F:WW RPG at Necronomicon 2019 - Chryslus Motors

At Necronomicon Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror/Gaming Convention in Tampa, Florida, on Friday, October 18th, I’m going to be running a scenario using the new Fallout: Wasteland Warfare RPG rules.

A band of wastelanders ventures into a grand Chryslus Showroom taken over by super mutants to mount a rescue mission. If they just head in, guns blazing, odds are pretty good that they’ll get wiped out, and/or get the prisoner (soon to be lunch) killed. This calls for resourcefulness and careful use of each of the wastelanders’ special skills and their surroundings. (Well, that AND a bit of judiciously-applied violence against mutant-kind, most likely.)

This is a scenario I’ve used and expanded upon for play-testing with some local F:WW players.

More more information about the convention, here’s the main page: http://www.stonehill.org/necro.htm

For the current game schedule (still being updated), you can check it out here: http://www.rjritchie.com/necro/schedule.cfm

I’ll also be running some scenarios using Modiphius F:WW miniatures and scenery, but using other systems, over the course of the weekend.

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I love that showroom entrance!

That looks great! I’m inspired. :pleading_face:

Thanks! Here’s the breakdown on what I used:

  • The building walls are from McFarlane Toys “Halo Micro Ops” play sets: “High Ground Tower” and “High Ground Gate.”

  • The car front displayed at the entrance is a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy circa 2006 (Pixar “Cars” toy – “Doc Hudson” – a 4" toy car that I modified by removing the windshield/eye section, and the wind-up key, using some putty for gap-filling).

  • The CHRYSLUS sign is made from some 2" high “letterboard letters” from DCWV, pinned to a section of sprue (with wire) which in turn is based on some mat board.

  • The street tiles are Secret Weapon Miniatures “Tablescapes” terrain boards (“Urban Streets” theme).

  • The scrap barricades ringing the entrance are Secret Weapon Miniatures “Scrap Yard Barricades.”

  • The lamp post and “meat bag” are made from assorted “bits,” a wooden chopstick, pieces of plastic sprue, epoxy putty, and a scrap of nylon mesh.

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I ran the scenario at Necronomicon last Friday. Turnout wasn’t as high as I’d hoped, but we still made the best of it, with Paladin Danse, Sturges, and Codsworth venturing into the super-mutant-infested Chryslus “Showroom Of Tomorrow” in order to rescue a lost settler. (Eh, I couldn’t find my BoS Scribe, so I did a last minute “story” change, and made the subject of rescue a somewhat absent-minded settler who was nonetheless THE VERY BEST COOK in all of Sanctuary Hills, so of course for the greater good, our heroes had to rescue her. :slight_smile: )

First off, instead of using table tents, since table space was at a premium, I issued customized name badges to each of the players. On the downside, I had a problem with players forgetting and walking off with their badges after the game … but on the upside, at least they were nice enough to track me down later and return them once they’d realized their mistake! :slight_smile:

For transporting the minis, I modified a Portable Warfare “Sergeant” bag with a Vault-Tec logo painted on top. (I used a cardstock stencil as a rough guide to apply “dots” of paint along the edges and in the corners, but then removed the stencil so I could do the fine work by hand. I’ve had a bit of trouble with blotching if I try to apply paint thickly by brush through a stencil, or hazy edges if I try to spray it on.)

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One nice thing about post-apocalyptic scenery is that if two letters of the “Chryslus” sign fall off in the transport box, it’s not the end of the world. (I mean, the end of the world has already happened.)

Anyway, as before, I’ve got the Halo Micro Ops buildings acting as a building facade for the exterior, and Secret Weapon Miniatures Tablescapes tiles for the street and the “showroom” interior, with a “Cars” Happy Meal toy inserted as a big car front end for the entrance.

Here’s a closeup of the scene:

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One thing I wanted to do was to make sure every character’s special skills had some sort of application. For instance, I wanted there to be something for Sturges to repair, if someone picked that character. So, I had a “ruined Protectron” on the street scene, and the players noticed it right away (even without me calling it out as a scenery detail). While keeping hidden from the mutant hounds guarding the entrance to the Chryslus “Showroom Of Tomorrow,” they did some emergency repairs to add a Police Protectron to their number … but I played it up that the Police Protectron wasn’t just automatically going to follow orders from some random wastelander.

