A Fallout'esque Post Apocalypse Campaign

[Tema69]

Originally Posted by SuedodeuS

What I would do is have some mercenaries (the equivalent of Talon Company) attack the group with tangler rounds and the like...

Great idea! Combined with Nightwatch's more civilian ideas, this should make sure the PCs know that there's something special about those caps. :)

Originally Posted by SuedodeuS

...which leads to all manner of Centrum-related fun.

Any suggestions as to how I'd connect the link between "weird money/bottlecap facility" and "Centran agents"?

Originally Posted by SuedodeuS

Base: The Centrum have a nice little base set up, stocked with food, ammunition, and amenities. It makes a good base of operations for the PCs, or it can be sold/leased to an ally group (the Brotherhood of Steel equivalent might work).

Well, since the PCs have just taken over a bunker, another 'permanent' base might be overkill, but even a temporary camouflaged base with high tech tents, camo nets, radio comms, supplies, weapons & ammo would be awesome for the PCs...
The Stockpile and Tech ideas would fit in nicely here.

Originally Posted by SuedodeuS

Intel: The Centrum have extensive information about the surrounding area, including local caches, the inner workings of local Raider gangs (and ideal modes of attack against their bases), information on various creatures, etc. Their historical knowledge alone could be invaluable to the right people.

That's also definetely something worth looking into. :)



Thanks for the ideas mate!

[Gold & Appel Inc]

Originally Posted by Tema69

Sealed (Limited Use 1/day)
9pts
You drop from orbit. You better be sealed.

I'd probably not use Limited Use for this, and add Vacuum Support if they're supposed to drop from orbit. How about Preparation Required and/or Maximum Duration for Limitations on both? Those would scrape up a couple points without nerfing the power for its intended use (unless they're meant to do those orbital jumps without any warning)...

Speaking of jumping out of a perfectly good spaceship into the atmosphere of a planet: that's going to be brutal with HT 8. By the time you give these guys enough Temperature Tolerance and Resistance (Acceleration) to do what they're supposed to be able to do for a living without blacking out and hitting the planet like a bag of wet cement, you really may as well just increase HT.

DR 30 (40 on front torso) is pretty good against the general hazards of a rough and tumble life, but not exactly the be-all-end-all of personal defense on the TL 10 battlefield. Can't Wear Armor is huge at that TL; this guy is vulnerable to civilian projectile handguns from a full TL down (9) with APEP ammo. He needs to be able to layer on some external armor over that to be credible at his job, and he will probably want to make use of some kind of environment suit occasionally in his travels also.

ETA: Willpower 9 is probably not a great thing for a cyborg super soldier to have, too... Are they supposed to be more vulnerable to fear and persuasion than the average human?

[SuedodeuS]

Originally Posted by Tema69

Any suggestions as to how I'd connect the link between "weird money/bottlecap facility" and "Centran agents"?

The characters basically do what the mercs were doing, although ideally they are a bit more civil about it. That is, they keep an eye out for people using the Centran caps and find out where/from whom they got said caps. This will either lead them to a Centran agent somewhere along the line, or the person they are interviewing might be a Centran. Presumably the lies of the Centrans will eventually be detected, and the characters will either follow the agent(s) or maybe even beat the information out of them.

Additionally, the Centrum are unlikely to be particularly happy about all the questions the PCs have been asking (and if I'm reading correctly the characters recently ran into a Centrum leader of some sort, with said leader coming out on the bad end of things as the characters stole his stockpile of caps). This means the Centrum are likely to come after them directly (or through mercenaries) at some point or another, and all these paramilitary types with the "special" bottlecaps on their corpses are likely to leave clues. Following the information should eventually lead to some manner of Centrum base, where the characters will try to get information about the facility. Indicating that the arc has ended will be problematic, unless you're willing to let them discover the Secret, which opens a whole other can of worms (particularly if they manage to capture an intact conveyor).

[lachimba]

One thing:

To the best of my knowledge in canon "Infinite Worlds" most parallels are behind Infinity and Centrum in both tech and actual dates.


Its your setting so you don't have to follow this. That said though if Centrum and Infinity both have access to the world their tech will rapidly increase from what they can scavenge.

Making the parallel a weird parallel(which Fallout's version of radiation is) and the tech not necessarily work in other dimensions would limit this though.

