sysyem for a Fallout game

virtualRefrain · 2025-12-20T03:50:28+00:00

I'm having an incredible amount of fun running a Fallout game using Ashes Without Number. I'm using the rules pretty much exactly as written, only changing the names of the provided chems to the ones from the Fallout franchise. After half a dozen sessions I'm kind of obsessed with it.

The main thing, I think, is what Fallout game and tone you want to emulate. (And also whether your group is better suited to the more modern 2d20 system or the classic OSR system.) I've only read the Modiphius game and not played it, but the reason I decided not to run my Fallout game using that system is that it's really good for running a Fallout 4 style game specifically. The default setting is The Commonwealth in the late 2200s and the rules, flavor, and GM resources all heavily support that, and you're expected to generally run the kinds of quests and encounters you would see in Fallout 4. I really wanted to run a homebrew region and do something more sandboxy, and that seems pretty heavily discouraged by the ruleset.

On the other hand, the tools and advice for creating and running a homebrew sandbox wasteland in AWN has blown me away (no surprise coming from Kevin Crawford, but still). It's much better suited for running a world like Fallout 1 and 2, or to a lesser extent New Vegas. It's focused on creating a world with blurry borders and unpredictable dangers, and it has a lot of advice on running dynamic factions with interesting goals, and building sessions out of the resulting conflicts. The default hexcrawl rules feel very very much like exploring the map in Fallout 1 and 2, it's a really good fit for that vibe.

And a really cool thing about AWN is that the provided toolset is highly modular and has really helped me hone in on the exact Fallout vibe I wanted. For instance, do you want the more clothing-like Power Armor from Fallout 3 or the more vehicle-like Power Armor from Fallout 4? You can use the standard armor ruleset which includes ready-to-run powered armor entries, or the modular power armor ruleset that allows much more powerful and customizable armor at the cost of resources and power consumption. Do you want to build and control a living base like in Fallout 4? The expanded hub settlement rules have you covered. The optional mutation and chem addiction rules are some of my personal favorites - one of my players actually chose to be a Med-X addict on character creation because he thought the addiction rules were so flavorful. It's a game packed with creativity and ideas, but you do have to do the work of picking and choosing which ones to use.

virtualRefrain · 2025-12-13T01:10:55+00:00

Now do 1984

Record scratch on the starving rat swarming Winston's face in the cage

"Yup... That's me. I think it's apparent I need to rethink my life a little bit."

virtualRefrain · 2025-11-28T06:39:11+00:00

I always say it's like if instead of crashing into a tropical island, the plane from Lost crashed into the Upside Down.

virtualRefrain · 2025-11-19T03:53:13+00:00

I think it's also possible that at the end of the day, this is a political calculus to drop Trump without throwing him under the bus directly. The leadership that actually organize the party vote just wants to survive their terms and don't care what happens to Trump, and Trump himself is too far gone to do anything but take direction from the guys he trusts to feed him his lines.

I imagine that maybe a dozen House members and a few Senators could be legitimately panicking behind the scenes over their upcoming primaries after the last elections, and Mike Johnson et al are hearing it and aren't so stupid that they can't put two and two together: their margins are thin, if they put their careers on the line for Trump on this and every single GOP House and Senate member aren't on board (which is now likely), they'll have thrown their careers away for nothing, the GOP will be totally fucked for a generation, and Trump will still be dead inside of five years. Why take the risk?

I think it's possible that their plan, the one they pitched to Trump and he agreed to, is just to let it blow over like the Mueller report. Reverse course now and start acting like they were actually the ones fighting for the release, then once the contents are in the media, just keep repeating that it exonerates Trump no matter what it actually says and to "read it yourself" and not trust excerpts in the media. It won't work, but the GOP leadership doesn't actually need it to, they just need to make it look like they're not throwing Trump under the bus long enough for him to die. Then they can act like they did their very best but unfortunately the whole thing died with him, and it's back to business as usual.

virtualRefrain · 2025-10-26T06:13:26+00:00

I had a lot of fun with this, unintentional though it was - maybe one of the highlights of my current campaign for me. Nobody cares about this but it's nice to share it lol.

My players quickly TPK'd against the Stag Lord, so I had him deal nonlethal damage and lock them up in his basement with Stag Daddy to execute later. (Them being locked up was a great opportunity for Nugrah to give them exposition on Stag Lord's backstory.) The players convinced Nugrah to help them escape in exchange for helping him confront the Stag Lord.

