Origins and Origin-Related Traits for Fallout: Year Zero

As I slowly tinker away at this, I would appreciate insights/feedback on the origins so far.
Anyway, here's the Origins.

Super Mutant:
+ The Strong Survive: Super Mutants roll d8's for all Vigor tests, gain "X" amount of bonus HP
+ Immune to Radiation
- Roll 1 fewer die for Tact rolls against non-Mutants
- Large frame: Armor is more expensive (need more), and -1 to any roll requiring fine motor skills

Ghoul:
+ Immune to Radiation
+ Heals in Radiation (?)
- -1 Die when dealing with non-ghouls (unless specifically ghoul friendly)
- (Should they get another debuff?)

Human:
You're a person, No pros nor cons.

Ghouls are effectively the anti-elves in Fallout. They are immortal until killed, but they are not lithe, not beautiful, not elegant, and not fragrant.

IMO, all ghouls should have the following in common:

• Originated from Vault 12; all of them. This means that there should be less than a thousand individuals roaming the US; mostly on the West Coast.
• They are the only ones who remember the pre-war era first hand; having each lived there before the great war.
• Only possible from the singular event at Vault 12 during the war. Not possible by radiation alone. Not related to FEV; Harold is not a ghoul.
• Obviously feral ghouls are nonsense. They exist because Bethesda could not make them look and move accurately using Face-gen and the common humanoid animation rig. They could make them as a standard animal/monster entity, but those can't equip clothes, nor use the preset marker/animations for chairs, beds, stools, and other interactive assets that pose the entity. There are no feral ghouls in Fallout 1 or 2.
  
  And Typhon tells it like it is:
  
  

Okay, that makes sense.
Then it may actually be easier to have them as a Ghoul archetype, since there is one way they showed up. Same with the super mutants.
Here's a mock up of the Archetype sheets (art will change... eventually...)

FlukeboxHero said:

since there is one way they showed up.

Click to expand...

I (personally) consider it canon (it's in the games), but it's not Bethesda's canon, and is still debated among fans and even the Interplay devs themselves hadn't been unanimous about it. Later work by black Isle on Van Buran would seem to contradict it totally.

Gizmojunk said:

Ghouls are effectively the anti-elves in Fallout. They are immortal until killed, but they are not lithe, not beautiful, not elegant, and not fragrant.

IMO, all ghouls should have the following in common:

• Originated from Vault 12; all of them. This means that there should be less than a thousand individuals roaming the US; mostly on the West Coast.
• They are the only ones who remember the pre-war era first hand; having each lived there before the great war.
• Only possible from the singular event at Vault 12 during the war. Not possible by radiation alone. Not related to FEV; Harold is not a ghoul.
• Obviously feral ghouls are nonsense. They exist because Bethesda could not make them look and move accurately using Face-gen and the common humanoid animation rig. They could make them as a standard animal/monster entity, but those can't equip clothes, nor use the preset marker/animations for chairs, beds, stools, and other interactive assets that pose the entity. There are no feral ghouls in Fallout 1 or 2.

Click to expand...

i disagree that ghouls should be only vault 12 relevant they were created by radiation in general nothing stops the idea that they were everywhere but they were a rare condition most of them didn't have immortality and died shortly or years after they were mutated and i think vault 12 only decreases radiation and has better medical treat which will help to increases their chance to live
and ferals were in the originals but they develop dementia
tim mention those on his channel here:

Gizmojunk said:

And Typhon tells it like it is:
View attachment 36242

Click to expand...

i don't think he means necropolis ghouls are the only first and last ghouls but that there's only one generation of ghouls

RoosterCole said:

i don't think he means necropolis ghouls are the only first and last ghouls but that there's only one generation of ghouls

Click to expand...

I'd say that is —precisely— what he means. That is the humor of the joke. He says it right there, "We are the first, and last generation of ghouls"; there are only old ghouls (meaning no new ones).

The ghouls were a product of the [mysterious] event at Vault 12; itself a product of their cultural fear and foreboding of all things atomic. There is a reason that all of the monsters in Fallout all look like they've come out of 50's pop-culture B-movies.



In the Fallout world setting, the laws of reality are bent to the pop-cultural expectation, apprehension, and ignorance of the atomic age rather than hard nuclear science. Ghouls like to feel the warm rads; early US military were said to have once stood in front of radar transmitters to keep warm —for whatever reason, real or assumed. Ghouls in Fallout could be the product of their own terror at being exposed to the nuclear unknown.

I say (for me) that normalizing a fluke event in the lore diminishes the ghouls in both novelty and concept. They become commonplace; simple plaque victims, essentially lepers. Their condition being meaningless, rather than like —for instance, D-Day survivors, all of them tied to a significant (and not casually repeatable) event.

A side note, not Fallout related per se, but it came to mind on the subject: