How dark is the future of the Morrow Project
 

An interesting angle for me is how dark is the future of the project.

A typical team starts off spreading the good news, runs into a few happy villagers and some bullying, bandits. Maybe armed with muskets or battered old guns and shows them the error of their ways.

Then bam they run into a horde of Krell, or an organised patrol of KFS. And suddenly they're over matched and fleeing for their lives.

Fairly soon they realise that the project failed. Most of it's big resources were wiped out in the first year of operation. Many teams would have woken to unfriendly faces in their bolt holes and a truly horrible fate.

They're part of a handful of survivors trying to turn around not just the remains of the project, but the rest of the world around them.

With the realisation that people like the KFS have come up with an actual industrial base, whilst all the MP has is what it can dig out of the ground.

The main problem is a lack of a central command and control. With Damocles there is the start of one and we have a hint or two of it happening regionally but in the end there still well and truly separated with maybe a third of the Project awake, some having awoken way to early, or even on time after the nukes. If they could get there acts together and get a signal out to awaken all the remaining teams they would have a much better chance.

I go for the dark dystopian future.

Those that survived were survivors because they were more ruthless, less forgiving, and even more self serving than those that did not. Those that hid food from others, those that turned away hungry people knowing if they shared their cache they would starve too before spring. Those that burned books for heat and ate their neighbors pets.

They lived. They had children, and those children had children.

The Humanity and Motivation scales for typical encounters are in the middle and lower most often.

Though villages and other survivors maybe within a days walk of one another there is no trade, no contact, and only confrontation. Those "others" may be hunting on your land. Looking in your territory for good salvage. Trying to steal your women.

It is the MP teams that convince them to open up to more than Mailmen, Emdees, and passing traders.

The MP team has to show them through skill and cooperation that more is achieved by sharing and working together with neighboring villages; not just their own village, tribe, or clan.

Such a small, small Morrow Project for such a big undertaking.

Its also going to be location based. Area's with more villages and settlements may have more open trade with each other while areas with less settlements will be more hostile to outside contact.

Probably the most grinding and depressing thing that the project has to deal with is it failed, but other rival organisations didn't.

Certainly the KFS amongst others have recreated an industrial base. So the project will be on a back foot as it's equipment can't be replaced.

But the KFS and MM can build tanks, planes and train the crews to replace them.

Another angle will be if the Snake Eaters are basically benevolent, if they start working witht the MP will they inevitably start to take over.

Well yeah, the MP personnel are upgunned civvies with little real world experience. The Snake Eaters are motivated and experienced so in many ways there taking over would be a good thing. The Project was designed to work in the early years after the nukes fell, but 150 there out in the cold and screwed and scavenging like everyone else. In many ways the best bet would be to start nation building in one area and begin to rebuild a tech base they could work with and base themselves out of. Four to Six guys in a Humvee are not going to rebuild a whole lot, but dozens acting as a cadre for several towns can begin to rebuild a nation. It just has to be the right area is all. Up by Damocles is good, Chicago is a maybe. Don't know much about area's on the East Coast though.

Well, on the rare occasions that I use the KFS (I tend to run games up in Yankeeland), I always do my best not to forget that even in the KFS, there exists the seed of hope. It would be a completely nonstandard MP game (being very dissatisfying to the run&gun style of players), but I've always wanted to run the long-term espionage-style "help out the resistance movement(s)" game. The Project can't hope to conquer the KFS...but they can help to change it into something more idealogically-acceptable.

When/if that's come about, as regards to Krell and his boys... Well, Boris Badinov said it best: "Den vee get moose and squirrel!"

It is true. The setting of the Morrow Project is dark. A team wakes up, does a little recon, and drives to the nearest community. They let the team believe they are helping and, once lulled into a false sense of security, whack them in the head and take their goodies. Soon the team (and the players) go rogue and abandon the MP goals for basic survival. Players quickly tire of a game without hope.

