Atomic Postman
Vault Archives Overseer
After scrapping my Texas setting, I've decided to return to Van Buren as the blueprint for my future Vault Archives PnP campaign. However, I'd like to rework it with New Vegas in mind. Primarily this means working it into the existing canon, but also removing/reworking aspects that ended up later in Vegas.
The objective is a campaign that is largely sandbox based, driven by player motivation with compact story-arcs. Obviously as I haven't organized this campaign, this will just be material for the world.
The campaign theme would be "Prisoner of Love" by the Ink Spots.
Van Buren Prison Complex
Mood OST:
Nestled inside Capitol Peak of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the Van Buren Prison was a gigantic project commissioned by the Department of Civil Defense (the Fallout world's equivalent of Homeland Security) in the late 2050s. Intended to hold America's greatest enemies. Terrorists, communist agents and major dissidents. Construction was completed in the mid 2060s.
As the Resource Wars waned on, the facility was given an overhaul. Designed to act as the test bed for the CODE Conditioning Protocol on the most far-gone, anti-American prisoners. Initially conceived as a forced re-education, through heavily incentivized learning programs and tests to instill behaviour and attitudes reflecting the white-picket fence American ideal. However as time passed this too received the beginnings of more development: reconditioning through technology.
Similarly, the facility was slowly becoming more automated, and it was projected that the Prison would be completely human-staff free by the end of the 2070s. The guards and wardens were to be replaced by advanced robots including state-of-the-art Eyebots and the gigantic ARGOS, designed with input from Robert House's personal design team. Each Prisoner was also to be given a specially designed "Prison-Boy", a custom designed Pip-Boy model with a biometric seal. It allowed for constant monitoring, health tracking and potentially the ability to do things such as stopping the heart of escaped prisoners. However, the latter feature was massively buggy and scrapped.
The facility would be entirely run by the ZAX Super-Computer TARTARUS, linked to a greater "Civil Defense System" that would allow for cross-communication nationwide for matters of national security.
TARTARUS was designed to have two split function "personalities" in addition to its third, overseer personality (TARTARUS itself): Prosecution and Defense. This would allow for those detained by the DCD to receive easy, impartial and effective trial whilst keeping the bad guys off the streets in the meantime (effectively, a blacksite and the Fallout world's equivalent of Gitmo). The AI would host the trial and TARTARUS would act as its own jury to its two separate personalities.
Initially, a certain number of detainees would be authorized for reallocation to other facilities such as Big MT and Mariposa Millitary Base for experimentation purposes. However, the progress of the CODE program meant prisoner experimentation would eventually be done "in-house" with the extension of the medical wing to accommodate Robobrain manufacture and future CODE programs.
The deepest part of the facility, above only the AI core, was the cryogenic storage. These chambers would be used to freeze the most dangerous prisoners of all. Officially to keep them totally controlled, but the real plan was to keep high-value individuals preserved until CODE was effective enough to safely reprogram them into US-allied assets. For this purpose, the other prisoners would simply be lab-rats.
Though hyper-lethal individuals such as Chinese assassins and spies were kept here, the most notorious of those in the freezer was Prisoner 13: Victor Presper.
Presper was a home-grown anarchist, somewhat sympathetic to the Communist cause (and certainly framed as such by the papers) , he was largely opposed to the totalitarian and despotic way he viewed the US Government was being run. Presper in his younger years had been a project lead on Limit-115 - the bioweapon that would later be leaked by Chinese spies and result in the New Plague. Presper and his followers had leaked US secrets to the public (inciting civil unrest), made attempts to bomb Congress, sabotaged a number of millitary projects on the East Coast. His final failed plot however was an attempt to hijack the orbital BOMB stations above the US in an attempt to launch all-out nuclear strikes on select government targets, including DC. His group was all but killed and dismantled, but Presper himself was disappeared into Van Buren Prison, kept on ice so his cunning intellect and strategic mind could be used for America's benefit once more.
When the Great War occured, the Civil Defense System completely failed, the situation caused a total system crash on the part of TARTARUS. The prisoners and guards left inside were entombed, and died. Leaving a silent prison with only the Cryogenic wing remaining active.
That was until the 2190s, when a strange call came from Cheyenne Mountain - another artificial intelligence calling out to raise as much automated mayhem as it could. TARTARUS resumed partial function, but by the time it's processing resumed, the "call" had gone silent. Over the next few decades, the AI would repeatedly crash, reboot, crash and reboot. Dealing serious damage to its logic core. Eventually, by 2250, it began to reach stabilization. The resolution came at a cost: total fragmentation of its split personalities, which began to form "identities" rooted in their function. These personalities were simple, and still largely in-human, but they were uncharacteristically distinct for a ZAX.
Prosecution became "Uncle Sam", a hard-liner entirely concerned with ancient ideas of national security and the continuation of the CODE program.
