This post is part two of a series. You can find the original here.

Previously, I went through a better alternative to the default human origin story in Fallout 4, and promised to go into detail on what I thought should be the other playable races.  Today, I am covering ghouls.

Of the 4 ‘races’ I mentioned, I think ghouls are the least changed from the human default. Super mutants will have been dipped in FEV,  and synths and robots would have been constructed. Ghouls are just highly irradiated humans, so they could have potentially any origin story the developers choose to give them. Perhaps the player could choose from one of several, to add some replay value.

One possibility would be to have the player character be the Vault-Tec representative (hereafter referred to as the Representative for simplicity’s sake) the Lone Survivor (the human default) talks to at the beginning of the game. In this case, the Representative’s story doesn’t necessarily need to start several days before the Great War, as this would be a great opportunity to actually see what happens in downtown Boston during the aftermath of the war. The Representative wanders the town for a while, interacts with the authorities, and watches society descend into chaos, while slowly transforming into a ghoul due to the high levels of radiation.

Because ghouls live indefinitely, we would be able to have vignettes, where we see what the Representative is doing at various points in time, and what the Commonwealth looks like 50, 100, or 150 years after the war, before the main story takes place in 2287. We could see the him wander for a time while facing anti-ghoul prejudice, find a lover (ghouls need love, too!) and fight off the urge to go feral. He could settle down in a homestead, and finally achieve a semblance of normalcy, again.

I figure the Representative’s main story would start with the Brotherhood of Steel’s entrance in force into the Commonwealth; the Brotherhood is openly hostile to any mutated life (which includes ghouls, with no distinction between ferals and non-ferals) as well as synths and super mutants (though I honestly can’t fault them for hating super mutants). He would be living his life, when a Brotherhood patrol shows up and harms him in some way- perhaps killing his spouse, or critically wounding him and leaving him for dead in a ditch. The Representative’s motivation would then be to survive, and get revenge on the Brotherhood. Doing so would require joining up with the Railroad, or rebuilding the Minutemen (I don’t think the Institute would accept a ghoul recruit, even if you could find them). Destroying the Institute would then become a secondary goal, should the Representative side with the Railroad. Perhaps he hears rumors of a rogue Institute scientist living in the glowing sea from somebody within the Railroad, rather than exploring Kellogg’s memories. From this point onward, the Representative’s story converges with that of the Sole Survivor, as the factions vie for dominance.

I figure the choice of player race should also have some mechanical benefits and drawbacks within the game. The player’s stats might be different, with different maximums and minimums (I imagine the Representative wouldn’t be able to have a charisma score higher than 3, for instance) and they would interact differently with the environment. The most important thing, however, is that ghouls are healed by radiation rather than harmed by it. This would make many areas of the game more accessible, and could allow the player to peacefully interact with the Children of Atom, who are normally hostile. In the same vein, I imagine the player would face prejudice in some settlements, like Diamond City, and would be unable to join either the Brotherhood (for obvious reasons) or the Institute. There could be entire settlements and places the Representative could go that the Sole Survivor cannot, and quests that the Sole Survivor cannot do. By the same token, since some characters are prejudiced against ghouls, some quests would be unavailable to the Representative.

Bottom line, I think playing as a different race should be mechanically different than playing as a human. You should have access to different storylines, different factions, and different styles of play. In order to get the full experience, a player would need to play many times, making different choices each time.