Hey! Vault Dweller! Get out here and play Fallout Factions with us at the March 2025 Goonhammer Open UK. It’ll be more fun than taking a load of Jet and falling into a Deathclaw nest, honest!
So you checked out our review of the core rules for Fallout Factions and thought, “Looks good,” but what you really want is the story experience of playing a Fallout game. That’s why you’re here for our review of the Campaign mechanics in the new Modiphius Fallout Factions core book.
Before diving in, thank you to Modiphius for sending this out for review. Some of the rules here were written by Goonhammer author Evie “Lupe” Moriarty, though they had no input on this review.
It might seem a bit odd to separate out the campaign rules from the core book, but make no mistake – what you’re picking up here is a rulebook designed from the ground up for persistent campaign play. While the core rules make up a tight 19 pages, the campaign rules more than double that. The campaign play isn’t just progression between battles and territory – this is a campaign as an emergent story, handing over the reins of power to the players to influence their battles. It’s a modern campaign system, tight and exciting, where results of battles can create major and minor changes, clearly signposting story hooks and radically changing the position and abilities of gangs. It’s an inspiring read and something you’ll want to dive into as much as you can.
Campaign rules – to an extent rare in other systems – make up the beating heart of what’s on offer here and are tightly integrated into “main” gameplay. This isn’t a system where campaign rules only come in after a battle is finished, but are sprinkled throughout, from setup and scenario choice through to the in/glorious end. There are a ton of options presented, paths laid out, endgame scenarios and ways to explore the wasteland, so much so that in a well-organised and well-run campaign with an enthusiastic group, you’re going to feel like you’re playing through a multiplayer Fallout campaign – and there can be no higher aim (or praise!) than that. Everything you would want to explore emergent narrative and craft your own is here, from home bases to repeatedly fighting the same rival gang, asymmetric scenarios, using your knowledge of the wasteland to get an advantage, loading up on drugs (goddamn jet is great) picking up new parts, weapons and hangers on, split cleanly between scenario setup rules and the massive “story phase” where your post battle options are laid out as in a PVP RPG.
Building Your Wasteland
You start your campaign easy enough – each Crew (mostly) will have a Home Turf. You start off with a Hazard, which will determine the special type of hell your hole is (or if you have no hole to call home at all), and what Facility you start out with. This can be anything from an unopened Vault to an old world monument your Crew rallies around.
Easy, quick, and you can really flesh this out if you want too. You rolled a Bog and a Factory on your Home Turf? Your people are squatting in the sludged-out remains of an industrial estate. I love things like this, getting to fill in the gaps between the rolls with your imagination and this being so quick and easy makes it even better. It creates a really fitting and natural metagame. You’re going to get players who want to build up their Home Turf and make it their stronghold, and you’re going to get players whose sole objective is to take it from them. It’s a beautiful, thematically on-point reason to stir up trouble with your neighbours.
Alongside this, every Crew comes with a couple of meta-currencies – Reach and Scouting.
Reach is the measure of your Crew’s ability to reach out and shape the Wasteland. You gain (and lose!) it from a variety of actions, and its primary spend is to upgrade your Crew Tier. Neat. Simple. Effective. It’s only a good thing to spend.
The next are Scouting Points, which are just a measure of how much forward recon your Crew can do. These let you do a bunch of things, too many to mention, but their primary use is letting you re-roll things like Hazard Rolls or turning fights into Raids.
Game Phase and Story Phase
Reach is a key mechanism whereby campaign impacts gameplay, reaching across the two main phases of a Fallout Factions game. Campaigns are played across two distinct phases, neatly listed as Game & “Story”. Once you’ve shot, clawed, and nuked your way through the Game Phase you’ll end up in the Story immediately after.
The Game Phase isn’t as straightforward as issuing a challenge to another player and setting up some terrain. It’s a tangle of random rolls, check boxes, and if-this-then-thats. It’d be honestly overwhelming to tackle it game-to-game if the entire chapter didn’t start with one of the most helpful flowcharts in the entire book:
There’s a slight bit of book-keeping to make before the fight goes on that is ultimately fairly light. You gain Reach if you tick certain boxes and then move straight onto rolling up the reason you’re even having this scrap in the first place.
Rolling for this is the single most important thing you’re doing in this phase. (outside of actually playing the game) It forms the narrative core of why you’re fighting, whether it be a daring rescue, a revenge raid on your rival, or a chance encounter scavenging in some nightmarish, rad-soaked plaza.
Mechanically, it gives you, the player, time to figure out your gameplan and the type of board you’re going to be walking into. What hazards you deal with will be, for the most part, out of your hands but the Underdog gets the chance to sway it in their favour, and if you’re on their Home Turf, exploit them against you with a Ploy.
