Everest Hotel

Everest Hotel is a location in Wasteland 3.

Background
In the mountains northwest of Denver stands a grand but somewhat weathered hotel, a remnant from simpler, more peaceful times. When the bombs fell in 1998, the hotel guests watched mushroom clouds rise over the mountains and listened to the world end over the radio. They talked long into the night about what the future held. Then, over the next few days, they had final, sumptuous meals before wandering into the surrounding forest to hang themselves. Only the caretakers remained - employees, at first, and then people seduced by the idea that they could bring back a certain elegance to the world.

As the world devolved into savagery, stories of this relatively peaceful end spread through Colorado. The Everest became a popular destination for suicidal pilgrims who came to the hotel for a joyful final repast before joining the frozen corpses hanging in the forest.

Those corpses instill superstitious fear in the wild, inbred clans in the surrounding mountains, as well as a certain unease in neighboring settlements. Rumor has it that the Everest is haunted - those who spend too much time here swear that they hear the whispering voices of the unquiet dead. The caretakers of the Everest don’t mind. They are people of quiet faith and firm belief in doing the right thing by their guests, and they welcome anyone who comes to their doors.

The Suicide Forest beyond their walls is not as peaceful. Predatory cats of unusual size and intelligence roam the hills, as more than one corpse-robber has found to his chagrin. Caves twist into the hard rock of the mountain - a perfect place to den for the long winter, or for a thoughtful, morality-light “entrepreneur” to set up shop far from the prying eyes of what remains of Colorado’s law.

Above it all, the Everest looms, promising an end to the misery of life in this world. Stop on by! Reservations are appreciated, but even if the hotel is full, hang around.

A room should be vacant soon...

Points of interest

 * The hotel has been cut from Wasteland 3.

Behind the scenes
"The idea for the hotel was born from the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, inspiration for Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel in “The Shining”. I wanted to make a haunted hotel, a place with a hideous secret that would entrap the unwary. As a secondary goal, I wanted to include several references to The Shining itself as an homage to an author whose early work had an outsize influence on my career (read: gave me nightmares as a kid).

Originally, I was looking at the basement of the hotel as the home to a dimensional rift, and it was voices from the rift that spoke to the caretakers of the hotel, exhorting them to murder/“preserve the spirits of the lost”. The first comment on this plan was, “This is Wasteland, not Torment.”

OK, fine. What if instead of an actual rift, the caretakers just believe there’s a hole to another world there? That’s still cool, but now we need to explain why it is that they’d believe such a thing. The easiest solution to that? Mass hallucination and charismatic cult leaders.

So now I needed to find a way to induce mass hallucination in this crowd, and what easier way to do that than via the fungus the caretakers use for food? Throw some hallucinogens (similar to psilocybin), maybe include something like Cordyceps to rewire their neural pathways, and suddenly having the caretakers believing that they can kill people to save them starts to sound almost reasonable."

- Colin McComb


 * Other updates from Fig: https://www.fig.co/campaigns/wasteland-3/updates/531