Fallout X: Back after those messages

[Rater202]

Yeah. progress is hard, the process can be full steps backward and ideas that come too early to be useful and such.

like its very possible that the NCR just plain ends up steadily becoming an empire juggernaut that retakes everything in its way, and the commonwealth just gets steamrolled.

but still, at some point you have to start answering questions that Fallout has avoided ever since it began, which is "what happened to the rest of the world?" and bethesda's style of game where they are make one single open game world in a certain area isn't really conducive to that, because its better done with multiple levels and worldspaces that you can just fast travel between, which often goes against the open world design they do with Fallout.

I'm not gonna link them becuase these on the Shodyycast channel where he curses like a sailor, but Austin of Game Theory and Shoddycast has a lot of "The Science of..." videos about Fallout...

In one of them, he makes a very convincing argument that most of the world is probably vast swathes of uninhabited land. With how many bombs would have gone off over the US, and assuming that pre-war Americans responded in kind to pre-war china due to MAD, there would be enough fallout making it into the atmosphere and being spread by the wind that pretty much the whole planet would have been irradiated all to hell and if allied nations threw their own nukes into it... Combine that with the destruction of major supply lines as major economic powers are no longer producing or trading...

And that's ignoring all of the horrible monsters born from a mixture of nuclear radiation and escaped super soldier experiments.

[Lord Raziere]

Well yeah, and that's what Fallout 2 and New Vegas explore. The "what next".

Eh.

They still were in the wasteland though? Like it kinda feels like New vegas was doing that, but I don't have the F1/F2 experience to know? like New vegas feels like its putting an end to the nuclear wasteland, but not really anything beyond it. I wouldn't say it really answers anything.

Edit @ rater:
okay cool.....but that pretty much cuts off any setting you can make right there. if most of the planet is uninhabited, that is either "whelp, thats all the stories we have to tell" and thats the end of Fallout, we go the bethesda route of focusing on small areas that survived forever, or flash forward to when Fallout humans starting going into space anyways.

[Rater202]

Eh.

They still were in the wasteland though? Like it kinda feels like New vegas was doing that, but I don't have the F1/F2 experience to know? like New vegas feels like its putting an end to the nuclear wasteland, but not really anything beyond it. I wouldn't say it really answers anything.

Edit @ rater:
okay cool.....but that pretty much cuts off any setting you can make right there. if most of the planet is uninhabited, that is either "whelp, thats all the stories we have to tell" and thats the end of Fallout, we go the bethesda route of focusing on small areas that survived forever, or flash forward to when Fallout humans starting going into space anyways.

I mean, yeah basically.

I think they wanted to make an MMO for exactly that reason. You can run an MMO almost indefinitely,

Eventually, they're gonna run out of places i the US they can set games. You could maybe do Canada and Mexico... and parts of Europe, but...

Or they could just ignore realism.

[LibraryOgre]

And that's ignoring all of the horrible monsters born from a mixture of nuclear radiation and escaped super soldier experiments.

Though, that, in and of itself, is an interesting question... would the rest of the world have the monsters?

Most of the monsters in North America are shown to be the result of FEV, not just radiation. How far does the FEV spread? Were there European partners working on it? Did China have its own, similar, program? Would these necessarily be there in Africa, or Australia?

[Rater202]

Most of the monsters in North America are shown to be the result of FEV, not just radiation.

That's not canon.

That was one guy's suggestion and it was ignored by everyone else.

Ghouls, for example, are canonically just "some people don't die when they suffer horrible radiation burns all over their bodies."

Also, not every Super Soldier experiment type mosnter was born from FEV. Deatclaws, fo example, are never stated to be FEV derived, just that they were bred from stock that included a number of creatures including Jackson Chameleons

...Inf act,t eh fact thatDeathclaws can become Ghoulified or even Glowing Ones strongly suggests that they're not the result of FEV. FEV is supposed to make you impervious to radiation, so...

Also, it stops you from reproducing. I'm pretty sure it's just Super Mutants, Centaurs, Mutant Hounds, and Grafton Monsters that are confirmed to be FEV.

Now, one of the posisble suggestions for Wendigoes in 76 is someone who got goulified after FEV exposure but before the virus fully ran its the course... But other people confirmed to have become a Wendigo haven't been confirmed to have siilar exposure. They could in fact just be actual Wendigos

This brings us to another point: Not every supernatural occurrence in Fallout is the result of mutation. Aliens, ghosts, and mystical creatures are confirmed to exist.