[Maz]

Originally Posted by Tema69

You're missing the part were I explain what's going on. :) I'll do that now.
We tried to model a bulletproof cyborg (DR30, DR40 Chest) that would be very vulnerable once truly wounded (when that odd 7.62mmNATO punches through your groin plate). I hope you understand what I mean.
Imagine a really tough shell with a really soft interior. And by really soft, try to imagine a human body lying in stasis for 300 years in orbit.
Do you know WH40k? Imagine a Space Marine Dreadnought sarcophagus...

Yeah I know WH40k, and I got that part, but Drednought for instance, there is so little fleshy parts inside them ,and those that are aren't really needed to function. Most of it is hard metal, and hard metal have lots of HP in addition to high DR.
Now ofcourse a lot of "battle-balance" is going to be determined by what is going to be attacking the players, and that is all in your hands ofcourse. And I'm prett yunclear on what TL the rest of the world actually is? THe price of 20 pts for TL:10 indicates that the rest of the world is actually only at TL:6, this ofcourse makes DR:30 much more effecient than at TL:8 or 9. But still not really that great as it is semi-ablative:

Standard TL:6 rifles does 7d dam, thats 24 dam, now ad AP ammo and his DR:30 is reduced to DR:15 and 9 dam is going to pierce the armour on an average roll, granted it will reduce the dam to Pi- lowering the actual damage to 5, but when he only have 7 HP, 5 damage is more than enough to cause a major wound, that means a crippled leg or arm if it hits them, this causes a Knockdow nroll, and with HT:8 he will fail and be stunned, and again thanks to low HT he will most likely stay stunned for at least 4-5 rounds. Not to mentin that there is a 25% chance of him failing the roll by 5 or more, faling unconcious!

Ok assume you do not use AP against him, he will still take many hits, he is big and intimidating and only has a dodge of 8. With each average shot doing 24 dam he onyl need to be hit 8 times before the standard shots (each reducing the semi-ablative with 2 DR) starts to penetrate the DR on average rolls (and thats against the DR:40).
Remember also that Semi-ablative heals very slowly over time. So if the DR is reduced by 6 one day, he till has 6 less DR the rest of the week unless he takes time to rest. (Giving him Regeneration (DR) would probably be very helpfull to him, it can represent some sort of repair-nanos).


...and all this is without going into HMG fire which at TL:6 does 13+1 dam!

Originally Posted by Tema69

Well, I see your point, but having an ever-ready, unstealable, rechargeable, semi-silent, fully automatic laser weapon mounted on your forearm is pretty nifty. It also leaves the hand free to hold and manipulate objects. For the weapon, we interpreted "Emergencies Only" as "Self-Defense Only". He can only use it after having been shot at or attacked. Which means no sniping, no assassination, etc...

Ok, fair enough.

Originally Posted by Tema69

Well, you're referring to a book we don't have (we have GURPS Basic Sets 1&2 and High Tech), but according to GURPS Characters, I can add AP to any weapon, can't I?

No only to innate attacks. P. 102 og Basic: "Only Innate Attacks and Afflictions can have this enhancement".

You could ofcourse model his bite by giving him an innate, melee crushing attack. Then you are also more free to determine how much damage it's going to give.

Originally Posted by Tema69

If I had to make him stronger, it'd cost points, and as it is, he doesn't really have any to spare (that he knows of - I have 30pts of surprise for him. I'm thinking Vampirism (counts as cannibalism), to mitigate his Unhealing, representing another design flaw - too few blood cells).

As long as the player is liking the character there is no reason to change anything :)

[Tema69]

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

I'd probably not use Limited Use for this, and add Vacuum Support if they're supposed to drop from orbit. How about Preparation Required and/or Maximum Duration for Limitations on both? Those would scrape up a couple points without nerfing the power for its intended use (unless they're meant to do those orbital jumps without any warning)...

Good idea, thanks. I'll look into it. :)
Edit: Maximum Duration, where's that?

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

Speaking of jumping out of a perfectly good spaceship into the atmosphere of a planet: that's going to be brutal with HT 8. By the time you give these guys enough Temperature Tolerance and Resistance (Acceleration) to do what they're supposed to be able to do for a living without blacking out and hitting the planet like a bag of wet cement, you really may as well just increase HT.

I'm thinking that they deploy in some sort of drop-pod-style things, that break apart after entering the atmosphere. The low HT is supposed to represent his body having laid in stasis for 300 years in orbit. He "accindentally" dropped with his unit, but scattered during freefall, and most of the other guys died (he's looking for them, so I think I'll have one or two alive for later).