The Story Phase is where you’ll resolve everything that happened in the Game – victory, however pyrrhic, and losses, however brutal, is all recorded down here. You’re going to spend a lot of time here. First things first is your book-keeping – marking XP, rolling on Injury Tables for your crew members, and then checking to see if you’ve progressed your Questline in any way (or choosing to spend some resources to simply go to the next tier if you haven’t).
That all honestly can be done right after a game while chatting with your opponent. Where it slows down considerably is the Story Actions. You get three per Story Phase, not including any free ones you might be able to take due to circumstances, and they all come with rolls you’ll need to communicate to your DM. Some of them, genuinely, can be a bit of a logistical nightmare as they might involve players who aren’t necessarily even there playing with you. No one’s ever really far away with WhatsApp/Discord/Text, sure, but I can foresee frustration of having your next game lined up before your previous Story Phase is even technically finished because someone is on holiday, or just hard to get a hold of in time.
You probably want to think about these decisions, and you might honestly be a little decision’d out by the end of a game, and that does probably create an issue where it’d be easy to cheat but honestly if you’re that concerned someone might cheat in a campaign you’re running, probably just don’t invite that person.
Overall, I really do like the theory of it. It feels like you’re really genuinely building up a world that expands the more you play. Some actions are more impactful than others, that’s inevitable, but ultimately having this much choice in how to build a narrative from gameplay is awesome. In reality, I wonder how this would hold up to something like a five or six person campaign without some streamlining.
What’s Good About the Campaign?
This feels like a very modern, very comprehensive campaign system where story phase decisions are impactful above and beyond “my guy levels up and gets a better gun”. That is bloody interesting stuff and having mechanics for persistent rivalries, questlines and how campaign actions can change scenario setup is really cool. There’s a lot to like here – if you can pull it off. It doesn’t just feel interesting, it’s suffused with the vibes and feel of Fallout – story actions and questlines are “lore appropriate”, hunting for caps and parts to upgrade weapons is exactly as it should be, even the end games are given little epilogue slides. Playing through the campaign is going to feel like multiple Fallout games being played at once, which is very cool!
A major strength of the campaign section, and something that will grant campaigns a lot of replay value, are the Faction specific Story Actions and Quest Lines.
The Brotherhood of Steel are an interesting batch with a lot of flexibility to explore the different aspects of the Brotherhood we’ve seen in generations of Fallout media. You’ll be focused on securing and judging (while hoping to execute) members of opposing crews, while pushing thematic questlines. Ad Victoriam is a questline for the gung-ho, techno-supremacists who unleash the might of the old world onto the people of the new one. It’s focused on hoarding Parts for large XP gains, and its capstone is simply having a chance to obliterate opposing Crews and yourself by unleashing powerful (most likely atomic) weapons on the backlines. By Steel embodies the religious, faithful knight aspect of the Brotherhood of Steel, and it has the most straightforward abilities of the three by keeping your Crew healthy and ready for a fight, and a reliably strong, if not a bit boring, capstone of gaining Reach after every Story Phase. Protect Humanity From Itself are the classical Brotherhood of Steel, the holier-than-thou technocrats, who believe that only they are capable of dispensing justice and upholding order in the Wasteland. This is an incredibly Scribe focused route, with each tier of Quest goals relating to keeping a Scribe alive or upgrading one. Both of its abilities aim you to make more use of Judge Captives and have a chance at skewing the result in your favour. (You want Execution. Obviously.)
Super Mutants might have devolved into single minded barbarians in most recent Fallout media but there’s space here to take the older paths of the Master. Survival of the Fittest is all about might makes right, supercharging your Champions while gambling with their lives. You want a strong stable of Champions in this Questline – not only to take advantage of the XP buff they get, but also to mitigate any taking an injury and leaving you down a guy while he Recuperates. Ours By Right is all about achieving genetic perfection, becoming the next step in human evolution, and sees you playing with modifying the statistics of your crew like you’re some mad scientist. You can create monsters with this, and should! Dawn Of A New Age sees the Super Mutants take over, dedicating your crew to wiping clean the old and making room for the new (mutant) world. This one is easily the most straight forward of the three, with Progression focused on tearing down Facilities on your Home Turf and gaining massive amounts of Reach for it. Your story action is a straightforward “eat someone”, which fits, even if it doesn’t always give you the kind of gory reward you’re after.
Survivor Quest Lines go wide on themes and aesthetics to match the varied nature of Wastelanders. Each delivers on its theme and can cover most Survivor crews you can think of. Dear Hearts and Gentle People is all about being do-gooders doing good things. You carry the spark of hope into the Wasteland, and turning people to your cause. Its capstone is funny to me, letting everyone Negotiate with you for free if you have one of their people, and letting you freely Negotiate with anyone once per Story Phase. I love the idea of an entire Campaign turning into a negotiation-fest. My Home Town is all about dying (and more importantly killing) in the defence of your land. These are your civilised folk who have had enough of the Wastelands nonsense. These Survivors are all about building up their Home Turf with Facilities, gaining one Reach per Facility. It’s simple and encourages you to live up to the theme, and encourages other Crews to come take your hard work away from you. Every Time That I Return is for the nomads and wanderers out there, only settling in an area for a small time before moving on. Each time you progress this Quest Line, you become Nomadic and leave your Home Turf behind and gain a bunch of Caps and other goodies for doing so. You pack up shop, go resettle somewhere new, and do it again and again.
