The Chosen One: What the fuck am I, chopped liver? Why are you breaking my adventure in two?!
Hehehe.
Also, check out the scriptwriter/director's name.
I've been meaning to ask, what do you use to make your maps?
Paint.net.
Is Appalachia a coherent faction or just a general region?
It's a coherent government, more of a confederation than anything strongly unified but they'll all get together if they're seriously threatened with invasion. Even the Enclave with all their tech is using non-military options to try and get them to reintegrate peacefully.
Kind of a shame that the story is on so deep because the brown area there is prime for a faction.
Well, FO3 doesn't suggest
any kind of big faction near the CW. The East Coast seems to be behind the West when it comes to nation building, more on the level of the FO1 era with its isolated towns and city states. Though, if the Enclave and Brotherhood had never arrived in the CW some sort of Southern state would probably have been the eastern unifier as the NCR was for the west and the Legion for the Southwest. The steps toward unification just had barely begun to start when out of the blue two very technologically advanced factions arrived in the mid-Atlantic.
Also, adding some more stuff to the next chapter as I rework it (don't wanna spoil Nate and Danse's trek through the Glowing Sea):
==*==
Corporal Phil Stanstead kept an eye out from the cupola of his hummer as the patrol moved along I-95 in the dusk of a fading day, seeing the sarge just on ahead clad in the pre-War USMC armour he wore as squad leaders. The hummers (their real name was some kind of lengthy acronym but even the Federal people just called them hummers) were heavy-duty military trucks, first designed in the late 20th century and now being made by the thousands in auto plants down south as general-duty military vehicles, with some surplus for civilians. Two of the ones in the patrol convoy were armed with gatling lasers fed with power directly from the vehicles’ fusion engines – the third, Stanstead’s own, was armed with a Mk19 Grenade Launcher, something the regular Army boys had told him was used since a war three centuries ago in somewhere called Vietnam.
But the fourth vehicle, leading the patrol unit, was really something special – it was a Lafayette tank, armed with a 105mm M277 Viper railcannon and two gatling lasers, one mounted on top of the turret and one co-axial with the main gun. The vehicle was a lot lighter than the big Custer tanks, light enough to be shipped by air from down south instead of having to be produced on-site in the Lexington factory. That’d seen them well a couple of days ago when they’d been ambushed by a group of muties – he’d seen the tank’s cannon shoot a round right through the biggest one’s chest, spraying oversized bone fragments and chunks of supersized lung and heart out behind it in a fountain of blood straight from its arteries. The green-skinned monsters had turned tail when they saw that happen, that was for sure. Stanstead had earned a medal in that fight as well, for using the hummer’s gatling laser to nail a mutie carrying a mini-nuke in the head as it ran towards them. This area, the countryside between Lexington and Waltham, was what the brass called a “green zone” – not under formal US authority like a “blue zone” such as Lexington, Concord or Sanctuary, but reasonably safe, not like a contested “yellow” or outright hostile “red” zone. But still, it never paid to let your guard down. Just over a month up north in the Commonwealth had already taught Stanstead to be ready for anything.
His unit of National Guard troops (officially designated the 113th Cavalry, “Steel Horses”, Regiment) was from the farming towns of North Carolina, who’d joined up shortly after the Federals arrived in the area seven years ago. Their first action, that year, had been against the pirates and raiders that lurked in the old Crater Banks and were always preying on the people heading to Hampton Roads, working behind the two spearheads of Army and Marines hitting them from land and sea respectively to make sure none got out alive. He himself had only joined this year, as a third son there was almost no chance of him inheriting the homestead and there were rumours down from regular units in the area that the military was ready to make a move bigger than any it had in living memory.
The choice to join a Guard unit instead of the Army had been deliberate – he might not get power armour, but the training lasted shorter, the discipline wasn’t as harsh, and Guard units were inactive most of the time, meaning he’d only have to live in a barracks when deployed for campaign. That, and most of the officers were regular folks. Full-on Army units were commanded by Federal people or Vaulters, and he knew most of both groups looked down on people like him; sometimes, they didn’t even try to hide it.
