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[Man of Paper]

Tensions are rising! The evil Reds conspire to strike at democracy and take away our freedoms! But do not worry! When our barbaric foes inevitably unleash nuclear fire, you, yes you, can rest comfortably safe within a brand new Vault, brought to you by Vault-Tec! Philadelphia, birthplace of America, is sure to be a target of heathen missiles! For a small fee, Vault-Tec will send you an application for admission into the illustrious Vault 98! Be safe from above in the City of Brotherly Love!

Guarantee your safety today!

You are one of many people who've paid the $1200 application fee to attempt to get their families admitted into Vault 98 should the worst come to pass. Luckily, you and your family passed inspection! Unluckily, the worst did come to pass! Your families were ushered underground at Penn's Landing into Vault 98, but somehow no Vault-Tec employees managed to make their way inside before the doors sealed behind your. A quick inspection of the Vault has shown the bare necessities are available to survive for quite a while, but it won't last forever. Without any form of leadership, each family has elected a representative to a Vault Council in order to organize the denizens of 98. It didn't take long for the people of 98 to find evidence of something extremely nefarious: Vault-Tec had intended to use the Vault and it's people in an experiment! What was the experiment?


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Okay, so some rules for this game so you'se actually know what's up. This is a single-team PvE game where you players will be answering prompts like the above "What was the experiment?" in a proposal for your team to look over. Multiple submissions can be made, but ultimately one will need to be voted on in order to proceed. Proposals will receive two behind-the-scenes dice rolls, one to determine overall effectiveness of the proposal, and the other to determine Karma drift modified by the intrinsic nature of the proposal.

Karma will largely determine how you're viewed by other factions.

Each prompt will define your faction or a period of time for the faction in some way, and will likely have long-lasting effects. Think very hard about what effects the prompt could possibly have.

Any military, scientific, social, etc. advancements that are made will be summarized in the Vault 98 spoiler. Other spoilers, such as Diplomacy, will be added as necessary as time goes on.

Fallout canon will be flexible, but there will be an attempt at a level of adherence to it on my end. This shouldn't be too much of a problem, since the Fallout universe is fuckin ridiculous.

If you're familiar with how I did Preliminary Turns in Mechanized Warfare and how much I enjoyed it, this is essentially a game made entirely of that fused with my love of New Vegas and my knowledge of the only place I've lived fused with frustration over Boston being used for Fallout 4 when Philly is way more important. We also won that one sportball game against them.

Also, read this before writing your proposal. I put this last to see who's not gonna read. There is one clear experiment going on, which is a remote observation of Vault 98. The evidence of another experiment is intentionally being placed to observe their reactions. You will actually be designing the red herring, so please avoid designing an experiment about remote observation. If you see a teammate propose the actual experiment please feel free to point and make fun of them.

Spoiler: Vault 98 Experiment (click to show/hide)

Log of [REDACTED], 10.27.77 - Present

No data yet

[NUKE9.13]

Vault 98 Experiment proposal: There's a faint ringing sound playing 24 hours a day, juuust loud enough to be really friggin annoying.
Vault 98 is connected to nuclear-bomb-proof cameras hidden on the surface in strategic locations, the feeds of which are available to the denizens.

Or:
Vault 98 is stocked with centuries worth of extra-caffeinated Nuka-Cola, and no running water. (The bottles have unique bottlecaps which are not considered legal tender in the outside world)
(Apparently this one is similar to an actual vault, but I like the idea of cooking pasta in Nuka-Cola too much to abandon it)(For that matter, having to shower with Nuka-Cola sounds like a whole lotta fun)
(E: I couldn’t find reference to such a vault, so I’m voting for it)

Or:
Vault 98 is filled with bees. Where are they getting the pollen to survive? Good question. Moving on. Bees everywhere. Every room has vents large enough for bees to fit through.

[Rockeater]

PTW

[Powder Miner]

The data uncovered by the survivors of Vault 98 indicates that the planned experiment was to slowly spread rumors among the vault, rumors indicating that a secret conspiracy hidden deep within the denizens of the Vault is hoarding significant resources, enough resources to increase the quality of life of the denizens by a fair margin. The rumors would then stoke the citizens of the Vault into believing that this conspiracy is both hoarding all of this to live in utter luxury and get rid of the other denizens, considered beneath them, and the experiment was evidently intended to see how much this conspiracy stuck and how much conflict it caused.

However, despite all of this being discovered among the documentation, the documentation never at any point directly says that the conspiracy doesn't actually exist.

[NUKE9.13]

Surface cameras:
Nuka-Cola, and no running water: (1) NUKE9.13
Bees:
Conspiracy... maybe:

[Powder Miner]

Surface cameras:
Nuka-Cola, and no running water: (1) NUKE9.13
Bees:
Conspiracy... maybe: (1) Powder Miner

[Doomblade187]

Herring:

Vault 98 is less so a vault and moreso an artificial underground habitat contained in a natural cave. With a day/night cycle, multiple small islands within the larger cavern, and an abundance of fish and vegetation, the only thing vault 98 is missing is modern amenities, outside of one very small island with only room for three people...

