The Wasteland in Fallout is not a safe place, yet the vaults, which are supposed to provide safety, can be worse than monsters. This is also shown by Vault 12, which led to a whole city full of ghouls.
What are vaults? Apparently, vaults are large bunkers scattered throughout the USA that are supposed to protect against atomic bombs. However, very few vaults actually focus solely on safety. Many places were designed to conduct insidious experiments on the inhabitants.
Sometimes people were sacrificed or drugged, sometimes children were meant to become perfect humans. If you’re unlucky, you’ll end up in such a vault.
Quite simply, but also quite insidiously, the experiment in Vault 12 went. A radiation observation led to a whole city full of ghouls.
A broken door created many ghouls
What was Vault 12 intended for? Vault 12 was supposed to serve as a bunker in public to produce fresh water, but secretly it was about research. They wanted to investigate the impact of radiation on humans. To do this, they simply installed a broken door that could not close properly. This allowed radiation to enter the bunker and affect the people.
In the city of Bakersfield, the residents rushed into the vault, but as planned, the door did not close properly. Although they survived the impact, the radiation turned the people into ghouls, essentially irradiated zombies with consciousness. This makes them some of the first ghouls in the wasteland, along with the people who were not in any bunker.
A few years after the bombs fell in 2077, some ghouls left the vault and together founded the city of Necropolis in Bakersfield. There, the ghoul Set
became the ruler. Over several decades, Necropolis became an important city for ghouls, even though Set was not exactly a benevolent leader.
The majority of people who found themselves in Necropolis were killed or even eaten by the ghouls.
The Master thwarted Set’s plans
What happened to Necropolis? When the Master, a nasty mutant leader, learned about Vault 12, he sent his super mutants there to find vault dwellers that could be turned into mutants. However, when they learned that the ghouls were the former inhabitants, they did not simply disappear.
To advance the Master’s nasty plan, a group of super mutants was stationed to control the water supply. In addition, they enslaved ghouls to work at a military base.
Together with Talius, a resident from Vault 13 who wanted the water chip from Vault 12, Set fought against the super mutants, but this did not lead to a good outcome.
In Fallout 1, however, the player character manages to acquire the water chip years later. But for the city, this all does not end well. The Master sends his mutants to Necropolis to kill the city and the ghouls. Those who could escape fled.
Where did the ghouls of the city go? In the Fallout Bible 0 (source: Fallout Wiki), Chris Avellone (a designer behind Fallout 2) explains that ghouls, like humans, also have the urge to expand. Between Fallout 1 and 2, they spread in all directions.
But there are still supposed to be ghouls in Necropolis; it is just unknown what happened to Set.
Many of the experiments already sealed the fate of many vault inhabitants. It was not always about atomic weapons or radiation; sometimes they simply experimented with drugs and their influence on behavior in Vault 106: Fallout has a vault where everyone is constantly high – But that goes really wrong
