sedans. You shop for groceries, pick up the kids from school, spray your groceries down with bleach, and hope to God the thing on the back of your hand is just a rash.

THE DIVISION OF SECURITY OPERATIONS
Empowered by the 2001 PROTECT America Federal Bioterrorism Commission Act, refreshed every year by Congress during the usual appropriation cycle, the Division of Security Operations is the cabinet level agency which assumed the duties of both the FBC and the National Counterterrorism Center. Unlike its predecessors, the DSO has broad authority to assemble Joint Terrorism Task Forces on a permanent basis, in effect skimming personnel from other law enforcement, military and intelligence three letter agencies.

BRIEFING
Yesterday, local police in Lubbock, Texas making a routine traffic stop found a hermetically sealed container filled with plagas spores. Thankfully the driver was apprehended without incident, and the container secured without releasing its contents.

We’ve got people checking out the trucking operation, and the source of the package. We need you to investigate the destination. According to the shipping records, the box hiding the spores was destined for a community in Central Washington called Squiddler’s Patch, up in the Okanogan National Forest. We’re sending you in undercover to sniff out the operation, with the option to go loud and neutralize any threat that can’t wait for a followup team.

Fallout: Yellowstone - Session One

Building on the success of my last two Fallout sandboxes, I recently ran my first session of Fallout: Yellowstone.

I had three players, one returning from a previous Fallout adventure.

• Professor Delores, high powered scientist
• Ethan Hollister, eagle eyed wasteland scout
• Dani Masterson, villager from Colorado

They entered Yellowstone under the following pretenses:

Your prairie village in Montana has been struck by plague. A burrowing creature with a glowing belly bit a child, who fell ill a few days later. By the time the town doctor noticed the swelling in the kid’s lymph nodes, the disease had already spread among the populace. It’s easy to treat with antibiotics, but the town doesn’t have nearly enough. The caravan was due a week ago, and hasn’t shown up yet.

You were spared the ravages of the disease. You’ve been sent South into the seething cauldron of Yellowstone, to search for enough medicine to save your town. You were given a healthy supply of bits (the silver tokens used as money in Montana) and the last of the stimpaks (a rare trade good from down South, since Broc Flower and Xander Root don’t grow in the tundra).

As you travel South from Gardiner along the 89, the air smells like pollen, flowers and sulfur. The peaks and valleys are covered with snow, but everywhere else you see evidence of Spring. You heard this place was spared the worst ravages of the nuclear dust storms that swept the region after the war, but you'd never seen it for yourself.

There's a fort up ahead.

 

Fallout: Seattle Political Compass

 

From my Fallout: Seattle series

Fallout: Seattle Masterpost

This is a masterpost for my Fallout: Seattle mini campaign. It includes play reports of all the sessions, the rules I used, and the GM sandbox, in case you're interested in using it yourself.

Islands of Seattle By Jeffrey Lin

First, the Play Reports. I tested this with four Delta Green players, three of whom had also played in the previous Two Sun Campaign.

• Session One
• Session Two

Next, the system itself:

• Player Document - start here
• Player Map - what the players see at the beginning of the game
• GM Sandbox - the content that populates the world
• GM Map - the place where it all happens
• Character Sheet - auto calculates so you don't have to
• Folder, containing all of the above

Fallout: Seattle - Session 2

Session two of Fallout: Seattle. Session 1 saw the players getting to know the major players of the Drowned City, and come up with a plan to find a fusion core.

In attendance, same as last time:

• Elizabeth "Scythe" Forscythe, scavenger from the ruins of Two Sun
• Professor Delores, high powered scientist and Amazon
• Dr Emily Ridgeway, surly drugrunner
• Chews on Fat, smooth talking tribal and "honorable cannibal"

The Seekers woke up early at Establishing Shots, woke up Sean the Researcher, and went to the Gun Runners' outlet store on the South side of the Sound. Chewie picked up a Ripper, while Delores grabbed a set of Security Armor to boost her substantial natural defenses (she grabbed a perk to boost her damage resistance after last session).

 

Before dropping Sean off on Capitol Island, the team decided to check out the neat mansion they saw on Beacon Island.

The Turner-Koepf House

They passed a solitary buoy on the canoe ride over - a ghoul in a life vest, which tried its best to thrash toward them and didn't achieve much of anything. The hike up the hill to the house didn't reveal anything of interest. The house itself had a rickety wooden fence around it, written in English and simplified Chinese, warning visitors to go around and use the front gate. The front gate had a sign instructing visitors to deposit their weapons in a green plastic recycling bin - which had a tarp and drainage holes in the bottom to protect its contents from water. The players dropped their gear off and followed the path to the house, where a sign on the front door instructed them to knock and then step well back of the door.

Fallout: Two Sun Political Compass

 

Based on the Fallout: Two Sun campaign

Fallout: Seattle - Session 1

After I finished Fallout: Two Sun, I had the idea for a "DLC" adventure set in Seattle. I didn't have a whole lot of ideas I liked, at first. The breakthrough came when I remembered Jeffrey Linn's Flooded Seattle Map. Not only did this create a lot of unique terrain for the players to explore, it also reduced the amount of the city I had to fill out and detail. So I worked on it for a couple weeks, and ran the first session.

 

After nuking Two Sun, Scythe and Spider made it all the way to Washington in their fusion powered M113. Then the casing on the ACAV's fusion core failed, and they had to find a new one. Spider stayed behind to guard the vehicle, while Scythe took the new friends they made along the way North to the Drowned City, to find a new one.

