The fallout campaign I plan to run will have several factions in the wasteland fighting over a crashed satelite that contains essentially a bigger garden of Eden kit, an assortment of energy weapons, and data records of most of the old world's knowledge.
I'd like a thematic old song to play when I start the campaign that could relate to this.
I have a more general Fallout question - why are caps currency in the Capital Wasteland? They're not even water bottle caps, but Nuka Cola caps. And why didn't any Vault in Fallout 3 aside from Vault 101 actually keep its inhabitants safe, when a fair number of Vaults in older Fallout games and NV did a pretty good job?
Jason Lopez
Fallout 3 was the one to really double down on the 'Vault experiment' meme
Austin Peterson
Bethesda is your answer.
That and it's a lot simpler to come up with insane experiments that killed everyone than working societies based around realistic experiments. They did get better at it for Fallout 4, but not by much. I mean the Far Harbor vault is quite a good idea that got hijacked, and the one where the overseer rejected the experiment.
As for the caps well that's mostly just a case of "Hey they used bottle caps for money in the first Fallout, let's just use that". Weirdly I could understand caps being used in the same way as Fallout 1 after the purifier is up and running, but beforehand is just silly.
Luis Torres
Great Also great especially if the game is going to be super bleak. Best in the thread.
They don't even necessarily have to be working societies - they could just be like the Boomers and have left their Vault at some point.
Sometimes I do look back on Fallout 3 and think it could've been better. There's a bunch of smaller things in it that point to the idea that the nukes didn't reset the world there, they just stopped the clock. So they could've framed the main story as a continuation of the Great War, had the Chinese ghouls be using the dumb Super Mutants as cat's paws to take down the BoS, which they don't recognize as tech scavengers, but assume to be the US military. Might've made a nice contrast to NV and earlier games, where the theme is more a new and different world with similar problems as the old.