[Games] Fallout Scenario Super-Rough Concepts
Adventure Scenario Thoughts:
All You Can Eat:
This is basically a "chicken hunt," except that "mutant chickens" here are more like velociraptors.
Meta-Considerations:
I made up a front street facade with an image of the "Wok-a-Doodle" restaurant as an opening show-piece, and I intend to use it. It may, however, just be a set piece for the opening scene, and then removed for the main event.
Overview:
Ideally, I would set up an environment that's basically a ruined urban area with what I would would be a few interesting locations for the PCs to explore, in search of "chickens." The objective is to get poultry for the Wok-a-Doodle. There might be various ways of killing "chickens" that wouldn't result in edible goods. (For instance: Grenades = bad. Shrapnel makes for "crunchy" meat in a very bad way. Nuclear explosions = bad. You can't eat vaporized poultry. Plasma disintegration = bad. The-green-goo-formerly-known-as-a-chicken doesn't count.)
I just have to figure out some way to keep things interesting, other than "Poke inside a building, and see what tries to kill you."
Initial Ideas:
Possible intro scenario: Beside the Wok-a-Doodle is a Laundr-O-Mat occupied by a crazy Mr. Handy robot who is a clean freak. Perhaps up until recently he's been keeping to himself, but some event tied to the recent loss of the Wok-a-Doodle's poultry supply has caused Mr. Handy to go berserk, or to come out of his Laundr-O-Mat, or to require someone to go INTO the Laundr-O-Mat (which most people have the sense to avoid). Anyway, it'd be an encounter with a psychotic clean-obsessed robot. Since he's deranged, "Tricks" and "Taunts" would work well, for those characters who can use them effectively.
Otherwise, perhaps he is encountered while exploring the ruins out back, as he's exploring as well, searching for more Abraxo Cleaning Powder to replace his depleted supply.
Bonus points if I can work in some sort of fast-food or chicken jokes.
Okay, honestly, I haven't put much thought into this yet. I mostly just plan on having a bunch of building ruins, and the PCs can decide where they want to look, and I need to have something interesting inside. I only have 3 (to scale) velociraptor minis, but several Jurassic Park dino toys glued down to bases that I might be able to pass off for jumbo-sized "chickens."
The Nuclear Family
My problem here is that my very, very rough concepts tend to bleed in with the vague concepts I've got in mind for "Please Stand By" (below).
The basic idea is that the PCs have discovered the entrance to a multi-level Vault. As it turns out, it's still inhabited ... by something. (And, likely, something potentially hostile.) I don't really have a macguffin other than "general looting," though I suppose once the inhabitants are discovered, the goal might switch to "escape."
I just need to figure out ... what sort of demented Vault experiment was Vault-Tec up to here? And who are the inhabitants? Could they be descendents of the original Vault-Dwellers? Deranged clones? Maybe just a bunch of robots (not remotely PASSING for human) who THINK they're red-blooded Americans and that the PCs are Commie invaders? Perhaps ghouls who were alive when the bombs dropped, and some of whom have some slivers of sanity (but the rest are flesh-craving fiends)?
One random idea I had (but which crosses over uncomfortably with the other adventure) is that some sort of "behavioral modification" experiment was underway. Perhaps the Vault contains some model of Idyllic American Suburbia where the dwellers go through a pantomime of idealized American life -- they're either clones or descendents of original dwellers who are indoctrinated through "teaching devices," or some-such. Any intruders need to carefully play along, or run afoul of the unhinged inhabitants (and NOT setting them off is nigh impossible).
Or, if it's ghouls, maybe there are some quasi-intelligent ghouls (but still a bit insane) who are friendly and welcome to outsiders, but largely oblivious to the fact that they've become ghouls, or that Uncle Alfred and Little Sally have become flesh-ravening abominations, or that "Fido" is really a rabid mole-rat who is simply incapable of doing much harm to the rugged ghoul physiology (but quite capable of taking bites out of outsiders).
I'd like one part dungeon delving, one part interacting with wacky NPCs.
