Post date: Sep 28, 2009 6:40:4 PM
So the first game session has come and gone, and I believe it was a success. The players are eager to return to the wasteland and were seemingly captivated for 7 hours.
The first session is the probably the most important, in my opinion, for any campaign. It encompasses character creation, covering setting rules, and setting the stage for which all other acts will stand.
So first thing is to set the stage. It is important to know that the group I am running for is not all hard-core Fallout fans, in fact two of them had never played the game in any of its incarnations, just watched others play it. So to ensure everyone had a similar concept it is important to lay a solid foundation that all other items would build from. To this end I decided to leverage some modern technology; a combination of You Tube, an iPod, and TV.
First, from You Tube, some kind souls have created videos of the introductions from Fallout 1, 2, and 3, as well as, captured other classic game footage. So after searching around I found a video converter that will translate YouTube videos into MPG4, for play on an iPod (The tool I am using is Any Video Converter). Now that the video is in MPG4 I am able to then push it on to my Video iPod. Then after purchasing the right video adapter cables, I am able to play these videos on any TV that has the White, Red, and Yellow adapters. So we went to the hosts TV and played the introduction from Fallout 1. For those that had played Fallout, you could see their smiles, for those that had not, listening to Ron Peralmans voice saying "War..war never changes" I think set the stage perfectly. It is my intent going forward, to show the videos that have the intro at the beginning of each session. In fact, because I think they set the stage so well, I have linked them in on the Videos page.
Then upstairs we went, creating the player characters. There was lots of discussions of what rolls were needed and dividing up who would do what. So we have in our group 5 players. We have our Doctor, our Gung-ho killer who calls himself public relations, our Face man, a weird scientist inventor, and a two-gun infiltration specialist. Or in classic D&D terms, a cleric, a fighter, a bard, a wizard, and a rogue. It is funny how the roots of one of the core game systems creeps even into a post-apocalyptic setting. I will visit each of these characters later on, but for now I will refer to them as Doc, PR, Face, Geek, and ninja.
The next step is probably the most delicate, it is setting the hook deep into the flesh of the characters, it is the motivation of why they want to comeback to the table time and again. You mess this part up and the game will get off on the wrong foot and the players will have no interest in playing other than the social interaction. I must confess, this is the part that I wrote and rewrote time and again, it is the introduction to the whole campaign that is to follow. It needs to convey the setting, communicate the reason they players are even in this world, and setup what they must do.
So here is what I read to the players - probably, and hopefully the longest monologue that I will do during this campaign, because going forward it should be about what the players are doing, vs. what the rest of the world is doing, so here it is:
Imagine a life completely indoors, with no windows to the outside. A life in steel halls, recycled air, recycled water, and probably recycled food. Imagine a life being told about the sun, but never seeing it except in holotapes. Told about the sky, but to only look up and see the ceiling above your head. Told about the rain, but only feeling water on your skin during your daily rationed shower. Told about the wind, but only feeling a breeze if you stand in front of an air duct. Now imagine you only get to experience this for four years at a time, then you spend the next 8 in cryogenic sleep. This is the life you were born into in your home, Vault 33. Your parents were lucky, you guess, to have been able to make this vault their home when the bombs fell on October 23, 2077. Their gift to you is clean water, clean air, palatable food, and most importantly your life, if you call this living.
For you see, Vault 33 was only built to hold 300 active living people, but in reality there are 900 people "living" in Vault 33, they get rotated out every four years. Of course there is that crazy month at either end of your four years, where one group gets "thawed" and the other gets ready to "sleep." This is your sixth time in your life of going in for the long sleep, the deep chill, the icebox.
At least this time you will not be going to stuck in your cryo pod in within your parents and siblings, instead you get to go in the last group with your friends, giving you just a couple more days to relax with your friends and chat with some people from Group C who have been only out of dethaw a few weeks.
As you get fitted for your chamber, you look at your friends, hoping they all make it out of the sleep. You put on your mask, knowing the gas that will soon fill your lungs and will put you in a deep slumber before the chamber supercools. Goggles are placed over your eyes to protect the sensitive tissue within from bursting as the temperature drops. The scientists have explained that in reality, you are physically about a year older than you really are because the CSS unit does not freeze you entirely, it does not completely stop the aging process, that in those 4 years in storage you age about a month and a half.