So any given creature from real-life folklore could be a real thing in the areas their stories are from the just choose to become more active as society falls apart.

At the very least, there's going to be a hell of a lot of people irradiated to death and a lot of people tuned into ghouls.

And considering the kinds of horrific human experiments both the Government and private corporations were doing on American soil with American citizens, it's all but guaranteed that equally ba or far worse things were happening in the rest of the world.

Vault Tech's South American Branches were probably just grabbing people off the street to run torturous psychological experiments on them.

[Lord Raziere]

I mean, yeah basically.

I think they wanted to make an MMO for exactly that reason. You can run an MMO almost indefinitely,

Eventually, they're gonna run out of places i the US they can set games. You could maybe do Canada and Mexico... and parts of Europe, but...

Or they could just ignore realism.

I guess thats why the original studio decided to make Outer Worlds: its basically what would happen if Mr. House was successful in his efforts to restore Earth, because he is such a capitalist that any society he would successfully make would probably follow his model and encounter the same problems as the one in Outer Worlds.

[Grim Portent]

The only FEV monsters that seem to be officially stated as such are the intelligent deathclaws and molerats from FO2, which were injected with a strain of FEV by the enclave that made them smarter than normal examples of their kind, the fire ants from FO3, gatorclaws from FO4, and the snallygaster and grafton monster from FO:O. Notably three of those are just FEV modifications to pre-existing mutants.

Everything else seems to be the result of other mad science, radiation or both. Or a nebulous genre monster of uncertain past like the tunnelers I guess, seeing as we only have Ulysses speculation on their origins to go on.

[factotum]

Well yeah, and that's what Fallout 2 and New Vegas explore. The "what next".

Not to mention that, as they proved with Fallout 76 (in terms of setting, anyway, less said about the rest of that game the better) they weren't beholden to setting FO3 and 4 *after* 1 and 2. They didn't need supermutants--they were a major plot thread in the first game, but barely appeared in FO2--and we know that Bethesda's strengths in worldbuilding come from setpieces of the world as it was at the time the bombs fell, so it's likely FO3 would have been a much better game because of it; and they could have then followed on from that story in FO4.

[Rodin]

I would love to see a Fallout game set somewhere else in the world. Set one in the UK or Europe, or even just Canada. Come up with a different set of irradiated monsters, different factions. We've explored the hell out factions like the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave. Stick with the 50s-punk aesthetic, but diversify things a bit.

There's a whole wide world out there to have fun with, why not experiment a bit now that the previous games have covered both coasts of the US?

[GloatingSwine]

Eh.

They still were in the wasteland though? Like it kinda feels like New vegas was doing that, but I don't have the F1/F2 experience to know? like New vegas feels like its putting an end to the nuclear wasteland, but not really anything beyond it. I wouldn't say it really answers anything.

Edit @ rater:
okay cool.....but that pretty much cuts off any setting you can make right there. if most of the planet is uninhabited, that is either "whelp, thats all the stories we have to tell" and thats the end of Fallout, we go the bethesda route of focusing on small areas that survived forever, or flash forward to when Fallout humans starting going into space anyways.

New Vegas is explicitly set on the edge of the NCR's territory, it's still the "wild west" (or east, from the NCR's perspective), the place civilisation hasn't reached yet. With the implication that back home things are a lot less of a wasteland and people are actually getting on quite nicely, and New Vegas is mostly only a wasteland because, well, it's the Mojave Desert, go and look at it now...

Fallout 2 is supposed to show how things have progressed since 1. There's a lot more, bigger, and cleaner towns and cities, bottle caps aren't currency any more because the NCR is established enough to issue its own currency and powerful enough to make it stick, etc.

They are stories in a world which is actively rebuilding. They did put an end to the nuclear wasteland. Bethesda just scrapped all that so that they could have endless dungeons that nobody else had ever been in (except the requisite 15 raiders to every other human, who do they raid?) despite them being five minutes walk away.

That's also why the Brotherhood of Steel are irrelevant and on the verge of collapse in Fallout 2 and New Vegas because, well, they were obsessed with the past and the future got built without them. The world moved on.

