What are some cool factions you could stick into a post apocalyptic game?

Social Anarchists

The Postmen.

A squad of pre-war power-armoured soldiers, who march from town to town delivering parcels and mail. Their goal is to help humanity rebuild by ensuring that lines of trade and communication remain open. Since their armour is virtually impenetrable to most post-war weapons, they are the perfect delivery-men.

The Postmen survive off of gifts of food and ammo from the various settlements along their route. But finding the parts to repair their armour is getting harder every day. The Postmen's only hope is that, when their last suit fails, it will no longer be needed.

A militaristic proto-government made by ex-military commanders who are trying to rebuild the nation by any means necessary. Nothing quiet Marxist or fascist but have a order based society with everyone having a place and everyone in their place.

After the apocolypse fantasy with knights, guns and robot-giants

I think religion is probably going to be the strongest force binding people together after the fall of society. So I have many religiously centred groups in my post apoc setting. I can post the pdf if there is interest. My personal favorite is the Reborn, led by Father Joshua, who are very much like Puritans but punish all forms of degeneracy with death. Sometimes father Joshua goes too far, not to mention his exiles often join up with the reborns' enemies. Adultery, fornication, drug use, excessive drinking, are all punished. However, as things get worse from time to time, father Joshua doubles down on his punishments of sin, thinking that God is punishing them, and as a result occasionally turns a bit dark, but overall he is a good and charitable man, just ruthless.

Veteran groups forming vigilante militias, then governments.

"The first known case, in Aberdeen, Scotland, was typical. Some veterans got together as vigilantes to stop rioting and looting, hanged a few people (including two veterans) and decided not to let anyone but veterans on their committee. Just arbitrary at first, they trusted each other a bit, they didn’t trust anyone else. What started as an emergency measure became constitutional practice in a generation or two.”

Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers.

All female factions, don't see them much in post-apocalyptic settings. I figure that naturally since the first thing people do instead of building sustainable ways to grow food, and shelter is rape the nearest woman that women would band together and actively avoid men altogether.

Not to go full incel, but that would just make them a bigger target, and despite their numbers they would immediately be raided and kidnapped by a physically much stronger force of men. -4 to strength and all that memery. Better to make a platonic alliance rather than be forced into subjugation if not outright slavery. Also women are inherently more tribalistic and competitive amongst themselves so a large enough group would rapidly break apart into smaller factions which would tear it apart.

I really like this.
Hope and idealism backed up with pre-apocalypse heavy weapons

>Also women are inherently more tribalistic and competitive amongst themselves so a large enough group would rapidly break apart into smaller factions which would tear it apart.

Reminds me of that tribe where the women got together with the women of the enemy tribe and agreed to kill all their baby males for a few years because that was the only way for them to ensure that both tribes weren't completely wiped out, since the males were all hyper-focused on warfare. At that point the tribes were basically 90% women because the men kept dying in stupid fights.

The Moonmen

A group of people specialized in alcohol firebombs.

They trade alcohol as currency and use it as fuel and weaponry.

They use massive gardens to brew the alcohol.

The alcohol is so important to them that none of them are drinkers and hold a rage to those who do drink alcohol.

A single gender tribe wouldn't last very long, likewise a lot of post-apocalyptic tribes would be founded by people who mostly know each other within the same geographical region or religious/cultural group, I doubt Jimmy is going to start raping old lady Daniels who was like a mother to him his whole life because bombs dropped.

There is a novel by the name The Postman about the same concept, although in that case it was just one man. It's been such a long time since I read it I can't remember if it was any good.

Also I think A Canticle For Leibowitz has some brilliant factions in and would reccomend it as a great source for long post-collapse campaigns. In fact the Brotherhood Of Steel were directly inspired by the book if I recall, they were also influenced by Isaac Asimov's Foundation which is another good read, although solidly sci-fi as oppose to post-apocalyptic.

[CITATION NEEDED]

Also a movie from 97'

>There is a novel by the name The Postman about the same concept, although in that case it was just one man. It's been such a long time since I read it I can't remember if it was any good.

That book was the exact inspiration for my idea:

Oh neat, sounds like something to read

A bunch of barbarians/tribals etc bound together by a single or team of visionaries who wish to shape their new society in their image.

I like the Legion from FNV for being interesting in this way but I'd love to see someone do something similar but original. Like replicating Chinese Legalism and the Qin or something else.

Also neofeudalism with damaged but great tech is also good.

