What are your favourite visual set pieces that you've come across in a Fallout game that help to build atmosphere? By this is I mean any arrangement of loot or static objects that can tell a story non verbally such as the pistols found next to skeletons in the personal bomb shelters in FO3 or maybe the various crashed alien space ships. Any one good any other good examples?

The reference to Indiana Jones(I believe it's Indiana jones) in new Vegas the guy in the refrigerator next to good Springs.

Ah yeah the surviving a nuke in a fridge part haha, good one!

There is a room in Vault 106 (the Vault that experimented on it's inhabitants with a hallucinogenic gas) that I entered on my first visit. You all probably remember it well enough. When you go inside there are two skeletons embracing on the double bed along with the skeleton of a child on the single bed in the corner. When I saw it I had to take a moment because it's very rare that I would even pay attention to things like that.

But just the placement of the bodies tells a very sad tale. Maybe the parents knew that they wouldn't be surviving the night but they didn't want to scare their child. So they tucked them in as usual and they all lay together in that room to die.

Very sad, poignant room that took me by surprise on my first viewing. Now, I usually move the child's skeleton onto the bed with the parents because I'm weird like that and I care about NPC's ghost's feelings.

On a lighter note there's also the poker table with the skeletons sitting around it that you find at the bottom of a body of water (I think it's in the Old World Blues DLC?) that made me laugh for like five minutes straight. Now that would be a cool story to tell someone out in the Wasteland.

It was one of the Vaults in New Vegas, 34 I think it was, that had sandbags and traps and ammo crates and bodies laying around every where. I kept thinking what the hell went down over here, it looks like the vault had its own little civil war which I thought was pretty sad giving that living in such a small space would make for some pretty ruthless fighting.