FrankManic
First time out of the vault
Think of this as the design document for a Mod that I'll probably never make. Bethesda's reasons for the Enclave and Super Muties being on the East Coast can best be described as piss poor, so I decided to write up a better explanation. It includes a lot of the ideas used in FIII, but with a different focus and twist. For example, Raven Rock is the Enclave Base, but you won't here any mention of Eden, Autumn, or anyone else. There's no Project Purity, no Dad, no Giant Anime Doom Robot. There is a definite hint of damned if you do, damned if you don't moral ambiguity, and a reaffirmation of the old line "the enemy of my enemy is my enemies enemy, nothing more, nothing less." I hope you all enjoy it.
As the chosen one was happily laying waste to the Poseidon Oil Platform a number of Enclave citizens realized that if there was ever a time to emigrate it was right now. Many fled the platform in Vertibirds or life rafts, with a few being lucky enough to reach the mainland. Among the passengers of these fleeing Vertibirds was a scientist working in the chemical corp. In the mad rush to evacuate the platform he happened to grab a set of holotapes detailing what the Enclave had found in the ruins of Mariposa, as well as a map listing military bases that were known to be sealed and intact. After rendezvousing at Navarro the decapitated Enclave split into a number of factions. Gunfire was exchanged as the various groups tried to seize the bases reserves of weapons, food, fuel, and vertibirds. One faction that managed to get away with a few birds and a stockpile of micro fusion cells decided to strike out for the east coast to look for a place called Raven Rock.
This tiny, desperate splinter of the Enclave flew across the former nation of America in a matter of days, pushing their vertibirds to the limit and losing several of them to mechanical failure in the process. The group that landed outside Raven Rock was dirty, starving, and badly demoralized. Using ancient security passcodes they were able to enter the old base, reactivate vital systems, and set up a basic living arrangement. The surviving officers elected one of their number as President Pro Tem and sat down to figure out their situation.
The surviving “Enclave” consisted of about forty people, mostly junior enlisted men, vertibird pilots, and a few technicians and chemical corps geeks. Initial scouting forays into the Capitol area revealed the place to be crawling with muties, both the near human kind that the Enclave had worked hard to wipe out and more wretched forms, like ghouls, zombies, and other less easily categorized abominations. The muties had established a number of small towns and kingdoms in the area. By querying the computer systems of local national guard armories and military bases the Enclave splinter, now calling itself the Ravens, learned that many heavy weapons and advanced armour suits had been looted in over the years. It stood to reason that some of the petty kingdoms in the area could pose a real threat to Raven Rock. Leaving wasn’t an option, the vertibirds were barely functional and no spare parts were readily available. Moreover, there was no where else to go. The Ravens agreed that they would try to fortify Raven Rock as best they could and seek out Project Safehouse control Vaults in search of new citizens to induct into their little community.
Years passed. The Ravens managed to locate one unopened Vault, Vault ‘76. ‘76 had been stocked with near equal numbers of extreme right wing patriots and suspected communist sympathizers, a large variety of patriotic and subversive literature, and no weapons of any kind. As a result the Vault Dwellers in ’76 had been engaged in rounds of brutal civil war for over two hundred years. Patriots hunted commies in the sprawling service tunnels of the Vault only to fall into Cadre ambushes armed with kitchen knives and sharpened pipes. As one side or another gained ascendency it would splinter on ideological grounds and turn on itself. When the Ravens landed outside and opened the Vault doors they found the Patriot faction in bad shape. The current manifestation of Party had forced them into the upper levels of the vault, cutting them off from vital food and water replicators, and were slowly starving them to death. The Patriots saw the Ravens as saviors. They practically fell overthemselves to welcome the returned United States. Upon hearing of the Patriots situation the Ravens sent soldiers equipped with power armor, gas grenades, and flame throwers into the bowels of the Vault. Those Party members who surrendered were lead out in slaves manacles, those who refused burned alive or choked on poison gas.
Vault ’76 was a major windfall for the Ravens. The Patriots numbered nearly two hundred. They had the benefit of a vault education. Their hard core right wing views meshed neatly with those of the Enclave, and they had been raised from birth to expect the return of the good old USA. After being saved from a slow death at the hands of the Party they were fanatically loyal to the Ravens. And they had all grown up fighting constantly in small, disciplined guerilla bands. The Raven NCOs were able to rapidly train the patriots in the use of firearms and modern military equipment. The Patriots took to infantry tactics very well and showed great creativity in applying asymmetric warfare techniques. Equipped with the slightly dusty but still serviceable pre-war combat armor and assault rifles the Patriot Brigade gave the Ravens a real chance at holding out and surviving in the Capitol Waste.
But Surviving isn’t thriving. Raven Rock had a good store of military supplies, but before the war it had been mostly used for communications, not a supply dump. The Ravens, by this point calling them selves the Patriots of Raven Rock, were able to secure Raven Rock and it’s surroundings against raiders and other threats, but they didn’t have enough men or resources to expand. They also had constant problems keeping the enslaved Party members in line. The Party were just as resourceful and dangerous as the Patriots, and while they lacked the training the Patriots had received they managed to pick up the knack for explosives and sabotage anyway.
It was one of the members of the old chemical corps that provided the solution. Searching for a design document on power armor actuators, he happened to pull Horrigan’s file. The file revealed a number of interesting things, how exposure to FEV had triggered a massive increase in size and strength. How it had initially left Horrigan confused, amnesiac, and dumber than he’d started. And how he had ultimately proved highly susceptible to indoctrination; his previous enthusiasm for the Enclave giving way to a unquestioning bloody minded fanaticism.