The standard currency of the realm is the menhir: giant monoliths of stone. However, due to transportation difficulties an organization has arisen, called The Bank, that stores menhirs and distributes promissory notes instead. Scandal rocks the land when it is discovered that The Bank is lending out more menhirs than it actually possesses in its vaults.

Ave Nex Alea! Saulto Nex Alea!

We offer our prayers, that you might continue to grant men dreams of tools for war.

You mean like an Americaneqsue military republic?

you should, it's great. Also gives you serious feels when he meets an AI.

Still the best Faction by virtue of not being two-faced assholes.

>not two faced assholes
>what is the Railroad

Do the second and third groups ever go on tour together? Because they should.

Sea-striders - groups of sailors living almost exclusively on semi-autonomous ships contracted out to naval corporations in a post-apocalyptic world. Renowned for their absolutely batshit Marines, even more batshit superstitions and patchwork of religious thoughts, whoring, fighting, and drinking. Sometimes make port. Hated, but ultimately respected as they are the only people crazy enough to make long distance trade feasible.

>#SynthLivesMatter

Shitposting aside, I put the Railroad on the same level as the Dawnguard from Skyrim. Bunch of fags who kick you around and demand you do all their legwork for you while acting like you're not carrying their whole organization on your shoulders.

I never got that impression from either faction. You seem pretty touchy.
Glory seems a hardass but she warms up to you eventually and her holding off a shit ton of BoS almost alone should redeem her unless you have zero taste

>Shitposting aside, I put the Railroad on the same level as the Dawnguard from Skyrim. Bunch of fags who kick you around and demand you do all their legwork for you while acting like you're not carrying their whole organization on your shoulders.

the main character doing literally ALL the work isn't really intentional, it's a byproduct of the fact that any detail outside of what the player is doing is not relevant enough to take the time and effort to put into the game. if NPCs just seem to be just sitting around in a cave all day it's only because they haven't been programmed to do anything else. in an impossible perfect game an organization like the railroad should have hundreds of members and several operations ongoing at any given time even when the player is doing something else, but you can't simulate that in an open world game at any decent level of detail (you can in other games, but only because it all happens "off-screen").

Why would anyone intentionally downgrade an AK like that. As it is, getting them to stop working is a loosing battle.

>Krazy Lucha Killers
A cult of raiders who worship a warrior code they interpretted from stills of old El Santo and Mil Mascaras films of them fighting monsters. They practice a lucha libre style of martial art and all have personalized Lucha names and masks. They also practice ritual lobotomy which ups their adrenal response, lessens their pain but also turns them batshit crazy developing unpredictable temperements and grandoise "Lucha" personalities. Such is their reputation you never know if a KLK is going to help save a village under threat of annihilation or cannibalise everyone to absorb their strength, honor and latent lucha spirit.

Lets be real here though, the institute (while jerks) will eventually bring some progress to the world.

Just like the enclave, Mr House, potentially the mailman, and maybe the NCR.

I got a couple of factions from fallout stories I never finished I guess I can post.

The Noose Callers- A band of raiders descended from prison inmates (And prisoners of their own) that claim the Georgia Interstate Highway System as their territory. Those they capture are hung from the highway itself, along with those who fail to pass their initiation rituals. They are a sadistic band of psychopaths that brand themselves and each other as signs of loyalty, and to show off personal accomplishments.

The Liberty Launchers- a band of 'pirates' who have built a shanty town around and on Ellis Island and the statue of Liberty. They possess a number of working pre-war military ships and often attack the coastline for fun, loot, and profit.

The Mongols: A biker gang (Think the Road Rash Jailbreak cast as one big gang) specializing in motorized combat. Their favoured pastime is dragging victims through the streets on their bikes with chains. When they're not raiding, they're brewing moonshine.

>progress at the cost of our basic humanity is still progress and therefore worth it
NCR is only good faction in NV, House needs to die just like the Institute.

Independent only good ending. NCR is terrible.

>Why would anyone intentionally downgrade an AK like that.
I don't think it is intentional. Looks like it lost its gas tube so it was converted into a bolt action rifle.

>ncr
>not the mailman

Besides house and institute are both still techincially human.

Plus you didn’t say anything about the enclave, are you a fan?

If you want to approach it like Fallout, just have a faction based on a single gimmick. If you don't, start fleshing out your wasteland and figure out what sort of old world influences there would be based on geographical location and pre-apocalyptic history.

Look up some of the cut factions from the main games and Van Buren.

Daughters of Hecate would be an in-universe, though non-canon example.

fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Daughters_of_Hecate

I always thought the Gunslingers from the Dark Tower was so over the top that it worked. Post apocalyptic knights turned cowboys.

