The Pitt Uprising is a pivotal conflict in the history of the raider-dominated city known as the Pitt. Occurring in 2277, an inhabitant population of slaves formed a resistance, led by Wernher, to free themselves from the control of the raider army that had enslaved them, led by the warlord Ishmael Ashur, a former member of the Capital Brotherhood of Steel. The conflict serves as the guiding storyline for the Fallout 3 add-on The Pitt, with its outcome determined by the Lone Wanderer's intervention.
Prelude[]
The Brotherhood goes east[]
In 2254,[1] over a decade since the collapse of the Enclave's power base in New California during their conflict with each other, the Brotherhood's ruling council of elders from the Lost Hills foundational chapter came to a decision to send an expeditionary force across the continent to the East Coast, led by Owyn Lyons, a star paladin at the time.[Non-game 1] Their primary goals were scouring the former American capital of Washington D.C. to recover any and all advanced technology and investigating reports of super mutant activity in the area;[Non-game 2] a secondary goal was to reestablish contact with the long-lost Eastern Brotherhood believed to be based in Chicago, Illinois.[Non-game 1][2][3]
The Scourge[]
After arriving in the Capital Wasteland and occupying the ruins of the Pentagon, renaming it the Citadel, Lyons' team performed long-range recon on the surrounding area and discovered there was an inhabitant population in the ruins of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, now known as "The Pitt."[4] Before their arrival, The Pitt was an utterly chaotic and lawless den of horrors, with rape gangs, torture squads, mutated humans, and other kinds of horrors terrorizing the few innocent survivors. Just from his initial assessment, Lyons made the decision to bring destruction to the Pitt and its horrors, despite the fact of his squad being completely outnumbered and outgunned.[5] While they doubted their chances, their leader's determination earned him the admiration of his fellow brothers, including Henry Casdin.[6] With preparations made, the Brotherhood embarked on their mission: the Pitt was to be looted of any viable technology and then wiped off the map.[7]
In an event that later became known as the Scourge, Lyons' Brotherhood swept through the city, utilizing their superior firepower and technology to purge many of its worst elements, recovering technology as well as liberating a small number of unmutated children to be trained into would-be initiates of the Brotherhood.[4]
Ashur's rise[]
While the ostensible goal of the Scourge was largely a success in almost completely ridding the Pitt of the human filth that plagued its streets, it was not without cost, one that would have significant ramifications for the Pitt's future. At one point when the Brotherhood pushed into the city's steelyard, an explosion destroyed much of a steel mill and also ended up burying an initiate named Ishmael Ashur under heavy debris.[8] Believing him dead, his brothers-in-arms abandoned searching for Ashur and left him in the rubble, a choice that he eventually understood and for which he did not blame them.
As he had been wearing his durable T-45d power armor at the time, however, Ashur was injured but alive in the aftermath of the Brotherhood's attack on the Pitt. He awoke from his state of unconsciousness sometime later due to the commotion caused by a female scavenger attempting to remove his armor. He rebuked the woman's attempt, but spared her life, learning from her that she had an entire family of scavengers who were forced to survive by making raids into the city to acquire salvage from the still-functional Mill. Once he saw the Mill's capabilities himself, Ashur came to the realization that the Pitt was not a lost cause as the Brotherhood had thought, that the mills and their intact industrial value meant there was a chance to start over and build something better out of the rubble and filth, only requiring a inspirational voice to guide them. Assuming the mantle himself, to the remaining inhabitants of the Pitt, Ashur bid them to help him rebuild the city causing the scavengers to deify him as their leader. Ashur also reinforced his position by applying his knowledge, technology, and training benefitted to him from his time in the Brotherhood.[9][10]