The Survivors unique Story Action is all about Redemption. Whenever they take a Captive, Survivors can do their best to appeal to the good nature within all to turn someone to their cause and add them to their ranks. This rocks and can tell so many stories with all the outcomes – does that evil raider bastard who’s been bullying your crew from the start of the campaign see the light and turn against his former gang? Does he break his way out and stick to his evil ways, making you figure next time you won’t be so kind? This is one of my favourite actions in the entire game for the storytelling potential alone.
Wasteland Raiders have a narrower, yet still quite broad set of Quest Lines that represent all the flavour of raider we’ve seen over so many games. You’ve got your classical plunder and steal you see all over, your more Fiend-esque chem-junkies focused on hedonistic violence, and the more sinister, tyrannical overlords who want an empire of slaves, ala the Pitt.
Ours for the Taking is the classic raider route. You want stuff, and when you get that stuff? You use it to take more stuff. This Quest Line is all about getting other Crews hard-earned goods and getting paid for it. The Progression Ability is a strong injection of Caps, rolling 10 dice and adding up the result to get your total, all at the low-cost of your leader getting himself a Bounty.
It’s Party Time! is all about one thing: getting Chems, doin’ Chems, and then getting some more Chems. Rinse repeat. This is for your Fiend wannabes who want a crew solely focused on bringing the pain to the people so you can get your fix. (and presumably doing both at the same time. ) Your Progression Ability is rolling on the Rare Chems table three times and adding each to your stash. This is bonkers. Rare Chems are ridiculously powerful and having easy access to them is going to make other Crews jealous.
Make Them Fear Us is the most sinister of the three, marking your crew as tyrants with a dream of total domination. You’re either the guy with the gun, or the guy with the bullet in him. Thankfully, your Progression Ability is all about making sure you have the most Guys with Guns, gaining a new Grunt every time you progress your Quest Line and then letting you upgrade them for free.
Your Story Action for being a raider is a good one: Sell Captives. It does what it says on the tin, letting you roll on a table to either sell a Captive off for Caps, Parts, or simply force them to fight deathmatches with some of your Crew members for XP. Beware, they have a small chance to escape or even possibly kill one of your own… though, if they do, they’ll join your Crew or even end up as its Leader. A fantastic story can be spawned from this result that I’m sure people will talk about for a long time. This action is another favourite of mine.
There’s so much to dive into here especially once you dive into the Faction specific actions. The idea of running a long, multiplayer campaign where player decisions compound upon one another to create a long-winding, epic narrative is super awesome. Most everything you do feels impactful and that’s what I crave most out of these types of systems. Number go up is great, but add a story behind why that number is going up and it’s even better.
Each Faction delivers on its thematic promise. You feel like a bastard when you’re playing the Raiders and you’re selling off that captured Brotherhood of Steel Paladin off for some Chems. You feel like a Wastelander holding desperately onto their patch of dirt as you write off another couple of Grunts killed in the last raid. It’s rare you get such perfect harmony in the mechanics, and it’s really been achieved here.
War Is Time Consuming
It’s all pretty good, to be honest, but the big question is is anyone going to pull this off? There is a lot here – perhaps not the longest campaign system ever, but one with a lot of moving parts and a lot of options. Your story phase is going to be as long, if not longer, than your games. That might sound like the ideal campaign experience, but in reality I wonder if anyone other than the most fanatically dedicated and determined (and readily available) group will make it work. Playing a Fallout game is a great deal of fun, but corralling six people to simultaneously play? Hmmmm.
While it’s exciting and interesting, for me at least (Lenoon that is) this is an aspirational campaign rather than a doable one. I want to play a campaign like this. But will I? Probably not. If it were stripped back a little, fewer moving parts or things to keep track of, then maybe I could convince fellow time-strapped and rarely available players to get involved.
Final Thoughts
Factions is built around the campaign system, and it delivers on the promise of a multiplayer skirmish Fallout game, providing a fantastically choice-filled, impactful experience where campaign and gameplay blend and merge into one. If you’ve got a group who will go for it with gusto, or you think you can make that happen, we doubt you’ll find a better skirmish game campaign system out there. Meaningful, flavoursome and innovative, it’s the Cram of campaigns – everything you need in one handy package.
If you want to come play Fallout Factions with us, you can! Check out the upcoming March 2025 Goonhammer Open UK, grab tickets and you can be crowned Goonhammer’s first Sole Survivor.
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