Escape Vault 99: A Dungeonalia Inspired Fallout Adventure

It got a bit close there for our survivor’s didn’t it? I think I needed as much of a breather as they did once they cleared the clinic and saved Lucie just in the nick of time! I’ll be honest, I made sure there was anti-venom in that safe, because the odds of it being there randomly was far too low! (More on that later).

I have now decided to run the battle and battle report in a couple of parts because:

1) I ran out of time on the day I was playing. It became clear that this will be a multi-dayer!
2) I don’t have a permanent space for gaming just yet so I needed to clear the table for dinner!
3) I learned a lot from the first part of the battle which will help me with the scenario design, and balance things going forward. This is part play through and part play test for me. The story so far has been everything I wanted, but without me GMing a few elements, the scenario would have been impossible. And my goal is to create an adventure that works without too many ‘hand of god’ moments.

So what have I learned from Part 1?

Firstly, the ‘Into the Vault’ rules from Modiphius are great, but they seem to be designed for an experienced, geared-up crew to take on. Whilst I used the points ratio for crew vs enemies suggested in those rules, it simply didn’t work with brand new survivors starting with no armour and little in the way of weapons. Whilst that might make for a thrilling 5/6 turn game, even low level enemies will do more damage than the crew can handle over the course of a long mission like this, unless they are tripping over stimpaks every 5 paces. This has been exacerbated with the updated Fallout Wasteland Warfare rules which now say that the characters have no armour value unless they have pieces of armour equipped. It might have been ok in the past because on character cards there was decent built in armour as standard, but this has been changed.

Couple of ways I could fix this:
1) Use the armour values on the cards i.e. the ‘old’ rules
2) Give them armour to start with. I gave them a stun baton, I could have given them some armour.
3) Weight the item deck more towards armour items to have a greater chance of discovery.
4) Keep the stronger enemies out of the game until the characters have ‘levelled up’ their armour.

In hindsight, I should have done 2). I ended up doing 4) in Part 1, and it still got very very close to a TPK early on. And they need to encounter more than just radroaches! I don’t want to do 1) because I want the scenario to be compatible with the current FWW rules. For my playthrough I think I will do 3). I am happy with the story so far and don’t want to retroactively change things. This is the start of my Fallout adventure, and I am happy with the start. Also, we haven’t encountered the ‘Armoury’ Feature Room yet, and there will be armour to find there in the same way the Clinic had medical supplies. I will just hope that it is encountered soon!

To help this, I have curated a better item deck to have a better chance of finding things that will be useful for the crew. One of the challenges with FWW in its current state is that with all the expansions there are now soooo many item cards available, some quite exotic and specific to certain factions. To this end, recent expansions are suggesting curating item decks specific to certain locations to make them simpler but more thematic. I don’t want to make the deck too specific (too boring!) but I need to balance having a variety of things that can be found (which creates more uniqueness to a play through and therefore more story options) vs making sure the very green crew can level up in a sensible way.

So I went through all the cards and selected the ones that would typically be encountered in the early stages of a Fallout video game, and also removed duplicates. So the deck is still large but not too huge, and contains a variety of weapons, armour, food and meds, as well as junk items and other things. It will still require luck to pull useful items but the variance has been reduced. But sorry crew, you won’t be finding any legendary items or missile launchers!

I will see how this goes for my playthrough, but I am seriously considering including some basic armour in the starting loadout for the crew for the shareable scenario. I think this is the simplest fix. They can still find better weapons and armour, but at least they’ll have a change of surviving until they do so!

Lucie getting poisoned from a ‘Danger’ card so early on was very very unlucky, but it is something that can happen. It is a reminder that the item deck needs to contain cures for poison, fire, etc. even if you don’t have enemies that can inflict those types of damage. Yes, I had to ‘hand of god’ her finding it at the right time, but thematically her and Leeland had found and cleared the Clinic, so I am quite happy concluding that they found the cure they needed in the place most likely to have it! The feral ghouls were a bit like end-of-level bosses in the end weren’t they?!

So Part 1 has been really useful in helping me to modify the scenario rules to make them more balanced, and I am looking forward to Part 2.

The other decision I have to make for Part 2 is whether, before I start, I am going to physically recreate the entire vault that we have discovered so far, or just start from the clinic and build from there. Whilst on one hand it would be great to have the spectacle of the whole layout on the table, it will be a lot of work, and what is the likelihood of me re-entering previous sections?

So I had an idea. Before I tore down the terrain from Part 1, I drew out the floor plan on some square paper. That way I now have a “map” of the vault which can be re-explored if necessary, but doesn’t require me to physically build it unless I need to.