What would you guys like to see in a hypothetical Fallout game set in Colorado

ElloinmorninJ said:
Boulder Dome. Sounds like an interesting idea. Why should they do? Like, their motivations
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Presumably Boulder Dome is the most advanced of the Survivalist settlements, to the point where its hard to even call it a Survivalist group. Its a technocracy lead by the descenants of scientists in the Dome, lording over the benighted farmers of Boulder, providing them with advanced technology and possibly treatment for the local form of New Plague. They've tried to extend similar aid to the cities across the Eastern Slope, and is just now trying to expand to the mountain tribes and survivalists. Essentially, they're a more successful Vault City that is well on its ay to forming its own *NCR.

But much to their chagrin, their expansion and consolidation is being interrupted by the arrival of the Legion. Ideologically, they would draw a contrast between themselves as futurists trying to build a more humane world, whereas the Legion are obsessed with the Old World and building a more brutal world. There's a lot of hypocrisy you could play with in that dynamic.

Would you mind if I threw in a few concepts for settlements and tribes in this thread?
 
Alternatively you could have the Boulder Dome scientists ruling over their own small "empire" of tribals who have grown to worship them and view Boulder as kind of this 'Mecca' of sorts, making pilgrimages there and having this small permanent settlement at the Boulder Dome's base. There's some fun ideas and themes you could explore in this kind of scenario, such as:

  • Ambitious prospectors swear an allegiance with the Legion in order to finally 'crack' the Boulder Dome and get the tech hidden within
  • The Legion is attempting to create friction within the fragile alliance of tribes that protect and worship the dome
  • The scientists have elected to 'play-along' with the tribals viewing them as gods, but what happens if one of them feels guilty about it and wants to disrupt the arrangement by revealing who they truly are?
    • The scientists would likely be clothed during any contact with the outside world in those protective suits you see in the design documents for Van Buren
 
Hardboiled Android said:
Presumably Boulder Dome is the most advanced of the Survivalist settlements, to the point where its hard to even call it a Survivalist group. Its a technocracy lead by the descenants of scientists in the Dome, lording over the benighted farmers of Boulder, providing them with advanced technology and possibly treatment for the local form of New Plague. They've tried to extend similar aid to the cities across the Eastern Slope, and is just now trying to expand to the mountain tribes and survivalists. Essentially, they're a more successful Vault City that is well on its ay to forming its own *NCR.

But much to their chagrin, their expansion and consolidation is being interrupted by the arrival of the Legion. Ideologically, they would draw a contrast between themselves as futurists trying to build a more humane world, whereas the Legion are obsessed with the Old World and building a more brutal world. There's a lot of hypocrisy you could play with in that dynamic.

Would you mind if I threw in a few concepts for settlements and tribes in this thread?
Click to expand...

Do anything, man. I love getting new ideas thrown in!
 
One thing I was thinking of was creatures! Typical wasteland animals like Brahmin and Bighorners would be present (mostly as farm animals fro the people in the region). One thing I’d like to add is Alpacas/Llamas (since many farmers import them in the region).

Hostile mutants could include...deathclaws (maybe not? I don’t know) but mostly I’d like to see those wild dogs from Denver act as a threat, spreading out from Dog-town to surrounding regions. Along with that, rad-scorpions, mole-rats and etc
 
ElloinmorninJ said:
One thing I was thinking of was creatures! Typical wasteland animals like Brahmin and Bighorners would be present (mostly as farm animals fro the people in the region). One thing I’d like to add is Alpacas/Llamas (since many farmers import them in the region).

Hostile mutants could include...deathclaws (maybe not? I don’t know) but mostly I’d like to see those wild dogs from Denver act as a threat, spreading out from Dog-town to surrounding regions. Along with that, rad-scorpions, mole-rats and etc
Click to expand...
Generally speaking, I don't like repetition in mutants. Like, are we to believe that there's really not a single cow with one head in the whole of America? That there's something about cows that makes it so whenever they're exposed to radiation and maybe a little teensy FEV that they ALWAYS grow another head - and not only that, another head in that exact same spot?

Or are we to believe that this mutant species was just so wildly successful that it has managed to overtake the entire continent in ~200 years, which would make it one of the most phenomenally successful species in planetary history? And the same would go for all the mutants of Southern California.

