Ethnicity in the Morrow Project

[RandyT0001]

How do you as a PD handle race and ethnicity in the Morrow Project?

In the United States, the issues of race and ethnicity are ingrained in the psyche and culture of America. Typically, at present, a discussion of these issues are avoided until an event occurs that exposes the divisions of race and ethnicity followed by speeches that assign blame, promise fixes, etc. as people talk past each other. This is the norm. This perception of race relations are what the characters in a MP game will have with them when they wake up. The players have to compensate for this reality while playing MP.

As a PD, you have two choices on how the people in the future view and act to other people based on their race and ethnicity. The first is that the needs of survival over the past 150 years have shown that race/ethnicity is irrelevant and every MP society, culture, survival group, etc. is completely blind to race/ethnicity. The second is that people still use race/ethnicity to differentiate people into groups. Some groups will have a bias while some groups will not. Some people will have a bias and some will not. The spectrum of bias will vary widely depending upon the group or person. The first choice represents an idealistic outlook. The second choice is, honestly, more realistic.

Racial/ethnic bias will survive because the people survive. Those who seek power and control that have a racial/ethnic bias will use that bias to vilify others in order to advance their agenda. This has been true in the past, it occurs in the present and it will continue to occur in the future of the Morrow Project setting. A Project Director should not avoid the issue out of fear of offending a group here in the present but should understand it in order to incorporate it into the setting. It can add conflict to a storyline that the player-characters have to rectify.

On the character sheets that I created for MP, there is a box for ethnicity. There are certain physical facial and body characteristics that are common among people from general regions of the world. From what I have seen it is common for people in the United States to categorize others into one of these groups in the media and culturally. I use the six categories listed below for my games. If a person has mixed ethnic parentage then the ethnicity that dominates their facial characteristics is listed first. So a child that has one parent of Asian ancestry and one parent of European ancestry would be coded as As/Eu or Eu/As depending upon which ancestry dominates the child’s facial characteristics. Other PDs might use more or less or different separations and corresponding codes for race and/or ethnicity for their game.

European (Eu) - Northern Europe – Nordic countries, the British Isles, central and northern France, Central European countries north of Italy and the Balkans, Eastern Europe to the Ural Mountains

Mediterranean (Me) - Mediterranean Sea – Iberian Peninsula, southern France, Italy, the Balkans, the Levant region, the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa

African (Af) – Sub-Sahara Africa

Indian (In) - Indian subcontinent

Asian (As) - East Asia, Southeast Asia, Pacific Islanders

American (Am) - Indigenous people of North and South America

[rob]

My take on ethnicity is one of more equitity based on the need to survive. With 95% of the population (based on the 4th edition), I see the need to survive would most likely outway the ethnicity issue. This would most likely be in the surviving urban areas and less in the rural areas. In my campaign, the local population is of mixed ethnicity and skin complexion. Racism being what it is, would still exist where groups of very similar ethnic backgrounds exits. An example would some of the New Confederacy states (again from the 4th edition). Slavery may/should/will exist maybe not like in the KFS, but because of skin color, gender, shape of the eyes and maybe even hair color. It is one of humanity's worst faults.

[midnight77]

I try not to mention it unless I have to. It's a thorny issue IRL and I don't want that in my game.

[RandyT0001]

Here is a place to start to avoid creating stereotypes in MP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo..._United_States

The Rich Five strike me as a WASP group.

[ArmySGT.]

I am with Midnight77....... A topic that is going to spoil the gaming night and poison the group. Seriously, if it becomes an issue around your gaming table your campaign is probably over.

[midnight77]

That's not to say racist groups don't make good enemies, I just try to avoid the topic within survivor groups.

[RandyT0001]

The MP player character sheets provided in the 4th edition core rulebook TM 1-1 starting on pages 315-321 have a space for ethnicity. This is the same PC sheet that is free to D/L from Timeline. None of the six sample PC's in the TM 1-1 rulebook have a specific ethnicity listed. (Two of the women have the same picture also.) I cannot find anything in the rules about determining a character's ethnicity within the game, no dice roll or chart.

Instead of using characterizations and labels from the present for ethnicity such as East Asian, Hispanic, etc. maybe we should use the name of the survivor group that best fits that person. So the ethnic group might be biker, badge, emdee, mailman, wanderer, etc. (Maybe we can use Morrow as the ethnic label for MP teams.) This separates present day bias from the game.

[rob]

I realized last night while running that the Project group I running has several Hispanic NPCs, several female NPC, one female PC of mixed ethnicity (playing half Japanese, half African-American), several Project personnel of European-American decent. The local area in which the party is working in is of mixed ethnic groups, mostly European-American decent but not making anything of it. Several community leaders in other villages are African-American females. I use this model to sort of reflecting of what I think happened in post apocalypse America, that the need to survive is greater than looking at person's ethnicity but realizing that this view has existed as long as man has been on the planet.