I bet a lot of kids sneaked out of their houses and shelters to "explore" the outside during the Great War.


So why all the ghouls are advlts? Maybe they only stop growing up after 19 years old like the LW?

Ghouls, like Supermutants, can't breed. You become a Ghoul through radiation, and it's a long process enough that you are an advlt by the time you're a Ghoul.
Carol is a good example of this, who was a child in 2077. She hid in the Museum, and by years became a Ghoul.

As far as i know. Ghouls were "born" when the bombs fell. So.. in fallout 3 they are over 200 years old. They just age much much slower than normal people. It really depends how much a ghoul does age compared to normal people in fallout lore.

Like 30 ghoul years=1 human year ?

Completely correct. Really you could have looked that up on Fallout wiki... :'|

Children are still developing and vulnerable to everything, so no ghoulification or FEV hulk-outs into Super Muties. advlts have well-developed DNA which can be scrambled with everything and rearranged. Besides, the survivors of the bomb weren't all advlts, take Carol in Underworld for instance. She was a kid when she crawled out of the rubble, it took years for her to ghoulify. I'm thinking the ferals took decades to become that demented, like the Burnland Screamers in A Boy and His Dog and Vic and Blood. Look at Snowflake, he was a human in Rivet City till he soaked up too many rads and ghoulified and was shunned into Underworld. Guess you ghoulify quickly after the bombs drop, but as the radiation dissipates, you'd get less rapid ghoulification or you'd have to be swimming in hot spots like most of the new-baked ghouls you meet.

Well there were "Born Ghouls" on The Reservation:

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Born_ghoul

I don't really count Van Buren as canon.

why? I know it's hard to call it canon because it was not made. But it was going to be. They were at he Beta stage I think when they cancelled it. Parts of Van Buren are going to be in New Vegas like Ceaser's Legion. I heard that is going to be in NV. At the Very least Van buren and the stuff taken out of fallout 1 and 2 should be counted as canon because it gives use an Idea of what would be in the area east of NCR and between the midwestern united states. It was very close to being offical canon that the makes of new vegas are using it for ideas.

There's an argument (and a valid one at that...) in that only things that appeared in games that were published should be considered canon. VB's in a particularly odd place in that although its not piublished, a lot of folks (including myself) do consider the state of play to be canon.

The extension of this argument though, would be to include cut locations like the burrows as canon from FO1, which clearly we do not want... Although most people who've read the bibles seem to be happy with the idea of the Master's army having steam wagons (even though they were cut).

Also the good ending for the Follower of the Apocalypse, "The Crater"(formerly NORAD), The Renegade Brotherhood Soldier, The Lobotomites etc. all good examples of things that may not have been included, but by default are basically cannon. About the only place that most people have dismissed has been "The Burrows".

yeah, it was always my understanding that most, if not all, ghouls became ghouls by the initial bombs dropping, as indicated by the burnt, disfigured skin and face. and any children exposed to this would have been like 200 years old by FO3, and even in FO1 they are still fairly old.


oh, and the reason for no children ghouls being born is that all the radiation has turned the ghouls infertile, which i think is also stated, and if not is actually true.

That still doesn't account for the fact that there are no children that have been turned into ghouls, either from the initial bombs or through going into areas with intense radiation. Perhaps children aren't able to survive the sort of dose of radiation required for ghoulification?

ghoul mating = disgusting

There's a lot of Van Buren material being worked into New Vegas. Maybe the Born Ghouls will be included as well. It would be a great addition to the lore to at least acknowledge it as a possibility.

I think the reason you don't see any Ghoul children is a censoring issue. Killing children is obviously a no go area, so I reckon that showing small children in a diseased form with skin falling off would cause some questions to be asked against Bethesda. Ghouls dont breed, but humans can become ghouls when exposed to radiation, as shown by Moira from Megaton who steps out from Megaton as a ghoul after you detonate the nuke in Megaton (how she survives I don't know :s). But thinking about it, it is possible that children, as a previous member posted, would be unable to cope with radiation and survive. In Rivet City, you hear some people dicussing the tragedy where a little girl fell into the water. Perhaps she was rescued, but later died from ghoulification due to the large radiation source of the river. So many questions!

Don't ghouls like Moira, or that guy in Dunwich, contradict the concept of long-term ghoul-ing?

I would just figure that the body of a kid might not be strong enough to handle the exposure of the radiation to turn Bobby into a Ghoul. Other then that, ghoul cannot breed.


I would consider those to that of Beth's fault in "knowledge" of their lore in Ghoul that would make sense via gameplay.

As for child ghouls.... The ghouls don't STOP aging right? They just live a long time... And they aren't like vampires, so any kids that had turned into ghouls would eventually grow into advlt ghouls.

Wasn't Moira's ghoulification just a continuity error on the developers' part? That's what I've heard.