Let’s Play D&D in ‘Fallout’
Grab your RayAway and get your squire to polish your power armor, this week we’re returning to the Wasteland with some fallout characters.
We finally finished the first season of Fallout and can’t wait for more. Everything from the tone to the soundtrack was exactly what I wanted this show to be, and I can absolutely understand where the resurgence in love for the games is coming from. Whether you’ve played every game, are more of a video game watcher than player, or this was your first introduction to the wasteland, this is a huge, endlessly interesting world that we all want to unpack a little more.
While we wait for season two, there are lots of options for continuing to explore the dystopian wastes, from an entire series of video games, to Wikipedia articles full of lists of all of the various vault experiments, to the official Fallout TTRPG by Modiphius. But for me, the assignment is D&D, so we’ll be adding a little rad to our D&D campaign and play some D&D with….
The Ghoul formerly known as Cooper Howard
Does he still go by that name, or did he leave it behind along with his nose and that birthday party?
There will be spoilers for the show past this point, so proceed with caution if you haven’t finished yet.
Something I really appreciate about this character is that he knows exactly what and who he is. He’s very personally aware of his entire deal, and we by extension are clued into just about everything about him that matters very quickly. Sure, there’s history and backstory and his personal relationship with Vault-Tech, but that’s all background. The Ghoul as he exists in modern-to-the-story times is very straight forward.
So he has a very straight forward sheet. When you think ‘gunslinger,’ you probably think of somebody almost identical to The Ghoul. Does your mental image have a nose? Maybe, but that’s not important.
via Amazon
The only thing that’s a little more than by-the-book on this sheet, is what is a Ghoul’s race? He was human at some point, but now he’s a (mostly) undying radiation zombie. Luckily, the Reborn have an undying nature, some amount of traumatic memory of their former lives, and often look a little different than your average not-undead humanoid.
We also didn’t focus at all on his past as an entertainer or actor. While these are part of his past, and ‘actor’ is a background option, you don’t really get the impression that Cooper was an amazing actor or entertainer as much as a very good and very earnest cowboy. He didn’t have a ton of charisma or stage presence, he just had a lot of presence. He did talk at least a few times about his time as a Marine.
Maximus
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make a generic Brotherhood of Steel grunt, or Maximus specifically. But I decided that Max is the character while everyone else is just the sort of NPC that you usually want to steer clear of. And as a character, Maximus has the potential to be pretty interesting.
I made him a Fighter-Artificer split, but he’s not a terribly high rank in either. I picture him as getting a few levels in Fighter, and then veryveryquickly needing to power through enough Artificer to work the armor. But he’s making it work… more or less.
With the power armor, he’s obviously an Armorer Artificer, which gives him all sorts of boosts and protections as well as a few spells that can look a lot like power-armor-weapons in this setting, but he doesn’t quite have a Fighter Archetype just yet. I imagine he barely makes it that far by the end of the season. But based on that, I think I’d go with Banneret.
How would you make Fallout characters for a D&D setting? Have you played the Modiphius Fallout TTRPG? Have you been a longtime fan of the series, or will you be diving into the lore starting now? What movie, show, game, book, or comic should we make sheets from next time? Let us know in the comments!
Happy adventuring, vault-dwellers!
