Fallout

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"War. War never changes."

– Ron Perlman

"War has changed."

– Solid Snake, being a contrarian as always.

Fallout is a post-post-apocalyptic video game series, with a boardgame released in 2017 (see below), that takes place in America about a century or two in the future where America had been bombed so much that it has been left as a irradiated, smelly and depressing wasteland that happens to have high as fuck raiders come up to you and attempt to kill you with a flaming chainsaw or a laser weapon.

Despite the setting, most of the games are fairly noblebright, with a darkly humorous streak and a series-long theme of rebuilding. The freedom of approach to how you interact with the world set before you is one of the main selling points of the series, though it has attracted criticism for becoming somewhat unfocused in both writing and gameplay. Some say that this was magnified by Bethesda, while others say it's always been like that. And that's all we'll say on that for now.

Plot and Setting

For those wanting an in-depth analysis of the Fallout storyline, the "Fallout Storyteller" Youtube series has a large number of (mostly accurate) episodes dealing with the subject and can be viewed here.

Basically, while technology continued to advance past the 50-60's, the culture did not, which is one of the biggest sources of hilarity in the game. Imagine a lady in a pink diner dress, high heels and curly, blonde hair run up to you with a nuke-launcher on the back and try to sell some drugs to you that could enhance you to the level of a Space Marine for hours while jingoistic jazz music blares from radios that were built in the 2040's. All because some dipshit forgot to invent semiconductors and global idea exchanges slowed, the ham-fisted, pin-up U.S post-WW2 culture endures for a century.

From there, imagine the future as depicted in 1950s-era sci-fi media, then picture the US and China nuking the shit out of each other. Between that, the release of a bio-weapon that mutates living things which was itself mutated, and the general inability of anyone to get civilization's shit together for more than ten minutes at a time, the world remains for the most part a radioactive shithole even after over 200 years since the bombs dropped. It's not the nukes that killed humanity, but it's inability to agree on the most obvious shit.

Not helping matters (at least in the States) is that the pre-war underground-bunker living Vault Dwellers, intended as the best hope for repopulating the world, are either woefully unprepared for this hellscape or are just as messed up as everyone else. See, the Vault's were nominally only partly intended as fallout shelters. Their creators often added unusual conditions as experiments (nominally for testing conditions for space colonisation but occasionally for shits and giggles) ranging from quirky (like only giving glove puppets as entertainment) or downright fucking messed up (like gradually dosing the vault dwellers with hallucinogens and rage amplifiers over time). Naturally, most games have you starting as a Vault Dweller.

The Games

Fallout 1

I'm here to kick ass and chew bubble gum. I'm all out of gum.

Eighty four years after the bombs fell, a resident of Vault 13 in California is chosen to leave the Vault to find a replacement unit for the Vault's damaged water chip, which controls the water recycling system. This Vault Dweller, in his search for his prize, discovers that the world is (sort of) safe to return to, as many others had. He also discovers a major threat to the nascent human rebuilding: the Master's Army. This army of Super Mutants is the tool of the mutant known as The Master, who intends to turn the entire human race into Super Mutants to unite mankind into one whole and bring an end to conflict and war. The Vault Dweller manages to stop the Master, though it is not known if he talked him down or blew him up, and return to the Vault with his prize only to be exiled for being "contaminated" by contact with the outside world. Many other inhabitants of Vault 13 choose to leave with him, traveling north and founding the village of Arroyo.

Fallout 2

You get to visit New Reno, the scummiest of all pits in Fallout games.

The Vault Dweller's grandchild comes of age, passes a series of trials, and is then selected to find a sacred artifact from Vault 13: a Garden of Eden Creation Kit, which will rebuild the wasteland into a paradise. This Chosen One, in his search for his prize, discovers that the United States government is (sort of) still around and had abducted the people of Vault 13. He later learns that they are called the Enclave and had also abducted his tribe in his absence when he found Vault 13 himself. So the Chosen One travels to the Enclave's base of operations, a Poseidon Energy oil rig, to free the captives, find the GECK, and destroy the Enclave, helping (or breaking) towns along the way. Despite being regarded as the best of the classic Fallout games it was rushed to meet a Christmas deadline with large sections of the game cut for time. These have since been re-added and bug fixed through modding and is considered required to get the full and proper Fallout 2 experience.

