A Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game

Fallout Wastelands A Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game A Black Diamond Project - Version 2.0 Table of Contents 4… Notes About Fallout Wastelands #... 5. Adventuring in the Wastes 7... 1. Introduction #... Exploration and Travel 9... 2. Character Creation #... Eat, Pray, Live 9... Character Terminology #... Rest and Relaxation 12... Character Races #... Maintaining Gear 12... Humans #... Trading and Barter 13... Ghouls #... Breaking and Entering 14... Super Mutants #... Hazards of the Wasteland 15... Robots #... Energy and Power 16... Character Statistics #... The Art of the Steal 16... SPECIAL Stats #... Damage, Death, and Dying 18... Derived Stats #... Karma 22... Traits #... 6. Combat 30... Finishing Touches #... Combat Begins 32... 3. Skills #... Determining Initiative 32... Character Creation #... Actions 37... Applying Skills #... Vehicle Combat 37... Skill Tests #... After Combat 38... Skill Competencies #... 7. The Armory 38... Degrees of Success #... Weapons 39... Skill Contests #... Energy Weapons 40... 4. Character Advancement #... Explosives 42... Perks #... Guns #... Melee Weapons #... Unarmed Weapons #... Weapon Modifications #... Armor #... Traps #... Equipment #... Ammunition #... Chems #... Gear #... Vehicles #... Vehicle Enhancements #... 8. The Bestiary #... Appendices #... Index A Few Notes About Fallout: Wastelands For years I’ve loved playing the Fallout games, starting out with Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas before moving on (or back?) to Fallout and Fallout 2. I became enamored by the setting and fell in love with the 1950s-era retro-futuristic atmosphere, the pulp Science! themes, and the surprisingly beautiful post-apocalyptic world that unfolded before me. It was like Firefly met Mad Max and Rango and it was perfect. Once I worked my way through the series (the games that existed at the time), I began searching for a tabletop version of Fallout so I could explore the wasteland with my friends at college. Unfortunately all of the systems I found were either too complicated or otherwise didn’t have the right “feel” to them. Games either took too long to set up or we got hung up on some mechanic that the video games’ systems had always handled for us without our knowledge or notice. Five or six games were scrapped because of this… until I found David’s “Retropocalypse” (which you can find here at http://machineageproductions.com). Thus Fallout: Wastelands was born. Since all of my college buddies had graduated and moved back home or forward with their lives and careers, I established a new group of gamers, all of them fairly new to pen and paper games. After a few hours of exploring the post- apocalyptic ruins of their hometown, they all fell in love with it, and so did I. It was fairly easy to pick up, they were familiar enough with the setting, and they weren’t bogged down with all sorts of rules and numbers. As they kept exploring the ruins of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania (or to be more accurate, Shippensburg, Eastern Commonwealth) my players expressed a desire to have a system with a bit more crunch. They had grown as gamers, and the game had to grow with them. So I spent a few weeks working on additions to “Retropocalypse,” adding more dice (because as gamers we all love rolling more dice!), reworking the combat system (which we found was the biggest hang up of the game and prevented everyone from just jumping in), and creating several new Backgrounds, Perks, Traits, and gear. I built upon the original framework while doing my best to stay true to David’s work. That worked well for several months, but then I moved, leaving my new-old group 4 behind (though I’ve heard they’ve continued exploring the wastes without me). I continued Page working on Fallout: Wastelands until I reached a point where I couldn’t continue working on it without doing a complete overhaul. Which is, of course, what I did. I looked back through some of the more complex games my friends and I had tried and found myself looking at Jason Mical’s Fallout Pen and Paper, the very first system I looked at in college. Reading through the system I found that it could work as a basis for Fallout: Wastelands v2. However, as I looked through the rules I also found the things that had turned my friends and me off in the first place. The biggest thing was the Damage Threshold/Damage Resistance calculations. It’d require a calculator to get through a single turn of combat if things weren’t changed around a bit. So I rolled up my sleeves, recruited some friends with varying degrees of role-playing experience, and got to work. The main body of Jason’s Fallout Pen and Paper has remained untouched and I credit most of this game to him. Credit also goes