The Chem Corp technician had found a solution to the PA’s needs. All the files were on hand, data recovered from the Master’s experiments at Mariposa, Chemical Corp logs of the mutations experienced by workers and soldiers excavating the sight, studies on the effects of radiation on mainlanders, and possibly the most complete set of records, data, and experiments on the minutiae of FEV anywhere in the world. To top it off, they had the entire file on Horrigan, detailing how brutish man had been turned into something like a walking Nuke.
A plan was quickly sketched out and put into action. A strike team of the original, power armor equipped Ravens descended on the Lister Emergency Clinic, an old, semi-automated decontamination and quarantine center established during the height of the New Plague hundreds of years ago. As technicians and mechanics worked to bring the Lister center back online the Chemical Corp scientists worked feverishly to synthesize FEV out of the available data and a few fragmentary samples. With extensive access to FEV research they were able to quickly brew a batch of the virus which was thought to be sufficient to effect the transformation. Within a year they were ready for the first trials.
Early one morning a work detachment of Party slaves was marched into the quarantine facility and ordered into the Decontamination showers. Their Patriot handlers told them they had been exposed to a disease in the wastes, and would receive decontamination and inoculation for their own safety. Suspicious, but unable to resist, the Party members stood naked in the showers as a thin greenish foam was sprayed over them. On the other side technicians in isolation suits stood were armed with autoinjectors of greenish liquid, while troopers in sealed power armor looked on. Each of the slaves was then given a thin blanket and herded into a solitary cell.
The change came rapidly. The Patriots of Raven Rock were working with a resource that the Master had long dreamed of, humans who were almost wholly free of radiation or other contaminants. The trial subjects experienced a successful “conversion” rate of almost 45%, a number the Master had never achieved with hapless victims plucked from the wastes. The survivors were full fledged super mutants. Their intelligence was low but uniform, their memories were almost totally absent. Experience gleaned from Horrigan’s file gave PRR NCO’s everything they needed to indoctrinate the new Super Mutants into their expected role in the PRR’s armed forces. Within six months of the first slaves stepping into the showers, the first twelve mutant squad of Super Muties was deployed in a raid against a slaver camp. They performed better than expected. The raiders fled in terror from the huge, brutal mutants, turning what might have been a pitched battle into a complete route. The Mutants, clad in grey and black uniforms adapted from old Enclave patterns and armed for close assault with shotguns, submachine guns, and grenades, had a powerful psychological effect on the enemies of the PRR.
Victories brought more slaves to be sent to the showers. Experimentation and refinements on the FEV serum allowed the PRR to maintain consistently high and uniform conversion rates. The uncontaminated Party members provided the most success, but even moderately contaminated wastelanders were converted with acceptable losses, and with several hundred former Party Members forming the core of a new Super Mutant army the failures were hardly missed.
Of course it wasn’t long before the Party became aware that something awful was happening down at the Lister Center. While the work gangs were kept largely segregated from each other, slaves brought in from the wastes and carefully smuggled messages passed the word that none of the slaves who went into Lister didn’t come out again, at least not as humans. The slave leaders quietly, carefully worked out a plan of escape.
When the party struck, it struck quickly and with maximum violence. A valiant party cadre took on a suicide assault against the main fusion reactor in Raven Rock. Armed with stolen weapons and explosives that had been painfully stolen or extorted over the years they fought desperately through maintenance corridors that were so like the ones of Vault ’76. But with Power Armor and Super Mutants being too bulky for use in the tight corridors their pursuers were mostly old Patriots, now armed with modern weapons and well trained. The cadre was cornered and destroyed long before they reached their target. Their mission, however, was a diversion.
While the volunteer cadre was racing towards the Fusion Reactor an explosive rocked the slave camps. A tunnel dug under one of the main guard towers had been packed with explosives and detonated. Slaves poured through the gap, taking up weapons wherever they could, freeing their brethren when possible, but mostly heading out into the wastes. Stolen maps guided them and stockpiled food and water sustained them as they made their way to their rally point at the Arnold Monument in downtown DC. Of the hundred of slaves who made it past the fences many were killed or quickly recaptured. But over the next few weeks a nearly a hundred escapees rendezvoused at the monument. There a committee was convened and the Party voted to disperse in small groups throughout the area, engaging in a guerilla war to free their imprisoned comrades, destroy their hated enemies, and bring about a socialist utopia in the wasteland.
As they crept through the ruins of Capitalisms broken Mecca, skirmishing with raiders and mutants and hiding from PRR Vertibirds, the Party succeeded in finding various allies. Perhaps most surprising were the Chinese Remnant. Some were ghouls who had been Chinese sleeper agents during the war, other were descended from sleeper agents. Throughout the long years in the harsh American wastes they had held on to their ideals, waiting for contact from nearly forgotten homeland.
Other Allies were found among the wasteland communities. The Capitol Wastelanders were terrified by the PRR. While power armor and advanced technology weren’t entirely unknown the PRR’s training and organization, coupled with their Super Mutant shock troopers, made them an unstoppable force in the wastelands. It seemed that they could be anywhere without warning, descending from the skies spitting plasma death or breaking down the door with size thirty six boots. The Party, disciplined by it’s long struggle and adept at guerilla fighting, without a home base to siege or burn, was able to bring the fight to the PRR, whittling away at them in lightning raids or harassing them with snipers and bombs. With the aid of hundreds of years of knowledge gathered from the Chinese ghouls the Party could strike the PRR then disappear into ancient sewers and half collapsed sub basements faster than vertibird assault squads could respond.
Those communities that refuse to join the Parties struggles find the same tactics that work so well against the PRR turned against them. Prisoners are sent to re-education camps located deep in the DC sprawl or work in tiny ammunition factories hidden away from the PRR’s sensors. Those who speak openly against the Party’s influence are found dead in their beds, or they simply disappear.
