The Brotherhood of Steel

 Ad Victoriam.

When we come to Fallout, is there any single faction more intrinsic to the game than 'The Brotherhood of Steel'? Surely not, given that it is their visage which adorns the cover of Fallout 1, 3, 4, 76: Wastelanders, and Brotherhood Tactics. The mean mugging face of those power armoured helmets get plastered over all the promotional material, all the game trailers and quickly become some of the most sought-out armour sets in the games. And why not? They're stylish, powerful, and give off that 'I'm a walking tank utterly untouchable by the wasteland' vibe that is just so desirable. And of course that attention naturally draws eyes to the faction who don it most, The Brotherhood themselves, making them a shoe in for favourite post apocalyptic group in most general polls. Which is interesting considering how diverse the Brotherhood themselves have been in who they are and what they represent throughout their many appearances in Fallout lore.

Whereas the high ranking of the US Military had their passage into the post-war world guaranteed through back-door antics, exclusive saftey protocols and a membership into the elusive 'Enclave'; the grunts of the United States Armed Forces had to suffer the apocalypse along with everyone else. Such was the case for those who served under Captain Roger Maxon as they served at the Mariposa Military Base, overseeing a group of West-Tek military researchers as they worked to create a virus that could counteract biological weapons that could be deployed from China. As tensions between China and America started to heat up and experiments being performed on military prisoners came to light, Captain Maxon became stuck in a conflict between his morality and his duties. Morals won out and Maxon ended up leading a rebellion to shut down the West-Tek operation and get to the bottom of who was behind it. His little coup d'état was shortlived, however; because hardly two weeks after the good Captain went rogue, the Great War ended the world on October 23, 2077.

Maxon was left in command of a disillusioned military force and their on-base families who had just lost their entire worlds, and so the responsibility fell to him to pick those soldiers up and rebuild their rigid militarism into a force dedicated to a new commanding structure; one which placed himself at the head. Perhaps taking inspiration off romantic tales of medieval chivalry and staunch adherence to strict moral values, he based his new military around the principals of medieval knighthood; an model formed less off how medieval knights would have appeared in real history, and more how they are glorified in old fantasy stories. American military ranks were abandoned in favour of medieval roles that honed on each individuals key skills that they could dedicate to his new Brotherhood. That meant scribes who studied technology and kept history, Knights who donned the salvaged military power armour and were deployed against credible threats, Paladin's who exemplified the virtues of  the Brotherhood and enforced them with the fist of order, and the Elders who would manage individual 'Chapters' stretched across America, so that the Brotherhood could operate independently on the otherside of the continent if it needed to.

But what were these principles that Maxon founded his new military under? Well he remembered well the insanity that had gripped the immoral scientists of West-Tek as they played god manipulating and re-writing the human genome; and everyone had a front-seat view to the consequences of the thoughtless, greed-driven, machinations of a ruling class with the maturity of children throwing stones, but the technology of intercontinental ballistic missiles at their fingertips. As such, Maxon formed his Brotherhood to be a bulwark over the survivors of humanity to stop another catastrophe like the Great War happening again, through whatever means necessary. In his eyes, the masters of the post-world were no better equipped than the elites who had ended the world, and thus could not be trusted with the various advanced technologies and weapons left from the Old world. Only his people, drilled as they were with military discipline and trained to study and utilise various pre-war tech weapons, deserved to inherent the power of technology. As such the Brotherhood have developed a reputation as technology-obsessed fanatics who will turn over a town to secure one errant laser pistol. 

Nearly a century later and the Brotherhood had established themselves as an enigmatic and powerful force within the Wasteland, one that rarely involved itself with the squabbles of the common people but not a passive and approachable people either. Some chapters of the Brotherhood adopt a outright xenophobic stance against the denizens of the wasteland, and often become outright hostile to those that demonstrate significant mutation such as Super Mutants and Ghouls. Concepts such as 'purity' and 'abomination' bring the Brotherhood closer in line with the fascistic government they split away from so long ago then they'd ever care to admit. Never so close, however, as the Enclave have always been; which is just one of the many reasons why when that secretive pro-American-elitism cabal resurfaced, the Brotherhood would be destined to clash with them.

On the East Coast around the date of 2277, The Brotherhood of Steel had a very different reputation. Operating in the heart of the Capital and amidst a sea of Super Mutants, the Brotherhood had adopted the role of protectors of the wastes, saving the battered locals with genuine public good works that turned them into something of a public defence force. They even worked to provide clean water to the residents there using a technological project called Project Purity; something the western Brotherhood would never have condoned. In general this really does highlight the weakness of the whole 'independently operating chapters anchored by an Elder', because all it takes is for an Elder to come along who holds a different set of values, despite his disciplined raising, and the integral values of your faction can just whittle away. Some small contingent broke off from that chapter and labelled themselves 'Outcasts', but the majority of their number assimilated to this new way of life completely.

That same branch of the Brotherhood did have a chance to make up for their transgressions in the face of their elders, in the time when they met out war against the resurfaced Enclave threat. Having battled them before and found their technological capabilities comparable, both factions had positioned themselves as sort of arch-nemesis to each other. All out warfare over the Capital Wasteland bought rise to powerful technologies the likes of which never even walked in the time of the Old world, such as the commie-smashing Liberty Prime and the Enclave's Bradley-Hercules Orbital Bombardment station. Once again, supposedly superior minds wielding doomsday weapons bought chaos and destruction to the world, betraying the cold hypocritical truth behind the Brotherhood's mantle of confiscation for preservations sake. They are just as unworthy of these weapons as those who burned the earth 200 years previously.

With their cool power armour and their slick laser weaponry, and especially with their friendly protagonistic role in Fallout 3, it's common for people to mistake the Brotherhood of Steel for the 'Goodguys of Fallout', forgetting how this is a world that's supposed to be devoid of such arbitrary positive and negatives. In truth they aren't all that different from the various factions they align themselves opposite too and context could just as easily frame them as the merciless subjugators without their number breaking a single code in their book of rules. Such is the danger of groups who err on extremes and purposely foster a perception of superiority justified on assumed universal truths. Today's saviors can so very easy be tomorrow's conquerors.