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How To Behave In Britain, 2043: A British 'Fallout' Setting

M

Mumby

Always mysterious!
Published by SLP
Location
Municipal Commune of Bourne
Pronouns
He/Him
CAVEAT THE FIRST: This isn't set in the same world as Fallout. The aim is to capture the same or similar atmosphere of that world, but in a way more suitable to Britain. In this case, rather than the world ending in a Cold War gone hot with atompunk madness everywhere, this will be a world that died in the fires of a Worse World War Two with dieselpunk madness everywhere.

CAVEAT THE SECOND: This will be deliberately sparse and vague on details. I want to lay out the principles of the setting, but I don't intend this to be a world I write stories in necessarily and there is too much of the country I know too little about to go around saying 'London is like this, Birmingham is like this'. If you read the vague ideas I have laid out for the country as a whole and think you have cool ideas about a specific part of the country, or even another bit of the world, please let me know and if it works we can flesh the world out.

Now that those are out of the way...
 
It has been eighty-eight years since the Old World came to an end. Biological and chemical weapons scoured much of the planet, poisoning waterways, turning cities into diseased charnelhouses and civilisation withered on the vine as a series of engineered plagues burned out across the globe. Mutagens have made their impact upon the world, creating a whole range of strange beasts who haunt the ruins of the cities, whilst also infecting many humans, reducing some to ravening beasts, and changing others in more disturbing ways.

Britain is a changed country. There is no central government, and the basic unit of organisation has been reduced to a tribal or feudal level. Few people leave the safety of their communities, which are often entirely new settlements. Pre-war towns and cities were made nearly uninhabitable in those last days of the war, so many of the settlements have cropped up out of makeshift shelters. While these settlements are mostly safe, the Wasteland is home to reavers, monsters and worse. Water and food are precious commodities so the communities do trade with their immediate neighbours, but the caravans that travel from place to place are by necessity heavily armed.
 
One of the apex predators of the British Wasteland are reynards. They are the mutated descendants of foxes, but only bear a passing resemblance to those small animals. Reynards are huge, powerful beasts which have more in common with something like a big cat or wolf than their ancestors. Long powerful limbs with razor sharp claws are attached to a sinuous, muscular torso the size of which belies its flexibility. Reynards are shockingly agile for animals of their size, and believing that you may find sanctuary inside a house will be sadly disabused as reynards are competent climbers.

Foolhardy explorer-biologists have recorded a number of subspecies in Britain alone, but classification is difficult in a country with no unified standards or institutions. To the practical wasteland wanderer, there are essentially two variants which are worth bearing in mind. Country reynards and city reynards. Country reynards tend to be larger and gather into bigger packs, claiming larger territorial expanses, but may ironically be less aggressive. City reynards may be smaller and gather in lesser numbers, but are far more territorial and bloodthirsty. They also exhibit a certain higher intelligence, and are more likely to be mutated in other more esoteric ways.

Reynard packs are typically family units, dominated by an alpha male and a mating vixen. Other members of the pack do not have the right to mating within the pack and instead are given the responsibility of caring for the young. Reynard cubs can be tamed though the process of acquiring a cub when it is young enough to imprint upon a human owner is obviously extremely dangerous and in any case there is no guarantee of success. The number of would be reynard breeders who have been killed and eaten by their pets is obviously impossible to quantify.
 
One of the sadder results of the apocalypse are revenants. Individuals mutilated by chemical exposure, and infested by viral mutagens, they still live thanks to a symbiotic relationship with the cocktail of weaponry which they were attacked with. Most are little more than mindless animals, but some are entirely cogent human beings. They vary in appearance, from skeletal, skinless moving corpses to horrendously scarred and pocked but still recognisably human. Others are more alien, their limbs and torsoes covered in buboes and pustules, their skeletons altered and distended.

Sentient revenants tend to repulse unafflicted humans, and when they are found in human settlements they are treated as subhuman. When bad things happen and no-one can be easily found to blame, revenants are treated as the cause of misfortune, and can be lynched. Their longevity, stamina and ability to take much greater physical punishment than unafflicted humans mean they are sometimes used as slaves, though the perception that they are carriers of disease (not an entirely unfounded belief) means that this is not that common an occurence. More often, revenants are not permitted to enter human settlements. Revenants often gather together for safety, but their settlements are often the victim of human paranoia leading to pogroms.

