Legacy: Ashes of Houston

Fallout: Ashes of Houston

War. War never changes.

The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth.

Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory.

Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower.

But war never changes.

In the 21st century, war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired. Only this time, the spoils of war were also its weapons: petroleum and uranium ore. For these resources, China would invade Alaska, the US would annex Canada, and the European Commonwealth would dissolve into quarreling, bickering nation-states, bent on controlling the last remaining resources on Earth.

In 2077, the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, on October 23rd, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. And from the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization would struggle to arise.

But the end of the world was not the end of everything. In many ways, it was a new beginning.

A few were able to reach the relative safety of the large underground Vaults. Others rode it out on the surface. As they rose from the ashes and inherited a radioactive world, they began to rebuild. Some held onto they had from before the war. Some deliberately abandoned it. Others lost it and became primative tribes. But life, society, civilization... it continued. A legacy of what the world before. Life continued among the ruins.

And of course, scant few generations had passed before conflict reared its head again as the survivors grew in number and gtathered resources.

Because. War, after all, never changes.

The Texas Commonwealth was one of the thirteen commonwealths of the pre-war United States of America. Created in the mid 20th century, it was comprised of the former states of Texas and Arkansas, and borders the Four States, East Central, Gulf and Plains Commonwealth. Industrial might became the watch word of Texas as the resource wars raged in the last days of the old world. The military machine the United States had built in its desperate struggle with China to secure the last resources on earth. And off it, as the battles in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon, fought by marines launched in Texas, would prove. Bullets, lasers, vehicles, power armor, bombs, missiles; there was a never ending demand for all of them, and they were provided by the industrial might of America's heartlands

The oil fields dried in the late fifties, to serve a ravenous population. Mining and oil concerns, desperate for more drops of the precious black fluid, dug deeper, devised new methods to try to find more oil. Most of them failed. Some of them succeeded. By 2077, a handful of fields in Texas were one of three locations on planet Earth still producing oil, which was immediately consumed to feed the industrial machine. Houston was the center of this.

Said machine came to a screeching halt on October 23, 2077. Nuclear bombs rained from the sky. Silos in Texas fired back, and were hit by counter-fire. Multiple bombs hit the city itself, though the relative small size of the warheads left the bulk of the downtown district relatively intact.

By 2167, the swamps had reclaimed the shorline and parts of the city of Houston. Life began to return as survivors set up various

Old fusion plants, brought online in the last years of the war to support the military industrial complex, still function somewhere deep under Houston, powering robotic factories that were never told to stop.

The ports contain both military and civilian ships, abandoned since the war, along with their cargos. Chemicals from the industrial plants have leaked into the bay, mixing with radioaction from the bombs, producing substances foul and dangerous. The animal life that survived is utterly imicable to human life.

Rumors of miracles medicines, stored in the Texas Medical Center, drew scavengers into the city. Few survived what they found there.

South of the city, the massive United States Space Administration facility remained, rockets pointed skywards. The last launch never taken. The payloads still waiting in the bellies.

This is Houston. This is where civilization in Texas has begun to be reborn.

Links

• Planning Thread

Families

• The most noble House Akon, long may it light a path through the darkness
• The Scouts, descendants of boys and girls on a camping trip when the world ended

