Share your head-cannons for Fallout

Ugly Kid

Ugly Kid

Still Mildly Glowing
I am very interested in new knowledge of Fallout content, whether it's official or not. Here I'd appreciate it if people shared their head-cannons. I know it might be cringe, but honestly anyone's imagination is better than Bethesda's.

I'll start:
The games I find cannon are: Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Fallout Tactics 2, Fallout Van Buren, Fallout New Vegas + the frontier (I know, I'll address conflictions.), Fallout New California, Fallout 1.5, Fallout Nevada, Fallout Sonora, Fallout Mutants Rising, Fallout Empire (fudgemuppet's idea), and two fallout games I've come up with.

I will clarify first, I haven't finished any total conversions and I'm aware there are conflicts, but when I finish them I'll try to fix it in my mind.

I left out Bethesda games, but I don't think they should be 100% non-cannon, I mean Fallout 3 and 4's stories on paper sound pretty cool, but they need to be heavily modified to make me care.

Now Fallout New Vegas and Van Buren don't work together in their current states but I have retcons for the inconsistencies. First, just remove Arcade from Van Buren, easy, second, Joshua Graham doesn't get punished by the Legion and you can get him as a follower if you clean up his schedule a bit. And lastly (as far I know, I just finished reading design doc 12) Hoover Dam, in New Vegas it was apparently lying dormant until 2274 but in Van Buren an entire city was built on and in Hoover Dam in 2253. I think it could be fixed by saying this: As Caesar's Legion grew, they pushed the NCR further and further west. NCR's president Peterson just told everyone to hold position and fight back as hard as they could, but when Kimball was elected, he could see this was not working out well. A year later, in 2274, Kimball made the decision to evict the citizens of Hoover Dam and turn it into a military outpost. This was, of course, an unpopular decision so the NCR had to cover it up. They sent all of the citizens, eastward, into Legion territory but provided protection and even bribed many of them to not tell. It was effective for hiding it from the people west of the dam, but almost every major city in the four-states commonwealth got droves of immigrants telling the tale.

I also think that the cut good ending for Fallout 2's intelligent deathclaws should be re-integrated.

And I think that S'lanters could work if modified a bit. How about instead of dwarfs wearing fur suits living in a fairy forest, they could be just regular sized raccoons, or maybe just regular shaped but bigger. They could live in a landfill which they've fortified with walls and makeshift turrets. There could be a whole colony instead of just 4 or whatever because they reproduce quick. The military would be in three groups, soldiers, gatherers, and scientists. The soldiers would be commanded around by the general and they'd mostly just be guards but if they needed, they'd fight invaders. Gatherers would leave the landfill to gather resources. Scientists would do scientist things I don't know.

And lastly for retcons, Harold never went to Washington D.C., and he sure as hell never becomes a tree. Who knows where he is now, maybe he went back to Gecko, maybe the HUB, maybe Vault 5, who knows.

I can give my ideas for Fallout games if you guys want, but for now I think is satisfactory, please share your ideas.
 
I did a campaign with my Fallout PnP system between October-March set in Utah, Idaho, Nevada and Colorado in 2273 (In retrospective I wish I had set it earlier in the timeline, but it is what it is) so I have quite the roster of head-canon. I won't post the whole breakdown of my campaign lore, but I will post some random tidbits that were encountered by the party itself.

Here are some very brief overviews of a few of the locations and people that my party came across:

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Stardust, Utah:

One place they came across was UFO worshippers living in a decommissioned space-center come tourist attraction, pre-war. They believe this great EPCOT dome is the doorway to alien heaven if they can get inside, but in truth it is a proof-of-concept space colony. They manufacture hallucinogens from a mix of peyote and crushed meteorite dust from the museum which they believe communes them with aliens. The party turned up working for a caravan company trying to establish contact with a tribe they could rip-off, but they ended up being drugged and spending a week in their compound as captives being coereced to join their cult. Eventually the party managed to crack into the dome, trap the leader inside, and escape.