For the next three decades, "Lord" Ashur ruled in the Pitt unquestionanly, slowly restoring the industrial capacity of the city through harvesting material for the steel mills.[Non-game 3] However, his plans for a glorious revival went up against a seemingly impassable roadblock: the Troglodyte Degeneration Contagion (unnamed at the time) that had festered within the Pitt since the early post-War days had become untenable, rendering most of the population incapable of birthing healthy children that might live long enough to be of use to their leader. To substitute for this limitation, Ashur and his strongest followers began harvesting manpower from the wasteland. When rival raider gangs converged on the Pitt lured by word of its growing prosperity, Ashur made sure to kill their leaders and then recruit and integrate the rest.[11][12] He also found that, although the Brotherhood had looted much of the city during the Scourge, they had left even more behind, including certain individuals that they considered to be too wild, but who the newly minted "Lord of the Pitt" saw the true potential of, allowing him to recruit them as the finest soldiers for his growing army.[13]
While the Pitt's military might was steadily increasing, much to his regret, Ashur also had to forcefully recruit and ultimately purchase slaves from organized slaver outfits like Paradise Falls in the Capital Wasteland to keep the city's expansion manageable, the mills producing steel, and the raiders fed and supplied with ammo to fight off attacks from wildmen and trogs.[11][14][15] In what he considers a gesture of good faith, Ashur organized a tournament in which any and all slave were given an opportunity to gain their freedom and join his army by fighting against competitors in an irradiated pit known as the Hole; by 2277, at least three members of his army had gained their stations this way, while others simply wanted to join the ranks of the largest developing army in the region.[16]
A cure[]
The fortunes of the Pitt and Lord Ashur took a pivotal turn when one day he was approached by Sandra Kundanika, a scientist who had traveled to the city after hearing about the Pitt's status as an up-and-coming civilization in the wastes. Sandra managed to gain an audience with Ashur and after displaying her educated intelligence and scientific knowledge, was welcomed into his inner circle. Through Sandra's efforts to study the plaguing sickness, giving it its name of "TDC," she and Ashur began working to formulate a means of combatting it and resolving the Pitt's population crisis, meanwhile growing closer together and developing romantic feelings to the point of viewing each other as husband and wife.[Non-game 4]
Around 2276, Sandra became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl, Marie. It was later discovered that Marie had been born with a natural immunity to both radiation and the degenerative effects of TDC. Realizing the potential of their daughter's unique gift, Ashur and Sandra began the process of harvesting small amounts of Marie's blood over time in order to produce a cure that could transfer her immunity to others and even possibly lead to cures for other kinds of mutation as well.[17][18]
Igniting an uprising[]
The slave uprising in the Pitt first formed not from the voice of a dreamer wanting to be free, but from a schemer fallen from grace and still scheming. Sometime around 2277, Wernher, one of Ashur's top lieutenants who was born around the time of the Scourge,[19] grew ambitious and sought to take the throne of the Pitt for himself, however his attempted coup failed.[Non-game 5] As punishment, Wernher was enslaved himself and sent to work in Downtown with the other slaves.
Not content to let his goals die out toiling to death for Ashur or mutating into a feral trog, Wernher began organizing a plan for an uprising with the help of another slave named Midea, the de facto leader of the Pitt's slave population,[20] and Marcos who used his position working in the Mill to discreetly modify industrial tools into functional weapons.[21][22] Wernher himself has no qualms whatsoever about potentially leading the slaves into their mass slaughter by Ashur's raiders, as he sees them as merely a means to an end.[Non-game 5] But the strength of the enemy meant he needed something better, namely the assistance of a healthy, able outsider that could work their way up the hierarchy of the Pitt raiders without being recognized as a double agent and get into Ashur's good graces to strike.
The Lone Wanderer's involvement[]
Note: Because there is no officially confirmed canon outcome for The Pitt to date, all scenarios available to the player character will have separate sections detailing their outcomes.