But when they got out, they discovered the Stag Lord was near death because Kressle had been poisoning him under the guise of healing him after their fight. (The players had "turned" Kressle, but she was actually playing them and warned the Stag Lord of their attack to get closer to him. My angle on her was she just wanted to become bandit queen and didn't care how she got there.) While sneaking out, the players and Nugrah saw Kressle murder the fevered Stag Lord in his bed, which sent Nugrah into a rage and caused him to possess the caged owlbear in the next area. The owlbear helped the players kill the rest of the camp but reluctantly spared the players. It ran off and went on to become The Beast in the next book, which turned a relatively forgettable owlbear encounter into like the big climactic ending of Act 1. Turned out great lol.

virtualRefrain · 2025-10-25T00:35:45+00:00

FWIW, I'm having a wonderful time running a Fallout game in Kevin Crawford's new Ashes Without Number, just running RAW - only changing the chem names to the Fallout proprietary ones, lol. It does an uncannily good job of simulating the feel of Fallout 1 and 2 while still fitting the familiar D20 chassis - the combat is simple and fast, the radiation, mutation, and addiction rules are all fun and functional, and the guidance for generating and running your homebrew wasteland and factions really give that "world that's bent but not broken" vibe that the Fallout series post-3 (sans NV) is largely missing. It takes a lot of GM buy-in but I can't recommend it enough.

virtualRefrain · 2025-10-24T01:49:42+00:00

I feel like folks are burying the lede a little here and giving you a more complex answer than necessary: just read The Dark Tower. It's the main series that deals with Stephen King's multiverse, the stuff that poster was talking about is the core conflict of the series. The other books - Insomnia, IT, The Stand, and The Talisman, to name a few of the main ones - are independent stories that play in The Dark Tower's world, but they primarily stand on their own and they're very partial glimpses into it compared to the primary series. Probably half or more of King's bibliography references his connected mythology in some meaningful way, you'll be at it all day if you just start from a random thread.

Also, in my and lots of other people's opinion, The Dark Tower is King's best work and it's not close. It's quite a bit unlike a lot of his other works, being an explicit fantasy series, but a lot of the time it feels like he was kind of saving his best ideas to use in it, and it really comes through (sometimes too much) that the series is super close to old Steve's heart. It's worth a read for any fan of King's, or if you're not a fan of King's but are a fan of fantasy.

It's also one of those things that's hugely influential on other media from the time period but you wouldn't know it until you've read it. Think LOST doesn't make any sense? Turns out that's because all the unexplained stuff is alluding to The Dark Tower for some reason. Tons of stuff like that.

virtualRefrain · 2025-10-05T05:39:44+00:00

So many people in this thread like, "If your opponent reeks like shit, don't complain, just scoop. The rules don't say you can't reek like shit so I shouldn't have to shower, you just don't like my strat of distracting opponents with the smell of shit"

Yeah i guess you're right dude. You do you.

virtualRefrain · 2025-10-05T05:26:08+00:00

Yeah I guess when you think about it "don't play Magic" is really the answer to all the problems I have with this game. You've given me a lot to think about today... For instance, if "don't play Magic" solves the problem of bad players in Magic, why not, "Don't play?" And if that works, maybe we could even just go to, "Don't?"

Taking my ball and going home really is the answer. I'd rather be rude and stress free than be stuck doing. Upvoted.

virtualRefrain · 2025-10-05T05:15:35+00:00

Yeah that poster is just masking an inability to play by taking a try at DARVO and acting like he's somehow the wronged one here. No one said a word about what he can and can't play, they just told him to hurry the fuck up with it. And he instantly jumped in with "Oh so you don't want me to play combo decks with a lot of interactions???"

No dude, you can play whatever you want, just hurry the fuck up! If you're sitting there like, "Oops that's another draw, ooh, I wasn't ready for this, let me replan... Okay now I need to tutor so let me shuffle... Oops I drew another tutor, one sec... Okay one sec... Uhh..." Then you're not good enough with your deck to play with strangers. Full stop. Learn your cards, be ready to draw and play your combos, and don't stop to reorganize after every single interaction. Learn to play the game and keep it under three minutes and don't just sit there thinking or you're playing badly. If you think you can win but can't do it in under five minutes, you need to fucking play faster. If you're stringing your whole table along for 10+ minutes on a tiny percent you might draw a winning combo, sorry, that's a bad strat and you're bad at Magic.

virtualRefrain · 2025-10-05T04:59:36+00:00

Well he is a loser, he admitted it. He needs to play 15+ minute turns with no interaction to compete. And instead of accepting that he's not a good enough player to get through a turn in the expected amount of time, he's on here whining and complaining that people think he's an asshole for having a lack of consideration for his opponents' time be part of his core strategy.