I guess thats why the original studio decided to make Outer Worlds: its basically what would happen if Mr. House was successful in his efforts to restore Earth, because he is such a capitalist that any society he would successfully make would probably follow his model and encounter the same problems as the one in Outer Worlds.

Depends which original studio. Fallout 1 and 2 were made by considerably different teams. The original original game director finally managed to get the original original IP back and made Wasteland 2 and 3. (Fallout was basically "Wasteland but EA own the rights and won't let go".

I would love to see a Fallout game set somewhere else in the world. Set one in the UK or Europe, or even just Canada. Come up with a different set of irradiated monsters, different factions. We've explored the hell out factions like the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave. Stick with the 50s-punk aesthetic, but diversify things a bit.

Fallout is bound up with Americana. Also, it's not supposed to be the 1950s, it's supposed to be what 1950s America thought the 2150s would look like. If it was recognisable as Fallout but not in America, it would have failed at not being America because other countries had other visions of what the future would be like based on what their present and recent past had been like.

[Mechalich]

Not to mention that, as they proved with Fallout 76 (in terms of setting, anyway, less said about the rest of that game the better) they weren't beholden to setting FO3 and 4 *after* 1 and 2. They didn't need supermutants--they were a major plot thread in the first game, but barely appeared in FO2--and we know that Bethesda's strengths in worldbuilding come from setpieces of the world as it was at the time the bombs fell, so it's likely FO3 would have been a much better game because of it; and they could have then followed on from that story in FO4.

76 definitely got the timeframe right. 25 after the war is very much in the sweet spot to have areas that are both as they were from the day the bombs fell and to have others where a postwar story happened. And 76's postwar story actually wasn't bad, though it was very grim, it was just actually getting to that story was a unrelentingly absurd pain in the butt.

And there's plenty of the US left to explore in future Fallouts. The Southeast has been left mostly untouched, as has the Upper Midwest (a fallout set in Michigan or Minnesota where cold rather than heat is a big factor seems like an interesting possibility), and most of the Great Plains.

[Misery Esquire]

I would love to see a Fallout game set somewhere else in the world. Set one in the UK or Europe, or even just Canada. Come up with a different set of irradiated monsters, different factions. We've explored the hell out factions like the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave. Stick with the 50s-punk aesthetic, but diversify things a bit.

Fallout is bound up with Americana. Also, it's not supposed to be the 1950s, it's supposed to be what 1950s America thought the 2150s would look like. If it was recognisable as Fallout but not in America, it would have failed at not being America because other countries had other visions of what the future would be like based on what their present and recent past had been like.

Well, the USA apparently annexed Canada at some point.

I'm definitely not just saying that because I want a Fallout (#) : Ottawa, where you trudge through radioactive blizzards to get to the safety of the glowing Tommy Hartan's signs that are your only beacons in the dark wilderness, and where the friendly inhabitants are waiting with a cup of coffee.

The raiders apologize to you, briefly, before trying to skin you for laughs, Wendiglows are the result of trying to Deathclaw-ize polar bears instead of geckos (newts, whatever), most of the Vaults are half-done but oddly clean and healthy, and the Parliament buildings are stuffed to the brim with ghouls. That other people refuse to acknowledge. They just say things like, "Oh yes, the Government is real busy these days." or, "You know, the last election got us a lot of hosers again, just like every other election we've had recently, eh?"

And the north of the river (possibly DLC) is even worse. It's French. And Chaudiere Island is just funny to show to people who haven't seen it.

You can even play an American that accidentally wanders over the border fleeing from [problem American faction that drives the plot], so that you can use the fish out of water opening to acknowledge why the PC/Player doesn't know what's going on around town.

[Anteros]

I've always wanted a Fallout in Louisiana. Post apocalyptic New Orleans would be a perfect Fallout setting.

[NeoVid]

And Fallout 4 is the same thing. New Vegas did a bit of work, building off Fallout 2, but the core worldbuilding of the game seldom feels like it's supposed to be centuries past the apocalypse.

In Fallout 3's case, it's because the game was designed with the intention that it would be set 50 years after the end of the world, but they eventually realized that would mean they couldn't include iconic parts of Fallout like the Brotherhood and super mutants, so they changed the date and nothing else.

