Editing Fallout (section)

==Notable People, Mutants, and Factions==

===Tribals and Wastelanders===

Anyone who ''didn't'' grow up in a bunker (Vault, Military, Science-y, or otherwise). These shmucks have the burden of being born in a radioactive wasteland where ''everything'' is radioactive/mutagenic, and because time stopped during Boomer-era America, all the things you can find Pre-War contains Lead, Asbestos, and yup, more Nuclear Material. It's no wonder that the Enclave, the remnants of America's Pre-War government and its loyal troops, considers everyone in the Wasteland to be a [[Abhuman|sub-human mutant]] (but in reality though, the real reason why the Enclave hates everyone is because FEV, the virus that created Super Mutants, is already present in most humans simply because of how polluted and fucked up the Wasteland is.) 

Tribals on the other hand are humans who grew up in cultures that are just pastiches of Native American cultures. They tend to be very superstitious and avoid most Pre-War sites and artifacts (except guns, because AMERICA [and also because everything in the Wasteland can and will kill the unarmed]). The PC in FO2 is a Tribal, and you meet quite a few tribes in most games...except FO4 (this is going to be a running theme)

===Super Mutants===

[[Orks|7-foot tall sterile humanoids immune to aging, radiation and disease and built entirely of muscle that go to battle armed with the]] [[Choppa|biggest, heaviest choppers]] [[Dakka|or the shootiest, heaviest guns]] (and the [[Kommando|sneaky ones are Purple]]). [[Greenskin|Most of them are also Green]], except those in Washington D.C. because [[Derp|Reasons]]. They are stereotyped as big dumb cannibals, and you'd be right for the most part, [[This Guy|except for the ones that aren't]] and those from the "First Generation" of Super Mutants created by the [[God-Emperor of Man|Master]] (super mutated Psyker) himself. Each game has their own version of Super Mutants created by whatever mad scientist/evil organization/whatever-macguffin is present at the time, but they are all created due to experimentation with the FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus) that was supposed to turn humans into [[Adeptus Custodes|what peak performance looks like]], but ended up creating the pseudo-orcs we know today. 
<span style='color:green;font-size:115%'><s>THAT'S CUZ GREEN IS DA BEST!</s></span> <span style='color:darkgreen;font-size:116%'>NOW ''<sup>*wheeze*</sup>'' IS THE TIME OF THE SUPER MUTANT</span>

All that being said, you really do feel for the super mutants. All Super Mutants are the unwilling result of humans being mutated, with pure Vault dwellers and other [[Primaris Marine|untouched-by-mutation virgins]] producing the [[Fabius_Bile#The_Great_Work|best and most successful results]]. We know that it's a painful process, some kind of memory loss is a given and it's a rarity for the succeeding generations to have some sense of connection to their former life, so those that do and actually want to do good are such a rarity that [[grimdark|you can call it a margin of error]]. In the West Coast, all of them are either survivors of the Master's Army (intelligent) or second generations caused by haphazard conversions of wastelanders (dumb). The [[Boyz|Dumb-Dumbs]] follow the [[Nob|smart ones]], for better ([[Vulkan|Marcus is pretty much the coolest guy you'll ever meet]]) or worse (everyone else). 

The sneaky ones are the most dangerous, because they're all first generation and also suffering from [[Srs|intense and serious mental illness]] due to the stealth-radiation frying their brains and worsening the dementia they have from being so old, which is how you get [[Awesome|Grannies chopping down Deathclaws with helicopter blades while being egged on by her personal demon]] but also split personality Mr. Slave/[[murderhobo]].

As of Fallout 4, [[Derp|being a Super Mutant is a reversible condition]], because apparently it's easier to cure than a common cold.

===Ghouls===

Most people die when they take too much rads. You won the genetic lottery by becoming a living zombie, your body now a cancer that's nourished by radiation. On the plus side, you're immortal, but your mind will eventually decay (also made quicker by radiation). People will also treat you like absolute shit, and [[Brotherhood of Steel|some people may even shoot you on sight]]. 

===NCR===

Emerging out of the efforts of the Vault Dweller from FO1, the New California Republic was built with the trappings of pre-War California. They adhere to the principles of democracy and equality, though in reality, due to the difficulty of holding a country together in the wasteland, influence and power is bought by cattlefucking ranchers, unscrupulous arms dealers, and [[Rogue Traders|caravan companies]]. That, and their recent expansionist policies have stretched much of their military thin, and have also angered many communities who weren't keen on being annexed and taxed by the Republic. Though they're waaaaaay better than most of the other factions in the Wasteland, it's kind of a hard sell joining the faction that's so bad at its job, [[GRIMDARK|its Chief Ranger would rather die and have all his boys go down with him in a blaze of glory]] than let them be used as pawns in NCR power games. 

