Fallout Pen and Paper d20/Intro

The following text is the introductory chapter of the canceled Fallout Pen and Paper d20, released as a free sample by Glutton Creeper Games. Keep in mind that it contains numerous inconsistencies with the established Fallout canon.

The NCR Historical News
Sunday, February 07, 2155 Article 5-26

History of The Wasteland
By Jacob Smith

War, war never changes…

If you were able to describe the world we live in to someone from way back in the 21 st century, they would have called it “post-apocalyptic”. While not an entirely accurate description, it gets the idea across. All of the great monuments, convenience stores (hell, convenience itself), and the entertainment technology of the 21 st century are all gone. The buildings have been morphed into burned out husks, the open land glows with radiation. Any trip outside (and sometimes inside) the fortified walls of any of the larger remaining cities is always met with violence. The Wasteland is overrun with criminals, Radscorpions, and worse.

However, this way of life is not “post- apocalyptic”. You see that would imply some sort of world ending event followed by a Judgment Day/Reckoning and finally a Heaven for the good and a Hell for the wicked. What we received instead was a world changing set of events followed by generations of people just trying to get by. Hell is dished out in any sized portion you could dream of. We live in a time that is merely Apocalyptic.

This is an attempt to set the record straight about how we ended up this way and what we can do about it now. Hopefully this will prove to be a useful reference for those wanting to catch a peek of the things that are waiting for them outside.

So…let’s start at the beginning; The Great War.

The idea of conquest in the name of riches is nothing new. Even a quick glance back through history will reveal a very basic pattern. Winner takes all, to the victor go the spoils, you snooze, you lose; this is the first lesson of history. The Roman empire, the British empire, the Third Reich, even small scale land grabs such as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait were all fueled by the desire to control resources.

The second lesson is a little harder to pick up on, but it’s there. Sometimes being the victor, maintaining victory or even the fight itself is simply self-destructive. You end up spending or destroying the very riches you were trying to gain.

By the mid-21st century the riches that Man had usually waged war over had grown from the simple list of gold, ports, slaves, and arable land. This list now included oil, coal, lumber, and technology. And when these things started getting scarce, people began to become very afraid.

Like many impending crises, the dwindling of the Earth’s natural resources went largely unnoticed by the general population.

That is until a televised documentary about the tapped out oil fields in Texas put the issue front and center in everyone’s living room. It did not take long for the rising panic to cause world leaders to take overt actions (despite attempting to deal with the problems in quiet, ignorable ways for years).

The United States began laying down economic sanctions against Mexico using the cover story that the government of Mexico was unstable and was therefore a threat to the U.S.’s national security. The real reason for stirring up trouble was, of course, to create a politically viable reason to send in American troops to secure the oil refineries and other North American business concerns. Despite this rather open case of “appropriation”, the Resource Wars kicked off in earnest in the Middle East and Europe.

The European Union had begun military actions against the Middle East in response to rising fuel costs. Fully prepared to fight to the death for their oil and land, the nations of the Middle East launched counter attacks. Before long, the entire Earth was engaged in a war seemingly without resolution.

The U.S. began sending an ever- increasing amount of troops to Alaska to secure the oil reserves. Tempers flared between Canada and the U.S. over this issue. Meanwhile, the conflict between Europe and the Middle East devolved into a limited nuclear exchange. These developments lead to the creation of the Vaults.

It did not take long for the oil fields in the Middle East to dry up (effectively ending the war while exhausting both sides). With the world’s greatest deposit of oil gone, countries prepared to fight over the scraps. China, in particular, had its eye on the Alaska oil reserves.

In 2066, China finally invades Alaska. The result is not only a major increase in military hardware (Power Armor was invented to combat Chinese tanks), but also the U.S.’s annexation of Canada. Even as Alaska fell to communist China, The United States managed to tap the last known deposit of petroleum. This deposit is miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

The Chinese-American war continued to escalate while the rest of the world crumbled. Food supplies were running out, riots were occurring daily, and there were still no viable solutions on the table.

The U.S. sent Power Armored troops into mainland China, which turns into a fiasco. Fortunately, for the U.S., the American army is able to reclaim Alaska. This victory is short lived. While entrenched in a protracted war with another nation, the domestic situation in the United States became untenable. The entire nation seemed poised for violent revolt. The war with China might have been something of a victory, but any sort of idea of “winning” was long gone.

And that’s when it happened. Someone pushed the button and changed the world. Everything we knew became unraveled in a matter of less than two hours.

On October 23rd , modern civilization died in a sea of mushroom clouds and heat. That day was forever engrained in our minds.

In the past, U.S. history’s most powerful events were so immersed in the culture, such as July 4 th , that they were celebrated. The dates they occurred on became a sort of short hand for what they signified and formed a calendar of national identity. Not only did they represent the events, but also the implied context, feelings, and aftermath left in their wake.

This phenomenon was not unique to the U.S. either. Specific dates had special meaning for various countries around the globe. Each culture had its own defined, but separated, collection of events and histories.

October 23rd , 2077 cut across all national borders. On that day the sky burned, the earth blackened. On that day, all people of all nations were united in a terrifying and deadly maelstrom.