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

DR 30 (40 on front torso) is pretty good against the general hazards of a rough and tumble life, but not exactly the be-all-end-all of personal defense on the TL 10 battlefield. Can't Wear Armor is huge at that TL; this guy is vulnerable to civilian projectile handguns from a full TL down (9) with APEP ammo. He needs to be able to layer on some external armor over that to be credible at his job, and he will probably want to make use of some kind of environment suit occasionally in his travels also.

My thoughts on Can't Wear Armour were simply balancing issues. I didn't really feel him donning a suit of powerarmour... I guess he could wear armour, but it'd have to be heavily modified (both for size and random weird bitz). How would you model that?
And yeah, DR40/30 isn't invincible, just like modern body armour isn't invincible (or covers everything). Nonetheless, it's effective. He's supposed to be Light Infantry after all. Airborne...

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

ETA: Willpower 9 is probably not a great thing for a cyborg super soldier to have, too... Are they supposed to be more vulnerable to fear and persuasion than the average human?

That was actually his choice. Not sure why, and he wanted it even lower. I guess he was trying to model the whole "my brain is slightly weird after my whole space-thing". It also fits well with the story, as he's easily influenced by Silvius.

Originally Posted by SuedodeuS

The characters basically do what the mercs were doing, although ideally they are a bit more civil about it. That is, they keep an eye out for people using the Centran caps and find out where/from whom they got said caps. This will either lead them to a Centran agent somewhere along the line, or the person they are interviewing might be a Centran. Presumably the lies of the Centrans will eventually be detected, and the characters will either follow the agent(s) or maybe even beat the information out of them.

Additionally, the Centrum are unlikely to be particularly happy about all the questions the PCs have been asking (and if I'm reading correctly the characters recently ran into a Centrum leader of some sort, with said leader coming out on the bad end of things as the characters stole his stockpile of caps). This means the Centrum are likely to come after them directly (or through mercenaries) at some point or another, and all these paramilitary types with the "special" bottlecaps on their corpses are likely to leave clues. Following the information should eventually lead to some manner of Centrum base, where the characters will try to get information about the facility. Indicating that the arc has ended will be problematic, unless you're willing to let them discover the Secret, which opens a whole other can of worms (particularly if they manage to capture an intact conveyor).

The PCs defeated a BBEG who had been tricked/payed/convinced by the Centrans do do BBEG-things. :)
Thanks, good ideas. I'll have to tweak a little, because my players aren't very investigative (they haven't really bothered to try to find out why the BBEG was there in the first place).

Originally Posted by lachimba

One thing:

To the best of my knowledge in canon "Infinite Worlds" most parallels are behind Infinity and Centrum in both tech and actual dates.


Its your setting so you don't have to follow this. That said though if Centrum and Infinity both have access to the world their tech will rapidly increase from what they can scavenge.

Making the parallel a weird parallel(which Fallout's version of radiation is) and the tech not necessarily work in other dimensions would limit this though.

Yeah, but I wanted slightly highter tech all around. So, basically, it's Infinite Worlds +100years or so? It's not exactly canon, I know. That's because we settled on the campaign before I read about Infinite Worlds. :)
I think you have a good point with some of the Fallout Tech not working everywhere. I might have to do that.

Originally Posted by Maz

Yeah I know WH40k, and I got that part, but Drednought for instance, there is so little fleshy parts inside them ,and those that are aren't really needed to function. Most of it is hard metal, and hard metal have lots of HP in addition to high DR.
Now ofcourse a lot of "battle-balance" is going to be determined by what is going to be attacking the players, and that is all in your hands ofcourse. And I'm prett yunclear on what TL the rest of the world actually is? THe price of 20 pts for TL:10 indicates that the rest of the world is actually only at TL:6, this ofcourse makes DR:30 much more effecient than at TL:8 or 9. But still not really that great as it is semi-ablative:

Standard TL:6 rifles does 7d dam, thats 24 dam, now ad AP ammo and his DR:30 is reduced to DR:15 and 9 dam is going to pierce the armour on an average roll, granted it will reduce the dam to Pi- lowering the actual damage to 5, but when he only have 7 HP, 5 damage is more than enough to cause a major wound, that means a crippled leg or arm if it hits them, this causes a Knockdow nroll, and with HT:8 he will fail and be stunned, and again thanks to low HT he will most likely stay stunned for at least 4-5 rounds. Not to mentin that there is a 25% chance of him failing the roll by 5 or more, faling unconcious!

