Introducing Fallout d20

This is an odd read.
The first bit tries to present itself as some kind of newspaper article ('historical news') but it carries the wrong tone. Sentences like 'All of the great monuments, convenience stores (hell, convenience itself)' don't fit in such an article. It's extremely informal and approaches the world of Fallout with a viewpoint derived from our own world and as such fails to create the atmosphere that the Fallout manual, for instance, did have.

It's also plain wrong in some cases. The European Union didn't exist in Fallout, for instance. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait? Hello?

And some parts are just silly. One tries to explain the idea of celebrating certain dates. It occupies two paragraphs and doesn't serve to show anything, not even the idea of commemmorating the nuclear exchange is offered to give it some kind of reason for existing.
I also don't get the idea of trying to explain why the world isn't post-apocalyptic after having introduced the concept yourself. It feels very inconsistent.
Lastly, it's supposedly from 2155, but according to canon, NCR hadn't been founded yet (eh, the vault Dweller hadn't even started out on his quest for the water chip either).

Then comes a newspaper carrying the name 'Vault City Rogue Press', which seems to be a contradictio in terminis. It is also from before the journey of the Chosen One, and hence much of the article is not consistent with the timeline. How do they know about the Enclave?

And again with the informal style. Although more fitting since this seems to be an opinion-magazine. Then again, its opinion is very weird. It first offers the view that people disagree with Vault City's policies (I can't see anyone admitting that in Vault City, especially in a public newspaper), then carries on to sing its praises.
Why is it then called 'Rogue Press'? And how did they know that Vault 13 didn't receive its G.E.C.K. (and what relevance could it possibly have in the article?).
And the conclusion that some Vaults must not have used their GECKs since they haven't been found is also silly. Hello, they can't communicate with you when they're hundreds of miles away, can they?
And why is there the addition of a spacecraft the Enclave looked into? Seems to be pretty uncanonical.
Oh, and the Necropolis ghouls are now cannibals as well. Although this might be true, I don't seem to recall any cannibalistic tendencies.
In the end the article suddenly reveals that Vault City knows that the Enclave is trying to kill off the rest of the USA, even though they could not possibly know about this. Hell, it's even very unlikely they'd know about this even after the Chosen One defeated them, since they operated very much in the dark and not many people knew about their existence.


It then ends as if it were the intro to a game, with the words 'There is, of course, resistance to such a plan.' completely destroying any kind of atmosphere the article might have had.

The next article, again Rogue Press, shows surprising knowledge of exactly what happened at the West Tek facility (although technically possible, it's highly unlikely they knew this). It also refers to the common version of the Super Mutant (the dumb version) as not being a Super Mutant, but just a dumb giant.

F.E.V. was also not originally intended to create a super soldier, it was intended to protect the population against possible biological weapons the Chinese were suspected to have. When what they created turned out to have different effects, experiments began to see what they could achieve with it, one goal being possibly the super soldiers.
It also claims that FEV could not be covered up when the vaults finally opened, even though no-one knew about it until Richard Grey re-discovered it, and even after he was defeated the outside world knew almost nothing of it, save for the Enclave.
The article then takes on a very different tone from the previous Rogue Press article, being very uncertain about what happened to other Vaults, even though, in the previous article, many claims were made about the Vaults.

Next article: again the NCR newspaper, again with an impossible date.
Again with information they would probably never know. Details about the founding of the Brotherhood of Steel and its dispositions, which they are very unlikely to know considering the secretive nature of the Brotherhood. And details about the 'Eastern Brotherhood of Steel', which is really annoying, since it acknowledges Tactics as canon(yech), and it's pretty hard for them to know anything about a faction that hasn't even been established yet, and when it was established it was established pretty far away.
And again with details about the Enclave they could not possibly know. Especially not some 100 years before the Enclave did anything on the mainland.
And why does the NCR Historical Press explain to its readers what the NCR is? The people who would read this would live in the NCR.
In a surprisingly stupid form of internal contradiction it claims that Jet was invented in 2241, while the article was written in 2164. It also claims that Jet was invented in New Reno, but I'm not sure whether this would be known to them.
And then an even dumber mistake: they start writing as if they were in Vault City, even though the article is supposed to be written from the NCR point of view. being somewhat aprreciative of San Francisco going along fine without the NCR, they then say that 'we are all given a place in the social order here' when talking about Vault City.
The article also claims that 'heroes' get a day pass in Vault City, even though there's no indication of that in the game at all.
Even worse, it then claims that Necropolis is worth seeing, and mentions some other towns, but not the Hub.

And then the Redding Rag, which talks about the Vault Dweller as if he were some giant hero, even though his exploits are barely known outside of Vault 13 and Arroyo. Even in NCR he's not remembered as the man who saved the world, but as the man who killed the raiders. His accounts are never known in such great detail.
Also 'a number of scholars now agree'. What, there's an academic community now? In Redding?


