Tenpenny Tower is Morally Impossible

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Behind me is Ten Penney Tower, home to one of the most morally ambiguous quests in all of Fallout 3. And I wanted to walk you through it today because I've been thinking about it since the first time I played [music] through it. This is Roy Phillips, an ex- cop turned ghoul who lives out of the subway station not too far away from Ten Penney Tower.

[00:00:20][music] So Roy's whole deal is that he wants to live in Ten Penney Tower alongside of the rest of the humans, unlike in the subway station like literal rats do, which is honestly totally fair. This place is massive and there's got to be a bunch of empty floors, [music] so why wouldn't we let Roy stay here? Roy walks away from the intercom and you're basically next up and you get let in with literally no issues. Once you get up to the front desk, you talk to the guard there and he tells you that they want to get rid of Roy. And they want to get rid of Roy because they don't want to deal with ghouls and they don't want to see what Roy has up his sleeves if they don't.

[00:01:03]And that's where you as a player get to make a choice. Hooray. There are like three basic options that you can kind of choose in this quest to more or less decide the outcome. And I'm going to walk you through all of those options right here. So, the first option and the one Gustavo the guard is paying you for is the most straightforward. You head down into the subway station and you find Michael Masters [music] and he tells you to put your gun down and you can choose right then and there whether or not you want to start the fight. But if you hold off, he'll take you straight to Roy. Once you're there, you kill Roy.

[00:01:38]You kill his ghoul friend Bessie. That's in the wiki. It's in the wiki. Don't get all up and get out of my face. It's in the wiki. Look, look. You see what I mean? So, you kill Roy, you kill Bessie, and then you kill >> Michael. Michael is that his name?

[00:01:55]>> Yes. Yes. Once you kill all of them, you walk back into 10 Penney Tower. You tell Gustavo you've done the job. Then you get your caps and you're on your merry way. All positive karma. Hooray. Yippi.

[00:02:08]Woohoo. You get caps, you get a gun, and Ten Penney gets to stay up in his ivory tower and keep shooting at innocent wastelanders for fun. Alistar Tenpenney, owner and operator of 10 Penney Tower, goes on what he calls a wasteland safari. And by that, he means literally shooting at people from his tower with a sniper rifle and injuring or killing whoever he wants to. So when you complete this option, really all you did was kill people who were looking for a new home and [music] continue to let an old man get away with murder for sport. That's the positive option, by the way. That's all positive karma, baby. But that's not the only way that you deal with this quest. Hey, question for you. Do you know what Ten Penney Tower and the American health care system have in common? They both make you feel like you have to smoo a guy to get through the front door. Well, not anymore because today's video is sponsored by Zachdoc. A while back, I was going through something that wasn't an ER situation, but definitely something that was uh I need to go to the doctor today and get this fixed situation. And if you ever tried to go to a doctor on short notice with no plan, you know how it goes. The regular place you go to is booked 3 weeks out.

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[00:04:25]Thank you, Zakdock, for sponsoring today's video. Option two starts much the same way. You head into the tower, you talk to Gustavo, and then you head into the subway tunnels to meet Masters again. He'll take you to Roy, and then when you meet Roy, you get to actually have a conversation with him this time.

[00:04:42][music] And Roy tells you that obviously they don't want him in the tower.

[00:04:47][music] So, he's devised a plan to kill everybody inside of the tower. And you're like, "Oh, hey, Roy. Whoa, chill.

[00:04:57]Oh, chill. Oh, go on. What are you doing here?" You tell Roy that there's probably a better option. And you're going to figure it out for him because you want him in the tower because it there's more than enough room. There's more than enough room inside of the tower for everybody. Once you get back to the tower, you head up the elevator.

[00:05:15]You convince the guard that you're supposed to meet 10 penny. And that was really easy for me for some reason. So anyway, um you go in and you talk to him and he's like, "Well, if you could convince all the people that live here."

[00:05:29]Here's one thing I didn't know about this quest when I first started it is you don't have to talk to everybody. He does say here's a list of five people and I skipped that dialogue so quick. I did not care about listening to 10 penny yap. So I said, "You know what? I'm just going to [music] get through it and I'll just talk to everybody." And I went and I talked to every single person. Uh, and a lot of them didn't require speech checks. And I was like, this is easy.

[00:05:54]And then the ones that did, I was like, I failed every one of them. And I was like, well, what am I supposed to do now? So, he tells you, you have to convince Anthony, Lydia, Susan, Edgar, and Mickey Wellington to either accept the fact that ghouls are going to live here or to find a new place to live. And that's all well and good. You can go through and you can do all the speech checks and pass all the speech checks.

[00:06:19]Hooray! Yippy! Woohoo. But there are other options, more sinister options.