Having said all of this, even the most jaded and disheartened citizens and soldiers of the NCR still hold at least a grudging respect for the principles they live under, or realize how bad all the alternative groups are, which is often the main selling point to support the Republic, more so than just the fact that they are a "democracy". In fact, the NCR's greatest flaws also feed into their greatest strength. The [[Imperium of Man|NCR may be an overstretched, disorganized and corrupt expansionist government]], but despite that it's still [[Humanity Fuck Yeah|full of everyday decent people on the ground trying to make some difference with what they got.]]

===Enclave===
Introduced in FO2, the Enclave claim to be the rightful rulers and inheritors of post-apocalyptic America. Y'see, back before the bombs dropped, the situation in the world and the US themselves had already deteriorated to a point a nuclear war was seen as a certainty, so ''obviously'' douchebags in the government decided "fuck the people, ''our'' survival is top priority!" Made up of all manner of high-ranking assholes, including the President, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prize-winning scientists, wealthy industrialists, members of the military, influential politicians and other powerful men and women, they constructed their own secret sea-based survival retreat, and evacuated there several months prior to the big day (at least in the old fluff). These assholes were content to let the rest of the world die and planned on repopulating the wasteland afterwards <s>with their pure and uncorrupted Aryan genes</s>. When they finally deemed the mainland safe to return to, they weren't happy to find out that other people had survived, so they decided the best thing to do was to wipe out everyone who wasn't descended from their ranks (no matter how inbred said ranks might have been).

Basically, the Enclave represented the "Asshole Surviving Elite" archetype from post-apocalyptic fiction; they preserved themselves at the expense of the average American, they maintained and built upon the highest pre-War tech so they are ''the'' ultimate , and they regard all others outside of their ranks as fit only to be enslaved or exterminated.

The ultimate antagonist of FO2 (with [[Awesome|12' tall genetically engineered homicidal maniac cyborg ex-Marine-turned-Secret-Service-agent]] serving as a final boss), they returned in FO3 as a surviving offshoot that is somehow more numerous than the original organization, BoS-style, where here they began to pick up a following amongst fans, largely because the whole "genocidal old world elitist bastards" angle was kinda downplayed by an extensive use of in-game propaganda, despite the plan of eradicating all mutants still being the same. FONV shows the aftermath of the original Enclave being destroyed by the NCR/BoS alliance for several of ex-members, so few in number they are almost irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Their quest, however, is all about gathering said remnants and convincing them to support your chosen faction during the final fight. They don't show up in FO4, but a separate branch of the Enclave does make an appearance in the lore in FO76, where it turns out that one absolute fucking '''maniac''' of an Enclave member not only got into the POTUS' private survival bunker, but secretly sabotaged the escape effort so that anyone with a higher rank than him would not get to the bunker under Whitesprings, meaning he would be officially left as the POTUS by virtue of being the highest ranked governmental official present and alive. He promptly used this power to flood Appalachia with mutants and killer robots as part of a crazy plan to gain access to remaining nuclear stockpiles to continue bombing China... which, as far as anyone knew, had ''already'' been nuked to oblivion...

===[[Brotherhood of Steel]]===
[[Adeptus Mechanicus|Tech-hoarding soldiers]] [[Black Templar|LARPing]] as [[Bretonnia|Arthurian Knights]]. Seriously. 

Most notable for their near-exclusive use of Power Armor (until other, less toaster-obsessed factions came into play) and their fetish for energy weapons. The Brotherhood’s originated from US Army defectors who turned away from the atrocities and corruption of the pre- and post-war US Government under the guidance of High Elder Roger Maxson, who also wrote the [[Codex Astartes|Codex]] that continues to guide them to this day. 

Being the poster boys of the setting, each Fallout game features them in some capacity. Since the original organization was just one bunker, the idea of [[Space Marines|chapters]] was introduced. In their quest to reclaim more technology ([[Iron_Hands#The_Moirae_Schism|but also to exile the forward-thinking while still making them useful]]) expeditions were sent out to found new chapters all across America so that Brotherhood paladins and knights can be found pretty much anywhere in post-apocalyptic US. Their doctrines also widely differ from staunch traditionalism to even more [[Adeptus Mechanicus|AdMech]]-like behavior of the Mojave chapter, brutal pragmatism of the Midwestern Brotherhood or naïve idealism of the FO3 Eastern chapter. Said chapters also have a bad tendency of being more prominent and numerous of a force than the OG Brotherhood, but such is life in the Wasteland. 

