art by Ruby-Sunrise

Good evening, chiiildren! It’s me again, your favorite disk jockey, DJ Pon3! What’s a jockey? Hell if I know. But I’ll tell you what I do know because I’ve got news! I’ve got reports of slaver attacks in the area between Whitetail Woods and the Everfree Forest. Best of my recollection, this is the farthest north the slavers have spread. So if you’re out that way, and you ain’t a raider, I’d suggest investing in ammo. Stay in groups and avoiding strangers. Speaking of north, I’m hearin’ there was quite the lightshow in the sky east of Stalliongrad earlier this evening. Don’t know what’s goin’ on up there, but that sounds like more than the local wildlife. If any of you dear listeners up that way can drop me a beat, I’d be much appreciative. Finally, closer to home, Gutterville’s gone silent. Traders doin’ the Manehattan circuit say they found the place completely abandoned and looking like it got in the way of a brahmin stampede. Until we know more, folks should avoid the area, and exercise extreme caution when moving between the Manehattan villages. Hold up in a friendly place like Arbu or Friendship City if you can manage it.

I wanted to share a little world-building and storytelling that I did for the Fallout: Equestria world in my Stalliongrad game, presented largely through a couple of DJ-Pon3 broadcasts that I wrote up for the campaign.

animation by Argodaemon

check it out full size at the link

One of my favorite literary devices, next to the Chekhov's Gun, is the "WHAM episode". It's that point where the course of a story suddenly and dramatically changes. "Signs and Portents" happens to be the name of one of the first "WHAM episodes" in my favorite television series, Babylon 5. Creator of the series, J. Michael Straczynski coined the term in his commentary on the episode:

Like Tolkien, and Jonathan Carroll, whose wonderful books start out looking very nice and comfortable...and gradually take you to someplace strange and dark and unique...I've tried to apply a similar structure to Babylon 5. It seems to be chugging along at a good clip along relatively familiar terrain. Now my job is to walk up alongside the story with a crowbar and give it a good, hard WHAM! to move it into a different trajectory. "Parliament" was just sort of a preliminary nudge. "And the Sky Full of Stars" was a good, solid WHAM! This week's episode, "Signs and Portents," is another WHAM, even bigger than the one that precedes it.

I tried a similar technique in Fallout: Equestria. The intended "WHAM chapters" were even highlighted with the naming convention "The X of the Y". Some, like "The Truth of the Matter" are more subtle. Nothing particularly course-changing seems to happen for most of the chapter -- they learn about Stable-Tec, Littlepip is given some Party Time Mint-als, she first hears DJ Pon3 (who is claiming that the great truth of the wasteland is that everyone has done something they regret), and she realizes how Laughter can be a virtue thanks to Ditzy Doo -- nothing big, right? At least, up until the end when she finds Velvet Remedy.

Often, WHAM episodes (or chapters, or similar portions of a series) are more overt, like "The Heart of Twilight Sparkle" or the Babylon 5 episode "The Coming of Shadows". When these moments occur in a story, you know things will never be the same.

I tried to do this with my Stalliongrad game too. The DJ Pon3 broadcast above, and the one below, bookend the finale of a "WHAM" adventure within the campaign. For much of the campaign, the wasteland party found themselves dealing with the many factions of the extremely fractured city of Stalliongrad, trying to keep ahead of rising tensions as the city was plague by one seemingly random misfortune after another.

First, ravenous, radiation-twisted timberwolves swooped down upon the city from the neighboring mountains of the Frozen North...

...then a sudden, violent storm wrecked havok on the city...

...then the stormravens gathered...

...at which point a powerful zebra necromancer appeared in town, attempting to perform a ritual to control the stormravens, proclaiming something about needing to stop the signs and omens before it was too late. Our heroes couldn't figure out what she was doing, or what she was ranting about, but stepped up and stopped her anyway, sending her fleeing. And they stormravens few...

Even at this point, in the eyes of the players, there seemed to be no pattern to the events that were making their characters' lives difficult. I was surprised to discover that many of them had either not bothered to watch the episode Family Appreciation Day or never given it much thought... as surprised as they were when their characters found a children's book about Zap Apples and they realized just what was going on. (By the next session, every player had watched that episode and some had taken notes!) WHAM.

Of course, those who fallow my blog will likely remember The Rainbow Factory Orb, and if you do, you will remember that Sparkle~Cola planted a huge zap apple orchard in the battlefield east-southeast of Stalliongrad. Once they had put the pieces together, they realized that final act was going to revolve around the sudden appearance of a massive crop, and the struggle to forge an alliance that would make sure the zap apple harvest went to everyone rather than being horded by one of the factions began.

This was, after all, what all the signs and portents were pointing towards:

Soon enough, the zap apples would be almost ready, just waiting for that sunny day and the rainbow that would trigger their final transformation into the most precious harvest the wasteland had ever seen... just waiting for a day of sunshine and rainbows.

Of course, before that happened, there was one sign left. And when they realized what the necromancer had been trying to prevent by stopping the signs, they knew the horror that was coming...

WHAM.

When one Pony ain’t enough, and two is too few, it’s got to be… DJ Pon3. Coming to you over the wasteland airwaves. And now for a very special edition of the news. For those of you who missed the earlier broadcast, another big “thank you!” to my listener way up in Stalliongrad. We finally know the source of the northern lightshow a few nights back. Starfall. What’s a star, you ask? Well, to be honest, children, we don’t rightly know. Ain’t nopony seen the stars in two hundred years, ‘cept in books and paintings. And even back before the cloud cover, I get that we ponies didn’t have much of an answer. Other folk have their tales, of course. The hellhounds believe that the stars are diamonds woven into the blanket of the night sky. And zebras believe that the stars are the only visible forms of ancient entities of unfathomable malevolence. But I don’t know if the ponies of Equestria ever had their own beliefs. But we sure do now. Ever since my broadcast yesterday, your favorite DJ has been flooded with theories and suspicions from ponies from every occupied part of the Equestrian Wasteland (except Fillydelphia, of course). So it’s tinfoil hat time, colts and fillies, as DJ Pon3 reads the mail! Crane from New Appleloosa says that the universe is full of alternate Equestrias, each with their own alternate Celestia who guides that Equestria’s own sun, raising and lowering it just like our Celestia once did… and that those alternate-Equestrian suns are the stars we see. They just look like specks of light because they’re really, really far away. Bubba Bubbles from The Republic believes that the night sky is a quarantine zone for really bad, dangerous monsters. Remember, that’s where Celestia sent Nightmare Moon… only since Nightmare Moon was Luna, Her sister, Celestia kept Her in the moon, which is closer. Quillo from Flank believes the stars are all really powerful spirits – the most powerful spirits of them all. According to Quillo, the spirit Discord came to Equestria in a falling star. Gutterville’s young Quick Speed writes: who cares about what the dumb stars are? I never see them anyway. All I care about is if I can find food for tomorrow. …I hear you, kid. And finally, a resident of Tenpony Tower who wishes to remain anonymous floated this theory: falling stars aren’t stars at all. They can’t be, since they’re made of rock. Instead, these “meteors” are chunks of another world which, like ours, blew themselves up in a war. Only instead of just turning their world into a wasteland, they completely destroyed it. …Well, ain’t that a cheery thought to imagine falling stars might be chunks of somebody else’s version of the Everfree Forest or the Canterlot Ruins. Truth is, boys and girls, we don’t know for sure. Stars are, and probably always have been, a mystery. So if something falls from the heavens and lands anyplace nearby, why don’t you take ol’ DJ Pon3’s advice and leave it alone. You don’t know where it’s been. This is DJ Pon3, signing off for the evening.