In Fallout: New Vegas, there are numerous possible endings to the game that a character can create through a variety of main and side quests.

Now, most players of the game will recognize the Fiends.

Basically, the Fiends are the largest single group of raiders in the Mojave Wasteland. They inhabit the areas right outside of New Vegas and actively pillage the landscape around the area. The only redeeming quality they have is that they are willing to trade with people who sell chems (basically drugs), but apart of that, they have nothing. They are thugs who want nothing more than to see their own success at the expense of everybody else.

The Fiends have four main leaders, one of whom is a man named Cook Cook.

Although we know little about the other Fiends apart from a few unsavory practices (i.e. Violet feeds her dogs the human flesh of Fiend victims), we do know that Cook Cook is a child slaver and a rapist. On your journey through the Mojave, you can end up hearing much about Cook Cook. One woman in the New California Republic (NCR), for example, is a sharpshooter who was kidnapped and raped by Cook Cook just prior to having her body burned by fire so as to make it so she can no longer have sex with anybody else.

Furthermore, one discovers plenty about Cook Cook’s child slavery operation in a major side quest in the game. Basically, upon arriving in and exploring an NCR refugee camp, the leader of the camp tells you how a child went missing. Upon investigation, you discover that two suspicious men in Freeside (the outer skirts of New Vegas) have been kidnapping refugees and selling them as slaves to Cook Cook. Now, knowing what Cook Cook does with females like that NCR sharpshooter mentioned above, it is scary to think that he does the same with children.

But Cook Cook isn’t even their main leader. He’s just one of the side bosses. No, their main leader is a man named Motor-Runner.

Motor-Runner is the main leader of the Fiends and he and the main Fiend force occupies Vault 3, one of the several Vault-Tech vaults across the Mojave Wasteland. In the game, upon meeting the Great Khans, you can be tasked to make a chem delivery directly to Motor-Runner. If you explore Vault 3, however, you will discover a few notable things.

Firstly, you discover that an NCR ranger is trapped inside a room that is boody trapped with mines and grenades. This ranger is himself incredibly injured, and you can help him escape. You discover that he was a man sent to try taking out Motor-Runner, but he was caught and narrowly escaped, only surviving thanks to the traps he put up. However, if you left him in there, he would have surely died. He is only there because he believes it is his duty to his country to kill Motor-Runner and will do what it costs to do it, even if it means his own life. To save him, you can either recruit him as a temporary companion and work with him to kill the Fiends in Vault 3, or you can convince him to sneak out of the base by saying that you’ll kill Motor-Runner yourself. Or you can just kill all the Fiends in the building and save that man. But either way, there are multiple ways to save him.

Another thing you discover is that Vault 3 was one of the few vaults in the entire Fallout universe with a stable population of people who were not wiped out through some nasty Vault-Tech experiment. The people of this vault, you see, created a stable society that themselves were incredibly friendly and were quite literally eager to open their doors to the outside world so as to allow for trade. Which is where it gets nasty…

That thing that Motor-Runner says in that picture is portraying how the people of the vault opened their doors to him and his Fiends. At this moment, he and his Fiends burst in there and massacred all the vault residents, turning the place into their own personal base of operations. As such, the Fiends are responsible for massacring an entire vault population and had this vault population been left alone, it would have been the only one in the entire Mojave Wasteland to survive.

Now, what did I do that was so horrible?

Well, in Fallout: New Vegas, most players tend to wipe out the Fiends. Even ‘evil’ karma characters tend to wipe out the Fiends due to the reward on their heads or implicitly do so by supporting Caesar’s Legion in the war against the NCR (if the Fiends are still around by the end of the game and you support Caesar, he himself wipes out the Fiends).

However, I felt like this was too merciful. Instead, I decided to help the Fiends.

In my play-through of the game, I made it a point to leave the Fiends alone and get lots of ‘evil’ karma. In the main story, I wiped out the NCR at Fort McCarran, their main fort right outside of New Vegas (and thus the first line of direct defense for New Vegas). I left all of the Fiend bosses alive and, while playing through the game, I also killed Mr. House (leader of New Vegas) and Caesar. As such, I made it so that none of the three main sides won but, rather, that New Vegas became an independent nation.

And as such, the ending had it so that New Vegas itself was in complete turmoil and was overrun by the Fiends. The NCR, the last military force with any presence in New Vegas, were forced out and New Vegas itself fell apart.

I made it so that the Fiends were the victors of the Second Battle of Hoover Dam and, thus, everything else was forced to suffer through such turmoil