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Fallout: Caldera is a theoretical post-apocalyptic role-playing fan game inspired by & expanding upon the setting associated with Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks. While Caldera is neither a direct sequel nor prequel to any of the games, it references many of the events surrounding the era, including cut or outright canceled content & concepts. While the theoretical game would likely make use of a modified Fallout 4 or Fallout 76 engine, its overall tone & themes would likely be more typical of Fallout: New Vegas or earlier titles. The theoretical game is set primarily in a post-apocalyptic Montana, specifically Yellowstone National Park, a Postgame ‘Add-on’ facility, and The Grand Teton 'Add-on' Area.
The game takes place in 2256, 179 years after the Great War. The events of Fallout: Caldera occur 154 years after Fallout: 76, 95 years after Fallout 1, 59 years after Fallout: Tactics, 48 years after Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, 15 years after Fallout 2, and 3 years after the canceled Van Buren, which it considers as semi-canon.
This means it is also 21 years before the events of Fallout 3, 25 years before Fallout: New Vegas, and 31 years before Fallout: 4. Chronologically it is the fifth game in the series after Fallout 2 (though sixth if counting Van Buren).
The game takes place in The Caldera, which is composed of the former Grand Loop of Yellowstone National Park. Much of the main game takes place across various ‘Domesticons’ - planned condominium communities reliant on android ‘Securiunits’ to keep them safe & maintained, along with various campground-based shanty communities, ranger stations, and firewatch towers.
Famous local landmarks like the the Grand Prismatic Spring, Old Faithful Inn, and Fort Yellowstone are included in the game world, though Caldera takes a semi-’procedural’ approach akin to earlier games like Fallout 1 & Fallout 2 - with the majority of the actual mapping focusing on points of interest & landmarks while otherwise pulling from a series of random encounter map tiles designed to fit that area, such as Mountain, Forest, Lake, Road, Ect.
The Homemaker, the player character, arrives in Yellowstone to join a new kind of planned community in Madison, a 'Domestic Condominium', or 'Domesticon', created by an expanding medical company called REGENT. After leaving their bus & interacting with various neighbors or protesters, they meet their assigned 'Securispouse' - a cutting-edge comfort & service android.
Although the player can decide both the Homemaker & their Securispouses name, gender, and appearance, they are commonly referred to as 'Mx. Nazerov' & 'Daisy Belle' due to these being the names given as default both in-game & in expanded media. Fallout: Caldera briefly begins on October 23, 2077 (the day of the Great War), showing the player arriving at their new home and interacting with their Securispouse before being rushed inside as the bombs drop. After a series of events, they emerge after the Great War to a largely decrepit Madison Domesticon.
The story of Fallout: Caldera guides the player into its world, discovering a series of different factions with varying ideals & conflicts with others, albeit generally being introduced as paired groups.
These include the grungy and patch-job’d Outskirts, continuingly pushing-and-pulling with the large, pristine, and repressive Stepford Domesticon, whose citizens live in a perfect simulacrum of pre-war americana at cost of their sanity & deepening guilt while their Outskirts neighbors grow increasingly disruptive to their illusionary way of life.
Out in the campgrounds, a group of ghoulified tourists and their descendants now known as Caldera Runners chafe against the rules and regulations still-enforced by the Caldera’s Ranger Corps, having ample reason to utilize what many in the Ranger Corps think should be pristine wilderness and virgin pools.
Then there is the Ranger’s sister group, the Firemen, who have grown their own new brand of social structure thanks to the Caldera-strain Super Mutants withins constant fight against both the natural wildfires of the Caldera, and the arsonist tendencies of the flame-worshiping raider group known as the Char - who speak of great calamity, past sins, and strange visions from their psyker oracles and triad of ‘Sears’.
Meanwhile a group known as the Bison Riders has had the differences amongst their two subfactions come to nearly a head, with the Bison Ranchers summer lives differing so much from the Bison Nomads winter movings that both groups can barely recognize the other as the same. Though the player cannot change their minds on the subject, they might be able to influence their hearts.
All the while, two groups connected-yet-disconnected from the rest of the Caldera are about to be forced to find where they stand, with the strange neolithic Mammoth Men reinventing the wheel when it comes to culture, and the Golden Eagles scouting out if they are fit to be part of everyone's life again properly or not.
Fallout: Caldera has four main endings, one for each reaction to the end event sequence, with variations regarding the choices made involving each of the ten distinct political factions, along with separate ending slides for Recruited Companions.
REGENTs Crown is a post-game Add-On similar in concept to Fallout 3’s ‘Broken Steel’, split between a winterized post-ending Caldera and the REGENT Headquarters facility, which is designed as a Survival-Exploration-Horror Add-on with puzzle elements.
Broken prototypes & creeping-flesh mutations roam the halls as you descend into the depths of the still-sealed ruins in an attempt to either reactivate or destroy the almost-eldritch AI construct below, guided by a production master-prototype ‘E.V.E.’ Securiunit named Earth.
Grand Teton is a (canonically post-game spring of 2257) anytime playable Add-on intended for high-level characters still in development, featuring new enemies, in-depth environmental hazards, and ambush gameplay.
