The Unwashed Villagers were a Fallout player clan that formed on the Interplay message boards. Their fight against a spammer and spoiler who went by the name Grim Reaper, described in more detail below, and their general helpful attitude towards newbies, brought them to the attention of the Fallout developers, who featured a dozen of them in a Fallout 2 special encounter, which in turn made the group known to players who never frequented the Interplay boards.
This introduction was written by Lerk (John Hancock), and originally posted on his website, which went down in late 2000 or early 2001. He reposted on 2004-06-04 on the Political Crossfire message board, which is meanwhile defunct as well.
Who the heck ARE the unwashed villagers?
ORIGIN: one weekend night late, several veteran fallout gamers were on interplay's fallout feedback board, answering questions people had and each other's posts. Then, no one was asking questions, and the veterans got bored. They started posting jokes to each other, and discovered several were on at the same time, so we started speed posting jokes, almost as fast as a chat room. It was very creative, witty and humorous (most of the time). It sort of became a groundswell that referred to itself as "unwashed villagers", like those with pitchforks and torches that storm castles of evil characters in old movies. That's why the bloody pitchfork is part of the logo. Soon, it had grown so large it was threatening to take over the fallout board, so Jay and Necrolyte offered us a website (two, in fact)
OUR NEMESIS: although we try to combat this whenever it happens, or whoever causes it, the main focus of our wrath was an inconsiderate fellow that posted endlessly on the interplay fallout feedback board (don't try to find the posts, as they were deleted, mostly, by interplay admin)
his crimes? He verbally attacked, with extremely foul language, anyone who simply asked a question (newbies especially). I for one, was appalled, and tried to get him to be quiet (others tried, also). This only added fuel to the fire. I referred to him as a verbal terrorist, which I think is appropriate.
He also would post spoils, with the spoil in the title. This could happen once or twice due to ignorance, but he was politely, and then not so politely told to knock it off, but he kept doing it. (for example, he was fond of posting…THE WATER CHIP IS IN… in the title of his message, so one would be unable to avoid the knowledge, even if one didn't want that knowledge.)
Admin eventually told him to knock it off, and ultimately started deleting whole portions of the board that included his rants, and flames back at him (which I agree with that decision, by the way)
OUR PURPOSE: anyway, our original stated purpose, besides this one bad apple, was to try to remind others to be more considerate of newbies, by not flaming them unprovoked, and not spoiling in the title. In other words, we are an unruly mob that gangs up on those that unfairly gang up on unsuspecting others. Of course, we run the risk of being bad ourselves, sometimes, and mobs are always difficult to control, but by and large, we're pretty good folk.
For a while, there were Unwashed Villager guilds for other games too (Diablo II for example), but then they vanished, yes, it seemed as if the Unwashed Villagers as such had vanished from the Internet. The webpages of the old members went down or were not updated any more. But, as Troels Larsen ensures me in an Email,
The Unwashed Villagers are very much alive and we are currently hosted at uv.vault-tec.net. I am the one responsible for creating a new website for the placeholder site that is currently there. We are currently rebuilding the community after a rather turbulent time with several host changes, but we are as insane and unwashed as ever ;)
I was happy to hear that. The Homepage was still in temporary design until a H.E.C.K. (Homepage of Eden Creation Kit) was found, but it already had a lively board with more than a hundred registered members, you could browse the messages for hours and found a number of old acquaintances.
Then vault-tec.net went down, and the Unwashed Villagers again vanished from the web. I thought I had lost them for good, but then someone on Bethesda's Fallout 3 thread told me there was a forum again, now at forum.unwashed.org.
Since 2007 their site is on unwashed.eu. As of 2011-09-18, it consists only of a forum with no sub-boards. There is only little discussion about Fallout, and it seems that only few old members remain (Doombot and BlueCross being the most active ones).
[…] the Village was originally a really late night joke about those dirty peasants who chased monsters in old movies carried much too far. The original members banded and drove off these nasty people from Interplay's Fallout board.
It might seem silly, and at the time, it probably did to those 6 or 7 people, but that was more than a year and a half ago, more than 14 months for me. And there's something like 60 active members, plus a lot who come and go, or moved on to other things, a few who aren't allowed on until school is done (Miss you Aria.), and people who who seemingly vanished. As a whole, we don't like when our members have to go, but we know eventually they'll all come back at some point.
Steve Webber (for whom I have no longer a link) used to be
Sheelagh the Vault Dweller. He wrote some
Fallout stories for publication on Unwashed Villagers'
websites.
In an email, he wrote me about his Unwashed history:
While many of the members either retreated to the UW boards or migrated to the then-unreleased FO2’s boards (this is ancient history!) I and a few others remained on the FO1 board, serving up hints, tips and wit to all who needed it. Even with the release of FO2, I stuck with the FO1 boards until Interplay reshuffled their whole site and everything closed. My constant online companion was Hatchetman, who was more mature, less verbose, and a real firearms expert. We spent a lot of time on the boards chatting to Dave Hendee, who was kind enough to send me some Fallout magnetic stickers and a doorhanger (which I still have).
