Let me see your headcanons!

[Hardboiled Android]

Fair enough, though I would correct you on one factual matter: the Amazon is not the majority of South America's landmass and only a very small portion of its population, so to summarize the entirety of a continent it doesn't really make sense to focus on that

 

[TheGM]

 

[Jogre]

@TheGM Your headcanons are pretty hilarious because they're like:

"America won every single war in the Cold War, French Colonialism in Southeast Asia never ended, Britain keeps Hong Kong, the rest of the world never had any preperations for nuclear war whatsoever because I said so, South America has no functioning civilisations anymore, the instability in Africa somehow continues even after the slate was wiped clean, and South Africa is now apparently as hyper-xenophobic and milistaristic as it was during Apartheid* and is nuking the shit out of it's neighbours."

Like, seeing your profile pic of a sinister looking cyborg in front of an American flag saying all this gives off this pretty hilarious vibe.

*Assuming it still ended in your headcanon.

 

[TheGM]

And there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.

At most I did was think about taking Post WW2 western anti communism and turning it up to 13(11 doesn't go far enough) and how that in turn would make other places react and string along events to that lead up to the world getting blown to shit. I guess I could have just ripped off Watchmen or said my hometown survived, but that isn't interesting enough to me. And yes I think if America was as inordinately anti-communist as they are shown to be in the franchise as early as the divergence is said to have happened, I could see events playing out very differently as opposed to what really happened, to think otherwise would be kinda silly.

 

[Gefilte Fish]

The whole rest of the world in the Fallout universe really is an interesting thing to think about. One of the most prominent timelines on the Alternate History Wiki is one called 1983: Doomsday, and in the post-apocalyptic landscape (which is nowhere near like Fallout but, just for the sake of conversation) South America—united in a confederation—and Australia became the world's biggest power blocs. I think it's interesting to think of a post-war situation where the first and third-worlds flip like that (with Australia being the oddball in this instance).

In Fallout, I imagine that the pre-War landscape of SA was FUBAR but it probably wasn't hit by many ICBMs, if any at all; they would definitely have gotten less of a nuclear asswhupin' than North America or Europe. The resulting collapse of global civilization would hit the South Americans pretty hard, but they'd be on average better off than most places in the world; although they were probably (and in my headcanon) at each other's throats as TheGM said, the lack of direct nuclear attacks on their lands would give them quite the head start over places like the US. That's my opinion anyways.

 

[Atomic Postman]

@TheGM Your headcanons are pretty hilarious because they're like:

"America won every single war in the Cold War, French Colonialism in Southeast Asia never ended, Britain keeps Hong Kong, the rest of the world never had any preperations for nuclear war whatsoever because I said so, South America has no functioning civilisations anymore, the instability in Africa somehow continues even after the slate was wiped clean, and South Africa is now apparently as hyper-xenophobic and milistaristic as it was during Apartheid* and is nuking the shit out of it's neighbours."

Like, seeing your profile pic of a sinister looking cyborg in front of an American flag saying all this gives off this pretty hilarious vibe.

*Assuming it still ended in your headcanon.

Well, Fallout is meant to be a retrofuture gone wrong. It is, or was, a dystopia. I feel like GM and I's headcanons about a grim hyper-cold war is in keeping. The world was fucked.

You've got to set up the whole world to be nuclear holocaust dominoes some way

 

[TheGM]

Well, Fallout is meant to be a retrofuture gone wrong. It is, or was, a dystopia. I feel like GM and I's headcanons about a grim hyper-cold war is in keeping. The world was fucked.

You've got to set up the whole world to be nuclear holocaust dominoes some way

Indeederini. Just look how bad East vs West shenanigans in South America and Africa played out in the real world. Now imagine them in the Fallout universe and after over a century of Coups and Counter Coups, Cover and Overt interventions and other tomfoolery, there probably wasn't much of a South America left standing by the time the bombs dropped.

 

[WonderGlueSniffer]

I guess my most important head canon is that there is no "rebuilding." While a central theme to Fallout is history being cyclical and war never changing, and that is true, the Earth is changed. Forever. To the point where, IMO, there won't be a second industrial revolution. Without horses, without meaningful amounts of oil or fissile material, without coal for trains, what advanced industrial and military equipment that does exist in the Fallout world essentially runs on fumes from the empty tank the old world left behind. And that's something where I think Fallout titles can be too optimistic about, where there should be more tech lost as time goes on. NCR shouldn't have an endless supply of bullets.

The tribes might advance in their own way, but every day in the setting, blueprints rot away, micro fusion cells run dry, and laser guns break without parts to fix them. And without the resources there for the world to develop the intermediate technologies, those techs will never be discovered.

tl;dr technological progress will slide backwards as more pre-war stuff is used up/broken, and will never recover.