The only FEV monsters that seem to be officially stated as such are the intelligent deathclaws and molerats from FO2, which were injected with a strain of FEV by the enclave that made them smarter than normal examples of their kind, the fire ants from FO3, gatorclaws from FO4, and the snallygaster and grafton monster from FO:O. Notably three of those are just FEV modifications to pre-existing mutants.

Well, damn. All this time I thought that everything from ghouls to Mirelurks to Mole Miners were explained by low levels of FEV in the environment combined with massive amounts of radiation.

[factotum]

In Fallout 3's case, it's because the game was designed with the intention that it would be set 50 years after the end of the world, but they eventually realized that would mean they couldn't include iconic parts of Fallout like the Brotherhood and super mutants, so they changed the date and nothing else.

I think setting it on the opposite side of the continent was more a problem there...the BoS were certainly already well established at the time of FO1, so having them around 20 years earlier wouldn't be a stretch. And I disagree supermutants were iconic parts of Fallout, like I said, they hardly appear IN FO2 due to you, y'know, destroying the Master and the FEV vats in the first game, so them not appearing in FO3 would not have been a problem either IMHO. What it comes down to is Bethesda really not figuring out what actually made the original games iconic and thus hitting all the wrong targets.

[Mechalich]

I think setting it on the opposite side of the continent was more a problem there...the BoS were certainly already well established at the time of FO1, so having them around 20 years earlier wouldn't be a stretch. And I disagree supermutants were iconic parts of Fallout, like I said, they hardly appear IN FO2 due to you, y'know, destroying the Master and the FEV vats in the first game, so them not appearing in FO3 would not have been a problem either IMHO. What it comes down to is Bethesda really not figuring out what actually made the original games iconic and thus hitting all the wrong targets.

Well, 'iconic' is probably a stretch for the original games, being honest. Fallout 1 & 2 were popular late 90s cRPGs, but they were hardly smash hits at the time - Fallout 2 game out in the same year as Baldur's Gate, and it's definitely not the former that made the biggest impression in terms of RPGs of 1998. Certainly the first two games weren't potent enough to bring success to tactics or BoS. There's a reason the franchise was sold to Bethesda in the first place. Really, Fallout 3 is absolutely the touchstone for the franchise - NV is a better FO3, FO4 is a bigger FO3, and F76 is a multiplayer cash-grab FO3. And while FO3 has the same basic flaws as every major big Bethesda open-world game (plus some special ones the others don't) it's a genuinely great game and was an absolute smash. The number of people who've played one of the Bethesda games compared to the original two games is simply not comparable.

[Grim Portent]

Well, damn. All this time I thought that everything from ghouls to Mirelurks to Mole Miners were explained by low levels of FEV in the environment combined with massive amounts of radiation.

I expected more creatures to be FEV based other than the classic mutants myself, but couldn't see any mentions of it in the descriptions of the other creatures. I had assumed that nightstalkers and cazadors would have some recombinant FEV tinkering, but it seems like it was never mentioned in game, so it probably wasn't what the devs had in mind.

I could have sworn that FEV was mentioned in a terminal in Old World Blues somewhere, but I can't find anything to back that up so I might be misremembering.



On the idea of future Fallout games, I'm in favour of sticking with the US as a setting, it's a big place with lots of room for different ideas, but I would like to see more stuff set in the period shortly after the bombs fell. A decade or two is a good time for the sort of stories Bethesda is good at telling, but I would also be interested in a game set just a few years after the bombs fell, playing as a survivor whose community is gradually turning into ghouls with the associated issues while also dealing with the slow spread of mutants and bio-weapons that resulted from pre-war experiments that have broken free.

[Triaxx]

So FEV is responsible for a lot of the mutations. It was already around pre-war. But many of it's worst creations weren't realized until after it was combined with Radiation. For example the Vault 8 ghouls were created when their Vault Door did not fully seal. Radiation combined with FEV created most of the Ghouls as we know them. The green Vats at Mariposa were FEV tanks, exposed to radiation after the BOS left following the extermination of the scientists in charge of the project.

The reason we visit Mariposa in F2 is because the Enclave had maps and had gone in search of the project left there. After they left they dynamited the entrance that we then have to blow back open.

The FEV samples they retrieved were tje reason they kidnapped the residents of Vault 13 and Arroyo. They wanted to continue testing on them.