It was somewhat acceptable in Fallout 2 since these are contiguous regions with a huge valley connecting them, but in Fo3 and 4 (and even New Vegas to a certain extent) it just becomes so absurd. Same is true for Tactics. Part of the appeal of Fallout for me is that an event as extreme as a full on nuclear war are so unpredictable that every single region is going to be wildly different, the only true connecting threads running between them being the Mad Max mindset common to Wastelanders, and the omnipresent ruins of Old America. Each respective Wasteland has its own history, its own mutants, and its own singular events of potential world-changing nature involving Mad Science.

I think something like Bighorners make sense, they'd be tremendously useful animals to herd in the mountains and would probably spread all across the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas. But generally, I would be really careful about including old species, Colorado's a long ways away from California.
 
Hardboiled Android said:
Generally speaking, I don't like repetition in mutants. Like, are we to believe that there's really not a single cow with one head in the whole of America? That there's something about cows that makes it so whenever they're exposed to radiation and maybe a little teensy FEV that they ALWAYS grow another head - and not only that, another head in that exact same spot?

Or are we to believe that this mutant species was just so wildly successful that it has managed to overtake the entire continent in ~200 years, which would make it one of the most phenomenally successful species in planetary history? And the same would go for all the mutants of Southern California.

It was somewhat acceptable in Fallout 2 since these are contiguous regions with a huge valley connecting them, but in Fo3 and 4 (and even New Vegas to a certain extent) it just becomes so absurd. Same is true for Tactics. Part of the appeal of Fallout for me is that an event as extreme as a full on nuclear war are so unpredictable that every single region is going to be wildly different, the only true connecting threads running between them being the Mad Max mindset common to Wastelanders, and the omnipresent ruins of Old America. Each respective Wasteland has its own history, its own mutants, and its own singular events of potential world-changing nature involving Mad Science.

I think something like Bighorners make sense, they'd be tremendously useful animals to herd in the mountains and would probably spread all across the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas. But generally, I would be really careful about including old species, Colorado's a long ways away from California.
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So are you suggesting Bighorners take the place of Brahman entirely? Because I had thought of creating a unique breed of farm animal for the region a while ago. It would be basically a goat of some sort, called and would be mutated to have a third horn or something, giving it the name “Three Horner”
 
ElloinmorninJ said:
So are you suggesting Bighorners take the place of Brahman entirely? Because I had thought of creating a unique breed of farm animal for the region a while ago. It would be basically a goat of some sort, called and would be mutated to have a third horn or something, giving it the name “Three Horner”
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Yeah, I'd prefer this. Perhaps Brahmin could only be present in Cortex and environs, and the Legion derides and looks down upon these of Three Horners.
 
Hardboiled Android said:
Yeah, I'd prefer this. Perhaps Brahmin could only be present in Cortex and environs, and the Legion derides and looks down upon these of Three Horners.
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Now that I think about it, Bighorners and Three Horners work better in Colorado’s mountainous environment anyway. Since it’s been established that Bighorners aren’t useful as pack animals, maybe the Three Horners are used for that purpose instead.
 
So what we’ve set up for this hypothetical game is that) Colorado is split between Caesar’s Legion I’m the West and the Boulder Technocracy to the East, with a large inbetween zone controlled by the tribes of Colorado.

Maybe we could add a third faction of some sort in the region? On the border of Colorado and Utah you could have a colony of Mormons trying to get a foothold in the region or something? Maybe the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in the “Ghoul” inhabited part of Colorado, sort of like a Necropolis?

Oh, and let’s not forget about Vaults. You could have, Vault 28 or 31, those numbers haven’t been used yet. Maybe they established little, more civilized communities in the mountains, or it could’ve been a situation like Vault 15 where a bunch of tribes were founded instead
 
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ElloinmorninJ said:
Okay, well here’s my question than: how would you write the region?
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I have actually written for this region before, well sort of. I ran a Fallout PnP campaign that was set in Nevada, Idaho and portions of the Four Courner states (Colorado included).

Stuff we know canonically exists or did exist at one point in Colorado:
  • Circle Junction and the Iron Lines tribe (Though it seems the location exists, Ulysses refers to a seperate place called "Circle Junction" that's west of the Mojave so it wouldn't be called that.). The Iron Lines are apparently not absorbed by the Legion (likely due to logistical difficulty) but according to Avellone they're infrequently raided for slaves, again I would imagine this was during the Legion's conquest of Colorado
  • Hangdogs Tribe and the Denver hounds (Absorbed by the Legion), as well as the DPD Cyberdogs that Rex originates from
  • Twin Mothers Tribe and by extension Vault 29 (Absorbed by the Legion)
I think the best setting for a story would either be immediately prior to or during the occupation of the Legion, considering the Legion is a nomadic horde a Colorado Wasteland post-Legion is going to be even more empty than it was previously.