Help from the Capital[]
Once an opportunity to escape came, Wernher used his talent for electronics to disable his slave collar and flee beyond the boundaries of the Pitt, eventually making it to the Capital Wasteland. There, he set up at a radio tower and broadcast a radio beacon to attract any potentially useful pawns, where he would then put on the act of a desperate agent of freedom to recruit them to his cause.[23][24][25]
Around mid-August 2277, he finds such a pawn in the form of the Lone Wanderer, though it also got him found by a few of Ashur's raiders that had followed him south. Once they are dead and Wernher tells his story to the hero, the Lone Wanderer accepts the task of helping topple Ashur and travels to the train tunnel used by the raiders to move between regions. There they are sent by Wernher to acquire a slave disguise from a group that were being held captive by slavers from Paradise Falls; the Lone Wanderer either kills the slavers and rescues the slaves including Prosper or pays the slavers' fee for the slaves and sets them free. They then either dress in the disguise or forgo it and go as they are as they enter the tunnel and travel north to the Pitt.[26]
Enter the Pitt[]
Upon arriving on the outskirts of the Pitt, Wernher tries to talk his way past a raider checkpoint but gets recognized and they kill the guards. At the gate through the checkpoint, he warns the Lone Wanderer that they are certainly going to be spotted and thrown in with the rest of the slaves, and he will need to be elsewhere to ensure the plan can move forward. They might have requested he give them a concealed weapon for some protection, receiving either a switchblade or .32 pistol. The Lone Wanderer then proceeds out of the trainyard and has to navigate through the outer ruins of the pre-War city, including a fight with a group of savage wildmen and needing to get over the severely-irradiated Monongahela River via an intact bridge that is watched by snipers and laden with frag mines. Once in the city limits, they witness a scene of a few runaway slaves attempting to make an escape only to be blown up by the mines to the raiders' taunts.[26]
At the gates to the Pitt, a raider named Mex intercepts them, either taunting the disguised Lone Wanderer as a slave that gave up hope of escape, or questions who they are and why they came to the Pitt. The Lone Wanderer might either support his notion that they are a slave, pass themselves off as a recruit for the raider army, or incite Mex and his men to violence and kill them. Their choice influences the subsequent circumstances upon passing through the gate, as a second group of raiders led by Reddup attacks and incapacitates the Lone Wanderer for either just being a slave or because they killed Mex.[26]
Climbing the ranks[]
Depending on the circumstances of their arrival, the Lone Wanderer meets with Wernher's contact, Midea either by reaching her quarters in disguise or after she rouses them from their state of unconsciousness following the beating by the raiders and tells them to meet her there. In private, Midea explains the circumstances of the rebellion and says their arrival will be crucial to its success as an outsider is their best chance to get close enough to Ashur to find and steal the cure he has been working on for the Troglodyte Degeneration Contagion.[27]
Further discussion is interrupted by a raider named Jackson barging in and questioning Midea, though she manages to throw off suspicion with a lie. After Jackson leaves, Midea says the Lone Wanderer will have to blend in with the slaves in order to avoid getting on the raiders' radar for now and sends them to work with Jackson at the steelyard. She can also inform them about the slaves' weapons supplier Marcos if they want additional gear. At the steelyard, Jackson has the Lone Wanderer venture into the hazardous interior sections to collect valuable steel ingots in exchange for rewards, in which they also have their first encounters with the mutated denizens of the Pitt known as trogs.[27]
Upon their return, Midea reveals the next step is proving their capability to Ashur by competing in an arena match at the Hole, one of the only ways that slaves in the Pitt can earn their freedom. The Lone Wanderer then goes to observe Ashur making a speech to the slaves in Downtown, where the warlord informs them of the battles taking place in the arena and Midea publicly promotes the Lone Wanderer as the next competitor. Following suit, the Lone Wanderer enters the Hole themselves, fighting against other enslaved competitors before eventually going up against the brothers Grudd and John Bear, two of Ashur's strongest soldiers, and later Gruber, the previously undefeated champion. Their victory against the worst of the Hole grants the Lone Wanderer an opportunity to speak directly with Lord Ashur himself in the halls of Haven in Uptown.[27]
War in the Pitt[]
Once they leave the Hole and retrieve any lost personal effects from the raiders' stash, the Lone Wanderer travels to Uptown, the stronghold of Lord Ashur and enters his skyscraper fortress where they meet him in his office. After congratulating them on their victory and newfound freedom, Ashur requests a service from them in tracking down and eliminating Wernher. The Lone Wanderer may also ask him about the cure for which he directs them to the inner laboratory where Sandra is working with their sleeping baby Marie close by. Moments later, one of his men runs in and reports that the slave rebellion has begun, taking to the streets to attack with their improvised weapons. Ashur repeats his request before heading out to face the rebels himself.
