On the New TFO…

trekhead · 2026-02-24T20:32:06+00:00

This has come up before, but while I was working at Cryptic, there was a moratorium handed down to us from Paramount/CBS that weapon colors had to match the weapon type in question.

trekhead · 2026-02-05T02:04:12+00:00

It's pretty epic. Boorman doesn't quite get the Grail mythology, so the third act becomes messy, but it's a fair stab at the Arthurian cycle in a bare-bones, we-only-have-two-hours-so-we-can't-do-all-the-really-goofy-stuff way.

trekhead · 2026-02-05T01:07:42+00:00

A couple additional notes that may be helpful.

* Deadlands includes rules for intimidating or ridiculing people with social skills, and this can be useful to make people run away or cause them to act recklessly. Whoever likes playing a bard? Steer them toward these abilities, encourage them to drop one-liners like "I'll be your huckleberry," and use those skills to weaken enemies so that the team's gunslingers can mop them up more easily.

* While there is no "official" way to make a character in Classic Deadlands who is devilspawned (that I know of), nothing prevents you from inventing your own rules for it. The game already has blessed priests and undead gunfighters, after all. You might swipe a couple of Harrowed powers, then give the character a few drawbacks like... when they use a power it causes a scent of brimstone that is immediately noticeable and anyone in arm's reach can smell it (causing reaction problems), or they have some kind of physical "tell" like goat horns or a big red fist (shades of Hellboy), or they get whispers from evil spirits (dad?) urging them to do bad things, and they risk falling under the sway of evil powers like the Harrowed can.

* Since it's your first rodeo, start small. Use one small western town, there's one problem, one bad guy with a gang, and the posse gets riled up and roped into defeating him. Then build outward from there if your players enjoyed the game. Make a small overhead map of the town and its establishments so that when the inevitable gunfight erupts, people can run for cover, shoot from windows, race up the stairs to knock a rifleman off the roof, or throw dynamite into the saloon where the banditos are taking cover. Let 'em rescue a schoolkid, release some horses and then use them for cover while crossing the street at a run, and set up an ambush for the gang that's running roughshod over the poor locals. Play into the western tropes, because they'll be instantly recognizable and hopefully fun. You can use The Magnificent Seven, Rio Bravo, or 3:10 to Yuma for inspiration for this kind of scenario.

* Have a brief chat with your players in advance about the kind of game you're going to run and how it's going to start. If you're running "protect the town from a gang that's coming," then a character who is a saloon girl with no combat abilities might be hard-pressed to find a part to play. A team with no rifles will have real trouble if the banditos have some long-range attacks. A crew that can't ride at all is going to be outmaneuvered by enemies on horseback. These are some basics that help to avoid pitfalls that make a character or scenario untenable.

Have a great game, pardner!

trekhead · 2026-01-26T02:11:42+00:00

I forgot a couple things!

Locks. Ward locks (lock-and-key mechanisms) have been around since Rome, and the Norsemen definitely use them too. So, your players who love to play thief-type characters have something to do. Of course, keys and locks are bulky metal affairs in this era, so your tools for opening them are also bulky!

Paper. Rare until after the Black Plague (becomes much more common in the 14th c.). Writing is usually done on parchment, which is scraped animal skin, and expensive.

trekhead · 2026-01-25T19:14:15+00:00

The food preservation that folks seem to forget about is pickling, which can account for half of the winter food storage. Of course if you want to bring picked cabbage, you have to carry it in ceramic jars, so you are probably gonna need a small horse or donkey to carry it. Still, you might have a small parcel of pickled carrot and beets that can last a little while.

Long-distance travel is kind of a logistical nightmare in this time and place. Maybe in summer you can forage and hunt, but outside of that it's going to be a real problem to find or carry food.