Things of Van Buren canonicity that I would incorporate or adapt in some form:
  • Boulder Dome
  • Denver Prospectors
  • Cheyenne Mountain being a nuked-out crater (Either during the Great War or as a canonically amended version of Tactics where the Midwest BoS nuking the Calculator actually had a serious impact and thus none of the Tactics endings are canon)
  • The Nursery
For the Denver Prospectors, I effectively took the idea from Van Buren and ran with it, but adapted it to Salt Lake City instead. So you could just flip it back to being in Denver. Instead of being work-release under NCR, I just had the city ripped up between various rival Prospecting gangs. Kimball Krew, Silver Salvagers and the Bonneville Boys. The crews have a gentleman's honor system of "claims" similar to that of mining stakes, but as of the time the story takes place they've been suffering infringements on this system from crews claim-jumping eachother, primarily the Bonneville Boys. To make matters worse, one of the Kimball Krew "Bombay Jack" has gone nuts and turned a section of the city into a bomb-wired Home Alone nightmare, with himself perched up a few floors in a cosy sniper's nest. They also have to deal with the Hangdogs and the swarms of violent hounds, though that's largely in a seperate section of the city. Some of the crews could have working deals with the Hangdogs. They'd be hardy blue-collar folk, but with an extra edge considering their environment. Quests here could involve "Skyscraper (read: dungeon) Crawls" or settling disputes between the crews, eliminating Bombay Jack or dealing with the Hangdogs.

There have already been some nice ideas put into here about Boulder-Dome. I like the tiered society idea, you could mix in elements of the Van Buren iteration with the cryogenically frozen scientists and the ZAX super-computer. I like the idea that these scientists thawed out a generation or two back, and referred to the ZAX Unit as their "Director" or leader to help organize their society. The dome itself is actually a rather spartan West-Tek viral research facility but the people outside the Dome don't know that, to the community of Boulder outside it's basically heaven. Only those inside know the truth, and how massively reliant Boulder Dome actually is to the people outside who grow their food. In exchange, however, the Boulder Dome has been able to provide treatment for the New Plague which has periodic outbreaks throughout the state. They're also able to provide state of the art medical treatment broadly, such as Stimpaks and an Auto-Doc. The people of the dome are all about appearances and illusion.

Additionally, the ZAX unit, the "leader" of Boulder which at first organized their society in its totality and made their decisions for them, has recently shut-down after cannibalizing its own data and effectively expiring. Similarly, the last of the pre-war scientists died quite a while back and whilst their offspring are comparatively well-educated, they aren't their ancestors and their knowledge is considerably more limited, primarily due to over-reliance on the ZAX. The process of treating the New Plague is becoming more of a practiced ritual without true understanding with each coming year, and the next generation of those inside the Dome probably won't understand the science of it properly at all. The only implications of this is that the Boulder Dome historically used to purchase bulk computer components from the Denver Prospectors, and of course have since stopped with the total failure of the ZAX. They're a community on a ticking clock, in effect.

As I said before for The Nursery, I think the "desert oasis" concept has been done better and definitively by Vault 22 so I'd scrap that aspect, but I think "Diana the AI Goddess of the Twin Mothers" is still a good angle. So we'd keep the Van Buren angle of Derek Greenway and Diana Stone creating a project wherein Diana's conciousness is uploaded to a computer, she is later linked to Vault 29 and becomes their nature Goddess. In Van Buren this was more of an act and she was purely benevolent, I would write that in her isolation and her position as a human turned machine, where in the VB documents it's briefly touched upon that Diana felt distressed at the sensation of it, I'd have her a little bonkers and genuinely believing in her own divinity.

Perhaps instead of an oasis of plantlife, it's a menagerie of preserved animals. Perhaps in her mad beliefs regarding mankind and nature (the kind that would lead her to deliberately cultivate a primitive, cult-like tribe with the Twin Mothers) she's performed ungodly experiments merging animal and man. Or if that's a little too buckwild, perhaps Diana and the Nursery are a storehouse of great anthropological knowledge. A massive storehouse of data regarding ancient human societies, history, cultures, traditions, practices. Both practical and cultural. Kind of like a GECK but vaster and with an AI. A decision a protagonist might have to make is that the only way to preserve the society at Boulder is by reviving ZAX, and doing so requires dismantling Diana. On the one hand, she's a mad computerized cult leader, but on the other she is a holder of vast tribal knowledge and survivalist data that if she goes, so does it. Alternatively players could help the Twin Mothers search for their Goddess and the Nursery (Especially dramatic if it's during the Legion's conquest, as you could be leading the very last survivors to sanctuary)