[Rater202]

So FEV is responsible for a lot of the mutations. It was already around pre-war. But many of it's worst creations weren't realized until after it was combined with Radiation. For example the Vault 8 ghouls were created when their Vault Door did not fully seal. Radiation combined with FEV created most of the Ghouls as we know them. The green Vats at Mariposa were FEV tanks, exposed to radiation after the BOS left following the extermination of the scientists in charge of the project.

The reason we visit Mariposa in F2 is that the Enclave had maps and had gone in search of the project left there. After they left they dynamited the entrance that we then have to blowback open.

The FEV samples they retrieved were tje reason they kidnapped the residents of Vault 13 and Arroyo. They wanted to continue testing on them.

Everything I've read on the subject says that none of that is canon.

It was suggested by one guy to handwave away the "radiation doesn't work like that" thing... Completely ignoring that Fallout was deliberately going for a 1950s comic book sci-fi/horror aesthetic and in those genres radiation absolutely does.

It has been ignored completely ever since.

If a creature is not explicitly said to result from FEC, then FEV had nothing to do with it.

The closest thing to FEV being involved in the creation of ghouls, for example, is Harold becoming virtually indistinguishable from a ghoul to the point of being assumed to be one as part of his centuries ling metamorphois into a tree caused by incidental FEV exposure.

[Grim Portent]

It does occur to me that not all FEV mutants seem to be sterile.

Super mutants are sterile because their sexual characteristics get re-absorbed into the body.

Centaurs aren't stated to be sterile as I recall, but given their garbled anatomy I don't think they can breed.

Mutant hounds are also FEV mutants, but we don't know if they are sterile, though given that the mutants of FO4 don't seem to get the idea of sex I have to assume they haven't got a hound breeding program.

The Master was probably sterile, as well as being unique.

The grafton monster and the snallygaster can presumably breed, because there's a whole bunch of them in 76.

Psykers are still recognisably human and still sexually dimorphic, and we encounter the Forecaster in NV, long after the Master's own handful of psykers would have died of old age. No one in the Mojave area that we know of is tinkering with FEV strains, so this kid is probably the descendent of a psyker or gained their powers from another source like Cabot did. There's also Mama Murphy in FO4, but she could plausibly have been exposed to Institute FEV.

Gatorclaws are probably sterile since they're all clones and there don't seem to be any nests in their part of Nuka World.

Fire ants were also able to breed perfectly fine, though their FEV tinkering was less major than other examples.

[Triaxx]

Rater have you got a source for the non-canonicity?

[Rynjin]

Alternately, do you have a source FOR the canonicity?

[Rater202]

An exact source is hard to find: All I know for sure is that one of the orignal creators said that FEV was responsible for everything while other creatures said otherwise and that it was mostly radiation or unrelated experiments.

And since Bethesda took over, FEV has only been mentioned in the context of Super Mutants and their relatives, except the one specific strain in Fallout 3.

Edit: Okay, double checking, the first game and comments by it's lead designer indicate that all mutations are the reuslt of FEV, but that was retconned from Fallout 2 onward.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I expected more creatures to be FEV based other than the classic mutants myself, but couldn't see any mentions of it in the descriptions of the other creatures. I had assumed that nightstalkers and cazadors would have some recombinant FEV tinkering, but it seems like it was never mentioned in game, so it probably wasn't what the devs had in mind.

I could have sworn that FEV was mentioned in a terminal in Old World Blues somewhere, but I can't find anything to back that up so I might be misremembering.

Dr. Borous, if you talk to him, mentions making both Nightstalkers and Cazadores, then in an obvious Jurassic Park reference, claiming it is 'unpossible' for them to breed, making them perfectly safe and containable. Which was, of course, demonstrably false. FEV was never mentioned, it was all pure Gene Splicing and DNA Recombinating, just like the facility wherein you can make Roxy.

[Triaxx]

The primary source for the canon was the fallout bible which as far as I know was comprised of the various notes and world building done during the dev for Fallout 1. Whether or not it's Bethesda Canon I can't say.

That said I'm taking the same approach to it I am to Tactics. Broad Strokes canon until directly contradicted.

[Winthur]

The primary source for the canon was the fallout bible which as far as I know was comprised of the various notes and world building done during the dev for Fallout 1. Whether or not it's Bethesda Canon I can't say.

