By Dom Westerland
The community asked for it and we hear y’all! Existing players of Fallout: Wasteland Warfare will now be able to bring four of their most popular forces into the fight for Nuka-World in Fallout Factions! Want to see how your Brotherhood of Steel, Super Mutants, Raiders and Wastelanders stack up against the Operators, Disciples and The Pack?
Well, now you can! All of the Fallout Factions action can be found here.
A Friendly Disclaimer from your friends at Vault-Tec
It is worth stressing though - these four lists are very much placeholders! They are designed as a way for you to bring your existing collection to your games of Fallout Factions.
These lists are all very much still works in progress. We don’t think there is anything too game breaking in here* but being mere humans rather than hyper elite business magnates who have plugged ourselves into a computer system, we can’t be entirely sure. The benefit of getting these Get You By lists out to you, our players, is that we can treat this as an informal playtest of sorts. We will be looking to change and develop what we have here for these four crews for potential releases down the line. Personally, I am very interested to see how the unique Ploy for each of these crews shakes out on the table. Having said that, we are curious about what you have to think about everything to do with these four crews. If you have any feedback, be sure to leave us a reply on the Ongoing Feedback Form which you can find here.
This all means that what we are bringing to you today isn't the end of the road for these four iconic Fallout… factions. We do have plans for these crews we aren’t ready to reveal just yet but whatever shape they end up, what you read in these lists might not make it to whatever the final form of these lists is. The broad feel of these lists certainly will though - the Brotherhood and their Power Armor, the Raiders and their Chem fuelled antics or the Super Mutants being the correct choice to play on the table.**
Last point of small print to cover. If your favourite Fallout folks don’t have a crew list just yet, not to worry! We are looking to cover as much of the Wasteland as possible with Fallout Factions so each group of Wasteland denizens should be getting its time in the (radioactive) spotlight eventually. Looking up from my desk, I can spot sticky notes for eleven different crew design concepts. Some of these have never featured in a Modiphius Fallout miniatures game before. I hope we get to share them with you over the upcoming years!
We’ll be talking in more detail about the Super Mutants, Brotherhood of Steel, Raiders and Wastelanders in due course. With the small print out of the way, how about we spend the rest of this article talking about general crew list design and game theory?
Nice to Meet Crew
A Fallout Factions crew list encompasses a few things. There is the list of potential crew members/valuable employees/bullet sponges (delete as appropriate), stats and modifications for weapons, Ploys, Innate Perks, Quest Lines and tables with Upgrades. Pulling these elements together is our main way of encapsulating a faction identity for each of the crews.
Simply put, a faction identity is the bare bones of what makes each group of Wastelanders S.P.E.C.I.A.L. The Operators are skilled at long range but less inclined to get up close and personal. The Pack prefer rushing headlong into a scrap, dealing with their problems in melee or with devastating short range firepower. Faction identity is about getting crews to ‘feel’ right. Brotherhood of Steel wouldn’t feel right without Power Armor, just like having Super Mutants weak to radiation would be something most weird. We are looking to make the faction identity of a crew on the tabletop feel like the same characters from the video game.
Ploys are a fantastic place for us to explore a crew’s faction identity. They allow us to represent aspects of a Wasteland society that are harder to communicate through a statline. Casting a critical eye over the Operators once more, they are known as being calculating, efficient and cap collectors. None of these aspects translate particularly well to a numerical scale like a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. statline. Giving the Operators a Ploy that represents their vast stockpiles of wealth such as ‘Prepared for Anything’ helps to colour in those gaps. This is something you’ll get to see in Fallout Factions going forwards. Ploys really let us translate the ethos or values of your favourite Fallout groups onto the table.
Quest Lines fulfil a similar vein. Quest Lines have an absolute ton of information in them and effort goes into each of them feeling different, as well as fitting to the crew attached to them. If the rest of a crew list is the ‘how’ of a faction, Quest Lines are the ‘why’ of a faction - why do they fight, why do they get up of bed in the morning? Things like that. Let’s take the three Quest Lines of The Disciples as an example.
‘Rise to Power’ shows the ambition the Disciples have for making their mark on Nuka-World. A number of the Goals relate to amassing territory and really making the nearby area yours. ‘Let Them Know Fear’ has a similar territory base vibe to it but is much about getting in the heads of your neighbouring gangs - sowing discord by dispatching leaders, scouting out their lands to get the drop on them and terrifying the poor saps so they never darken your doorway again. Last of all, we have the charmingly named ‘The Blooded Blade’. This Quest Line is all about the Disciples indulging in their storied interest in dispatching foes in the most artistic way possible. The Goals here are either about killing, preparing to kill or the result of killing. Very nice. Taken altogether, these Quest Lines illustrate the Disciples as power hungry, fear mongering maniacs which encapsulates their appearance in the video game quite well.
Quest Lines are the essential method for communicating ongoing emergent narratives within Fallout Factions with the power for telling those stories firmly in the hands of the players.
Last point I almost forgot to mention was the Training Tables. These are one last spot where we can weave in a little bit of faction identity. If you take a close look at two different Training Tables, you may notice different crews have different chances of attaining certain Upgrades. We use this to give a small bit of flavour in crew upgrade paths, in order to represent the character of each crew. The crafty Disciples are more inclined towards Intelligence and Agility upgrades, whereas the boisterous Pack are more likely to get Strength or Charisma.
War Never Changes
It is an exciting time in the Wasteland. Best head over to the official Modiphius Discord channel to exchange tactics with other enterprising Nuka-World Head Honchos and keep up to date with other future Fallout Factions news!
*Shout out to the diligent Fallout Factions fans screencapping this for use in future balance discussions.
** Am I biassed? Yes. Puny humans.