Original Content (from my campaign):

Pleasant Hills:
A town of Prospectors built around pre-war landfill /garbage mountains. The townsfolk have effectively created mining tunnels into the garbage mountains to salvage/prospect the stuff. The mayor of the town sells "tickets" to Wastelanders for entry into the mines, where they can salvage to their hearts content. There's risk obviously, with mutant bugs and cave-ins, but the main problem is a specific breed of mutant bug that eats through the salvage/junk has started breeding like crazy and is slowly destroying all the garbage, which is the town's main source of income (They sell to non-legion communities in Arizona and New Mexico). The Trashbugs are a lot like the Ant-Lions of Half-Life in effect. The mayor is paying an expedition of mercenaries to transport a drill into the heart of the biggest junk-mountain, drilling into where they believe the trashbug queen's nest is, and kill the damn thing. It turns out the thing is nesting on a still-functioning micro-fusion reactor, and has grown to gigantic size.

The surrounding town would be your typical pseudo-western Junktown kinda vibe, with all the local problems one might encounter in such a seedy location. Gambling debts, wronged townsfolk, petty feuds et cetera.

Sun-Tree:

A mostly self-sufficient survivalist community reminiscent of Shady Sands. A town built around pre-war "Solar Trees" (these are real things btw), effectively large pylons with circular/disc-shaped solar panelling at the top providing shade underneath and solar power. Under each of these pylons people have constructed their homes in the shade, wiring the power directly from the "trees" into their homes. Excess power is fueled into forming Small Energy Cells, which the town sells. Within the various outer-rings of the town, non-functional solar-trees have been stripped of their components in order to repair the others, and transformed instead into "protein farms", effectively circular troughs of viscous goo-soil. A mix of battery-acid run off from the Energy Cell creation process, some chemical stimulants and the irradiated soil. It proves a fertile breeding ground for a unique type of fat mutant worm/larvae that reproduce and thrive only in this battery-acid trough. The town occasionally pays tribute (or at times ransom) to Raiders, but otherwise the townsfolk live largely uneventful lives. If you were to start a game in Colorado somewhere, here might not be a bad place.

White-Liners:

Effectively a nomadic community of gypsy-like people likely to become completely tribal within the next generation or two. For the moment they resemble your more traditional Road Warrior Wastelanders, but they're getting there. Colorado is a rough place, and there aren't many places that are suitable for fertile settlement. So, they keep on the move. Always. They set up large, sprawling camps along sections of the Highways. Rumour has it they have a mapped network of secret routes and supply caches, but they'd never share it with anyone outside their group. To the right trusted people, the White-Liners make excellent couriers.
 
Atomic Postman said:
I have actually written for this region before, well sort of. I ran a Fallout PnP campaign that was set in Nevada, Idaho and portions of the Four Courner states (Colorado included).

Stuff we know canonically exists or did exist at one point in Colorado:
  • Circle Junction and the Iron Lines tribe (Though it seems the location exists, Ulysses refers to a seperate place called "Circle Junction" that's west of the Mojave so it wouldn't be called that.). The Iron Lines are apparently not absorbed by the Legion (likely due to logistical difficulty) but according to Avellone they're infrequently raided for slaves, again I would imagine this was during the Legion's conquest of Colorado
  • Hangdogs Tribe and the Denver hounds (Absorbed by the Legion), as well as the DPD Cyberdogs that Rex originates from
  • Twin Mothers Tribe and by extension Vault 29 (Absorbed by the Legion)
I think the best setting for a story would either be immediately prior to or during the occupation of the Legion, considering the Legion is a nomadic horde a Colorado Wasteland post-Legion is going to be even more empty than it was previously.