The solution is to provide the team with a friendly base for operations. I tend to favor university towns, preferably one more than a couple hundred miles from MM, KFS, and WoK that was home to a medical school (for teaching future eemdees), which had a county wide pre-war population of 100-150,000. Assuming a war survival rate of just one percent and a growth rate of one percent (equals the world population growth rate from 1800 to 1987) for 150 years, the community will have a population between 4500 and 6700, plenty of folks for growth and protection from entities smaller than MM, the KFS, and the WoK. Another possibility is that a command team for a Combined Team woke up several decades ago and was able to establish a friendly base. (A good area for such a base of operations would be the Wilson, Rocky Mount, Greenville, NC triangle of small cities. Greenville is home to ECU, a university with a medical school. Such an operations base with about 18,000 people might be the source of MP teams that the KFS’ Fourth Regiment was sent out to find and destroy.)

Teams do not want to spend time building their own base; it’s boring to most players. Players want action; why else do their characters have the weapons?

That is up to the PD to roleplay the NPCs well, and Players to find solutions in something other than 5.56.

Why should a village throw open their arms and welcome strangers with weapons and an armored car? After 150 years of scraping by and fighting off those with weapons that have come to kill and plunder. Why should that same village cooperate with the next one down the road, likely the one that raiders have come from before?

Role play or Roll play?

The future is dark for Project teams. Bleak, even. For me the central conflict of the game is and always will be, "How do they react to the darkness?"

Do they try and find other Project teams and assets? [Generally, unless something really big and unsubtle (read: the setup for Desert Search) hits them in the face, very few take it upon themselves to try and locate any Project resources.]

Do they try to do their mission anyway? [Generally, yes, though quite often "Rule Number 3" very quickly begins to take precedence over the other two until in short order the "Project" shows little difference from any other despotic "do it our way or else" pocket empire. They may try to be enlightened despots, but they still want to take over.]

Will they come up with ambitious missions and projects of their own? [Same as above.]

Do they go native? [This is almost always an unqualified "no". For some reason, despite whatever hints you might give them that the locals they encounter have managed to survive and thrive without any help for 150 years, the Project team still feels themselves to be intellectually and morally-superior. They never assimilate into the post-oops culture.]

The answers in brackets are, of course, my own cynicism born and reared of what I consider to be unsuccessful games. It is really hard to find a mix of players who, given the darkness of the world they find themselves in, can retain the idealism of the Project while still being pragmatic enough to adapt their mission to current conditions. If you've got them (and I finally found a great core group), great. Keep them. Listen to them.

Roleplaying is the key. Trust is earned, both ways. Typically, the team has to do a series of tasks for the community, not all requiring gunplay. The community has to assist the team by providing material (tires, metal stock) for repair of the vehicle, reloading of brass, food and medical supplies and/or surgery for bullet removal, etc. After a few months, maybe a year's, worth of gaming the PC's are integrated into the community.

Do your players-characters come into town on foot without weapons and roleplay the team's instruction and education of the locals about crop rotation, germ theory, representative government, etc. for a year, two or five to convince the community of the team's sincerity? Or do they run from one community to another, constantly fighting off everybody wanting to steal their weapons, vehicle, etc., until they meet their final ambush and are killed?

Isn't it a balance of the two?

Survive, yes; thrive, no. IMO to be considered "thriving" they would have to have developed beyond individual communities into city-states or small nations that had re-learned more of the lost technology than is typically portrayed in games in the given 150 years. The teams are intellectually superior to the average person in the MP setting because the average person does not have a college degree. If the characters (or the players through their characters) present a condescending attitude toward the people that should have consequences. Isn't rule three about the teams assimilating into the post war culture of depotism? IMO the team is not supposed to assimilate to the new culture but strive to change it back to "pre-war American" culture.

Amen.

The current game has hope built right in. One of the first jobs had been to get communications up by entering Philadelphia (parts were radioactive but several large buildings had survived) and setting up and repairing a radio antenna then setting repeaters all over the place. When we returned to base we were pleasantly surprised to hear voices on the air talking to each other, our people's voices. The various teams were spread out, separated by hundreds of miles and essentially uncrossable terrain but there were teams out there and the project was moving forward. Sometimes a friendly voice is all a team really needs.

