[Games] Fallout Minis (lots of pictures)

[jordangreywolf]

Okay, so I've been on a bit of a "Fallout" kick lately. Recently, I revisited "Fallout: New Vegas" thanks to a mega fan-DLC project put together called "Fallout: New California" (formerly code-named "Project Brazil"), and once I got through that, I tried the game again with a number of fan-made mods that added a lot of new material. Of the whole Fallout franchise, "New Vegas" is my favorite, and I think does the best job of capturing the potential for a feeling of "role-play" in a computer game. (I say this with caveats: I'm talking about the MAIN game, not all the DLC, which is very hit-and-miss ... without the "hit" part.)

Also, I've been playing some Fallout-themed games lately, but there's a nondisclosure agreement involved, so unfortunately I can't talk about that.

Not necessarily related, but it was recently announced that there will be a role-playing expansion for the "Fallout: Wasteland Warfare" miniatures game released sometime this summer (by Modiphius -- same folks who revived the Mutant Chronicles RPG), and a 2d20 RPG edition sometime next year. And it so happens that I've been painting up a lot of "Fallout: Wasteland Warfare" miniatures lately, and getting acquainted with the rules.

Why Fallout? Well, first off, early on when I was on my own, and I owed a great deal to Prester_Scott for supporting me during my job hunt when my first big job in North Carolina curled up and died (the company decided to eliminate its entire IT department, and outsource any technical concerns), he was a big fan of this new game called "Fallout." I didn't actually play it -- he warned me that it was too grim-dark for the likes of me -- but I still managed to pick up a little sense of the setting by cultural osmosis.

Much, much later, my introduction to actually PLAYING in the setting was via "Fallout: New Vegas," followed by "Fallout 3," and eventually I got around to playing the old 3-quarter-view RPGs (Fallout and Fallout 2), and of course the much newer and shinier and prettier (but dumbed-down) Fallout 4.

At present, it's my post-apocalyptic setting of choice. I shall have a fond place in my heart for "Deadlands: Hell on Earth," but that setting is SUCH a mash-up that it's a little hard to bring new players up to speed on what the heck is going on in that setting. Fallout allows for a much shorter "elevator speech."

Billboard for "Nuka Cola" -- a popular drink with some mildly radioactive elements thrown in for that extra "kick" and a faint glow -- with three characters dressed up as the "Nuka Girl" mascot.

In short: Imagine "the future" as it could have been imagined by someone in the late 1950s, with marvelous-but-clunky robots, medical marvels, laser guns, rocket ships, and just about everything (your fridge, your car, your radio) powered by the atom. Then imagine that World War III finally happens and it all goes kablooie, with a radioactive wasteland where radiation does all the crazy stuff it would do in 1950s sci-fi movies, giant ants, two-headed cows, flesh-eating mutants, etc. Fast forward two hundred years later: you're the descendant of people who've survived in one of a network of underground high-tech "vaults," and now you emerge to explore and conquer the wasteland. That pretty much covers the important stuff.

A group of bikers in the Great Khans tribe/gang, in front of the ruins of a supermarket complex. In this universe, Twinkies really DO last forever: pre-war foods were packed with such potent preservatives that people still live off of packaged goods they salvage from the ruins. As a bonus, some of those "TV dinners" are self-heating. Just be sure to use Rad-X and Rad-Away on occasion.

Trivia about the particular factions, the "history" established by the various games, etc., can pretty much be dropped on the players as the game goes. For the most part, whether they're fresh out of a vault, or playing some primitive "tribal" who's descended from the poor mutant folks who've been scraping out existence on the surface for all this time, there's no need to have an exhaustive knowledge of all the established canon.

A recurring threat in the wasteland would be the Super Mutants -- products of secret pre-war military experiments with a tailored "FEV" Forced Evolutionary Virus to try to breed a "super-soldier" immune to designer plagues bio-engineered by the enemy. Super Mutants are effectively immortal, but cannot procreate, and have a disturbing tendency to see normal humans as a legitimate food source. They often hang out with other "mutants" produced by offshoots of the same experiments, such as the Mutant Hounds.

It might take a little getting used to what is NOT present in this setting: the internet never happened (computers were connected via LAN at best), cell phones never happened (people actually still used telephones!), and while you might expect it in a retro-futuristic setting, they somehow never got those flying cars. Oh, and no "British invasion," and because this is extrapolated from a 1950s point of view, the cultural aesthetic is still very much frozen in the late 1950s (or earlier) in terms of architecture, artwork, music, etc. (I like to imagine all the hits of the 1980s still happening, but if you listened to them, they'd sound as if bands from the 1950s had done COVERS of them in "doo-wop," "rockabilly," "swing," or "rhythm and blues" styles.)

Some scavengers meet up with some former Vault-Dwellers (on the right, wearing their distinctive blue-and-yellow mass-produced bodysuits) outside a facility formerly owned by Chryslus -- a major manufacturer of atomic-powered vehicles in the pre-war era. Beware firefights in traffic-choked streets! Those old atomic engines haven't been maintained in over 200 years, with weakened shielding, and a stray plasma shot in the right place could start a chain reaction.