“Codsworth,” however, being such an expert on robot mentality (partly on account of being one) was able to recognize that what the Police Protectron needed was some context. As such, he talked the Protectron into believing that they were deputies, and that there was a hostage situation involving some terrorists in the “Super Mutant Gang,” and that those were some very vicious attack dogs out front. (In a manner of speaking, it wasn’t so much a lie, as a repackaging of the present situation in an attempt at Pre-War terms.) This was sufficient to get the Protectron to aid them, although they very quickly realized that the Protectron, though durable, was not the least bit sneaky, so they basically just instructed it to act as backup while they took the lead.

To reflect the difficulty in carefully phrasing everything for the Protectron to understand, I treated it as an action or quick action to give the Protectron new orders. This would be no big deal in non-combat phases, but in combat it could take time away from attacking, etc. I wouldn’t require a directive every single activation, but I would insist that the robot would rather mechanically keep carrying out its previous orders. If it was instructed to “apprehend that criminal,” then it would continue to do so until the “criminal” was “apprehended” (or otherwise neutralized). Despite the difficulties I introduced in instructing the robot, I left it to one of the players to handle the stat mat and die rolls for the Protectron.

NOTE: For this game, I tried to be very flexible in terms of how skills were handled. Unless there was a situation that I determined absolutely required a specific Skill Expertise, I phrased my requests for tests in the form of “Give me an Agility or Stealth roll,” or “Give me a Perception or Notice roll.” So, if I ask for “Agility/Stealth,” EVERYONE has Agility, so they can roll that. However, if you have Stealth as a Skill Expertise, then you’ve got that extra bonus die you can roll for it.

I only applied the massive -4 untrained skill penalty (for lack of a specific Expertise) in cases where I felt like it should be nearly impossible to do a task without at least the very basic of training (e.g., repairing a robot, picking a lock, hacking a computer, performing brain surgery, flying a vertibird).

Another benefit of my doing it this way was that I could get away with giving the players all half-sheet “character mats,” rather than necessitating the full page format (half of it taken up by an exhaustive list of skills, most of which any given character WILL NOT have). I made the sheets in cardstock, and put paper clips on the top wounds/rads counter section, for ease of keeping track of damage without having to mess with those tiny punch-out cardboard dots. (Also, for Luck Points, I gave the players Fallout-themed poker chips to use as counters.)

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Once the action moved into the Showroom, I took down the outer wall sections to free up more line-of-sight to the interior. The room featured three automated displays of simulated “cars of the future” (I used some HeroClix SHIELD Flying Cars, under the conceit that perhaps if the bombs hadn’t dropped in 2070, Chryslus EVENTUALLY would come out with those long-wished-for “flying cars” – or at least they were working on it, possibly using the same tech that makes ED-E and the other eyebots float despite no visible means of propulsion.) I divided up the showroom interior into sub-sections with walls of junk. Up ahead was where the captive was kept and some super mutants were loudly arguing over how to properly prepare her – as one of them thought it would be highly inappropriate to eat a /cook/ RAW.

(I did a bit of crazy ad-libbing here, with contributions from the crazy cook settler where she’d blithely offer a bunch of suggestions about the proper uses of herbs and what sort of wine might go best with the meal – insert joke about eating liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti here – but the PCs weren’t about to just keep listening in.)

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Very nice! The only fault I can find with your broken sign logic is that I don’t see the broken letters on the ground in front of the building.

Seriously though, outstanding looking table.

Sturges, despite having a pretty dismal Agility (4), nonetheless took the lead on the sneaking approach, first making his way over to a side area where a super-mutant “doc” was happily butchering (AKA “doing surgery”) on some previous victims of the super mutants. Sturges created a distracting noise near the entrance that happened to catch the “doc’s” attention, and as the super mutant went over to investigate, he and Codsworth quickly beset him with melee weapons. Although there’s no actual rule for it, I invented a damage bonus on an attack made on a completely unaware enemy (Stealth/Agility vs. Notice/Perception, and add a Black Die upon winning the opposing check, so long as the enemy had no reason to be “on guard”), and thanks to that and their coordinated attacks, they somehow managed to defeat him (with melee attacks and Danse’s laser) before he could sound the alarm.

