Brotherhood of Steel

The Brotherhood of Steel are a major faction in the Fallout series, usually appearing as protagonist faction that can assist the player character. They are a group of soldiers and scientists originally formed from a United States Military unit stationed at Mariposa Military Base before the Great War. Disgusted by the horrific human experiments conducted at the base, the soldiers defected from the military and formed the Brotherhood shortly following the nuclear exchange between the US and China, making it their mission to recover and store technology in the Wasteland to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
==History==
===Mariposa Rebellion===
In 2076, the NBC division of West Tek achieved breakthrough results in the Pan-Immunity Virion Project. The United States Defense Department, fearing international espionage, moved a military team under the command of Colonel Robert Spindel and Captain Roger Maxson onto the site to secure and oversee the project, now dubbed the Forced Evolutionary Virus (or FEV) project.
On 7th January, 2077, all FEV research was moved to the newly constructed Mariposa Military Base to commence testing of the virus on human subjects. The security team was transferred to the newly constructed base as well, to provide protection for the research going on within the facility. They were not informed of the nature of the research.
The situation unraveled shortly before 10th October, 2077. The soldiers stationed at Mariposa discovered the fact that the scientists under their care were performing experiments with the Forced Evolutionary Virus on military prisoners. The revelation prompted a nervous breakdown in Colonel Spindel, who locked himself in his office. Captain Maxson was the only officer left to handle the deteriorating situation.
Soldiers were screaming for blood and the whole situation was at risk of devolving into a bloodbath. On 12th October, when Maxson had to step in to prevent one of his subordinates from killing a member of the science team, he ordered interrogations of the science team under his authority as acting commander. He hoped to prevent a full mutiny by offering his troops a semblance of justice.
The first scientist was brought before Maxson a day later, on 13th October. Chief Researcher Robert Anderson explained that human experiments at the facility were sanctioned by the government. He outlined the program to the Captain, emphasizing the fact that it was the government that ordered. When Maxson refused to believe him, the scientist lost his nerve and started screaming how he was just following orders and that he was a military man just like Maxson. The Captain shot him in response. He rationalized it as trying to prevent a full-scale mutiny, but even he didn't believe it.
The killing of Robert Anderson effectively established Maxson as the leader of the rebellion. His position was further reinforced just two days later on 15th October, when he attempted to speak to Colonel Spindel through the door of his office. It soon became clear that the Colonel had lost touch with reality, so Maxson and several of his men broke down the door just in time to hear the Colonel apologize and shoot himself. Subsequent scientist interrogations invariably ended in executions.
Erin Shellman held out the longest by 18th October, finally convincing the Captain that the experiments were really ordered by the government with her detailed account. On 20th October, 2077, Captain Maxson declared his unit in full secession from the United States over the radio, attempting to force the government to respond to the situation at Mariposa. No response came. A day later, he ordered the families of soldiers under his command to take shelter within the facility.
On 23rd October, 2077, the Great War struck. As Maxson was halfway through prying the story from Head Researcher Leon Von Felden, the facility lost contact with the outside world as nuclear weapons started to drop. Spared the nuclear devastation, Mariposa protected the inhabitants from nuclear fallout flooding the wasteland. Fearing that China would soon make up for the oversight, on October 24, Maxson ordered his soldiers and their families to prepare to vacate the base the next day.
On 25th October, Sergeant Platner volunteered to take atmospheric readings outside the base. Reporting no significant amounts of radiation in the atmosphere, final preparations for the exodus were undertaken. On 26th October, Maxson ordered the remains of the scientists to be buried in the wastes outside the base. A day later, on 27th October, former US servicemen and their families left the base under the lead of Captain Roger Maxson, heading for the Lost Hills government bunker in the south.
===The Exodus===
In November, a few weeks later, war refugees arrived at the bunker. The people suffered casualties along the way, as while the soldiers were protected by T-51 power armor, their families had no armor to speak of. Marauders that attacked the caravan quickly learned to target the unprotected civilians. Though the attackers paid with two lives for every one they took, many were lost, including Roger Maxson's wife (but not his teenage son).
Several soldiers broke off during the Exodus as well, led by Sergeant Dennis Allen. Ignoring warnings from Captain Maxson and defying the group's will, Allen's faction separated from the convoy in order to excavate the remains of the West Tek Research Facility using their power armor. They were never heard from again. Around 2151, the Brotherhood sent out Knights to seek out Allen's group or its remains. All they found were desolate ruins.
The Exodus survivors claimed the Lost Hills bunker as their own. The refugees expanded and adapted it to fit their own needs, becoming a bastion of technology in a world that had lost centuries of technological development overnight. Maxson also needed to find others elsewhere in the U.S. to gain badly needed answers. Using surviving satellite connections, he reached out across the continent, broadcasting a request for contact.