Pleasant Hills, Colorado

Another one is a town of Prospectors built around pre-war landfill /garbage mountains. The townsfolk have effectively created mining tunnels into the garbage mountains to salvage/prospect the stuff. The mayor of the town sells "tickets" to Wastelanders for entry into the mines, where they can salvage to their hearts content. There's risk obviously, with mutant bugs and cave-ins, but the main problem is a specific breed of mutant bug that eats through the salvage/junk has started breeding like crazy and is slowly destroying all the garbage, which is the town's main source of income. The Trashbugs are a lot like the Ant-Lions of Half-Life in effect. The mayor is paying an expedition of mercenaries (I.e the party and some mooks) to transport a drill into the heart of the biggest junk-mountain, drilling into where they believe the trashbug queen's nest is, and kill the damn thing.

Bridgetown, Idaho

An area where the party got themselves engaged in of note was also along the Snake River in Idaho. Idaho being pretty big on slavery, and the river being home to a coalition of smaller towns that profit off of the slave trade. The main hub of this is a town built on and around the Perrine Bridge, which effectively acted as the main passageway to the northern half of the state and basically the main/only route to cross the snake river.

The town is a hub of commerce for Idaho, chiefly slaves, moonshine and tobacco. The town is democratic, and the party turned up just as they were having an election. The town was under threat from a band of anti-slaver abolitionists who were formly part of the town guard and attempted a failed coup, and the election debate topic was how to defend the town: allow one of two competing larger factions to occupy/defend the town, or defend the town on its own? The party got involved with the election, ended up rooting out the aboloitionists from hiding, then sided with them and blew up the pivotal bridge, effectively giving a jugular cut to the Idaho slave trade but also dooming the communities of the Snake River.


Vault 41, Utah

They also discovered a Vault, Vault 41, within which the experiment was miring everything in the vault in massively unnecessary bureaucracy and paperwork with countless pointless tasks and jobs, the population filled with middle-management types, and monitoring how long and with what nature the inhabitants ironed out the needless bureaucracy and made the system more efficient. In reality, things ended up spiraling out of control into a beaucratic nightmare. Heavily inspired by the movie Brazil. The Vault's geothermal power system is about to explode, but there is too much red-tape that most don't even know it's going to happen and those that do can't authorize repair. There's a "terrorist" in the Vault who is effectively a repairman without paperwork. The party saved the Vault, after great frustration.


Warlords of Utah AKA the "White Line Nightmare"

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Sidewinder

Originally a blend of national guardsmen mixed with survivors on the Uintah tribe reservation, they are easily the best armed of the groups but also the smallest in numbers. Equipped in millitary grade combat armor and with good training, though now passed down more like a tribal rite/tradition. Their home base as of the last decade or so is a small-scale lead mine within which they use slaves to operate, and use the lead to manufacture bullets for themselves. They hold spiritual reverance for bullets and rifles, and the ancestral legacy of their US Army infantry armor is a point of pride to them. Sidewinder himself is known for his gigantic MG3 which is named "Thunderbird".

Overlord Colt the Rock N' Rolla, King of Saratoga!

Overlord Colt, son (and murderer) of Overlord Wesson before him. His lordship's territory extends to everything in and around the pre-war Provo bay, the southern stretches of Salt Lake City where he collects tribute from the town of Jericho, and it used to extend to Burham Springs before the mining town blew up. He is the most "relaxed" of the War-Lords though he often comes into friction with the New Canaanites. Within Provo bay he runs a pit of gambling and prostitution. The party worked numerous bounties underneath him.

Hecate
This one is taken from the cancelled Van Buren game. A survivor of a tribe absorbed by Caesar's Legion, she has formed her own tribal army made up of survivors like her. She gains numbers by sending her cult "daughters" to the tribes of the region as herbalists/healers, and effectively tricking them into believing their religon and into sending their children/young men as fighters to join her force. Primarily, she does this by establishing long-winded schemes where they, through herbalism, bring problems to the tribe like miscarriages and sterility whilst hiding their influence, then turn up and stop poisoning them, claiming it is their spiritual guidance that has stopped the evil. The party discovered this scheme whilst they were protecting one of the smaller tribes in Utah, and initially planned to expose this plot and undermine Hecate, however several of the party members had as big of a bone to pick with the Legion as she did, and so worked with her.