Fallout Tactics

"Fuck em"...*pukes*

In Fallout Tactics, the Midwestern Brotherhood of Steel began inducting tribes into its ranks in small numbers while defending the Wasteland against threats such as an army of renegade robots. The main group of the Brotherhood is separated from this group, which takes over Vault 0 and continues pushing eastwards. Although the bulk of Fallout Tactics is non-canon, the basic story (and some elements such as airships and Nuka Cherry) remained canon.

Fallout: Brotherhood Of Steel

Unintentionally meta.

Three Initiates to the Brotherhood, one strangely enough being a Ghoul despite how much the Brotherhood hates both outsiders and mutants, are sent to go find missing Paladins despite how illogical it is to send three fresh recruits after several high ranking veterans in power armor. They wound up being aided by the Vault Dweller, who was still alive at the time, and take out another Super Mutant army. At one point you wipe out the entire population of a town of Ghouls because they don't accept humans but you need to get to the other side and apparently can't be arsed to just walk around it, despite the fact you may in fact be playing as a Ghoul with absolutely no humans for miles who's entire backstory was humans wiped out his town...

Completely non-canon.

Fallout 3

"Scenic overlook". Gotta love them 4th wall breaches!

The series turns into Skyrim/Oblivion with guns and good graphics graphics that always have looked like shit, and always will look like shit.. Many cheers were had...And sometimes RAGE. The beautiful mangled graphics and faster Janky as fuck pace was not worth it. The new power armour mechanics have a barely functioning FUCKING HUNK of metal that can't block damage for shit. Wear some leather jacket and inject your balls with heroi- I mean Med-X, and you'll have the same defense without carrying a ton of armor on you.

Two hundred years after the Great War, a civil war breaks out in Vault 101 after its head physician, James, leaves. His child then escapes the chaos in search of him. This Lone Wanderer, in his search for his father, discovers that he was not born in Vault 101 as he had been led to believe, but in Rivet City, and his father had been working on "Project Purity" to purge the radiation from the Potomac River. Following his father's trail, the Lone Wanderer eventually comes into conflict with the resurgent Enclave which wants to take the project for itself.

Fallout: New Vegas

The cold, cold road to hookers, drugs, street violence and rock 'n roll.

In 2281, the New California Republic and Caesar's Legion are staring at each other across the Colorado River, having fought over Hoover Dam once before. Against this backdrop, a courier is shot for his charge, a poker chip made of platinum, and buried in a shallow grave. He's dug out by a Securitron robot and taken to Dr. Mitchell of Goodsprings, who saves his life. This Courier, in his search for his prize, travels around the Mojave Wasteland in pursuit of his attempted murderer, Benny, the head of the Chairmen, who runs the Tops casino in New Vegas. Eventually, all three major players in the Mojave (the NCR, the Legion, and Mr. House) want the Courier to do their dirty work to gain control over the Mojave, but there is a fourth option: Benny's plan was to use a subverted Securitron named Yes Man to take over House's network and use the platinum chip (actually a data disc containing a firmware upgrade for the Securitrons) to secure control over New Vegas. Whatever the Courier chose, the Second Battle of Hoover Dam is inevitable and only one faction can win.

That's the main story anyway. The DLC depicted a more personal plotline, all revolving around a similar theme - one person, usually you, being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time.

Jokes aside, this is one of the most atmospheric settings in all of games out there.

Whilst releasing as a buggy janky hot mess, the game was lauded as a return to the style and atmosphere of the first two games, albeit with decent additions to 3's rpg light formula and taking notes from the most popular mods released for 3, like survival mods, first person aiming, weapon addons, etc. It's now pretty stable to play.

Fallout 4

Colours in a Fallout game? What a time to be alive.

In Boston at the zero hour of the war, new parents are admitted to Vault 111 and placed in cryogenic suspension. One of them is murdered, their infant child Shaun stolen, and the other refrozen. When the cryo systems fail, the only survivor of Vault 111 heads to the surface in pursuit of the man who ruined a family. This Sole Survivor, in pursuit of his (or her) prize- I mean child, discovers that two hundred years have passed. As he travels, he encounters the last of the Minutemen and goes to Diamond City (built on the ruins of Fenway Park) following a lead. He finds the people paranoid about an organization called "The Institute" replacing anybody they know with near-perfect replicas called synths, and further investigation points to the Institute having abducted Shaun. He can work with the Minutemen, the Brotherhood of Steel, or the synth emancipation group known as the Railroad to fight the Institute, or choose to join it instead.