Defense became "Red Menace", an amalgamation of propagandist ideas of Chinese and Russian red scare. These were superficial traits however, and Red Menace is entirely defined only by its opposition to everything Uncle Sam.
By 2253, Uncle Sam had primary control of the facility, and began to repair and send out CODE equipped Eyebot retrieval teams to kidnap what it believed were escaped prisoners. Eventually locking up a number of innocent Wasteland travellers and keeping them alive in a barely-functioning automated prison, with their own vault-suit like prison jumpsuits in imitation of the random prisoners they were mistakenly captured as.
Uncle Sam became fixated with Prisoner 13, who it believed had escaped and was of the highest priority. Believing it needed to capture 13 Prisoner 13s, these "13s" were outfitted in Prisoner 13 Jumpsuits and were the only ones issued Prison-Boys, as a result of malfunction.
The Party are the latest and final batch of Prisoner 13s, making up the "13" count to satisfy Uncle Sam. Each 13 is taken to TARTARUS to experience a repeat of Presper's original trial before being returned to their cells.
Several of the 13s have died in the prison as a result of prisoner in-fighting, leaving 6 of them other than the party among the groups of other prisoners.
With this completion, Red Menace becomes active, and seeks to assist the trapped Prisoners in a prison break. Limited in function, Red Menace can only offer periodic advice, and the break must be instigated by the prisoners themselves.
Upon escape, the myriad prisoners, the 13s among them, flee into the Wasteland. Triggering Uncle Sam to go into overdrive, repairing and upgrading it's broken robot arsenal. The titanic ARGOS requiring a construction that will take many months, if not an entire year.
Eventually the party (who, much like the other 13s have biometrically sealed Prison-Boys) will discover they are being tracked via their Prison-Boys and infrequently harassed by swarms of Eyebots that become further upgraded and repaired with each arrival. Uncle Sam further uses the Civil Defense System to activate any automated security systems that come in proximity of the Prison-Boys, such as the Denver Police Department Cyberdogs.
The party, either through their own meddling or through Red Menace, will eventually learn that to cease this and to prevent the deployment of ARGOS, they must retrieve the other Prison-Boys and return them to Van Buren, alive or on the end of a dismembered arm. They can use their Prison Boys to track the others and receive indication of their general locations, meaning the hunt is on.
When returned, Van Buren Prison will act as a Mega-Dungeon with ARGOS as its final boss (at varying stages of completion depending on their speed), resulting ultimately in the meltdown of TARTARUS.
I will be posting my adaptions of other Van Buren locales and story beats. But I'd like some feedback and discussion if anyone wants to offer it.
The objective is a campaign that is largely sandbox based, driven by player motivation with compact story-arcs. Obviously as I haven't organized this campaign, this will just be material for the world.
The campaign theme would be "Prisoner of Love" by the Ink Spots.
Van Buren Prison Complex
Mood OST:
Nestled inside Capitol Peak of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the Van Buren Prison was a gigantic project commissioned by the Department of Civil Defense (the Fallout world's equivalent of Homeland Security) in the late 2050s. Intended to hold America's greatest enemies. Terrorists, communist agents and major dissidents. Construction was completed in the mid 2060s.
As the Resource Wars waned on, the facility was given an overhaul. Designed to act as the test bed for the CODE Conditioning Protocol on the most far-gone, anti-American prisoners. Initially conceived as a forced re-education, through heavily incentivized learning programs and tests to instill behaviour and attitudes reflecting the white-picket fence American ideal. However as time passed this too received the beginnings of more development: reconditioning through technology.
Similarly, the facility was slowly becoming more automated, and it was projected that the Prison would be completely human-staff free by the end of the 2070s. The guards and wardens were to be replaced by advanced robots including state-of-the-art Eyebots and the gigantic ARGOS, designed with input from Robert House's personal design team. Each Prisoner was also to be given a specially designed "Prison-Boy", a custom designed Pip-Boy model with a biometric seal. It allowed for constant monitoring, health tracking and potentially the ability to do things such as stopping the heart of escaped prisoners. However, the latter feature was massively buggy and scrapped.
The facility would be entirely run by the ZAX Super-Computer TARTARUS, linked to a greater "Civil Defense System" that would allow for cross-communication nationwide for matters of national security.
TARTARUS was designed to have two split function "personalities" in addition to its third, overseer personality (TARTARUS itself): Prosecution and Defense. This would allow for those detained by the DCD to receive easy, impartial and effective trial whilst keeping the bad guys off the streets in the meantime (effectively, a blacksite and the Fallout world's equivalent of Gitmo). The AI would host the trial and TARTARUS would act as its own jury to its two separate personalities.
Initially, a certain number of detainees would be authorized for reallocation to other facilities such as Big MT and Mariposa Millitary Base for experimentation purposes. However, the progress of the CODE program meant prisoner experimentation would eventually be done "in-house" with the extension of the medical wing to accommodate Robobrain manufacture and future CODE programs.