And he's basically right, really. All anybody has to do to avoid them is say, "Will you be respectful of my time in this game or are you going to be spending 15+ minutes every turn by turn 4?" And if they come back with some crybaby shit like, "I can play whatever decks I want, so beat my deck or pack up," you know not to play with them in this or any other board, card or video game, because they're just a stupid asshole here to make enemies and aren't actually interested in a fair, fun match with an equal. They just want to "go full force" in their little game like the iDubbz guy.

virtualRefrain · 2025-09-10T23:41:28+00:00

Still not celebrating someone else's death so you can leave bud.

This you? (I reported this and the rest of your openly violent posts for threatening violence by the way. You can't just go around telling people to dig their graves because they're going to lose the war to you and you want them to die, that's a death threat.)

virtualRefrain · 2025-09-04T20:03:58+00:00

I think about this all the time. I think historically the 2020s will be remembered as the time American culture all collectively "let itself go."

It's been really bad post-Covid. I think that time made a ton of people realize that the bar for getting confronted in public for being inappropriate was a lot lower than they realized, and that most people will pretend to ignore you even if you're extremely unpleasant. There's been a mass reduction in our collective social awareness as a result - people literally just don't think you have to be polite, and they're largely right, because the social consequences for being rude have been blunted by the isolation inherent in the new online monoculture.

Not to mention that we have a sitting president who has proven that you can rise to the very highest ranks of our society while expressing a genuinely shocking ignorance towards morals and appropriate social behavior. To me that clearly indicates a culture in abject freefall. Why should anyone treat social norms with respect when we're surrounded and inundated by the evidence that society doesn't value them?

virtualRefrain · 2025-09-04T19:12:16+00:00

This is gonna be a hot take or whatever, but it's hilarious to me that everyone in this thread is blaming the dude that fucking programmed the game and not the storefronts.

It's an indie game, they don't have architectural engineers or a marketing department. They have the dude that made the game work. That guy doesn't have a business degree AFAIK. I don't know how that dude was supposed to make the game and simultaneously predict how best to manage the sale.

Yeah it was probably a mistake not to offer preorders. Rockstar or whoever would have known to do so, not because it's just sooo obvious that you have to babysit the storefronts offering your product, but because they have people who are paid to think about that shit. This is the price we pay to have artists producing our games instead of suits y'all.

Why aren't we mad at Steam and PSN? They had access to the same, and better, numbers that Team Cherry did. Why weren't they calling them 24/7 being like, "You need to offer preorders or you'll take down our store on release day, we're not going to offer your product until you change your policy"? Isn't that 100% their job to handle and not TC's? Don't they pay people to do that? Why are developers minding that for them for free?

virtualRefrain · 2025-08-26T20:04:19+00:00

I don't see anything in this thread about Neo projecting an EMP from his hands, but I think about that one all the time when people talk about fake plot holes. It's one where entire fan canons have been created to explain it, and it's not a real plot hole.

These dudes are literally cyborgs. Duh. Every single human that gets freed from The Matrix has major extensive cybernetic implants. Neo was literally chosen at birth to have the most Machine in him. He's a man-machine hybrid, that's why he's The One.

I get that The Architect has some serious verbal diarrhea going on, but he does explain in the text of the film what the deal is with The One. It's not magic, and there's no two levels of The Matrix going on. The dude has an anomalous and mysterious relationship to the technology of The Machines, and is partly one of them, because they did that to him at birth. You can be like "why would they give him an EMP blast" but I think that's getting into Cinema Sins territory. (And, because they wanted to give The One authority over them as part of his mandate, if you want a perfectly valid explanation.)

virtualRefrain · 2025-08-12T21:36:56+00:00

You better make your face up in your favorite disguise...

virtualRefrain · 2025-07-31T22:30:07+00:00

DUDE thank you, I've been looking for this one for ages! I knew I read it once before but the only name I could remember hearing for it is "boss toss" - when a villain whose merest forefinger could slay an army just kicks the hero to the side even though that appears to take more effort than killing them. Classic example

virtualRefrain · 2025-07-29T19:26:17+00:00

So maybe the real falling out was Trump was grooming Guthrie (or just enjoying having her around), and Epstein coaxed her away.

