Brainstorming: Brotherhood takes over the Mojave

[genolune]

Just an idea I've had in my head for awhile after playing Fallout 4. When confronted with Elder Maxson's hard charging, "Show No Mercy", Brotherhood (reminded me of Warhammer 40,000 and Space Marines), and replaying New Vegas, I felt like the Mojave Brotherhood was a bunch of weak willed wimps. For descendants of the U.S. Army, they didn't act like a military force, nor did they seem to have any tactical or strategic goals.

 

Basically, I'm brainstorming, and would like input from others. So I've copied and pasted my notes here. Ideally, it would use only vanilla Fallout assets to keep bug discovering and troubleshooting easy. At this stage, I'm trying to nail down some general ideas to get some kind of idea on what would make sense. This is after all, a military campaign.

 

Needs prioritization in order:
• Primary Needs (which will kill you if you don’t have them in order of how quickly you will die without them): Air (radiation scrubbers like FO4 Fog Condensers or gas masks?), Water, Food, Shelter / Clothing
• Secondary (same train of thought, defense for short term, medicine for long term, weapons for offense, ammunition for greater offense): Armor, Medicine, Weapons (Fiends and Van Graffs for laser and plasma weapons?), Ammunition (I thought the Pitt had a working ammo mill at the end of the DLC? Maybe a similar idea would work? Or take over Gun Runner building if that is base game, I might have to play the base game without any DLCs for once to find out)
• Tertiary: Supply Lines (supply lines could break the Legion according to end-game dialogue options and were foolishly ignored in Fallout 4 ie Quartermaster has you scrounge up food for troops), Training (for proficiency and excellence and calm under fire, it will definitely play a factor)

 

Other Ideas:
• Black Mountain & Lone Wolf Radio for extending radio areas (extending the Brotherhood’s communications network would provide a tactical advantage)
• New Vegas Steel (on West Side) & H&H Tools for manufacturing
• Vault 22 for crop materials & plant research
• HELIOS One for Power
• NCR Correctional Facility & Searchlight Airport for bases
• Sabotage McCarran train to prevent NCR reinforcements
• Take over each Ranger station (and secure radio towers) for outposts to extend Brotherhood patrolling

• Boomers for aircraft and artillery

• Mr. House's Securitron army would be good technology and the Brotherhood has used robots in the past. Maybe have the Brotherhood of Steel emblem as their face.

• Recruit wastelanders

• Helping people and acquiring technology are not mutually exclusive. Helping people improves goodwill and cooperation which is useful for wastelanders voluntarily providing intelligence, resources and recruits. In the base game, you help Legion/NCR to a certain point and they'll provide Legion drops/NCR radio so why not have a faction act that way.

 

I think that's everything I have. I just wanted to get that out there, see if others had any ideas, pointers, lore friendly ideas, etc.

[madmongo]

The West Coast Brotherhood and the East Coast Brotherhood are very, very different. People play Fallout 3 in which the Brotherhood are the heroes, and they think that the west coast Brotherhood is the same. It's not, even though the east coast Brotherhood started from the west coast Brotherhood. They are very, very different.

 

The Brotherhood on the east coast came from an expeditionary force from the west coast Brotherhood, led by Owen Lyons. They were trying to hook up with the Midwest Brotherhood, but couldn't find them and eventually ended up in Pittsburgh and then DC. Since it was a small expeditionary force, they had no choice but to rely on locals for help. Lyons was also the type of person who cared about other human beings, unlike most of the leaders of the west coast Brotherhood. These two factors radically changed the way that the east coast Brotherhood did things. Instead of keeping themselves separate from the wastelanders they encountered, the east coast Brotherhood became friendly with these wastelanders, and instead of hogging the water purifier for themselves in FO3, they provided water for everyone, and all of the wastelanders celebrated them as great heroes.

 

Things were very different out west. The western Brotherhood used to be the biggest and baddest guys out there. But then the got into a war with the Master's Army (Fallout 1), followed by conflicts with the Enclave. The constant battles took their toll on the western Brotherhood. To make things worse, while the east coast Brotherhood managed to find help and support among the locals, the west coast Brotherhood found the locals banding together in the expanding New California Republic, and the NCR saw the Brotherhood as a threat. The NCR didn't have much with respect to technology, but they had numbers. The NCR was constantly expanding, constantly getting a bigger and bigger army. So, as the east coast Brotherhood was getting friendlier and friendlier with the locals, the west coast Brotherhood was finding the locals to be more and more hostile.

 

The west coast Brotherhood started out much less wimpy than they are now, but constant fighting with the Enclave and the NCR slowly whittled away at the Brotherhood's numbers. While the east coast Brotherhood had a good relationship with locals and could integrate some of the friendlier ones into their ranks, the west coast Brotherhood found themselves at war with the locals, and weren't about to recruit outsiders into their fold. The east coast Brotherhood kept growing in strength, while the west coast Brotherhood, which was formerly the far more powerful of the two, became weaker and weaker. After several huge battles with the Enclave and an all-out war with the NCR, the west coast Brotherhood ended up broken and scattered.

 

And, very importantly, the west coast Brotherhood does not view the local populations as friends. To the west coast Brotherhood, the locals are an unfriendly menace that has done their best in recent years to completely destroy the Brotherhood. Therefore the locals are enemies that must be wiped out. It's not that the Mojave Brotherhood is weak-willed, but rather that they've been beaten into submission. After their losses in battle against the NCR, they retreated into their bunker and hid so that they wouldn't be hunted down and killed by the numerically superior NCR.

 

Don't make the mistake of thinking that they are the same Brotherhood as in FO3 and FO4. The west coast Brotherhood is very different in terms of how they view the world around them.