Big Rig

Your most traditional "raider" type war-lord. Has a feudal castle built out of a truck-stop/gas station. Has a huge flamethrower constructed from engine parts and halved car wheels for shoulder armor. Cooks most of the chems in the region, and plays sadistic games in his fortress with captives. Musical chairs but the loser gets flamethrowered, poker but the stakes are your fingers, that kind of shit. Big-Rig has the most numbers of all the Warlords, primarily because he has numerous smaller raider-gangs "under" him that work for him. A lot of the party's work for Overlord Colt was rooting out and taking down these smaller gangs.


The 80s Tribe

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The campaign was set in 2273, in my writing of the lore I had it so that the 80s dominated everything on the I-80, Sacramento to Salt Lake City, for decades prior to roughly the 2250s, wherein a combined effort of the NCR expanding north, the Desert Rangers in Nevada and the New Canaanites on the Salt Lake pushed the 80s off of the highway and south into the Nevada badlands, opening up the first communications and trade across the 80 between New Canaan and north NCR.

The 80s themselves are a cross-breed of tribals and raiders. Visually, I described them as appearing wrapped in desert robes very much like Tusken Raiders and with the same type of goggle-like eyes, but with various roadsigns strapped to their bodies like armor ala the Marked Men of Lonesome Road.

The 80s are known for their borderline inhuman speed, able to cross the deserts in record pace. If you're being hunted by the 80s, your choices are to fight or to hide, you cannot outrun them. This was represented in gameplay by them having extremely high AP and numerous ranks of Bonus Move granting them free movement.

Culturally, they speak a broken, pidgin english. If anyone has read Crossed +100, think of it like that. They are entirely nomadic desert people. Their iconic tribal weapon is their "Dust-Spears" which are actually M-14 rifles raided from a Nevada armory. Rank within the 80s tribe is demonstrated by what type of roadsign you wear, with the highest ranking members wearing original blue/red I-80 signs. They also adorn themselves in items such as necklaces made of car-keys, or segments of steering wheels.Typically their method of raiding involves ransom and kidnapping, though occasionally they do pierce into wealthy NCR settlements for more "Traditional" raids.

To some who travel the 80, they are granted "charms" typically made of bone and car-keys. These charms, if visibly worn, will show to the 80s that you are for trading and not for killing.

The 80s are collecting old world components and technology for the purpose of repairing and building motorcycles, in order to embrace their ancient heritage as motorbike gangs.


Other than that the party interacted with a lot of less notable places, frontier towns and salvage crews in Old World cities. Also lots of existing Fallout lore locations like New Canaan and New Reno.
 
I came up with a little head canon explanation for how ghouls are created based off of what was implied in fallout 1 mixed with some original ideas.
Essentially, the first strain of FEV created (which was never tested on humans) infected one of the scientists at west tek, who then managed to spread it across America, maybe even the world.

This strain had mild effects on humans: it didn’t cause an increase in growth, but it did mildly increase the subject’s immune system and in some individuals it increased aggression as well. When the bombs fell, those infected with this strain and exposed to lethal levels of radiation were likely to be kept alive by the FEV, although the radiation damaged the FEV enough to “corrupt” its “programming”, and mutate it’s host into a horrifyingly grotesque creature existing in a constant state of agony.

I came up with more stuff that relates to how other strains of FEV work and interact with each other and radiation, but I don’t have the time to get into it now. You might find this explanation a bit contrived, pointless, and unnecessary but I just thought I’d share anyway.

Edit: the main reason I came up with this was because I wanted to explain why there are ghouls after the war but no mention of ghouls before the war, despite other nuclear exchanges happening.
 
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For personal headcanon if I had the chance (and some how was granted the providence of having any hand in said production) would have Fallout 5 go back to its roots and have the plot centered around some strange phenomenon. Sure in Fallout 4 they did something along these lines but it is a hamfisted Blade-Runner trope-coaster. For Fallout 5 I'd think to make the central antagonist some powerful psyker (even more than the Master was so it'll be different). Idk, I just felt that unique aspect hasn't been looked at into that much in concrete interesting ways, except for the Forecaster in FNV and the Master at F1.
 