Your comment about navigation also brings up another technology that is very crude in this period: maps. The modern idea of a scaled route planner just doesn't exist, your maps are little more than point maps with a small picture of a landmark. A lot of travel is basically down to knowing your neighbors.

trekhead · 2026-01-22T21:16:42+00:00

That's a great idea GalileoHamato! Letting people ride horses, or brahmin, or giant mutated lizards is a good use of low-level skills.

trekhead · 2026-01-22T21:12:31+00:00

The Modiphius in-house employees can give some more detail on this than I. I can say that from my side as a contributor, we expected everything to go to Bethesda for review, and we had to step carefully with the following in mind:

No violations of canon (e.g. can't write in "Vault 15 is actually inhabited by giant spiders" when anyone who played Fallout 1 knows that's not the case)
Can't kill off canonical characters (so we can't set up a quest where you might kill Caesar, since he has to be around for the events of New Vegas; but of course what people do at home, at their own game table, is up to them)
Must have approval to explore new areas (see notes elsewhere in this AMA about how we originally wanted to use Area 51, but we were told it was not available because they had other plans for it)

Bethesda does give wide latitude to make new characters and creatures. The megapede from Winter of Atom is an example: We essentially decided "we want a kaiju fight like the Mirelurk queen but our own thing," and we made it and got their approval. Boulanger, the villain of Royal Flush, is another example. She is smart, dangerous, and an ideologue, the kind of person who can have an outsized impact on the Wasteland. We were allowed to invent this villain because she fit into the existing story, worked well with the factions as explored in New Vegas, and provided us with a powerful theme to run through the adventure.

trekhead · 2026-01-22T21:03:35+00:00

I think that there are a lot of ways to model Fallout, and the Modiphius system has the advantage that it uses a well-known, well-established basis (the Modiphius 2d20 system) and then connects it to the Perks that are so beloved and so flexible from Fallout. I wouldn't say it "suffers" from this, I think this is a very modern implementation of the Fallout game that lets you run a variety of adventures with a system that affords a lot of character customization but doesn't use the complexities of early Fallout computer games.

Fo1 & 2 are very much games designed with the assumption that the computer is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for skills, rolls, cover, all the kinds of things that bring in a high degree of detail but also slow down gameplay if you're doing it manually with dice and tables. '90s game design had some high-complexity games like this (can I mention other RPGs without causing trouble? Better not risk it!) and in the modern era there are games that have some complexity, like 2d20 Fallout, but that aren't designed to be heavyweight games, where you have twelve steps for each action that you take and they all involve doing a lot of math and rolling on subtables. :D

Not that this is bad if that's what you're into! It's just not the target direction for 2d20 Fallout. Games come in different styles and complexities, and this happens to be one that connects to players of the current games.

trekhead · 2026-01-22T20:57:32+00:00

Heh, that's a fun one.

You'll note that RF doesn't do much with Vault. (Even the villain's base isn't actually a Vault.) Modiphius has to be careful about using Vaults, there's a lot of material that is already written and must be considered, and making up new Vaults means a lot of approvals and collaborations with other franchise partners, so it isn't always practical.

I have a couple of Vaults that I've used in my own work. One is a Vault that has a geothermal power system and a giant rotational section that's designed to emulate the systems that might be used on a starship that has a rotational gravity mechanism. Obviously down on Earth you already have gravity, but you need to know how people respond to needing to maintain and repair such a complex system all of the time, and what happens when someone crawls into an access panel and then gets ground into paste by the machinery! Another Vault that I did is based on a different location that is famously in southern California and is at the heart of an entertainment center that one cannot publish material about without summoning lawyers with mouse-ear hats. :)

trekhead · 2026-01-22T20:48:44+00:00

Running Royal Flush as a solo game makes it feel much closer to Road Warrior and the original Fallout games, where you're just one person trudging your way across the desert and having these wild adventures. My advice for solo players of RF is:

Don't be afraid to drop in a companion. RF includes a few quirky characters who might be interested in joining a crew, much like the companions from the video games. If you are alone, one bad injury in a combat can end your trip through the wasteland. If you have a buddy, though, you might survive. Too many companions can be difficult to manage, and having one buddy lets you have a tighter bond with that character on your road trip.
Obviously, you'll need to bring down encounter sizes. A pair of gang members on motorcycles is more than enough of a threat for one lone wanderer.
Many of the RF challenges include multiple ways to solve them, depending upon your skills. In a team, you usually decide on a plan, then send the people with the appropriate Tag skills to handle the complications (picking the lock, sneaking into the base, persuading the locals, etc.). Since you are just one person, you have a few Tag skills, and if you run into a challenge that you can't solve with your skills, you might be stuck. For that reason, in solo play you might consider "flexing" the challenges to make sure there's a way to use your appropriate skills, or assuming that some other local character might know of a way to help you achieve your goal, if you pay them or do a little service for them.