By chance, Maxson found an old friend in Appalachia, Lieutenant Elizabeth Taggerdy of the US Army Rangers. Although initially hesitant to trust him due to his public declaration of secession before the war, she gambled and left the channel open. As Maxson revealed the depth of atrocities perpetrated by the United States government, Taggerdy's faith in the system was shaken, then dismantled. Following the winter spent at Camp Venture, she joined Maxson's banner.
===Foundation===
Witnessing how people around him slowly succumbed to depression, Captain Maxson formulated a new ideology for the survivors. It took him years to create it, replacing the tarnished Stars and Stripes with new symbols, new ranks, and new ideas to replace the ones scorched in nuclear fire. They would provide meaning for people before they became lost in the depths of despair after losing their friends, family, their entire world.
Although some under his command, particularly Lieutenant Taggerdy, were skeptical of his plans, Maxson believed that the way forward lay in new traditions and a new mythology, free of the burden of the past. He also believed that it would prevent any surviving politicians from exercising their authority over former American soldiers, especially those with an agenda that involved burning Americans on the funeral pyre of the regime. By June 20, 2082, all members under his command switched over to using Brotherhood ranks and practices.
The Brotherhood kept growing in New California, welcoming into its ranks a National Guard unit that was formerly stationed near Mariposa, acquired several bunkers and sent expeditions as far as the Mojave Wasteland, gathering intelligence and new recruits. As the Brotherhood in New California developed, so did its sister organization in Appalachia, under Paladin Lizzy Taggerdy.
Although she showed a bias towards candidates with a military background while building up the ranks, she eventually understood Roger Maxson's vision and continued to expand and develop the organization using Camp Venture as a training outpost. Despite initial resistance to the new rank system by the rest in her outfit, the new ideas offered by Maxson eventually took root and were accepted.
Although the Brotherhood's insistence on acquiring munitions for their fighting against mutants has led to ruffled feathers - especially with the Responders prior to the Charleston flood in December 2082 - they eventually found a common tongue, standing together during the Battle of Huntersville in May 2086. Although the Brotherhood sustained losses, it prevailed. This coincided with the announcement of a new mandate by Roger Maxson: The preservation of technology, to gather, record, and save the collective knowledge of mankind for future generations, to act as a catalyst for the rebirth of civilization in time.
Some responded to this new policy with enthusiasm, others with grudging acceptance, and yet others, like Sergeant Hank Madigan, left the Brotherhood to join the Responders. The new mission quickly took a backseat, however, as the Brotherhood encountered the scorchbeasts and the Scorched in the Cranberry Bog. Conferring with Maxson's ace researcher, Scribe Hailey Takano, the Brotherhood in Appalachia quickly calculated that the scorchbeasts represented a potential extinction event for humanity.
Lost Hills supplied a number of designs and weapon schematics to help stem the tide, including a sonic generator and an automated research program, but by the 2090s, the failing infrastructure of the Old World rapidly rendered communication impossible. Before being cut-off, Maxson ordered Taggerdy to hold the tide - and proscribed the use of nuclear weapons.
Eventually, the communications failed entirely, separating Lost Hills from Appalachia. The chapter in Appalachia fought on, trying to destroy the scorchbeasts through attrition, but by 2093, their numbers dwindled to the point where they were forced to close down Camp Venture, their first base, and focus their remaining forces at Fort Defiance and Thunder Mountain Power Plant.
Declining support from the Responders and the constant fighting just to stem the tide of the scorched and their masters took their toll, preventing the Brotherhood from completing the automated research program at Vault-Tec University, supplied to them by Takano. Eventually, the Brotherhood launched Operation Touchdown. This last ditch effort was launched in January 2095 and briefly stemmed the tide at the cost of the entire strike force, which included Knight Moreno and Paladin Taggerdy.
Ultimately, the Brotherhood in Appalachia was wiped out in their last stand at Fort Defiance and Thunder Mountain on August 18–19, 2095, marking the end of the Brotherhood in Appalachia. However, by 2103, a small group of reinforcements are on their way from Lost Hills, and are monitoring the area closely.
When the Brotherhood First Expeditionary Force arrived, with confirmation that Taggerdy's Brotherhood was completely wiped out to the last man, Paladin Leila Rahmani, leading the First Expeditionary Force, set up their new base of operations at the former ATLAS Observatory, turning it into Fort Atlas, and thus reestablishing the Brotherhood's presence in Appalachia. With help from the residents of Vault 76, who had been rebuilding in the ruins of Appalachia since Reclamation Day, the Brotherhood works with them to protect the people now returning to Appalachia, and attempt to continue to protect technology from the pre-War world to prevent a repeat of something like the Great War occurring again.
