The following is a recap of the first several sessions of one of the two tabletop campaigns I'm involved in. This one is for one I am running that's using Modiphus' Fallout 2d20 system. I'd do a similiar post for the other campaign, one using Pokemon Tabletop United, a fanproject/hack of pathfinder, but it's been ongoing for over a year at this point, and succinctly recapping it would be difficult. This started a couple months ago with spotty sessions, so I can recap it succinctly, and continue posting updates on it as the campaign progresses! I'll try to remember to add links to the next post to this one when it comes out. With all that said...
Tales of the Midnight Rangers
In the five years since the courier won the mojave, much had change. Though she fought for an independent vegas, she was happy to gift the NCR the rest of the Mojave, on the condition the recognize the Strip, Westside, and Freeside as seperate nations unwilling to colonizaiton and unwanting of the NCR's "help." The NCR agreed, not so much because it was a good deal, but because the courier had just succeeded in sending Caeser's legion packing and had made it clear she could do much the same to the NCR.
But for most folks, uninterested in high-minded ideas such as "politics" and more concerned with where they'll find their next meal, it didn't mean much aside from a stronger preesence of securitrons around Vegas. This circumstance is what lead to Vault 3, previously a hive of Fiends turned to a silent tomb by the courier, regaining some of its population from before things went to hell. Homesteaders from NCR, Vegas gamblers who had gone bust, vagrants and gadabouts, freaks and weirdos, all could find shelter and community there, so long as they didn't mind the scent of death and bloodstains.
It was on a strange autumn morning that four denizens of Vault 3 were called to the office of the community's defacto leader, Miss Miriam Roosevelt. Miss Roosevelt was not a born leader, and did not consider herself to be one even now, chafing against the title of "overseer" which so many had referred to her by. However, she was one of the first to come to Vault 3 after the Courier's liberation of the vault, and she was one of the few living denizens of Vault 3 from before the fiend takeover. She knew her way around, and people listened when she spoke. When she called for the vault's Doctor Handy (who most just called Doc), a talking deathclaw named Chase, a part-wolf super mutant called Fox, and the Luckiest man in the vault, Sam, people knew she had to have a reason for it.
It had turned out that, between her exodus from the vault and then her return to the vault, some data had been scraped from the hard drives of the vault's terminals. Miriam wanted to know who'd doen the deed and why, and her only lead was the one person she had known to have been in the vault in the interim years; The Courier. She had called on Doc, Chase, Fox, and Lucky Sam, because she could trust Chase and Fox to survive just about anything, Doc to patch them up afterwards, and Sam because, in her words, he "needs to go out more."
So the four strangers ventured off into a strange land indeed. They were jumped pretty early on by a group of thieves who had set an explosive trap near a gas station, taking pot shots but ultimately underestimating the combined force of a medical droid, two massive monsters, and one lucky sunuvabitch, but none were more caught off guard than oen of the lackies of the crew, who had a car tossed at him by Chase before being shot point blank by Sam.
The group made it to freeside not long after. There were some shady words exchanged with the local shop owner, Mick of Mick and Ralph's, before they found themselves stopped by the gate and needing to scrounge up 500 caps to pass a credit check. Luckily, the party had a talent for listening out for rumors and whispers, and quickly put together that an abandoned shop in Freeside, the Silver Rush, was rumored to have some loot stashed away somewhere, but nobody wanted to find it for fear of the building being haunted. When the party approached, it quickly became why the building was abandoned. Scortch marks, rendering the windows useless, covered the whole outer face. Laser gun fire. Shop owners must've pissed someone off. After Fox snapped the lock into the building in two, the inside didn't look much better. Seemed like others had already poked around and found just about anything you'd want from the place. A desperate search ensued, but no real headway came until Doc plugged himself into a terminal, first finding out that the assault on the place was almost certainly the courier's doing, and secondly finding a way to open a secret hatch into an underground worksite, loaded with 600 caps, an experimental plasma arm for a protectron, and 6 protectrons in charging bays. The problem was, they had no way to control said protectrons.
