#professor calvert

[child-of-the-cathedral]

[honourablejester]

My sister and I have been replaying Fallout 3 the last little while, and tonight we were playing Point Lookout, and I had forgotten how much I fucking love the Desmond Lockheart/Professor Calvert questline. I’m sorry, it’s just quintessential silver age spy comics/80s cartoon cheese. A ghoulified pre-war british spy vs a telepathic brain in a jar monologuing supervillain, one of them with a besieged gothic mansion (that’s actually his nemesis’ ancestral family home, for bonus cheek) and the other one with a full underground supervillain lair underneath a local landmark. It just makes me giddy, it’s like an old school Diabolik or GI Joe or Johnny Quest plotline. They’ve been doing this for 200 years, just these ridiculous shenanigans, playing out a pre-war rivalry across the post-nuclear hellscape, unperturbed by the fact that there’s nothing left. I love it. Plus, Desmond is hilarious.

Like, if Fallout ever do a spin-off comic series, the post-war adventures of foul-mouthed ex-spy Desmond Lockheart and his villainous and increasingly unhinged opponent Professor Calvert would 100% be my recommendation.

It makes the Antagoniser/Mechanist rivalry in Canterbury commons look so shallow by comparison. It’s just such a great little tidbit of lore. It’s a fully functional rivalry that has lasted since before the war, involving an American old-money villain and a British spy, and they have been in recurrent conflict the entire time, with temporary victories for both of them. A lot of Fallout lore struggles to bridge the ever-increasing gap between pre-war and post-war, in a lot of cases feeling a bit like there was a void for those two centuries, but this absolutely ridiculous storyline from a DLC has a constant through-line, an adventure and characters that have been doing things those entire two hundred years, and possibly not just in post-war America. IDK, it just feels crunchy, like shit went down, in a smaller and grittier and sillier way than a lot of the big factional politics of the games manage? For real, I would read those comics and/or watch that cartoon.

In a similar vein, by the way, I will also give points to Herbert ‘Daring’ Dashwood and Argyle and their radio adventures, because that’s a post-war radio programme, based (however loosely) on the post-war adventures of two men. That’s a radio programme that someone in-universe created and dramatised and broadcast, instead of the endless replays of pre-war music. There’s such a creative void in so much of Fallout, like nobody’s been doing anything or making anything in the entire time since the war, no music or drama or nothing, just reusing the resources (and skeletons) so implausibly still lying around from two hundred years ago like nobody’s made anything since then. But this guy & Three Dog made a radio show out of his old adventures with his incredibly long-suffering pal and broadcast them. I do enjoy that.

But, yes. The Adventures of Lockheart & The Villainous Professor Calvert would also be deeply appreciated. Heh.

[dnd-knightt]

Calvert: You're really campaigning for bastard of the year, aren't you?

Desmond: As reigning champion, are you nervous?

[skumpitt]

Hearing Voices by GalooGameLady

[crisontumblr]

Those of you who've done the Calvert vs. Desmond quests in "Point Lookout," who have you sided with?

I'm on the "Thought Control" quest and got the jammer, but I'm really not sure who to side with. Desmond's a neat character, but if I side with him, the Tribals will turn hostile and they're a pain in the ass to fight.

On the other hand, siding with Calvert means having to kill Desmond, but I'm not entirely sure what that means for the lighthouse.

Either way, the mansion explodes, which sucks because the building is pretty neat.

Choices, man. :|