Vault Tec's Safe Haven

Available as players head west on I-10/Highway 90 near where Vault Town is.

Add 2 Action Points per Player Character to the GM’s pool when the quest begins.

Summary

After encounters with the Highwaymen and Boomweeds, the players encounter a Billboard for "Vault-Tec's Safe Haven". They arrive in what appears to be an abandoned, but not run down town in the praires with nothing for fifty miles in either direction. As the players explore, they realize that nothing is quite as it seems when they have a ghastly encounter.

Setting

Vault Town

Plot

Gamemaster's Note (Spoilers!)

Vault Town is a Vault-Tec experiment intended to gather data before the Great War on how Reclamation day (when a Vault opens and its citizens reclaim the nearby wasteland) would occur. The dome surrounding Vault Town exhibits a time dilation. Time inside the bubble ticks 5x faster than time outside the dome. This means that observers outside the dome will watch events inside the dome occur on fast-forward, and observers inside the dome will see events outside progress 5x slower. This means that days appear to be 5x longer inside the dome, as the sun moves 5x slower across the sky above the dome. The residents calibrated their clocks and calendars to tick 5x slower, so clocks would remain in sync with those in the outside world.

It is important to note that locally within the bubble, time appears to tick normally. An observer inside the dome would have no reason to suspect anything strange was happening unless they looked out the dome (or they notice that the clocks are artificially slow).

Other consequences of this include radio frequencies being distorted. A 100MHz signal originating from within the dome is now 500MHz outside, and vice versa. Video or Audio streamed from outside the dome to players inside will feel very stretched out.

When roleplaying, it is important for the GM to remember the time dilation, especially if the party is split inside/outside the dome. Some techniques include giving players inside the dome 5 turns for every 1 turn of a player outside of the dome. More successful GMs will typically prevent the party from splitting in such a way, to help preserve the mystery.

Far across the isolated prairies, rumors of Vault-Tec’s experimental “Safe Haven” persist among scavengers and wanderers. The last known communications ceased during the Great War, and the town has remained unvisited for decades. Now, the PCs find themselves approaching a seemingly intact settlement where nothing has lived for years… or so it seems.

In this quest, PCs have the following objectives:

• Investigate the abandoned town and gather information about what happened to its residents.
• Explore the dome-enclosed area without succumbing to environmental hazards.
• Uncover the purpose of Vault-Tec’s experiments and any surviving systems or records.

As the PCs crest a small rise in the prairie, they see a faded billboard along the edge of the highway:

> Vault-Tec's Safe Haven--Post-War Survival Initiative. Come be part of the solution! Exit at FM 1383.

The town lies some way off of I-10, along FM 1383.

Scene One: The Ghost Town

Begin this scene as the PCs approach the town and notice subtle anomalies. Read or paraphrase the following:

> As you travel along the long, empty highway stretching across the prairies, the landscape seems to stretch endlessly. The sun hangs low in the sky, casting long shadows across the wind-swept grass. For miles, nothing disturbs the monotony—until a faint glint catches your eye on the horizon. > > At first, it looks like heat rising off the asphalt, a mirage of something unreal. As you squint and draw closer, the shape resolves into a perfect dome covering a cluster of buildings in the distance. Its surface is smooth and metallic, reflecting the sun in a faint, wavering shimmer, as if the air itself bends around it. No roads lead into it, and no fences surround it—yet it dominates the landscape like an alien artifact dropped into the prairie. > > The dome’s edges ripple subtly, like waves on a pond, distorting the sunlight and making the buildings inside appear slightly warped. Dust swirls unnaturally at its base, and even from here, the town beyond seems… off. Windows glint in ways that suggest brittle glass. Roofs sag unnaturally, and paint peels in long, sharp streaks. The town looks intact at a distance, but closer observation hints at decay accelerated beyond normal time. > > Your radios and sensors, even from this distance, begin to hiss and chirp intermittently. Fragments of voices and static float through the airwaves, distorted in speed and pitch. Something about this place does not obey the normal rules of the world—and the farther you drive, the more you sense that entering the dome may change everything.

The PCs arrive at the isolated prairies where the Vault-Tec Safe Haven is said to exist. Read or paraphrase the following:

> The town sits beneath a shimmering dome, faintly visible even from a distance. The buildings are oddly intact, but closer inspection reveals peeling paint, warped wood, and corroded metal, as if decades of weathering have passed in mere months. The prairie stretches fifty miles in every direction with no roads, no fences, no sign of life.

The town can only be entered at a single gate that juts out from the dome, facing the road.

Clues the PCs can Discover:

• Clue 1 – Environmental Decay
• Buildings appear superficially intact, but the materials are brittle, warped, or corroded.
• Vegetation inside the dome has grown and died multiple cycles.
• Optional PER + Survival test, difficulty 2: success lets the PC notice accelerated aging and decay patterns.
• Clue 2 – Radio / EM Anomalies
• Radios, sensors, and any transmitting equipment pick up distorted signals. Voices sound sped up, slowed down, or broken when heard from outside of the town.
• Optional INT + Science test, difficulty 3: success allows the PC to map anomalies or partially interpret garbled messages.
• Clue 3 – Inhabitants
• No human inhabitants are visible from outside the dome. This is a ghost town.
• Optional PER + Science test, difficulty 2: success lets PCs see some robots that appear to be moving at 5x speed within the gate.

