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They're hateful savages who live only to plunder and destroy. Their leader is a devil called Salt-Upon-Wounds.Daniel

The White Legs are a raider tribe inhabiting the state of Utah in 2281, engaging in a campaign of pillaging and warfare against the native tribes of Zion Canyon on the behalf of Caesar's Legion.[1] They serve as the central antagonists for the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Honest Hearts.

Background[]

Origins[]

FNVHH White Legs attack promo

A White Leg tribal roaming Zion Canyon

The present-day White Legs are descended from the survivors of the Great War that resided in the surrounding area of Salt Lake City, Utah, with their ancestors forming the tribe from a broad cross-section of Americans of different ethnic backgrounds, including Native American and various European ethnicities, from pre-War tourists trapped in post-nuclear North America.[Non-game 1]

Adapting to the desolate environment of their homeland in the Great Salt Lake, the White Legs gained their name from the tradition of painting their bodies, especially their legs, white, to camouflage themselves among the dried salt beds of the once-massive lake. The tribe has learned to survive as master scavengers, and what they cannot obtain by salvaging, they obtain by raiding other tribes and communities. As a result, they lack many survival skills considered essential, including food preservation, tanning, even basic hunting and cooking, while becoming exceptionally adept at warfare and acts of violence, serving to alienate them from most other well-organized inhabitants of the wasteland,[2] particularly other tribes in neighboring regions to the Great Salt Lake, which they have claimed as their primary territory.[1] For decades, the White Legs have been particularly bitter enemies with the Mormon settlement of New Canaan (formerly the city of Ogden), fighting them for supplies and territory, but generally being outmatched by the Canaanites' marksmanship with their .45 Auto pistols.[3]

Escalated violence[]

The raider tribe was usually kept at bay owing to the New Canaanites, and the broad presence of other groups like the Desert Rangers. Towards the later part of the 23rd century, however, the latter's presence waned after being absorbed into the Rangers of the New California Republic in 2271 through the Ranger Unification Treaty. By 2277, Desert Ranger peacekeeping efforts were abandoned entirely with their frontier overwatch outposts vacated. The lessening of external threats emboldened the White Legs; while they normally raided northeast of Caliente, promises of new territory drove them to pounce on nearby stretches of Interstate 15, raiding and pillaging the traffic of trading caravans passing through it northwards. The violence eventually got so bad that the route was entirely abandoned, culminating in the raiders' destruction of bridges spanning the Virgin River as a means to seal off the region and claim it as their territory.[4]

Envoy of the Legion[]

Despite these substantial gains, their increased territory now presented a problem, as the isolation from caravan traffic and the loot they carried left the White Legs stuck on a downhill decline. Without any ability to develop vital skills for permanent settlement and sustainability, and unable to meaningfully assault well-fed, fortified settlements with just their primitive arsenals, the White Legs were poised to die out within a generation, collapsing under the weight of their own success.[5]

Their fortunes changed, however, upon the arrival of an emissary from the marauding army of Caesar's Legion in the form of the frumentarius, Ulysses. He brought an offer from his lord Caesar: in return for the destruction of New Canaan and the slaughter of all of its inhabitants, the White Legs would be invited to assimilate into the Legion and gain new purpose. In truth, Caesar could not care less about whether the raider tribe succeeded in wiping out the Mormon settlement; New Canaan itself was just collateral damage, while his real goal was the assassination of his former "Malpais Legate," Joshua Graham, with the White Legs merely an unrefined tool to do it.[6]

Through Ulysses' instruction, the White Legs' knowledge of warfare as well as their cruelty deepened even more. The frumentarius led them to raid Old-World military caches, including one near Spanish Fork, containing a surplus of .45 Auto submachine guns that they appropriated and renamed "storm drums," becoming the tribe's signature weapon. With this infusion of strategy and strength, the White Legs carried out greater and more devastating raids on the neighboring regions.[7][4]

Destroyers of Canaan and Zion[]

