Help a faction re-settle Black Mountain

[ElfWord]

Once the nightkin are removed from Black Mountain, it just sits there. A prime piece of real estate, very defensible, with powerful radio equipment, lots of salvage, and perhaps some other tech still usable. Surely there are groups in the Mojave Wasteland that would want this.

 

I'd love to see a quest that gives the player the option of helping one of several groups re-settle Black Mountain. The Followers of the Apocalypse, a group of ghouls without a town of their own, the OSI, or maybe just a prospector couple with some technical skills and courage.

 

http://i.imgur.com/OPapnK7.jpg

 

The way I see this mod working is:

• adding some NPCs in faction locations, or adding dialogue options to existing NPCs, to initiate the quest (only once Crazy, Crazy, Crazy has been completed).
  • one of the Followers at the Mormon Fort, who tells the player "We're running out of space here..."
  • a traveling ghoul in Novac who complains to the player that the ghouls of the Mojave have no home of their own
  • Dr. Hildern at Camp McCarran, having heard that the Black Mountain radio signal is no longer transmitting ravings, wants the player to help him establish an OSI outpost there
  • a prospector couple at Jacobstown have heard about Black Mountain from the mutants there. Now that it's empty, they'd love to start their own trading post there
• Initiating the quest lets the player start to help whoever they initiated it with, or optionally find others who might be interested in Black Mountain (with quest markers marking their locations)

Each group should have some different requirements to make it feasible for them to move there, and promise the player different rewards.

• [Easy option] The Followers would need more radiation suits, parts for a radio transmitter at the Mormon Fort to allow two-way communication, and assurance that the supermutants at Jacobstown won't be coming to reclaim Black Mountain.
• [speech / Charisma option] The ghoul leader would need the player to find a number of other ghouls who would commit to settling it with him, and for the player to talk to leaders of nearby towns and get them warmed up to the idea of a nearby town of ghouls (bonus if the player can get them to agree to trade with them).
• [Dangerous option] The OSI needs to know exactly how bad the radioactivity in the area is, and needs the player to spend a minute with his PipBoy recording in two locations: the impact crater, and the overturned Satellite dish where most of the storage is. Hildern also can't take the risk of Deathclaws ever encroaching on Black Mountain, and needs the player to complete the unmarked quest Claws Out (kill the Alpha Deathclaw and Deathclaw Mother in Quarry Junction).
• [High-effort option] The prospector couple needs a lot of help. They need a variety of personal supplies (water, RadAway, food), initial stock for their trading post (booze, weapons, magazines), and connections to trading groups that can add them to their routes or spread the word (Crimson Caravan, 188 Trading Post, Mojave Outpost).

Helping any group to move there should result in a new settlement at Black Mountain, with a new merchant. The player would get some kind of experience, caps, & equipment reward, plus karma and faction fame if applicable. An ambitious modder might make a new radio station for the Prospector couple or the ghoul settlement (I assume the Followers would use the equipment just to broadcast public education / offers of help, and the OSI would just use it for NCR broadcasts).

 

Compatibility issues:

• Anyone making this mod would want to make sure Eyesight to the Blind can still be completed. And it probably makes sense that Neil, at the base of the mountain, could finally join the other super mutants at Jacobstown once someone else is at Black Mountain to direct others to it. He might even be a good alternative quest initiator ("I'd like to leave, but I can't leave Black Mountain abandoned -- can you find a group that would want to settle here?").
• Super mutant spawn points on Black Mountain would need to be disabled.

 

I thought I'd put this idea out there and see if any experienced modders wanted to pick it up and run with it. If you want help, I'm happy to do what I can to help with story, write dialogue, or do any simple grunt work in the GECK if you can give me some basic instruction.

Edited May 9, 2014 by ElfWord

[sullyvanj93]

2 small issues I see with this:

 

firstly: black mountain is a spawn point for Super mutants. While they aren't hostile to the Courier, you would have to make sure they wouldn't attack the new settlement on site as they spawn

 

secondly: raul is highly against being sent back to black mountain. He says so every time you send him to the lucky 38. Now if you help him set up a ghoul encampment, as per his original request, that wouldn't really make a lot of sense.

