LOVE the monkey.
Stupid monkey…
Seriously tho, that’s a pretty awesome find!!
For the showroom. I like the reasoning you have behind it. They’re used to it happening, so they would be more curious/irritated than openly hostile at first. It would change up the paths they are taking, so the players would have to adjust.
I was going to suggest clues such as tracks on the floor giving the displays a wide berth, or they arrive in time to see the end of a patrol that goes wide past them. But I like the smashed terminal better. More thematic to the mutants.
I hate those monkeys… 
That is a great paintjob though 
I think smashed, sparking speakers are perfect for the mutants.
Yeah, those monkeys are a pain in the neck when you’re trying to be stealthy. I shoot the heads off the things as soon as I see them when playing the game. They actually bother me enough that I tend to go out of my way to destroy them.
On that note, I wandered over to ebay to look the things up, they’re not hard to find, and the set they come from has toy cars, toy airplanes, and teddy bears all in roughly the same size range.
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Before you order one (and I know you will) check with me… I found a place we can get them cheap and combine shipping.
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Too late, . . . . found a bundle online that included two of the monkeys, two toy cars that I think I can use, and two little toy airplanes. After shipping and handling I ended up dolling out about a buck each. I want to do a little play area with one of the airplanes and cars like a kids room.
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That sounds pretty cool! And, yeah, the monkeys are quite a drag in Fallout 4. The funny thing is, the first time I found one was in downtown Boston, as I was meandering around, trying to find Goodneighbor (but having a rough time of it with the high density of super mutants, Gunners, and miscellaneous raiders in the area). I was working my way through a ridiculously narrow stretch of suspended-highway on-ramp (driving in the pre-war Fallout universe must have been nerve-wracking!), and there was this car with that MONKEY sitting on it. I saw it at a distance, looking through my scope, and my instinct upon seeing it was just to BLAST THE HORRID THING. I expected that it would just be a piece of indestructible terrain and nothing would happen, but I was flabbergasted when I actually managed to shoot the thing’s head off.
It wasn’t until much later that I learned that the things actually DID something. 
But by that point, I was routinely blasting the things on sight anyway.
Anyway, I used the Cymbal-Banging Monkey in my “Creature Feature” and “Scary, Indiana” scenarios at Necronomicon this year. Several players in my games were familiar with Fallout, but one newbie who was (near as I could tell) new to the setting still had the right instinct – she blasted that monkey on sight!
That’s pretty nice to know about the toy cars and airplanes. I might have to do something with that.
Actually, one possible source for some “alt-reality retrofuturistic” airplane models could be Crimson Skies. Sci-Fi City, an Orlando, Florida store, has a whole display of them for $1 a pack (each pack including 4 of the little Clix planes). It’s in NO WAY in scale for Fallout, and these are prop planes, but they’ve got some strange aesthetics and I could see simply removing the prop circles (little clear discs that are used to represent spinning propellers on the models) and using the models to represent some sort of retro-futuristic jet plane. Some might work better than others in this regard.
I used some to make some custom fighters for a Star Wars “Edge of the Empire” campaign (where we were kludging the X-Wing Miniatures rules to handle starfighter combat – in retrospect, NOT a great idea for large battles, for how long it took to resolve). I basically just rearranged the positions of the wings to put them toward the BACK of the model, and right away they suddenly looked very Star-Wars-esque (at least in a “Clone Wars era” sort of way, which was what I was hoping for).
Anyway, I could just imagine using such a plane as a decoration for, say, a fast food restaurant. For my “reusable” fast food restaurant project (generic main building, but with a replaceable sign so I can “re-name” the restaurant a few different ways, so it represents “different” locations for an RPG), one of the restaurants I was thinking of was “Bomber Wing” (a fast food place specializing in spicy chicken wings), with a big “flying wing” type plane incorporated into the sign on each side.
Another idea I had was as playground equipment: Get some ballpoint pen springs (or something) around a wire core, and put a few rocketships or planes on them, and some sort of T-bar handle arrangement and a dab of putty to represent a saddle-style seat, and – tada! It’s now a bouncy ride ship/plane, and I could put a few of them on a base for another addition to my playground “furniture” set.
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