On the orders of their Legion masters, the White Legs committed to a plan to attack New Canaan, exploiting the inhabitants' underestimation of them as a petty nuisance. They scouted and observed the Canaanites' movements, looking for an opening when Graham and the bulk of the city's defenders were away.[8] Under the cover of night, the White Legs blitzed the city, attacking in force before its civilian denizens could mount an effective defense;[6][9] few managed to flee into the surrounding countryside during the massacre. Those that remained, the White Legs killed without mercy, including chasing down and butchering the elderly, ill and children.[10] To fully complete their destruction of New Canaan as they believed Caesar wanted, the White Legs burned down the city's ancient structures. Those Canaanites who tried to hide inside were trapped, eventually burning to death, including Bishop Mordecai.[11] As a final insult, the tribe's war chief, Salt-Upon-Wounds, ordered that the ground be salted, ensuring that nothing natural would ever grow there easily.[12]

However, even with the loss of their home, there still remained some New Canaanites, including their unknowingly intended target, Joshua Graham who had fled with his remaining people into Zion Canyon. The White Legs followed, leading to a guerilla war that pitted them against Graham's coalition with the Sorrows and Dead Horses tribes. The White Legs themselves took over the Three Marys as their war camp and began incursions into the remote paradise, seeking to drench it in blood for the chance to become part of the Legion.[8]

Overview[]

Society[]

The White Legs are a raider tribe through and through, reveling in destruction and warring against all non-White Legs.[13] They boast a barbaric lifestyle based off of the simple tenets of strength and combat acuity determines status. Everything they claim and control has been acquired either by picking through ruins of the Old World or raiding more capable wasteland groups. Tribe leaders are chosen on the basis of their prowess and savagery; in the 2280s, war chief Salt-Upon-Wounds is reputed to have slain a hundred men using his custom-outfitted power fist to achieve his title. Of the few groups that regularly encounter them, members of the New Canaanites including Daniel and Joshua Graham have a low opinion of the White Legs, considering their way of life brutal and unsustainable in the long term without a sufficient benefactor to hold them up like Caesar's Legion.[2]

While they will raid and pillage from anyone and anything, White Legs are superstitious like most tribals and dislike anything to do with pre-War buildings, which they consider to be taboo to enter.[14] Their superstitions contribute to their strong tribal identity, together with two additional factors: first, their tribal tongue is a pidgin language, heavily borrowing from various pre-War languages and serving to socially isolate them from other neighboring tribes; second, while composed primarily of men and women of Caucasian descent, all White Legs cover their bodies in white chalk and identical war paint on their faces as a tradition going back to their founding after the Great War, reinforcing their distinct identity.[Non-game 2]

A relatively recent addition to the White Legs' culture is that most, if not all of their warriors have fashioned their hair into dreadlocks, acting as a direct tribute to Ulysses as the one to uplift them and bring the tribe closer to glory as a part of Caesar's Legion. Unbeknownst to the White Legs, by appropriating the frumentarius' hairstyle, a gesture they thought showed respect, it instead was viewed by Ulysses as a deep insult, as his dreadlocks were one of his few lingering ties to his own tribe, the Twisted Hairs, after they were conquered by the Legion; the White Legs' imitations "spoke" to him like gibberish and he realized they had done so "ignorant of what the knots meant."[15]

Language[]

Military[]

Tactically, a White Legs offensive heavily relies on ambush tactics to deny their targets the ability to form a defense. Often taking to hiding behind cover such as trees, rocks and even bushes, they attack when they believe they have the upper hand. Conversely, open assault maneuvers with sustained attacks are a weak point as their ammo-reliant firearms and lightweight armor do not support long-term defensive tactics.

One will rarely encounter individual White Legs warriors by themselves, usually traveling in pairs or larger groups. The White Legs warbands are composed of four different types of warriors, each specializing in a different aspect of combat and typically formed around a mix of ranged and melee units:

  • White Legs storm-drummer: Specializing in ranged weaponry, their signature weapon is the White Legs' "storm drum" (.45 Auto submachine gun). They also sometimes carry a random rifle, ranging (based on level) from the varmint rifle to the anti-materiel rifle. They also carry a random melee weapon as a backup weapon.
  • White Legs light-bringer: Specializing in explosives, they typically carry fire bombs or grenades, with a random pistol or submachine gun as a backup weapon.
  • White Legs pain-maker: Specializing in close-quarters combat, they carry either a poisoned bladed weapon or a Shishkebab. They also carry several throwing tomahawks for ranged combat.
  • White Legs bone-breaker: Specializing in unarmed combat, they have slightly more health than other White Legs warriors and are armed with a random unarmed weapon, ranging (depending on level) from brass knuckles to the mantis gauntlet. They also have an innate +3 bonus to DT.