The Enclave are a nonentity after two presidents in a row got whacked. If there's any left that haven't gone native they have the sense to stay hidden.

If you do this, it's essential you have at least half a dozen families, and at least three inter-clan conflicts and alliances for depth.

I kid you not, wasteland raiders led by a repentant Satan/Lucifer with a god syndrome who now wants to lead a holy crusade across the wasteland and become the new official god while slaying demons and devils who won't follow his new religious laws which are basically the laws laid out in the old testament. He also blesses folks and leads his forces into battle in his dragon form scorching his enemies with cleansing flame.

What is this from

>potentially the mailman
>Implying there are bad couriers it there who don't do every last sidequest in order to provide the best possible future for the wasteland

I like doing this with my own setting but then you have rather clear evidence that the rescue missions post-cataclysm did not fare well.
Isolated, these divorced from the chain of yelling became their own entities and generally went the way of highwaymen.

I like it.

I hated preston and the rest of the group. Good thing there's a mod so you can kill him.

Honestly as long as you don't go fucking legion (even taking cut content into consideration) it's a "good" end with progress, the difference is degrees and possibilities.

>i really love the concept of The Minutemen
Literal reddit.

Do a knock-off of the Gayboy Berzerkers

Bunch of fucking tribals living in the ruins of an abandoned university and have adopted heavily distorted Frat culture as their culture. All their important rituals involve ritual beer-pong.

sort of like a combination of backwoods rednecks and Celtic clanwars?

AVE NEX ALEA.
SALUTO NEX ALEA.

Ask Pakistan

The amount of AVE is getting a little too high in this thread, at this rate it won't take long before someone rapes a deer

Steal everything from The Warriors.

I've been laid up and watching a bunch of videos of airsoft players freaking out and I realized a "tribe" of operator wannabes would make a fun post-apoc faction. Bunch of hyped up teenagers who find some spec ops gear and form a cargo cult around milsim garbage.

A group of vault dwellers that developed a sort of "mind link" robot suit.
They use these robot bodies to remotely explore and interact with the outside world.
Eventually, they discover that their bodies have been dead for a long time and they only exist in the suits now.

The fragmented people of Windsor, who occasionally band together to attack Seattle. Have not forgiven America for the whole annexing Canada thing.

godammit i should've done that from the beginning

>play airsoft a bit with friends
>loads of fun
>everywhere I go to play in an actual legal place with more people, everyone is decked out in milsurp gear and takes everything way too seriously
>they all look me funny when I'm dressed like a post-apoc scavenger
Fuck airshit.

Airsoft weenies confuse the hell out of me. Maybe I'm just biased because I'm a paintballfag but the game seems like it lends itself to blatant cheating. Because not only to those wimpy little BBs not leave any kind of easily-seen evidence, but most airsofters are decked out in all that tactical shit they can't even feel them in the first place.

Faction I have came up for my own piece of Fallout setting is a gang of raiders who found a warehouse full of robots and used their new firepower to turn legit.

Yeah that's why we would always play with basically just a light jacket and a mask and maybe gloves.
I'm kind of sad I never got into paintball instead.
But now that I'm buying actual guns, maybe I'll sell all of my airshit and go paintball.

This is a faction my freind and I came up with during a fallout based campaign
A group of escaped slaves that banded together to fight the slavers guild, they all came from isolated tribes and settlements. most of them have no concept of the world before it was what it is now. They found a statue of Abraham Lincoln and believed it was a god. A ghoulified history professor found them and he attemoted to teach them the story of lincoln but the slaves couldnt really grasp it. So instead he reinvented lincoln as a god. In his version Lincoln in the god of ''mercy,freedom, and rightues vengence''
So these guys while disorganized fight with hardcore religious fury, they have become experts in unconventional warfare and have gone to war with the slavers guild

Paintball has its own problems in the fact it attracts the IRL version of MLGProLegit faggots who bumrush you with 2000 dollar guns. Those guys are no fun to play with most of the time. It typically doesn't help how they always have similarly-colored outfits so refs are forced to put them on the same team.

But if you can find a good brushball field and get some buddies together it's a lot of fun. Especially if an Airsoft Operator shows up and reveals just how much of a pussy he is.

This, NCR is more human, than any fraction in Fallout, with ups and downs, everyman, heroes and asshols, actual political, social and economical system. Even Sawyer and Avelonne hatered for West coast and NCR ironically helped them in portrayal of faction. Yes Man are literal reddit mary-sue trash, legion and House are jokes, BoS popularity after F2 was a mistake.

Exactly like a combination of backwoods redneck and celtic clan wars.