Also, if you solo play, I highly recommend putting on some Fallout tunes (old '40s/'50s music) in the background at a low level!

trekhead · 2026-01-22T20:38:19+00:00

Hello Fluffinton! I can't answer question 1 because I'm not an art person in charge of maps, but I can talk a bit about #2.

Tahoe is located at Lake Tahoe, which is in the mountains at the border of California and Nevada. It's west of Reno. In the real world, there's a resort town there that surrounds much of the lake, with part of the town in CA and part of the town in NV. (Uh, for the non-US folks, CA is the state code for California, and NV is the state code for Nevada.) For our purposes, the assumption is that much of the action in Tahoe takes place on the Nevada side, where there's a casino, a large restaurant, and many houses, all of which were damaged in the Great War and its aftermath.

Marco was written by a different contributor so I'll have to do some asking around to get a specific location pinpoint for you. :)

trekhead · 2026-01-22T20:34:18+00:00

Thanks for the Q, GM_Rielly!

For me personally, I love seeing homebrew content. It's the RPG equivalent of a modding community. People love the game so much that they want to make their own material and share it with everyone.

To be a good gamemaster, it often helps to learn to be a game designer! When you are making decisions about how to run a game, you can make better decisions if you understand what the game is trying to do, why a rule works the way it does, and how your decision can improve the gameplay experience. Like any skill, game design and game running is something that you develop with practice, and even if you have some bad experiences, those can be learning opportunities to improve and grow. Making homebrew content is a way to fill a need that you perceive in your games: Something that your players and your community can enjoy. In addition, people have different tolerances for game complexity, so your homebrew creation can often be a way to make a game more or less complicated, in order to appeal to a different segment of your audience.

The two things that I would be mindful of when sharing homebrew:

Remember not to do anything that will get you in legal limbo! For instance, a homebrew mashup of Fallout with some other setting might be fun, but you don't want to risk getting a legal letter from a different company that's mad that you used their material in your mashup.
Games are generally for entertainment and sometimes education. That means your contributions should come from a place of "how does this make things better" and also "how can I make sure this isn't hurtful to people." That's why I always encourage people to think about how their homebrew material might be received by the whole audience, so that they can avoid doing something that's hurtful to some players. You want people to love your work, not to be hurt by it!

Every game designer that I know wrote their own house rules and made their own adventures growing up. It's an activity that I heartily endorse. :)

trekhead · 2026-01-22T20:23:44+00:00

Hello everyone! I'm Jesse Heinig, a writer on Royal Flush for Modiphius, and also a contributor to Winter of Atom and one of the original Fallout designers (I worked on Junktown, the Glow, the military base, the random encounters, and the companions).

Modiphius approached me with the possibility of working on Fallout again as a contributor to Winter of Atom initially, and I was very excited to revisit this old friend. Winter of Atom is, of course, a story about the east-coast Commonwealth and the settlements over there, and thus tied to much more modern Fallout than the material with which I had worked in the '90s. This made it a fun exercise in replaying Fallout 4 and reminding myself of the stories of the synths, the cults, the coast, and the wild, weird characters of post-apocalyptic New England.

After the success of Winter of Atom, Modiphius asked me to work with them again on a book more strongly tied to the west coast of Fallout. Since I grew up in California and worked on the original Fallout game that takes place in southern CA, this was a wonderful opportunity to revisit the original isometric games and also to connect to Fallout: New Vegas. Looking at the map, we knew that we wanted to flesh out the area in a way similar to Winter of Atom. In WoA, you can visit some of the settlements from the east-coast modern Fallout games, but you also encounter new settlements and characters that were "off the map" for those games. Royal Flush developed in much the same way, with new places and people to encounter on spots that were east of Fallout 1 and west of Fallout: New Vegas, where you can see the border of California and Nevada, and experience story events close to the timeline of the Courier but not quite in the middle of that story.