 

You would also have to wipe door names, computer terminals, etc to comply with the new settlement, whatever they may be.

 

If someone is willing to work through all this and make the multiple options quest, it'd be great. Need someone with more skill than I, though.

[ElfWord]

Thanks for the feedback @sullyvanj93. I've edited the post to remove the suggestion of Raul as a quest initiator for the ghoul group, and added removing super mutant spawn points as a compatibility issue.

 

I'm taking it for granted that the mod will involve a bunch of changes to the cells for the new settlement. Door names, terminals, etc.

[Uragan907]

Another thing:radiation there is very deadly to humans.A kinda problem don't you think?

[sgtKraigO]

Another thing:radiation there is very deadly to humans.A kinda problem don't you think?

 

Agreed. If the place is going to be repopulated it should be with Ghouls and maybe a few humans at the base of the mountain.

[ElfWord]

Another thing:radiation there is very deadly to humans.A kinda problem don't you think?

 

Agreed. If the place is going to be repopulated it should be with Ghouls and maybe a few humans at the base of the mountain.

 

 

Ghouls would definitely be able to get use of a lot more of it. But as I recall, except for the area around the impact creator and the overturned satellite dish, or venturing further past it to the field where the centaurs are, a good bit of Black Mountain isn't actually radioactive.

 

Also, the other groups I've outlined would be well equipped (or helped to be by the Courier) to deal with the areas that are irradiated. The Followers and the OSI would be interested enough in the technology that they wouldn't care about having to use some RadAway every now and then, and the prospector couple may well have experience of their own in using radiation suits to get access to salvage others have had to pass by.

 

Imagine Neil's shack turned into the trading post other towns come to (in the case of a resettling group that wants to trade), while the base / community proper is up in the harder-to-reach, more defensible transmitter areas. A few radiation road blocks in the way could actually be seen as a good thing.

 

I know the more content in the mod the more difficult it would be to tackle, so as much as I'd love to see some player choice components in it, a modder who likes this idea could do an initial version of the mod that's just about giving some ghouls in the Mojave a place to call home.

[MarchUntoTorment]

If you're interested, Elf, there's a few posts on resettling Black Mountain in the Independent NV thread - head over there if you want to contribute!

[Polyfemus]

I was recently thinking about the logistics of making a Nipton rebuilt mod. I know it's not Black Mountain but hear me out. I think with these [town] rebuilt mods since there is going to be new structures in place and stuff there would have to be a reconfiguration of the navmeshes. But I think I read somewhere that deleting vanilla navmeshes in a plugin crashes the game or something but someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

[ElfWord]

If you're interested, Elf, there's a few posts on resettling Black Mountain in the Independent NV thread - head over there if you want to contribute!

 

Now that's an intimidating (129 pages) thread. I did a search in the thread for "Black Mountain" and it looks like most of the content is around the NCR / BoS fighting over it in the aftermath of the game. As I posted in that thread, anyone's welcome to my ideas here. But I think this idea would work great as a standalone.

 

I was recently thinking about the logistics of making a Nipton rebuilt mod. I know it's not Black Mountain but hear me out. I think with these [town] rebuilt mods since there is going to be new structures in place and stuff there would have to be a reconfiguration of the navmeshes. But I think I read somewhere that deleting vanilla navmeshes in a plugin crashes the game or something but someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Nipton's on my mind too; drives me nuts that areas you visit early in the game basically never change as the game goes on. I thought I'd see if anyone was interested in working on this first before putting ideas for Nipton (which seems like a larger project) out there. But if you're interested, let me know, and I'll start a new thread to drop some ideas into. There are some other threads that have ideas:

• http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/1058911-nipton-mod/
• http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/418252-nipton-rebuilt/
• http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/307128-rebuilding-nipton/

Bond123 actually made a rebuilt Nipton mod - http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/44694/ - but it's gaudy, lacks interactivity, and is lore unfriendly in the extreme. There's also the Nipton Revisited mod, which does general cleanup and is actually available as a modder's resource: http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/36815/