There’s an old saying. “History is written by the winners”. If that’s the case, then history stopped being recorded on October 23rd 2077. As the bombs fell and the Vault doors closed, all winners and history began to be erased. Those left behind to tell the story of what happened were merely survivors and history became a folk legend degrading with each generation retelling the story.

Vault City Rogue Press
Tuesday September 5th, 2240 Limited Edition

A People’s History: '''Imprisoned safely behind a large vault door…
By Sarah Grey

In 2054, the American government funded an initiative dubbed “Project Safehouse”. The aim of this project was to build strategically located shelters to protect the populace in case of nuclear or biological attack. The beginning of the European-Middle Eastern conflict drove the need for this program.

Each of these 122 shelters was designed to house 1000 people. The people inside would be safely sealed within the Vault’s protective walls for a minimum of 10 years. Or, at least, that’s what the populace was told. The real purpose of the Vaults was far less altruistic, a shocking and terrifying angle we’ll explore later.

The Vaults themselves were large underground structures constructed to withstand any sort of attack. The water and air filtration systems were supposedly impervious to high intensity blasts and were also very efficient at removing toxins and radiation. There were vast supplies of food, government provided entertainment tapes, and survival guides. Arguably, though, the most important resource in the Vault was the G.E.C.K.

The G.E.C.K., or Garden of Eden Creation Kit, was a self-contained devised designed to jumpstart terraformation in the post-nuclear war world. The kits contained a small cold fusion reactor, soils, seeds, fertilizer, and basic force field tech. Each Vault was supposed to have two of these units and they were to be deployed as soon as the Vault doors opened. The 460 Holodisks that came with the kit were loaded with numerous how-to guides for construction as well as the full contents of The Library of Congress.

Vault City was essentially grown from one of these kits and remains a singular success in the kit’s use. While not every citizen may agree with all of our government’s actions (and are thusly jailed), we can all agree that the city serves as a symbol of hope for the entire Wasteland. All hail Vault City!

Not all Vaults were as lucky as own ancestral Vault 8 though. Some Vaults, such as Vault 13, did not receive their G.E.C.K. (or maybe they were stolen). Also, since not all 122 Vaults have been found, we can assume that their kits did not work, or that their Vaults did not survive the war.

This goes back to the chilling truth that was brought up earlier. Not all Vaults were supposed to work. In fact, only Vault 8 was designed to neither be without flaw nor hitch. The Government did not create these Vaults as a safe refuge for the nation’s smartest, bravest, richest, most powerful, nor even most famous people. The Vaults were constructed to be a sort of Social Darwinist experiment.

The U.S. government (remnants of which remain to this day, known as The Enclave) had recognized the inevitability of nuclear war and the destruction that it would have on the Earth. Figuring that even if they survived such devastation, there would be nothing left on the entire planet with which to build on. Essentially, all the things that we as a species had waged war over for since we could walk upright would be gone. This was not a problem that a simple G.E.C.K. could solve. The solution was a new planet.

Vault records received by a ceased wanderer’s possession through Holodisks revealed that The Enclave at one time prior to the war had looked into (and possibly accomplished) the creation of an interstellar spacecraft. This spacecraft, of course, only had limited capacity for travelers. Only the strongest and best should be allowed to colonize the human race’s new home. How to choose the said individuals? Enter the Vaults.

Each Vault, with the noted exception of Vault 8, which was used as a control group, was graced with an intentional design flaw. These flaws gave each Vault a unique set of circumstances to which to test the inhabitants. Those deemed worthy (i.e. the survivors) when the Vault doors opened were supposed to be given the invitation to join the self-appointed elite in their journey to the stars.

Some of the Vaults had rather minor challenges set to them, such as Vault 70’s lack of sufficient clothing. While it might have been a source of consternation for the Vaults largely Mormon population, it pales when compared to Vault 68 with its population breakdown of 999 men and one woman, or that of Vault 29’s lack of anyone over the age of 15. Most would agree, however, that the Vault with the worst possible experiment assignment was Vault 12.

Located in Bakersfield, California, Vault 12’s doors were designed to not close. The inhabitants of the Vault were exposed to an extremely high level of radiation. The survivors of this horrible experiment were mutated into ghouls. These violent cannibals rechristened Bakersfield “Necropolis”. These violent cannibals are well known throughout the Wasteland and frighten even the most battle-hardened traveler. There are rumors of a more peaceful Ghoul population that lives in the sewers. One wonders if this is wishful thinking.

These Vaults were presented as the last hope of the human race surviving the war. But, they were nothing more that yet another game played on the public by the power elite. As the war waged and the cities melted, these 4-yard thick walls entombed the hopeful underground.

Meanwhile, the heads of The Enclave waited out the war not in Vaults, but rather the Poseidon Oil Rig, located off the coast of San Francisco. They waited for the day they could enlist those who emerged alive from the Vaults and leave Earth forever.

Something must have happened though. Either the blasts from the bombs or the resulting radiation must have destroyed the spacecraft, or maybe it was not yet complete when the bombs fell. Either way, the plan for colonizing a new planet never came to fruition. Now The Enclave is stuck with the only option available to it: reclaim and reform the United States.

There is, of course, resistance to such a plan.