Fallout: New Vegas turned 15 in October, so I’m a bit late with this post, but whatever. With season 2 of the Amazon show coming up, I’m more eager than ever to revisit the Mojave Wasteland. New Vegas is a masterclass in faction design. Strip away the bottle caps and power armor and you’ve got a skeleton that fits any setting: a crossroads, a prize worth fighting for, and multiple groups with mutually exclusive visions for the future – and no one’s entirely wrong. Here’s what New Vegas has and how you can shuffle the deck for your own game.
The Major Players
New Vegas has…
- …The NCR
- …Caesar’s Legion
- …Mr. House
- …The Wild Card option
So you need…
- …A self-righteous expansionist power. The NCR is a democracy, but that’s set dressing. What matters is that they believe they’re the good guys – the bearers of civilization – while being blind to their own imperialism, corruption, and overreach. In your setting, this could be a crumbling republic, a “benevolent” kingdom, a colonial trading company, or an ancient elven nation convinced of its cultural superiority. They tax, they conscript, they bureaucratize. They build roads and courts and then wonder why the locals aren’t grateful. The key: they are trying to do good. They’re also hypocrites who can’t see it.
- …A brutal order that delivers on its promises. Caesar’s Legion is monstrous; slavery, crucifixion, the erasure of identity. But their roads are safe. Their traders don’t get robbed. The horror is that it works, at least by certain metrics. Your version could be a conquering horde, a ruthless theocracy, a fascist military state, or a hive-mind collective. They offer peace through absolute submission. Some NPCs, exhausted by chaos, will find that bargain tempting.
- …A visionary with a plan and no room for input. Mr. House isn’t evil in the traditional sense. He’s a genius with a genuine vision for the future; he just needs everyone to do exactly what he says forever. This archetype is the benevolent dictator, the immortal wizard-king, the AI administrator, the dragon who’s decided to rule for humanity’s own good. They might even be right.
- …The option to reject all of the above. The absence of structure or picking a faction. The terrifying chaos and responsibility of freedom. Always leave room for your players to flip the table entirely. What happens to the region if nobody wins?
The Land Itself
The Mojave is a pressure cooker: the desert is harsh, water is scarce, and arable land is precious. Hoover Dam represents an important strategic landmark, and survival itself. Your setting does not need to be a literal wasteland, but it does need some kind of hostility baked into the landscape that drives conflict:
- A desert where water rights are worth killing for
- A jungle where safe paths through the green hell are controlled by whoever holds the old roads
- A frozen waste where fuel and warmth are currency
- A dying land where the only fertile valley left is behind someone’s walls
- A shattered realm where portals to safe havens are limited and jealously guarded
The key is that the resource must be essential, limited, and controllable. If one faction could just go somewhere else, the tension collapses. Everyone has to fight over the same prize because there’s nowhere else to go.
The Dungeons In Between
New Vegas is dotted with smaller factions that owe allegiance to no one, or sell it to the highest bidder. These are your wildcards, your quest-givers, your complications.
New Vegas has…
- …The Brotherhood of Steel
- …The Great Khans
- …The Followers of the Apocalypse
- …Goodsprings, Primm, and other independent settlements
So you need…
- …A hoarding order of dogmatic preservationists. The Brotherhood of Steel fetishizes the old world. They hoard technology, distrust outsiders, and believe they alone are worthy of guarding dangerous power. They’re isolationist to the point of self-destruction. Adapt them as a knightly order guarding forbidden magic, a dwarven clan sitting on a weapons cache, a monastery protecting pre-war texts they won’t let anyone read, or a guild of artificers who’d rather let the world burn than share their secrets. The group with the most means to affect change is seemingly the least motivated to do so.
- …A proud people with nowhere left to go. The Great Khans were beaten, pushed out, and nearly exterminated. Now they cling to a harsh existence and an identity built on raiding and defiance. Every setting has them: the tribes the “good” kingdom displaced, the refugees no one wants, the culture being ground away by history. They’ll side with devils if it means survival.
- …Idealists working in the margins. The Followers of the Apocalypse are doctors, teachers, and archivists trying to rebuild knowledge and help people, with almost no resources and no army. They’re what goodness looks like without power: struggling, underfunded, and heartbreakingly hopeful. Your setting needs people like this to remind players what they’re actually fighting for.
- …Communities that just want to be left alone. Goodsprings, Primm, Novac: small settlements that don’t care about ideology. They want to farm, trade, and not get killed. They’ll support whoever offers protection and hate whoever causes trouble. These are your human stakes. When the big factions clash, these are the people who burn.
The Question At The Center
New Vegas (and Fallout in general, or at least, the good Fallout) provides a range of answers to the question: “How do we rebuild after the end of the world?”
Imperialism dressed up in decency or imperialism that at least has the decency to not pretend to be decent or trusting the vision of the worthy few or tear everything down and truly start anew.
When building your powder keg, find your central question. It might be:
- “Who has the right to rule?”
- “What do we preserve from the old world?”
- “How do we survive what’s coming?”
- “What are we willing to sacrifice for peace?”
Create factions that are each a different answer to that question. Make those answers incompatible. Drop your players at the crossroads where all of them collide.
And Finally…
Your setting should have a Big Iron of sorts.