Things of Van Buren canonicity that I would incorporate or adapt in some form:
  • Boulder Dome
  • Denver Prospectors
  • Cheyenne Mountain being a nuked-out crater (Either during the Great War or as a canonically amended version of Tactics where the Midwest BoS nuking the Calculator actually had a serious impact and thus none of the Tactics endings are canon)
  • The Nursery
For the Denver Prospectors, I effectively took the idea from Van Buren and ran with it, but adapted it to Salt Lake City instead. So you could just flip it back to being in Denver. Instead of being work-release under NCR, I just had the city ripped up between various rival Prospecting gangs. Kimball Krew, Silver Salvagers and the Bonneville Boys. The crews have a gentleman's honor system of "claims" similar to that of mining stakes, but as of the time the story takes place they've been suffering infringements on this system from crews claim-jumping eachother, primarily the Bonneville Boys. To make matters worse, one of the Kimball Krew "Bombay Jack" has gone nuts and turned a section of the city into a bomb-wired Home Alone nightmare, with himself perched up a few floors in a cosy sniper's nest. They also have to deal with the Hangdogs and the swarms of violent hounds, though that's largely in a seperate section of the city. Some of the crews could have working deals with the Hangdogs. They'd be hardy blue-collar folk, but with an extra edge considering their environment. Quests here could involve "Skyscraper (read: dungeon) Crawls" or settling disputes between the crews, eliminating Bombay Jack or dealing with the Hangdogs.

There have already been some nice ideas put into here about Boulder-Dome. I like the tiered society idea, you could mix in elements of the Van Buren iteration with the cryogenically frozen scientists and the ZAX super-computer. I like the idea that these scientists thawed out a generation or two back, and referred to the ZAX Unit as their "Director" or leader to help organize their society. The dome itself is actually a rather spartan West-Tek viral research facility but the people outside the Dome don't know that, to the community of Boulder outside it's basically heaven. Only those inside know the truth, and how massively reliant Boulder Dome actually is to the people outside who grow their food. In exchange, however, the Boulder Dome has been able to provide treatment for the New Plague which has periodic outbreaks throughout the state. They're also able to provide state of the art medical treatment broadly, such as Stimpaks and an Auto-Doc. The people of the dome are all about appearances and illusion.

Additionally, the ZAX unit, the "leader" of Boulder which at first organized their society in its totality and made their decisions for them, has recently shut-down after cannibalizing its own data and effectively expiring. Similarly, the last of the pre-war scientists died quite a while back and whilst their offspring are comparatively well-educated, they aren't their ancestors and their knowledge is considerably more limited, primarily due to over-reliance on the ZAX. The process of treating the New Plague is becoming more of a practiced ritual without true understanding with each coming year, and the next generation of those inside the Dome probably won't understand the science of it properly at all. The only implications of this is that the Boulder Dome historically used to purchase bulk computer components from the Denver Prospectors, and of course have since stopped with the total failure of the ZAX. They're a community on a ticking clock, in effect.

As I said before for The Nursery, I think the "desert oasis" concept has been done better and definitively by Vault 22 so I'd scrap that aspect, but I think "Diana the AI Goddess of the Twin Mothers" is still a good angle. So we'd keep the Van Buren angle of Derek Greenway and Diana Stone creating a project wherein Diana's conciousness is uploaded to a computer, she is later linked to Vault 29 and becomes their nature Goddess. In Van Buren this was more of an act and she was purely benevolent, I would write that in her isolation and her position as a human turned machine, where in the VB documents it's briefly touched upon that Diana felt distressed at the sensation of it, I'd have her a little bonkers and genuinely believing in her own divinity.

Perhaps instead of an oasis of plantlife, it's a menagerie of preserved animals. Perhaps in her mad beliefs regarding mankind and nature (the kind that would lead her to deliberately cultivate a primitive, cult-like tribe with the Twin Mothers) she's performed ungodly experiments merging animal and man. Or if that's a little too buckwild, perhaps Diana and the Nursery are a storehouse of great anthropological knowledge. A massive storehouse of data regarding ancient human societies, history, cultures, traditions, practices. Both practical and cultural. Kind of like a GECK but vaster and with an AI. A decision a protagonist might have to make is that the only way to preserve the society at Boulder is by reviving ZAX, and doing so requires dismantling Diana. On the one hand, she's a mad computerized cult leader, but on the other she is a holder of vast tribal knowledge and survivalist data that if she goes, so does it. Alternatively players could help the Twin Mothers search for their Goddess and the Nursery (Especially dramatic if it's during the Legion's conquest, as you could be leading the very last survivors to sanctuary)

Original Content (from my campaign):

Pleasant Hills:
A town of Prospectors built around pre-war landfill /garbage mountains. The townsfolk have effectively created mining tunnels into the garbage mountains to salvage/prospect the stuff. The mayor of the town sells "tickets" to Wastelanders for entry into the mines, where they can salvage to their hearts content. There's risk obviously, with mutant bugs and cave-ins, but the main problem is a specific breed of mutant bug that eats through the salvage/junk has started breeding like crazy and is slowly destroying all the garbage, which is the town's main source of income (They sell to non-legion communities in Arizona and New Mexico). The Trashbugs are a lot like the Ant-Lions of Half-Life in effect. The mayor is paying an expedition of mercenaries to transport a drill into the heart of the biggest junk-mountain, drilling into where they believe the trashbug queen's nest is, and kill the damn thing. It turns out the thing is nesting on a still-functioning micro-fusion reactor, and has grown to gigantic size.

