He said he needed to review our old power generators! Of course I told him the site had been infested with super mutants since we left, that there weren’t any ghosts in that building worth dying for, but he never listens.<\/p>\n
I told him not to come back. I don’t need to sit up here in my chair waiting to see if he’ll live or die. I’m sorry to say it, but I buried his bones a long time ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/div>A move in the dark<\/h2>\n
The player is told that James probably used one of the old access tunnels to the facility. They’re “well hidden,” and Dr. Li knows no-one has used them in decades. It’s recommended the player take the same route to avoid having to fight or sneak through the dangerous main entrance.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, as the player comes within a few blocks of the secret tunnel, there’s a loud nuke-style earth-shaking explosion. The player reaches the quest marker to find a caved-in building.<\/p>\n
This creates an element of mystery, to say nothing of paranoia. James makes his way through a secret tunnel and a few days later, it’s blown to pieces? Was James caught? Who would have the knowledge and intent and munitions to perform that kind of detonation? The player discovers that they have an enemy they haven’t seen, who hasn’t seen them, but who has already acted against their family’s interests.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Notes from Project Purity<\/h2>\n
Once the player is actually cleaning house in Project Purity, they’re going to be finding signs of reasonably recent habitation.Although, with how forgiving the world decorating is, it’s surprisingly hard to differentiate “someone was here yesterday” from “someone was here 20 years ago” from “someone was here 200 years ago.” The best we can really do is establish campsites—generators hooked up to computers, cigarettes lying everywhere—which wouldn’t make sense for pre-war or even long-term occupation, and thus would have to date after the abandonment by your parents.<\/span> The computers contain two kinds of notes: those dated about twenty years ago and those dated a few years ago. The two different kinds of notes hit on varying topics:<\/p>\n 20 YEARS AGO:<\/strong><\/p>\n ~5 YEARS AGO:<\/strong><\/p>\n The player can find a gore bag stuffed with electronic parts. By this point, shrewd players should be wondering how someone managed to conduct research here while it was infested with super mutants. Whoever it was, it seems likely they were also responsible for blowing up your dad’s secret tunnel.<\/p>\n In the center of the purifier the player finds notes from James planning to break into a nearby Vault. “Our generators are sufficient! I have to take the risk. If Braun really is still alive, he may be the only man who can help us.”<\/p>\n The only change we’re going to make to Vault 112 is the backstory. It’s productive for our story and our theme for us to discuss the idea that power can turn the well-intentioned into tyrants.<\/p>\n We will establish, in the virtual terminal containing Braun’s histories, that the simulated reality network of Vault 112 was in no way falsely advertised or conceived. It was in fact a post-war paradise created out of explicit goodwill: Braun wanted to provide an eternally novel and deprivation-free environment where his residents would live forever without pain. All citizens would retain their memories, forms, and personalities entirely. Unsure whether people would adapt well to this new world, knowing he’d be unable to leave it and make changes, he provided himself admin abilities that would let him restructure his environment and moderate residents.<\/p>\n As the early days unfolded, Braun exercised his powers only in a measured, structured, and rigorously transparent way. He positioned himself as the local judge and lawkeeper: after all, not everyone adapted well to the sudden freedom and anarchy of a simulation. Many of the problems that arose from this experimental civilization were bizarre and unprecedented. Braun had to make a lot of snap judgments, some of which came off as arbitrary, all of which antagonized somebody. People began to bear grudges against him, and since there was no other power source to appeal to, those grudges festered. Braun’s paradise quickly took on a painfully sour character, and his self-image as benign monarch began to droop. Months of being the “bad guy” every time he had to fix a problem ate at him. He considered a jury system, but for some reason he found himself uneasy with the idea of ceding his administrative powers to the uninformed and potentially biased views of his fellow citizens. So he kept on the way he always had, but the guilt began to fester.<\/p>\n Eventually he realized for his own sanity he couldn’t internalize every <\/em>complaint made against him. In fact—he gradually came to understand—the trick was to consider arguments against his decisions strictly rationally, without letting his emotions come into it. Living up to this idea produced mixed results: he was sleeping a little better, and finding himself less constantly troubled, but the more detached he seemed to grow from the consequences of his judgments—the less sympathetic and contrite he sounded—the more demanding and infuriated his constituents became. He set down hard rules on how long he’d listen to appeals. They were not observed. When people refused to leave, ultimately he’d suspend their voices or teleport them away a short distance.<\/p>\n Now they were furious. Not just some of them, not just half of them, all of them—even the ones he’d come to see as reasonable! They called unanimously for his authority to be removed. Braun burned, because what was he supposed to do? Go into seclusion? Give them all administrative power and watch the chaos unfold? He certainly couldn’t give them power over him, couldn’t safely relinquish his own, not now that they all irrationally hated him. And they very obviously still needed someone taking care of them.<\/p>\n That was it, though, wasn’t it? The problem was they couldn’t bear that idea. They couldn’t yield themselves to administration. There was no way for them to be happy in this simulation knowing there was an all-powerful being ultimately calling the shots for them. Clearly, he’d made a mistake. It’d be so much easier if they should forget their old lives, forget the artifice—forget that Braun controlled everything around them.<\/p>\n So he wiped their memories and reconfigured their forms to match the environment, and the relief was instant<\/em>. In an moment they blended perfectly with Braun’s fabricated world. Nobody asked him to meddle, nobody noticed when he had. He was free to make any well-intentioned changes he wanted with nobody yelling at him—with nobody even noticing. He would walk among them calmly, righting wrongs without a hiccup. People would misbehave and he’d reverse it. Then they’d misbehave again and he’d reverse it again. Then they’d misbehave and he’d reverse it again. After a long while, this repetition did grow irritating. He realized that from a practical perspective, it’d be a lot easier to simulate the learning of a lesson and remove the source of each misbehavior.<\/p>\n So he made little tinkering improvements. He “fixed” personality disorders. He trimmed aggression, vice, inconsiderateness, jealousies, disagreements. He made loves requited, disagreements end amicably. This happened so gradually that it took years for the obvious realization to sink in: the people in his simulation weren’t anything like who they used to be anymore. They were things he’d<\/em> made. They were his projects.<\/p>\n Well…that was fair enough, wasn’t it? The real people would have died years ago without him. In a way, it was fitting and natural they should “die” and evolve, smoothly and without trauma, into his custom-designed virtual companions. Maybe he should feel guilty. He felt as though he should, but…what if he didn’t? Who could possibly judge him anymore?<\/p>\n He should have felt desperately lonely. Fact was, he’d felt lonely for decades.<\/p>\n More than anything, he was growing bored.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The player’s found Dr. Li and discovered that James stopped by for a brief visit. By now they should realize he was trying to give the wasteland a supply of free, pure water, and they’ve seen repeated confirmations of his reason why: if water is allowed to remain a resource possessed by individual parties, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
<\/div>That Creepy Vault<\/h2>\n