The deepest part of the facility, above only the AI core, was the cryogenic storage. These chambers would be used to freeze the most dangerous prisoners of all. Officially to keep them totally controlled, but the real plan was to keep high-value individuals preserved until CODE was effective enough to safely reprogram them into US-allied assets. For this purpose, the other prisoners would simply be lab-rats.
Though hyper-lethal individuals such as Chinese assassins and spies were kept here, the most notorious of those in the freezer was Prisoner 13: Victor Presper.
Presper was a home-grown anarchist, somewhat sympathetic to the Communist cause (and certainly framed as such by the papers) , he was largely opposed to the totalitarian and despotic way he viewed the US Government was being run. Presper in his younger years had been a project lead on Limit-115 - the bioweapon that would later be leaked by Chinese spies and result in the New Plague. Presper and his followers had leaked US secrets to the public (inciting civil unrest), made attempts to bomb Congress, sabotaged a number of millitary projects on the East Coast. His final failed plot however was an attempt to hijack the orbital BOMB stations above the US in an attempt to launch all-out nuclear strikes on select government targets, including DC. His group was all but killed and dismantled, but Presper himself was disappeared into Van Buren Prison, kept on ice so his cunning intellect and strategic mind could be used for America's benefit once more.
When the Great War occured, the Civil Defense System completely failed, the situation caused a total system crash on the part of TARTARUS. The prisoners and guards left inside were entombed, and died. Leaving a silent prison with only the Cryogenic wing remaining active.
That was until the 2190s, when a strange call came from Cheyenne Mountain - another artificial intelligence calling out to raise as much automated mayhem as it could. TARTARUS resumed partial function, but by the time it's processing resumed, the "call" had gone silent. Over the next few decades, the AI would repeatedly crash, reboot, crash and reboot. Dealing serious damage to its logic core. Eventually, by 2250, it began to reach stabilization. The resolution came at a cost: total fragmentation of its split personalities, which began to form "identities" rooted in their function. These personalities were simple, and still largely in-human, but they were uncharacteristically distinct for a ZAX.
Prosecution became "Uncle Sam", a hard-liner entirely concerned with ancient ideas of national security and the continuation of the CODE program.
Defense became "Red Menace", an amalgamation of propagandist ideas of Chinese and Russian red scare. These were superficial traits however, and Red Menace is entirely defined only by its opposition to everything Uncle Sam.
By 2253, Uncle Sam had primary control of the facility, and began to repair and send out CODE equipped Eyebot retrieval teams to kidnap what it believed were escaped prisoners. Eventually locking up a number of innocent Wasteland travellers and keeping them alive in a barely-functioning automated prison, with their own vault-suit like prison jumpsuits in imitation of the random prisoners they were mistakenly captured as.
Uncle Sam became fixated with Prisoner 13, who it believed had escaped and was of the highest priority. Believing it needed to capture 13 Prisoner 13s, these "13s" were outfitted in Prisoner 13 Jumpsuits and were the only ones issued Prison-Boys, as a result of malfunction.
The Party are the latest and final batch of Prisoner 13s, making up the "13" count to satisfy Uncle Sam. Each 13 is taken to TARTARUS to experience a repeat of Presper's original trial before being returned to their cells.
Several of the 13s have died in the prison as a result of prisoner in-fighting, leaving 6 of them other than the party among the groups of other prisoners.
With this completion, Red Menace becomes active, and seeks to assist the trapped Prisoners in a prison break. Limited in function, Red Menace can only offer periodic advice, and the break must be instigated by the prisoners themselves.
Upon escape, the myriad prisoners, the 13s among them, flee into the Wasteland. Triggering Uncle Sam to go into overdrive, repairing and upgrading it's broken robot arsenal. The titanic ARGOS requiring a construction that will take many months, if not an entire year.
Eventually the party (who, much like the other 13s have biometrically sealed Prison-Boys) will discover they are being tracked via their Prison-Boys and infrequently harassed by swarms of Eyebots that become further upgraded and repaired with each arrival. Uncle Sam further uses the Civil Defense System to activate any automated security systems that come in proximity of the Prison-Boys, such as the Denver Police Department Cyberdogs.
The party, either through their own meddling or through Red Menace, will eventually learn that to cease this and to prevent the deployment of ARGOS, they must retrieve the other Prison-Boys and return them to Van Buren, alive or on the end of a dismembered arm. They can use their Prison Boys to track the others and receive indication of their general locations, meaning the hunt is on.
When returned, Van Buren Prison will act as a Mega-Dungeon with ARGOS as its final boss (at varying stages of completion depending on their speed), resulting ultimately in the meltdown of TARTARUS.
I will be posting my adaptions of other Van Buren locales and story beats. But I'd like some feedback and discussion if anyone wants to offer it.
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