Back Home
FALLOUT Lore: Ch.10 - Ghouls
This entry was posted on April 18, 2014
The radiant heat of an atomic bomb can turn a human body to ash in an instant. The shockwave can crush bones and burst organs for miles in every direction. And those unfortunate enough to survive will soon succumb to the unseen threat of radioactive fallout. Most bodies will lay down and die once they've absorbed enough radiation; a horrible death that takes days, but maybe better than the alternative that some people face. Ghoulification.
Plenty of people in the wasteland will shoot ghouls on site. They look like zombies, or mummies - monsters right out old horror vids. The tragedy is that most ghouls are just as intelligent now as they were back when they were human, and they're perfectly aware of what's happened to them. There's still plenty of them that have gone feral, though. Spend enough time in a rotting body, and they degenerate into little more than animals that attack any human they see. Most folk think it's better to just shoot first and worry about being called a bigot later.
Fallout 3 Feral Ghoul Lore
We're not sure why some people turn into ghouls while others just keel over after being exposed to radiation. The history tapes don't mention ghouls existing before the Great War, so something must have changed back around the end of the 21st century. Well, a lot of things changed, but even the best minds of the wasteland can't figure out which factor causes ghoulification. The planet was covered with unprecedented levels of radiation. Some of the sites holding stockpiles of Forced Evolutionary Virus were hit in the war, and trace amounts of the virus were released into the atmosphere. Humanity's gene pool had also been reduced from billions of people down to a smattering of survivors - many of which had been selected by Vault-Tec for dubious purposes.
Ghoulification might happen when folks get just the right dose of radiation. Could even be a hereditary trait that was always present in humanity, but only activated by high levels of radiation exposure. Walk the wasteland long enough and you'll find evidence for all these theories and more.
When the Great War happened, thousands of people made it to Vault-Tec facilities in time to survive the nuclear bombardment. Most of them were kept safe from the ensuing fallout, but there was one vault, number 12, where the doors didn't close all the way. They shielded most of the radioactivity, but just enough got through to turn Vault 12's population into ghouls.
Every one of them was chosen by Vault-Tec, and they have a history of rigging their vaults to experience "Theatrical" malfunctions, so it can't be a coincidence that the doors failed to seal up. This supports the notion that ghouls have a pre-existing dormant trait, but it could also mean that the scamps at Vault-Tec knew the exact amount of radiation to let in.
Either way, the ghouls who lived in Vault 12 used their pre-war technology to create a prosperous, if unsightly, town. Humans stayed away from the place, although naming the town "Necropolis" probably didn't help with tourism.
The ghouls got along pretty well by themselves for close to a century. One of the few good parts about a ghoul is that they don't age like humans do. Some of the pre-war ghouls are still kicking, today. Unfortunately, most of them were killed a while back, because Necropolis was one of the first places to be overrun when the Master unleashed his mutant army.
The mutants stormed in hoping to find a Vault full of pure-strain humans with no trace of mutation. They must have been hopping mad to learn that all that was left of Vault 12's gene pool was a bunch of radioactive zombies. The ghouls managed to keep an uneasy truce with the Super Mutants for a couple of years, but eventually the mutants turned on them and slaughtered most of the town. It was nearly a hundred years after the Great War, but the folks from Vault 12 finally made it into their graves.