That can happen in "Final Watch" or "American Outback". Your point is a valid one, presenting the players with NPC contact with authentic MP credentials would help to keep the team as Project members versus becoming AD&D murder hobos.

Which was why it was done I think. The group I was with tend to do that after a while as they start looking for a home and base and then lord it over the locals. Because someone always pulls out the lighter and goes "Look, I can make fire!" to impress someone.

But having a Command and Control or even just a friendly word over the radio changed all that. The team actually began to do there jobs in hope of hearing a 'atta boys!' over the radio from others or hear how bad they got it or better than our team.

Darkness and Light
 

This is why in most of the games I have played, the team had a First Contact person. Non-GI hair. Dressed in blue jeans, with either a 12 gage shotgun or a .44 Winchester. Several trinkets from the trade pack. This person WALKS in. There is no sign of the V-150 or whatever vehicle the team has. Yes the team is probably in fire positions to assist the FC IF everything goes south. The FC probably has an open mike communications, but no reception. NO EAR BUD is visible.

Because of the 150 year FUBAR, the FC still has a LOT of explaining to do. Excellent area for role play by FC and locals.

(Note to GM, PLAY THE LOCALS STRAIGHT UP. These are not ignorant savages. They, and 4-5 generations before have SURVIVED The Day. AND what came after.)

My $0.02

Mike

The game as originally written was meant to be bleak and dark, and more than a little incompetent. Part of this can be explained by the simple fact that we saw so little of the Project in the modules, but even the basic premise of the main book is bizarre - the implication is minimal training and patchwork supply, secrecy that makes little sense once the bolthole seals, little manufacturing capacity (when that would be of paramount importance in reconstruction), all topped by a command structure that is so dysfunctional that eliminating Prime Base kills the whole Project!

If you go with that, then yes, the teams are screwed.

I went with a different premise. I gave the characters more training, and more consistent and sensible equipment. I gave them a better understanding of the scope of the project and their immediate command structure (including emergency procedures!), and I designed a command structure that was more rugged and included factories while omitting uselessly-located power stations.

This changed a few things in the game - it made the players more survivable, made resupply easier, and gave them instructions and a sense of direction beyond the first module. I changed the circumstances of the fall of Prime Base to include that the attackers were able to disable the antennas on the transmitter (to stop the base from summoning reinforcements) so the reason the Project is still asleep is simply because there were essentially no wake-up calls at all - I had all the teams awakened by automatic fail-safes as either the bolthole was compromised or the century-old life-support died. This meant that the Team could engage in their individual, country-spanning missions while still accomplishing the goal of waking the Project.

I wouldn't say incompetent. Just not prepared for the situation they ended up in. Remember the plan was for a mass wake up 5 years after. Not 150 years after or with everyone waking up at different times. This is literally not something they were trained or prepared for. The expectation was to have then remnants of the old UD Gov't and military to help and what they ended up with was Mad Max meets The US Civil War tech.

I would argue that any organization which has an important job and doesn't plan for the loss of its leadership during a nuclear war is incompetent. All it was going to take was one stray nuke and Prime Base gets obliterated without warning.

The whole 5 years vs 150 years makes the core job of the Project harder, but the lack of basic leadership made the whole thing a roll of the dice. The whole point of spreading the Project so thin was because of the possibility of losing individual facilities, they had to consider the possibility that the facility they would lose would be Prime Base!

Losing Prime Base was unthinkable I think to the Projects Leadership, but I think the idea was that even if lost the Regional Bases working together could take over. The problem is the Regional Bases either never woke up, or woke up far too early, or were destroyed themselves. Prime Base itself was just a HQ. It didn't do much more than coordinate. Everything else was the Regional HQ's jobs.

But why, and why does this excuse their stunning oversight?

Or a backup Prime Base or whatever. Having plans (especially vague ones) does not help if you are completely unable to enact them.

But that's a pretty big "much more than" when the job was waking up the entire Project. A parachute is one small, specialized part of a paratrooper's equipment, but if it doesn't work then the results are catastrophic. So you jump with a reserve. The entire Project hinged on Prime Base remaining intact and functional for five years through a nuclear holocaust and the ensuing chaos... and it didn't have to.

Prime Base's only job was to send out the wake up call. And it failed in that. Lack the module so I am not sure of exactly why. But it should have been the regional bases job. Prime Base was supposed to be the hangout of the Council of Tomorrow and be main base for coordinating country wide relief efforts. The Regional Bases job was to implement them. The Project put all its eggs in one basket and the basket got dropped. And there are hints in the 4th edition book that this was deliberate. Bruce Morrow wanted this to happen.

Weird. Not sure how "designed to fail" is better than incompetent...

Incompetent means they did a poor job. Designed to fail means someone deliberately set it up to fail even though many others did there best to make it work. It looks like Morrow (who in the 4th edition dies) had a plan for the Project that was only partly set up to rebuild a nuked United States. In earlier editions its not as clear but if no one ever noticed or I haven't learned. Mr Morrow wasn't at Prime Base when it was destroyed.
Did he know something he wasn't telling anyone?

The latter still implies the former in no small part - if it was set up to fail, and no one recognized and addressed some pretty glaring signs of such, then they were incompetent also.


Those earlier editions never explained Morrow enough to really know his abilities or intentions - you could assume anything you wanted. I always assumed that, other than his ability to time-travel, he was a pretty ordinary guy who had been shocked into action by what he saw of the future. The only time it came up in a game, I told my players that his abilities were killing him, and that he chose to make his last trip into the future so that he could personally help those hurt by the war he was unable to prevent.

But regardless, he was the initiator of the Project, not the sole vision behind it. Whatever his personal intentions, there were plenty of people who should have been able to see and correct the problems that endangered their own dear lives... unless, of course, they were ALL incompetent and/or suicidal. OR just Morrow's version of the Golgafrincham's "C" Ark!

Actually I kind of figured that after plans were set in motion he would send changes along after the fact. The Council of Tomorrow might have made approvals of several things that would have worked, but Morrow after the fact modified them. As far as anyone was concerned everything is as it should have been.
The question would be why. I think that rebuilding after a nuclear war would have just recreated the old United States, an angry one. By forcing the issue and waking the teams later he had a blank check to create a new nation. The entire US is either small ministates or wilderness. A true blank slate with Morrow Teams doing the rebuilding with a large leg up in comparison to other survivors.

That implies that (a) Morrow was in operational control and that (b) the Council had no other contact with the rest of the Project. Those don't seem like reasonable assumptions to me. Any of thousands of people should have seen immediate problems and worked to correct them, presumably reporting up their change of command.

Regardless, this Morrowluminati idea is a quite different interpretation than anything I ever saw implied in the game.

Why would it recreate the old US? Most of the people who were devoted to that specific form of government and who had the passion and skill to execute it would have been the exact people targeted in the war! I always saw the purpose of the Project as being saving the people, and allowing them to decide the course of their governance on their own - perhaps uniting into a new United States, perhaps become a patchwork of independent nations. I don't recall anywhere the Teams are instructed to give specific guidance on this to the people they are helping.

That is a 3rd edition versus 4th edition schism...

3rd was about saving civilization and 4th implies strong if not outright saying the Project is there to preserve and rebuild the United States of America.

So when championing one or the other it helps with everyones understanding if you let people know which edition you are concerned about.

Gotcha. Don't have 4th edition yet, have not yet been overwhelmed with reasons to purchase it, either.

From a practical standpoint, rebuilding the USA as it currently exists would be a monumentally complex task. Even just a few years post-apocalypse, that type of government might be very problematic and not even desired by the population.

That's the issue. A few years afterwords no one will want a US or they will want a US that will exact revenge for them. By waiting the old US of A becomes a Golden Age in peoples memorys and something to rebuild towards. The main issue is that after Prime was destroyed the Regional Bases didn't wake up either or were destroyed. And if they did wake up, they didn't have the ability to wake anyone else up. A massive oversight.