Ghouls: How Fallout's Radiation Survivors Work, and Why Some Go Feral

Ghouls are people who were mutated by radiation instead of killed by it. They look burned or rotten, often with no nose and patchy skin, but they can live for centuries, heal from terrible wounds and walk through radiation that would kill anyone else. Most were made by the Great War in 2077. Every Fallout game has them, and the TV series centres on one, the Ghoul. (Fallout; Fallout 3; Fallout, "The End")

What is a ghoul?#

A ghoul is a human whose body survived massive radiation by mutating. Radiation keeps damaging their skin and flesh, which is why they look the way they do, but it also triggers fast healing. Ghouls stop ageing, shrug off most diseases, and need no anti-radiation medicine at all. They are sterile. Doctor Barrows, a ghoul scientist in Underworld, prefers the clinical name "necrotic post-human". (Fallout 3; Fallout: New Vegas)

Their healing is extreme. In the TV series the Ghoul sews a severed finger back on. When Thaddeus is hit in the neck by a crossbow bolt and pulls it out, the wound closes on the spot, the first sign he is turning. (Fallout, "The Ghouls"; Fallout, "The Radio")

Why do ghouls go feral?#

A sane ghoul thinks and talks like anyone else. A feral ghoul has lost its mind and acts like an animal, attacking anything living that isn't a ghoul. Ferals fill the ruins in every game from Fallout 3 on. Ghoul characters link the change to isolation, trauma and heavy radiation, but nobody in the games finds a cure. A ghoul that absorbs too much radiation can glow, becoming a glowing one, and most of those are feral too. (Fallout 3; Fallout 4; Fallout 76)

The TV series adds a drug that holds feralness off. The Ghoul takes it from small inhaler vials and collapses without them. His old friend Roger has run out and is close to turning, and the Ghoul shoots him. The Ghoul even buys vials by trading Lucy to organ harvesters. (Fallout, "The Ghouls")

Ghouls in the early games#

The first ghouls the series shows are in Necropolis, a ruined city over Vault 12, whose door was built not to close. Its people became ghouls and are ruled by a ghoul named Set. Harold, a ghoul trader met in the Hub, was on the same expedition to Mariposa Military Base as Richard Grey, the man who became the Master. (Fallout)

Harold turns up again in Fallout 2, at the ghoul town of Gecko, which runs an old reactor that its human neighbours in Vault City blame for poisoning their water. In Fallout 3 he is in the Capital Wasteland with a tree growing out of his head. (Fallout 2; Fallout 3)

Ghouls in Fallout 3, New Vegas and Fallout 4#

In Fallout 3, Underworld, inside the Museum of History in Washington, DC, is a ghoul town that takes in any ghoul. Not far away, the luxury apartment block of Tenpenny Tower keeps ghouls out, and the player can broker a deal to let them in or help them take it by force. (Fallout 3)

In the Mojave of 2281, ghouls live mixed in with humans, like the mechanic Raul Tejada, who is old enough to remember life before the war. The Bright Brotherhood, a ghoul cult led by the glowing one Jason Bright, plans to fly away on rockets to a promised land. At Camp Searchlight, a radiation attack turned most of an NCR garrison into ferals. (Fallout: New Vegas)

In the Commonwealth, Mayor McDonough threw the ghouls out of Diamond City after his 2282 election. Many settled in Goodneighbor, run by a ghoul mayor named Hancock, who turned himself into one on purpose with an experimental drug. (Fallout 4)

Ghouls in Fallout 76#

In Appalachia, ghouls were hunted down by frightened survivors after the war, and the region's Vault 63 is full of ghouls fighting feralness. The Ghoul Within update lets players turn their own character into a ghoul, a first for the series. (Fallout 76)

Ghouls in the Fallout TV series#

The show makes ghouls central. Filly bans them, and Ma June tells the Ghoul as much before the shooting starts. Lucy's mother Rose turns out to be a ghoul, turned when Hank MacLean bombed Shady Sands, and Lucy shoots her to end her suffering. (Fallout, "The Target"; Fallout, "The Beginning")

In season 2 the Brotherhood of Steel's Codex treats ghouls as abominations. Paladin Xander Harkness is ready to kill a group of ghoul children Thaddeus is protecting, and Maximus kills him to stop it. At the gate of the empty New Vegas Strip, a pack of feral ghouls blocks the way until Lucy, high on Buffout, guns them down. (Fallout, "The Profligate"; Fallout, "The Demon in the Snow")