The surrounding town would be your typical pseudo-western Junktown kinda vibe, with all the local problems one might encounter in such a seedy location. Gambling debts, wronged townsfolk, petty feuds et cetera.

Sun-Tree:

A mostly self-sufficient survivalist community reminiscent of Shady Sands. A town built around pre-war "Solar Trees" (these are real things btw), effectively large pylons with circular/disc-shaped solar panelling at the top providing shade underneath and solar power. Under each of these pylons people have constructed their homes in the shade, wiring the power directly from the "trees" into their homes. Excess power is fueled into forming Small Energy Cells, which the town sells. Within the various outer-rings of the town, non-functional solar-trees have been stripped of their components in order to repair the others, and transformed instead into "protein farms", effectively circular troughs of viscous goo-soil. A mix of battery-acid run off from the Energy Cell creation process, some chemical stimulants and the irradiated soil. It proves a fertile breeding ground for a unique type of fat mutant worm/larvae that reproduce and thrive only in this battery-acid trough. The town occasionally pays tribute (or at times ransom) to Raiders, but otherwise the townsfolk live largely uneventful lives. If you were to start a game in Colorado somewhere, here might not be a bad place.

White-Liners:

Effectively a nomadic community of gypsy-like people likely to become completely tribal within the next generation or two. For the moment they resemble your more traditional Road Warrior Wastelanders, but they're getting there. Colorado is a rough place, and there aren't many places that are suitable for fertile settlement. So, they keep on the move. Always. They set up large, sprawling camps along sections of the Highways. Rumour has it they have a mapped network of secret routes and supply caches, but they'd never share it with anyone outside their group. To the right trusted people, the White-Liners make excellent couriers.
Click to expand...

Holy crap. Looks like I’m sorta beat out. Good writing
 
Atomic Postman said:
Additionally, the ZAX unit, the "leader" of Boulder which at first organized their society in its totality and made their decisions for them, has recently shut-down after cannibalizing its own data and effectively expiring. Similarly, the last of the pre-war scientists died quite a while back and whilst their offspring are comparatively well-educated, they aren't their ancestors and their knowledge is considerably more limited, primarily due to over-reliance on the ZAX. The process of treating the New Plague is becoming more of a practiced ritual without true understanding with each coming year, and the next generation of those inside the Dome probably won't understand the science of it properly at all. The only implications of this is that the Boulder Dome historically used to purchase bulk computer components from the Denver Prospectors, and of course have since stopped with the total failure of the ZAX. They're a community on a ticking clock, in effect.
Click to expand...

This fucking rules
 
Dayglow Drifter said:
this fucking rules
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Jesus I just had an idea! What if stored in the Nursery is something called “The Great G.E.C.K”? Like, it’s a normal GECK on steroids. About the size of small car, it has the ability to refertilize the entire region of Colorado. That would be super cool. Maybe many of the factions in CO are fighting over its use.
 
Atomic Postman said:
I have actually written for this region before, well sort of. I ran a Fallout PnP campaign that was set in Nevada, Idaho and portions of the Four Courner states (Colorado included).

Stuff we know canonically exists or did exist at one point in Colorado:
  • Circle Junction and the Iron Lines tribe (Though it seems the location exists, Ulysses refers to a seperate place called "Circle Junction" that's west of the Mojave so it wouldn't be called that.). The Iron Lines are apparently not absorbed by the Legion (likely due to logistical difficulty) but according to Avellone they're infrequently raided for slaves, again I would imagine this was during the Legion's conquest of Colorado
  • Hangdogs Tribe and the Denver hounds (Absorbed by the Legion), as well as the DPD Cyberdogs that Rex originates from
  • Twin Mothers Tribe and by extension Vault 29 (Absorbed by the Legion)
I think the best setting for a story would either be immediately prior to or during the occupation of the Legion, considering the Legion is a nomadic horde a Colorado Wasteland post-Legion is going to be even more empty than it was previously.