You, the protagonist, are a young waste management technician in a Vault, number 101. Unbeknownst to you, your Vault is a control Vault. You’re one of the lucky few in Project Safehouse who can rely on the water purifiers to function and the GECK to contain seeds for useful crops instead of potent narcotics. While you’re not terribly happy with your life in the bowels of the Vault’s waste reclamation plant, you know from the Overseer’s frequent lectures that life outside would be much, much worse.
Your peaceful life is peaceful, if dull, until one day when fixing the Overseer’s private toilet you hear a strange, authoritarian voice speaking over the PA in the next room. “Attention Citizens. This is Lieutenant Clint Murphy of the United States of America. We are here to escort you to a designated reintegration camp by the order of President Pro Tem Alexander Franklin. Please proceed to the Vault entrance chamber. Do not bring personal possessions. Failure to comply will be met with force.”
The PA goes dead, but you can hear the Overseer running into the room. As you look out from the bathroom you see him bent over his communication station, squinting at the tiny video display, and you can’t help but overhear what he says.
“Lieutenant Murphy! This is Overseer Stirling of Vault 101. There must be some mistake. I have standing orders that the Vault is not to be opened under any circumstances until it’s scheduled date! That’s not for another fifty years! I demand to know what’s going on!”
“Overseer Stirling, you will order your people to assemble in the Vault entrance chamber and open the Vault door, or we will blow the door and detain the population by force. Resistors will be shot. You have thirty seconds to comply.”
Lieutenant Murphy begins a countdown as the Overseer desperately begs for an explanation or more time. If you walk over to the console, the Overseer ignores you, but you can see the Vault door on the video screen, from the Outside. Two figures in strange, bulky armor are assembling a huge gun of some sort, hooking it up to a pulsating power supply. As the countdown approaches zero, the Overseer yells
“Alright, Alright! I’ll open it! I’ll need a moment, It’s a dual key lock!”
“You have five minutes, Overseer Stirling”.
Stirling turns to you and says
“I need your help, lad. I’ve got one key on me, but the other is in the safe in my room. I need you to run and get it, I’ll stay here and try to figure out what is going on out there. Don’t waste time and don’t talk to anyone, just get the key and come back here. My password is “Cain”."
You run to the safe, and retrieve the key within. Returning to the Overseers control room you are instructed to insert the key into a large console labeled "Due not touch under any circumstances, ever. This means you!”. Alarms sound and warning lights strobe red. On the monitor you can see the Vault Door swing into life for the first time in hundreds of years. The overseer begins issuing orders for all the vault citizens to be calm, to proceed to the vault entrance chamber and to cooperate with the men there.
As the first Vault citizens arrive in the Entrance chamber you watch on the monitor as one begins questioning an armored soldier as to what is happening. He is told to shut up, when he persists with his questions he is clubbed with the butt of a strange weapon. When another vault dweller attempts to intervene he is shot, his body disintegrating into a green goo. A woman screams and tries to flee, she is shot in the back. This leads to a general panic and the vault dwellers flee into the vault amid gunfire. The soldiers produce stun sticks and follow them in.
The Overseer rushes out into the corridors. Having nothing else to do you follow him. The two of you ride his personal evelator up the the entrance level. When the door opens a soldier in power armor has a plasma rifle aimed at your head. Another soldier enters and clubs you in the head with a stun stick, and you are knocked unconscious.
You come too in the vault entranceway. The Overseer is being interrogated by an armored man wearing lieutenants stripes on his power armor. Your arms have been bound and a man is standing over you with a gun. A steady stream of cuffed vault dwellers is marching out of the vault under the eyes of armed soldiers. You pass out again.
You come too and you find yourself blinded. The whole world is bright, painful white, brighter than anything you’ve ever see. You’re staring straight up into the noonday sun, seeing sunlight for the first time in your life. A man in power armor is dragging you by the arm towards a vertibird, which you can see is full of other vault dwellers, many wounded, cowering fearfully on the floor. To your right you can see a line of vault dwellers being escorted into the desert by hulking grey skinned giants with grey and black uniforms. The walking vault dwellers are tied together and well guarded, very few of them seem to be wounded.
The Vertibird infront of you explodes with great force and the man carrying you is impaled by a piece of rotor blade which spears straight through his midsection, lodging in his armor. You fall to the ground, attempt to gain your feet, but stumble. Disoriented by the explosion and the stunstick you crawl away from the burning wreck, until you feel a hand helping you to your feet. The man seems to have come from nowhere. He’s wearing a leather jacket with a red star painted boldly on the chest and shoulder, and he’s carrying a rifle that looks like something out of an old war movie but rougher, handmade. You can see that there are others dressed like him firing from cover ahead of you, presumably shooting at the armored men who attacked your vault. You feel heat on your back as another explosion lifts you off your feet and throws you into the brush ahead of you, then everything fades to black.
You wake up some time later. The sky is dark and full of stars, but the Vertibird is still burning and casts enough light for you to see. You landed in a shallow ditch and you must have been left behind after the battle. Around you are dead men and women wearing red stars, and many dead vault dwellers apparently shot down in the crossfire. You search the area and find a canteen, a few meal bars, and a hand made assault rifle that still has a few rounds in the magazine, though it looks ready to fall apart. You take one of the coats off of a dead Red Star, then try to go back into the Vault.
The entrance to the Vault is still opened, and thin black smoke is floating out. Beyond the entrance the roof of the Vault has collapse, some powerful explosive must have destroyed the corridor. To your surprise one of the Communications panels in the entrance chamber is still functional, the red ‘Respond’ button flashing frantically. You press the button and hear a voice.