Relations with the outside[]

They're hateful savages who live only to plunder and destroy.Daniel

Due to their raider lifestyle and open hostility to most other wasteland factions, the White Legs have little to no relations with any of the tribes of Zion and freely attack anyone who is not one of their own.[13] Any group that they know works with or is associated with their enemies is also in danger of violence, such as the Sorrows and Dead Horses allied with the New Canaanites.[3] The defeated are routinely scalped for trophies.[4]

One of, if not the only group willing to associate with the White Legs is the Legion, and even then, only for the purpose of manpower. Ulysses manipulated the White Legs into believing that the Legion will provide for them, but in truth, their only purpose is to kill Joshua Graham and destroy New Canaan for Caesar. Beyond that, the White Legs have no other value to Caesar, so even if they prove victorious in Zion Valley, the White Legs are refused entry into the Legion.[16]

Technology[]

The White Legs are scavengers and their gear consists of whatever tools the tribe managed to acquire. Their distinct armor is usually a collection of salvaged armored plates coupled with cloth and leather held together by belts and ropes, with any non-combat gear carried on these makeshift harnesses. Their weapons represent an eclectic mix, ranging from simple melee weapons such as tomahawks, through shishkebabs stolen from talented wastelanders, to jury-rigged weapons like mantis gauntlets; the most advanced tech seen used by White Legs is Salt-Upon-Wounds' customized power fist. Ranged weapons include a variety of firearms appearing on a leveled basis, i.e. at higher levels they can employ brush guns, riot shotguns and anti-materiel rifles. The tribe's signature weapon is the "storm drum," their name for a model of pre-War .45 Auto submachine gun.[7] As a result of their scavenging ways, however, most of their arsenal are in invariably poor condition as they lack the skills to maintain; consequently, what they do not know how to fix, they discard, leaving areas of White Legs habitation covered with loose junk strewn about.

Known members[]

Notes[]

  • The White Legs' dreadlocked hair seen on their in-game character models in Honest Hearts is actually not a hairstyle; instead it is a unique non-player piece of headwear that cannot be normally accessed and only obtained using console commands.
  • Completing the main quest Crush the White Legs in Honest Hearts will completely remove the White Legs faction from the game. They will no longer appear in Zion Canyon and cannot be spawned using console commands.
    • A few survivors can be found if one instead completes the main quest Flight from Zion.

Appearances[]

The White Legs appear only in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Honest Hearts and are mentioned in the Lonesome Road add-on.

Behind the scenes[]

  • Early in development for Honest Hearts, a pro-White Legs ending with the Courier aiding their conquest of Zion Canyon was discussed. However, the short time schedule for the add-on prevented this from being feasible; the closest element in the final game is the main quest Chaos in Zion, where the player decides for themselves to attack the Zion tribes, a process that mechanically would be no different if done to side with the White Legs.[Non-game 3]
  • Joshua Sawyer has stated that he regrets the decision to tie the White Legs to the Legion in the story of Honest Hearts, thinking of it as unnecessary and leading to them being overshadowed as antagonists, as players would only think of the White Legs as an extension of Caesar's conflict with Joshua Graham and New Canaan rather than a threat in and of themselves.[Non-game 4]
  • According to Joshua Sawyer, the gameplay reasons for the White Legs (and other tribals) having high-tier weapons in Honest Hearts were that the player was reasonably expected to be anywhere between level 10 to 40 when playing Honest Hearts, and also because Sawyer had seen complaints about the swampfolk from Fallout 3's add-on Point Lookout being too weak.[Non-game 5]

Developer quotes[]

[H]ow the DLC shipped was not how it was planned. The tribes in Zion are descendants of a mix of North American native people as well as other American citizens and European (of various non-native ethnicities) tourists/campers. This survives in the language of the Dead Horses, for example, who use a large number of German-derived words.