It was also the game that got power armour right after the letdown of 3 and NV by turning you into a nearly unstoppable tank but limiting it's usage with power cores that were scarce at the beginning of the game - seriously, you get a full suit of Power Armour within the first hour of the game.

Fallout 76

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No, you didn't miss Fallout 5 to 75. Its the newest addition to the franchise, announced during E3 2018.

Fallout 76 takes a different approach to the game and goes for a multiplayer-focused experience with a focus on player-player driven interaction, instead of player-NPCs (essentially, they're advertising it as being populated with real people), with a heavy emphasis on Co-op and PvP, rather than pure PvE, and also on stronghold building like what we've seen in FO4. Or at least it was promised to at any rate.

The mere move of shifting from a single-player narrative to a pure multiplayer game already had the fanbase engaging in "friendly debates" with each other, given the goodwill Bethesda had earned over its history (whatever the skub above may indicate, its primarily nitpicks or a fairly small minority of grognards and contrarians who had major gripes previously). For the record, unlike SOME companies, Bethesda openly stated that the game is just to keep fan interest in Fallout going until Fallout 5, and that they're okay with fans of traditional Fallout games not getting into it the same way they don't mind fans of TES games not getting into The Elder Scrolls: Online until whatever comes after Skyrim gets made.

On November 14, 2018 the game was released and was universally reviled by all but the most staunch of fans (as well as those suffering from the sunk cost fallacy, a principle that leads people who have invested financially or emotionally into something to defend it tribally to prevent confronting a sense of having lost). Generally speaking all of these were easy to predict, given all Bethesda games for The Elder Scrolls and Fallout run on the same game engine which is ancient by gaming standards and generally only runs well because in a singleplayer game you can mod out the bugs and reload from a save when something goes haywire. The game is of course plagued with numerous optimization issues for both PCs and consoles, the usual bugs that Bethesda can't be bothered to fix despite fans releasing the "Unofficial (game) Patch within mere days of launch for every single one of their games so the fix is the complete opposite of too arcane to solve (not the least of which involves an incident where one group set off three nukes at the same time and crashed an entire server). In addition the entire multiplayer experience was executed horribly, since the game is extremely easy (sometimes because buggy enemies just don't do anything when shot at) and receiving the same amount of experience points and loot means you're actively hindered by cooperating, and in an effort to prevent griefing (read: That Guy but for video games) any PvP interaction requires one player to shoot the other, then the other to shoot back to enter into a duel which usually involves running around trying to exhaust each other's ammo followed by an easy beatdown, with virtually no reward or penalty beyond the ammo spent and an insignificant amount of caps changing hands. Overall: it sucks and failed in it's task of keeping interest alive, because nobody's interested in picking up the game. Bethesda followed it up by taking the usual defensive positions used by companies they have literally mocked in the past for doing the same thing, in particular accusing reviewers of being part of the "youtube hate machine", although thankfully without any accusations of sexism (possibly because there's nothing to be sexist about, not that it would keep some companies from trying the argument anyway).