Scene Two: The Gate

The only way into Vault-Tec’s Safe Haven is through a single reinforced gateway set into the shimmering dome. Read or paraphrase the following:

> The gate is a pair of thick, curved metal doors that blend seamlessly into the dome’s surface. A faint hum vibrates through the metal when you approach, and the surface is unusually smooth, reflecting the prairie like dark glass. Along the edges, thin conduits pulse with dim blue light, hinting at the dome’s active systems. The doors are tall enough to let a wagon-sized vehicle pass, but narrow enough that two people walking side by side barely fit. > > A small control panel sits to the right of the gate, its surface cracked but still active. The screen flickers, displaying fragments of schematics and an indecipherable Vault-Tec logo. The panel emits low static and occasional bursts of garbled audio, as if it is trying to communicate—but on a timeline slightly out of sync with the outside world.

Players may open the gate by hacking the console.

As the PCs step closer to the gate, the faint hum intensifies, and the pulsing conduits along the doors’ edges flare slightly. When the doors open and the first PC crosses the threshold, read or paraphrase the following:

> A sudden, disorienting sensation washes over you. The light inside the dome is subtly distorted, bending and shimmering like heat on asphalt. Sounds from outside—the wind, distant animals, your own footsteps—seem slightly delayed or unnaturally fast. For a heartbeat, your perception of time feels warped, as if the world itself is stretching and compressing around you.

Scene Three: Exploration

The dome is large, about the size of a small town, complete with all of the buildings you'd expect in such a structure.

The Empty Streets

A ghost town inside the dome. Buildings are intact, lawns overgrown but not wasted — time inside didn’t skip, it lived normally.

The PCs might find clues such as:

• Skeletons slumped at tables, half-eaten meals → the plague hit quickly.
• Notes and posters about a “Quarantine Order” issued by the Overseer.
• A Mister Handy endlessly announces “Reclamation Day in T-minus 24 months!” despite centuries passing (inside timeline).

Town Hall/Clinic/Library

The town has a combined town hall, clinic, and library. The medical facilities are modest, but ample for anything not overly life-threatening, comparable to an independent urgent care facility. The library is small.

The PCs might find clues such as:

• Overseer logs: growing panic from Vault-Tec corporate about the mutations happening too fast to treat. The overseer laments that they waited too long to ask for help from outside the dome.
• Doctors logs: Doctors outside Vault Town give instructions to the clinicians inside the dome that the clinicians were at an advantage to fighting the mutations because they had significantly more time. There is a note about a field epidemiologist who was supposed to come into the town, but there's no record of their arrival?
• A note that Vault-Tec ordered the dome sealed permanently after 70% of the population died within 3 weeks.
• Vials of isolated bacteria on ice, miraculously preserved in freezers still running after a thousand years.

Research Annex

Tucked away at the edge of the dome, there is an entrance to an underground research facility. The center of the facility is a large room, with smaller area jutting off, each with different equipment. The room is split in half by a large one-way glass, pointed in, with the other half of the room inaccessible to PCs. This is where outside scientists would oversee work and experiments inside the dome.

The PCs might find clues such as:

• Terminal logs: Vault-Tec didn't intervene because the rapid mutation data was too valuable to interrupt.
• They considered the dome "a unique accelerated laboratory"
• Final log: "Lockdown permanent. No extraction authorized. Data archived."
• A cryogenic freezing pod, containing a woman. If opened, they present themselves as Overseer Marjorie Klein – pragmatic, “by the book,” would follow Vault-Tec orders no matter the cost. She is aware of the plague, but had locked herself in the pod before it had finished killing its population and after Vault-Tec sent a message saying the dome would be permanently sealed. She had assumed that they would eventually come rescue her.

Scene Four: Reclamation Plaza

As the PCs continue to explore, they hear an invitation over the loudspeaker to join the overseer in Reclamation Plaza, a large civic plaza commemorating "Reclamation Day". Balloons, streamers, and other decorations lay dilapidated all over the plaza. The remains of a large cake with a thousand years of decay sits on a table in front of a podium. A banner overhead reads "First Reclamation Anniversary".

Dozens of skeletons sit posed in neat rows, as if attending a ceremony. A glitching Mister Handy keeps welcoming "citizens of Vault Town" to Reclamation Anniversary, looping forever.

Over the loudspeakers, a recorded Overseer speech cuts in, triumphant but broken: "You have survived the wasteland… the plague is defeated… We have reclaimed our world.!" Then silence, broken by static.

This was meant to be a grand ending to the simulation, but the entire population was dead by then. The robots just staged a celebration for corpses.