[m1895]

Surface cameras:
Nuka-Cola, and no running water: (1) NUKE9.13
Bees:
Conspiracy... maybe: (2) Powder Miner, m1895

[Xvareon]

Vault 98 was slated to be a place for "the research & development of sustainable energy sources" -- in other words, a big fat shut-up to the worried element of Vault-Tec who were making noise about the likely collapse of the national supply chain, and the loss of the energy infrastructure that could produce the ubiquitous fusion cores and even gasoline. Their batteries, for instance, are ton-weight metal blocks on cables that turn an electromagnet when dropped, then picked back up on a crane when energy is surplus. Perhaps silliest is the delegation of most technicians whose talents lie in designing solar panels for long-term space exploration to the Vault. The clash over how ridiculous it is to even try to develop such 'archaic' methods, versus those who decry the backwards thinking of the 'modern consumerist world' eventually led to whispers of communism blooming among them.

In a frantic attempt to not be seen as traitors and be removed by Corporate, or even have the entire project shut down, an elaborate ruse was devised -- go whole ham and essentially worship the life-giving Sun as an eternal god, relegate fusion technology to a secondary role at best, and continue devising clever means of generating and conserving power. This also unsurprisingly triggered a violent confrontation throughout the Vault, which ended in several inhabitants dead from cauterized laser wounds. Vault-Tec quickly upgraded their assessment of Vault 98's survivability rating, labeling it 'ruthlessly adaptable' and 'too stubborn to fail'.

[ConscriptFive]

Despite consisting of only 12 percent of the population, African Americans comprise 50 percent of the leadership positions in this vault.  Otherwise, the population of this vault comprises a cross-section of society from the populace of Huntsville, Alabama.  What could go wrong?

Politics, in my forum game?  Something lighter...

In a post-nuclear society, it will be of the utmost necessity for America to overcome their differences, and unite.  But are some societal cleavages too profound to overcome?  Half of the Vault's population shall be rabid Philadelphia NFL fans, and the other half rabid Boston NFL fans.  Will our vault-dwellers prove as true patriots, or will this experiment go to the birds?

Maybe too American.  So here's something really off the wall...

All male vault-dweller will be unaccompanied bachelors named "John."  All female vault-dwellers will be unaccompanied bachelorettes named "Jane."  Yet, there will be one "James" and one "Joan."  Post lockdown, all rosters, name tags, and Roboco automation will insist everyone is named "John" and "Jane."  James and Joan will be as geographically isolated from each other for as long as possible, until their meeting can be arranged at a suitably precipitous moment?  Will these two go with it, rebel, or develop delusions to explain the situation?  Can they trust each other, or will they pursue separate courses of action?  Upon likely revelation, will these outsiders be mistrusted or embraced?  Marginalized or elevated?  On an unrelated note, many lighting sources will be replaced by natural gas fixtures.

[King Zultan]

I like the Nuka-Cola and no running water idea.

[Skynet]

Surface cameras:
Nuka-Cola, and no running water: (1) NUKE9.13
Bees:
Conspiracy... maybe: (3) Powder Miner, m1895, Skynet

I really like the Conspiracy, for how insidious and clever it is...but Vault-Tec (and the Enclave in general) aren’t really known for their competence. “Hello, my name is John” sounds more like an actual Vault-Tec experiment, while “Sol Invictus” sounds more like how Vault-Tec would handle actually competent people (and I could imagine such a tech cult actually showing up in a FO game).

Still, I vote for “Conspiracy... maybe”, because I like the idea of certain sections of Vault-Tec really knowing what’s going on, and actually demonstrate said competence instead of having it handed to them as backstory. Maybe Sol Invictus is the department in charge of this experiment?

[NUKE9.13]

I really like the Conspiracy, for how insidious and clever it is...but Vault-Tec (and the Enclave in general) aren’t really known for their competence. “Hello, my name is John” sounds more like an actual Vault-Tec experiment, while “Sol Invictus” sounds more like how Vault-Tec would handle actually competent people (and I could imagine such a tech cult actually showing up in a FO game).

Still, I vote for “Conspiracy... maybe”, because I like the idea of certain sections of Vault-Tec really knowing what’s going on, and actually demonstrate said competence instead of having it handed to them as backstory. Maybe Sol Invictus is the department in charge of this experiment?

I mean, that's kinda exactly why I don't like the conspiracy idea. It's not on-theme for the Fallout universe.

Also, have you read the last paragraph of the OP? The experiment isn't supposed to be a good experiment.

[Skynet]

Also, have you read the last paragraph of the OP? The experiment isn't supposed to be a good experiment.

Yeah, I have read the last paragraph. But I don't think this means the red herring has to actually be a bad experiment. It's just there to distract the others from discovering the "true" experiment (which, I think, is testing their reaction to discovering the experiment? I'm not actually sure about that).

It's possible that Vault-Tec is actually carrying out this experiment for real in another Vault, and for cost-saving reasons, decided to recycle the paperwork for that experiment to serve as the "red herring" of Vault 98.

[Powder Miner]

I’m also pretty sure that the experiment involves seeing the reaction of Vault 98 to finding that they were going to be experimented on. In that context I’m not really that big on some of NUKE’s suggestions because it doesn’t make any sense to seed that - like, the only reaction that makes sense to some of these is just “wow those guys are kind of assholes”. I don’t know, frankly, where you get the idea that the red herring is supposed to be a “bad experiment” - having read the list of vaults from the games made me realize that several (albeit not all) of the sillier vaults, like the Gary vault, are only actually that way because Vault-Tec fucked up their implementation, not because they just went “I’m so random lol”. Setting up the red herring as completely silly and irrelevant therefore actually doesn’t make much sense within the remote observation context for Vault-Tec. You need to keep in mind that most of these vaults were explicitly designed to test high-handed concepts, it’s just that they keep getting fucked up because of course they do.