“Oh thank God. We didn’t think anyone was still out there. You’ve got to help us! There are about fifty of us down here and we can’t get out! The whole entry level has collapsed! The elevator jammed, I managed to get up to the first level through a service way, but the way out is totally blocked by rubble! There’s no way to move it from our side! You have to get help! Everything is a mess down here. We’ve got enough food and water to last for a while, but the air exchangers are damaged. Some of those guys in armor tried to come back into the vault during the battle, but the other guys followed them and they caused a lot of damage down here. We managed to put the fires out but we’re going to run out of air. According to the computer we’ve got about three weeks. You’ve got to go get help! You’ve got to help us get out!”
At this point the game begins. The player must venture out into the wasteland in search of a way to save his trapped fellows. Ultimately, he’ll find himself in the middle of the war between the Patriots of Raven Rock and the Party. With many of his fellow Vault 101 Citizens enslaved in Party reeducation camps or interned in Lister Emergency Clinic awaiting the horrible transformation into Super Mutants, the protagonist whether to aid one side or play each against the other in order to ultimately free his people and find a new place for them in the wasteland. His decisions will ultimately shape the future of all the people of the Capitol Wastes.
So that’s my little “If I had designed Fallout III” blurb. It started out as an attempt to come up with a reason for the Enclave and the Super Mutants to be present on the East Coast. I think the idea of a surviving splinter of the Enclave that escaped to an old army base then used their accumulated research on Super Mutants to create a Jiffy Army is more interesting and original than the vanilla story, which basically amounts to “What happened in Fallout II had no real effect on the Enclave, despite the fact that they were for all intents and purposes destroyed. And oh look, for no reason we’re going to throw in Super Mutants’. This version tries to create a compelling reason for both the Enclave and Super Muties to be on the east coast, and also changes each of those factions.
Instead of a shadowy secret organization that shows up only in the last parts of the game the Enclave is an active force in the region, trying to exert control. The super high tech Enclave with unlimited resources in replaced by a group that retains the high technology only for it’s most elite troops, deploying most of it’s human soldiers with simpler armor and weapons and sending the Super Muties into battle with oversized Sten guns.
To oppose them there is the powerful, decentralized Party, a communist organization made up of survivors from Vault ’76, Chinese Remnant Ghouls, and wastelanders recruited or pressed into service. To match the Enclaves high technology and mighty mutants, the Party has active support from the population, extensive knowledge of the terrain passed on from the Ghouls, and a long tradition of vicious guerilla warfare.
To stir a little moral ambiguity into the mix, neither of these groups are anything like good guys. The new Enclave isn’t quite as xenophobic as the old Enclave. Without their cushy Oil Rig they’re forced to accept some outsiders, as long as they’ve got a low rad count and pass regular loyalty checks. And they’re willing to make use of Super Mutants out of sheer expedience and the irresistible lure of an army of unfailingly loyal, stupid, tough super soldiers, which is what FEV was supposed to create all along. Of course, since they’re the Enclave they’re making their super mutants out of slaves in a process that is not unintentionally reminiscent of one of the most horrific events in human history. And while they may not be trying to virus bomb the whole world, they’re still fighting to impose a fascistic government on the Capitol wasteland, which was doing just fine before the Enclave showed up and mostly wants to be left alone.
The Party, the counter part to the Enclaves extreme right, is so far left you they’d scare comrade Mao. They’ve been fighting the Patriots in the depths of Vault ’76 for 200 years with shivs and icepicks, so they’ve had plenty of time to refine their propaganda and develop a political machine which can convince people to undertake absolutely suicidal missions for the good of the whole. And the really terrifying thing about them is that they really, sincerely believe in what they’re doing. So they don’t have any problem sending anyone who disagrees to do slave labor in a reeducation camp, painstakingly hand assembling weapons and ammo in tiny factories that will likely be bombed out of existence by the PRR on a regular basis. Other prisoners will be wired with bombs and sent running at enclave patrols, knowing that there is a rifle trained at their backs. They think nothing of using assignations, kidnapping, and extortion to exert influence over the settlements of the wasteland and happily confiscate food, weapons, and other goods ‘For the benefit of the party’.
The people of the wasteland are totally unable to cope with these groups. The Enclave are simply too strong to confront directly. After Vertibirds are done bombing a settlements strongpoints platoons of Super Mutants kick the doors in and enslave the survivors. Vertibird scouts keep the Enclave up to date on enemy movements and nearly invincible Assault Squads in power armor can destroy most wasteland forces out of hand. The Party is numerous, nomadic, and very well organized. Raiders who attack Party cadres are tailed back to their camps and decimated by organized counter raids. Slavers find themselves forced to work with the Party for fear of being kidnapped themselves, or gutted by one of their own slaves who is a Party sleeper agent. Young, angry people flock to the Party’s banner while their elders, who have worked hard for what little they have, look on in fear.
In short, the events of the last few years have rapidly, radically destabilized the region with the appearance of two powerful forces that are ideologically opposed and bent on total war. The player is throw into the mess in his attempts to rescue his people, some of whom have been enslaved by one side, some of whom have been enslaved by the other. And just rescuing them isn’t enough. He’ll have to find a place for his folk in this strange land, And he might just have to be a hero to do it.
This plot idea also presents a close to the FEV ‘trilogy’. FEV is the Death Star of the Fallout series. It shows up everywhere, creating the terrifying Deathclaws, bringing about the Master and his Army. The Enclave tries to use it to wipe out every last person in the wasteland. And now it’s finally being used in the manner it was originally intended for. A fascistic government is using it to create super strong, super tough, super loyal super soldiers out of unwilling victims in order to expand its power and control. And it’s not enough to simply defeat the PRR or shut down Lister Emergency Clinic. The FEV research itself is a ticking bomb. If the Party or another power gets a hold of the necessary research and facilities there is nothing to prevent them from creating their own Super Mutant army.