There's a main questline, albeit one that's largely the same as regular repeated quests (probably by design since it kind of serves as a tutorial for most of the elements of the game), but thanks to the lack of NPC interaction or complexity (read: any choices at all) its largely dismissed by the fanbase as not really being a main quest or story. All the lore in Fallout 76 comes from what before was just a type of minor quest, like delves into dungeons and one-man assaults on towns full of hostiles where you can gather the story from looking around at the skeletons, reading notes, and listening to audio records on holotapes. The bulk of these just serve either to explain monsters you fight or give minor stories to the destroyed towns, with the main quest being dealing with a new type of enemy, the "Scorched". Of note is thanks to few bombs dropping literally on the region and the immediate time the game takes place (so very few raiders have gotten there before the players) you get more post-apocalyptic logs of people in the immediate aftermath. Since most of Appalachia had been automated with robots (despite far more populated areas and places that literally produced robots not reaching that extent) they can deliver quests as prerecorded messages, dropoff points, or merchants, without using NPC humans or mutants (so yeah, no chance at a talking Deathclaw again). At least players being able to nuke each other explains why the quite livable Wasteland went to shit; the residents of Vault 76, the resettlement Vault, seemingly decided to nuke America many more times so it'd take another 100 years to be safe again. Fallout 76 also added a large number of new mutants and monsters (despite Super Mutants being a large focus again) which can be used later in better entries. Despite its flaws, the game is at least being praised for its construction of a fantastic world (despite reusing F4 assets) and its sometimes amazingly creative monsters which are inspired by real life folklore and urban legends. Its possible that a lot of the Wasteland folks are descended from the Vault 76-ers, and given how insane the playerbase and intended interactions are (like nuking yourselves "just because" or giving fingerguns constantly because its a simple interaction with other players) they might explain some of the bandit groups and silly side factions in chronologically later games.

The main story goes like this: Vault 76 itself was created to celebrate the Tricentennial (for the non-Americans or just people too young to remember 1976, _____tennials are 100 year celebrations since the establishment of America in 1776 and are about as patriotic as Americans get outside of the months following 9/11). Vault 76 was, as far as we know, the only (canon) Vault actually intended for resettlement of a post-apocalyptic world, with no sabotage experiment opening only 25 years after the bombs fell so the pre-war is still in living memory. Given how lush and relatively safe (or at least as safe as the rest of the world is around 200 years later) most Vaults were just redundant after the actual bombs falling, adding some extra darkness to the previous games. The Vault 76 Overseer had secret orders from Vault Tec, and the player character(s?) were selected to be among her elite group. She directs, via holotape of course, players to find a group called the Responders, made up of conspiracy theorists (more on them below) banding together with anyone with authority such as police, fire departments, and medical officials to try and save anyone left alive. The Responders were wiped out (get used to that, EVERYONE including the fucking Raiders are already dead) but left behind their stockpiles of food and water, as well as training materials (that'll be another thing you'll get a LOT of) for the resettlement of the region. The Overseer also wants her special 76 squad to take control of all remaining nuclear weapons, which was what the Vault Tec orders were.

The problem is there's a new type of enemy to the series which are taking center stage as being possibly the apocalypse after the apocalypse. A type of fungus exists deep underground, and due to the Brotherhood Of Steel (more on them later) finding an underground lab its possible it was created by one of the mad science prewar groups. Scorchbeasts are what happens when bats that lived deep underground in a gigantic cave system beneath Appalachia were exposed to the fungus, causing them to grow to giant sizes. When food supplies in the cavern complex grows low or their numbers grow too high, they tunnel to the surface to eat humans and whatever else they find. The humans they don't burn to a crisp and/or eat are infected by the fungus, resulting in a new type of zombie-like enemy (providing a secondary type of Ghoul in the game) who look like they burned to death. Said new enemies are called Scorched, and represent the bulk of the enemies in the game. Scorched are still fully capable of remembering who they were as humans, often falling back into activities or behavior patterns they did in life, but the fungus links them to a hivemind and they behave like Feral Ghouls who can still use guns and complex melee weapons once confronted by non-Scorched. Scorched have a mineral called ultracite growing in their skin for unknown reasons, which emits a radioactive signal allowing them to be tracked as well as making them physically weak to a depleted form of the substance (no reason for any of this is given). Scorched eventually petrify into human-shaped statues, which break when attacked and release radiation (possibly also spores of the fungus, but its unstated). Scorchbeasts themselves attack partially by spreading radiation, also presumably spores. If any of that seems odd and not to go together...well, it doesn't. Be prepared for some of it to make sense in DLC updates.