Next, they made their way over to the “workshop” area, where a super mutant was in charge of making and modifying the pipe weapons the super mutants primarily used – though for the moment, he was working on a heavily-modified ripper. Once again, the three heroes managed to finish him off, without even involving the Police Protectron (not that it had much hope of hitting anything anyway).

Around that time, however, the super mutants came to a compromise – that they’d just chop up the settler, and if half the mutants wanted their food cooked, then they’d cook that half, and eat the other half raw. That, however, would require the cook to be properly chopped up, so one of them headed over to fetch “Doc.”

That’s when the jig was up, as the PCs ambushed the lone super mutant, and after that point, there was no hiding the fact that the super mutants were under attack. Commence big, chaotic battle!

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One thing that was frequently a problem in the resulting battle was the matter of “friendly fire” – when firing into a mass of characters locked in close combat. Dealing with ranged attacks vs. engaged characters got particularly confusing when using Codsworth’s flamethrower (since it’s a bit different than a regular ranged attack or a grenade). There was an awful lot of hitting the wrong target in melee. (If only someone had opted to play Preston Garvey! The “Careful” ability is very useful to make sure ranged combatants stay useful even when melee is taking place.)

Anyway, it was a tough battle, as Codsworth went down early on, and the Police Protectron was a poor stand-in (although he COULD at least take a lot of punishment). We had some very close calls as one of the super mutants was holding onto the cook, and Codsworth seemed to be completely unconcerned about the very real risk of roasting the cook by flamethrowering everyone standing next to her. (Okay, so maybe it wasn’t all that BAD that he went down early on, from the point of view of trying to accomplish the mission by keeping her alive.)

Sturges proved to be far more effective in melee than with his .44 revolver (even though the yellow armor-breaker dice DID prove handy sometimes against the super mutants), whereas Paladin Danse was just plain deadly once he was free to open up with the laser rifle. Once Codsworth went down, I let the player of him take over the Police Protectron as an alternate PC (with a Luck Point pool), but with his ranged attacks tied to a 3 PER, and melee tied to a 1 AGI (the 9 STR accomplishing nothing), he was pretty useless except just as an additional target to draw fire when the mutant hounds were unleashed to join the fray.

I had to keep reminding players to actually USE their Luck points on occasion. I planned on giving out Luck points at various stages in the adventure, but rather than just saying, “Everyone gets a Luck Point,” I would say, “Everyone who is below your maximum Luck Points, gets a Luck Point BACK.” And early on, nobody had actually spent a Luck Point by that point.

One thing I really need to do for future games is to make a reference card to list the different things you can spend Luck Points on. A lot of the rules I could just explain on the fly, but the spending of Luck Points is something that’s player-initiated for the most part (unless I remember to suggest, “Oh, hey, you only missed that roll by 2, so if you spend a Luck Point, you have a 50% chance of passing!” – but that requires me to KNOW that the player actually missed by just 2).

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@GateKeeper: Well, obviously the super mutants had CARRIED AWAY those letters and done something dastardly with them. … Or, they were actually sitting at the bottom of my transport box somewhere, and I was running short on time to go digging around for them and then super-gluing them into place, when I had players gathering at my table early. (I got to my table an hour early, but as soon as I started putting terrain on the table, I had people dropping by to see what was up.)

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I can see it now. One Super Mutant converted the L into a giant club, while another thought the U was a giant magnet and is still trying to figure out how it works, . . .

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It’s a great table set up and it sounds like it was a fun game! :slight_smile:

This looks as though it was very enjoyable and the terrain is excellent. The concept is really good as well and I appreciate the time and effort that you put into making the scenario fun for all concerned. You really captured the game very well with the ideas in this mission.