The Brotherhood’s main mission is to safeguard the “forbidden” technology that led to the Great War, though they consider everything from Laser weapons to vital pre-War energy infrastructure as “forbidden” tech that cannot be trusted in the hands of “wasteland savages,” so they [[Template:American|liberate]] flashlights from the people who just happen to have it. To be fair to the Brotherhood, [[Dark Age of Technology|pre-War America was experimenting with some dangerous super-weapon level tech at the time, and were not above using their own citizens as guinea pigs]], as evidenced by the creation of Super Mutants and the entire Vault-Tec project. They also generally concentrate their efforts on things with immediate military applications, so they won't come knocking for your nuclear reactor (maybe). This also leads to them effectively ignoring civilian technologies like hydroponics, which bites them in the ass more often than not. None of that excuses the fact that their paranoia and elitism leads them to confiscate vital technology that could be used to actually better the lives of the Wastelanders around them.

Oh, and they're massive racists in fluff of every installment, shooting both Ghouls and Super Mutants on sight.

===Caesar's Legion===
The Big Bad of FNV, tribals larping as Rome, led by a man who can call himself [[God-Emperor|Caesar]] because most people are too illiterate to know what Rome is. They conquered a whole bunch of desert tribes (57 to be exact), but the truth is that they're really just a horde with a few Roman terms and ideas sprinkled in (mostly the nasty ones). They think the only way to save the world is to conquer everyone and impose a reactionary warlike totalitarian luddite misogynist anti-mutant homophobic puritanical militaristic dictatorship on everyone forever. If you can see the problem with this, congratulations on having at basic understanding of history, human behavior and morality. Pretty much everyone in the game says that the Legion will disintegrate when Caesar dies, except for Caesar himself, because he's a narcissistic fuck, which is unironically the only reason why the Legion is so cohesive. Considering his two likeliest successors are a blunt bloodthirsty brute and a two faced sadistic torturer, Caesar pretty much is the only figure in the Legion with the intellect to hold together this army of sycophantic slaves. They literally believe him to be the biggest gigachad ever, even though it's really because they're just [[/pol/|illiterate]].

===Followers of the Apocalypse===
Don't let the badass deathmetal name fool you, these guys are actually a bunch of nerds. If the Brotherhood is a bunch of tech hoarding soldiers, the Followers are their polar opposite, a group of [[SJW|pacifist scholars]] who seek to aid and educate the people of the Wastes. They have played an important role in the history of the West Coast and were the people responsible for educating the NCR, but due to the NCR's expansionism being at odds with the Followers goal of not repeating the same mistakes of the past (and encouraging self-determination over imperialism), the two factions have officially cut all ties with each other. Even though they're pacifists, don't expect them to just sit down and take it: they just leave the fighting to people who're good at it. Also, you have to give them props for surviving this long in the Wasteland, these guys got their start in the ruins of the LA Public Library back when Fallout was just an anarchic Mad Max simulator, and not a 50s music radio station, so they not only survived the lawless gang warfare of the LA Boneyard pre-NCR, but played a role in beating the Master and establishing the Wasteland's only true democracy. Also, Caesar was raised a Follower, though he was never a really good one.

