Fallout 4 and the Settlement Campaign

Alexis wrote some time ago about a settlement campaign.  For those of you not familiar with the idea, the gist is that the characters decide to create a settlement, and the campaign consists of preparing for the settlement, acquiring all the materials necessary to start it, constructing buildings and enticing villagers to live there, and then building relationships with neighboring settlements to ensure the continuing viability of the character's town.

For those of us interested in grittier games, the idea of a settlement campaign is incredibly appealing - it gives our players a place to call home and immediately generates play - war with neighboring groups over resources, doing adventures as 'favors' for other powers to extend some privilege to the settlement (freedom from the local lord's rule, tax exemption, etc.), and so on.  However, there aren't many resources to facilitate such a campaign.  Alexis, again, has a huge quantity of materials that are incredibly useful (his NTME posts and subhex generation are quite applicable), but this only supplies a limited framework for such an endeavor: the subhex generation procedures help communicate what natural resources are nearby in terms of food production, while the NTME series offers a way to think about settlement growth and productivity.  This post, too offers insights.

I don't have any new mechanical ideas to add to the discussion at the moment - I have many other more pressing game matters to address - but, having gone back to Fallout 4 recently, I had a couple of thoughts as to how settlements are addressed in Fallout 4.

For those less familiar with Fallout, a brief introduction.  The Fallout series of video games are set in a post-apocalyptic America, following global thermonuclear detonations as the result of the unabated Cold War in the late 21st century, with those same underlying 50s/60s ideologies and a raft of nuclear-powered futuristic technologies.  The games are set several hundred years after the detonation as individuals band together to reclaim civilization.

In the most recent game, Fallout 4, one of the player objectives is to found settlements throughout the wasteland.  These locations are infested with some kind of predator (bugs, bandits, Super Mutants, etc.) which must be cleared, and then the player may clean up the site, install amenities (water sources, food, sleeping accommodations, and defenses), and attract settlers.

It is exactly the first several stages of the settlement campaign.

One of the things that Fallout 4 nailed was that the player has complete control over how each site is laid out: with the exception of a few permanent, preexisting structures, the player can determine where and what food crops are grown, design any buildings, and attempt to figure out how to best defend the settlement via placement of traps, turrets, and guard stations (and one quickly realizes the benefits of walls).  Actually, that's pretty much all the player can do with a settlement: build it and hope that it all works.  That design process gives the player ownership of the space in an unparalleled way.

From my own experience, my players really committed to building their town as they dreamed up and designed their castle.  Now, the construction costs are too high for them right now, and it may never be built, but the act of designing how the space will be used is a powerful way to give players the feeling of ownership.



However, the Fallout 4 model does leave a great deal to be desired.  My first, and largest, issue with it actually comes from an underlying assumption in the Fallout universe: within the world of Fallout, almost every single individual is committed to scavenging, salvaging, and recycling the  remains of the pre-nuclear world, from wearing 1950s-esque fashions to repurposing old war robots and arms.  However, I can't think of a time in human history when people were not producing something, whether that be material artifacts or cultural ones.  The total lack of social infrastructure and structuring of human populations resembles, sort of, medieval Europe (actually medieval, not Renaissance) without massive influence of the Pope to keep everyone in line.  What that means is that there are but two factors to consider in placing a settlement: defensibility and land quality.  The only thing available for trade is food, so communities have little incentive to trade with one another.  However, scavengers, who venture into the cities for weapons, clothing, and other miscellaneous items, would be the preferred trading partners - almost exactly like how peddlers worked, back in the Middle Ages.

The problem is that this lack of an inter-settlement trade incentive means that there is little reason for communities to band together, which is the foundation of the end-stage of the settlement campaign: developing relationships with other communities.  In Fallout, a large part of this results from the few attributes settlements have (food, water, beds, and defense).  When there are more things a settlement produces (livestock, food variants, grain, booze, etc.), then we can begin differentiating between different ones and find reasons to trade (and reasons to war over resources!).

My second problem with the settlement system in Fallout 4 is that the scale is too small - most settlements have between 2 and 8 people each.  There is an achievement for a 20-person settlement, since such a population requires a great deal of work.  Obviously, even 20 people is miniscule in a medieval context - that's a tiny village with maybe 4 or 5 cottages.  That would be the very beginning of step 3 in our settlement campaign, with much more to do with regard to the development of industries (mills, livestock, smithies, tanneries, etc.) and constant expansion.

All in all, I think Fallout provides an excellent way to begin thinking about a settlement campaign, but it only provides the beginning.  We need more tools in our toolbox to continue where the game leaves off.