camwyn | Fallout plot noodling

- So Philly's not really accessible / in contact with DC
- And that's fine, a lot of places aren't
- Hell, until Tobar the Lobotomist shows up with his ferry, a state park in Maryland isn't accessible
- HOWEVER
- You know what's just over the hill, out of the Capital area, and has never been mentioned once by any living character?
- BALTIMORE
- What the hell happened in Baltimore
- You'd think something like that would leave more of a mark
- I mean, hell, you have a guy in the Citadel before the DLC was even written talking about the Pitt
- But not Baltimore
- You could stand on a tall hill in the northeast Capital Waste and sneeze real hard and hit Baltimore
- So What Happened In Baltimore?
- Candidate horror #1: Budget Crises
- No, hear me out
- DC obviously spent several decades busting their butts to nuke-proof the national capital
- Not that it helped in the end, but it's been my excuse for why anything is still standing at all
- Whereas Maryland did not have anywhere near the same kind of budget money flowing its way
- (Especially with the addition of regional commonwealth governments to handle area issues that affected more than one state)
- So whatever nuke-proofing they might have tried in Baltimore was entirely up to private investors to pay for
- And when DC became a primary target for Chinese nukes, Baltimore was bombed very nearly as hard, but didn't have the structural soundness to survive
- While this is a believable fate for the city it does not explain why people aren't in the area any more or why it's impassable
- I mean, DC's shot to hell, but people can still kinda sorta move around in a good deal of it
- Candidate horror #2: Damn You, Johns Hopkins
- We know FEV started off life as the Pan-Immunity Virion Project developed by West Tek
- Before FEV there was the New Plague, which people thought (at first) was a Chinese bioweapon causing flu-like symptoms, then lumps, then death; survivors were generally rendered sterile
- The New Plague was in fact a bioweapon being developed by the US to throw at China that got loose when saboteurs raided the testing labs at Hoover Dam
- I am not sure why there were testing labs at Hoover Dam but that's what the Wiki says the games say
- Anyway, we do not currently know exactly where New Plague was created
- And the only reference we have in the games to Baltimore is a computer message referencing 'Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore'
- God only knows what research projects might have been going on at Johns Hopkins, especially if they were getting government grants to try and, say, model bioweapon action mechanisms
- One good bomb right over the scariest building on their campus and everything that survives is now loose
- Pros: people give disease areas a very wide berth
- Cons: we have no indicator that the New Plague could do the anthrax/tetanus spore thing
- Counter: this is the Fallout universe and radiation can cause many mutations including that one
- Counter-counter: it kind of seems as if SOMEBODY would have said SOMETHING about a horrible death/sterilization zone just over the freaking hill
- I dunno, maybe it's just me
- Candidate horror #3: Deathclaws
- Olney is RL even closer to Baltimore than Washington
- And nobody really wants to live in or pass through a city full of killer monster mutant death lizards
- Pros: KILLER MONSTER MUTANT DEATH LIZARDS
- Cons: Deathclaws feel kinda overdone
- Even if I claim they were being tested or experimented on at Johns Hopkins that still feels more like an excuse than anything
- It'd just be Olney all over again, or possibly the quarry in New Vegas
- Either way, still a ripoff
- Candidate horror #4: Shoreline rearrangement due to the War resulted in the majority of the city being flooded and various tunnels under it collapsed
- Pros: Well, that explains why nobody lives there
- Cons: That's not a fantastic reason to swing wide of the area, unless the shoreline is too treacherous to walk near
- Candidate horror #5: A relatively recent, highly contagious plague
- Because let's face it, regular diseases are still out there
- Radiation plus the morbillivirus of your choice = a whole new world of ew
- And given that caravans rely heavily on Brahmin cattle, if the virus is anything like rinderpest, no trader is going to be willing to risk their cows
- granted, rinderpest was wiped out in 2001
- But stocks of the virus are maintained in 'highly specialized laboratories'
- See: Damn You, Johns Hopkins for the biggest candidate in the area
- Also there are other viruses that could be a problem, rinderpest just came to mind as an example
- I am going to have to think about this a while longer but I'm probably gonna go with disease
- Possibly disease released in an incident not unlike what the Legion pulled at Camp Searchlight
- If this happened sometime in the last twenty years or so, Ellen could even have papers from the Brotherhood saying they'd scouted in that direction and she was going to have to swing very, very wide of the area because someone found out about it
- Which I can work with, I think