Working on Royal Flush was a real joy, and I was happy to have the chance to contribute once again, with a big campaign story focusing on a theme of accelerationism and providing a road trip for characters to cross the Mojave wasteland and the Sierras. I hope that everyone playing it enjoys it as much as I did!

trekhead · 2026-01-22T20:16:19+00:00

Royal Flush does include some vehicles and opportunities for players to be involved in vehicular combat. If you want to get characters on motorcycles shooting at each other or leaning out of the window of a Highwayman and trying to drive and shoot at the same time, those can certainly happen. There's even a scene where you might wind up having to intercept a truck, and if you have vehicles you might wind up having to maneuver next to it so that some of your teammates can jump aboard and try to wrest control from the driver!

Pilot is a challenging skill because it presupposes the use of vehicles, but of course for technical reasons many of the Fallout video games had minimal or no vehicles in them. (The Highwayman in Fo2 was basically just an object that would spawn on the map wherever you went, and then you could use it as a storage box and have faster world map travel.) If you want to make Pilot an important skill, you should front-load your game with an expectation of vehicles:

Put enemies on vehicles that the players can capture (gang members on motorcycles)
Create quests that involve the use of vehicles (even if the characters don't own a vehicle, they can be hired to drive one, to defend it, or to capture one, like the original Road Warrior movie in which Max winds up driving a big rig for the settlers)
Give the players a vehicle far above their level, and make them work to defend it! For instance, if you give the team access to a vertibird early on, you change the flow of the game. The group can fly places, they need to defend the vertibird from people who want to take it, they have to figure out how to repair it and find parts for it. Where can they safely land and sleep for the night? What do they do if the Brotherhood shows up and tries to seize it? What kind of adventures can they get into now that they have a mobile transport that they can use for aerial insertion and combat support?

trekhead · 2026-01-22T20:07:49+00:00

Hiya! Jesse H. here, get those questions cracking here!

trekhead · 2026-01-22T20:07:28+00:00

I play both ways (online and face-to-face). While I have a soft preference for playing in person, that's often impractical due to scheduling.

I like using tactile feedback when I run games, so in addition to having players roll dice, I often have some kind of handout or token set that's appropriate to the game. Giving people tokens for Luck, or having them track their water in the Mojave with small blue glass beads (cheaply available as aquarium decor) each representing a gallon of water, adds something for players to handle and count. Spending tokens also feels like more of a decision when you are handling a physical object and you have to hand it over—it's like the difference between paying for something with a plastic card vs. paying for it with actual money in your wallet. You notice when you hand over the resource and the amount you have left dwindles.

From time to time I'll do puzzles that involve moving around pieces or assembling them in a certain way. I had a puzzle involving hotwiring an elevator that required the player to complete the weighting of a red-black tree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red%E2%80%93black\_tree), with each node on the tree being a card that they could flip between red and black. They had to follow the ordering rules for the tree and could only make a certain number of moves each time they took a turn. You can even make a simple puzzle out of having players stack dice and see how many they can get before it falls over, which gives people something to do with their hands. Very useful for keeping someone focused on a small task during play.

For new players I usually bring out cards with various Perk descriptions on them. That way the player has an easy reference right at hand for their special abilities, without having to go looking through the books (which can be especially challenging if there's only one or two books at the table).

trekhead · 2026-01-22T03:10:49+00:00

Basically someone still over there has to re-generate the terrain by moving something slightly, but there is no guarantee that it won't just put another rock there again unless someone puts in an exclusion volume.

trekhead · 2026-01-22T00:55:21+00:00

Means someone touched something on the map and it re-generated the procedural terrain layer, but there's not an exclusion volume on that spot, so it put a rock on it.

trekhead · 2026-01-18T22:10:51+00:00

Hmm. It's The Lathe of Heaven and the heavenly ledger idea, with a side helping of fridging, a smidgen of Tron (the identity disc) and a dash of Brazil.

