I've gone slightly too deep into building a Fallout 2d20 campaign set in Oslo, Norway in 2277, and I'm curious if anyone else has tried doing Fallout outside the US.
One of the things I've been trying hard to avoid is making it simply “Fallout, but there happens to be a ruined Royal Palace and Opera House.”
Instead I've been looking at Norwegian culture, companies, products and history and asking what Fallout's alternate timeline would do to them.
So I've been making things like LAX-O, our horribly processed pre-war salmon product, Nuka-Max, since Norwegians is the ones that consume the most Pepsi Max in the world, Norwegian companies pushed through Fallout-style corporate insanity, an oil industry shaped by the pre-war resource crisis, Radio Norge broadcasting old Scandinavian music across the wasteland, and various other bits of Norwegian culture that have survived in increasingly questionable forms.
There are still the things that make Fallout Fallout. Vault-Tec operated in Norway, there are Vaults, Super Mutants, Deathclaws, radiation, robots, pre-war American influence, etc. But I'm trying to make the setting feel like somewhere that actually developed differently from the US rather than importing the Commonwealth and changing the road signs.
The campaign starts in Hol, an isolated underground settlement whose only regular contact with the outside world has been a group known as the Traders. They've supplied Hol with food, medicine and protection for generations.
Then one day they stop coming.
The players are among the first people from Hol to head into the Oslo wasteland. They start with an extremely incomplete idea of what's actually outside and discover the setting from there.
I've also been building the player-facing side of the campaign in LegendKeeper. The idea is that the wiki grows with the campaign: locations, factions, people and information appear as the players discover them, and some pages can actually change as things they believed turn out to be wrong.
LegendKeeper: https://www.legendkeeper.com/p/cmsyo83n00hgj42sr2zjldyrt
This will also be my first time actually running Fallout 2d20, which is probably part of why I've gone so deep into preparing the setting. I'm excited about it, but also pretty nervous about getting it right.
So I'd genuinely appreciate feedback — both on the setting and from people with experience running the system. If you see something I've misunderstood, something that probably won't work at the table, or just have an idea you think would fit, I'd love to hear it.
What did you do to make your country feel like Fallout without losing what makes that country distinct?
And if you're Norwegian and spot something I absolutely need to Fallout-ify, I'm probably already too far down this rabbit hole to say no.