Fallout: Texas (The Great Wastes)

Love it! Even though I'm not crazy about the Church's underlying theology, this post shows how much promise its actual presence and implementation in the world provides.

I assume the White Lines are a local variant of the Iron Lines from VB?

And great adventure hook to figure out exactly what's going on with the water, it's certainly got me interested.
 
Hardboiled Android said:
Love it! Even though I'm not crazy about the Church's underlying theology, this post shows how much promise its actual presence and implementation in the world provides.

I assume the White Lines are a local variant of the Iron Lines from VB?

And great adventure hook to figure out exactly what's going on with the water, it's certainly got me interested.
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Thanks! As for the White-Liners, in a very loose sense they are. They're basically a pseudo-tribe of nomadic peoples that constantly travel and track highways. They're kind of like Romani/Travellers. They travel in small bands and encounter eachother infrequently, but they look after eachother with hospitality and have their own pidgin-english language developing. They leave caches and hidden outposts for eachother along the way. Pretty frequently they act as paid scouts and couriers for various settlements. Their reputation is very mixed. Some communities distrust them, whilst others view them as reliable outdoorsmen.

If you needed a guide in unknown territories or wanted to seek out/chase up rumours on anything Wasteland related, you'd find a White-Liner.
 
Atomic Postman said:
Thanks! As for the White-Liners, in a very loose sense they are. They're basically a pseudo-tribe of nomadic peoples that constantly travel and track highways. They're kind of like Romani/Travellers. They travel in small bands and encounter eachother infrequently, but they look after eachother with hospitality and have their own pidgin-english language developing. They leave caches and hidden outposts for eachother along the way. Pretty frequently they act as paid scouts and couriers for various settlements. Their reputation is very mixed. Some communities distrust them, whilst others view them as reliable outdoorsmen.

If you needed a guide in unknown territories or wanted to seek out/chase up rumours on anything Wasteland related, you'd find a White-Liner.
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I assume they're named after the white dash lines on highways?
 
The Sidewinder Tribe
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Background:
The Tribe have their origins with an American millitary force nicknamed "Sidewinder Company" that was deployed along the US/Mexico border in the final days of the Old World. When their own supplies eventually ran out, they left their shelter and travelled northward, finding a community of agrarian survivalists nestled in remote canyons. They made a pact: protection in exchange for food. The groups began to intermix: the soldiers giving millitary training to the survivalists, and knowledge of how to maintain and use their myriad army gear, and in return the survivalists taught the soldiers how to cultivate food and live off of the land. With time, they formed into one "unit". That's the way the Tribe tells it anyway, the truth is lost to time.

The Tribe and the Armory:
There are two main locations of the Sidewinders now: Sidewinder Tribe (Referred to as "Base" "Motherbase" and "The Village" by Sidewinders) and Sidewinder Armory. Sidewinder Tribe is off-limits to outsiders with very few exceptions, a short series of canyons lined by adobe housing and cliff-dwellings, with deeper inter-connected tunnels linking them. The canyon valleys are filled with farms and training pits for the young.

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The Armory is the beating heart of Sidewinder's regional relevance. About three days trek from the Tribe, it's a heavily fortified and large lead mine worked by slaves. Surrounded by the crafting houses, the slave pits and the bazaar. The crafting houses are where bullets and weapons are manufactured by Sidewinders utilizing their own techniques and salvaged pre-war machinery. Though they also make weapons to pre-war specification, they're also known for their resource-light spartan weapon designs (think the weapon roster of Metro 2033 in design philosophy) and their universal high quality. Seperated by a heavily guarded barbed wire fence lies the sprawling bazaar, where the Sidewinders sell and trade their weapons to the swathes of Wasteland merchants, organizing caravans to various settlements. Conjoined to the mine are the slave pits, where the slaves sleep, are disciplined and bought or sold by merchants.

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Society/Culture:

The Sidewinders culture is deriative of their US Army origins. They are known in the Wasteland for their green and brown uniforms and pre-war Combat Armor, covered with white war-paint in the style of snakes creeping across their armor. They strongly revere firearms, bullets and their pre-war millitary armor. Firearms and armor in particular act as lineage heirlooms passed from parent to child, the most elite of these being the handful of suits of T-51b Power Armor held by the highest ranking families of the tribe. With the tribe's population growth, not all can recieve these heirlooms of course, so at times they have become the centre of great family controversies and dramas within the tribe. They are mostly known for their pre-war reinforced combat armor, however.