More often, revenants form nomadic societies, their physical resilience allowing them to traverse the Wasteland more easily than their human counterparts. Revenants for instance are immune to the poisons and plagues that linger in the old cities. Revenant clans make a living for themselves scavenging the ruins and selling useful items to anyone who can pay, using the profits to arm themselves against human prejudice. Human caravaneers resent their revenant competition as their natural advantages enable them to obtain rarer salvage. By contrast however, revenant traders remain distrusted by the humans they invariably sell their goods to and are often not permitted to enter settlements, establishing camps on the outskirts for humans to visit.

Due to revenant success in scavenging, some of these clans can grow rich and powerful, able to purchase the choicest examples of weapons and armour. These leads to another path for human hatred, as they grow jealous of revenant success. However, there is little they can do about the larger and more powerful clans.

Revenants are incapable of reproducing, though anyone who is exposed to the chemical and biological fallout of the last war is at risk of transformation. It seems that all revenants are at risk of losing their sapiency at any point in their lives and no specific cause for turning 'feral' has been found.
 
Mumby said:
Foolhardy explorer-biologists have recorded a number of subspecies in Britain alone, but classification is difficult in a country with no unified standards or institutions.
Click to expand...

If it's not too similar to Fallout the game, could there be a kind of Fraternité d'Acier over from the continental mainland doing their stuff in metric, to the anger of 'The Metric Martyr' who'd be one of those random characters you bump into for a side-quest.

I was going to say in Sunderland, where the first case was, but I just noticed he died (only 39, poor sod.)
 
Mumby said:
CAVEAT THE FIRST: This isn't set in the same world as Fallout. The aim is to capture the same or similar atmosphere of that world, but in a way more suitable to Britain. In this case, rather than the world ending in a Cold War gone hot with atompunk madness everywhere, this will be a world that died in the fires of a Worse World War Two with dieselpunk madness everywhere.

CAVEAT THE SECOND: This will be deliberately sparse and vague on details. I want to lay out the principles of the setting, but I don't intend this to be a world I write stories in necessarily and there is too much of the country I know too little about to go around saying 'London is like this, Birmingham is like this'. If you read the vague ideas I have laid out for the country as a whole and think you have cool ideas about a specific part of the country, or even another bit of the world, please let me know and if it works we can flesh the world out.

Now that those are out of the way...
Click to expand...
Reminds me of the book called 48 where Adolf Hitler, moments before being completely defeated, uses a biological weapon in the shape of V-2 missiles, that mostly wipes out the human race.
 
There's a LARP called "Wasteland UK" that's an intentional Fallout ripoff :) MrBolt and I have pondered playing "Ghouls" (as they still call them) in 1950s outfits
 
Some of the strongest human societies in the wasteland of Britain are the Neo-Feudal Seats. These are the descendants of the 'Regional Seats of Government' which are scattered across the island. While there were Seats in London, they are not considered among the Neo-Feudalities, being part of the unique conditions of what was once the largest city in the world.

The Seats were dominated by military figures, and in the harsh conditions of the post-war world have jealously guarded their access to pre-war military equipment and technology. The necessity of quarantine in the early years have led to a somewhat xenophobic outlook amongst the leadership, something that continues even now. The military nature of the Seats is what has led to their 'neo-feudal' nature. When they felt safe to explore the outside world, usually a decision that came when stored supplies ran low, they used their superior weaponry and training to seize control of the surrounding area. Control was implemented in the most basic way; might makes right. The Seats exercise absolute control of their domains, with no recourse to public opinion except that within the hierarchy itself. The Seats offer protection to the settlements under their control in return for food, labour and first refusal. The tribal and village hierarchies of the settlements were integrated into the military one, and the original inhabitants of the Seat's military were soon joined by recruits from the survivor population.

Effectively, Seats have replicated the logic of medieval feudalism, with an elite class of military veterans ruling over a larger population of agrarian serfs. However, the system is mildly more egalitarian than the original form, with the common folk having more rights and rather than aristocratic primogeniture, power is obtained in a military meritocracy. In the larger Seats, this can lead to bloody power struggles, as there is often no clear successor when an existing Commissioner dies. Nevertheless, the freedom of civilians is substantially restricted in the Seats, with little to no freedom of movement unless specifically permitted by the military leaders, and extreme discipline is imposed on all individuals. The jealousy with which the military leadership guard their technology and power is such that only a small percentage of the broader population is ever recruited properly, and like most of the post-war soceties, the majority of the actual military is composed of peasant militia.

Nevertheless, the access that the Seats have to pre-war knowledge gives them an edge in this harsh world, and for those settlements under their control, a life under the jackboot is preferable to no life at all.
 
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