By Samantha Webb
We take our first look at the Fallout tabletop RPG campaign book Winter of Atom
It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a Fallout tabletop RPG fan, as we get closer to the release of Winter of Atom, our campaign book for the Fallout roleplaying game. As the author of both the adventure in the back of the core rulebook ‘A Bang and a Whimper’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in the Wasteland’ we enlisted Donathin Frye once again to not only take the lead on the project, but to assemble a team full of awesome writing talent and passion for the Fallout universe, including Gabe Hicks, Jacky Leung, Chelsea ‘Dot’ Steverson, Chris Bissette, and designer on the classic Fallout games Jesse Heinig.
From the outset, the team wanted to ensure that Winter of Atom felt like a Fallout game, with a main quest running through the whole campaign, but with tons of opportunities for side quests and exploration. The first part of the campaign, starting with the adventure ‘The Train Job’, has a broad scope, requiring player characters to define their objectives and explore as they see fit. As the chapter advances, the main quests narrow in focus to channel the PCs into the growing conflict within the Commonwealth. This eventually leads them into ‘The Winter War’ where they’ll be defending settlements around the Commonwealth from a rogue sect of the Church of the Children of Atom and their dangerous, charismatic leader the “Son of Atom”.
What’s fantastic is that the introductory chapter of the book gives you new tools in order to run the campaign in exactly that way, with new random encounters and hazards for the winter of the campaign’s namesake, and also advice for designing and balancing combat encounters, enhanced traveling rules, new settlement reputation rules, and rules for scaling encounters and using creatures and NPCs as minions. Not only that, but we’ve added new character creation options, including origins for generation 3 synths, protectrons, and even a Child of Atom.
The whole scope and scale of the campaign gives you enough material to take your group from levels 1 to 21, like completing a full playthrough of the Fallout 4 main questline while exploring some interesting locations and cool side quests. Different main quests are ‘unlocked’ or progressed as the characters level, which provides great opportunities to integrate some of the encounters from the core rulebook or RPG starter set, or to delve deeper into some of the new, original factions to the Commonwealth like Mirage, Big Top, Beatsville, and Mechminster Abbey.
We’ll be giving you insights into these new factions, new character creation options, rules, and the quests themselves in blog posts leading up to the launch of the campaign book over the coming weeks.
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