That’s right, I’m going to do a gaming journal about Fallout 4. I’ve started playing again because of Sim Settlements 2, and I’m returning to a character I enjoyed RPing before: Poe.

Things to establish: I mod the shit out of the game because I already played it vanilla, twice; I played once before with mods but fell off the horse (I had Poe then as well). Now I decided, eh, fuckit. I want to play what amounts to Sims with tower defense. I threw in a shitload of cheats (Cheat Terminal, anyone?) and just filled it to the brim with things to make settlement building go smoother. And also I sometimes shoot guns.

I want to play Poe as a hardass. Someone who was tough before the war and then only got tougher and meaner.

Warning: I am going to have a lot of screenshots because it’s, well. A playthrough in an open world game, with me going hard in the roleplay.

(but the journal will not be roleplayed because I do not have the capacity for it)

ANYWAY. The big thing is, uh. These two:

Yeah I decided to customize Nate’s face. Whatever. And he is clutching at a plastic babydoll who is supposed to be our son. Sure. But I want Poe to be a bit more independent. I’m going to mentally edit anything and everything having to do with Shaun and Nate. I was never really a big fan of this angle, and as I understand it, a lot of people feel the same. We dance around it.

And how do we do that?

We make up an entirely new angle. Nate and Shaun? Well, they came to live with their Auntie Poe, former war vet. She fixes problems. She took in these two, saddled Nate with a respectable enough job, and was working on her own business when the nukes dropped. Some dickhead came in and killed the kid, stole the baby, and now Poe is surrounded by problems to fix.

She’s going to fix them whether or not anyone wants her to, because fuck dude, is this garbage load-bearing? Are you saving this balled up paper for something? There’s soap all over the Commonwealth and yet…!

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I didn’t decide to write this til I had two settlements in the pocket and I was faithfully following Jake around cuz he’s a fucking charmer. Look at him.

Anyway. I was fixing up the Abernathy Farm. Abernathy Farm has what the Abernathys thought was load-bearing trash. There’s fucking sweepers and shit and a trash can right there. Does no one care about radroaches?? Acid rain? Rad rain???

And I’m still trying to figure out how to go about the fixing up of the tower. I sort of feel bad, just walking in and looking around and going, y’all live like this? It rains on their beds naturally. Dude. I don’t want to oust the Abernathys out from their original home, though, so I have to figure out how to… deal with it. I’m thinking I upgrade the home to be their base of operations, you know? Clean it up, make it nice, build it higher if I can. I might install a new mod. I imagine Poe is sick of seeing this.

She walks in and is absolutely flabbergasted. Not a single fucking fence around the outside. Vulnerable as all hell. Then Karen gets on Discord and me and Poe, we want to give her a tour, yeah? I’m already on my way to Red Rocket and then I hear fucking screaming, there are gunshots, and explosions. Poe and Dogmeat take out a shitload of super mutants and, well. Uh.

Time to fucking upgrade the defenses. Poe has been ruthlessly leveling with the building of settlements, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the fucking super mutants running in and trying to eat the fucking cows. We finish the tour, say bye to Karen, and I get to fixing things up.

The machine gun turrets aren’t cutting it so I had to go with heavy laser and some fuckin missile turrets. Then I get to hear from our pal and future lover Jake (probably not romanceable… let it go, Poe…) as he tries to hail us on the world’s shittiest transmitter. Also, there’s a preacher man moving into the church.

I didn’t realize that while I was working on the rest of the Commonwealth, Jake would be taking it slow and steady building up Concord. Cool, bro! I also when to harass the preacher man and found a peaceful feral ghoul.

Very neat. I suppose he must have been a preacher pre-war.

Afterwards I run a lil errand for Jake, because he’s my pardner, and sure, I’ll crawl around under Concord for ya. I’m not sure if this little loading cell was made just for the Sim Settlements 2 mod, but it was jam-packed with stuff. I can’t say I ever noticed it before when doing FO4 playthroughs.

Oh, yes, I must say: Poe is a bit of a magpie.

Yoink.

We got the lights back on in Concord and man, that was a nice moment. I’m really enjoying this mod.

And Jake, oh, honey. Maybe it’ll work next time.

Speaking of, I’ve written enough. We’ll see what happens next time I load in.