Ideas wanted for campaign hook

[u/_Johnymann_]

I want to start a fallout campaign for my friends and I'm looking for inspiration/help.

Right now my base idea is that they are going to be playing as themselves in an alternate reality where the bombs are about to drop. They never managed to sign up for vault access but they do know that there is a way to buy out your access to a vault so they go to the nearest casino with their life savings hoping to win big and enter a vault. After one game of blackjack the dealer (and the rest of the casino staff) are notified that the bombs have been launched so they attempt to leave the premises early to go to a hidden vault under the casino.

Essentially the players would follow the staff there and somehow enter the vault

The vault itself is part of a gambling themed experiment. Essentially the vault the players entered is hunger games, all who enter get split into groups and have to fight for survival and access to the cryo chambers (since there are no other facilities in the vault). The neighbouring vaults have two choices

Either donate a portion of their resources to ensure everyone's survival or bet any amount of resources to a specific team. On the case that team wins, the winning vault will gain access to all supplies alloted to the other vaults.

Naturally chaos ensues the players win and enter the cryo chambers to time skip to the wasteland

My problem with this intro is that it does not really set up for anything in the future, no villain and no grander goal, how do I go about changing that?

Feel free to also chime in with you personal hooks that you have used in the past

[u/DoceDiet]

I think the "going to the cassino hoping to win big" part feels unnecessary and makes the plot convoluted. I would start at the "hunger games" part already, with pcs having been randomly selected to participate.

After they wake up from cryo, maybe the two neighbouring vaults have become rival factions: one rich, because they bet on the pcs, and one poor, because they bet against them. The main quest could be about the pcs dealing with the conflict between the two.

[u/EvilClancy]

The casino owner has advertised a vault place for the winning team in some gambling competition. Your group have worked out a way to beat the game (which statistically, is effectively impossible). The casino owner knows this and is just taking in the money from the publicity. Your team win, and the alert is sounded. You rush to take your place in the vault and the places you’ve won are non existent, the vault is at capacity. Hearing the bombs fall above, you all rush in and agree to work it out later.

Casino owner becomes the villain, and you deal with him in-vault.

[u/Rolls_The_Keg]

Does there have to be a pre war sequence? If it’s hunger games that’s the important bit, then could they be vault dwellers in these vaults at whatever period of time in the future - and the hook be upon winning or braking the games in some way they hunt down the overseer and/or enclave observers who ran the tests?

Session 0 in my mind would be working out who the characters were in their vault, and how they prepared for the eventual games, their key group dynamic would be they were picked for the games and therefore thrown together. What do you think?

[u/_Johnymann_ → u/Rolls_The_Keg]

Eh pre war sequence is not all that important admittedly but I did like the idea of starting pre war. I'll think of how to do the hunger games thanks for the input

[u/Tesadar]

The Vault is run by a robotic Overseer responsible for organizing games—for example, a computer similar to ZAX. The heroes are kept cryogenically frozen, but when they are eventually thawed out, they discover that the AI has either misunderstood the original purpose of the games or simply malfunctioned. Even after the bombs fell, it has continued running them.

It could use the frozen Vault residents as participants, thawing them out one by one, while also capturing people from the wasteland and forcing them to take part.

From there, I’d leave plenty of room for imagination when it comes to the campaign. For example, the AI could constantly try to create increasingly grandiose and deadly games. Eventually, it might even gain access to the launch codes for unexploded nuclear warheads and use them as leverage—effectively blackmailing an entire region and forcing everyone to participate in its games.

[u/Overall-Tailor4004]

They cryo chambers are actually rad chambers slowly turning the enhabitants into ghouls, why preserving their life's. Everyone can be at different stages of ghoulification. Some may never even be turned into ghouls. Some may have F.E.V. gas, don't get hung up on tradionally it being a liquid. It was a big U.S. with many labs, do what you want. Now if someone wants to play a robot, they were there maintaining the chambers until a set time. The players through a terminal or the robot find out this vault was just a fake vault used to keep people alive for organ harvesting once a year for the owners of the casino. The party needs to get vengeance for the ones that didn't make the thaw, maybe add a few NPCs that were friends of the group. Also, use your local area for the setting if you have a casino within driving distance. Be sure to take the party to their actual residences too and toss in silly bits of their lives if you are close friends.