However, Rahmani faced tension with her second-in-command, Knight Daniel Shin, as an attempt to protect a community from Raider attacks by supplying them with Hellstorm missile launchers failed, with the community wiped out, save a few survivors, the Raiders getting the Hellstorms, and Knight Conners being killed, with the Raiders claiming his helmet as a trophy, and Shin blames himself as he supplied the Hellstorms, violating the Brotherhood's code to secure dangerous technology so it couldn't fall into the wrong hands. Shin felt that Elder Maxson and the other Elders needed to know and possibly put Shin and Rahmani on trial for their failure, but Rahmani fears doing so would cause the Elders to double-down on their policies of securing dangerous tech and ruin her attempts with convincing them to protect the people rebuilding in the post-War Wasteland as human life was more important. This comes to a head when she destroys an Enclave long-range transmitter that could have put them back in contact with Mariposa and Lost Hills, and Shin calls her out on having committed high treason with severing any hope of reestablishing contact with Maxson. Their conflict is temporarily put on hold when they receive word that Fort Atlas is under attack.
Though a Super Mutant attack on Fort Atlas temporarily mends the tension and hostility between Rahmani and Shin as they investigate the source of the Super Mutants after learning they have attacked other places in Appalachia, including the New Appalachia Settlers main camp of Foundation, they soon discover that Dr. Edgar Blackburn, one of the people who came to Fort Atlas earlier to ask for the Brotherhood's help, only to be turned away by Shin, is behind the Super Mutants as he tried to perfect the Forced Evolutionary Virus in a bid to help humanity survive in the Wasteland. Although he is captured while working on his research in Vault 96, saving several test subjects before they could be exposed to the FEV as well, Blackburn revealed that his co-conspirators are already at the West Tek research center to complete the project and are preparing to release the FEV into the air and water supply, creating another Super Mutant apocalypse worse than Huntersville. Rahmani and Shin head to West Tek to confront Blackburn's allies, but in a bid to prove their research is for the betterment of humanity, Blackburn asks to be exposed to the FEV himself to prove it has been perfected. However, something goes wrong during the process, and Blackburn is turned into a berserking Super Mutant Behemoth, forcing Rahmani and Shin to kill him. Shin is furious about this, reminding Rahmani that securing dangerous tech like the FEV is what the Elders wanted to do to prevent people from playing God with things like the FEV in the first place. Nevertheless, upon confronting Blackburn's co-workers, they beg for their lives, pleading that their research is invaluable to the Wasteland with schools and universities gone and without education to pass on their knowledge, killing them will cause it to vanish forever. Though Rahmani wants to spare them, Shin refuses, believing they are better off dead. In the end, the Vault 76 residents have to decide which Brotherhood member they are willing to side with over the fate of Blackburn's fellow scientists. Side with Rahmani, and Shin decides he's done with Rahmani and prepares to head back to Lost Hills and Mariposa to report to Elder Maxson about what's happened in person, or side with Shin, and Rahmani is branded a traitor and leaves to rebuild the Brotherhood to her ideals somewhere else, essentially going into exile. Whatever the choice, the remaining commander takes over leadership of the Brotherhood and Fort Atlas from that point onwards.
===Conflict with the Vipers===
In 2135, Roger Maxson died of cancer. Already a legendary figure to the Brotherhood, he was essentially deified as the Founder and Deliverer. His son, Maxson II, replaced him as the High Elder, while his grandson, John Maxson, joined the Paladin caste, showing great promise. Around 2141, the Brotherhood ceased admitting new members from the outside, relying solely on their natural growth for increasing their numbers.
The Brotherhood was a major power in the region at this point, firmly exercising their control on the lands surrounding their bunker and forming trade relations with the neighboring towns, especially the Hub. However, the focus on hard sciences gave in to the detriment of humanities, history in particular. This decline in soft sciences eventually lead to some Initiates of the youngest generations having no idea who Roger Maxson was. In 2150, they clashed with the newly reformed Vipers.
The battles intensified in subsequent years, culminating in the death of High Elder Maxson II in 2155. John Maxson's father expected the raiders to break formation and flee when faced with Brotherhood warriors clad in powered armor, but did not account for their religious ferocity. A poisoned arrow nicked him when his helmet was off, and he died within hours. John Maxson was promoted to the Elder council, while Rhombus was tasked with conducting a campaign of extermination against the Vipers.
