The Master: Richard Grey, Creator of the Super Mutants

The Master is the main villain of the original Fallout, a man named Richard Grey who was transformed by the Forced Evolutionary Virus into a huge, fused mass of flesh, other people and machinery. The game calls him the Master of the Super Mutants. From a vault beneath a church in the ruins of Los Angeles, he builds an army of super mutants to remake humanity in his image. (Fallout)

Who was Richard Grey?#

Grey was a doctor living in the Hub. Harold, a trader there, calls him "Brilliant guy. A doctor and philosopher." Mutants were attacking the caravans, mostly from the northwest, and Harold organised an expedition to find their source. Grey led it. (Fallout)

They found an old military base, which Harold in Fallout 3 remembers as Mariposa. Robots guarding it killed a member named Francine and wounded another, Mark, who was sent back. Only Grey and Harold reached the base's core. A robotic crane slammed into them, and the last Harold saw of Grey, he was flying into what looked like an acid bath. Harold woke up in the wasteland, already changing into a ghoul-like mutant. (Fallout; Fallout 3)

How did Grey become the Master?#

The vat was full of FEV. Grey's audio diary, stored on the vats control computer at Mariposa Military Base, tells the rest in his own words. He nearly drowned, dragged himself out and hacked the computer to shut down the robots. His skin festered and bubbled, but he felt stronger. (Fallout)

Then a tendril sprang from his stomach and swallowed one of the mutated rodents in the base, and he felt its mind. His thinking grew sharper: "I feel that I can understand even the most complex philosophical questions simply and directly." He dipped a dog and a rat together, saw them fuse, and decided this was the future, a harmonious unity of creatures. (Fallout)

A neurolink grew between him and the base computer, which told him the slime was a man-made virus. Wanderers who strayed into the base turned into big, dumb mutants, and he ate them. The breakthrough came when one subject with a low radiation count converted cleanly and joined his mind. From then on he built an army, and went looking for a permanent home with more knowledge and more bio-mass. (Fallout)

What was the Unity?#

The Unity was the Master's plan for humanity. He tells the Vault Dweller, "As long as there are differences, we will tear ourselves apart fighting each other." His answer was one race, super mutants, built to survive the wasteland. People who refused would be sterilised and let go, and anyone who resisted would be executed. No one outside the Unity would be allowed to breed. (Fallout)

Mariposa stayed the factory. A super mutant called the Lieutenant ran the vats there and called the place "the great procreator". He also explains why vaults matter so much to the Master: people sealed away from radiation take the virus best. Vault 13 was exactly what they were looking for. (Fallout)

The Master himself moved into the Los Angeles Vault, under the Boneyard, and grew into it. Human limbs sprout from the walls, and his central body has fused with the overseer's chair and the vault computer. He speaks in several voices that interrupt each other and repeat words. Above him stands the Cathedral of the Children of the Cathedral, a cult led by Morpheus that gives the Unity a friendly face and spies for it. Nightkin, super mutants cloaked by Stealth Boys, guard the place. (Fallout)

He is also psychic. Visitors to his chamber must wear a psychic nullifier to get through the Corridor of Revulsion outside it. (Fallout)

How does the Vault Dweller stop the Master?#

The Vault Dweller can end him three ways. The first is a straight fight against a creature with a Gatling laser who keeps calling super mutants into the room. The second is to sneak into the lower levels and set off the nuclear bomb kept there. The third is to talk. (Fallout)

Talking needs the evidence. Vree, a scientist of the Brotherhood of Steel, studies super mutant bodies, and her autopsy shows that the virus leaves them sterile. A clever, persuasive Vault Dweller can show the Master that the Unity can never have children, so his master race is a dead end. He breaks: "It was madness. I can see that now." He sets off the bomb, destroying himself and the Cathedral. (Fallout)

The Vault Dweller can also agree to join. That ending shows them dipped and Vault 13 overrun by super mutants. Fallout 2 settles the matter: the Vault Dweller killed the Master and destroyed the vats at Mariposa. (Fallout; Fallout 2)

What happened after the Master died?#

The Unity fell apart. In Fallout 2, a woman in the Den remembers her mother describing huge armed mutants heading north and east as if fleeing something, along with cultists in tattered purple robes who kept saying the Master was dead. Marcus, a veteran of the army, ends up sheriff of Broken Hills. (Fallout 2)

His soldiers outlive him by more than a century. By New Vegas in 2281, Marcus runs Jacobstown, and Nightkin who served the Master are half mad from years of Stealth Boy use. Lily Bowen, a grandmotherly Nightkin, says she killed a lot of people for him. A loading screen says the Mojave's super mutants are remnants of the Master's army and of the Enclave's experiments at Mariposa. In Dead Money, the split personality Dog and God reveals that Dog was conditioned to serve the Master. (Fallout: New Vegas; Fallout: New Vegas: Dead Money)

Harold lasts longest. He turns up in Fallout 2 in the ghoul town of Gecko, and again in Fallout 3 with a tree growing out of his head, still remembering the friend knocked into the green goo. (Fallout 2; Fallout 3)