Brotherhood of Steel

The Brotherhood of Steel (BoS) is a quasi-religious organization operating across the ruins of post-war North America, with its roots stemming from the American military and the government-sponsored scientific community from before the Great War.

The founder of the Brotherhood of Steel was Captain Roger Maxson of the United States Army. He was a member of a military team commanded by Colonel Robert Spindel, originally sent to the West-Tek research facility on January 3, 2076 by the U.S. Army to monitor the experiments being conducted there by West-Tek on behalf of the American government in the interest of national security. On January 7, 2077, all West-Tek military research was moved to the newly-constructed Mariposa Military Base, along with Spindel's team, to enhance the research's security.
On October 10, 2077 Captain Maxson and his men discovered, to their horror, that the West-Tek scientists at Mariposa were using military prisoners as involuntary test subjects in their experiments with the genetically-engineered Forced Evolutionary Virus. Morale in the base broke down, and Colonel Spindel suffered a mental breakdown, eventually committing suicide five days later. Captain Maxson's men turned to him for leadership in the midst of the crisis.

After interrogating Robert Anderson, the chief scientist on the West-Tek research team, and learning about the extent of their scientific experiments on military prisoners, Maxson executed Anderson and many of the other scientists. Maxson, now in control of Mariposa, declared himself to be in full desertion from the U.S. Army via radio on October 20, 2077. Strangely, he got no response from the Army chain-of-command, as the rest of the Army was too busy fighting the Chinese threat. Three days later, on October 23, 2077, the nuclear arsenals of both sides were launched, and the Great War ended two hours after it started, with most of the Earth reduced to a radioactive wasteland.

The Mariposa Military Base survived the nuclear exchange that devastated the United States, the soldiers within protected from the radiation and FEV flooding into the newly created Wasteland by the base's highly-effective nuclear, biological and chemical weapons protection protocols.

Two days later at Mariposa, on October 25, 2077, an Army scout in power armor named Platner was sent out to get specific readings on the atmosphere. He reported no significant amounts of radiation in the area surrounding the facility. After burying the bodies of the executed scientists in the wastes outside of Mariposa, the soldiers sealed the military base, then headed out into the desert, taking supplies and weapon schematics from the base with them.


Captain Maxson led his men and their families to the government fallout bunker at Lost Hills in California ("the Exodus"). In November 2077, after a few weeks in the Wasteland, the soldiers and their families arrived at the Lost Hills bunker. However, they suffered many casualties along the way from the terrible conditions of the Wasteland, including Maxson's wife (but not his teenage son). The Lost Hills bunker became the headquarters of the newly formed paramilitary organization that Maxson created and named the Brotherhood of Steel, intending to use its resources to eventually rebuild human civilization—no matter the cost.