It makes for a fun aesthetic to play with, for tabletop minis and handouts. First off, I can try to recreate the retro aesthetic by aping the styles of old signs, ads, and logos from the 1950s (or earlier), but sometimes I borrow elements from the early 1960s when representing the "futurism" twist. (After all, a lot of the design-work in the early 1960s existed as concept art in the 1950s. ;) )

A small town shopping area turned into a survivor settlement, built around the Wok-a-Doodle American-Chinese Restaurant and the Frosty Bar (represented, respectively, with a converted TMNT play set, and a Plasticville O-scale building kit).

For buildings, the old "Plasticville" O-scale buildings from Bachmann models work fairly well to represent ruined buildings, as those models were made in the 1950s but with forward-thinking aesthetics -- and a toy's simplification (which can also inadvertently lend a "futuristic" touch). I've also made use of plastic Happy Meal toys from Pixar's "Cars" movie (the first one), as the aesthetic of that movie was very evocative of the sense of the old classic "Route 66" look. Cars in the Fallout world may be atomic powered, but they often have big fins and big ugly grills (i.e., 1950s aesthetics dialed up to 11) -- but at the same time, there are sleek cars with bubble-top canopies and "jet engine" exhausts that look more akin to something from the Jetsons.

The "Atomic 66 Cafe" -- an automated mini-diner located along long stretches of Super-Highway 66, far outside urban areas, staffed by a robo-waitress (the "Dinah-bot") and equipped with preserved protein and carb stocks that can be fabricated on demand into a passing facsimile for all-American fare such as cheeseburgers, hot dogs, French fries, etc.

A Mysterious Stranger outside the Atomic 66 Cafe.

One of the fun and dubious aspects of the Fallout setting is the idea that thanks to atomic power, preservatives, self-repair systems, and all sorts of hand-wavy technological developments, even though two hundred years have passed, things haven't quite broken down and fallen into a complete state of decay quite the way we might expect. Here and there, the occasional neon sign and street lamp flickers to life at night, a partially-collapsed subway system likely still has an automated voice announcing -- over crackling speakers -- the (infinite) wait time for the next train to arrive, and wandering robots occasionally actually do useful stuff like restock vending machines or keep the local power plant and water works running.

On the flip side, of course, when technology malfunctions, it tends to do so in a DANGEROUS way, so when a robot is on the fritz, no matter what its original role was, more often than not it seems inclined to go berserk in such a way that presents a violent threat to our hero. (Because otherwise it wouldn't be nearly as exciting.)

Plus, you can't always trust the intentions of the pre-war inventors of certain technologies. It seems (as revealed in glimpses through old news articles, terminal entries, advertisements, film reels, etc.) that the pre-war society was heavily biased toward the glories of SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS, and all manner of hazards were readily accepted as the price of such achievements. (Liability and lawsuits seemed to exist, but were heavily weighted against the public. Safety was NOT a primary concern.)

Someone sets up a robotic shopping mall and the security bots go a little berserk and maimed a couple of shoppers they mistook for shoplifters? Well, the mall might close a few days, someone might lose his job, and the next of kin might get paid a little settlement, but in the name of PROGRESS, that place is going to be up and running again in short order, it's going to be packed with shoppers, and the security bots are probably STILL armed with laser guns. Nobody's going to even dream of asking for the place to be shut down or the security bots removed, for fear of being branded a Luddite.

Helping a little bit in this laissez-faire mindset was in the area of amazing advances in medical science. Auto-docs, stimpaks, wonder-chems, etc., meant that even if you've got a gaping chest wound, you might well be able to pull through using over-the-counter treatments before you even think of calling an ambulance (well, provided you've got the money to spare, that is). There was even a casual attitude toward the radiation everyone was picking up from all these micro-fusion units pervading everyday life, since products such as Rad-X and Rad-Away were readily available. (Note: radiation damage works a little weirdly in this universe, as this place follows a sort of B-movie logic. "Rads" are just something bad that you build up in your system and that need to get "flushed out" before it gets out of hand, rather than immediate and permanent damage to your cell structure that just happens when particles shoot through your body.)

"The Unstoppables" represent one of the most popular superhero teams in pop culture of the pre-war era -- a collection of the top heroes from Hubris Comics, despite the clash in the mood and even time periods of their particular story genres. Grognak is basically a "Conan" rip-off from some vaguely pre-historic time; the Silver Shroud is a 1930s-ish vigilante who guns down gangsters with his silver machinegun, while the Mistress of Mystery is his sultry rival/lover/ally; the Inspector is a stage magician/detective who actually tries to solve crimes rather than riddling the perpetrators full of bullets; Manta-Man is the closest of the group to a more conventional "superpowers and spandex" type superhero.

The setting also has built up enough of a mythos that I could probably do a lot with some of the "worlds within the world" introduced in the setting. I.e., I've had an idea to run a superheroic one-shot scenario at Necronomicon with pre-gens entirely comprised of "comic book heroes" from the in-universe comic books found in the setting. (The "Unstoppables" would be an obvious choice, but there are also superheroes/superheroines such as "La Fantoma," "Captain Cosmos (and Jangles the Moon Monkey)," "The Mechanist," etc.)

