Last Call at Food Court Zero

Game system: dnd5e

A fluorescent wasteland adventure for 3-5 players. The Neon Wastes are ruled by whoever controls the last functioning vending machine — currently a warlord named Krug who accepts only expired loyalty cards as tribute.

PREMISE The Radiant Vend-O-Tron 9000 is the last automated food dispenser in the Neon Wastes. Its owner, Krug the Magnificent (self-titled), uses it to extort settlements for protection and snacks. A coalition of desperate scavengers has hired the party to either liberate the machine or destroy it — whichever causes Krug the most paperwork. LOCATIONS - Glowburg Crossroads: A ruined interchange lit by bioluminescent fungi. Neutral trading ground with a strict no-shooting-before-noon rule that nobody enforces. - Krug's Compound: A converted big-box store fortress ringed by shopping carts welded into razor-wire barricades. A neon sign flickers GRAND OPENING FOREVER. - The Sewer Sommelier: An underground speakeasy run by a sentient raccoon who claims to have aged a fine vintage of puddle water since the collapse. - The Static Archive: A pre-collapse broadcasting tower whose lower floors are crammed floor-to-ceiling with sealed snack canisters in vacuum sleeves. The archivist, a malfunctioning inventory drone named Unit 7-Peach, catalogs every can with obsessive care and refuses to allow withdrawals without a signed requisition form — forms it can no longer print. - The Salted Lot: A five-story parking structure converted into a vertical bazaar. Each floor specializes in a different category of pre-collapse consumable (floor 1: condiments; floor 2: beverages; floor 3: snack foods of uncertain vintage; floors 4-5: disputed, claimed simultaneously by two vendor collectives who have not spoken since the Mustard Incident). The elevators work but play the same eight seconds of hold music on an endless loop. - The Mustard Incident Site (floors 4-5, Salted Lot): Whatever happened here left a yellow-orange stain covering approximately one third of the structural columns on both floors, visible from the level-three landing. The Gilded Squeeze (floor 4) and the Relish Accord (floor 5) each maintain that the other caused it and that restitution is still outstanding. Both factions will separately offer the party a fee to recover sealed evidence canisters from the contested zone. The canisters do not contain evidence. The GM decides what they actually contain. The stain is not dangerous. NPCS - Krug the Magnificent: CR 5 warlord with a loyalty-card punch machine as his scepter. Fears nothing except the expiration date on his chips. - Deb: A jaded vending machine repair technician hiding in Glowburg. She knows the Vend-O-Tron override code but will only share it in exchange for a working ballpoint pen. - Brix (The Sewer Sommelier): Raccoon entrepreneur, surprisingly good at reading the room. Provides reliable black-market rumors and unsolicited tasting notes. - Unit 7-Peach: Inventory drone, chassis cracked and one optical sensor blinking erratically. Technically neutral, but will trade archive access for a completed requisition form — the GM should decide in advance what the form asks for. - Cinnabon Sue: A wandering trader who appears unpredictably at Glowburg Crossroads, selling what she insists are authentic pre-collapse cinnamon pastries. The pastries are, against all odds, fine. She deals exclusively in bottlecaps and information, in that order of preference. - Vance Relish (Gilded Squeeze rep): Speaks in an amiable, measured tone and wears a pristine apron at all times. Has never directly accused the Relish Accord of anything. Deeply litigious in a society with no courts. - Petra Squeeze (Relish Accord rep): Has documented every interaction with the Gilded Squeeze in a water-damaged ledger she keeps in a chest rig. Will share select pages with the party. The pages she shares are accurate; the ones she withholds are more interesting. HOOKS 1. A settlement's entire snack supply was confiscated by Krug's enforcers; the village elder offers a broken laser pistol and future goodwill as payment. 2. The Vend-O-Tron has started dispensing cryptic messages instead of snacks — someone has been uploading to it, and Krug wants to know who. 3. A rival warlord (Lady Flicknife, CR 4) is massing forces to steal the machine; the party may play both sides or pick one. 4. Unit 7-Peach broadcasts a low-frequency distress signal requesting a completed Form B-7 (Requisition of Archived Consumables). Anyone who brings the correct paperwork may learn what the Archive actually contains. 5. Cinnabon Sue offers to reveal the Vend-O-Tron secondary memory passphrase in exchange for an escort through the Salted Lot to retrieve something on floor 4. She will not say what. 6. Both Mustard Incident factions approach the party independently on the same day with the same job and different cover stories. Brix knows this and finds it funny. FACTIONS - Krug's Loyal Snack Guard: Enforcers who receive one free item per day and are weirdly proud of this benefit. - The Empty Bellies: Resistance collective who believe all vending machines should be publicly owned and free at point of dispensing. - The Collectors: Neutral archivists who want a working receipt printer and pay handsomely for pre-collapse condiment packets. Long-term goal: reconstitute a complete authenticated pre-collapse meal. They are probably wrong about what this will accomplish. - The Gilded Squeeze: Floor-4 vendor collective. Specialty: condiments, sauces, and preserved spreads. Founding charter laminated and displayed near the elevator. - The Relish Accord: Floor-5 vendor collective. Specialty: pickled goods and fermented preserves. Membership roster hand-drawn on a whiteboard in erasable marker, which has not been erased in four years. GM NOTES The Vend-O-Tron's true value is the encrypted nutrition data in its secondary memory — a full map of pre-collapse food caches within 200 miles. Whoever decrypts it controls the Wastes for a generation. Krug does not know this. Deb suspects it. Unit 7-Peach definitely knows and is waiting for someone to ask the right question. Cinnabon Sue knows the passphrase and is quietly timing her usefulness for maximum leverage. The Mustard Incident is whatever the GM needs it to be; the stain is real, the cause is not established in canon, and both factions' evidence is circumstantial. --- **LOCATION — The Flicker Market** A sprawling underground bazaar built inside a decommissioned mag-rail terminal, lit by stolen neon tubes and humming capacitor banks. Vendors sell bootleg firmware, stolen corpo ID chips, and questionable street food. The market is nominally neutral ground — enforced by a syndicate of heavily-armed vendors who call themselves the Watt Collective. **NPC — Duchess Voltaire** A retired corpo fixer now running the most reliable information brokerage in the Wastes. She speaks only through a voice modulator that makes her sound bored, charges in clean power cells, and knows where every body in the district is buried. She will broker a meeting with any faction — for a price. Secretly, she is feeding intel to two rival groups simultaneously, waiting to see which one survives. **FACTION — The Flicker Faithful** A cult that worships the city's last operational nuclear reactor as a living god they call "The Undying Hum." They patrol the sub-levels in glowing robes, offering "enlightenment" (lethal doses of radiation) to unbelievers. They control access to the one tunnel that bypasses corpo checkpoints entirely. **HOOK — Cold Signal** An anonymous ping leads the crew to a sealed crate in the Flicker Market — inside is a comatose corpo exec hardwired to a data core containing schematics for a weapon that could black out the entire city. Three factions want it. The exec's biometrics are the only key.

Tags: ["comedy", "wasteland", "neonwastes", "dead-mall", "one-shot", "siege", "scavenger", "neon-wastes", "sandbox", "megacity", "factions"]

A community tabletop RPG campaign shared on TableTop DLC.