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Of all the regions we did in the game, The Fetid Bayou is both one of my most despised and best loved regions, all at once. On the one hand, it had the whole "environmental damage" thing that, well to be frank... flat out never worked and then there's all the plans that never made it to fruition, but then again, it is home to some of the best vignettes the mutant's story has to offer: The Bloodfarm, Sanctuary and Slaughter.

The funny thing is, two of those weren't even meant to be part of the Fetid Bayou, originally.

As I already mentioned, Sanctuary was intended to be a town in Western Front. This was still reflected in the way it looked and felt in the Fetid Bayou. I actually abused the concept of "dramatic compression" by not changing it to match the swamp. "Dramatic compression" really just means "we cut out the boring bits" - The Fetid Bayou is not adjacent to Western Front in "reality," it's actually about 2 or 3 hundred miles north northwest from the region that is Western Front. This means that the idea that this high desert town could be in the hills overlooking a swamp is totally ridiculous, but because we never explained the concept to any players, there was no "rule" broken - it was just an oddity of the region. I often wondered if anyone thought it meant something or if they all just figured it was a hacked in bit of content, but honestly -- both are sort of true. I didn't want to cut Sanctuary from the game in the first place, so I was going to keep it no matter what and the dramatic compression thing gave me a window of opportunity. I think the region is better off for it, but I suppose that's not for me to decide.

None-the-less, keeping Sanctuary gave me the opportunity to talk about the Zendigs a bit. In my mind, the Zendig were always the true heroes of the game - the one faction that didn't just indiscriminately kill everyone who was alien and the ones that didn't rule by force. For me, the Zendig story is a story about humanity's best properties - the desires to create, coexist and improve. They were everything the mutants claimed to be and all the better for it. Above all else though, Sanctuary is reminder of the good fight - of the ideals that are worth fighting for and the way to do so without giving up who you are. There's a moment in Sanctuary where Fight Master Molly (a neuromancer and peter tosh reference, in a round-a-bout way) turns her head and closes her eyes to feel the wind on her face that is probably one of my favorites in the region. It's a very minor thing, but it's a human touch: we human beings can find beauty - even serenity - wherever we choose to. The Zendigs of Sanctuary hold a special place in my heart; I'm glad I was able to include them in the shipping game.

If I had a plan to save the Zendigs, then I suppose you'd have to call Slaughter a happy accident. I needed a way to weave the justice story into the world at large, so that I could show they were more than just another faction. I had already set them against the mutants via the Bloodfarm (a collaboration that marked Chris "Zirp" Zirpoli's debut on the team green writing team - damn what a debut), so I didn't want them to be fighting the mutants specifically in this phase of the story. They were supposed to be working in the background, taking over the smaller factions from within and putting them to work as their pawns, so another direct move against the greenies would have been a bit much... I knew I was going to hint at some Justice influence within the CB'ers, but I also wanted them to stand on their own against the Paynes, so that really only left the Scavs... Thus, Slaughter - originally not much more than a town of psychopathic cannibal scavs - became something entirely different. I decided that the best way to show what Justice's influence could do would be to tell Sanctuary's story, reflected through a dark mirror. In this new story, Slaughter used to be a nice town, a peaceful place where folk looked out for each other and maintained something akin to a normal life, but then, something happened. A mysterious figure calling himself Dakota showed up and stirred up the petty desires and avarice of the townsfolk, turning them against the town's leadership and eventually using them to take over Slaughter for himself.

Or did he? In reality, Dakota (Note the place name, Humans name themselves after places from the old world, don't they?) works for Justice. Using Justice's knowledge of the contamination, Dakota began to drug the water supply at Slaughter, making the townspeople paranoid. The form of spore poisoning that afflicts the Scavs there - Ruin Rot - isn't a byproduct of their environment; it's the result of Dakota's using Unity and a strange rock that players will later recover to influence the people. Those take take to it the worst, folks like Jeremiah and his crew in the exile camp, it literally drives mad [though not before granting them seemingly prophetic vision], but the rest devolve into baser versions of themselves. Jeremiah's lover becomes vindictive, her love of him turning into a hatred of Dakota that ultimately spells his doom, for example. Everyone in Slaughter was an example of something good corrupted into something evil, cruel or sometimes just downright pathetic. I spent a little time working on it, maybe even more than I should have considering it was sort of a side attraction to the main event, but I have a fondness for the story and the way I was able to use it to show players, frankly, the type of people their characters were. No mutant hero that made it to slaughter would walk away feeling perfectly righteous; the people of Slaughter and the way they reminded you that your enemies are people to, saw to that.