Wilma Winkley ... a member of the Rooby-Doo Gang, traveling the wasteland in the History Machine. Yeah, last year, I did a bit of a silly "cross-genre mash-up" experiment, on a lark, for a scenario at Necronomicon.

The setting works reasonably well for one-shots at conventions so far, because: a) a good number of players are actually at least passably familiar with the setting; b) even for those who AREN'T, it doesn't take much for them to get up to speed; c) it has a balance between silly and serious potential that seems to fit well with RPGs -- not too grim-dark, but not "Toon"-level goofball, either. Of course, I can ham it up a little more than usual with crossover elements (such as my "Rooby-Doo" adventures from last year) -- but that's basically just an excuse to drum up more interest when people are scanning the game list and choosing what to play.

(That sort of thing works well for KK and his "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen -- 1970s," "Kung Fury," "Goonies Meet the Ghostbusters," etc., scenarios -- a little silly, some pop culture references, a bit of nostalgia, a distinctive aesthetic, and some sort of novel "twist.")

For campaign play, however, that remains to be seen. I've got IDEAS for a campaign -- particularly a "Route 66 Road Trip" going up along the "Long 15" from California, up all the way to the ruins of Chicago ... and then I've got some crazy ideas for a tourist-trap journey to post-apocalyptic Florida, complete with an alternate-universe answer to Disney World that's more focused on the original ideas for "EPCOT" (i.e., all about SCIENCE! and not so much about fantasy and animation), mutant gators, and even some craziness at the Cape Canaveral Space Center. (I ended up turning my concept for an adventure at that latter location into my one-shot adventure, "Planetarium of the Apes," centered around some advanced simians, results of a secret experiment into modifying primates for "unmanned" space missions -- because, if Fallout is going to hit the B-movie tropes, there seriously need to be some TALKING APES.)

Goober_Chris is all for the idea, and has even given me a number of 3D-printed Fallout-themed models (mostly scenery, but also a few robots) toward many of my projects (and in return I've painted up a lot of his miniatures). He's also given me table-space at his house and recruited a few friends to help me playtest some Fallout-themed adventure scenarios for Necronomicon, and certain other projects. However, Digital_Rampage seems to have something against the Fallout setting, and has vetoed the idea of me running a Fallout-themed campaign when it has come up. Since that amounted to one person FOR, and one very much AGAINST, and nobody else was going to speak up for either side, that's pretty much scuttled the notion for the time being.

I suppose eventually I ought to just go ahead and compile all my ideas and just declare that I'm going to run something ... and if people show up, great, and if they don't, then I'll just have to move on to something else. It just hasn't happened yet, because while I have some broad ideas and an aesthetic interest in making little scenery pieces and painting minis, that's not the same as having a fully-written campaign series of adventures, ready to go.

If I ever get around to it, I've got a half-baked notion that I could make up some battle maps, a few paper models, and write up some of my adventure ideas in a more "quasi-generic retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic" setting -- and post it to my web site. I suppose I'd frame it in Savage Worlds rules, and just present it as something that you COULD run for "Deadlands: Hell on Earth," or you COULD run for something more overtly Fallout-themed, or you could even strip out some of the "retro" or "futuristic" elements to adapt to certain other settings. (Some of the locations might still be useful for a standard zombie-apocalypse setting, for instance.)

My working idea in my head is to theme the main page as the "Atomic 66 Cafe." Since it'd only be inspired by Fallout, rather than dependent upon it (i.e., I'd have no interest in directly involving any of the major factions or characters from the setting), I could be a little more free to pursue the parts of that I particularly LIKE about the setting, and ignore those I care less about.

For instance, I love the idea of some sort of "Route 66 Superhighway" with a bunch of robo-automated features still in operation (various things inspired by the old "Closer Than We Think" comic by Arthur Radebaugh from circa 1958-1963, or tongue-in-cheek stuff by Bruce McCall, or some of those Disney "educational" television shorts about THE FUTURE) -- such that there are of course some hazards on the way (mind those POTHOLES on an elevated superhighway! -- and of course the psycho robots and the mutant road gangs), but that just means we get to have some cool Mad-Max-ish road battles, but with exploding atomic-powered cars and zappy plasma weaponry.

And, in my universe, there ought to be horses. Mutant horses, perhaps, or ROBO horses, but horses nonetheless. For whatever reason, the Fallout canon "Bible" declares that there are NO HORSES, period.

(Never mind that the published Fallout New Vegas tie-in comic depicts NCR troopers riding horses. That's NOT CANON. So sayeth the canon authorities. But then, cats were supposed to be extinct, according to that same Bible, even though a cat - Cuddles - was referenced in Fallout 2, and yet here we have cats in Fallout 4. So ... huh.)

Comments

[tuftears]

These are utterly amazing! All the attention to details and backgrounds really pays off.