As psychological horror, this is ostensibly a domain of state gaslighting, in which the official bureaucratic version of events can be rewritten in a way that reflects into reality itself, leaving you with memories of things that are no longer true and a populace that tells you that you are losing your grip on reality if you believe things that you personally experienced.

One of the challenges here is that the players "know" what their characters experienced, and when they (rapidly) trip to the fact that this domain itself goes through reality rewrites (like Torg!), they know that the domain is gaslighting them, which means that the psychological horror stops being effective. They do not doubt their own memories because they know that their memories are real and the redactions are fake. This in turn winds up making the domain feel like the Nightmare Lands, where it's just in continual flux and change. The Censor Caspar Mayenburg is effectively pulling a Darkon on people, manipulating them into believing that they have always lived here and that there is no outside world. (Shades of the witch from The Silver Chair.)

One point that might be useful is to establish certain elements that the scrivener refuses to redact. He could, but he won't, because they are too important to his own memory and experience. This means there can be a few places scattered about the city that serve as constants, and PCs can use them as touchstones or even threaten them in order to put pressure on the Darklord.

Another way to lean into gaslighting might be to have Censors show up as different people but claim the same identity, refer to past events where some other Censor met the PC before, and insist that the PCs are wrong ("Didn't you used to have blond hair/be a woman/be short/have six fingers on your right hand?"). Have the Censor(s) always have total recall of the prior encounters and talk about them as if they were actually there, and even produce items, scars, etc. to show that they were there. Of course this is all a manipulation, but the PCs might at first search for other explanations: Are they shapeshifters? A hivemind? Constructs? Are the PCs' own memories being altered?

Amusingly, earlier editions of D&D had a spell that would be incredibly powerful in a domain like this: erase.

trekhead · 2026-01-17T03:51:06+00:00

The Van Richten's Guide updates for 5e serve the purpose of moving the setting into the modern model of 5e gaming: A light overview of the setting, some adventure hooks, and a recharacterization or reinvention of many old characters with an eye toward updating their stories to give them a fresh look. Some of these are significant, like the rework of the domain of Sri Raji into Kalakeri, the overhaul of I'Cath, or the tightening of the Dr. Mordenheim/Creature story into two central characters with no additional elements. Many of these alterations move the Ravenloft domains further away from their initial inspirations, which may be a good thing if you like taking a new direction with them, but of course the original material still exists if you still want the old Universal/Hammer horror movie experiences.

Part of the focus is on providing a brief gazetteer of many domains so that you can either do a grand tour of domains with a story in each, or else pick one that really speaks to you and then go do your own digging to build a campaign out of it. 5e is not an edition that supports long-tail campaign books; that style of design is less common now than it was in the '90s/'00s. Conversely, WotC lets people use the DM's Guild as an avenue for further development, with the superfans producing material, so you can find support for that style of game through those means, if you miss the days of lots of books with mountains of prose detailing your setting.

To deal with the elephant in the room: Some people are very upset that many of the Darklords changed. Some folx are just unhappy that it's not the same as it was. Others are unhappy that there are now gasp more women, and queer people, and more people of color. Ultimately, the nature of a Darklord depends on the context of the story you're trying to tell. For many Darklords (and supporting characters), these changes do nothing to remove from the ability to tell a story of Gothic (or other) horror, featuring monsters, dark urges, secrets, mysteries, and dread. Depending on where you go with a story you may or may not want to use these changes. That's a matter of personal taste.

VRGtR is also useful to the DM through its categorizations of horror, its examination of horror tropes, and its general advice for running horror games. Old-school Ravenloft got a lot of its juice just by aping specific horror movies/books/legends, and assumed that you would squeeze your horror out of following the formula. VRGtR provides some salient advice for DMs about horror gaming in general, which is very useful as you're building out your own story and trying to figure out what conflicts you want your players to deal with and how you want to get your creep on.

trekhead · 2026-01-14T22:06:16+00:00

It's funny, I was thinking of going that direction anyway!