As the party stepped down into the secret lab, the protectrons whirred to life, pointing their laser arms at the party members and demanding to see ID. It was then that Doc interjected that he would like to see their ID, at which point the protectrons suddenly identified Doc as a government robot, and began demanding to see ID from each other, resulting in a surreal fight as the protectrons all became hostile to one another, firing and swinging their arms until all that was left was scrap metal and the loot.
With the caps they needed, plus a little extra, in hand, the party restocked on weapons, ammo, and supplies before passing the gate into the strip. Naturally, they made a beeline to the Lucky 38 casino, where the Courier had her office on the top floor. Unfortunately, a securitron explained that the courier was busy, and they could schedule an appointment for an hour from then. The party agreed, and immediately instead turned their attention to gambling. Lucky Sam and Doc (using Fox as a pair of arms that could properly hold cards), together just about doubled the party's wealth in a really good few rounds of Poker and Blackjack, before everyone doubled back to finally speak with the Courier.
The courier spoke clamly, directly, and slightly madly, leading with a bit of a mind game, stating that her pipboy measures her vitals, and if she goes offline for an hour, will send a data package to every securitron under her to view all life as a threat, and if she goes offline for 24 hours, to set off a nuke under New Vegas, admitting all this could be a bluff, and admitting that her saying it could be a bluff could also be a bluff, and that it's in the partys' best interest to not find out. The party agreed, and discussions began. The courier had not taken the data, but said she knew who did. She couldn't tell the party who had taken it, why they had taken it, or even where they were, but said she could part with the information with someone she could trust; someone who works for her. She tasked the party with finding out the whereabouts of Mister New Vegas, the host of Radio New Vegas, who occasionally commented on the courier's travels, but who nobody had ever seen hide nor hair of. Her best guess at a starting point was doing something newsworthy and then keeping an eye out for any reporters, or speaking to her radio specialist friend, Raul Tejedo. The party headed out for Raul's shack right away.
After a very eventufl day, however, the party agreed that maybe some rest was in order, camping out in the Silver Rush, which they had effectively now claimed as their home base. The next morning, they even hired some construction works to install some workbenches, power supplies, and lighting.
The trip to Raul's was pretty uneventful aside from a brief brush with some giant ants, and Raul himself was a bit more forthcoming than the courier, mentioning that her interest in Mister New Vegas is in part because she's trying to launch her own radio station and she wants to take out the only other game in town. He also mentioned he was working on a sonic device to deal with the giant ants near his shack, so when Doc plugged himself into Raul's radio station and was quickly able to get through the military-grade encryption and pinpoint the source of the Radio New Vegas signal, he asked the party go to the warehouse he was going to send them to pick up supplies for that project instead, and the party agreed, especially since the station was right near the warehouse.
Visiting the warehouse was a whole other matter. Raul had warned that the rumor was the place was booby trapped and set to pop like a balloon at any time, but when they party entered (via a hole Chase made in a wall) they found no explosives. Not even deactivated ones. Hearing some sound on the upper levels, the party quickly put together someone had nabbed up all the bombs in this place, and because of how they entered, they probably didn't have long until shit would start getting hairy. As they moved to set up an ambush, a grenade came falling through a hole in the roof before a mine was set off and three people in NCR Correctional Facility jumpers landed down: The party had been caught by Powder Gangers. The powder Gangers each had racks of explosives tied to their shirts, along with a bag of loot in one hand and a tire iron in the other, but made it clear they weren't looking for a fight. Scared as they were, now that they knew their enemy had a deathclaw in their ranks, they made it clear the party were at a disadvantage, that they'd blow themselves up to take the party out, and things would go even stevens, just so long as they could leave. The party agreed, but had fingers crossed behind their back, as Sam landed a headshot on the last one out the door.
A big fight broke out, a mess of claws, metal, explosives, molitov cocktails, and gunfire, but in the end the party were victorious, and the only surviving powder ganger was one that made the wise decision to drop his stuff he had collected and ran for the hills.
Next FOTTRPG Recap (coming soon!)