Thanks

>THE GREAT ROADTRIP

THE TRAFFIC
>descendents of survivors who were caught in one of the great traffic jams that formed just before The Event
>has bizarre rules, anyone who sleeps on the ground rather than in a car or truck is untouchable and is forced to live in the very thin but long slums that have been built on the hard shoulders (often built up so it leans outside of the strict bounds of the highways and over into the verges) between the road proper and beyond the road as well as in the median strip.
>rulers are the descendents of the truckers, who provided the initial supplies from their trailers' cargos and so end up in charge, and have colonised the heights of a spaghetti junctions while their serfs and enforcers leave in the shadows and ensure the raised bits of the junction do not cllapse.
>beneath them in the caste system are the descendents of police who got caught in the jam
>beneath them are the drivers, the descendents of people caught in the jam who still retain rights to their ancestral "homes" i.e. the rusted wrecks of the original cars
>over time, the bulk of everyone has at some point been forced into the untouchables class as the truckers seized drivers' cars as punishment for transgressions, so vast slums full of these "pedestrians" ring and weave through the entire weird build up
>these pedestrians rove out from the road searching for supplies and wreckages to salvage or steal that they then tithe to the drivers, who in turn tithe to the enforcers (willingly or not) who in turn tithe to the truckers
>it is taboo for a driver, enforcer or trucker to touch the ground outside of the roadway, only pedestrians may
>outsiders from the community are considered equivalent and as rightsless as the pedestrians, but without the protection of solidarity from other pedestrians

I've got something similar but far less high-tech postman run between towns and have a small military that are armed with lever action rifles and some pre fall tech.

Wandering telepathic or telekinesis using swordsmen dressed in hooded robes thst speak of distant worlds and s man who walked the sky. They often work in pairs and speak of stars of death.

A transhumanist cult of pre-apocalypse times who have survived and mutated into a race of cyborgs and genetically modified super soldiers who scour the wastes looking for children to kidnap and indoctrinate into the cult. Some of them are new members, others are hundreds of years old

>The Historians
a group surviving in a museum, which is actually 3 sub factions, one or federal knights,one Egyptians,and one of a western.

All of those factions fucking suck. Just leave the world to the Followers of the Apocalypse and enjoy your utopia.

How does one mutate into a cyborg?

If you want me to patch up your lore then: The cultists discover a cyber-cell strain, which latches onto biological creatures acting like a stem-cell and contributing to repair. However these are faulty and have a trait allowing self-replication, with each replication the programming passed down becomes more and more lost/conflicted. This leads to them modifying the contractor in unsual ways.

>mutate into a cyborg
... And genetically engineered super soldiers. Which involves mutation. Key semantical points you are missing their

>you can't simulate that in an open world game at any decent level of detail
You can just by adding simple random encounters and making every NPC had a detailed background. No one wants to do it because a mediocre game still can make millions so what's the point. Very sad.

Mutation occurs by itself, one does not engineer mutation. Genetic engineering is exploiting pre-existing mutations and transplanting them, which would require a third-party involvement.

>lecturing me of semantics
>their

*on

The problem with this is that it doesn't work so much as a faction because there's no reason for the suits to affect the outter world, given they no longer have organic needs. It's a good idea though, it reminded me of a cyberpunk comic I once read.

How about they search for new bodies for themselves? Because if they found a way to transfer their minds to robots it should be possible to transfer them back.
Maybe you could include some themes about the worth of human emotion, and how loss of suffering makes life dull.

Sounds like the guys from fallout 3 point lookout.

>semantical autism: the post
They were genetically modified via mutation and anything else they could do to become transhumanist. Autism levels that shouldn't even be possible are occuring right now

Just read through all the colourful factions created for Wasteland (the original one) and Fountain of Dreams. There is enough of them to fill few settings.
It also depends on what scale you want to operate. You want something large and regional, or something small and within single hamlet?

BoS all the way ya pussies

Actually scientists are now using crisper to change genetic code.

Played one post-apoc game were the players decided they were a group of Russian sleepers, all they did is watch npcs fight, steal shit from everyone and murder every Chechen or suspected Chechen they came across.

They ended up stealing the only working water purifier while the guards were attacked by some cult the players had been egging on from the government remnants who put a hefty bounty on their heads, only problem was they always swore gasmasks, so they just changed masks and clothes and nobody could tell who they were.

By the end of the game they had enough guns and ammo to supply a whole company of men, plus the water purifier that they strapped to a tank so when the government found them they wouldn't shoot for fear of breaking the purifier.

Miss the vodka soaked bastards