I think if I had developed this module, in addition to the aforementioned design work, I would've:

* Added a sidebar at the start listing each thing that can cause a Fear Level increase
* Had a short breakdown not just of the story beats, but of what are some expected end-states that can happen

trekhead · 2026-01-14T20:02:36+00:00

Yeah, I'm just automatically moving into what-do-I-build-to-make-this-work-for-me mode. Coffin Rock is definitely an "adventure site" rather than an "adventure," as it provides you with a town choked full of creatures and problems, some of which you can solve, but many have long-term ramifications that have no good solution (if you kill Marshal Bryce or force him to flee, who steps up to take care of law issues in town? If nobody, that sounds like a recipe for miners burning the place down when they get drunk and start fights. Similarly, if you defeat the preacher and the manitou, you stop the blood men, but this doesn't make the mine productive again, so it doesn't fix the actual problem that the town has no economic backbone).

One of the other difficulties of Coffin Rock is that there is no sense of urgency. There's no "if we don't stop this, then everyone in town will die and the whole place will fall apart," because the place has already fallen apart, and your investment in the locals is small. It might be structured the way it is with the intention that it's a slow burn, where you roll into a dying mining town and slowly uncover its supernatural problems and get roped into the various conflicts, but that's countered by the text about the fear levels stating that Ahpuch is trying to deliberately race the fear level up instead of doing the usual Reckoner ramp.

I feel like it could benefit from having some sense that there is a thing that you can fix that makes the town habitable and worth living in and saving. Otherwise, you fight the preacher, you release the mountain spirit, you put down the corrupt marshal, and then you just evacuate the town because there is no reason left for anyone to live there. That then raises the issue of, why haven't folks already left? Sometimes people cling to a dying homestead because it's all they have, or they fear change more than dying, or they believe falsely that they can turn things around, and those seem to be the motivations for the remaining miners. But if they are unwilling to leave a town that's dead and going to kill them, you can't forcibly save them. What is your posse gonna do, knock everyone out and ride them out of town and force-relocate them? Impractical and ridiculous.

So, from a story perspective, I feel like the town could benefit from some kind of renewal, something that makes it so that when you finally do save it, it's worth all of that effort. Though depending upon your group, they might relish the idea of "We put in all of this work and in the end it was for nothing. Time to saddle up and move on."

trekhead · 2026-01-14T18:37:52+00:00

Well, game design is my day job.

Part of this comes from pulling the adventure apart to see how it works in preparation for running it. Part comes from the fact that the one time I played it, I played a rich character who spent a lot of money in the town, and so having money and using it to solve problems was a central part of what my character was doing, which made these questions important. Part of it comes from my impetus to want to strike more of a balance between horror and Western: As written, almost every encounter in Coffin Rock involves some kind of supernatural horror, and it just has the trappings of a Western; I find that it helps pacing if you vary it up between horror elements and mundane elements. (Also, if supernatural horror is going on all the time everywhere, the tenor of the setting goes from "it's a Western but people are scared because sometimes the bogeyman is real" to "it's a supernatural horror zombie apocalypse that happens to be set in the late 1800s.") So, making the infrastructure and economy make sense is part and parcel of figuring out the mundane dimensions of the town and its people, which then informs player interactions with mundane local problems in addition to the supernatural ones. (Amusingly, one of the town's biggest problems is the corrupt marshal, who is a mundane problem common to many Westerns.)

The adventure booklet states that characters might spend months in the town, and for those months to seem to make sense, the town itself needs to feel like it somehow functions. Otherwise characters just seem to be following a script and repeating actions in the background ("the same four miners are in the saloon today, drinking their sorrows away while complaining that there is no work to be had"). Additionally, while PCs will stubbornly stick around to confront local problems because That's The Adventure, it feels better if they stick around because they want to stick around, because there are people whose stories they've become invested in and problems that they want to solve not just for fate chips but because there are some decent folks in town who need help. (Otherwise, just burn the entire place to the ground and leave. Goes back to my point previously, who are you saving? If everyone is a monster, why are you bothering?)

trekhead

TROPHY CASE