[00:06:26]And and and to and to be honest, more just interesting, [laughter] more interesting ones. You could go through and kill every single one of them in their sleep if you needed to. You pop in, pop them one quiet one, and then you leave. And that's just something the game lets you do, which is why I like Fallout so much. A couple of these guys own shops in the tower and you can steal from them and frame them for their own thievery which is like crazy. And then they just leave the tower cuz like they can't prove that they didn't do it.

[00:06:57]Susan, Edgar, and Mickey, however, need to be dealt with in a slightly different way. Edgar has left a love letter for Susan on his desk like a total fool. And here's the thing. Edgar's handwriting is very obvious to Mickey. And all you have to do is snag the love letter, give it to Mickey, she reads it, loses her [ __ ] mind, which is totally I mean, totally fair. And then she kills Susan, she kills Edgar, and then she leaves the tower. [laughter] So, you've convinced three people to leave the tower and two people are dead and you don't have to pass any speech checks and arguably it's one of the more fun routes in this entire quest. It's definitely one of the more interesting.

[00:07:48]And then boom, you just tell Penny that everything's solved and he's like, "Yeah, absolutely. Let him in." You go down into the subway and you let Roy know, "Hey, I solved your problem." And he is so grateful, so happy. Um, all the ghouls move into the 10 penny tower and life is good. Real good. I wake every up every morning next to the ghouls. I have soup. Um, and you know, life is great for a little while. And you leave 10 penny Tower thinking, gosh, I really did a good thing. I did a good deed here, minus the killing. But, and of course there's a butt. When you first head back to Ten Penney Tower, you find Roy and you kind of notice if you go up to the to the top suites. Oh, Ten Penney ain't here, which is like, what are we doing?

[00:08:40]But Roy and Ten Penney had a disagreement, an argument basically the second that Roy walked in, apparently.

[00:08:45]And Roy chucked him off the balcony, I think.

[00:08:49]None of the bodies showed up when I did this last. So, I think Ten Penney just Sorry. [laughter] But like it's what he said, you know, me and Ten Penney had a disagreement and I fixed it. And I said, you know what, that's incredibly fair.

[00:09:06]This guy shoots people off of his balcony for sport and he's kind of an [ __ ] I'm going to let this one slide. But if you wait a week and then you come back to 10 Penney Tower, you've noticed that it's kind of empty in here. There there are no non- ghoul residents aside from the bartender, this bartender here who is a robot. So, all right, we got to find Roy again because what's going on? Roy lets you know that uh they had it coming and that they're all in the basement and that every single one of them is dead.

[00:09:39]Michael Masters says something along the lines of, "Hey, thank God I don't have a sense of smell anymore because of, you know, because of all the rotten corpses [laughter] in the basement." So when you go down there, every human resident of Ten Penney Tower is dead on the ground and a feral ghoul is just kind of picking over the body parts. You go back to Roy, you tell him, "Hey man, what the [ __ ] are we doing here?" And Roy tells you that they had it coming and that you should probably leave before he does the same thing to you.

[00:10:13]You do all that work, you do everything right, and all those people still end up dead.

[00:10:20]Option three is a bit nuclear. Nuclear.

[00:10:24]I don't know. My president has ruined the pronunciation of that. You go down and you talk to Roy and Roy convinces you that these racists kind of deserve it. And you know what? Who am I to say different? Time to help Roy. There is a door in the basement of 10 penny Tower that leads straight to the subway from the generator room. If you break into the basement from the outside and you go to the terminal and you put in the right phrase, you are able to unlock the big door to 10 penny Tower and Roy will be there waiting for you to unlock it with a load of Pharaoh ghouls. and Roy tells you to meet me out front. In meeting Roy out front, he tells you that the feral ghouls will just eat you two. So, he gives you the ghoul mask. And this is the, as far as I know, the only way to receive the ghoul mask in the entire game. Uh, which is an extremely I overpowered item to be frank. Uh, there's a lot of places in the game that have the ghouls and that you don't have to deal with them or fight them. when you're wearing this mask is kind of sick. But Roy gives you that mask so you can head into the tower and also deal some damage. And this one is the worst uh in in terms of the most violent outcome to this quest. The generator cuts power to Ten Penney Tower and in the darkness all you see is gunfire, the feral ghouls running around ripping people apart and you can choose to just hang out and watch or participate or leave. But no matter what, every single resident of Ten Penney Tower gets slaughtered by these ferals. And that doesn't particularly feel great either.

[00:12:20]So Bethesda obviously designed this quest with no good way to go about things. The lead designer said that he based 10 penny Tower off of the wealthy only hotel in Land of the Dead. The design of the quest is that there is no right answer. Everything is kind of just supposed to be bad. Before I really get to the no good ending thing, I should talk about what this quest really kind of is. And obviously I don't think it's super subtle, right? But that's just me.