to J.E. Sawyer and his Fallout RPG from which I borrowed some ideas, and of course David and his Retropocalypse team. Anything you like here was probably the idea of one of those fine gentlemen, while anything you’re not a fan of… well, I’ll take credit. Before you dive too deeply into Fallout: Wastelands, please remember that this game assumes you have some pre-existing knowledge of how pen and paper games are run and the Fallout series and universe in general. I didn’t write this to be “Baby’s First RPG,” but I did try my best to strike a balance between ease of use and accessibility for new players and crunch and customization for more veteran role-players. I hope I succeeded. This document only touches on the Fallout setting since I didn’t want to wind up with hundreds and hundreds of pages (though I’m close) and because the setting and its lore are the copyrighted materials of Bethesda Softworks. My biggest sources of information are, of course, the Fallout video games. I also recommend checking out No Mutants Allowed, Nukapedia: the Fallout Wiki, and the Fallout Bibles by Chris Avellone. All in all, this is a labor of love and I hope that someone out there in the wastelands enjoys it. Thanks, Sean M., Lead Designer 5 Page Much of this document is reprinted material from Jason Mical's "Fallout Pen and Paper" and as such I claim none of it as my own intellectual property. Anything you like, thank Jason (as well as David and the entire “Retropocalypse” crew). Anything you hate is my fault and my fault alone. The images found throughout this PDF are also not mine, and will be credited appropriately as I find the original sources. This work is a free, noncommercial Role-Playing Game not intended for sale. It is based off of Jason Mical’s “Fallout Pen and Paper” and in parts “Retropocalypse,” which in turn was derived from “Old School Hack.” The game setting is based on Interplay Entertainment and Bethesda Softwork's Fallout video game series and is meant to be a fan-created homage. The game content, but not the setting content, is released under a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial License. 6 Page Section One: Introduction “War. War never changes.” The Fallout universe exists in an alternate timeline not so different than our own. When this divergence started exactly is difficult to say, although most agree that it was some point not long after World War II and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From this point of divergence until the Great War on October 23, 2077, a stylized representation of 1950s American culture –heavily influenced by the Worlds of Tomorrow and similar works. Nuclear energy was harnessed as a source of energy rather than as a weapon of mass destruction (although there were plenty of those too). Life was good for the citizens of America in the Fallout universe (at least on the surface), but that all changed one fateful day in October when the United States, China, and other nuclear- armed nations commenced a brief, but rapid, exchange of nuclear strikes. Although the conflict –the Great War- lasted for less than two hours, the destruction it wrought was staggering and complete: more energy was released in earliest moments of the war than in all previous global conflicts combined. The world that remained was harsh and unforgiving. Each day was a battle for survival, a war against the wasteland. For ninety years after the Great War, humanity survived, but struggled each day to do so. Above ground small bands of humans fought over the crumbling remains of once great cities while mutants prowled the irradiated wastes. Underground, a fortunate few enjoyed the relative safety and comfort of Vault-Tec’s Vaults. Some fought to keep the world out, others decided to connect with the surface world and attempt to repopulate it. Wherever humanity survived, it did so under the constant threat of psychotic super mutants, haywire robots, vicious raiders, and all manner of hostile mutant creatures. However, despite all of this, civilization is starting to make a comeback in the post-War world, and is doing whatever it can to flourish. Now about the world itself… Remember, all of this was based on the thoughts and ideas of how science, especially in regards to nuclear power and radiation, worked back in the 1950s. All of those wacky myths of our timeline? They’re the hard truth in Fallout’s timeline. The world has remained a scorched, blasted wasteland rather than the lush, vibrant world it would 7 have become in our timeline. Page Science is all but thrown out the window as radiation causes insane mutations than simply killing whatever it infects. A simple mole rat becomes a dog-sized monster capable of chewing through steel. Ants develop the ability to breathe fire.

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