So we get to keep some old, familiar elements, but use them in new ways. And we get to introduce some new stuff, like an all out war and a bunch of crazy communists. Have fun trying to barter with these guys. And maybe we get to see the end of the FEV project. And if we’re lucky we have fun shooting, persuading, stealing, gambling, and punching our way through the wasteland.
As the chosen one was happily laying waste to the Poseidon Oil Platform a number of Enclave citizens realized that if there was ever a time to emigrate it was right now. Many fled the platform in Vertibirds or life rafts, with a few being lucky enough to reach the mainland. Among the passengers of these fleeing Vertibirds was a scientist working in the chemical corp. In the mad rush to evacuate the platform he happened to grab a set of holotapes detailing what the Enclave had found in the ruins of Mariposa, as well as a map listing military bases that were known to be sealed and intact. After rendezvousing at Navarro the decapitated Enclave split into a number of factions. Gunfire was exchanged as the various groups tried to seize the bases reserves of weapons, food, fuel, and vertibirds. One faction that managed to get away with a few birds and a stockpile of micro fusion cells decided to strike out for the east coast to look for a place called Raven Rock.
This tiny, desperate splinter of the Enclave flew across the former nation of America in a matter of days, pushing their vertibirds to the limit and losing several of them to mechanical failure in the process. The group that landed outside Raven Rock was dirty, starving, and badly demoralized. Using ancient security passcodes they were able to enter the old base, reactivate vital systems, and set up a basic living arrangement. The surviving officers elected one of their number as President Pro Tem and sat down to figure out their situation.
The surviving “Enclave” consisted of about forty people, mostly junior enlisted men, vertibird pilots, and a few technicians and chemical corps geeks. Initial scouting forays into the Capitol area revealed the place to be crawling with muties, both the near human kind that the Enclave had worked hard to wipe out and more wretched forms, like ghouls, zombies, and other less easily categorized abominations. The muties had established a number of small towns and kingdoms in the area. By querying the computer systems of local national guard armories and military bases the Enclave splinter, now calling itself the Ravens, learned that many heavy weapons and advanced armour suits had been looted in over the years. It stood to reason that some of the petty kingdoms in the area could pose a real threat to Raven Rock. Leaving wasn’t an option, the vertibirds were barely functional and no spare parts were readily available. Moreover, there was no where else to go. The Ravens agreed that they would try to fortify Raven Rock as best they could and seek out Project Safehouse control Vaults in search of new citizens to induct into their little community.
Years passed. The Ravens managed to locate one unopened Vault, Vault ‘76. ‘76 had been stocked with near equal numbers of extreme right wing patriots and suspected communist sympathizers, a large variety of patriotic and subversive literature, and no weapons of any kind. As a result the Vault Dwellers in ’76 had been engaged in rounds of brutal civil war for over two hundred years. Patriots hunted commies in the sprawling service tunnels of the Vault only to fall into Cadre ambushes armed with kitchen knives and sharpened pipes. As one side or another gained ascendency it would splinter on ideological grounds and turn on itself. When the Ravens landed outside and opened the Vault doors they found the Patriot faction in bad shape. The current manifestation of Party had forced them into the upper levels of the vault, cutting them off from vital food and water replicators, and were slowly starving them to death. The Patriots saw the Ravens as saviors. They practically fell overthemselves to welcome the returned United States. Upon hearing of the Patriots situation the Ravens sent soldiers equipped with power armor, gas grenades, and flame throwers into the bowels of the Vault. Those Party members who surrendered were lead out in slaves manacles, those who refused burned alive or choked on poison gas.
Vault ’76 was a major windfall for the Ravens. The Patriots numbered nearly two hundred. They had the benefit of a vault education. Their hard core right wing views meshed neatly with those of the Enclave, and they had been raised from birth to expect the return of the good old USA. After being saved from a slow death at the hands of the Party they were fanatically loyal to the Ravens. And they had all grown up fighting constantly in small, disciplined guerilla bands. The Raven NCOs were able to rapidly train the patriots in the use of firearms and modern military equipment. The Patriots took to infantry tactics very well and showed great creativity in applying asymmetric warfare techniques. Equipped with the slightly dusty but still serviceable pre-war combat armor and assault rifles the Patriot Brigade gave the Ravens a real chance at holding out and surviving in the Capitol Waste.
But Surviving isn’t thriving. Raven Rock had a good store of military supplies, but before the war it had been mostly used for communications, not a supply dump. The Ravens, by this point calling them selves the Patriots of Raven Rock, were able to secure Raven Rock and it’s surroundings against raiders and other threats, but they didn’t have enough men or resources to expand. They also had constant problems keeping the enslaved Party members in line. The Party were just as resourceful and dangerous as the Patriots, and while they lacked the training the Patriots had received they managed to pick up the knack for explosives and sabotage anyway.
It was one of the members of the old chemical corps that provided the solution. Searching for a design document on power armor actuators, he happened to pull Horrigan’s file. The file revealed a number of interesting things, how exposure to FEV had triggered a massive increase in size and strength. How it had initially left Horrigan confused, amnesiac, and dumber than he’d started. And how he had ultimately proved highly susceptible to indoctrination; his previous enthusiasm for the Enclave giving way to a unquestioning bloody minded fanaticism.
The Chem Corp technician had found a solution to the PA’s needs. All the files were on hand, data recovered from the Master’s experiments at Mariposa, Chemical Corp logs of the mutations experienced by workers and soldiers excavating the sight, studies on the effects of radiation on mainlanders, and possibly the most complete set of records, data, and experiments on the minutiae of FEV anywhere in the world. To top it off, they had the entire file on Horrigan, detailing how brutish man had been turned into something like a walking Nuke.
