It is April, 2157. Nearly 80 years following the War. For the generations since the war, you and your ancestors have lived within Vault 45, beneath the east slopes of the Olympic Mountains. Resources are becoming scarce, while population grows. It has been decided that a small group of the most competent, resourceful vault dwellers (YOU, the PCs) should be sent to scout the surface, and find possible room to grow.
Located beneath Mt. Sentinel in the Olympic Mountains at 47.796036, -123.343958, Vault 45 was established before the War to house the upper echelon of officers from the numerous military installations around the Puget Sound region. The bombs finally went flying in the year 2077, and for about a decade, the survivors stayed holed up. By that time, however, the enlisted portion of the dwellers, lead by Chief Petty Officer Reginald Jones, mutinied against the officers, who had grown "increasingly authoritarian and despotic".
The mutineers won, and the surviving officers and families were exiled to the surface.
Despite population loss that resulted the deaths and exiles that happened during the mutiny, the population has grown in the decades since. The vault's capacity of a few hundred citizens will soon be exceeded.
(NOTE: I have a sort of sketch of what Vault 45 is like, but if any of you feel like doing player-side worldbuilding, feel free to chime in on details for Vault 45!)
I intend for this to be a very open-ended, sand boxy game. If it turns out some GM direction would help, I can definitely come up with motivators. The game is intended to be moderately "cinematic", but with a nice helping of realism: Fallout is totally a rule-of-cool, cinematic-type setting (real post-nuclear world would be even more grim, for instance, and a lot of technology is based around hand wavium), but gunshots will still hurt you a lot (especially if you run out of stimpacks!), and things like the bottlecap economy will work in a logical manner (I've read up on the bottlecap economy in the various Fallout sources, and, yes, it does make logical sense).
Stereotypical 1950s society was pretty racist and sexist: see the early seasons of "Mad Men" for examples ("Mad Men" begins in the year 1960, but the stereotypical "60s" did not begin, of course, until after JFK and MLK were killed, and the Vietnam War began to metastasize). I'll go ahead and hand-wave away a lot of the 1950s prejudice: even in the 2070s, the social progress of the 1960s was made while aesthetics and fashion remained in the 1950s. Vault 45 carries these more liberal mores, and in the Outside, presumably no one cares about your skin color or chromosomes if you're good with a rifle (or can patch up rifle wounds), or whatever.
Mechanically, you are building 100-point PCs, max 40 points of disadvantages (below-10 attributes count as disads), plus 5 quirks. You will likely be building human Vault 45 residents. If you want to build a non-human vault dweller (ghoul, android, etc), I think I can work you in pretty easily. If you want to build an Outsider who encounters the rest of the party, I might be able to work you in, but it might be a bit harder.
I will write up a more detailed help guide on character creation here, and of course we will meet in person on May 1.