War. War Never Changes.

This is the mantra, voiced by Ron Perlman, of the Fallout series of video games. It is profound, cautionary, and subversively humorous in juxtaposition with the cheery mug of the series' ever-present mascot, Vault Boy. The games themselves support the tagline, as again and again, it is made obvious that, despite living in a world almost completely destroyed by war, humanity still cannot seem to learn the lesson.

Fallout is a great setting for role-playing games, and for a long time, I was working on converting the spirit of those games into rules for a tabletop RPG. I actually did run a few sessions with a very early iteration of such rules, vaguely based on the Pathfinder system, with some Type IV thrown in for spice. However, as my design moved forward, I had a moment where suddenly I didn't feel empowered by the setting of Fallout as much as constrained by it.

I let my imagination drift for a bit, exploring the things I love about Fallout and figuring out the things I wanted different. To whit:

• I love the googie influence in architecture.
• I love the retro-future "atomic optimism" design sensibilities in everything from cars to mascots to ray guns.
• I love the dark humor, best illustrated by the cheerful Vault Boy and the silly pop culture references.
• I love the satirical elements aimed at imperial notions of capitalism, industrialism and militarism as indicated by strong in-game branding and the unfolding story of the War.
• I love the strong emphasis on exploration.
• In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, I love the radio music, generally culled from the post-WW2 years, which also led me to discovering the music collated by CONELRAD--fun stuff.

• The branding proves problematic with a system that is so wildly divorced from the source IP that the rules may actually be marketable one day. If I designed my ruleset around Fallout's brands (Vault-Tec, Nuka-Cola, RobCo, etc) it would be like knowing I was sticking labels on jars that I'd just have to take off again later. Same goes for Vault Boy and distinctive naming conventions.
• The history of things to come in Fallout is a bit bland for me, and by all my calculations, seems to indicate that universe diverged from this one sometime in the first half of 1961. That means that a LOT of things from our real history cannot really be referenced without some serious retconning.
• I don't want to be confined to lore-established technologies, politics or geography. I want there to have been flying cars before the War, dammit!
• I don't want the whole world to be a radioactive desert. Radioactive, maybe. Desert, no.

These are the most important points, but there are, of course, more. Point being, Fallout is not where my game lives. Mine is in a universe that is, perhaps, next door to Fallout, but they never get together for holidays or anything. I'm still trying to come up with something suitably clever for a name, but its working name for the time being is ATOMIC.

Musings to come. Until next time, true believers.