 

You'll notice as you go through the FNV quests, that while you can change the leadership of the Mojave Brotherhood, you can't really change their outlook on the people around them. They have no desire to aid the locals in any way, and if you force a change in leadership, the new leader (Hardin) doesn't really change the way that the Brotherhood does things.

 

Also, the Brotherhood isn't the descendants of the US Army. That's the Enclave. The Brotherhood was formed by a very small group of military personnel led by Roger Maxson who were sent to the Mariposa military base and didn't like what they saw there, and as a result they went rogue (justifiably so, in my opinion). They have their origins in the US Army, but they aren't the heirs to the US military.

 

Ok, that's the lore.

 

With all of that in mind, there's nothing wrong with having a big quest to rebuild the Mojave Brotherhood. You just need to adjust your lore behind it a bit to match up with the actual lore of Fallout.

 

I think this is completely do-able, in a lore-friendly way. To start out, you need a bunch of quests to build up the Brotherhood. They face enemies on all sides. Mr. House wants to wipe them out. The NCR wants to wipe them out. The Legion wants to conquer everyone, and hates technology, so Caesar wants to wipe them out too. But, the NCR is busy focusing on the Legion, and the Legion is busy focusing on the NCR. House is being sneaky and building up his securitron army, ready to pounce on both the NCR and the Legion when they go at each other at Hoover Dam.

 

So what does the Brotherhood do? I think their ultimate goal has to be to take out Mr. House and then use his securitrons to defeat both the NCR and the Legion at the dam. So basically it would kinda follow the Yes-Man path.

 

I don't think your idea of helping the locals and winning friends is very realistic. The NCR went to war against the Brotherhood, so all of the NCR squatters in New Vegas are going to have a deep-rooted hatred of the Brotherhood. The people of New Vegas and some of the surrounding settlements probably aren't going to care too much about the Brotherhood one way or the other (they didn't go to war with them) so you might be able to win some friends there, but Mr. House is going to get very uppity if the Brotherhood starts making themselves into a major political force in the Mojave. I think the Brotherhood's only chance at this is to be sneaky about it and to take out Mr. House when he's not expecting it. Then, with Mr. House's securitrons, the Brotherhood finally has enough strength to go toe-to-toe with the NCR and the Legion.

 

I also think that most of the members of the Brotherhood would be very much opposed to working with the locals. After all, that has always gone poorly in the past. They don't have any real contact with the east coast Brotherhood any more, so they don't have any examples of how working with the locals can actually work in their favor.

 

Making a partnership with the Boomers, or just taking them over (both could be options) would also give the Brotherhood more of a force at the Dam.

 

I like the idea of the Securitrons changing to have the BoS logo on their faces once the Brotherhood takes control of them.

 

Anyway, that's my thoughts.

[genolune]

Thanks for all that. I had to read quite a bit on the Fallout wiki to see that some of the ideas were partially implemented in the game such as elimination of the Van Graffs if certain outcomes were pursued. I also was reading that Arcade Gannon mentions that Freeside and Westside should be supplied power from HELIOS One for redundancy in case Caesar cuts off power to the dam, leading to the conclusion that power is covered by the dam (I truthfully, never go there nor really advance the main storyline because I'm always doing other things like mods and sidequests hehe) and that HELIOS One could safely be diverted into weaponry and power needs still met.

 

After reading the Yes Man's quest earlier before I read your post, I agree, essentially the Wild Card option could be kept intact, if not minimally altered.

 

What was the extent of the western Brotherhood's war with the Enclave? According to the wiki and my memory of Fallout 2, both of which are limited, it was primarily an NCR-Enclave war. I know that in the east it was primarily Enclave-Brotherhood conflict ie Fallout 3.

 

As far as helping locals, it's less helping them and more of a hearts and minds insurgency/counter-insurgency campaign practiced by Special Forces. Basically, you are trying to manipulate the locals into becoming tactical assets. Something along the lines of eliminating raiders in the area (raiders being a threat to Brotherhood as well) and then playing that card and opening diplomatic ties to start gaining access to information, supplies and potential recruits. Actually, Fallout 4 did it well with building up settlements to swell the ranks of the Minutemen with each settlement joining. It's less Elder Lyons altruism and more shrewd manipulation of the battlefield. Maybe a speech check could be implemented on a new high ranking NPC to be convinced of the logic behind it and/or old Special Operations Field Manuals could be located to aid in the development of military tactics and doctrine. The same attitude as the Legion could also be applied to the Brotherhood, ie give the populace of a settlement the opportunity to join and be folded into the Brotherhood and become Initiates or wipe them out.

 

Another idea:

Followers of Apocalypse for medicine and implants for Knights/Paladins

 

If I remember correctly from the wiki, Maxson took over the East Coast Brotherhood, 3 to 4 years after the events of New Vegas so I can't tie them together legitimately.

 

 

Sidenote: The Mojave is an interesting place. The NCR in the West which can barely hold its own and looks to be losing its grip, the Boomers in the North with artillery and flight training but not much else nor interest, Legion in the East waiting for the West to conquer it by overextension if it wins or dissolution when Caesar dies and no capable successor to guide the Legion, Mr. House in the center with interest only in New Vegas and using its economy to restart civilization but lacking a broader view at times in matters such as law, governance, and morality or virtue; and the Brotherhood in the South which is technologically advanced but basically crippled from the past. The Yes Man option is viable for New Vegas only, but unless you were to be very savvy politically or undergo a stasis like Mr. House when the Courier ages, there is no way it would last. Basically, as far as nation or state building, the options aren't good but then again, it is post-apocalypse so to be expected.