Fallout ICRPG personal hack, a playtest report!

hack
campaign-diary
post-apocalyptic
fallout

#1

BRACE YOURSELF, SCREENSHOT ICBM INCOMING!!

Woah boy those look good haha, welcome to my self plug post about the Fallout campaign we’ve been playing with my usual suspects. So far it’s been two strong sessions and nobody have died of thirst or RAD accumulation (yet). So good so far.

RANT INCOMING!

So, long story short, I’m an uber Fallout fanboy. Fallout 2 is my favorite CRPG ever and since I first played D&D a long time ago I wanted to have a system to get the nuclear psot apocalypse to tabletop rping. For years it was just a dream, most “Fallout” pnp systems out there just don’t “click” to what the game actually represents and feels like. But when ICRPG came around the corner I knew it was it, I NEEDED to make a hack and finally play my dream. It took me long enough.

Some years forward I got bored during cuarantine and started hacking my way through the Fallout Wiki and ICRPG to create the monstrous abomination of rules we are currently “testing” with my group. Boy it has been awesome.

A really low res look into the hack: (Clip art is mostly from Fallout wiki and game-icons.net , but there are also a couple of cool things from this forums I credited on the doc, it is in spanish and incomplete for now, but I PROMISE I’ll share later :p).


“Handy” chart on calculating distances by @TheWunderLich

Fantasy is my go-to rpg genre, I’ve never felt like I was doing a great job as a GM in any other type of fiction until I took my go into the unique radioactive wasteland of Fallout. It has been an ironical breath of fresh air for us as a group, and I have to thank the beautiful community of these forums for encouraging hobbie and homebrew so much.

And I think that’s one of the things that make ICRPG as a system so special. It allows you to be free and change/move around stuff as you please, it makes you want to hack it and mod it to your liking. It tells you “do whatever you want, there’s no wrong answer other than what works for you and your party”. Other “generic” systems never totally acomplished this level of freedom for me, being able to change every little detail and STILL feel like we are playing the same game but in a different world.

Speaking about the hack, I first tought about posting the rules I came up with individually, but then I realised I changed, adapted and created so much stuff It would take me less work to just translate the whole thing and release it around, even though it will take some time from now to finish it.

Also, even tho this sounds like an announcement, this is never going to be a commercial product and it doesn’t any intention to become IP appropiation, it is a fan project and ultimately an adaptation that will not work without you playing both ICRPG CORE and the actual Fallout video games first. So that’s that :stuck_out_tongue:

The campaign so far:

  • It’s been 223 years since the great war, and nearly 20 years since the 2nd battle for Hoover Dam between the NCR and Caesar’s Legion.
  • The players are residents of Vault 6, which was designed to test how long people can live from finite resources (prep food and non renewable energy sources). They just ran out of fuel for the main reactor and rations are running low. In order to survive, a recon patrol needs to go out and check out what is left of Civilization, the former cities of Seattle and Portland, as well as other vaults.
  • The unsuspecting group is made by a Tech Wizard (Alex Cooper), an eye patched Gangster Wanna-Be (Mike Wazowski) and a Muscle mass happy-go-lucky simpleton (Rod McFly). Yes the names are all stupid references and they fit so surprisingly good lol.
  • After getting the shortest straw, they venture onto the wilderness and find out the world near Seattle doesn’t seem to be a nuclear barren, but more of a mutated super forest.
  • A first encounter makes the realise the reality of the wasteland. As they where running low on supplies, they encountered a cabin in the forest. At this point, they hadn’t encountered other people yet, they weren’t even sure there WAS other people. Do we loot the cabin knowing that we might be traspassing or do we leave it behind and risk earlier starvation?
  • This last moment came as a cool breeze, a different mindset from the now over-donde fantasy we where used to.
  • The group ends up breaking into the cabin, no consecuences at first. Then an old man with a shotgun made his entrance, yelling “DAMN RAIDERS, GET OFF M’STUFF!!” to the shocked vault dwellers. Reasoning doesn’t work, a couple of shots are exchanged and they end up murdering a seemingly innocent person.
  • They run through the forest with some petty loot (which includes a shotgun) and end up camping not to far from the site. At night, lights could be seen near the location of the cabin, no doubt some where looking for them. Another lesson learned, “we are not alone.”
  • More hiking along the road to what today is Castle Rock. A laser rifle discharge makes the birds fly around the forest, as the group brace themselves to whatever is going on ahead on the road.
  • A Brotherhood of Steel Paladin is fighting a pack of feral ghouls, leaded by a “Glowing One”. The Paladin shouts and the group begins to engage the ghouls to help him. Some hard fighting goes on as Mike Wazowski starts to shred the ghouls to pieces with his Tommy gun. Poor Rod Mcfly on the other side rolls terrible 1s and 2s during the whole encounter, leading to him loosing almost all of his grenades without properly harming the enemy.
  • Paladin Ramos is grateful to the party of dwellers, and quickly realises they are a lil’ bit lost. He offers escort to the nearby town of “Long City” so they can talk to his superior, Paladin Lynn, about getting help for their Vault.
  • Now on session 2 territory, the party finds themselves in town and start to talk with Paladin Lynn, a fierce no-nonsense woman who offers them help and supplies in exchange for a little help investigating some disappearings around town. They agree and after some drinking game shenanigans they also find out that the owner of the local bar is having troubles with BIG bugs eating their crops.
  • By the end of the day, they fight CUCA, the huge mutant sentient bull cockroach that inhabits the hills to the west. A milestone moment triggers for Rod Mcfly as he literally grabs the cockroach by the horns and mounts it, blankfiring his looted shotgun between the exoskeleton of the giant bug.
  • Excellent teamwork leads to an amazing victory, Rod receives a “bag” containing a LOT of grenades of different types, allowing him to throw “random” grenades from it for extra gags.

All considered, it has been a (nuclear?) blast xD

Sorry for the Wall of Text shield siblings, GAME ON!


#2

I love this! Thanks a bunch for sharing, it’s very inspiring. :slight_smile:


#3

Hey, thanks for the shout out for the distance calculation chart, I will have to get ya a new version of that sketch, I “finger painted” that on my iPad before I even got a real drawing tablet.i can whip up a nicer one in no time flat now. Glad that the idea is being used to help folks lose the dogma of moving in squares, and as a huge fan of The Fallout series, I am honored that you included it.