Things of Van Buren canonicity that I would incorporate or adapt in some form:
  • Boulder Dome
  • Denver Prospectors
  • Cheyenne Mountain being a nuked-out crater (Either during the Great War or as a canonically amended version of Tactics where the Midwest BoS nuking the Calculator actually had a serious impact and thus none of the Tactics endings are canon)
  • The Nursery
For the Denver Prospectors, I effectively took the idea from Van Buren and ran with it, but adapted it to Salt Lake City instead. So you could just flip it back to being in Denver. Instead of being work-release under NCR, I just had the city ripped up between various rival Prospecting gangs. Kimball Krew, Silver Salvagers and the Bonneville Boys. The crews have a gentleman's honor system of "claims" similar to that of mining stakes, but as of the time the story takes place they've been suffering infringements on this system from crews claim-jumping eachother, primarily the Bonneville Boys. To make matters worse, one of the Kimball Krew "Bombay Jack" has gone nuts and turned a section of the city into a bomb-wired Home Alone nightmare, with himself perched up a few floors in a cosy sniper's nest. They also have to deal with the Hangdogs and the swarms of violent hounds, though that's largely in a seperate section of the city. Some of the crews could have working deals with the Hangdogs. They'd be hardy blue-collar folk, but with an extra edge considering their environment. Quests here could involve "Skyscraper (read: dungeon) Crawls" or settling disputes between the crews, eliminating Bombay Jack or dealing with the Hangdogs.

There have already been some nice ideas put into here about Boulder-Dome. I like the tiered society idea, you could mix in elements of the Van Buren iteration with the cryogenically frozen scientists and the ZAX super-computer. I like the idea that these scientists thawed out a generation or two back, and referred to the ZAX Unit as their "Director" or leader to help organize their society. The dome itself is actually a rather spartan West-Tek viral research facility but the people outside the Dome don't know that, to the community of Boulder outside it's basically heaven. Only those inside know the truth, and how massively reliant Boulder Dome actually is to the people outside who grow their food. In exchange, however, the Boulder Dome has been able to provide treatment for the New Plague which has periodic outbreaks throughout the state. They're also able to provide state of the art medical treatment broadly, such as Stimpaks and an Auto-Doc. The people of the dome are all about appearances and illusion.

Additionally, the ZAX unit, the "leader" of Boulder which at first organized their society in its totality and made their decisions for them, has recently shut-down after cannibalizing its own data and effectively expiring. Similarly, the last of the pre-war scientists died quite a while back and whilst their offspring are comparatively well-educated, they aren't their ancestors and their knowledge is considerably more limited, primarily due to over-reliance on the ZAX. The process of treating the New Plague is becoming more of a practiced ritual without true understanding with each coming year, and the next generation of those inside the Dome probably won't understand the science of it properly at all. The only implications of this is that the Boulder Dome historically used to purchase bulk computer components from the Denver Prospectors, and of course have since stopped with the total failure of the ZAX. They're a community on a ticking clock, in effect.

As I said before for The Nursery, I think the "desert oasis" concept has been done better and definitively by Vault 22 so I'd scrap that aspect, but I think "Diana the AI Goddess of the Twin Mothers" is still a good angle. So we'd keep the Van Buren angle of Derek Greenway and Diana Stone creating a project wherein Diana's conciousness is uploaded to a computer, she is later linked to Vault 29 and becomes their nature Goddess. In Van Buren this was more of an act and she was purely benevolent, I would write that in her isolation and her position as a human turned machine, where in the VB documents it's briefly touched upon that Diana felt distressed at the sensation of it, I'd have her a little bonkers and genuinely believing in her own divinity.

Perhaps instead of an oasis of plantlife, it's a menagerie of preserved animals. Perhaps in her mad beliefs regarding mankind and nature (the kind that would lead her to deliberately cultivate a primitive, cult-like tribe with the Twin Mothers) she's performed ungodly experiments merging animal and man. Or if that's a little too buckwild, perhaps Diana and the Nursery are a storehouse of great anthropological knowledge. A massive storehouse of data regarding ancient human societies, history, cultures, traditions, practices. Both practical and cultural. Kind of like a GECK but vaster and with an AI. A decision a protagonist might have to make is that the only way to preserve the society at Boulder is by reviving ZAX, and doing so requires dismantling Diana. On the one hand, she's a mad computerized cult leader, but on the other she is a holder of vast tribal knowledge and survivalist data that if she goes, so does it. Alternatively players could help the Twin Mothers search for their Goddess and the Nursery (Especially dramatic if it's during the Legion's conquest, as you could be leading the very last survivors to sanctuary)

Original Content (from my campaign):