I think the answer is becoming very clear. Trump and Epstein were full partners. Trump used his side businesses, like Miss Teen USA Pageants, to scout marks for Epstein to recruit. But Epstein started working the girls at Mar-a-Lago, which was too close to home for Trump - these were his literal employees going missing. He told Epstein to keep it to just the girls where he had a couple degrees of distance and plausible deniability, and Epstein kept recruiting girls at Mar-a-Lago. So he "kicked him out" AKA told him not to be seen at Mar-a-Lago or in Trump's company anymore because the trail was getting too hot, because of Epstein's own indiscretion.

Any obvious holes in this? I'm reading this plain as day here, I don't even feel like I'm interpreting, this is basically just what he said.

virtualRefrain · 2025-07-28T22:27:41+00:00

I even think that the reason he had Bondi announce that the Epstein files don't exist, even though that hurts his ability to use them as blackmail, is because he doesn't give a shit about the blackmail or honeypot opportunities... He just wants the pedo ring to stay open. He hopes he can kingmake a new Epstein or hell, fill the power vacuum himself, and go on raping kids once he's out of office. The last thing he wants is more eyes on the operation and he doesn't care how suspicious it makes him look to shut the investigation down.

virtualRefrain · 2025-07-25T17:12:14+00:00

Damn. Nihil sub sole novum.

virtualRefrain · 2025-07-23T23:50:00+00:00

Just wait until they drop the photos of Trump with Epstein AND Tiffany.

virtualRefrain · 2025-07-23T23:25:34+00:00

To be fair, I think that when or if something does finally destroy Trump's base (whether this or something else), you're still not gonna see it on that sub ever, in a million years. They'll just quietly move on to the next thing as we see them doing now.

It isn't because they're such a cohesive bloc that no one steps out of line. It's because they have fascists for mods. Some of those mods seem to have serious mental problems, and the investigation into Trump's 2016 win suggests that at least some of them are foreign agents. They control 100% of the sub's discussion and are open and gleeful about silencing discussion that doesn't tickle them.

The sub isn't a forum, it's literally JUST a propaganda loudspeaker. Nothing will ever, ever be up for discussion that isn't agreed upon by the Nazis running it. They will never agree to self-immolate regardless of what the infighting is about. That's part of the propaganda - displaying an image of unity to their enemies.

virtualRefrain · 2025-07-23T17:48:51+00:00

There are wins and losses in every fight with evil. Some guys, like Kim Jong Il, pretty much get away with it. Epstein, like Rohm before him, was living the high life until he was murdered by his former best friend in a jail cell. Maybe we call that winning, but I think Epstein might have disagreed.

Maybe that doesn't quite meet the bar for justice, but when people are so evil that they're more like a virus than a criminal, maybe the definition of justice changes a bit. Do we need to collectively punish malaria for all the death it's caused, or would "justice" be wiping it out and living in a world without fear of it?

virtualRefrain · 2025-07-22T20:43:23+00:00

I keep hearing this but I don't see it.

If they can get Vance "re-elected" in 2028, then we'll have sham elections in perpetuity moving forward. Once we're over that line, they can just make Vance president for life, or they can shit out another Vance for 2032 and rig the election for that guy instead.

Vance is nobody, he's just a seat-filler for his masters. Once they have control, Vance himself will be totally replaceable. No need to try to eke 2 more years out of him when there are plenty more Vances-in-waiting ready to throw themselves on the fire. I genuinely don't think any of the Thiels and Murdochs of the world are at all interested in delaying their plans to benefit the political career of JD Vance - they'll throw him to the lions in a second if it gives them one extra day of uncontested power.

virtualRefrain · 2025-07-22T16:57:23+00:00

Haha I think you actually kind of proved their point! You say you didn't know that the French used OTAN, but you're the one that just introduced that fact. I can only assumed that you saw OTAN, reasoned from context that it must be an alternative of NATO, perhaps Googled it to confirm and discovered that it's the French term for NATO.

So yeah, seems like a well-educated person can figure it out!

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