In short, the writers display an amazing lack of ability to write in character and make a lot of huge mistakes due to that. It seems as if the articles were written without the idea of having to write them in character in mind.

One thing that could vastly improve this intro would be to drop the idea that it has to be in character and correct a lot of canonical mistakes.
Aside from that, some proofreading certainly wouldn't hurt either.
 
This "introduction" - much like the entire idea behind Fallout d20 - is bullshit. It's as if the Fallout IP is so universally hated that every incompetent idiot in the world wants to give their contribution to violating it as savagely as possible.

Sander said:
Oh, and the Necropolis ghouls are now cannibals as well. Although this might be true, I don't seem to recall any cannibalistic tendencies.
Set openly announces his intention to eat the player character when he/she doesn't give a "killer reason for standing in [his] shadow".

My memory is a bit vague, but combat taunts of hostile ghouls also allude to cannibalism.
 
Sander - Glutton Creeper 1:0, Hell, a thousand to zero.

Although there was a "European Commonwealth" in Fallout.
 
Ratty said:
Set openly announces his intention to eat the player character when he/she doesn't give a "killer reason for standing in [his] shadow".

My memory is a bit vague, but combat taunts of hostile ghouls also allude to cannibalism.
As I said, I wasn't entirely sure.
But Set was a maniac, and I don't think the rest of the ghouls were cannibalistic. On this point I could be wrong though.
However, this would obviously make the recommendation in one of the later bits about Necropolis being a worthy place to visit even more ridiculous.

And Silencer, I know there was a European Commonwealth. I also know that that wasn't called the European UNion, though. ;)
 
Sander's right...much of that "history" proves that the "developers" didn't even pay attention to the fellow they brought on board from their original P&P conversion. Or they didn't even care to play the games much at all, and decided to cook up their own brand of bullshit. Like FEV being around prior to the war, meaning that they didn't pay attention to the Brotherhood of Steel's history (kind of hard to not miss that, since it seems like every spin-off featuring them has skullfucked their current role in the wasteland...but now Glutton Creeper wants to fuck over the BOS a third time - this time with their origins.)

Hell, Zax alone calls Glutton Creeper a bunch of overpaid tards (even if they're overpaid from people paying attention), and it's obvious Chuck Cuevas has more of a clue about Fallout's setting than them, even if Chuck didn't care.

I don't have the time at the moment to go through and detail each and every point that is incorrect, not just because it would likely be a waste of time given how poorly they paid attention to the source material in the first place, but I'm not paid to do these shitheads' job for them.

This is simply sloppy shit we wouldn't even expect from MCA, so maybe Matt Asshelmet or someone else might like to tell us one important question:

Exactly what the fuck are you idiots doing and who the hell are you trying to fool, when it looks like this is simply a bit of quick work to take advantage of a license?

We've been here before. We're not amused. Neither does DAC appear to be amused, given that they haven't cared to give this news yet, assuming that Glutton Creeper was bright enought to tell them, like GC was nice enough to axe all of the threads in the Fallout d20 forum for shits and giggles. (EDIT: Anyone miss the irony of where the forum is located...and the Fallout Wiki? Which has a timeline these folks could have used to at least fake it if they weren't going to bother having a clue. Really, there's simply no excuse when you count the amount of source material available, particularly when someone takes the trouble to catalog the information into a Wiki so it's easier to understand, and then this shit Creeps out.)

I guess they were still chafing over being caught at trying to put in classes of sorts into Fallout d20 with "character backgrounds" and such that would determine skills. Now they can't even get the history right, which should be even simpler to do, since the history is already right there and they only have to play a fucking video game to obtain it, which a weekend of playing Fallout could illuminate many important points Glutton Creeper has failed at, and likely instead took weeks to come up with this laughable piece of shit "history".

And yet they apparently expected us to be double-plus excited about them having something to do with the Fallout name.

Guess again, kiddies.
 
Good post, Sander.

The Commonwealth was left mostly undescribed, it's kind of hinted that it did function as a rudimentary military union (which in turn hints at the disbandenment of NATO), but calling it the European Union would be both wrong and imply it served the same function (which is an unknown).

save for the Enclave

And the Brotherhood of Steel.

PS: Jet wasn't technically invented "in" New Reno, as far as I know
 
Suffer said:
The Commonwealth was left mostly undescribed, it's kind of hinted that it did function as a rudimentary military union (which in turn hints at the disbandenment of NATO), but calling it the European Union would be both wrong and imply it served the same function (which is an unknown)

Now where did you get that, dearest of all my Suffers?

It's not hinted at all. It is only said that the member states were "quarreling", which might have referred to the military threat, but also fights over the remaining resources, energy policies etc. The term commonwealth might have meant a military pact, but also a political-economic one. You can't just jump to conclusions like that, as we are no closer to the "truth" than the d20 devs. Agreed, we can't be sure it was an economic body unless it was called "Union", but neither can we be sure it serves purely defensive purposes unless it was called a "European Pact".

