War … war has changed.
Despite the well-worn mantra to the contrary repeated throughout the Equestrian Wasteland, this is undeniable to anyone who has any knowledge of the past. Two centuries ago, the War consumed the nations of Equestria and the Zebra Empire; a century-and-a-half ago, that conflict ended with the destruction of society as we knew it. When spellfire rained from the sky, it forever changed war. Gone were the well-equipped armies of the past, serving mighty nations with inscrutable goals. Instead, war became improvised and immediate. Though gangs and warlords roam the wastes, accumulating power and raising death tolls, most ponies simply kill each other because they are angry, afraid, desperate, or simply bored.
I was born in a Stable, one of the secure bunkers created during the War to save pony life from extinction in the extreme (and ultimately inevitable) possibility that Equestria and the Zebra Empire would annihilate each other with megaspells. That, however, is a life I had no memory of until recently. I did not recall the razing of my home Stable by power-armored Steel Rangers, nor the harsh lessons taught by raiders and tyrannical settlements that turned me into Lord Lamplight—a pony devoted to rebuilding some semblance of society, no matter the cost. Whatever motivated my past self to wipe my own memories and release myself on the Wasteland to eventually fight against the Northern Lights Coalition I’d built, I can’t recall or understand … but that’s what happened. I was reborn as Doc, and I learned an entirely different set of lessons; ones that led me to form the North Equestrian Alliance from settlements, to oppose and destroy the NLC’s alliance of raiders. It was as close to a war as Equestria had seen since the War that had ended it all, yet it was fundamentally different.
War might have changed, but it did survive the end of the world, when so many other things did not. War, it seems, is a constant, inescapable and ever-present. This is as true across space as it is across time, as I would soon learn. In the aftermath of the conflict between the Northern Lights Coalition and the North Equestrian Alliance, it was discovered that Lamplight and I were one and the same. Mistrust grew, forcing me to go into a self-imposed exile. I travelled east and just kept going, trying to outrun my past, until I arrived in a distant land where ponies were in the minority, the sky was not obscured by a constant cloud ceiling, and the Equestrian Ministries had had no sway: the Griffin Commonwealth. And yet … war was waiting for me there as well.
Fallout: Equestria
Common Ground