A plan was quickly sketched out and put into action. A strike team of the original, power armor equipped Ravens descended on the Lister Emergency Clinic, an old, semi-automated decontamination and quarantine center established during the height of the New Plague hundreds of years ago. As technicians and mechanics worked to bring the Lister center back online the Chemical Corp scientists worked feverishly to synthesize FEV out of the available data and a few fragmentary samples. With extensive access to FEV research they were able to quickly brew a batch of the virus which was thought to be sufficient to effect the transformation. Within a year they were ready for the first trials.
Early one morning a work detachment of Party slaves was marched into the quarantine facility and ordered into the Decontamination showers. Their Patriot handlers told them they had been exposed to a disease in the wastes, and would receive decontamination and inoculation for their own safety. Suspicious, but unable to resist, the Party members stood naked in the showers as a thin greenish foam was sprayed over them. On the other side technicians in isolation suits stood were armed with autoinjectors of greenish liquid, while troopers in sealed power armor looked on. Each of the slaves was then given a thin blanket and herded into a solitary cell.
The change came rapidly. The Patriots of Raven Rock were working with a resource that the Master had long dreamed of, humans who were almost wholly free of radiation or other contaminants. The trial subjects experienced a successful “conversion” rate of almost 45%, a number the Master had never achieved with hapless victims plucked from the wastes. The survivors were full fledged super mutants. Their intelligence was low but uniform, their memories were almost totally absent. Experience gleaned from Horrigan’s file gave PRR NCO’s everything they needed to indoctrinate the new Super Mutants into their expected role in the PRR’s armed forces. Within six months of the first slaves stepping into the showers, the first twelve mutant squad of Super Muties was deployed in a raid against a slaver camp. They performed better than expected. The raiders fled in terror from the huge, brutal mutants, turning what might have been a pitched battle into a complete route. The Mutants, clad in grey and black uniforms adapted from old Enclave patterns and armed for close assault with shotguns, submachine guns, and grenades, had a powerful psychological effect on the enemies of the PRR.
Victories brought more slaves to be sent to the showers. Experimentation and refinements on the FEV serum allowed the PRR to maintain consistently high and uniform conversion rates. The uncontaminated Party members provided the most success, but even moderately contaminated wastelanders were converted with acceptable losses, and with several hundred former Party Members forming the core of a new Super Mutant army the failures were hardly missed.
Of course it wasn’t long before the Party became aware that something awful was happening down at the Lister Center. While the work gangs were kept largely segregated from each other, slaves brought in from the wastes and carefully smuggled messages passed the word that none of the slaves who went into Lister didn’t come out again, at least not as humans. The slave leaders quietly, carefully worked out a plan of escape.
When the party struck, it struck quickly and with maximum violence. A valiant party cadre took on a suicide assault against the main fusion reactor in Raven Rock. Armed with stolen weapons and explosives that had been painfully stolen or extorted over the years they fought desperately through maintenance corridors that were so like the ones of Vault ’76. But with Power Armor and Super Mutants being too bulky for use in the tight corridors their pursuers were mostly old Patriots, now armed with modern weapons and well trained. The cadre was cornered and destroyed long before they reached their target. Their mission, however, was a diversion.
While the volunteer cadre was racing towards the Fusion Reactor an explosive rocked the slave camps. A tunnel dug under one of the main guard towers had been packed with explosives and detonated. Slaves poured through the gap, taking up weapons wherever they could, freeing their brethren when possible, but mostly heading out into the wastes. Stolen maps guided them and stockpiled food and water sustained them as they made their way to their rally point at the Arnold Monument in downtown DC. Of the hundred of slaves who made it past the fences many were killed or quickly recaptured. But over the next few weeks a nearly a hundred escapees rendezvoused at the monument. There a committee was convened and the Party voted to disperse in small groups throughout the area, engaging in a guerilla war to free their imprisoned comrades, destroy their hated enemies, and bring about a socialist utopia in the wasteland.
As they crept through the ruins of Capitalisms broken Mecca, skirmishing with raiders and mutants and hiding from PRR Vertibirds, the Party succeeded in finding various allies. Perhaps most surprising were the Chinese Remnant. Some were ghouls who had been Chinese sleeper agents during the war, other were descended from sleeper agents. Throughout the long years in the harsh American wastes they had held on to their ideals, waiting for contact from nearly forgotten homeland.
Other Allies were found among the wasteland communities. The Capitol Wastelanders were terrified by the PRR. While power armor and advanced technology weren’t entirely unknown the PRR’s training and organization, coupled with their Super Mutant shock troopers, made them an unstoppable force in the wastelands. It seemed that they could be anywhere without warning, descending from the skies spitting plasma death or breaking down the door with size thirty six boots. The Party, disciplined by it’s long struggle and adept at guerilla fighting, without a home base to siege or burn, was able to bring the fight to the PRR, whittling away at them in lightning raids or harassing them with snipers and bombs. With the aid of hundreds of years of knowledge gathered from the Chinese ghouls the Party could strike the PRR then disappear into ancient sewers and half collapsed sub basements faster than vertibird assault squads could respond.
Those communities that refuse to join the Parties struggles find the same tactics that work so well against the PRR turned against them. Prisoners are sent to re-education camps located deep in the DC sprawl or work in tiny ammunition factories hidden away from the PRR’s sensors. Those who speak openly against the Party’s influence are found dead in their beds, or they simply disappear.
You, the protagonist, are a young waste management technician in a Vault, number 101. Unbeknownst to you, your Vault is a control Vault. You’re one of the lucky few in Project Safehouse who can rely on the water purifiers to function and the GECK to contain seeds for useful crops instead of potent narcotics. While you’re not terribly happy with your life in the bowels of the Vault’s waste reclamation plant, you know from the Overseer’s frequent lectures that life outside would be much, much worse.