===New Vegas===
The very two-sided metropolis of the Mojave and subdivided into two main factions, the Families under the leadership of Robert House, an obscenely wealthy and ambitious totally-not-Howard-Hughes Industrialist from the Pre-War years who survived the Great War thanks to his advanced life support systems and the various factions of outer Vegas, of whom the biggest is Freeside under the leadership of The King and the group of gangers of the same name, a rag-tag assortment of folks all cosplaying as Elvis Prestley. Mr. House holds an iron first over the wealth and technology of the Las Vegas Strip that he with the help of his advanced Robot Army built to be an unconquerable fortress. His aims for the Mojave is to "civilize" it, by which he means using the major power advantage his robot army gives him to enforce a free-trade zone independent from the rest of the Wastelanders. Being a true Ayn-Rand-style libertarian anarcho-capitalist with a serious god-complex, he usually views any kind of moral objection one might have to his egotistical dreams as a lack of vision. This brings with it its own buttload of problems, mainly that the people he "civilized" (The Families) self-admittedly didn't really agree to it in the first place and by the time of New Vegas tried to undermine Houses authority for very understandable reasons. The Families themselves, which House dubs his employees, are the former members of three wastelander tribes House basically forced at gunpoint to populate the Las Vegas strip some years prior are the Omertas, who were Slavers and Pimps who just continued their business under House, the White Glove Society, a bunch of cannibals whose tendencies and cultural habits turned out to be really hard to overcome, and the Chairmen, that were a band of marauding, drug-fueled raiders. The Kings that control most of outer Vegas (called Freeside) are a gang of Elvis Presley cosplayers whose boss once found a building that housed a school for Elvis Presley impersonators in the Rubble of Vegas and assumed that, in order to be so famous that other people wanted to be you, you must have been some sort of divine being and he subsequently assumed the style, music and even accent of the real deal for himself and his gang in a truly bizarre cargo cult. The Kings are both opposed to Mr. House, whom they view as the same sort of oppressive slaver as Caesar and the NCR, who step on their turf under Houses protection, much to their chagrin.

===Boston Factions===
Of the four factions vying for control over Boston, only two can be considered as having a large impact on the Wasteland outside of the Commonwealth, and one of those (The BOS) isn't even from Massachusetts. 

'''The Institute''' was formed by the scientists of MIT, their base fully underground, and the only way in either being teleportation, or through their toilets. Not only did they manage to ride out the Apocalypse, but were able to ''thrive'', their tech and quality of life being way beyond what anyone else in the Wasteland can even imagine. [[Tau|Everything inside is clean, shiny, and plastic.]] Their greatest creation is Synths, which are basically bladerunner-style synthetic life. Starting out as nothing more than mechanical robots before being perfected with full-on synthetic flesh completely indistinguishable from "real humans", they obviously did the amoral science thing and gave them sentience and free will that could instantly be overided with a few words. [[Men of Iron|Clearly, nothing can go wrong.]] 

These guys might look like squeaky-clean Futurists, but they're exactly like the pre-War scientist of Vault-Tec, but no longer bound by government/corporate agendas. Just like Vault-Tec, they do their experiment on civilians, which they do by replacing Wastelanders with Synths (i.e literally kidnapping and murdering a defenseless innocent after raping its brain for memories) so they can <s>watch people fuck</s> test their theories and make sure no one can mount an effective resistance against them. Of course, because Synths are sentient and do most of the actual work, some of the more advanced ones manage to escape, and over time, have worked with a group of sympathizers to create...

'''The Railroad'''. Named after the Underground railroad that helped free slaves, these guys do the same, but with Synths. <s> absolutely no word on whether or not they free real human slaves, like the ones you found in the Capital Wasteland, even though they have agents there, too, and a burgeoning anti-slavery faction</s> Whenever a Synth manages to break free from their programming and realizes they're pretty much people, they seek out the Railroad for help. The Railroad operates all over the East Coast, helping synths get away from <s>Blade Runners</s> [[Original character, do not steal|Coursers]], wiping their memories so they can get a fresh start, before spiriting them away to new lives. These guys have a pretty robust intelligence network with freed synths and even a Pre-War DeepBlue-copy, but are otherwise just regular Wastelanders and Sympathizers. That being said, most of the people of the Commonwealth dislike them because it's really hard to trust Synths whose personalities and wills can be overriden at any point and turned against you. 

'''The Minutemen''' - Named after the historic militia, these guys organize themselves the exact same way, down to the fucking muskets (technically it's a [[Wat|crank-operated]] single-shot laser, which makes 0 sense because it still uses <s>batteries</s> microfusion cells, and quite literally any weapon will be better. Apparently it was once planned to not need energy cells, but that feature was scrapped somewhere during production). Because these guys organize themselves with tactics straight out the Colonial-era, it was pretty easy for them to be wiped out by a gang of sadistic mercenary types called the Gunners that ''do organize themselves like a proper army''. These guys suck so bad, you are literally made their General within the game's first act, and you just kinda sorta stay in the position, even if you help anyone else, including Raiders (but at that point, the one guy will refuse to help you until you leave them, but you're still their General and besides him they'll still help you). Of course, just like the NCR, these guys are probably the ''best'' option for the Commonwealth because the members that really stuck around are the types that genuinely believe in their mission of making the Wasteland a better place, and unlike the Brotherhood, they understand that by wiping the Institute they can also free the Synths from their control, so there's no need to hunt them down.