Lidku said:
For Fallout 5 I'd think to make the central antagonist some powerful psyker (even more than the Master was so it'll be different).
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I had the same idea, not sure if you care but in one of the Fallout games I'm coming up with, the main antagonist is a dude who's brain is connected to this giant brain and this gives him ultimate psyker abilities.
 
That kinda feels like Fallout Tactics plot, no? The antagonist being just being born latently like that would be much much more chilling and interesting. Having a crutch so to speak like that would make him feel like other central antagonists that have been like that. It'd be a polar opposite of how Warhammer 40k's story iterated where this godly psyker eventually consolidates the entire world. Instead in Fallout a reverse situation where your this average nobody Wastelander who has to stop the psyker.
 
Ugly Kid said:
And I think that S'lanters could work if modified a bit. How about instead of dwarfs wearing fur suits living in a fairy forest, they could be just regular sized raccoons, or maybe just regular shaped but bigger. They could live in a landfill which they've fortified with walls and makeshift turrets. There could be a whole colony instead of just 4 or whatever because they reproduce quick. The military would be in three groups, soldiers, gatherers, and scientists. The soldiers would be commanded around by the general and they'd mostly just be guards but if they needed, they'd fight invaders. Gatherers would leave the landfill to gather resources. Scientists would do scientist things I don't know.
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We (TTW Team) are making the first TTW DLC-like expansion and it will have the S'lanters. In our project they moved East a bit and founded their settlement there, the rest I can't share yet.
 
Psionics is bullshit, a stinking pile of BS from the mid century via quasi religious hacks writing scifi that has long overstayed its welcome. In the case of Fallout it may just be sonic or electric weaponry in the case of the master and BS everywhere else. It's such a minor thing it aughta be removed.

Personal fun headcanon: the Space Race never ended, and there's no reason beyond 3's weird BS to think it did. We have manned rockets in NV (though maybe they've been augmented), the Space Shuttle HTHL? in 2 and the like, it seemed that space was a very big thing for mankind in Fallout. E.g we got Commies on the Moon and Mars. Domed cities and the like. Sure the war went out there, but some survived.

I also think the world was very developed. Strained, of course, but most of the world was basically like the European Commonwealth. There was a united India, a united Indonesia, Arabia (we know of this via the MEC?), Africa, Oceania, South America/Pan-Latin org (Mexico had enough oil and tried to stay free...look what that got it). Of course they all nuke each other/get nuked (maybe some were far too leftist for the US' liking) but I prefer this than to think the world stood geopolitically in the 60s; the whole focus against China but not the Soviets is not really analogous so who knows what was mixed up.
 
Eshanas said:
It's such a minor thing it aughta be removed.
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Why? It was a really interesting thing I found in Fallout 1. Its actually a shame they didn't go into that more. They already went the mile with ghouls, Supermutants, and multiple uniquely thought up anomlies in Fallout 1 and 2. I'd say more Sci-Fi (when done right unlike what was done in Fallout 4) is good for the series as a whole. That was and is the main appeal of the original Fallouts- this high tech retrofuturistic world with the post survivors of a nuclear apocalypse surviving and attempting to adapt despite the awakened craziness of the Wasteland.

Also I'm not sure what you mean, the Master was an adept psyker due to his constantly horrifying self-evolutions with FEV and splicing other organisms with himself. Making psykers a thing to be removed would be a lost opportunity tbh.
 


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I'd have like the Psykers to have been further developed in the later games; the S'Lanter too.
 
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Gizmojunk said:


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I'd have like the Psykers to have been further developed in the later games; the S'Lanter too.
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LOL, what game is that?

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Ugly Kid said:
S'lanters could work if modified a bit
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Also speaking of unique FEV mutated species further, whatever happened to the Slags from Fallout 2? The unique race of unnaturally pale-skinned humanoids with fully black enlargened eyes?
 