In the first design docs for HH, every tribe was supposed to have members from all of the F3/FNV ethnic groups. However, there was a complicating factor: body art. The various tattoos and body paints we needed to texture the bodies multiplied the number of required textures. They couldn’t simply be layered on (as they can in F4), but were entirely new body textures that dramatically increased the amount of texture memory being used. For that reason, each tribe wound up having only one body texture per sex. This compressed their ethnicities into homogenized blends, with Dead Horses being a darker tan, Sorrows a light tan, and White Legs (under the body paint) fairly pale.

As a minor point, Daniel was specifically supposed to be (and was, in data, for most of development) Asian. I don’t know when, how, or why he was switched to Caucasian, but that’s how he shipped. It’s frustrating, because those changes slot Joshua and Daniel as white guys among (mostly) brown folk when 1) they weren’t supposed to be white guys and 2) the tribes were specifically called out as ethnically and culturally mixed without any real-world analogues.

Regarding the “natives as aesthetic” criticism, the patterns we used for the three tribes’ body art are not based on any current or historical native American body art (AFAIK). There are in-fiction explanations for each tribe’s specific choices. The White Legs initially colored themselves white to blend into the Great Salt Lake (where they are from) and they dread their hair out of reverence for Ulysses. The Sorrows use the river pattern to reflect their suffering and their connection to the Virgin River in Zion. The Dead Horses mark various accomplishments on their skin and decorate their clubs with .45 shells out of their respect for Joshua Graham.
Joshua Sawyer, on Tumblr
Helping the White Legs wouldn't really help the Legion in any substantive way unless you consider helping Caesar clean up an embarrassing mistake to be inherently pro-Legion. It's worth noting that if you do Chaos In Zion and actually kill Joshua Graham yourself, the White Legs still aren't accepted into the Legion. Caesar just wants Graham dead and the White Legs are the scumbags to do it. We discussed doing a White Legs-oriented path through Honest Hearts but a) it would have been out of scope and b ) it still would likely have ended with you doing essentially Chaos in Zion: killing Daniel and/or Joshua Graham. In retrospect, associating the White Legs with the Legion was probably my key mistake. Take the exact same tribe doing the exact same thing and remove their association with the Legion and people would not conclude that opposing them [equals] opposing the Legion or that helping the New Canaanites [equals] helping the Legion's enemies. The New Canaanites, though fundamentally opposed to the Legion, aren't really the parties in conflict. Caesar hates Joshua Graham, regardless of the lack of threat posed by New Canaan, the Sorrows, and the Dead Horses.Joshua Sawyer, on the Bethesda forums

References[]

