A-Z Fallout lore

M is for the Master

The Master was the alleged leader of a Super Mutant army in the second half of the 22nd century. Of all the wasteland myths passed down from one generation to the next, perhaps none has proven as enduring as the tale of the Master, even if only as a scary bedtime story for small children. According to the story the Master, in some versions called the Dark God or New God, was a highly intelligent creature, neither man, Ghoul nor Super Mutant but composed of many creatures in one, with mental abilities far beyond normal mortals. Making his lair in a newly erected cathedral in the Boneyard, the Master created an army of Super Mutants to fulfill his goal of unifying all of the wasteland's inhabitants in one, mutant race. Nowadays the story is generally considered to have been, at the very least, wildly distorted and exaggerated or more likely entirely groundless, a creation myth spread by the then newly-emerging race of Super Mutants. While some elements of the tale are rooted in reality and corroborated by other sources, the only accounts on the Master himself come from a few of the so-called Nightkin, a group of mentally unstable, paranoid Super Mutants, and the memoirs of the legendary Vault Dweller, who supposedly confronted the Master and defeated him before his plans could come to fruition. Though it is a fact that around this time Super Mutants were first seen out in the wasteland, they were only seldom encountered, in small, unorganized bands. Some Ghouls claim that a large contingent of them raided the ruined city of Necropolis, but there is no hard evidence of this. Many believe the "Master" the Vault Dweller defeated to actually have been a normal man by the name of Morpheus, the leader of a doomsday cult called the Children of the Cathedral, who indeed had their base of operations in the Angel's Boneyard roughly at that time. The second lair of the Mutants the Vault Dweller's memoirs mention, was never found. Whatever the truth, the Master lives on, as the bogeyman in children's stories and in the memories of the Super Mutants, who rarely speak of their troubled pasts with non-Mutants.