Also, do we even have a NATO in the Fallout timeline? I know it's in the Wasteland timeline, but here, NATO was only founded in 1949, which might have been after the P.O.D.
 
NATO isn't mentioned or dissavowed.

The European Commonwealth shows a tendency to act as one military body (towards the middle east, for instance) through much of the Fallout timeline before "breaking apast through internal squabbeling"

PS: it's bible timeline, according to the Wiki:
# April: The Resource Wars begin. Many smaller nations go bankrupt, and Europe, dependent on oil imports from the Middle East, responds to the Middle East's rising oil prices with military action. The long drawn-out war between the European Commonwealth and the Middle East begins. (mentioned only in the Fallout Bible timeline )
 
Also, the gray-on-gray site is hideous and the PDF itself has a ghastly background.

EDIT: Wording would indicate that "Europe" and "Middle East" are also military entities, not geographical ;)
 
The Evolution of Tabletop Games

A new monster is in town, the Glutton Creeper, and like Santa, he has games.

Glutton Creeper Games is just not d20 role-playing games; we are a tabletop game creation company and will bring you into the next evolution of tabletop gaming. Spread the word to all of your friends, foes, and people you don’t know, that the Glutton Creeper is on the scene.

Apparently, to Glutton Creeper, tabletop games have "evolved" past the point of requiring a setting with a coherent history or other accurate yet conventionally necessary details.
 
Silencer said:
Also, the gray-on-gray site is hideous and the PDF itself has a ghastly background.

EDIT: Wording would indicate that "Europe" and "Middle East" are also military entities, not geographical ;)

Yeah, except that it does mention "the European Commonwealth" as fighting the "Middle East", rather than "Europe" vs "the Middle East"
 
I'm really quite disappointed with the intro. I totally agree with what Rosh and Sander said. Poor grammar, typos, and terribly formed sentences all add to the disappointment. All of the stuff in the Fallout Vault is better written, as is most of the stuff the forum members of DAC and NMA put out on a daily basis.
 
Roshambo said:
Neither does DAC appear to be amused, given that they haven't cared to give this news yet

In truth I think people were too busy wondering where all the posts in the d20 forum had gone to. And since that (which wiped almost all developer feedback), there's been no communication from any of the d20 devs as far as I'm aware. A coincidence, or orders from the boss? Strange.
 
Mr. Teatime said:
In truth I think people were too busy wondering where all the posts in the d20 forum had gone to.

True, true, which is why I added the latter half of that sentence, "assuming that Glutton Creeper was bright enought to tell them, like GC was nice enough to axe all of the threads in the Fallout d20 forum for shits and giggles."

And since that (which wiped almost all developer feedback), there's been no communication from any of the d20 devs as far as I'm aware.

I don't know if it had anything to do with my evaluation of how they were developing the P&P, but that would be silly since it wasn't posted on the d20 forum itself.

I mean, really, what do they want? Carsten Strehse style media ass-licking whenever they post the merest hint of anything with the name Fallout, and no care as to what is done with the title otherwise? Sorry, we've already dealt with developmental failures with that primadonna attitude before, adding one more team to the list of chuckleheads who pissed all over Fallout's story/setting/just about fucking everything with this wad of shit will simply be doing ShittyFalloutSpin-OffDeveloper++;.

A coincidence, or orders from the boss? Strange.

Interplay's SOP, it appears, when people are starting to say bad things about a Fallout title...quick, delete everything negative or that could put this title into question with one simple forum thread! If a forum is enough to make their work dubious, then their work is simply shit.
 
Suffer said:
NATO isn't mentioned or dissavowed.

The European Commonwealth shows a tendency to act as one military body (towards the middle east, for instance) through much of the Fallout timeline before "breaking apast through internal squabbeling"

PS: it's bible timeline, according to the Wiki:
# April: The Resource Wars begin. Many smaller nations go bankrupt, and Europe, dependent on oil imports from the Middle East, responds to the Middle East's rising oil prices with military action. The long drawn-out war between the European Commonwealth and the Middle East begins. (mentioned only in the Fallout Bible timeline )

The most probable hypothetical ascendants for "The European Commonwealth" could be:
- The European Communities, created 1957, wich are economic community and international law person (one of the parts of political agreement - not an organisation and law person - known as The European Union, created 1994)
- West European Union, separate from NATO and the EU military agreement (some french ambitions, no real power), origins since 1948.
Remember, that Europe has plenty of affiliated and semi-affiliated organisations of diffrent sort and nobody knows how it will evolve for the next two centuries.
Or better - ask the dev - what is this.

Semicanon kanibal ghouls appear in van Buren, but this Endless Walkers have coocked brains and can't create any community.
 
Back
Top