The good news is the Overseers, the people responsible for the Vault, believes that in just 3 more cycles the Vault can be permanently opened based on what the "Straws" have been reporting. The "Straws" are the people who have to leave the vault if there is more than 300 people alive at the beginning of each sleep cycle. "Straws" have always been volunteers who have either lost family during a failed dethaw, or have grown old and tired of this life in the vault and are willing to take the risk of life beyond the vault door. Of course this is a one way trip, those who leave never come back inside the Vault, sworn to never reveal the location of Vault 33. Some have returned to tell what they have learned. Fortunately the last time anyone had to be sent out from Group B, your group, was 24 years ago, or 3 cycles back.
You watch the other chambers slowly raise into the ceiling one by one. Each carrying family and friends to another 8 year snooze. Doctor Rigsby checks your vitals one more time, as some techs from the latest thaw are messing around with some wires going to your pod. As the door closes, you hear one say "Yeah, had to move this one to group C's isotropic backup generator due to the new piping, but otherwise the main power line is the same for the rest of Group B." You take one last breath of stale vault air and slipping on your masks for the start of your sleep.
You of course have dreams, dreams of people you know, dreams of one day walking in the "outside." These dreams give way Nightmares of people dying, people you loved and people you never even knew before fading into mostly blackness and rest.
You awaken to the red and white strobbing of klaxon lighting, your eyes feel like they have been glued shut but you still know that light. You feel the warm air of the vault knowing that your chamber door has opened correctly. You wait for a little bit for the hands of the dethaw techs to pull you out of your chamber to begin your return to normalcy. And you wait, and you wait a bit more. You then realize some things are missing, the laughing of people meeting old friends, the chatter of the physicians, in fact the only noise is your breathing, the hum of the machinery, and the murmuring of a few voices nearby, voices you recognize as your friends.
Forcing your eyes open, you see your friends and fellow poddites staring across at each other, the klaxon light silently strobbing, but as for the rest of the chamber what you see makes you sick to your heart. For while there is no one around, but the chamber looks like it had been used for a military exercise or target practice for 10 year olds with automatic weapons. The walls are pock marked and scorched, the normally bright lights of the vault have been replaced by emergency lighting and the air has something new to it, something dusty and coppery.
You open your dry mouth to speak, tasting that muck that you only get if you don't brush your teeth before going to bed, and wonder what the hell is going on.
What do you wish to do?
----
So from here the players "explored" their vault finding clues that eventually led them to conclude that a Straw named Harold Davis had betrayed the vault to some slavers. That these slavers damaged the power supply and that Group A was taken, Group B was all dead except for them, and Group C was in peril as the backup power supply was going to fail in about 60 days. This exploration got the party some guns, knives, food and meds, and fulfilled some group Hinderances (one had a vendetta, this intro gave him a target - Harold Davis). The exploration taught the fundamentals of combat as they fought giant rats and radroaches that had infiltrated the vault through a broken vent. From here they exited the vault and we left them stepping outside and getting their first glimpse of the outside world.
Some of the fun things that were put into play: I had obtained through RPGNow a couple of 2-D sci-fi Tile sets and made those into the vault layout. The problem is I printed them with Adobe PDF with Auto Rotate and Center on and it shrank the images so that the 1" squares were .75" so that was a bummer as I did not discover this until after I printed, cut, and pasted them on to matt board. Still the players seemed to enjoy the terrain.
Another was in the Savage Worlds rules there are items called Bennies that can be given to players as impromptu rewards. These bennies can be anything from poker chips to gummy-bears (not recommended as they get eaten before used). I went and made my own for the Fallout setting. I got a mostly clean Nuka Cola logo and sent it to Crafty Caps (http://www.craftycaps.com/brewers/) and for $15 + s/h, I got 50 custom bottle caps. Totally worth it. Now for those not familiar with the fallout universe, the coin of the world is no longer federally issued money, but Nuka Cola bottlecaps, so to make these into Bennies was a huge hit amongst the players familiar with the setting.
Anyway, that ends my recap of session 1