The Paladins tracked down and wiped out almost all of their members within the span of a month. A handful of Vipers were able to flee north and east into the mountain range; While small groups continued to exist and raid in New California, they never regained their full power. Both Rhombus and John Maxson would eventually ascend to leadership roles, with John Maxson becoming the High Elder in 2159 and promoting Rhombus to the role of Head Paladin.
During the campaign, the Brotherhood sent a few scouts and emissaries to the Hub to track down Vipers members, and from these beginnings, the Hub and the Brotherhood began full trade relations. Caravans had delivered to the Brotherhood before, but not long after the destruction of the Vipers, caravan trains ran directly from the Hub to the Brotherhood on a regular basis.
While the situation remained peaceful and prosperous, issues would develop between the Hub and the Brotherhood from time to time. In the late 2150s, the Water Merchants of the Hub attempted to barter a large quantity of water for a weapons stockpile. Although the Brotherhood turned down the offer, the merchants attempted to take the weapons regardless. The thieves were caught, but the Brotherhood Elders voted down a retaliatory expedition.
===Unity's Emergence===
In 2161, the Brotherhood discovered the presence of a new enemy. In October, a group of Knights on a patrol in the badlands discovered a dead super mutant. After examining the creature, Master Scribe Vree determined that it was sterile, but also notes that there must have been a central location that created these mutants. The Elder Council, fearing a potential invasion, enacted several security decrees, including a moratorium on training new recruits until the threat passed.
The Elders also sent out several scouts north and east into the badlands. Only one returned from the east, reporting an encounter with twenty super mutants, and none at all returned from the north. The Council could not reach an agreement on how to act. Even as Hub merchant caravans started disappearing in the northern wastes, the Elders refused to act until they were fully certain that there was an army massing in the northern mountains.
The impasse was broken by the arrival of the Vault Dweller. Having rescued a Brotherhood Initiate from bandits in the Hub, the Dweller visited the Brotherhood and accepted the mission to the Glow, to recover the disk belonging to Sergeant Dennis Allen to learn the fate of the splinter faction from the Mariposa Rebellion. The Dweller surprised everyone by surviving and returning with the artifact. He became the first outsider to join the Brotherhood in nearly twenty years.
The Brotherhood shared what knowledge they had and some of their advanced technology with the Dweller, allowing him to seek out the Master and destroy him in the Boneyard. Following the death of the super mutant leader, the Brotherhood further aided the Vault Dweller's quest, sending a team of crack assault Paladins to storm Mariposa.
===Apex of Power===
Following the destruction of the Unity, the Brotherhood aided other human settlements to drive the mutants away with minimal loss of life on both sides of the conflict. The Brotherhood remained out of the power structure for a time, becoming a major research and development house by reintroducing advanced technology into New California at a slow pace. The wise guidance of Rhombus arguably brought the Brotherhood to the zenith of its power.
The Brotherhood had good relations with the developing New California Republic, to the point that one of the states of the federation was named after the founder of the Brotherhood: Maxson. However, Lost Hills was never incorporated into the NCR. Over the years, the Brotherhood grew confident in its status as the sole source of advanced technology left to mankind, and allowed its prominence and influence to wane, growing stagnant.
This stagnancy made them unable to deal with the technologically superior Enclave, when the Brotherhood learned of their existence circa 2240. In order to learn more about them, the Brotherhood reactivated a network of outposts in Northern California to observe Enclave activity. Thanks to their low profile, they achieved practical anonymity, even in the populous San Francisco.
Once the Enclave was destroyed by the Chosen One, the Brotherhood was without a foe to face. In an effort to end the stagnation the Brotherhood expanded eastward (most notably the formation of the Mojave chapter under Elder Elijah) and sent out expeditions to recover technology, going as far as the Capital Wasteland in 2255, with the expedition under Senior Paladin Owyn Lyons.
===NCR-Brotherhood War===
The rampant expansionism of the NCR would eventually lead to a collision course with the Brotherhood. As the NCR's power grew, the Brotherhood adopted a policy of reclaiming technology from people outside the order, energy weapons most of all. The disagreements over the way technology should be handled eventually resulted in full out war with the New California Republic. The Brotherhood was eventually forced into a retreat.
At least six Brotherhood bunkers were lost to the Republic, four of them destroyed by the Brotherhood themselves in a last ditch attempt to deny them to the enemy. The most well-known known confrontation occurred during the NCRA's Operation: Sunburst in 2276. Under Elder Elijah's leadership, the Mojave chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel was operating out of the solar power plant of HELIOS One when the NCR launched an attack.