- Siding with Wernher
If the Lone Wanderer chooses to help the slaves in their revolt, they kidnap Marie from Haven and escape to deliver her to Midea, then meets with Wernher. With control of the cure in his hands, Wernher wants to remove the raiders' advantage by cutting the power to the floodlight rigs in Uptown, allowing for hordes of trogs to overrun the district and send the raiders into chaos. Back outside Haven, if not killed beforehand, Ashur and Sandra confront the Lone Wanderer and initiate a fight that ultimately leads to their deaths.[28]
In this scenario, all involved parties' outcomes are as follows:
- Lord Ashur and his regime collapse. Wernher takes over as de facto ruler of the Pitt, claiming he will oversee the rebuilding of the city while giving the Lone Wanderer free access to the ammo press in the Mill.[29]
- Midea takes on caring for Marie and developing the cure, though admits it will be slow-going as she has to handle full-time childcare which limits her opportunities to do research.[28][30]
- Siding with Ashur
If the Lone Wanderer chooses to assist Ashur's regime, they abandon the plan to kidnap Marie and return to Midea, either interrogating her or killing her and searching for evidence that leads to the rebel leader's hideout. They might have either killed him or persuaded Wernher to abandon the Pitt and flee once again.[28]
In this scenario, all involved parties' outcomes are as follows:
- The revolting slaves are slaughtered and Wernher is either killed himself or flees far from the Pitt. Ashur remains in control and promises to restore the status quo to the city,[31] though he claims it is only a temporary measure as the cure derived from Marie will make it possible to one day rely entirely on natural growth instead of an enslaved workforce.[32]
- Midea is furious at the Lone Wanderer's betrayal and rebukes any attempts to speak further with her, chastising them for giving up the slaves' freedom for their own ends.[33]
Appearances[]
The Pitt Uprising appears only in the Fallout 3 add-on The Pitt.
References[]
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Non-game
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Fallout 3 Official Game Guide Game of the Year Edition p.71: Elder Owyn Lyons
Lyons, 75, was already highly decorated when he set out from the order's West Coast headquarters, leading a party of soldiers on a mission to reestablish contact with the "Eastern Brotherhood." He discovered this abandoned Pentagon military complex. The presence of Super Mutants sent a chill up the collective spine of the Brotherhood; these weren't the children of the dreaded Master, nor were they the remnants of the band that fled east and were ultimately destroyed (or assimilated into the Brotherhood of Steel) in the Chicago area. No, this was a new breed of Super Mutant, one with a local origin. But where did they come from? What did they want? How were they reproducing? Elder Lyons was ordered to discover the source of this new Super Mutant infestation and wipe it from the face of the earth. Recent weeks have seen him galvanize his "Pride" to thwart the remnants of the Enclave forces, and to provide drinking water to all."
(Fallout 3 Official Game Guide Game of the Year Edition Wasteland Census) - ↑ Faction Profile – the Brotherhood of Steel (Fallout 3)
- ↑ Fallout 3 Official Game Guide Game of the Year Edition p.61: Ashur
Leader of the Pitt Raiders, Ashur is an imposing force in The Pitt, commanding respect through fear and accomplishments and his part in past atrocities. He was part of the Brotherhood of Steel forces that tore through The Pitt in a cataclysmic clash known as the Scourge. He remained, ruling the masses while seeking technological breakthroughs that could help heal the population from the ravages of 'the sickness.' His secondary plan is to continue to build up his army of Pitt Raiders, weaning out the infirm or incompetent in the Arena, and then march on the Wasteland, reuniting it and The Pitt. He is married to Sandra, who has recently given birth to a beautiful baby daughter."
(Fallout 3 Official Game Guide Game of the Year Edition Wasteland Census) - ↑ Fallout 3 Official Game Guide Game of the Year Edition p. 61: Sandra Kundanika
"Sandra is one of the few Raiders with a solid education, and she deliberately approached the Pitt because she saw it as a strong up-and-coming force in the Wasteland. Ashur recognized her intelligence immediately and offered to support her work. Sandra’s friendly demeanor hides a fierce intelligence and absolute conviction. Sandra has no illusions about the cutthroat nature of the Pitt’s raiders. In fact, she shares a good deal of their ruthlessness, although she prefers to avoid direct violence, if possible. She wholeheartedly supports Ashur’s plans to build an army and unite the Wasteland." - ↑ 5.0 5.1 Fallout 3 Official Game Guide Game of the Year Edition p.102-103: Wernher
"Once one of the smarter raiders in The Pitt, Wernher was condemned to slavery after trying to stage a coup to overthrow Ashur. He used his knowledge of electronics to deactivate his collar and escape. He harbors a grudge against the city and against Ashur in particular. He has no particular love for the slaves, and he sees a plan to kidnap Ashur's baby as a way to get back at The Pitt's ruler and the city in general."