Pleasant Hills:
A town of Prospectors built around pre-war landfill /garbage mountains. The townsfolk have effectively created mining tunnels into the garbage mountains to salvage/prospect the stuff. The mayor of the town sells "tickets" to Wastelanders for entry into the mines, where they can salvage to their hearts content. There's risk obviously, with mutant bugs and cave-ins, but the main problem is a specific breed of mutant bug that eats through the salvage/junk has started breeding like crazy and is slowly destroying all the garbage, which is the town's main source of income (They sell to non-legion communities in Arizona and New Mexico). The Trashbugs are a lot like the Ant-Lions of Half-Life in effect. The mayor is paying an expedition of mercenaries to transport a drill into the heart of the biggest junk-mountain, drilling into where they believe the trashbug queen's nest is, and kill the damn thing. It turns out the thing is nesting on a still-functioning micro-fusion reactor, and has grown to gigantic size.

The surrounding town would be your typical pseudo-western Junktown kinda vibe, with all the local problems one might encounter in such a seedy location. Gambling debts, wronged townsfolk, petty feuds et cetera.

Sun-Tree:

A mostly self-sufficient survivalist community reminiscent of Shady Sands. A town built around pre-war "Solar Trees" (these are real things btw), effectively large pylons with circular/disc-shaped solar panelling at the top providing shade underneath and solar power. Under each of these pylons people have constructed their homes in the shade, wiring the power directly from the "trees" into their homes. Excess power is fueled into forming Small Energy Cells, which the town sells. Within the various outer-rings of the town, non-functional solar-trees have been stripped of their components in order to repair the others, and transformed instead into "protein farms", effectively circular troughs of viscous goo-soil. A mix of battery-acid run off from the Energy Cell creation process, some chemical stimulants and the irradiated soil. It proves a fertile breeding ground for a unique type of fat mutant worm/larvae that reproduce and thrive only in this battery-acid trough. The town occasionally pays tribute (or at times ransom) to Raiders, but otherwise the townsfolk live largely uneventful lives. If you were to start a game in Colorado somewhere, here might not be a bad place.

White-Liners:

Effectively a nomadic community of gypsy-like people likely to become completely tribal within the next generation or two. For the moment they resemble your more traditional Road Warrior Wastelanders, but they're getting there. Colorado is a rough place, and there aren't many places that are suitable for fertile settlement. So, they keep on the move. Always. They set up large, sprawling camps along sections of the Highways. Rumour has it they have a mapped network of secret routes and supply caches, but they'd never share it with anyone outside their group. To the right trusted people, the White-Liners make excellent couriers.
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Also I was thinking of changing Buchanan’s Brigade up somehow. Maybe instead of trying to continue the Enclave’s ideals, they just become extremely powerful raiders, or just try and set up a normal, peaceful community of people
 
ElloinmorninJ said:
Jesus I just had an idea! What if stored in the Nursery is something called “The Great G.E.C.K”? Like, it’s a normal GECK on steroids. About the size of small car, it has the ability to refertilize the entire region of Colorado. That would be super cool. Maybe many of the factions in CO are fighting over its use.
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In my opinion a G.E.C.K is pretty played out as the 'macguffin' of a Fallout game at this point, it would be way more interesting to have the main plot center around a the virus or perhaps even the B.O.M.B platform from Van Buren.
 
Thanks for the compliments!

ElloinmorninJ said:
Also I was thinking of changing Buchanan’s Brigade up somehow. Maybe instead of trying to continue the Enclave’s ideals, they just become extremely powerful raiders, or just try and set up a normal, peaceful community of people
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I think having less connections to prior existing factions is always a good thing. "Buchanan" could literally be a cult of personality would-be fascist strongman that emerged at some point in Colorado's history in the 200 years since the Great War that has since died and his community changed or collapsed, and the Brigade are effectively what remains of his legacy. You could have nice interactions with other communities in Colorado that remember who Buchanan was and would likely hold strong opinions or generational grudges about it, which may or may not hold merit dependant on how the Brigade is. Are they Buchanan's legacy because they're only literally ran by his offspring? Or are they his legacy because they continue his ideals? You could explore ideas of the burden of "Sins of the Father" or on the lasting poison of evil ideologies beyond their time and place.

It gives a nice bit of independent history and flavour to Colorado that makes it feel like a real place and not just "another Fallout map" whereas tying everything back into the same thing is universe shrinking IMO.

I think an area unexplored in Fallout is theological societies. We get taste of it with New Canaan, but I think an entirely post-war religion that is for the first time experiencing ideological schisms or debate over its own history would be really interesting.
 
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