Vault 139
Officially listed as a 'Control Vault', its true sinister intention was kept hidden from everyone except one very ambitious Vault Tec executive. Searching for a reliable way to break human will and create an obedient workforce with minimal upkeep, dwellers were chosen from all walks of life to get a broad test group with sufficient genetic diversity to support up to eleven generations. Perhaps three times as large as a normal Vault, an entire mountain was nearly hollowed out to make room for the endless corridors and laboratories stocked with enough resources to experiment quite comfortably for the foreseeable two hundred years of lockdown to avoid a nuclear fallout.
Leading this project, Dawson Hughes was as guilty as any other Vault Tec executive as far as embezzling money from the United States Government and American public, however instead of living a lavish lifestyle like many of his peers, he chose to invest in a vision. Severely narcissistic, he dreamed of a world ruled by only one mind; a utopia without conflict, hunger, or loneliness. He arranged to beat death by taking advantage of the newly available 'LEAP-X' program and planned to use his time underground perfecting a method to enslave whatever life remained after atomic fire cleansed the land at the end of the Great War.
Three main schools of thought ended up gaining the most support; chemical therapy, bionic implantation, and intense conditioning. Searching for morally corrupt scientists that would not look too closely into his end goals, Hughes recruited all manner of reprehensible humans to fill his ranks. Most dwellers have lived in waking nightmares for the past five years, being experimented on and abused to elicit responses that are then 'corrected' with further conditioning, surgery, or dosage of chemical agents.
One scientist eventually broke down enough, however, a woman named Hariot Lucas who had been pressured onto the staff after a mistake she made that could have ended her career in medicine. At first believing the lies she was told, the harsh new reality of her situation became apparent when her protests were met with threats of violence and coercion. Conquering her fears five years after the doors sealed she orchestrated an uprising, purging the chemical mood stabilizers and empathy blockers from a group of dwellers while the Overseer was visiting nearby. If they are able to capture the keycard he carries they should be able to gain access to Hughes himself, leaving the fate of the entire Vault in the hands of Hariot and her six new compatriots..
OOC Notes
I plan to run this again on April 8th at the new Gather Your Party Games shop! You will not need anything to play, (I will have a physical copy of the Fallout 2d20 rulebook and dice), and do not need to create a character in advance or know anything about Fallout to join this one-shot. Players will choose their characters based on the answers they give to a question I ask them, (fans will recognize the familiar GOAT exam theme), and then we can get right into an 'escape the Vault' style one-shot!
Want to run this one-shot yourself? Pop in the Discord for access to the GM subscriber group!
Anyone not familiar with Fallout that has three minutes for a beautiful cinematic, check out the intro for Fallout 4 on Youtube!
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