Ghoul: Baseline
Prolonged exposure to the effects of background
gamma radiation—part of the fallout of the Great
War—can spontaneously mutate humans. You are
one of those mutants. Either slowly, or strangely
spontaneously, your body changed into that of a rotting, living corpse. You no longer age the same way,
and appear unaffected by radiation. Your skin peels
from your flesh but seems to be sustained by your
mutated metabolism.
You are a “ghoul”—a necrotic post-human—one of
many rag-tag survivors who weren’t lucky enough to
get into a Vault-Tec facility. You may have been born
after the war, and over time developed the necrotic
mutation. You may have come from Vault 12 in
Bakersfield, California, whose vault door did not close,
exposing the population to the radiation from outside.
You may have taken refuge in a ghoul settlement, like
Underworld in the Capital Wasteland, and have ventured out recently to explore, scavenge, and survive.
Civilized ghouls, such as yourself, also fear a possible degeneration into a frenzied, feral nature. Feral
ghouls are necrotic mutants like yourself who have
lost higher brain functions, and reverted to a primal,
violent state. They attack non-ghouls indiscriminately
to defend their territory or feed. Whether this loss of
reason is due to acute levels of radiation or the inevitable outcome of the mutation, you’re not sure, and
that makes it all the more terrifying.
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