  1. 1.0 1.1 The Courier: "White Legs? Who are they?"
    Follows-Chalk: "Nasty bunch of raiders from up by Great Salt Lake. White Legs killed your friends at the Southern Passage. Not many survive White Leg raids - not even by running. Joshua will want to hear about what happened to you."
    The Courier: "Where do they come from?"
    Follows-Chalk: "That's the weird part - normally the White Legs keep to the Great Salt Lake. I don't know what brought them down this far south."
    (Follows-Chalk's dialogue)
  2. 2.0 2.1 The Courier: "What do you know of the White Legs?"
    Daniel: "They're hateful savages who live only to plunder and destroy. Their leader is a devil called Salt-Upon-Wounds. War is what all he knows. Everything he has, everything that tribe has, was taken by force, raiding and scavenging. It's said there's no man deadlier at close range, that that powerfist of his has smashed a hundred skulls. Maybe that's true, but so what? It's a low form of leadership. A tribe that knows only war has no future. And so he'll lead them to Caesar."
    (Daniel's dialogue)
  3. 3.0 3.1 The Courier: "You said you 'used to' help the Sorrows with problems. What do you do now?"
    Daniel: "I'm trying to make amends for allowing our problem to become their problem. The New Canaanites, I mean. The White Legs have always fought with us, and with Joshua returning, Caesar has motivated the White Legs to stamp out the New Canaanites entirely. That means the tribes we work with, too. It's already hap- I just want to prevent something terrible from happening to the Sorrows."
    (Daniel's dialogue)
  4. 4.0 4.1 4.2 The Courier: "What do you know about the White Legs?"
    Stella: "Used to be they raided northeast of Caliente, time to time. But then the Desert Rangers fell apart ten years ago, absorbed into the NCR. Soon enough the White Legs were swarming all over that stretch of I-15. Folks learned not to head north if they wanted to keep their scalps. Eventually the White Legs destroyed the bridges across the Virgin River, over in Arizona. End of discussion."
    (Stella's dialogue)
  5. The Courier: "Joshua's come up with a reasonable alternative. Why not help them fight?"
    Daniel: "Joshua doesn't just want to fight the White Legs. He wants to annihilate them. The stakes are too high for their tribe. Hurting them won't dissuade them. If they can't join Caesar's Legion, they'll die out in a generation. They've never learned how to survive. Food preservation, tanning, even basic hunting and cooking seem beyond them. They only survive by scavenging and raiding, but that can't last. They'll only stop if Joshua and the Dead Horses can kill their war chief and their entire war band. That's exactly what he intends to do."
    (Daniel's dialogue)
  6. 6.0 6.1 The Courier: "I came here with the Happy Trails Caravan Company to make contact with the New Canaanites."
    Joshua Graham: "Happy Trails. I remember. They were good friends. I have bad news for your employers. New Canaan was destroyed, its citizens scattered. All because of the White Legs. And Caesar, of course. The White Legs want to join the Legion. Caesar's rite of passage is the destruction of the New Canaanites, almost assuredly because of me. The good news is that we can help you find your way back. Daniel, one of the other New Canaanites, has made many maps of the region. The bad news is that we can't help you right now. Not with everything that's going on."
    (Joshua Graham's dialogue)
  7. 7.0 7.1 The Courier: "Nice guns."
    Joshua Graham: "In the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, all tribes are known for a specific weapon. White Legs are known for their big submachine guns, 'storm drums.' They broke into an armory near Spanish Fork and have been using them for years. Of course, the Dead Horses have their wooden war clubs and even the Sorrows have their Yao Guai gauntlets. This type of .45 Automatic pistol was designed by one of my tribe almost four hundred years ago. Learning its use is a New Canaanite rite of passage."
    (Joshua Graham's dialogue)
  8. 8.0 8.1 The Courier: "If you don't acknowledge your past now, it'll come back to you later."
    Daniel: "[SUCCEEDED] True enough. We can't escape it no matter how hard we try. Best we can do is own up, trust in the Lord to forgive. Joshua was gone, so were a lot of the other New Canaanites. White Legs must have been watching for a long while, counting who remained. We didn't think the White Legs were a real threat. Maybe it was overconfidence. Maybe sloth. Either way, we didn't see them coming. They attacked at night. They killed without regard to age or infirmity. Armed or unarmed. They beat children to- Beat them to death in their beds while they were sleeping. And now we're all that's left. Maybe thirty of us. Pride goeth before destruction."
    (Daniel's dialogue)
  9. The Courier: "Wait, what? New Canaan was wiped out? How?"
    Follows-Chalk: "That's what Joshua said. White Legs came down from Great Salt Lake in force - fell on New Canaan before they could mount a defense. Joshua found some of the survivors led by a man named Daniel. Most of them have fled the valley, but Daniel stayed on with the Sorrows tribe. He and Joshua have been arguing over whether to stand and fight the White Legs or take the Sorrows and the Dead Horses out of the valley."