They also revere millitary training as a necessity of adolescence nearly as intrinsic as puberty itself. Status within the Sidewinder tribe is held by the greatest warriors. They have a strong mercenary culture, as many Sidewinders who reach adulthood are encouraged to seek conflict and warfare to put their strength to use. So, in either small bands or alone entirely they travel the Wastes seeking to be paid for their combat-prowess. Traditionally, Sidewinders will reserve some of their wealth whether it be caps or trinkets, items of value, to gift to the tribe upon their return. Even if these returns might be years apart. The longer you are away from the tribe, the greater the gift you're expected to return.

Those who aren't suited to combat are encouraged instead to take up service roles, typically amongst the armory as crafters or slave-masters.

Due to their high quality equipment, training and professional attitudes they are strongly valued as mercenaries across the Great Wastes. They came to greater fame with their near single-handed successful repulsion of the "First Muto Wave" that plagued the Wasteland several years ago.

They can typically be found running slave caravans, fighting in petty Warlord conflicts, guarding Boomtown water convoys or protecting their merchant oligarchs. Across their history there have been numerous accusations of Sidewinder mercenaries acting independently in order to deliberately spark conflict through assassination or false-flag attacks.

Meta-Note:
Obvious inspirations here are the Blackfoot of Van Buren, the Bullet Farm of Mad Max and the Mandalorians. They were a minor (and unencountered) faction in my prior campaign that I've expanded in size.
 
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Hardboiled Android said:
"First Muto Wave" being the arrival of the first Super-Mutants post-master?
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No, in fact there's only one Super-Mutant (barring if any of the players decide to play one) who's a freakish gladiator in Boomtown.

The "Mutos" are the name given to Wanamingos in Texas. I've got the idea that there's a sister facility to Sacremento, CA, in Texas that was producing the Wanamingos pre-war. However unlike its California counterparts the nuclear radiation that bombarded the region sent their genetic programming wild. Insane, strange variants and a "Death clock" that's completely random.

The idea is that at one point the Great Wastes were heavily besieged by Mutos (Wanamingos) creating these horrible goo-nests and spreading further and further. The Sidewinders didn't do a broad counter-attack, but rather quite intelligently sussed out that precise strikes on their goo-nests would kneecap their reproduction, and eventually led to them discovering the Muto Queen, who they killed and effectively stopped the widespread factory-style production of them which was creating the "wave".

Mutos still are quite frequent across the Wastes but not to the swarm-like degree of a wave.

A "second" Muto wave occured on a much smaller scale, but thankfully the Queen was found quicker that time.

My campaign would have a "third wave" as a backdrop issue.
 
Whispering Grass / Sacred Roots Tribe
Whispering-Grass.png

History:
Before the Great War, the tech-company "Greenway Hydroponics" offered 'pacifistic' and cost-effective applications for technology across the US, primarily in the area of farming. However, after the mysterious public disappearance of its CEO and founder, Derek Greenway, the company was bought out by and formed into a subsidiary of Vault-Tec. From there, the company's primary focus was developing unambitious but reliably long-lasting and cheap hydroponics methods for US Government survival shelters as well as Vault-Tec's own vaults.

As the 2070s waned on, food scarcity issues began to develop in certain areas of the United States. Projections by the government warned that this would become a widespread issue, and the current problem was observed to be worsening civil unrest thanks to seditious documentaries showing the issues affecting America's most destitute. Hydroponics technology was known to be underway at Big Mountain, however these were viewed as notoriously volatile, outrageously expensive for effective public sector usage and effectively limited to usage by Project Safehouse. So, Greenway Hydroponics was contracted by the USDA to develop farming technology to respond to this rising crisis in the public sphere, and to do it for dirt cheap.

Greenway Hydroponics established a research project in rural Texas codenamed "Whispering Grass". Whilst the first few iterations of the project failed, by the time the final iteration came along, the Great War had already arrived.