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As far as psykers go I feel like the ones created by FEV are the only ones that should be considered canon, and even then FEV should only grant psychic powers in situations like the master where he was swimming around in a vat for hours/days, so the other psykers in fallout 1 aren’t canon to me either.
 
Iprovidelittlepianos said:
so the other psykers in fallout 1 aren’t canon to me either
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How exactly? They are explicitly canon though. Having the need to even be in the vats for "days and hours" to achieve being a psyker would be ridiculous because if you'd stay that long in FEV you'd just die- that is if your a Wastelander of course, but even pure slate humans such as people from the Vaults or Enclave would still die being stuck in the Vats for "hours/days". Besides the Master only gained to being a psyker from mutagenically assimilated the first Super-Mutant he created and assimilating more into his consciousness., while the Human psykers he had in his possession simple gained their abilities from unlocking them due to the FEV alone.
 
Lidku said:
How exactly? They are explicitly canon though. Having the need to even be in the vats for "days and hours" to achieve being a psyker would be ridiculous because if you'd stay that long in FEV you'd just die- that is if your a Wastelander of course, but even pure slate humans such as people from the Vaults or Enclave would still die being stuck in the Vats for "hours/days". Besides the Master only gained to being a psyker from mutagenically assimilated the first Super-Mutant he created and assimilating more into his consciousness., while the Human psykers he had in his possession simple gained their abilities from unlocking them due to the FEV alone.
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I just meant that I personally ignore them as canon, obviously they are canon (hell, being in fallout 1 is generally enough for me to consider something "truly" canon). The reason I ignore them is because I feel having psykers in the fallout universe opens the door for other psykers (Hakunin, the Forecaster, dare I say Mama Murphy) so in my opinion it would be better to just say that psychic powers are impossible except in extreme circumstances like the Master. Besides, the Master's psykers in fallout 1 don't really have any effect on the story, except for the fact that it gives an excuse to put a psychic nullifier in the game. It's just my personal headcanon though, I totally understand that you disagree.

Edit: Also I believe the Master had psychic powers from the moment he crawled out of the vat, as after he ate the rat he described that he felt himself absorb its conciousness.
 
Ugly Kid said:
Well please, when you have time, go ahead and tell!
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Well okay, I guess I can go into more detail. First of all I'd like to say I was heavily inspired by this post: https://www.nma-fallout.com/threads/fev-radiation-in-fo1.217656/
Those guys brought up a lot of information from Fallout 1 about FEV that I wasn't aware of/had forgotten.

Alright, here we go. The following is meant to explain how I believe FEV and radiation works and how these elements behave in my fallout headcanon, with plenty of exceptions to the rules.

First of all, in the vast majority of cases, high doses of radiation result in death for most animals and plants (unlike our universe where mature plants are highly resistant to radiation). While less lethal doses of radiation in our universe mostly cause cancer, in the fallout universe lower doses of radiation has an equal chance to result in cancer or result in the growth of relatively benign tumors, extra appendages, or even cause the entire body to grow larger, though these effects usually take place over the course of generations. It should also be noted that radiation can make smaller animals like insects and rodents larger, but humans will not increase in size and in fact radiation increases instances of dwarfism in humans. Many insects have a higher resistance to radiation and have a higher likelihood of increasing in size as a result of radiation exposure. Rodents are not necessarily more resistant to radiation than other animals, but the fact that they burrow underground helped them survive the radiation.

As far as FEV goes, there are three different types of FEV: “Mariposa” FEV, “wild” FEV, and “proto-FEV”. Mariposa FEV is what was located in the vats of Mariposa and was the final form of FEV developed by the military before the great war, referred to as batch 11-111. This is the most powerful strain of FEV, able to create Super Mutants, Centaurs, Floaters, Psykers, and horrifyingly grotesque blob monsters. Mariposa FEV causes immunity to disease, radiation and even aging, but it doesn’t work well when faced with a subject that has been damaged by radiation or already infected with another strain of FEV.