    (Follows-Chalk's dialogue)
  10. The Courier: "Well, I'm guessing you're pretty mad about something."
    Joshua Graham: "The White Legs didn't just force my people out of New Canaan. They butchered everyone who wasn't fast enough to get away. The elderly, the ill, children. Those who stopped to help the wounded. It made no difference to them. They can't be reasoned with, the White Legs. Daniel believes that if we leave, if the Sorrows leave, the White Legs will stop. He doesn't understand what this kind of tribe is like."
    (Joshua Graham's dialogue)
  11. The Courier: "You're the man in charge. If something's troubling you, it could affect all of us."
    Daniel: "[SUCCEEDED] I never thought I'd be in charge of anything. Don't know why. Bishop Mordecai was old. He had been sick for years. He couldn't walk anymore. It wasn't a problem for the rest of us. He made it out to be more trouble than it really was. Just his way, I guess. When the White Legs came... he was upstairs. We couldn't get him out in time. The house caught fire at the base and worked its way up. Fast. He didn't die of smoke. I wish he had. Sometimes I wake up and for a minute or two, I think all of it was a dream. But it's not. It wasn't. I wish all of this were some fevered vision of what could have been. Instead of what is, what we let happen."
    (Daniel's dialogue)
  12. Waking Cloud: "When Salt-Upon-Wounds took New Canaan, he ordered the White Legs to salt the earth so nothing could grow again. What kind of monster could do that?"
    (Waking Cloud's dialogue)
  13. 13.0 13.1 The Courier: "Degenerate tribes?"
    Jed Masterson: "That's right. The folks that lived in Zion before the war, they didn't just get a little savage, they're downright feral. Most of them don't even speak English any more - you got to get yourself a New Canaanite translator to talk to them. The ones you really got to watch out for are the White Legs, from the Great Salt Lake. They'll attack just about anyone that ain't one of theirs."
    (Jed Masterson's dialogue)
  14. The Courier: "Any idea where to start looking for these pre-War supplies Daniel needs?"
    Follows-Chalk: "Best place to look for Back When stuff is the taboo places. Sorrows and Dead Horses don't go in there, and even White Legs don't like them much."
    (Follows-Chalk's dialogue)
  15. Ulysses log Y-17.23
  16. Honest Hearts endings
Non-game
  1. 1.0 1.1 J.E. Sawyer on Tumblr: "I understand why people see it that way, but how the DLC shipped was not how it was planned. The tribes in Zion are descendants of a mix of North American native people as well as other American citizens and European (of various non-native ethnicities) tourists/campers. This survives in the language of the Dead Horses, for example, who use a large number of German-derived words.
    In the first design docs for HH, every tribe was supposed to have members from all of the F3/FNV ethnic groups. However, there was a complicating factor: body art. The various tattoos and body paints we needed to texture the bodies multiplied the number of required textures. They couldn’t simply be layered on (as they can in F4), but were entirely new body textures that dramatically increased the amount of texture memory being used. For that reason, each tribe wound up having only one body texture per sex. This compressed their ethnicities into homogenized blends, with Dead Horses being a darker tan, Sorrows a light tan, and White Legs (under the body paint) fairly pale.
    [...]
    Regarding the 'natives as aesthetic' criticism, the patterns we used for the three tribes’ body art are not based on any current or historical native American body art (AFAIK). There are in-fiction explanations for each tribe’s specific choices. The White Legs initially colored themselves white to blend into the Great Salt Lake (where they are from) and they dread their hair out of reverence for Ulysses."
  2. Josh Sawyer's tumblr "The White Legs initially colored themselves white to blend into the Great Salt Lake "
  3. Joshua Sawyer on Tumblr: "We talked about it briefly, but the time schedule for Honest Hearts was very short, so it never seemed like something we could feasibly support."
  4. Joshua Sawyer on the Bethesda forums
  5. Question: "Why does every single primitive weirdo in Honest Hearts have one of the most powerfull weapons in the game? Did I miss some in-game info or is it just your decision wich I didnt understand?"
    Joshua Sawyer: "You probably missed where Joshua Graham tells you that the White Legs raided an armory at Spanish Fork. The Dead Horses and Sorrows weaponry is typically not quite as powerful. The gameplay reason is that the DLC has to cover characters from (realistically) level 10 to level 40, with all of the gear the player could potentially have. I saw a lot of complaints about damage boosting on the swamp folk in F3's Point Lookout, so I thought it made more sense to actually upgrade the White Legs' weapons."
    (Formspring reply from July 8, 2011)