Overview:
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In the secluded canyons of the Great Wastes, an oasis lies hidden. In the surrounding area, patrolling Robobrains and Protectrons patrol endlessly, covered with a thin layer of moss and blooming flowers. The ground in this oasis is covered in a layer of mossy, tangled roots all leading back to a singular great and grand tree whose leaves and vines act as a roof for this small canyon valley. Across the knotted vines and roots, strange, large unamed vegetables and fruits sprout off and grow in bunches along with clusters of small flowers. The tree seems to have grown out of a single-story Old World building, its trunk reaching down below the ground to levels deeper. The deepest roots of the tree are wrapped around a humming nuclear reactor beneath the earth.

In the oasis, a tribe lives in peace. Primitive and isolated, they are complete pacifists, they are known as the "Sacred Roots". They live in houses shaped from the cut roots of the tree and bound with fibres. They eat only the large fruit and vegetables formed from the product of the tree, and do not eat meat out of principle. They get their water from a large industrial faucet in the surface level building that encases the Sacred Tree. They have little knowledge of the outside world, and are protected from outsiders by their secluded location and the patrolling Robots in the surrounding area. They don't know how to fight nor how to farm, as they're entirely reliant on the Sacred Tree, plucking its products freely and without care. There will always be more. There is only one connection the tribe has with the outside world: A trader from Boomtown who makes bank from selling the large, sweet and filling fruits which he recieves in disproportionate exchange for pointless pre-war trinkets.

Culture/Rituals:
The Sacred Roots believe that they're products of the Sacred Tree, effectively its children, and hold it in great reverence. Those who wish to leave the Tribe can make the decision freely, but they are never allowed to return. Barely any leave. When a member of the tribe dies, they are bound and wrapped in vines and flowers, and carried by The Leaders to the Sacred Tomb below the ground, using The Pass to gain safe passage, and they may be laid to rest.

The Truth:
If one were to gain access to The Pass (A Greenway Hydroponics Security Card) and go down to the Sacred Tomb (Facility Level 2) they would find an old world laboratory with the trunk of the Sacred Tree piercing its center, the walls a tangled mass of roots, and the roots themselves entwined with masses upon masses of fused skeletal remains and rotting corpses as they are being slowly digested by the Sacred Tree, their flesh looped with vines and flowers.

The Leaders in effect feed the corpses of their dead to the tree, where it is digested, consumed and the nutriets are transformed into the fruit and vegetables of the tree. No others in the Tribe barring the Leaders know this to be the case. The issue is that the tree has been producing less yield per corpse as the years have gone by, the tree is seemingly dying. In recent times, when an elderly member of the tribe has been sick and on their death bed, they have been carted away whilst still alive to be fed to the tree in secret. However, this still isn't enough.

By night, the Leaders and a very select few have been travelling out into the Wastelands (Dressed in moss-covered Greenway Hydroponics security gear) and kidnapping vulnerable people from the nearest settlements. Their targets have been those that seem weak or elderly. Bringing them back alive to the tree and feeding it to the core of the roots. They feel guilty over this practice, but are counterbalanced by its percieved neccessity.

Meta-Note:
I'm not entirely sure I like this idea. I feel like whatever is being done here was already done and done better by Vault 22 and the Big Empty in New Vegas, but ultimately it can exist as an unremarkable weird little minor quest location. Hooks would probably include tracking down missing people and/or "cracking the mystery". However I have no idea how you could turn this to be not completely obvious. Perhaps scientific players could form/discover a method of feeding animals, rather than humans, to the tree.
 
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I think it works perfectly fine as a minor isolated faction, and the potential solutions and results I can think of are all interesting. Maybe you could work out a deal with that Boomtown trader - after all, I have t oimagine there's plenty of riff-raff hanging around.
 
Hardboiled Android said:
I think it works perfectly fine as a minor isolated faction, and the potential solutions and results I can think of are all interesting. Maybe you could work out a deal with that Boomtown trader - after all, I have t oimagine there's plenty of riff-raff hanging around.
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That is wonderfully sinister.
 