[00:12:52]Ghouls in Fallout are people. And I think that's a fact that some people just forget about because of the way they look. But they are. They're people who got hit with such a crazy amount of radiation that their bodies just fell apart on them. Obviously, their minds are still there. They're still the same person that they were before they looked like this, but now they look like this.

[00:13:17]And despite being given such a bad hand from the nuclear blast, they're treated like trash. They get called zombies.

[00:13:24]They are told that they're not really people anymore. And they get shut out of just about everywhere. There's like legitimately one or two places [music] that ghouls can actually live in the entirety of the Capital Wasteland. Roy isn't some random raider. He's just a guy who shows up and gets told that there's no room in this building for people who look like him. He had the caps to pay his way and he got turned away regardless. And that's because it wasn't because of the caps. It was because of what he looked like. And I think the most obvious read for that as far as metaphor goes is race. I think that is the most that's the most obvious way you could go about it. housing discrimination, slurs, segregation, like that's all there, but there's an entire other layer that's about body, about being someone whose body stopped working the way it's supposed to, and gets treated like less of a person because of it. These are people who are in chronic pain, have lost senses, have been completely disfigured through no fault of their own, and the world looks at them and decides that they are disgusting, and that's the end of the story. Michael Masters makes a joke about how he can't smell anymore, and how that's a good thing for him in this particular situation. But really, that's a guy who has actively lost one of his senses and is doing his best to make dark humor out of it to cope. Now, Bessie, Royy's girlfriend, you remember her. We talked about her very briefly.

[00:14:55]She's a actually very sweet lady. If you actually talk to her, she talks about how she used to be pretty and all the boys used to come around and how she just wants to feel normal again. These people are not monsters. These are people who got dealt the absolute worst hand in this entire apocalypse and are just trying to find a place to sleep and somebody to love. Obviously, the discrimination is wrong, but also obviously Roy is either going to march everybody into the basement and kill them or unleash an entire flock of ghouls the second he gets the chance. Roy can both be completely right about how [music] he's been treated and also completely wrong in the way that he chooses [music] to deal with it. And obviously I'm not letting the bigots off the hook. Tenpeny is a guy who literally just shoots at people from for fun off the top of his balcony [music] and he's a piece of [ __ ] and he should die. But I think this has [music] broad strokes of saying, you know, you treat people like they're evil or that they're an animal long enough that [music] you shouldn't be surprised when this person acts a certain way or does a certain thing. So much for the tolerant left. I think that's the cool thing about 10 penny Tower as a quest, the fact that there is no right answer.

[00:16:21]Um, [music] obviously it's not that the designers went well just whatever and they weren't lazy about it. Clearly, this has a lot of depth and nuance to it. Uh, I think the most important part to take away from 10 penny Tower is the fact that [music] the wasteland kind of gets treated as set dressing a lot of the time. And typically in Fallout, you could do your absolute best and try your absolute hardest and get things done the right way and things will work out.

[00:16:52]People have a problem, you solve the problem, everybody's happy, you you get caps and you go about your way. That's how Fallout typically works. Hooray.

[00:17:01]Yippee. Woohoo. No, that is not how [laughter] Wasteland would work. That is not how an apocalypse, a post-apocalypse situation would work. Everybody, I I sincerely feel this way that every single person in a post-apocalypse is going to be evil. Everybody doesn't matter who you are, where you came from, you're going to be a little bit evil because realistically, there are more evil people than there are not. And you have to survive the apocalypse. So, you're going to do what you absolutely can to make sure that you stay alive. So yes, typically everything's happy, super yippy, woohoo all the time. 10 Penney Tower is not that. 10 Penney Tower shows you what an actual post-apocalypse would be like. And it's, you know, you're walking into a situation that has been broken beyond repair way longer than you've even been out of the vault. And to walk into this situation just like you've walked into everything else thinking, "Oh, yay. Yippee. I can save everybody."

[00:18:05]is naive.

[00:18:07]And the fact that you don't get the hero moment at the end of this like you do with every other quest in the game is um nice. It's a nice refresher. It it keeps you on your toes and it does exactly what it intends to in giving you that moment of being like, "Sorry, bud.

[00:18:24]Everything kind of sucks." Because it's a it's we're in the middle of the apocalypse. It's uncomfortable and it doesn't feel good and it's a pretty big bummer generally, but I think that's a good thing. Anyway, that was 10 penny Tower. Thank you to everybody who's made it to the end of the video. Thank you to all of the Patreon supporters and YouTube members for just being killer.

[00:18:50]And um I'll see you very soon. Stick around or watch some of my other stuff.

[00:18:54]This is a good video. I'll see you soon.