Really excited to hear you returning to Texas! Now time for some of my unasked for opinions...
- Not crazy about the name "Texaplex," but the basic concept is neat.
Thanks! and "Texaplex" is just the name for the region on wikipedia, in-universe it'd probably have some cheesy 50's name, not that it matters since nobody would know what it's called now anyway, nor care. Its only post-war relevance is that the main station in Dallas is home to one of the Salvager Union towns, and the raised-monorail stations (ala the Fallout 76 Appalachian ones) that dot the line have become hideouts and crows nests for various groups including raiders and Kallos Guardians.
Very cool, love it! Minor concept of mine - maybe Galveston could be a city on stilts inhabited by Voodoo cultists that's a trading post between the Great Wastes and the rest of the Gulf so you don't have to pass through the Poisoned Swamps.
That's already sort of what the fishing community in Houston is - periodically they take a sail boat to Awlins out on the Bayou, basically the only non-tribal community in the whole region. That place is kind of a Streetcar Named Desire meets the city of Venice nowadays what with the French Quarter (of course) being the surviving core of the city. However the vulnerability of the sailboat to inclement weather or destruction by Bayou creatures like Swamp Crawlers or Gatormaws, or worse things in the sea means trips aren't hugely common. The Party might be presented with an "in and out" adventure with the sail-captain.
Feels a little strange to have Arkansas dominated by cyclones, feel like it would make more sense for it to be overgrown wilderness. And I still feel like the Dune Sea should get megatwisters from the Great Plains/Dustbowl would still come down into the Dune Sea on occasion since its all flat terrain with no natural barriers, even if they're less common.
It might be overgrown wilderness - in the east part of the state. I'm following the lead on Cassidy's Fallout 2 comment and lore established in Van Buren and JSawyer's PnP about the midwest being a big dustbowl with twisters miles wide - I made the mistake originally of misremembering Van Buren's Caesar fleeing beyond mega-cyclones into Texas, but it was actually that Caesar was fleeing east of Texas, beyond the cyclones.
And yeah I agree with regards to the Dune Sea, I think that happens but just not as frequently so as to be the Dustbowl.
Eh, I understand the desire to place them in Fort Hood since that's the big Texas military base, but I much preferred them being descendants of border patrol/occupation forces. And Caprock Canyons feel waaaaaay too far into the west and north.
I felt like I had to do
something with the US's biggest army base. Truthfully the Sidewinders also aren't reliable when it comes to their history, in talking to them you'd get the vibe that somewhere along their history their ancestors made a deliberate effort to obscure it and conflate their millitary history. Their background is sketchy to say the least. I'm not 100% sold on Fort Hood either, and equally it makes complete sense that the place would be bombed so hard it'd make The Glow look like the Lucky 38 by comparison - so perhaps Fort Hood can be a gigantic mega-dungeon. I had ideas about a bunch of US Army soldiers in experimental cryostasis having their tubes cracked open one by one and their preservative stuffed-bodies being made into living eggnests for mutant insects (They can also pilot corpses as meat-puppeteers but that's a story for another day) as a sort of "ticking clock" for a millitary dungeon - maybe that's Fort Hood.
As for the North, with the utilization of Pantex as a "high level" area I've decided that the tribal, rural kingdoms that the campaign will begin in is dusty old West Texas (The Dune Sea is the "Here be dragons" barrier between New Mexico and Texas rather than eating up West Texas now) so north seemed reasonable for the Sidewinders. Location comes secondary, as I said before. Something I'll work out when the worldbuilding enters later drafts.
Love it, this is great. Why are they called the Painted Rocks? And I'd assume since its so radioactive and is the "21st Century Los Alamos," I have a feeling I know where Dr. Clark will be. And I imagine if he's theological it would tie in to the Deluge Remnants.
The Painted Rocks are actually New Vegas lore! They're Caesar's equivalent of the Baja Desert Rangers - the baddest of the bad from the furthest reach of his territory, the "Red Okie Centuria" which apparently refers to the Oklahoma panhandle.
And yeah, when I was reading about real-life Pantex and its critical importance to US nuclear weapon policy I knew it had to be the location of the "Reservation". Truthfully it actually makes more sense than Los Alamos. And yes, since the Deluge Remnants hate Ghouls as part of their theology and their cultural influence means Ghouls across the Great Wastes are outcasts, Dr. Clarke has crafted himself a safe-haven ethnostate of Ghouls with their own fervorous religion regarding the Great War.
I must continue to lobby and say that I'm partial to "The Cracked Lands," though Deadlands is an improvement of Fracked Lands. But "The Corpse" is absolutely genius, embarrassed I didn't think of this myself.
I think Deadlands just rolls of the tongue better and sounds more naturalistic (As well as being a reference to an excellent wild west RPG) - it also reflects that the Wastelanders don't really know what made these zones toxic waste nightmares. They're just dead and they kill everything that goes in. Also gels well with "The Corpse" being the peak of it, too. "The Corpse" however isn't my invention as The Dutch Ghost points out, it's taken from the cancelled Fallout BoS2. It
is a very cool name.
Salvagers Union sounds interesting.
I'm hoping they'll be a more likeable faction compared to the others, they're just in a petty internal feud that's ripping them apart. I think exploring a socialist/co-op style faction in Fallout is interesting new territory and I think the fact that they're doing it incidentally rather than knowing anything about socialist ideology or whatever will also give it the kind of blue-collar rustic flavour I'm aiming for rather than communist LARPers. In that sense I think I could capture the vibe of a new nation in its cradle - and the players are in the time period where it might be snuffed out before it gets started. I've also considered calling it the "Prospectors Union or the "Junk Union" or some variation thereof, but I'm not sure. "Salvager Union" doesn't ring quite right.
Heh, Atomic Postman, did you get the Corpse from me or from FOBOS2 Vagrant Lands where I also got the name from?
I took a look over some of the stuff of the spin-offs regarding Texas to see whether there was anything worth taking. Turns out other than using Carbon because its a cool name and "The Corpse", no there isn't. Those games truly sucked.
