Fallout 2d20 Scavenging 2: Creating locations

One of the key parts of the Fallout game and therefore the RPG is scavenging for Loot. Not a lot of this in the TV program, but I guess it’s not that exciting. But the core rulebook does a bad job of helping the GM with the neccesary tools to make scavenging work. It gives you the base rules, some random tables for the loot but misses some information on how you decide what’s in a location. There is nothing in the GM chapter, and although there is some more help in the GM toolkit even that still misses useful stuff. Even the adventures I have seen just have general loot tables and then a list of which loot you might find, and don’t follow the corebook info. Apparently the new Wanderers toolkit book has more and the Screen is helpful. But if you only have the Corebook, this should help you out. In this 3 part guide I will be looking at making scavenging more workable for the GM.

In part 2 we are looking at how to create a scavenging location.

There is no advice to creating locations in the corebook but there is in the GM toolkit. The rules are basically one page so easily could have been put in the corebook. There is a bit more information and guidance, but the key rules are pretty simple. I can’t just cut and paste them here, so I’ll use the guidance but now just copy.

Step 1 – Decide on the location and the scale (size).

Tiny, Small, Average, Large.

• Tiny is like a box or cupboard or locker
• Small is a room
• Average is a small building like a shop or home with a collection of rooms
• Large is a multi-story building or collection of small buildings

Step 2 – Decide on the Category

This determines what Items should be there.

• Residential – so Clothes, Food and Bevs
• Commercial – Food and Beverages
• Industry – Pretty much anything, less likely for weapons
• Medical – Chems, Clothing
• Agriculture – Food, Bevs
• Military – Weapons, Armor

All locations have Junk and can have any of the categories.

Step 3 – Decide on the Degree

This determines the difficulty of the search.

Step 4 – Determine Items

The GM toolkit gives closer guidelines on how to determine the number of items and which items each category gives you. I’ll give a simplified version. The GM toolkit suggests a Tiny location should have 6 items, and each scale above this increases this by 6. But you could vary this. So a Large Location could have as few as 20 or as many as 30 (or more) depending on your actual location. You then divide this number among the items you have to give the maximums for each item category.

Then create the minimums using the degree. Unsearched is 2 items less and each degree up increases this by 1, up to 5 for Heavily searched. This is multiplied up by a factor depending on size. So A Large, Heavily searched building will reduce the number of items by 20 (5×4). A Partly searched Small building loses 6 items (3×2). Determine the minimums by taking items away in various categories until you meet the total reduction.

Remember the Minimum is what you get on a successful search, whereas the maximum is the most you can get by spending AP. This bit is the trickiest to do without copying the tables from the GM toolkit. But try this as a rough guide.

Item min-max for each category	Untouched	Partly	Mostly	Heavily Searched
Tiny	1/0-1/1-2 4/6	0-1/0-1/0-2 3/6	0-1/0-1/0-1 2/6	0-1/0/0-1 1/6
Small	2/0-2/3-4 8/12	1-2/0-1/2-4 6/12	1-2/0-1/1-4 4/12	0-2/0/0-4 2/12
Average	2-3/1-3/4-6 12/18	1-3/1-3/3-6 9/18	1-3/0-3/2-6 6/18	0-3/0-1/1-6 3/18
Large	3-4/2-4/6-8 16/24	2-4/1-4/4-8 12/24	1-4/0-4/2-8 8/24	0-4/0-2/1-8 4/24

Item categories you expect to find / item categories you don’t / junk and min/max items

Step 5 – Determine Level

The GM toolkit has rules to do with rolling dice to generate a Level. I suggest to just look at your PCs and work from there. Level only really dictates the Level of inhabitants, so Pick a level that matches any inhabitants you want, else pick the Party level.

Step 6 – Determine Inhabitants, Ostacles, Hazards and Complications

Simple enough. Decide if you want any of these and what might happen on a complication. Probably not good to have all of them. Complications might trigger one of the other 3 problems to happen. The corebook has suggestions for all of these.

And that’s it.

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Let’s try some examples

Let’s start with a random locker, abandoned in the Wasteland.

1. It will be tiny, so 1 minute to seach.
2. I’m going to say it’s residential. It will have Beverages, Food, Clothing and oddities (and junk)
3. I’ll have it be untouched.
4. So a Tiny location has 6 items maximum (GM toolkit default). And because it’s unsearched that’s 2 items less for a minimum of 4. So I’ll have 0-1 Clothing, 1 Beverage, 1 Food, 0-1 Oddities and 2 Junk.
5. Level is really irrelevant here, i’ll put zero.
6. It could be locked. But I’ll just have a radroach appear on a complication.

The Location looks like this:

Let’s try a bigger one, a Military compound.

1. It is going to be Large, so 2 hours to search
2. It will be military! It will have Ammo, Armour, Clothing, Chems and Double weapons.
3. It is going to be Heavily searched, so D3.
4. A Large location has a maximum of 24 items and being heavily searched removes 20 for a minimum of 4. 1-4 Ammo, 0-4 Armor, 1-4 Clothing, 1-4 Chems, 1-8 weapons.
5. Again, Level should depend on PCs but I’m throwing in Level 5 baddies
6. There’s a whole load of things I could add. See below.

So that’s how you make Scavenging locations. Ideally you have some created for your session and then have a load of these for if players go off mission. You could make them on the fly, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Next up I will provide a collection of pre-made locations.

Tags: 2d20, Fallout, Fallout RPG, Scavenging