Meta-Considerations:
I've got a Batman Cave playset that I've been converting into a sort of "Vault cross-section" as a table show-piece (with a "working" elevator, among other things). Also, I could pretty easily kitbash some Vault-Dwellers -- either using some minis dressed in 50s-ish garb, or else using misc. HeroClix superhero/supervillain types in spandex suits, and paint them up as if they're wearing vault suits.
Please Stand By:
This one is the closest I've come to working out any sort of adventure, largely because it came from an idea for an adventure for my Fallout "Route 66 Road Trip" campaign. In the campaign, my idea was that the PCs would pick up a TV signal, and be able to watch some strange pre-war-style TV shows on the TV receiver in the Nuka-Cola Delivery Truck. This would be a minor little thing happening as an incident sprinkled among other adventures, before the PCs even got closer -- but the idea would be that these "pre-war" shows are a bit OFF.
I draw a little inspiration from "Serenity Lane," which is a weird segment from Fallout 3, wherein the PC ends up in a virtual reality environment where everything is in black and white, and feels vaguely like some sort of old "Leave It To Beaver" show gone horribly, horribly wrong. I envisioned that if someone was watching these TV shows, there might be things such as cartoons that are not entirely unlike, say, Road Runner cartoons, but where things are much more violent. Or, some sort of "Leave It To Beaver" show where things turn really dark. "Well, gee, Buster, it's really too bad Old Man Scruthers had to pull that shotgun on us just for sneaking into his wine cellar. So what're we gonna do with the body? If Mom finds out, she's gonna be BESIDE herself!" "Well, Cleav, you could say Old Man Scruthers is BESIDE himself, too!" (creepy laugh track) "Aw, Buster! Now's not the time for jokes. Think we can drag Old Man Scruthers up to the wood chipper?"
And then, as a further clue that things are a bit "off," the actors seem to change a lot in these shows, and sometimes they really mess up their lines a lot, or give a deer-in-the-headlights look at the camera before things go to another commercial break. That, and there are some anachronistic references to things such as Jet (invented in the Wasteland), or post-apoc names of cities, or mutant animals, etc. What I was going to go with is that when the PCs finally reach a broadcasting center where the signal is strongest, they find out that there's an AI that is in charge of putting programming on the air for this station, but much of its catalog was corrupted by electro-magnetic pulses and deterioration over time, so it has been using its robotic minions to abduct wastelanders and force them to act out "missing episodes" for broadcast.
I didn't really want to turn this into a "capture scenario," but I imagined that if the PCs ventured inside, they'd find a number of environments patrolled by Eye-Bots that are recreations of various TV show sets, and captured inhabitants pressed into acting out roles of people on these shows. Some are more accepting of their situation than others.
I guess I'd need to give the PCs some sort of quest object to go after (otherwise as soon as there's a hint of trouble, any sensible people would turn around and flee), and just have it be that if the PCs "play along" (or sneak around and avoid the camera) they're less likely to get in trouble, but if they blatantly break character/mood, then the show "goes to commercial break," and some heavy-duty robot sentries come out (powerful enough that the PCs have cause to flee rather than just planning on taking them all out).
I thought it might be amusing if, say, some Super-Mutant character suddenly gets assigned a "role" totally at odds with the Super-Mutant that he obviously is. So a player gets to play a gruff, not-so-sophisticated Super Mutant, who in turn is trying to "play" a doctor in a hospital soap opera, or a little kid in a sitcom, or whatever.
If the PCs just choose to shoot everything that moves (and run when the sentry bots show up), then I suppose the main source of entertainment would just be inventing weird TV shows and how a post-apoc AI might reinterpret them.
Meta Considerations:
I've got a Plasticville O/S-scale toy "TV station" building that would work well to help set the scene at the adventure start (though I'm not sure if actually having a combat mini-scenario outside it makes all that much sense).
I could perhaps merge this with the "Nuclear Family" concept, and use the "vault cutaway" to represent the underground "studio" complex used by the crazy AI (and perhaps the original "actors" were all vault-dwellers, with the idea that this vault was going to be responsible for generating new educational and entertainment media for the OTHER vaults) ... but in that case, I probably should think of some other adventure to run instead of "Nuclear Family."