Wild FEV is the FEV that was still at West-Tek when the bombs hit, which was released into the wasteland and mutated by radiation, both lessening its effects and temporarily allowing airborne transmission (usually FEV requires contact to transmit, and after the initial wave of wild FEV infected its hosts it lost the ability to transmit through the air). Wild FEV is derived from batches 10-011, 11-011, and 11-101a, but not 11-111. Wild FEV infected most anyone caught outside a vault or sufficiently shielded bunker in the western half of North America. Wild FEV had the effect of increasing radiation resistance while also increasing the odds of radiation causing minor mutations. In rodents it also increased the likelihood of radiation causing rapid growth. Wild FEV also significantly increases resistance to all forms of cancer (to help explain why most people don’t get leukemia in the fallout verse). Wild FEV is caught by most people who live in the wasteland for a significant amount of time and interact with wastelanders. It has an “inoculating” effect to Mariposa FEV, and those infected with wild FEV will face complications (often lethal) when dipped in Mariposa FEV.

Proto-FEV was the original form of FEV created by the West-Tek scientists referred to as Pan-Immunity Virion batch 10-011. Proto-FEV was not tested on humans, but one of the scientists accidentally became infected with the virus. FEV is spread through contact, and this scientist ending up being patient zero in spreading this virus to a large number of communities around North America and maybe even the world. This proto-FEV had a very mild effect on humans, and no one ever knew that they had been infected with anything. The virus did moderately increase their resistance to some diseases and cancer, and caused increased aggression in some of those infected, but for the most part no one ever suspected that proto-FEV had gotten loose on the population. About half the population was immune to the virus for whatever reason and wasn’t able to catch it. When the bombs fell, those who had been infected were turned to ghouls by the radiation (although not everyone infected turned to ghouls when exposed to lethal radiation, some just died). FEV’s reaction to radiation damage is what allows ghouls to survive, but the FEV grotesquely mutates their bodies as a result of being damaged by radiation. However, when faced with more mild levels of radiation, proto-FEV was able to prevent radiation damage with only minor abnormal mutations. This proto-FEV can be caught from ghouls, but due to the radiation damage it has essentially become identical to wild FEV.

In the post-war world, the only discernible difference between proto-FEV and wild FEV is that wild FEV will not turn you into a ghoul, but proto-FEV will (but remember, you can’t catch proto-FEV from a ghoul, because the proto-FEV they had has been damaged by the radiation that turned them into a ghoul). Both of these strains will “inoculate” you against Mariposa FEV. The dipping of a sufficiently radiation damaged subject into Mariposa FEV will typically result in death, or in rarer cases the creation of horrifyingly grotesque piles of barely sentient flesh (like those who line the Corridor of Revulsion). The dipping of a subject infected with proto FEV will result in the creation of a ghoul-like mutant (like Harold or Talius). The dipping of a subject that is infected with wild FEV will often result in death, but mostly creates super mutants with severely reduced intellectual abilities. The dipping of a subject that isn’t affected by any of these factors will result in super mutants with either marginally reduced intellect or slightly increased intellect, though they will still suffer from memory loss and an increased risk for mental disease. This is part of what makes stealth boy use more dangerous for super mutants than for humans.

Proto FEV still exists in some populations post-war (maybe some of those infected got into a vault that wasn’t Necropolis), so it is possible for new ghouls to be created by radiation or FEV post-war. Harold was a child when the bombs hit, so he probably got infected before the war, but somehow Talius became infected with proto-FEV during his time outside the Vault 13, causing him to turn into a ghoul-like mutant when he was dipped. The differences between FEV ghouls and radiation ghouls are negligible. FEV ghouls are not irradiated, and therefore cannot irradiate their target with hand to hand attacks, and they cannot become glowing ones as they are completely immune to radiation at this point and won’t even absorb it. Both types of ghouls have an equal chance of being driven insane by the constant pain they are in and turn “feral”. Turning feral does not mean a ghoul becomes an animalistic zombie, it means they have gone mad and become hostile towards outsiders. They are more like Lonesome Road’s Marked Men than Bethesda feral ghouls.

Anyway, feel free to tear this apart and call it the dumbest most convoluted bullshit you've ever read. Don't worry, I can take it.
 
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