My sister and I were talking about Fallout, and we were just idly considering, if you had a Fallout game set in Ireland, what would the setting be like? Considering Fallout’s particular alternate 1950s post-apocalyptic B-movie setting. How would that mesh with Ireland’s peculiarities?
(Sidenote: I’m talking specifically about southern Ireland here, and in particular small town Ireland is what I’m familiar with)
And we figured some elements of Fallout: Ireland would be:
Pre-war nuclear powered farm equipment. Tractors are the foundations of Irish society. Rusted nuclear tractors are going to be a strong setting feature.
Mutant sheep. What brahmin and bighorners are to American Fallout, sheep are going to be to Irish Fallout (well, and brahmin). Farming is huge in Ireland. And it’d be funny and/or terrifying to meet massive wandering herds of mutant sheep wandering around the landscape. That typical Irish encounter, where you have to pause on the road to wait out a farmer moving a herd of sheep, only now you’re on foot and surrounded by Fallout sheep.
Fishing fleets. While Ireland does have a military and a government, they’re not really the institutions that the American military and government are? In a post-apocalyptic setting where order broke down, the factions in Ireland are going to be significantly more localised. But certain industries would absolutely remain big enough to be factions, and the fishing industry is 100% one of them. An Irish fishing fleet stood off a Russian naval exercise IRL. So. Fallout: Ireland could definitely have a floating militarised faction based entirely on the pre-war fishing fleets.
(You might have the Rangers as a military faction. The Ranger Wing is probably the part of the Irish military that does have a mythology to it)
Speaking of factions, if national order breaks down and fractures, the two units it’s likely going to break down into are: parishes and GAA. Particularly if we’re basing it off an alternate 1950s Ireland.
Parishes: Fallout is weird about religion, and appears to mostly try to avoid it. Which … will be difficult in an Irish setting, especially if the game is located near the border, but lets say we do the Fallout thing and lose most of RL religion. What weird cult is going to replace it? And, in Ireland, the rituals that might stick will probably be things like the grottos and wishing wells and pilgrimage walks, and most of those are related to Mary (at least in Catholic Ireland). So … there might be a goddess cult? The Blue Mother. Probably with a lot of water associations. In terms of the physical art and statues and the physical rituals that might survive, a lot of it will probably feature Mary.
Doing a Fallout and avoiding religion probably will be wise in a Fallout: Ireland setting, just to avoid recreating The Troubles post-apocalyptically. Though, depending on where you set the game, you probably can have corrupted remnants of the conflict. Whether you should is a different question.
GAA: And in terms of tribes, if society devolves, in Ireland it will devolve around the Gaelic Athletic Association. Because your local club is the defining feature in Ireland, especially in the 50s. Those are your colours, those are your allegiances. The only other main contender is family, so you could also have good old fashioned familial tribes (the mammy mafia, 300 year old ghoul grannies running familial gangs), but GAA will also be a significant local focal point.
Which brings up the fun option of post-apocalyptic hurling. Because. Look. Hurling was always warrior training. Part of the myth of Cú Chulainn, how he got his name, was because Setanta, his boy self, killed a massive hound by driving a sliotar down its neck with a hurl, and became the ‘hound’ (cú) of the smith Culann (the hound’s owner) to make up for it. Remember talking to the guy in Diamond City about his post-apocalyptic interpretations of pre-war baseball? In a Fallout version of Ireland, the post-apocalyptic and pre-war versions of hurling will not be that far apart. Sliotar grenades that you launch with a hurl strike? Genuinely something several hurling teams have probably thought about IRL. Hurls will be a standard melee weapon in Fallout: Ireland.
In terms of the B-movie elements, the mutants and cryptids and cults that make up the Fallout landscape …
There’s going to be a lot of mutant horses. Irish myth is full of horses. Kelpies. Pooka. There’s going to be mutant carnivorous bog horses, and camouflaged mutant ‘ghost’ horses that can drag you across half the map. There’s also going to be mutant deer. There might also be mutant elk. Like radstags, but bigger. And quite possibly a lot more aquatic wildlife. Ireland’s an island nation. Mutant pike. Mutant seals. Mutant dolphins. Ghoul seals. Possible sentient seal people, maybe as the supermutant equivalent? Kind of merge supermutants and mirelurks, and likely call the end result Formorians.
And, speaking of Formorians, there has to be at least one enemy type with a massive eyebeam, because Balor of the Evil Eye. Think an assaultron’s eyebeam, but on something wholly organic, a supermutant equivalent. An elite Formorian variant.
There could be an interesting merging of ghouls and the sÃdhe, now that I think about it. The people of the barrows, the people of the mounds. The people of Ireland Before, who moved into a underground otherworld when the bombs fell. You could definitely do something with ghouls and the sÃdhe, in an Irish Fallout setting. And actually, if they do take more elements of sÃdhe, the ghoul faction might well be a respected faction, more so than many of the American Fallout games. Ireland has more of an ancestral/elder respect element going (‘back in my day’), and ghouls would be where knowledge survived. So you could very easily have a powerful scholarly ghoul faction under the banner of the SÃdhe. College is a big thing in Ireland. Fallout 4’s CIT, in a Fallout: Ireland that could so easily be a ghoul faction, centred on one of the University Colleges or Institutes of Technology That could actually be a faction divide too, the humanity-focused UCs vs the technically focused ITs. You could have ghoul college factions.
Then there’s the question of where to set the game. Realistically, it’s going to be Dublin, because Fallout games tend to be centred on urban centres, and in Ireland Dublin is the city. I sort of don’t want it to be set in Dublin, but likely it would be. And you would have some interesting locations in the Dublin environs and things like the Wicklow mountains for the rest of the map. You have the airport, the port, Phoenix Park, outlying areas like Greystones, Bray, Howth, Balbriggan, Lucan, and possibly Naas or Dundalk in a DLC. You’d have the north/south divide as a possible faction boundary. Put the ghoul SÃdhe in Trinity College.
(Thinking about that, actually, Ireland doesn’t have a lot of actual underground spaces. We don’t have a metro/subway/tube, almost all our transport is surface transport. So the subway stations that are such a feature of most Fallout games will not be a thing in Fallout: Ireland. But we do have older spaces. Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth, the passage tombs. Souterrains. Medieval cellars.)
It’d be fun to set it somewhere else, though. Waterford, Cork, Galway, Derry. Not Limerick. No offense to Limerick, but I don’t know if I’d want Angela’s Ashes: Fallout Edition. Although Limerick does have a lot of interesting hinterlands. So does Galway. Galway might let you use a post-apocalyptic Burren as a more alien nearby landscape.
… Anyway. That was a whole conversation. How to convert the Fallout setting and themes to a post-apocalyptic Ireland. Heh. Fallout is quite specifically America, building on 50s Americana mythology. But there are elements that would merge interestingly with an Ireland set in the same universe.
