Mikeburnfire's NPCs and Quests is a Fallout: New Vegas mod by Mike BurnFire and Zach Hazard.
Rather than focusing on a specific narrative, the mod adds a few dozen NPCs scattered around the Mojave, some of them offering new quests.
The mod can be downloaded here
, provided you have a Nexus Mods account, since the mod is marked as adult content.
Tropes demonstrated by the mod:
- Anti-Frustration Features: An addition of a doctor to Primm means you're no longer forced to backtrack to Goodsprings or NCRCF in order to heal your crippled limbs in early game Hardcore Mode.
- Bounty Hunter: Wishman, the ghoul added to Goodsprings. You can find him pursuing a bounty later on.
- Break the Haughty: The Van Graff crier near the Gun Runners gleefully advertises energy weapons in front of the biggest producer of conventional guns in the wasteland, knowing full well the Gun Runners can't hurt him without Van Graffs' retaliating. A sufficiently well-rounded Courier can point out enough drawbacks of energy weapons to humble him for good.
- But Thou Must!: One of the quests ("These Things Happen", the quest to kill the captured Powder Gangers for the Annoyed Legionary) seems to give you a few skill and faction checks for an outcome that lets everyone live, but even if you max out the relevant skill/reputation, the quest giver rejects the offer.
- Carnival of Killers: On top of base game's NCR and Legion assassins, the old (1.0) version of the mod added Powder Ganger, Great Khan and Brotherhood of Steel hit squads, sent after you if your reputation with the given faction falls too low.
- Crazy Enough to Work: Larry's plan to impress Emma hinges on the Courier fetching his parents' clothes from Vault 34, believing them to be the edge he needs to make a move. He doesn't back down once it turns out one of the clothing items is a dress, puts it on, and talks to her — she finds herself in awe of his boldness and the two hit it off.
- Damned by Faint Praise: The Caravan card thief does this to himself at one point, proclaiming that he "rarely ever get[s] court-martialed".
- Deconstruction Fic: Thief of Kings takes the popularity of Caravan to its logical conclusion — you can't play any other card game besides Caravan because it's impossible to keep a complete 54-card deck around because people keep stealing selected cards for their Caravan deck, creating a vicious cycle.
- Even Evil Has Standards: In the Legion quest Join or Die, the Legion has leads on three potential recruits: an NCR soldier whose parents were killed at the behest of a Corrupt Politician, an NCR officer who thinks a military dictatorship is a great way to run a nation and was demoted for shooting at a civilian kid who threw a rock at him, and an incel named Chad who is interested in joining the Legion because of their enslavement of women. If you send the three of them to Cottonwood Cove to join up with the Legion, the Legion gladly accepts the two ex-NCR soldiers, thinking they have the potential to become great Legionnaires. Chad, on the other hand, disgusts even them, so they kill him and feed him to their dogs.
- Evil Counterpart: "Their Kind of Town" and "These Things Happen" are designed to be evil versions of the quests to retake Primm from bandits and free the Powder Gangers enslaved in Nipton respectively — you're tasked with killing the main candidates for restoring the law in the former and executing the captured Gangers in the latter.
- Expy:
- The newly-added Primm doctor, a kid nameed Dougie, is an expy of Doogie Howser, M.D..
- The Wild-Wasteland-exclusive blonde-haired King is a reference to Johnny Bravo.
- Fetishes Are Weird: One of the throwaway NPCs added to Gomorrah talks at length about the attractiveness of feet, making him come off as a weirdo at best.
- Happiness in Slavery: The mod adds a slave woman to the Fort who will give you food if your reputation with the Legion is good. While she admits the life of a Legion slave isn't necessarily an easy life, she still considers it preferable to poverty in New Reno.
- In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It: Mikeburnfire's NPCs and Quests.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Wishman's justification for why he works alone is that partners have a tendency to push him out of cover and walk into his line of fire — something that's bound to occur with NV companions due to Artificial Stupidity.
- Mr. Exposition: A few NPCs are specifically designed to introduce the players to specific concepts and topic the base game didn't exposit on, like ghouls, toxins or Caravan strategies.
- Mythology Gag: One of the responses to the NCR soldier in McCarran asking what a civilian does in a military base is proclaiming you're there to steal all their corn, referencing a Running Gag from Mike's Let's Play series.
- Nominal Importance: Averted — the guy that stole the Caravan cards is labelled the same way the other generic NPCs around them are.
- No Name Given: The Legionary giving you the "These Things Happen" quest is only labelled in game as "Annoyed Legionary".
- One-Steve Limit: Wishman falls victim to an aversion: when looking for Marko [Booth], he follows a lead pointing him to Westside and finds Marco (with a C), the guy running Casa Madrid Apartments.
- Pun-Based Title: One of the missions is called "Voyeur Eyes Only", a pun on "for your eyes only".
- Punny Name: Leo Nardo, the mechanic added to Michael Angelo's workshop.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: First Sergeant Righty got reassigned to the Aerotech refugee camp after responding to the local children spitting on him and throwing a rock at him by shooting at them.
- Shout-Out:
- Tim Toolman, traveling tailor, alludes to Tim Taylor, complete with the grunt.
- The quest to gather ten gecko pelts for said tailor is named "It's Tail Time"
- When you meet Wishman for the third time, he mentions he's pursuing a dangerous bounty — Marko Booth, the overarching villain of The Someguy Series. Decanus Magnus also namedrops Firebase Zulu.
- Shown Their Work: The gun safety rules Wishman tells you are standard procedure for handling firearms, even if he concatenates "always treat a gun as if it's loaded" and "don't point it at anything you don't want to destroy" into one bullet point. Mike and Zach are both ex-US military, with Zach being a former armourer (and continuing his work with guns in various civilian occupations).