Your peaceful life is peaceful, if dull, until one day when fixing the Overseer’s private toilet you hear a strange, authoritarian voice speaking over the PA in the next room. “Attention Citizens. This is Lieutenant Clint Murphy of the United States of America. We are here to escort you to a designated reintegration camp by the order of President Pro Tem Alexander Franklin. Please proceed to the Vault entrance chamber. Do not bring personal possessions. Failure to comply will be met with force.”
The PA goes dead, but you can hear the Overseer running into the room. As you look out from the bathroom you see him bent over his communication station, squinting at the tiny video display, and you can’t help but overhear what he says.
“Lieutenant Murphy! This is Overseer Stirling of Vault 101. There must be some mistake. I have standing orders that the Vault is not to be opened under any circumstances until it’s scheduled date! That’s not for another fifty years! I demand to know what’s going on!”
“Overseer Stirling, you will order your people to assemble in the Vault entrance chamber and open the Vault door, or we will blow the door and detain the population by force. Resistors will be shot. You have thirty seconds to comply.”
Lieutenant Murphy begins a countdown as the Overseer desperately begs for an explanation or more time. If you walk over to the console, the Overseer ignores you, but you can see the Vault door on the video screen, from the Outside. Two figures in strange, bulky armor are assembling a huge gun of some sort, hooking it up to a pulsating power supply. As the countdown approaches zero, the Overseer yells
“Alright, Alright! I’ll open it! I’ll need a moment, It’s a dual key lock!”
“You have five minutes, Overseer Stirling”.
Stirling turns to you and says
“I need your help, lad. I’ve got one key on me, but the other is in the safe in my room. I need you to run and get it, I’ll stay here and try to figure out what is going on out there. Don’t waste time and don’t talk to anyone, just get the key and come back here. My password is “Cain”."
You run to the safe, and retrieve the key within. Returning to the Overseers control room you are instructed to insert the key into a large console labeled "Due not touch under any circumstances, ever. This means you!”. Alarms sound and warning lights strobe red. On the monitor you can see the Vault Door swing into life for the first time in hundreds of years. The overseer begins issuing orders for all the vault citizens to be calm, to proceed to the vault entrance chamber and to cooperate with the men there.
As the first Vault citizens arrive in the Entrance chamber you watch on the monitor as one begins questioning an armored soldier as to what is happening. He is told to shut up, when he persists with his questions he is clubbed with the butt of a strange weapon. When another vault dweller attempts to intervene he is shot, his body disintegrating into a green goo. A woman screams and tries to flee, she is shot in the back. This leads to a general panic and the vault dwellers flee into the vault amid gunfire. The soldiers produce stun sticks and follow them in.
The Overseer rushes out into the corridors. Having nothing else to do you follow him. The two of you ride his personal evelator up the the entrance level. When the door opens a soldier in power armor has a plasma rifle aimed at your head. Another soldier enters and clubs you in the head with a stun stick, and you are knocked unconscious.
You come too in the vault entranceway. The Overseer is being interrogated by an armored man wearing lieutenants stripes on his power armor. Your arms have been bound and a man is standing over you with a gun. A steady stream of cuffed vault dwellers is marching out of the vault under the eyes of armed soldiers. You pass out again.
You come too and you find yourself blinded. The whole world is bright, painful white, brighter than anything you’ve ever see. You’re staring straight up into the noonday sun, seeing sunlight for the first time in your life. A man in power armor is dragging you by the arm towards a vertibird, which you can see is full of other vault dwellers, many wounded, cowering fearfully on the floor. To your right you can see a line of vault dwellers being escorted into the desert by hulking grey skinned giants with grey and black uniforms. The walking vault dwellers are tied together and well guarded, very few of them seem to be wounded.
The Vertibird infront of you explodes with great force and the man carrying you is impaled by a piece of rotor blade which spears straight through his midsection, lodging in his armor. You fall to the ground, attempt to gain your feet, but stumble. Disoriented by the explosion and the stunstick you crawl away from the burning wreck, until you feel a hand helping you to your feet. The man seems to have come from nowhere. He’s wearing a leather jacket with a red star painted boldly on the chest and shoulder, and he’s carrying a rifle that looks like something out of an old war movie but rougher, handmade. You can see that there are others dressed like him firing from cover ahead of you, presumably shooting at the armored men who attacked your vault. You feel heat on your back as another explosion lifts you off your feet and throws you into the brush ahead of you, then everything fades to black.
You wake up some time later. The sky is dark and full of stars, but the Vertibird is still burning and casts enough light for you to see. You landed in a shallow ditch and you must have been left behind after the battle. Around you are dead men and women wearing red stars, and many dead vault dwellers apparently shot down in the crossfire. You search the area and find a canteen, a few meal bars, and a hand made assault rifle that still has a few rounds in the magazine, though it looks ready to fall apart. You take one of the coats off of a dead Red Star, then try to go back into the Vault.
The entrance to the Vault is still opened, and thin black smoke is floating out. Beyond the entrance the roof of the Vault has collapse, some powerful explosive must have destroyed the corridor. To your surprise one of the Communications panels in the entrance chamber is still functional, the red ‘Respond’ button flashing frantically. You press the button and hear a voice.
“Oh thank God. We didn’t think anyone was still out there. You’ve got to help us! There are about fifty of us down here and we can’t get out! The whole entry level has collapsed! The elevator jammed, I managed to get up to the first level through a service way, but the way out is totally blocked by rubble! There’s no way to move it from our side! You have to get help! Everything is a mess down here. We’ve got enough food and water to last for a while, but the air exchangers are damaged. Some of those guys in armor tried to come back into the vault during the battle, but the other guys followed them and they caused a lot of damage down here. We managed to put the fires out but we’re going to run out of air. According to the computer we’ve got about three weeks. You’ve got to go get help! You’ve got to help us get out!”