The player finishes the vaccine the Responders were working on to the Scorched Plague, too late to save anyone but the Vault 76 survivors, and is tasked with finding a group of anti-Scorched Responders called the Fire Breathers. The Fire Breathers are a combination of survivalist conspiracy-theorists (who were of course correct about most/all of their assumptions, because Fallout) called the Free States that had been in conflict with local governments prewar (parodying the homegrown terrorism of the 1980's and 1990's in real life) who began working with the Responders. Players become a Fire Breather using prewar training they had set up before finding out that they had basically set up sensors to detect them, which have now been destroyed by raiders and natural elements. After repairing them you are given a post-war plan to have the Brotherhood Of Steel (yeah, they're fully set up only 25 years later) to provide the dakka needed to take on the Scorched...but they've all been wiped out too of course. The plan of the Paladin in charge was to use the nukes to seal away the Scorchbeast tunnels, then work on eliminating remaining Scorched (has the word "Scorch" lost all meaning yet? If not, you clearly haven't played the game).

You're directed to a bunker for government officials using info from a Senator who supported the Free States, where you ally with an Enclave AI named MODUS who they isolated from its key functions before ALSO being wiped out. You restore MODUS's ability to access government surveillance, and upon seeing that the Scorched really are what you told it they were you're given tasks so it can promote you as a member of the Enclave so that you can launch the nukes yourself, something MODUS cannot actually do. Once you have the rank you just need the launch codes and keycards, found on the corpses of government officials and robots. During this you find out the Vault 76 Overseer is dead, as well as finishing her backstory in which she had originally been selected to be Overseer of Vault 101 (the Fallout 3 Vault) but declined in order to remain in her home state, as well as rejecting her fiance for access to Vault 76 in favor of people more suited to its mission since she's a fanatical follower of Vault Tec and a true believer in Dwellers of 76 actually repopulating the world. She tracked her fiance down, finding he had become a Scorched and her last wish being for you to lay him to rest. Once that's done you launch the nuke at the main Scorched tunnel which spawns a Scorched Queen boss. In theory you kill it, but there's no actual directive for you to do so and no actual end to the game story other than launching that nuke which completes the last main story quest. This counts as the main storyline being done, with no cutscene or exit narration at any point whether you kill the queen bat or not. From here on out you just pursue minor plots and do whatever. The Scorchbeasts will keep coming and Scorched will keep appearing, so its basically your job to keep them at bay. Or not, its not like there's a questline for it or any major rewards anymore, and the actual preview for the game was nuking other players, so...time to fuck up the world worse and keep continuity for the rest of the series.

The minor plots are as follows:

• Super Mutants, as always, are bumming around. This time its because of the West Tek headquarters literally being in the region. They had been working on ways to cure world hunger, and that research was abandoned when they decided to use what they were working on to instead just create the FEV virus. It was tested on a small town called Huntersville by initially abducting people and turning them into Super Mutants directly, and when the results became clear (angry hulks with diminished memories who are very aware something is wrong and thus too belligerent to take orders) they introduced FEV to the water supply in smaller amounts to see if it produced better monsters. The town was put under military quarantine, and it seems some of the healthier people were executed. The bombs fell during the experiment, and the FEV vats within the West Tek HQ were neutralized by survivors, meaning that all the Super Mutants roaming the region are the original inhabitants of Huntersville, interestingly putting a cap on the maximum number of them there can possibly be (although there could be some leftover contamination from the water, which doesn't matter given that players will drink and eat the wild agriculture from the region without mutating). So yeah, another excuse for Super Mutants but still preventing them from using the same explanation again in the future.
• A companion to the Silver Shroud comicbook quest from Fallout 4, a character in his shared universe called Mistress of Mystery was getting a television show. You can loot the clothing of the actress off her corpse, while also finding out she was in charge of actual female spies and the entire show was just a cover for one of their operations, and run around pretending to be either her or the comic character as you please (if you wonder why there's a lot of screencaps and video of male characters all wearing the same women's dress, you now know why) as well as a nice little "fuck you" from the writers of 76 parodying fanboys angry about lore on a computer terminal.
• In a similar vein to joining the Fire Breathers and Enclave via robot tasks and training, you can also join the army and become executive of a mining company.
• A LOT of "robots don't know the world ended" stuff. Maintaining a theme park, fixing up a town, organizing a picnic, delivering mail, delivering emergency supplies to towns with no survivors, big game hunting to add a collection of the new mutant species to a lodge, listening to the bedtime stories of a nanny Mr. Handy that's gone insane and now talking to mannequins, be mistaken as an escaped convict as a prison, help put another town back together but instead of working as assistant to an AI mayor you instead are appointed the new mayor by the overworked AI who then becomes YOUR assistant, and so on.
• The game continues to remind you the bombs dropped in the Halloween season with quests involving obtaining a clown costume and carving pumpkins for a robot.
• Find out about the hippie movement of the time in a mansion full of meditation tapes...which play as swarms of enemies attack.

