This post is part three of series. You can find part one here, and part two here.

Today, we’re discussing super mutants. The way I see it, the most important thing about playing as a super mutant is that the game should be mechanically different from other races. A super mutant should not have the manual dexterity to pick locks or hack terminals, opting instead to simply smash open doors and safes with brute force. In a similar vein, a super mutant should only have very limited ability to persuade people in dialog, and many individuals (notably the Brotherhood or Institute) would simply refuse to interact with a super mutant. I also think a super mutant would not be able to go certain places on account of their size-any cramped tunnels or building with low ceilings would be off-limits to a super mutant player-character. Lastly, a super mutant would have a hard time finding gear to fit them, on account of their size and lack of manual dexterity. I envision the player having the option of playing a smart super mutant who can create their own mods and armor, but the physical limitations would create some difficulties.

On the plus side, a super mutant would be totally immune to radiation damage, highly resistant to physical harm, and perhaps endowed with a healing factor, allowing them to regenerate health and restore crippled limbs automatically. The player would also start with a very high strength, and be able to increase it to truly superhuman proportions, with severe limits to agility, perception, and charisma to compensate (although many super mutants are stupid, the player need not be, so I don’t think a huge penalty to intelligence is necessary).

Obviously, a super mutant, even a friendly one, should not be able to join the Brotherhood or Institute, and even the Railroad will probably decline their overtures, on the grounds that super mutants are very high-profile and bad at keeping secrets. I imagine the Minutemen would be the only faction willing to include a super mutant in their ranks, and then only reluctantly. The life of a rogue super mutant should be lonely and filled with conflict. Other super mutants would see the protagonist as a traitor, while non-mutants would see them as a threat(excepting possibly robots or synths-more on that later).

Now, on to the possible origin story.

I imagine the protagonist, who I’ll call the Test Subject, would start out as a human living in vault 87 (or perhaps some other vault where FEV testing is going on, possibly even within the institute). We would see what the vault looked like before the super mutants rose up and killed the humans running the vault. During the prologue, the Test Subject is dipped against his (or her, not that it matters) will, and we see a montage of the massive physical changes the Test Subject undergoes-heavy musculature growth, loss of sexual organs and secondary sexual characteristics, and massive bone and tissue growth.

Shortly after the Test Subject is dipped, the other subjects take over the vault, murdering the overseer and security team, and letting all the other test subjects loose. The Test Subject perhaps occupies the same role that Fawkes (a side character in Fallout 3) does, a lone ‘good’ super mutant in a vault full of violent psychopaths. The other mutants chase him out of the vault, into the wasteland, where he wanders for a time, until he makes it to the Commonwealth, approaching from the south through the Glowing Sea.

The Test Subject arrives in the Commonwealth around the time that the events of the game occur, in 2287. There are several super mutant ‘communities’ that the Test Subject could interact with, as they would not necessarily attack him on sight; I imagine the conflict could center around trying to save one of these communities, and convince the other mutants to live in peace with their neighbors. The arrival of the Brotherhood into the Commonwealth would signal a significant threat to this effort, as the Knights and Paladins of the Brotherhood begin hunting down all the ‘undesirables’ of the Commonwealth, and could trigger the others to revolt against the Test Subject. The Test Subject could also discover that one or more of the others has been replaced by a synth, in some inscrutable plot by the institute. The Test Subject would then have reason to go to war against both the Brotherhood and the Institute, a tall order under any circumstances.