Atomic Postman said:
That is wonderfully sinister.
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Actually, in a New Vegas kind of way, you could have a choice between finding a supplier with the Boomtowners or the Sidewinders. In the former case it would be riskier and if you're found out it probably wouldn't go over well in Boomtown, but they'd probably be able to pay better for the resulting fruit. For the Sidewinders it would be a lot easier for them to supply slaves, there'd be a very low risk of news spreading to the outside world of whats happening or your involvement, but they probably wouldn't be able to pay as well.

Kallos presumably would go along with the science option
 
Hardboiled Android said:
Actually, in a New Vegas kind of way, you could have a choice between finding a supplier with the Boomtowners or the Sidewinders. In the former case it would be riskier and if you're found out it probably wouldn't go over well in Boomtown, but they'd probably be able to pay better for the resulting fruit. For the Sidewinders it would be a lot easier for them to supply slaves, there'd be a very low risk of news spreading to the outside world of whats happening or your involvement, but they probably wouldn't be able to pay as well.

Kallos presumably would go along with the science option
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Very apt observations and all great food for thought, though I would say that Sidewinder's downside would be that you'd need a good "in" with them since they are quite culturally insular and dictate their own business, so you'd have to already have a faction rep or prove your worth otherwise to organize such a deal for the Tribe. One of the players could actually be a Sidewinder so that would work too.
 
Just re-read it, and I got to say - great work!

To tell you the truth, first time around I only kind of skimmed it (twice, actually!) because it didn't seem terribly interesting - standard technocracy run by breaking down AI. As you'll recall, I had two such societies in FO:Colorado - Siena Supermax and Boulder Dome. I actually stopped work on that project because I was struggling to make Boulder Dome interesting. You've essentially succeeded in that.

The obsession of the Director with Ancient Greek visions of perfection is really great, since people automatically tend to assosciate classical imagery and ideas with "logic" and perfection in a way that doesn't really pan out in reality - its really just an aesthetic, followed at the follower's peril. It also dovetails really well with the idea that the Wisemen have degenerated away from being very skilled scientists to very skilled lab technicians, which plays into classic themes of the calcification of academia.

Project THEMIS is a good dark secret, presumably based on CODE and the Mesmotron - and do I detect a hint of influence from Siena Supermax? In any case, it works very well, and I imagine that security chief would be the "final boss" in many scenarios. And it would be pretty cool if one of the party members might grab a full robot body.

The Seditious Conspiracy also works well as a good adventure hook.

Overall I'd say that Kallos could probably use a few more hooks (perhaps by expanding the Wisemen and Authority sections.
 
Hardboiled Android said:
Just re-read it, and I got to say - great work!

To tell you the truth, first time around I only kind of skimmed it (twice, actually!) because it didn't seem terribly interesting - standard technocracy run by breaking down AI. As you'll recall, I had two such societies in FO:Colorado - Siena Supermax and Boulder Dome. I actually stopped work on that project because I was struggling to make Boulder Dome interesting. You've essentially succeeded in that.

The obsession of the Director with Ancient Greek visions of perfection is really great, since people automatically tend to assosciate classical imagery and ideas with "logic" and perfection in a way that doesn't really pan out in reality - its really just an aesthetic, followed at the follower's peril. It also dovetails really well with the idea that the Wisemen have degenerated away from being very skilled scientists to very skilled lab technicians, which plays into classic themes of the calcification of academia.
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Yep you got it on the money. I wanted to subvert/criticize the idea of technocracy and I thought that tying in philosophically false appeals to authority was a good way to communicate that (The machine can't math it's way to a better human community so it refers unblinkingly to the prestige of Old World academia as a source of authority). The city has an illusion of grand success through its 'brutal logic' - it's superficially grand. It's scientifically advanced, but it's basically a city that's built out of recycled finite old world junk and hasn't actually made anything new ran by people who couldn't invent anything. It's millitarily powerful and wealthy, but it's artificially constrained to a single city - and nobody outside of their strange society wants to voluntarily become part of it. Unlike say, NCR, at the same time period. To simplify it, the machine lacks human ambition or character. If it got its way and converted everyone, Kallos would basically be like an isolated pocketwatch. Just intricate machine parts endlessly operating and making sure they continue to do so for as long as possible. To a degree, you could argue that's what the city is already.