On the Tabletop

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Fallout: The Board Game

A 1-4 player game produced by Fantasy Flight Games. You and up to three other players take the roles of different people in the wasteland. You can be the following, a ghoul, who gains health from rads but has less maximum health, the super mutant, who gains XP by gaining rads, the Brotherhood of Steel outcast, who starts the game with power armor, the wastelander, who starts with a tire iron, and the vault dweller, who starts with a vault suit, which you can have another clothing item over. You can also play the game solo. You use a Pip-Boy like rectangular board to keep track of your special tokens, used for rerolling dice, both in combat and skill checks, if you get one you already have, you get to select one of the two perk cards for that special stat whic( are very useful., It also displays your health and rads, and your XP. There are also other tokens, such as the vilified or idolized tokens, or the synth or super mutant tokens. There are four campaigns that come with the game, The Captiol Wasteland, The Commonwealth, Far Harbor, and The Pitt. The goal of each is to gain the most influence, which you do by completing quests, which you do by scavenging or shopping for things like weapons, armor, companions, or random junk. There are multiple types of enemies in the game, humans, represented by a skull, pests, represented by a radroach, robots represented by a mr. Handy, super mutants, represented by a DNA helix, and super tough enemies, represented by a deathclaw head. The terrain for the game is represented by cardboard hexagons, some have a green back, others have a red, the map on the back of the campaign you choose to play tells you where to put what tile. Each campaign will also have two factions, represented by a star and a shield. Some quests will increase star or shields influence, meaning you move the toke higher, as the factions get more influence, their enemies gets better, however, some influence cards let you flip them over to declare your loyalty to that faction, meaning they won’t attack you. Buying stuff is pretty easy, if you have caps (red are one, blue are five) you can shop by doing a shop action at any settlement.

Fallout: Warfare

A tabletop wargame based on the Fallout Tactics spin-off game, and released alongside it in 2001. Made by the lead designer of the original Fallout, Chris Taylor, and can be downloaded here.

RPGs

There are a few systems for Nuka-Cola addicts to get their fill on the tabletop. The first is Exodus, licensed under the d20 System, which was originally going to be an official Fallout RPG until copyright disputes with Bethesda and Interplay prompted the publishers to file off the serial numbers and call it a "spiritual successor". It departs heavily from the canonical setting, and is mechanically weak, but a flexible GM will find it otherwise serviceable.

For purists, there is also J.E. Sawyer's Fallout Role-Playing Game, an original system that uses d100 rules, much like Dark Heresy only a thousand times more complicated. It is still in development and will probably never be finished, but all material can be found for free on its official wiki.

Originally, Fallout was going to be mechanically based on GURPS but due to Steve Jackson's signature controlling nature (the GURPS licence was pulled because SJ didn't like the vault boy icons) the GURPS licence was dropped and the series went with the SPECIAL system that is in use today. GURPS fans have created a Fallout suppliment that can be found here.

In addition, some cool anons have created a scenario book for Fallout that focuses on the Louisiana wastes. Check it out here. It's pretty good.

What appears to be the first official tabletop adaptation(barring the board game that came with Fallout Tactics, Fallout:Warfare) comes from Modiphius Entertainment in 2017: Fallout: Wasteland Warfare.

A new homebrew tabletop RPG based on Fallout, called Fallout d40, was released on the internet on Oct. 23rd, 2017, 60 years prior to the bombs dropping. It aims to give people a true Fallout tabletop RPG experience. The website for it is: https://falloutd40.wixsite.com/mainpage

Gallery

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  A Vault Girl pinup, wearing common Vault Tec clothing
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  A naive young girl from California with stars in her eyes and a pneumatic gauntlet on her hand. And an Enclave eyebot.
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  A common Mr Handy domestic robot
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  T-45 version of Power Armour
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  X-01 version of Power Armour
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  Power Armour modified by raiders
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See Also

• The Fallout Wiki
• Brother Vinni for not-Fallout miniatures.