TL6 as a general rule, yes. Higher and lower depending on the areas, and weaponry is mostly TL6-7. Since it's post-apoc, good ammo is VERY rare...
But keep in mind the stasis-for-300-years-in-space part. That's what the player wanted (he actually didn't want to play a working supersoldier). That's why low HT. He'll have to increase it by spending points as he gets his body working again.

Originally Posted by Maz

Ok assume you do not use AP against him, he will still take many hits, he is big and intimidating and only has a dodge of 8. With each average shot doing 24 dam he onyl need to be hit 8 times before the standard shots (each reducing the semi-ablative with 2 DR) starts to penetrate the DR on average rolls (and thats against the DR:40).
Remember also that Semi-ablative heals very slowly over time. So if the DR is reduced by 6 one day, he till has 6 less DR the rest of the week unless he takes time to rest. (Giving him Regeneration (DR) would probably be very helpfull to him, it can represent some sort of repair-nanos).

Well, you might want to keep in mind a motto I try to teach my players.
"Try getting shot less..."
8 SHOTS? 8 RIFLE SHOTS... That's pretty damn much. Personally, I wouldn't stand a pistol shot to the torso. He's Airborne Light Infantry (TL10), has the Soldier skill and Tactics, and he's gamed with me for ages, so he knows that I like combat deadly. I don't want players immune from weapons. I really don't.
As for reduced DR, they have skilled armourers.
I'll look at the bite thing. I'll have to change that. :)

[Maz]

Originally Posted by Tema69

Well, you might want to keep in mind a motto I try to teach my players.
"Try getting shot less..."
8 SHOTS? 8 RIFLE SHOTS... That's pretty damn much. Personally, I wouldn't stand a pistol shot to the torso. He's Airborne Light Infantry (TL10), has the Soldier skill and Tactics, and he's gamed with me for ages, so he knows that I like combat deadly. I don't want players immune from weapons. I really don't.
As for reduced DR, they have skilled armourers.
I'll look at the bite thing. I'll have to change that. :)

Ok fair enough, just wanted to be sure you and the player wasn't on different pages, is all. Coonflict in expectations can really ruin a game, but it sounds cool, and it's a good leasson to learn players in GURPS :)

Good luck with the campaign, it sounds nice! :)

[SuedodeuS]

Originally Posted by Tema69

I'll look at the bite thing. I'll have to change that. :)

Because you've already given him the bite, and all you really need to do is give it Armor Divisor, basically just figure out how much an Innate Attack that deals as much damage as his bite would cost. Then apply Armor Divisor to that, and charge him the extra points. So, if he does 1d imp, that's 8 points. Armor Divisor (2) is a +50% modifier. Thus, getting an Armor Divisor on his bite costs 4 points. In this case, however, this ends up being the same cost as if you had simply applied the Armor Divisor modifier to the Striker.

[Tema69]

@SuedodeuS:
Well, actually removing the armour divisor altogether seems like a better option. It isn't that necessary, and when I think of it, it isn't that realistic either, considering that it's supposed to be a mouthpiece clamp-thing.

So:

Striker (Thr+1 imp, Cannot Parry, Front Arc Only)
2pts
You have a nasty set of jaws that can bite pretty hard...

@Maz: Thanks. I sure do appreciate the help! I wasn't very thorough in my description of the character either - or at least not regarding his malfunctions and whatnot.
But since I have those 30pts for Amnesia, would you recommend anything else? So far, I'm looking at Vampirism (as stated earlier), Blessed (actually representing an orbiting sattelite transmitting blurred recon photos, but since he himself believes to be a divine angel, I thought it fitted nicely), and Honesty.
Anything else that might be cool?

[GnomesofZurich]

One thing that I noticed from the character is that the cost of ST seems to be off. He has Gigantism, so base cost of ST 12 is [18]. He only has 7 hp (which seems low to me, but if it works for your player, that's okay), so that's hp -5 [-10], so should be a net cost of [8], not [12] as you had listed.

As for the 30 points from Amnesia, some good options for a cyborg could include Fearlessness, Hard to Kill (representing redundant organs, self-repair routines, etc.), High Pain Threshold, a short term speed-boost (Basic Speed +1 with Costs Fatigue), a similar ST boost (use levels of Striking St and Lifting St with Costs Fatigue), etc.

Aside from his armour, as has been commented previously he does seem very fragile for a cyborg, so anything you could add to help offset that would be good.