 

[Atomic Postman]

I guess my most important head canon is that there is no "rebuilding." While a central theme to Fallout is history being cyclical and war never changing, and that is true, the Earth is changed. Forever. To the point where, IMO, there won't be a second industrial revolution. Without horses, without meaningful amounts of oil or fissile material, without coal for trains, what advanced industrial and military equipment that does exist in the Fallout world essentially runs on fumes from the empty tank the old world left behind. And that's something where I think Fallout titles can be too optimistic about, where there should be more tech lost as time goes on. NCR shouldn't have an endless supply of bullets.

The tribes might advance in their own way, but every day in the setting, blueprints rot away, micro fusion cells run dry, and laser guns break without parts to fix them. And without the resources there for the world to develop the intermediate technologies, those techs will never be discovered.

tl;dr technological progress will slide backwards as more pre-war stuff is used up/broken, and will never recover.

On the other hand, we do know that the Fallout world discovered post-scarcity technology via the Big MT. I tend to agree with you that the pre-war world will never be recreated, but alternately I can see a Canticle for Leibowitz style future where in centuries time after rebuilding and the Great War is a distant extinction event, the world will bomb itself again. Just layers upon layers of fallen history.

 

[WonderGlueSniffer]

I've read Leibowitz and I can see where Fallout tries to echo it with their depictions of humanity attempting to rebuild. So I understand what I'm saying kind of goes against the grain of Fallout, but I earnestly think that with horses extinct, most fossil and radioactive fuels already used or inaccessible, thousands of species extinct, and vast swathes of previously arable land now blasted desert, humanity should eventually reach a point where most of the tribes have risen out of the stone age and most of the pre-war tech that survived the initial war is non-functional, where it's all evened out in a world that's variously pre-modern/early modern, with not real way to move beyond that in a new industrial or nuclear age.

the issue isn't that the Great War destroyed the world. it's that the resource wars drained the world dry even before the War.

 

[Atomic Postman]

I've read Leibowitz and I can see where Fallout tries to echo it with their depictions of humanity attempting to rebuild. So I understand what I'm saying kind of goes against the grain of Fallout, but I earnestly think that with horses extinct, most fossil and radioactive fuels already used or inaccessible, thousands of species extinct, and vast swathes of previously arable land now blasted desert, humanity should eventually reach a point where most of the tribes have risen out of the stone age and most of the pre-war tech that survived the initial war is non-functional, where it's all evened out in a world that's variously pre-modern/early modern, with not real way to move beyond that in a new industrial or nuclear age.

the issue isn't that the Great War destroyed the world. it's that the resource wars drained the world dry even before the War.

You could make the argument that with the existing tech that's still working, resources clearly aren't completely dry but they were far too few to sustain the 2077 population and global infrastructure. Naturally the Wasteland is going to have about a fraction of the population and the resource demand. Obviously resources are still finite until they crack that post-scarcity tech, but I don't think they're completely doomed to medieval living.

 

[Dayglow Drifter]

I remember a fun little headcanon I saw that No-bark Noonan was the Chosen One and the Highwayman outside Novac where he resides is his as is "That Gun."

There's one that No Bark is the Vault 11 survivor as well

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

There's one that No Bark is the Vault 11 survivor as well

Yeah I’ve heard that, it’s mostly based off the fact that they have the same voice actor. Although I’m pretty sure Vault 11 opened much too early to have any surviving members by 2281.

Correction: In the files of the game there is a character called Vault 11 survivor, so at some point he was meant to appear in the game. If that’s the case though, then Vault 11 must have opened quite recently, given that the guy on the holotape sounds pretty old already. Couldn’t have been more than a decade before the start of the game. Then again, obviously this was scrapped during development, so who knows.

 

[cordelionreaver]

My head cannon is that the raider tribes are more like Vikings then gangs.

Basically most of them are regular people and a small percentage of them go on raids.

 

[Atomic Postman]

The Narrator (Ron Perlman) is a historian/scribe from the far future belonging to whatever final state/evolution/remnant of The Brotherhood of Steel.

And that any of of the narration handled by the characters and not Ron aren't history but perspectives, moments and personal stories lost to time.

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

My head cannon is that the raider tribes are more like Vikings then gangs.

Basically most of them are regular people and a small percentage of them go on raids.

I think it’s a combination of both. There are those who developed societies and cultures based on raiding, and there are those who were born to more “civilized” homes that later took up raiding to make ends meet, or simply because they were assholes.

 

[Atomic Postman]

I think it’s a combination of both. There are those who developed societies and cultures based on raiding, and there are those who were born to more “civilized” homes that later took up raiding to make ends meet, or simply because they were assholes.

Well I think it's how Caesar described the raider tribes of Arizona "playing" at warfare before the Legion. I.e they had a long term culture of infrequent minor raids, kidnapping and ransom etc. If all tribes acted like the Legion or the White Legs under Ulysses, these groups wouldn't have survived into the 23rd century anyway.

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

Well I think it's how Caesar described the raider tribes of Arizona "playing" at warfare before the Legion. I.e they had a long term culture of infrequent minor raids, kidnapping and ransom etc. If all tribes acted like the Legion or the White Legs under Ulysses, these groups wouldn't have survived into the 23rd century anyway.