Hardboiled Android said:
Project THEMIS is a good dark secret, presumably based on CODE and the Mesmotron - and do I detect a hint of influence from Siena Supermax? In any case, it works very well, and I imagine that security chief would be the "final boss" in many scenarios. And it would be pretty cool if one of the party members might grab a full robot body.

The Seditious Conspiracy also works well as a good adventure hook.

Overall I'd say that Kallos could probably use a few more hooks (perhaps by expanding the Wisemen and Authority sections.
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As Elijah says in Dead Money "I suspect this great land had... compliance issues before the war." The primary inspiration was Doctor Who's Cybermen for the subplot with the Fallout-y anti-citizen repression thrown in as the justification flavour, but I did think of your Supermax idea, yes! (I love the Dead-Heads by the way.)

Yeah Commander Lumic is the Frank Horrigan in waiting for that storyline, and could be used by anyone, even the players.

As for hooks - I plan on doing most of the nitty gritty questing stuff when the campaign is in motion, this is just broadstroke worldbuilding to draw a map so to speak. I have an idea floating around for the main quest being a The Good, The Bad and The Ugly inspired treasure hunt with the undiscovered Tibbets Prison (Referred to as "The Box") being the buried gold, and for that Kallos with the ZAX and Compliance Tech could be a neccessary link in the chain.
 
Kallos's interests in Tibbets* are clear - memory tape or a new ZAX core.** I'm less clear on what the Sidewinders, Boomtown, and the Church would want with it? I guess maybe some compliance tech would help with slaving. Boomtown I'm totally lost, maybe just generically Old World riches. The Church, either compliance tech could be useful for them, or they may believe that some divine truth is in there.

*Wasn't "The Box" the name of the sealed police station or something from Van Buren in the middle of Denver?
*Though thinking about it - just finding a new core for ZAX doesn't necessarily solve the problem of it not having human character or ambition. Its still a machine only interested in winding up the watch.
 
Hardboiled Android said:
Kallos's interests in Tibbets* are clear - memory tape or a new ZAX core.** I'm less clear on what the Sidewinders, Boomtown, and the Church would want with it? I guess maybe some compliance tech would help with slaving. Boomtown I'm totally lost, maybe just generically Old World riches. The Church, either compliance tech could be useful for them, or they may believe that some divine truth is in there.

*Wasn't "The Box" the name of the sealed police station or something from Van Buren in the middle of Denver?
*Though thinking about it - just finding a new core for ZAX doesn't necessarily solve the problem of it not having human character or ambition. Its still a machine only interested in winding up the watch.
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I'm in the process of scrapping and overhauling Boomtown completely to make it hopefully more interesting/Fallout-y (EDIT: now on page 3) and spreading some elements into regional Warlords/factions of their own so gimme five on that.

As for the TGTBaTU plot, like I said it's really early sketching phase and I might not even go through with it - however I had pictured that the groups involved wouldn't neccessarily be the regional factions (though they certainly could), they could be smaller bands of characters (i.e party antagonists) since the party would be a treasure hunting group themselves.

As for Tibbets itself, it is heavily fortified and heavily armed. Not only would it be a perfect fortress for whoever captures it, it would be a bounty of advanced robots and technology (Either for private usage or making a fortune on prospecting) high quality conventional arms and armor. A small but dedicated band could easily fashion themselves into a major regional power if they got their hands on it - or just get very rich. The Desert Saint getting his hands on it would probably mean he could fulfill his prophecy, for instance.

But, like I said, I don't know if I'll go with this angle for the main quest or if there will be a main quest at all - I might just go for a player driven sandbox like my previous campaign or something more conventional like stopping an "End of the Wasteland" story with the factions and their conflicts shaping the world in the background like a Stars Without Number campaign I was in. And yes, The Box is a name taken from VB.

And as for ZAX, the problem of it lacking human ambition is not one that the Wisemen themselves ever really see. Wiseman Cho just wants the city to resume a benign path rather than degenerate, and the others just want to blindly serve The Director by resuming its functionality. I guess in the process of the Director being offline, if things get heated you could have an insurgent wiseman or wisemen that wish to effectively throw a coup and lead the city in a new direction. I could definitely see something like that instigated by forward thinking players.
 
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