Slaughter was interesting to me for a few reasons, actually. At one point, I'd designed a quest line that would take you back to Slaughter... a few years before you arrived there the first time. It was meant to explain why the prophets know so much about you and to explain why you seem to run across the Justice stuff, so often. Without rambling on, the story called for you to come in contact with one of the last surviving Great AI, an entity known as Plato, who was studying particle physics before the terraforming came. Justice appears with overwhelming force and everything looks grim, but Plato does the only thing he can - he throws back into the past, with no specific target, using the materials he was researching. You were supposed to end up in Slaughter - the pre Dakota Slaughter - and you were supposed to see it all happen. Unfortunately, Plato himself was proving to be a technical challenge to implement and there ended up being no time to do the slaughter half of the story. In the end, I understand, they never opened Plato Station. Too bad that, but that at least that gives me something to talk about in a future installment.

Before I sign this installment off, I thought I'd mention one of the most interesting behind the scenes stories of the region. Did you know that players weren't meant, specifically, to fight the Paynes? In the original design, players had a choice - they could support either the CB'ers or the Paynes in their war. Doing so would lead to two separate instances - Sour Mash Creek if you supported the CB'ers and Route 14E if you supported the Paynes. In one, players would learn that El Oso carried the same stone that Dakota did, indicating to the watchful that El Oso was likely an agent of Justice. In the other, the Paynes would take their new mutant ally on a raid of a CB'er convoy and the player would witness the CB'ers trading off the Embryonic Garden from the Bloodfarm to the forces of Justice in exchange for 4 tanker trucks of fuel. Unfortunately, we had no faction system in the game, which meant no way for players to be allied with either the CB'ers or the Paynes, which meant that players supposedly fighting with the Paynes on the battlefield would be attacked by them instead. The same would be true the other way of course (CB'ers would turn and fire on their so called allies). We could do it in instances, but not out in the world.

It was a real shame, to be honest - I had intended the CB'er/Payne fight to be a way for mutants to engage in competitive play. There were supposed to be places on the map (A Payne outpost, a CB'er fuel depot, etc.) that were regularly raided and repaired by players by doing quests for their allies (E.g. fix the outpost, raid the depot, etc.). If all of the locations on a particular side of the war were destroyed, the other side would "win" and it would force the bosses of that faction to appear leading a super convoy that would sweep through the map, wreaking havoc on the opposing side and any fools in the way. As envisioned, it would have been sweet, but the reality is that we didn't have the tools we needed to make half of what we'd wanted possible and so we had to make a real painful choice. We had to cut one of the two lines of content and then tailor the remaining content line in such a way that the fact that they attacked you out there wouldn't matter. After looking at the two lines of content, I realized that the cut that made the most sense was the Paynes. *sigh* I really liked the Paynes. They weren't really bad people at all. They were the heroes of that little conflict, in fact. Or at least, they were to me.

To be honest, after we'd decided to go for the T rating and we had to totally rewrite El Oso (the foul-mouthed arrogant leader of the CB'ers with anger management issues) in order to prevent an M rating for language, I sort of came to wish we'd kept the Paynes instead. El Oso was the heart of the CB'ers to me... His being muzzled totally robbed him - and his whole !@#$ing faction - of his cajones.

Ah well, I have one happy memory there, at least. The last time I was in Crossroads, which was after ship but not long after, I stopped by El Oso's place and was happy to find that his snake trophy was still interactive. Stand in the right spot, hit the interact button and Lo! The pop up says:

This pendejo thought he could take El Oso!

- Snipehunter

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