Fallout Bible is not canon; it's just a bunch of random stuff informally written down by Avellone (who has not so recently confirmed it's not canon) and perhaps consulted with a few other people at Black Isle for the purpose of getting the studio on track with writing Van Buren, but it has never been encouraged to use as gospel. It's full of info that contradicts itself and the games. Avellone was also not a part of the original Fallout's development, having only shown up for Fallout 2.

Super mutants are sterile because their sexual characteristics get re-absorbed into the body.

Their sexual characteristics aren't so re-absorbed into the body that you can't get Marcus laid at the Cat's Paw or become another supermutant's "toy" for a night. Vree's holodisk is very vague on the subject of mutant sterility, other than "they just will not be able to reproduce".

Re: Vault 12 (Necropolis; not Vault 8, that's the Vault City vault), the ghouls there (or anywhere else) aren't products of the FEV in any way. It's just heavy doses of background radiation. Harold, the friendly neighborhood ghoulish-looking-not-ghoul, is a one-of-a-kind curiosity in the Fallout universe, but he's just a not-so-super mutant, not a ghoul. Part of the confusion on the subject is because Avellone, the writer of the Bible, was in the "FEV+radiation" camp, but notably Tim Cain wasn't. We know now that ghouls are an effect of radiation.

As for the super mutants, humans living for a long time on the Wasteland, in contact with all the crap in the air, seem more likely to end up with complications once dipped into FEV, most notably reduced intelligence. The FEV tanks themselves weren't irradiated, to my knowledge; Maxson and Co. didn't leave the base wide open. The entire ploy to capture pure strain humans from vaults wouldn't make sense otherwise, nor would Frank Horrigan likely come to exist since he's also likely a "pure" human given a FEV bath.

[NeoVid]

The types of Super Mutants was explained pretty clearly by Tabitha in one of her more sensible 'interviews.' IIRC, "Dum-dum" SMs like in FO3 are created from wastelanders with radiation-damaged genetics, and putting another layer of mutation on top of that has many side effects, especially loss of their pre-transformation memory and intelligence.

Of course, that was an explanation by the original Fallout devs, not Bethesda, so Bethesda games continue to contradict that. The first of Appalachia's Super Mutants were created pre-war, so they should be stable and intelligent Gen 1s like Marcus.

...Then again, I don't know how the Steel Dawn storyline progresses, maybe there's a group of pre-war genius Super Mutants controlling the mob of dum-dums. FO76's plotlines are significantly better than FO4's, so I'd say it's coin flip if the actual answer will be something that interesting.

[Rater202]

The types of Super Mutants was explained pretty clearly by Tabitha in one of her more sensible 'interviews.' IIRC, "Dum-dum" SMs like in FO3 are created from wastelanders with radiation-damaged genetics, and putting another layer of mutation on top of that has many side effects, especially loss of their pre-transformation memory and intelligence.

Of course, that was an explanation by the original Fallout devs, not Bethesda, so Bethesda games continue to contradict that. The first of Appalachia's Super Mutants were created pre-war, so they should be stable and intelligent Gen 1s like Marcus.

...Then again, I don't know how the Steel Dawn storyline progresses, maybe there's a group of pre-war genius Super Mutants controlling the mob of dum-dums. FO76's plotlines are significantly better than FO4's, so I'd say it's coin flip if the actual answer will be something that interesting.

1: Most of the old fusion cores n the old world were just nuclear fission reactors miniaturized to portable size and sold under a bad name. Lots of people would have acute radiation sickness.

2: It's been explained more than once that there are multiple strains of FEV all with slightly different effects: You don't get mutant behemoths in MAripos, for example. The Strain that the Institute used, which is responsible for the common wealth super mutants, seems to have no direct adverse effect on the mind only for the mind to slowly deteriorate over time. The Apalacian strain might have similar effects.

[LibraryOgre]

I've always wanted a Fallout in Louisiana. Post apocalyptic New Orleans would be a perfect Fallout setting.

I think you get some of this with both Far Harbor and Point Lookout. Obviously, not a huge amount of "Louisiana" there, but lots of "crazy people living in a swamp" that any Fallout NOLA would include.

[Rynjin]

You can always make your own. I ran a Louisiana based Fallout game using Savage Worlds as the system of choice for a good while.