The NCR's numerical superiority over the Brotherhood, coupled with Elder Elijah's immense reluctance to leave Helios, allowed the NCR to overwhelm the defenders, leading to the loss of over half the chapter. The Mojave chapter of the Brotherhood was considered effectively neutralized. The Mojave chapter went under lockdown following their defeat at HELIOS One and the retreat to Hidden Valley. Despite their crushing victory over the Brotherhood, the war would serve to cost the NCR dearly.
Apart from losses in manpower and materiel, the greatest victim of the war was the Republic's economy. The Republic's gold reserves were completely destroyed by Brotherhood raids: new gold coins could not be minted and paper money could not be properly backed with gold. NCR citizens panicked and rushed to reclaim the listed face value of currency from NCR's remaining gold reserves. Since the NCR was unable to realize these withdrawals, particularly towards the frontier, faith in their currency considerably dropped.
To protect against actual economic collapse, the NCR government abandoned the gold standard. Since then many wastelanders lost faith in it as a medium of worth, both as a result of it not being backed by anything but the government's word and the inevitable inflation. In response to the loss of faith, merchant consortiums of the Hub established their own currency, the veritable bottle cap, backing it with a standardized measure of water.
===The Brotherhood in the Capital===
The Brotherhood's presence in the east suffered a further setback, when Elder Lyons, head of the Capital Wasteland division, refused a direct order from the Lost Hills Elder Council, confirming their suspicions that he has gone rogue and was no longer pursuing the original mission. In response, the Brotherhood completely shut off communications to Lyon's division and denied them any reinforcements.
Alone, Lyons' organization attempted to implement a charitable program of aiding the wasteland, but their insistence on charity, rather than an equitable exchange, led to their steady decline and loss of territory. While the tides seemed to turn during the Battle of Project Purity with the remnants of the Enclave, thanks to the influx of new technology and resources, the organization was effectively crumbling.
The key blow to the organization came with the death of Owyn Lyons circa 2278 and the loss of now-Elder Sarah Lyons later that same year. With the seat of power emptied, the remaining Brotherhood members elected multiple ineffectual leaders, while the adolescent Squire Arthur Maxson matured into a capable warrior and tactician, eventually securing a victory over Shepherd, the new warboss of the Capital Wasteland super mutants, in 2282. This feat earned him a provisional leadership position. In fact, this position was bestowed by West Coast Elders, who revealed that they still monitored their errant brethren.
Maxson's position solidified in 2283, when he negotiated a treaty with the Brotherhood Outcasts, bringing them back into the fold and reforming the entire organization, abandoning Lyons' Doctrine. Lyons' Brotherhood became a distant memory as Maxson restored the original mission of the Brotherhood of Steel. While some members found this distasteful and left, the overwhelming majority remained, proud to serve a refocused Brotherhood. Maxson became leader of the Brotherhood's Eastern branch, effectively leading to its rebirth.
==Technology and Equipment==
The Brotherhood have access to a high tech pre-war arsenal with weapons such as laser guns, gatling lasers, plasma guns, gauss rifles, and even Tesla cannons. Additionally They have access to a wide variety of power armors including but not limited to, the T-45, T-51, and T-60. Additionally it is shown they have the ability to reprogram robots to act as soldiers or helpers with the most destructive robotic weapon in their arsenal being the Liberty Prime, a robot that was left unfinished during the war. One of their biggest advancements was during their mission to destroy the Institute in the Commonwealth with their construction and subsequent use of an airship known as The Prydwen. The Appalachia chapter of the Brotherhood during their soon to be failed mission of wiping out the Scorched plague found that the Ultracite crystals that the plague originated from became a deadly poison to infected hosts of the plague and were able to design laser guns, gatling lasers, and even suits of T-51 power armor upgraded by Ultracite.
Weapons 	Armour
Laser Rifle 	Recon Armor
Laser Pistol 	Brotherhood Fatigues
Ultracite Laser Rifle 	Brotherhood Recon Armor
Ultracite Laser Pistol 	Brotherhood Uniform
Gatling laser 	Brotherhood Combat Armor
Ultracite Gatling laser 	Brotherhood Recon Armor
Brotherhood Recon Rifle 	Steel Dawn Fatigues
Crusader Pistol 	Scribe Robes
War Glave 	Science Scribe's Armor
Plasma Pistol 	Field Scribe's Uniform
Plasma Rifle 	T-45 Power Armor
Plasma Caster 	T-51 Power Armor
Plasma Cutter 	T-60 Power Armor
Gatling Plasma 	Ultracite Power Armor
Minigun 	
Assault Rifle 	
Missile Launcher 	
Hellstorm Missile Launcher	
50 Calibre Machine Gun 	
==Licensing==
This article contains content derived from the "BoS" article on Nukapedia, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
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