I must have misread the comment I replied to. I thought they were saying that all raider groups have their own civilians and children that are kept unseen from the player. I agree that the raider tribes are like this, but I also believe that many raider gangs are just groups of murderous bandits.

 

[Atomic Postman]

I must have misread the comment I replied to. I thought they were saying that all raider groups have their own civilians and children that are kept unseen from the player. I agree that the raider tribes are like this, but I also believe that many raider gangs are just groups of murderous bandits.

Then they're just raiders, not raider-tribals. It's a narrow distinction but it's there.

 

[Slaughter Manslaught]

Some of mine:

1. There are a lot more human mutants around, we simply haven't seen them yet. We don't know about most of NA yet.

2. Vree was right about the bio-genetic weapons, but wrong about more mutations caused by those. She has simply not seen those mutations yet, because most mutations in the West Coast were caused by airbone FEV and rads, due to being near West Tek.

3. A single human race is pretty much done, for now. Its a world of mutants now, even the humans are just a human subspecies, as the Enclave discovered. "Humans" are the majority, but there are plenty of human mutants from a variety of causes, everywhere. Its more like that part of pre-history where homo sapiens lived onside Neanderthals, Denisovans, Florensis, etc. Not all of them are sterile, deformed monsters either. Its not Gamma World tier, but mutations are common and many can even breed with humans (cue racial panic).

4. East Coast FEVs are inferior versions compared to the one tweaked further by the Master. This is why East Coast Super Mutants are almost all psychotic green retards eternally growing, while West Coast Super Mutants are generally smarter, saner and stop growing

5. Super Mutant Behemoths aren't created purely with age. Fawkes is two hundred years old and is pretty normal. They are a special mutation within the mutation. Its just that East Coast mutants this old tend to be weak enough not to make it. Survivorship bias, in other words.

6. The original endings of Junktown are canon. This is why the Vault Dweller's diary seems to not be entirely happy with his actions in Junktown. Killian became a tyrant and Gizmo was actually the better choice.

7. The Gun Runners moved to the Hub after FO1. They returned to their old Fortress in Boneyard, later on, but staying in the Hub and becoming the top weapon manufacturers of the Wasteland makes more commercial sense.

8. Elder Lyons is a pretty cool guy, but he is a horrible strategical commander and that's why the D.C Chapter is losing: Because these idiots keep fighting urban warfare against genetically enhanced Super Soldiers, rather than seeking their HQ for one surgical strike or engaging them in the open outside D.C. He's Father Elijah-tier of sucking at warfare.

9. The reason the Chicago Chapter (the Brotherhood from FOT) was "off the radar" to Lyons and co, is simple: They saw a bunch of armed Brotherhood personnel coming from afar, and thought this wasn't an expedition or diplomatic mission, but the Western Elders sending a strike force to eliminate dissidents. Remember: The Airships were deliberately faulty and meant to kill or strand them.

10. Most of FOT's events happened. Not 100% how they went in-game, but they did. Calculator might have not been in a Vault at all. Mistakes like "BOS came from Military Vault" are actually in-universe mistakes because the Brotherhood sucks at preserving history.

11. Bonus: Gammorin/Latham was going to suceed in curing mutant sterelity, given time, but thanks to the Midwest BOS, they never got that time. Why? Because its more tragic that way.

12. The Super Mutant Army was made of a few thousand members. At least a thousand, possibly 1000-3000. In short: There are as many Super Mutants as the plot demands, but not TOO many Super Mutants.

13. Reservation exists as a vassaldom/protectorate of Caesar's Legion. It was pretty heavily defended and in radioactive land. Caesar ran the numbers and it simply wasn't worth it to lose thousands of men to conquer radioactive shit land around Los Alamos. It likely makes a living by supplying the Legion with weaponry and tech. Its like Ghoul North Korea over there.

15. Born Ghouls are a thing, and by 2281/2288 there are LOADS more than in Van Buren. And they already discovered Born Ghouls can breed true (at least with humans). Reservation is playing the long game and waiting the Legion to collapse.

16. Born Ghouls in VB were meant to be a way to keep Ghouls around in-universe as a viable, growing race. Belle was going to be the "Eve" of Born Ghouls, with the Prisioner as their "Adam". Its why they grow so fast - so they could have plenty of those for the next few games. Eventually, "Old Ghouls" would become a rare thing.

17. New Arroyo is independent of the NCR.

18. A big part of the Legion's economy is actually mining and selling Copper. Arizona has some of the biggest Copper reserves on the planet.

19. Trinity Test Site (where the first atomic bomb was detonated) is considered a holy site to many weirdo religions - atomic worshipers, death cults, doomsday cults, even some tech-cults. The Legion allows them do all sorts of weird pilgrimages and shit, because it brings in money. Hell, some Mars cultists might consider it sacred because Mars sent in the nukes to destroy the world.