Active Characters

• Dame Tiffany of the illustrious Order of the North Star

Homeland

Map of the Homeland

Landmarks

• Base Camp: Haven for the Scouts, the original campground where the waited out the end of the world.
• Art Vault: A vault built to preserve art for eternity. It served as the place which the ancestors of the Eternal Masquerade were able to survive the initial nuclear strikes and retains a quasi-religious status for the nomadic artists, with people--especially young people--returning there on pilgrimage for artistic inspiration.
• Reclaimed Lab: lab - reclaimed by nature - and tended by partially uplifted animals. Kind of smack dab near Fresno. I'm also to understand this is kind of where a branch of this huge Houston hospital complex thing is. While also being shortly north of the Scout's (who have perky animals!) initial camp grounds. This will presumably tie into my own family in...some fashion. Blending humans with animals, and blending animals with humans are just two sides of the same coin. What's better? Animals with the smarts of a human, or humans with the strengths of an animal? House Akon knows the answer to that question, but the world might shrug differently! Beneath the reclaimed lab tended by partially uplifted animals, a vast catacombs filled with failed genetic experiments. Are the uplifted animals creating them in their efforts to 'succeed'? Are they trying to keep their 'failed siblings' quarantined? Completely divorced from each other until some eejit breaks containment because they couldn't let the animals do their thing in peace? Something else!?
• The Lost Library, formerly the Houston Public Library, survived surprisingly well for a few years after the bombs due to solid construction and shelters built into the basement. The Scouts visited occasionally, trading supplies for knowledge and learning. But when raiders began attacking the library, the remaining librarians sent out a call for help but had no good way to contact the Scouts. By the time word reached them, they arrived to find the library lost, the books burned and its inhabitants dead or enslaved. They drove the raiders out but the damage was done, and it taught the Scouts an important lesson that survival was about more than being self-sufficient, one had to be a member of a community. These days it's mostly a burned out shell, occasionally used by groups of raiders, but the scouts honor it as a memorial.

Hazards

• Major Threat: A drought so severe that famine is a certainty.
• Threat: Carthage Raiders: Since the fall of the Old World, raiders and bandits have become a persistent problem. Texas seemed to be filled with people who'd rather take another man's work than put the effort in themselves. Far to the north of Houston, the town of Carthage has become a center of raiders and bandits all across Texas, preying heavily on trade routes between the shattered cities, using weapons looted from pre-war police stations and military bases. A gang of them, in recent years, have moved more directly into the Houston area to set up camp, notable for the fusion cycles they roam the roads in. After taking part in the failed raid on Vault 18, they've been scouting out the old Lost Library, to refurbish it as a base for their raids in the city.
• Threat: The peddlers of a new drug that removes the desire for beauty. No one knows where they actually create this drug, though rumors say they have a base of operations in a salvaged military submarine in Galveston or Trinity Bay.
• Vault 18: This vault is carved out of a tunnel extension built off the Bayou Place underground parking in the Theater District in the north side of Downtown. The sudden activation of a radio station broadcasting the collected works of Beethoven on a long loop drew the Knights of San Jacinto there from their sinking Monument Redoubt, thinking the signal presaged an opening Vault that would need protection from the ravages of the Wasteland and could possibly supply new recruits. It did indeed serve as notice the vault was about to open, but the opening door revealed a pile of decaying corpses. The state of them indicated people who had been violently slain while struggling to open the door and escape within the past few weeks - sometime after the music started. Concentrated attacks by a convoy of raiders arriving along I-45 from as far away as the Aggie Abbotoir (College Station) also looking to plunder the new Vault drove the Knights to retreat after forcibly re-seating the vault door. Most of the raiders moved on but the Star Table is reluctant to send recon teams to ascertain its current status until their situation stabilizes.
• Vault 18 was always more than a shelter. Beneath the main Vault—a fact lost even to most residents—lay Sublevel Theta, a sealed pre-War research center. This lower level was dedicated to Project Elysium, a program designed to solve the ecological collapse by creating hyper-adaptive flora and fauna. Its staff included geneticists, xeno-botanists, and Vault-Tec "specimen designers." When the Vault fell silent, Theta remained locked down. Automated systems continued their work, accelerating experiments in a closed-loop biosphere… until the Vault door above was forced. Now, with its upper levels breached and containment protocols disrupted, Sublevel Theta is exposed. The "untamed wonders" born there—bioengineered predators, mutagenic plants, self-directing fungal networks—are already moving upward into the ruined Vault and the Houston tunnels beyond. What's worse: Theta's databanks still hum with invaluable scientific records, and rumor has it a functioning pre-War AI is guiding the ecosystem like a gardener tending its greenhouse.