At this point the game begins. The player must venture out into the wasteland in search of a way to save his trapped fellows. Ultimately, he’ll find himself in the middle of the war between the Patriots of Raven Rock and the Party. With many of his fellow Vault 101 Citizens enslaved in Party reeducation camps or interned in Lister Emergency Clinic awaiting the horrible transformation into Super Mutants, the protagonist whether to aid one side or play each against the other in order to ultimately free his people and find a new place for them in the wasteland. His decisions will ultimately shape the future of all the people of the Capitol Wastes.
So that’s my little “If I had designed Fallout III” blurb. It started out as an attempt to come up with a reason for the Enclave and the Super Mutants to be present on the East Coast. I think the idea of a surviving splinter of the Enclave that escaped to an old army base then used their accumulated research on Super Mutants to create a Jiffy Army is more interesting and original than the vanilla story, which basically amounts to “What happened in Fallout II had no real effect on the Enclave, despite the fact that they were for all intents and purposes destroyed. And oh look, for no reason we’re going to throw in Super Mutants’. This version tries to create a compelling reason for both the Enclave and Super Muties to be on the east coast, and also changes each of those factions.
Instead of a shadowy secret organization that shows up only in the last parts of the game the Enclave is an active force in the region, trying to exert control. The super high tech Enclave with unlimited resources in replaced by a group that retains the high technology only for it’s most elite troops, deploying most of it’s human soldiers with simpler armor and weapons and sending the Super Muties into battle with oversized Sten guns.
To oppose them there is the powerful, decentralized Party, a communist organization made up of survivors from Vault ’76, Chinese Remnant Ghouls, and wastelanders recruited or pressed into service. To match the Enclaves high technology and mighty mutants, the Party has active support from the population, extensive knowledge of the terrain passed on from the Ghouls, and a long tradition of vicious guerilla warfare.
To stir a little moral ambiguity into the mix, neither of these groups are anything like good guys. The new Enclave isn’t quite as xenophobic as the old Enclave. Without their cushy Oil Rig they’re forced to accept some outsiders, as long as they’ve got a low rad count and pass regular loyalty checks. And they’re willing to make use of Super Mutants out of sheer expedience and the irresistible lure of an army of unfailingly loyal, stupid, tough super soldiers, which is what FEV was supposed to create all along. Of course, since they’re the Enclave they’re making their super mutants out of slaves in a process that is not unintentionally reminiscent of one of the most horrific events in human history. And while they may not be trying to virus bomb the whole world, they’re still fighting to impose a fascistic government on the Capitol wasteland, which was doing just fine before the Enclave showed up and mostly wants to be left alone.
The Party, the counter part to the Enclaves extreme right, is so far left you they’d scare comrade Mao. They’ve been fighting the Patriots in the depths of Vault ’76 for 200 years with shivs and icepicks, so they’ve had plenty of time to refine their propaganda and develop a political machine which can convince people to undertake absolutely suicidal missions for the good of the whole. And the really terrifying thing about them is that they really, sincerely believe in what they’re doing. So they don’t have any problem sending anyone who disagrees to do slave labor in a reeducation camp, painstakingly hand assembling weapons and ammo in tiny factories that will likely be bombed out of existence by the PRR on a regular basis. Other prisoners will be wired with bombs and sent running at enclave patrols, knowing that there is a rifle trained at their backs. They think nothing of using assignations, kidnapping, and extortion to exert influence over the settlements of the wasteland and happily confiscate food, weapons, and other goods ‘For the benefit of the party’.
The people of the wasteland are totally unable to cope with these groups. The Enclave are simply too strong to confront directly. After Vertibirds are done bombing a settlements strongpoints platoons of Super Mutants kick the doors in and enslave the survivors. Vertibird scouts keep the Enclave up to date on enemy movements and nearly invincible Assault Squads in power armor can destroy most wasteland forces out of hand. The Party is numerous, nomadic, and very well organized. Raiders who attack Party cadres are tailed back to their camps and decimated by organized counter raids. Slavers find themselves forced to work with the Party for fear of being kidnapped themselves, or gutted by one of their own slaves who is a Party sleeper agent. Young, angry people flock to the Party’s banner while their elders, who have worked hard for what little they have, look on in fear.
In short, the events of the last few years have rapidly, radically destabilized the region with the appearance of two powerful forces that are ideologically opposed and bent on total war. The player is throw into the mess in his attempts to rescue his people, some of whom have been enslaved by one side, some of whom have been enslaved by the other. And just rescuing them isn’t enough. He’ll have to find a place for his folk in this strange land, And he might just have to be a hero to do it.
This plot idea also presents a close to the FEV ‘trilogy’. FEV is the Death Star of the Fallout series. It shows up everywhere, creating the terrifying Deathclaws, bringing about the Master and his Army. The Enclave tries to use it to wipe out every last person in the wasteland. And now it’s finally being used in the manner it was originally intended for. A fascistic government is using it to create super strong, super tough, super loyal super soldiers out of unwilling victims in order to expand its power and control. And it’s not enough to simply defeat the PRR or shut down Lister Emergency Clinic. The FEV research itself is a ticking bomb. If the Party or another power gets a hold of the necessary research and facilities there is nothing to prevent them from creating their own Super Mutant army.
So we get to keep some old, familiar elements, but use them in new ways. And we get to introduce some new stuff, like an all out war and a bunch of crazy communists. Have fun trying to barter with these guys. And maybe we get to see the end of the FEV project. And if we’re lucky we have fun shooting, persuading, stealing, gambling, and punching our way through the wasteland.
