It’s a segue from action-adventure-intrigue to the post-apocalyptic section of the shelf today. Day seventeen’s character is for the 1984 third edition of The Morrow Project (TMP). The premise of the game is that starting in the early 1960s, a mysterious wealthy industrialist named Bruce Morrow began to show certain powerful & influential people undeniable proofs that he could & did travel into the future. There he had seen the world laid waste by a nuclear war it was already too late to prevent. The best the Project could do would be to prepare teams of skilled people to wait it out in cryogenic stasis bunkers, then emerge afterward to help rebuild society. Something went sideways, as it always does, & rather than awakening ten years after the war the PCs emerge 150 years later into what’s essentially The Postman with many, many more guns. Soooo many guns…

Chargen in TMP is simple, but not exactly quick. Generate the seven stats by rolling 4d6-4, which yes, may give you a value of zero. Possible, legal by the rules as written, but disastrous as we’ll see. The rules also offer the option of 5d6 drop lowest – 4, but we’re playing this on hard mode. Thus:

Strength: 10
Constitution: 11
Dexterity: 9
Accuracy: 5
Charisma: 9
Psi: 8
Luck: 15

We’ve regressed to the mean with a vengeance here. The scores of note are the disastrous Accuracy & impressive Luck. TMP is a roll-under system (for what there is of the system, about which more a little later) & Accuracy is a PC’s chance to hit with an attack or block one. This poor soul – obviously not recruited for their fighting abilities – has to roll 4 or under. Luck is something the PC can call upon when skill & ability has failed, or when the GM decides that the outcome of a situation is entirely up to the whim of fate. It looks like our hero depends mostly on luck to get out of a scrape.

PCs have Structural Points & Blood Points; they get (Strength x Constitution) + 100 points of each. SP are lost to physical damage to the body while BP are lost to bleeding. It’s possible to lose all your SP & die without losing much or any blood – by electrocution or being internally liquified by the shockwave from an explosion or whatnot – or to lose all your BP & bleed to death while leaving a more or less intact corpse behind. RuneQuest style, each part of the body accounts for a percentage of SP; unlike RuneQuest there are many, many more locations.

SP/BP: 210/210

Head: 13
Torso: 80
Shoulder (each): 3
Upper Arm (each): 5
Elbow (each): 3
Lower Arm (each): 5
Wrist (yes, wrist, each): 3
Hand (each): 3
Hip (each): 3
Thigh (each): 17
Knee (each): 3
Calf (each): 11
Ankle (I swear I’m not making this up, each): 3
Foot (each): 9

A body part that loses all its SP is functionally destroyed & may actually be blown, chopped or burnt right off. That’s a pain if it was your foot; if your head is destroyed it’s game over.

Each PC also has Constitution x Dexterity points of Endurance. These are burnt off during strenuous activity. When you run out, you’ve become exhausted & your effective Dexterity drops to 1, which greatly limits the number of actions you can take in a turn.

A table shows how many Movements the PC gets in a turn. This is a bit of a misnomer since it’s actually the number of points you get to spend on activities of varying cost. To fire your pistol or run your movement rate costs one movement, to open a door costs two, to put on a gas mask costs three, & so on. To complete an action that costs more than a PC has Movements will thus take several turns.

We wrap up by rolling for the PC’s blood type, because it’s a dangerous world out there & you’re gonna be doing plenty of transfusing. A PC with a Psi of 15 or above can roll to see whether they have actual powers, but that isn’t our very mundane hero’s concern.

That’s it for character creation. There’s no need to buy anything, since all the PCs are members of an organization that provides them with standard packages of equipment depending on their function. Each Project member gets a common standard issue kit of food, clothing, a Ka-Bar, camping gear, & other useful items. Then there are twenty “individual basic loads” of armaments. The GM & the players presumably decide what sort of team the party is & assign gear based on that, but let’s roll for the hell of it.

Oh dear.

#13, weight 29.359kg

1 M9A1-7 flamethrower
1 HP-35 w/ 3 mags
2 M34 WP grenades
2 AN-M14 TH3 grenades
3 HAFLA-35 Ls

Why?! Why would the Project have given someone with such a disastrous accuracy a personal load consisting entirely of fire & explosives? Did someone in management hate the rest of the team that much? There must have been some other reason they were brought on board.

What that is we may never know, because while the 64-page book goes into exhaustive description of guns, grenades, knives, Soviet missiles, hand-to-hand combat, radiation poisoning, structure condition, & some post-apocalyptic people & creatures, there’s no further discussion of a PC’s abilities. How good is your PC at what they do? We don’t know. What exactly is it they do? We don’t know. There are three types of Morrow Team: Recon, to scout out the land; Science, to study the world of the post-apoc; & MARS, to fight threats to the people & civilization. What differentiates the members of one team from another? We don’t know. Why did this PC get assigned to a Recon team instead of a MARS or Science one? We don’t know. If the PC attempts to do something other than breach a concrete wall with a shaped charge or drop a mortar on an enemy entrenchment or fire a controlled burst from an M16, how do you determine whether they succeeded? We don’t know.

I have to presume that in true old-school style it was simply assumed that the character knew what the player knew – & the players were assumed to be the sort of people who would have their own encyclopedic knowledge of the tan, paperback military manuals whose layout & visual style The Morrow Project imitates – & everything else was handwaved away with a “yeah, you would know how to do that”.

Norine Madigan

Strength: 10
Constitution: 11
Dexterity: 9
Accuracy: 5
Charisma: 9
Psi: 8
Luck: 15

SP/BP: 210/210

Head: 13
Torso: 80
Shoulder (each): 3
Upper Arm (each): 5
Elbow (each): 3
Lower Arm (each): 5
Wrist (each): 3
Hand (each): 3
Hip (each): 3
Thigh (each): 17
Knee (each): 3
Calf (each): 11
Ankle (each): 3
Foot (each): 9

#13, weight 29.359kg

1 M9A1-7 flamethrower
1 HP-35 w/ 3 mags
2 M34 WP grenades
2 AN-M14 TH3 grenades
3 HAFLA-35 Ls