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Playing around with a homebrew system for the fallout universe with a couple buddies of mine. I'm going to be DMing it and the majority of the game will be them bringing a settlement to a major force in the wasteland. However, I wanted to start them in a vault.

It seemed the easiest way to get them all together and we are going to be staring all humans just for playtestings sake though there will be more options as the game gets a little more fluid.

Basically I was wondering if anyone had any good vault experiment ideas that they could play through, then escape into the wasteland?

Vault 1066, a vault where knights and squires and old world mentality is a thing. They have access to horses and a jousting area, essentially Fallout the Ren Faire. They escape into the wasteland for X reason or another and they have a huge cultural shock as they find guns, cars (even if they're not running), people who speak differently than them. They recognize some technology because they had it in the Vault, but otherwise they know nothing about the world.

It's an interesting way to conduct a Vault-tec experiment that isn't one of their weird ones.

Edit: it's called Vault 1066 because that's the year the Battle of Hastings happened when William of Normandy fought King Harold.

A Vault where there is an AI Overseer, no formal human staff and every role and resource allocation is determined by ritual combat.

The purpose of the experiment is to induce social Darwinism and physical excellence, to ensure enough generations to mark the development of the genome the vault is intended to be sealed for 300 years. The backgrounds of the inhabitants were genetically diverse but all of premium health.

The AI Overseer (probably remote controlled rather than true AI) is necessary so that ritual combat for staff positions doesn't confer any decision making authority beyond adjudicating further combat trials. Every feasible decision is left to ritual combat, with the form of combat being dictated by the reward. As the system is intended to promote extreme Darwinism most combats are non lethal and avoid risk of debilitating injury. While preserving against lethality appears to work against extreme Darwinism the overseers of VaultTec beleive that frequent contests and mitigation against lucky wins by reducing lethality makes for a more Darwinian system. Contests are also varied. So the first choice of dessert could be settled by arm wrestling, whereas a work assignment could be dependant on a stealth trial in a darkened room. Sometimes contests are not combat orientated, such as races. Others are not direcrly competitive, but involve matchiing scores against AI controlled opponents or obstacles, including combat against target drones. Such contests should be designed to preserve vault resources. Ranged target drones are shot at with harmless low powered lasers, melee drones are attacked with stun swords which register hits but do no actual damage. The drones however could be armed with pain inducing or even lethal weaponry.
The vault contains a number of temperature, humidity and pressure controlled environment chambers. Some permanently converted for plant growth or ice fields. These environments are small, probably no larger than tennis courts, but some considerably larger however scale of range can be presented by movable walls and low lighting or by juggling plant covered floor tiles.

Resource contests are always restricted by gender and age group, though positional contests are open to all challengers with only a few posts further restricted by gender.

By far the most important contests revolve around breeding rights and child resources which are fight for by either or both parents until the child is of an age where they can fight for thier own resources. As genetic Darwinism is the valut goal intensity for combats is greatly diminished after the residents pass breeding age and are able to retire without only minimal further contest with a level of social support based on their lifetimes running score. These elders provide the little social bonding and community structure the vault possesses. Though geriatric enders must participate in annual fitness contests to avoid retirement by euthanasia.

Escapees from this vault may have plenty of culture shock issues, but will have fewer problems kicking arse all over the wasteland.

 Alfndrate wrote:
Vault 1066, a vault where knights and squires and old world mentality is a thing. They have access to horses and a jousting area, essentially Fallout the Ren Faire. They escape into the wasteland for X reason or another and they have a huge cultural shock as they find guns, cars (even if they're not running), people who speak differently than them. They recognize some technology because they had it in the Vault, but otherwise they know nothing about the world.

It's an interesting way to conduct a Vault-tec experiment that isn't one of their weird ones.

That's not a good idea. Somebody playing a Fallout RPG probably wants to play a Fallout character, not a medieval character who happens to be in a Fallout RPG.

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Alfndrate wrote:
Vault 1066, a vault where knights and squires and old world mentality is a thing. They have access to horses and a jousting area, essentially Fallout the Ren Faire. They escape into the wasteland for X reason or another and they have a huge cultural shock as they find guns, cars (even if they're not running), people who speak differently than them. They recognize some technology because they had it in the Vault, but otherwise they know nothing about the world.

It's an interesting way to conduct a Vault-tec experiment that isn't one of their weird ones.

That's not a good idea. Somebody playing a Fallout RPG probably wants to play a Fallout character, not a medieval character who happens to be in a Fallout RPG.

Great vault to visit though.

Have it be wierdly non-historical, where the "knights" have power armor instead of platemail, but they insist that's how it really was.

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Alfndrate wrote:
Vault 1066, a vault where knights and squires and old world mentality is a thing. They have access to horses and a jousting area, essentially Fallout the Ren Faire. They escape into the wasteland for X reason or another and they have a huge cultural shock as they find guns, cars (even if they're not running), people who speak differently than them. They recognize some technology because they had it in the Vault, but otherwise they know nothing about the world.

It's an interesting way to conduct a Vault-tec experiment that isn't one of their weird ones.

That's not a good idea. Somebody playing a Fallout RPG probably wants to play a Fallout character, not a medieval character who happens to be in a Fallout RPG.

Weird because that's what my players came up with when I asked them what kind of vault they wanted to come from. Different strokes I guess.

But what makes a fallout character? Because in the games, the character is just a blank slate to experience the wasteland through someone's eyes.

And OP was just looking for "good vault experiment ideas" a "medieval" vault gives plenty of chances for "Wtf is this, we've never seen this?" Or "well in our vault we would have done things this way" only for that to not be the best route and to play with the character's values.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Have it be wierdly non-historical, where the "knights" have power armor instead of platemail, but they insist that's how it really was.

I think that's an even worse idea. Maybe Alfndrate's players like it but if it was me, I'd be wondering why the DM is making up a vault that borrows the Brotherhood of Steel's schtick when we could just be playing as the Brotherhood of Steel.