Awesome setup. Love the use of the heroclix cars

How did you go about damaging the cars. What types of tools does one use

The HeroClix models are “G002 SHIELD Flying Car” from the Marvel HeroClix: Avengers Infinity line. (There’s also a doppleganger mini in red, called “Tony Stark’s Flying Car,” but it’s rarer. I was able to get these for about 75 cents each at my FLGS, Cool Stuff Games in Maitland FL, but they no longer have any in stock, last I checked.) I didn’t actually do any damage to the cars per se – I just used some cardstock to cover up the “window” on the dial, and painted over the base, then did some quick “distress” to the figure by drippling on some grey-brown wash, and then making rusty spots in the natural “pooling” spots with some stippling of dark brown, then pumpkin orange, then golden yellow. I also did a little bit of dry-brushing with light grey to suggest further wear, and stippled some more “rust” on the base. I could probably go a lot further with the distress, but this was a quick rush to get something to represent my “Show Cars of The Future.”

If I’d had more time, I would have tried to convert the cars so that one kept the sports-car convertible aesthetic, another would be a four-door sedan, and another would look like a station-wagon or some-such. I started off trying to construct a couple of hard-tops for two of the cars, but my initial attempts were so dismal that I decided to put that on the back burner and focus more on other parts of getting ready for the convention. I also wanted to put some sort of placard on the base or CRT screen to drive home the idea that this is a display and that there’s some sort of interactivity. In the original scenario, the primary purpose of the cars was that someone could potentially go up to them and activate the display, and they’d start making noise and rotating around every round, and thus potentially serve as a distraction to draw away some of the super-mutants while the heroes tried a rescue … but in every time I’ve gone through this scenario, the players just haven’t shown any interest in doing that. After all, their primary focus has been to be STEALTHY, since I’ve made a point of emphasizing that they’re outnumbered by the mutants, so a full frontal assault where they’d face the whole horde at once would be disadvantageous.

Maybe my problem (if I really want the cars to be more integral to the scenario) is that I need to position the cars somewhere less central to the room, and introduce some elements that would block line of sight to partition off the room more, so players could get the idea, “Hey, if one of us goes and sets this thing off over on THIS side, then we could all sneak over on the OTHER side and get past them,” etc.

I might go back at some point and try working on the car models a bit more for the next time I run this scenario. I’d also love to make a big half-circle desk as described in the original scenario, and “brand” it somehow as belonging in a Chryslus showroom – probably with “C H R Y S L U S” spelled out on the outer curved surface of it. I also should make some sort of standing poster displays that specifically feature retro-futuristic cars. Those could possibly provide those line-of-sight-blocking barriers that I’m mostly lacking in this big open space.

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I saw the green car outside the facility and thought it was a damaged matchbox

I’m liking the idea of the signage as a blocker to divide up the space, showing the cars “in action”.

If you wanted an idea for in the mean time, you could change it up and have the display activate based on proximity. Only they are broken/unreliable due to age. Might make it easier to trigger for them (send the Protectron over) or could be a potential drawback for being stealthy (like those thrice damned monkeys with the cymbals).

@AlxRaven: That actually sounds like a good idea. First off, it kind of makes SENSE that in some high-tech show-room, there might be motion sensors, so you walk up to some dormant piece of tech and all of a sudden music starts blaring and some voice starts piping out, “(special effects WOOSHING noise) In the FUTURE, with CHRYSLUS you’ll be able to take to the SKIES. Our scientists are hard at work harnessing the power of GRAVITY, to allow the cars of the future to SOAR…” (Blah, blah, blah, stirring inspirational music.) The end effect could be that some of the mutants are going to come investigate the display, but it doesn’t necessarily automatically commence combat, unless the PCs are still standing there when the mutants arrive (or the PCs decide to jump the gun and give up stealth entirely to launch an attack).

However, I can’t help but think that the mutants probably wouldn’t react well to that sort of thing happening all the time. There ought to be at least one path that can be taken without setting off the devices. Perhaps the middle car will spring to “life” and light up, but the speakers show signs of having been smashed repeatedly with a large blunt object, and now they only emit a weak crackling noise when the sequence is fired off. It’ll still draw the attention of the mutants, but not quite so noisily.

(Probably the other devices are left alone because they have some theoretical value as an early-warning system, but just because the device starts making noise doesn’t necessarily give a clue as to what set it off, so the mutants are inclined to investigate rather than just opening fire indiscriminately.)

Oh, and about those monkeys…

(HeroClix 099D “Monkey Banging Cymbals” from the “Legion of Super Heroes” series.)

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