 

(I had three returning players from the Two Sun series, but only one of them brought a character from that game. The others made new ones)

• Elizabeth "Scythe" Forscythe, scavenger from the ruins of Two Sun
  
• Professor Delores, high powered scientist and Amazon
• Dr Emily Ridgeway, surly drugrunner
  
• Chews on Fat, smooth talking tribal and "honorable cannibal"

Play began at Thanh Tran, an old Vietnamese cultural center in South Seattle, which now sat right on the waterfront in the flooded city. Chews On Fat, descended from a tribe of Chinese-American internees, angrily began tearing the anti-Chinese propaganda posters down, but was interrupted by Harbormaster Osman, owner of the docks and restorer of canoes and wood burning steamboats.

Osman gave the Seekers a basic rundown of the situation in the Drowned City.

Based on the previously linked map by Jeffrey Linn

 

Fallout: Two Sun - Masterpost

This is a materpost for my Fallout: Two Sun mini campaign. It includes play reports of all the sessions, the rules I used, and the scenario document in case you're interested in using it yourself.

I'd been thinking about running this game for years, but kept putting it off because of the heavy content lift. I came back to my old design documents this year after the randomizer mod rejuvenated my interest in New Vegas.

 

First, the play reports. I tested the game over three session with a group of veteran Delta Green players.

• Session 1
• Session 2
• Session 3

 

Next, the system itself:

• Player Document - start here
• GM Playset - the content that populates the world
• GM map - the places where it all happens
  
• Character Sheet - auto calculates so you don't have to
  
• Folder, containing all of the above

 
As a bonus, have some character art from my initial concept for this campaign, back in 2015.

That's it for now. Thanks for reading!

Fallout: Two Sun - Session 3

The third and final Fallout: Two Sun session! The version of the rules I used can be found here.

We had a trio of returning players this time:

• Wilbur "Spider" Webb, Odd Job Man - Vault 24 Exile
• Alex Bradshaw, Technician - Vault 24 Exile
  
• Elizabeth "Scythe" Forscythe- Scavenger retained by Vault 25 for odd jobs

Last session, the Exiles retrieved a vital computer component from the Pima Air and Space Museum, bringing it back to Vault 25 - along with a super mutant programmer and his retinue of autocannon armed sentry bots. That brought the Legion onto the Vault's doorstep. Which meant the Overseer had another job for the Exiles: finding weapons of mass destruction to disperse the barbarians at the gate.

The Blue Hoods used their fully functional GECK to fabricate a badass vehicle for the Exiles to travel in. Fully tracked, lightweight, armored, CBRN sealed, and with a plasma rifle in the turret.

 

I think this one's by Malaysia Model Kits

The Exiles had two options: a CIDR base holding New Plague germs in Marana, to the Northwest, or an unfired Titan silo holding a nuclear warhead in Glass Valley to the South. They chose to go South for the missile. The plan was to hook up a remote operating device to the missile silo's control network, allowing the Blue Hoods to fire the missile by radio if the Legion refused to negotiate.

Because none of the Exiles knew how to drive, the Blue Hoods took the liberty of kidnapping a slave from the Legion who could help. Gasket used to be a Highway King, a raider tribe that terrorized Arizona with salvaged vehicles, until the Legion hemmed them in with landmines and roadblocks and wiped them out. She was happy to be behind the wheel of a vehicle again, and even happier to run over the people who had enslaved her.

With a suite of other useful equipment in hand, the Exiles mounted up, and Gasket took them down the bumpy trail, through Pima Wash and down into the alluvial plain of Two Sun.

 

Fallout: Two Sun - Session 2

Session two of Fallout: Two Sun was shorter than the first, but kept the plot moving at a brisk pace. Once again, we used these rules - a riff on the Delta Green system. This session I introduced a short list of perks for the players to choose one,

In attendance:

• Dr Hernando Beckenbauer, Physician - Vault 24 Exile
• Wilbur "Spider" Webb, Odd Job Man - Vault 24 Exile
• Alex Bradshaw, Technician - Vault 24 Exile
  
• Elizabeth "Scythe" Forscythe- Scavenger retained by Vault 25 for odd jobs
  

Last session, the Vault 24 exiles found a new home in Vault 25, a thriving hidden community of congenitally blind Vault Dwellers with superhuman senses. These "blue hoods" were happy to welcome the exiles into the fold, provided they pulled their weight. Vault 25 needed special computer hardware to access their GECK's advanced functions, which wouldn't interface with the assistive technology their vault came with.

 

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. Ultimately they settled on observing the site from a safe distance to gauge the defenses, then heading South to the old Tucson speedway to see about salvaging parts to create an armored car and run the blockade.

Before the bombs fell, the Pima Air and Space Museum had its own aircraft graveyard.

The exiles removed the identifying marks from their Vault 25 security armor, shouldered their weapons, consulted their map and hit the road.

Fallout: Two Sun - Session 1

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.

Esoteric Enterprises NPC - Lester

An NPC from my favorite LISA fangame, adapted for Esoteric Enterprises. Cow Town needs people who know what to do with all this meat.

By Edvinas Kandrotas

LESTER
A flabby, broad shouldered boomer in a butcher's apron, rubber gloves and hairnet. He stinks like tomato sauce, sweat and blood. His wide, walleyed face splits into a grin around his king size cigarette as you enter the cafeteria. "Normal people!" he shouts. "I'm one of you!"
6 flesh (1 dice), 12 grit (2 dice). AC 14 (Apron and a Layer of Fat). Saves 15+. STR and CON 13
Beef Splitter (+2, d12 damage, target begins Bleeding Out on damage to Flesh)

My Favorite Character in Disco Elysium

Rejoyce "Joyce" Leyton-Messier is my favorite character in Disco Elysium.

She's the first genuinely helpful character you meet in a world of total dicks. She drops some of the most important lore about the world of Disco Elysium. The Insulindian Miracle. The Antecentennial Revolution. The four political alignments. The shape of the world. She's got a totally bitchin' theme song.

She's also a real piece of work.