Fallout Denver Session Notes 4: Wherein Our Heroes Obtain Information and Goods Before Fleeing Dangerous Situations

This is a record of a GURPS campaign set in a non-canonical version of Denver in the Fallout universe. The last part is here, or you can start at the beginning.

Once the party decided to stay on in Borealis, they ventured to a corner of the settlement where they were told public bounties would be available for consideration. On the way, they stopped off at a maintenance area where Gadget convinced the local smith to let her make modifications to Drengo's powerfist. His already powerful weapon would be equipped with a vicious blade for future encounters. They also did some trading with a local protectron shopkeeper, who seemed desperate to find a buyer for a surplus of life vests.

This done, they spoke with a local member of the town's administration team, who presented them with an array of possible public requests to look into.

For starters, they headed to a ghoul settlement that had lapsed on paying protection money to Borealis. Once there, they found a terrible malady spreading through the population that caused an outbreak of ghouls going feral. Drengo, as a ghoul, could pass without notice among the ferals, and Remington was able to sneak through the area with little trouble. Gadget and Chance kept watch at the perimeter, and missed Drengo's near-fatal encounter with a ghoul doctor.

Doctor Malone and his team had been desperately seeking a cure for the outbreak. Yet, when Malone found himself the last of his team, his focus shifted from treatment to quarantine. Upon Drengo and Remington's arrival, they found a ghoul who had shackled himself to the wall of a basement laboratory, and who tried to shoot them both to keep them from leaving the town as possible carriers of the mysterious plague. Remington and Drengo managed to survive the encounter, and flee without taking the doctor's life. Their questions answered, the party returned to Borealis to report the fall of this unnamed settlement.

Next, they sought out an abandoned RobCo plant. Borealis had an open bounty on electrical components useful to building the town infrastructure. On arrival, the party found a factory half buried beneath the ramped dirt at a crater's edge. Through the front doors, they took a left, and a shotgun immediately fired inches from Remington's face. The fear left Remy doubled over and retching for long seconds while the rest filed into an office-turned holdout shelter to salvage for useful equipment.

Scattered through the facilty, they found some assorted knick-knacks, and found protectrons roughly dismantled. The damage to the destroyed units was hard to identify, but the party was ready when they found an active protectron defending a small office unit. Beyond that, they caught a glimpse of what had fought against and beaten the protectrons. The back wall of the plant had been destroyed, and in the dirt behind it, tunnels spread, and a teeming colony of giant ants swarmed.

With armloads of tech, and no reason to loot ant corpses, the party decided to nope right away from that anthill, and return to Borealis with their spoils. Of course, they couldn't resist the allure of seeing what would happen if they shot a power cell with a 9mm pistol on the way. The results were colorful and radioactive, and the party decided to keep that option in mind if that level of firepower were to become necessary in the future.