Rebuild the Capital
is a mod focusing on the Brotherhood of Steel turning the Capital Wasteland into a proper nation after the events of Broken Steel. Replete with quests, NPCs, unique items, and more, it’s one of Fallout 3’s most expansive content mods.
While as of 2020 the Fallout 3 version is no longer being updated, the version for A Tale of Two Wastelands is still receiving regular updates.
This mod contains examples of the following tropes:
- Ace Custom: There’s no shortage of unique weapons to be found in the mod. In fact, after a certain point, you’ll get your own sidearm (which can be a .44 Magnum, a Tesla pistol, or a sword) which you can level up by killing enemies and increase its stats as you do so.
- Action Politician/Four-Star Badass: The player serves as both for the Eastern Brotherhood.
- Anti-Frustration Features: The mod more or less necessitates that you spend massive amounts of caps. To make it less frustrating to gather the appropriate amounts, one of the upgrades you can buy for your player home is a Caravan Crate, which allows you to sell things in bulk. A dropbox is also purchasable, which allows you to turn in items for radiant quests from the comfort of home rather than having to drop by the various locations where the people who want them are.
- Corrupt Bureaucrat: The player can skim caps from the taxes collected by the Brotherhood. Downplayed in that the caps are likely to be used on behalf of the Brotherhood anyway.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: The boss of Grand Dominion Smokes will try to sell cigarettes to children if you don’t convince him not to, and will try to get doctors to endorse his cigarettes.
- Do Wrong, Right: If you allow ex-Enclave members to join the Brotherhood, you can encounter a Brotherhood officer watching two Brotherhood trainees fight, one of whom is a former Enclave trooper. You can break up the fight for Reformist fame, or let it continue for Traditionalist fame. However, the best way to resolve the dispute is to say their unarmed combat is terrible, and mandate that they attend unarmed combat training. Both Brotherhood factions will approve of that.
- Fantastic Racism: The Traditionalists hate sapient robots, Ghouls, and Super Mutants, and will disapprove of you dealing with them peacefully.
- Player Headquarters: Early on in the mod, you are appointed commander of Castle Lyons (what Adams Air Force Base is renamed to after Brotherhood occupation), with Castle Lyons as a whole broadly serving as this trope and your office in it being a more specific example.
- Permanently Missable Content: Some investments are dependent upon choices you make playing Fallout 3’s base game. You can’t invest in Megaton if you’ve blown it up, for instance, nor can you invest in Tenpenny Tower if you sided with Roy Phillips (but you can if you killed Tenpenny for other reasons)note . There are also a few side quests you can't access unless you allow former Enclave members to join the Brotherhood.
- Shout-Out: Several to Fallout 4. Yeoman expeditions can be sent to the Commonwealth and Nuka-World to collect items of interest to the Brotherhood, and the player can interrupt a weapons deal involving the Gunners.
- Token Heroic Orc: The mod adds a few more friendly East Coast Super Mutants. Of note is Washington, a mutant granted more intelligence than most East Coast mutants by Enclave experimentation, who wants to establish a settlement where his simpler brethren can live undisturbed.
- Villain Has a Point: For all that the business practices of Grand Dominion Smokes are shady, the company’s boss is right that it’s better if smokers smoke fresh cigarettes made with tobacco grown near D.C., rather than Pre-War cigarettes that could be contaminated with various toxins they could have picked up over the years.
