TEXT: Who Are These Morrow Folks, Anyway?
  A Character Creation Variant for The Morrow Project
  ©1998 by Doyle Hunt
  Disclaimer:  The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect 
  the opinions of the publishers, designers, or players of The Morrow Project.
  One of the complaints I’ve heard most often from players of the Morrow Project concerning
  the game system is the character creation rules.  They’re sparse, to say the least.  There’s a good 
  reason for that.  From what I understand, the idea was that the players provide the “character” for
  their player characters, so only the physical statistics are randomly generated.  The characters 
  then have the mental abilities of the players themselves.  It certainly seemed like a good idea at the
  time.  Later, the role-playing supplement added the concept of degree fields and skill percentages, 
  but the concept wasn’t terribly self-supporting.
  In my own games, I solved that problem by switching to the Call of Cthulhu game system by 
  Chaosium.  Their system is copyrighted, so I won’t go into details about it here.  In general, though, 
  skill points in Call of Cthulhu are distributed based upon education and intelligence.  Education is 
  used for professional skills, intelligence for personal interest skills.  It’s a very workable system, 
  and I strongly urge those of you who’ve never used it to check it out.
  However, the purpose of this offering is not to extol the virtues of the Call of Cthulhu game
  system, but rather to address some of the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the Morrow Project 
  character creation system, and present my method for dealing with them.
  First of all, as stated in the game manual, every player character has at least a 
  baccalaureate degree.  With very few exceptions for geniuses, that means every character will be at
  least 22 years old before he or she is even recruited for the Project.  Characters with military 
  experience, in combat or not, will be at least three years older, to allow enough time to obtain both 
  that experience and the college degree.  The Project has no wet-behind-the-ears teenagers.
  Characters with military experience can be either officers or enlisted.  As a general rule, an 
  enlisted person would have gotten his military experience first, and gone to college after he got out 
  of the service.  Few college graduates go enlisted.  On the other hand, most former military officers
  will be college graduates at the time they signed up.  Damned few enlisted personnel go officer right
  from the start, though they may be graduates of Officer’s Candidate School after a few terms of 
  service.  You may have other ideas, but I assume that the Morrow Project picked up military 
  officers who went ROTC.  From the military officers I have known personally, most Academy 
  graduates are career types.  ROTC officers have a hard time making the military their career, even 
  if they want to.  The “old boy network” works against them.
  In the modern Army, based on information presented in the 1998 Soldiers’ Annual, one in six 
  active duty personnel are officers.  This proportion remains the same for both male and female.  
  One in six active duty personnel are female.  One in six as officers seems high, unless you consider 
  the fact that all pilots are officers (helicopter pilots may be an exception, I don’t know), all doctors 
  
  are officers, all engineers are officers, etc.  Unless the Project was specifically targeting officers 
  in their recruitment, a 1-in-6 chance of being a former officer sounds about right.
  Bachelors degrees should predominate in the process.  The higher you go in the educational 
  process, the more specialized you get.  The Project needs generalists more than specialists, except 
  in fields like medicine where lower degree levels fail to provide adequate skills.
  Has anyone else noticed that one degree field missing from the role-playing supplement is 
  Law?  I for one assume that was not an oversight.  Rather, in my version of the Project, the planners
  took Shakespeare seriously when he said, “First, let’s kill all the lawyers.”  Meaning no offense to 
  Morrow Project aficionados who are lawyers, of course.  You may not be part of the 99% who give 
  the rest a bad name, after all.  That is not to say that the Project recruited no lawyers.  Law 
  degrees are only available at the graduate level, so every lawyer must have a baccalaureate degree in
  something else first.  Whatever the BA/BS degree is in, that’s what the rare Project lawyer was 
  recruited for.
  Although it is possible for a character to be recruited straight out of college, I prefer to 
  allow my players several years of experience in the real world before they join the Project.  My 
  reasoning is that the Project doesn’t want “ivory tower intellectuals” but rather people who get their
  hands dirty.  An engineer who works as a field foreman on a major construction job would be 
  preferable to one who spent a couple of years at his desk designing that same project, for example.
  At the other end of the scale, the Project planners knew that the work of rebuilding society
  would last a lifetime or more.  For that reason, I arbitrarily assigned a maximum age of 45 to the 
  player characters.  If you want to generate age randomly, use 1d20 or 2d10 (I prefer 2d10 since it 
  groups people together in the middle of the range due to the bell curve) and add 25.  My rationale 
  for using 45 as a base maximum age is that it allows the character at least 20 years of active 
  Project duty after awakening, barring accident, disease, or violence, long enough to not only make a 
  good start, but to train the next generation of re-builders.  No point in selecting Project members 
  who would die off from age-related problems within a few years.  Using 25 for the base minimum 
  means that a BA/BS degree holder will have at least a few years of experience, but a graduate-level
  degree holder might still have been recruited directly from college.
  Once a character joins the Project, he has a year of training.  I disagree with the statement
  in the game manual that everyone knows how to operate all of the Project’s equipment.  When you 
  consider the wide variety of equipment available, there simply would not be time for any character 
  to become proficient with all of it before they’re frozen.
  So what does the Project teach in their one-year training course?  Part of it is a fitness 
  regimen.  Not at all like military boot camp.  These aren’t kids who are away from home for the first 
  time.  They’re highly educated, individualistic self-starters who would probably chafe under anything
  resembling military discipline.  Military veterans are the exception, of course, but even they show 
  more initiative than the rank and file, or the Project wouldn’t have head-hunted them.  So the 
  Project trainees don’t do the spit-and-polish drilling, but they certainly do the obstacle courses, the
  cross-country runs, and lots of calisthenics.
  
  Part of the training is a team-building exercise, like the mountaineering or white-water 
  rafting done by the Outward Bound schools.  Remember them?  For that matter, Outward Bound 
  could even be a front for the Project, though it’s not necessary.
  Part of the training is a series of one-week introductory courses in specialties outside their 
  own.  In the Corps of Engineers, I get sent to a course or two like this every year, within my 
  specialty.  The class consists of a pretest to find out what you know, a week of lecture and hands-on
  experience, and a posttest to see what you’ve learned.  You don’t get enough knowledge to actually 
  use in a meaningful manner, but you do get enough to at least know where to look to find out more.  
  So, along with all the introductory courses is a lot of free study time where the characters can do 
  further research in what interests them.  Advanced courses in a similar format are also available for
  those who have the interest and aptitude.
  Some of the things that would be covered are map reading, radio procedures, shooting the 
  guns, cleaning the guns, driving the vehicles, maintaining the vehicles (ever try to change a tire 
  weighing a couple hundred pounds?), basic first aid (not including CPR!), plus each other’s specialties. 
  One subject definitely not covered is flying the Air Scout.  The Project doesn’t have enough time to 
  teach a non-pilot how to fly.  However, someone who comes into the Project with pilot training could 
  get his type certification on autogyros, which are damned uncommon in both the military and civil 
  arenas, and thus be allowed to fly the Air Scout.
  One idiosyncrasy of the training is that no one fails.  No one washes out.  Those who do 
  poorly on the fitness part might be assigned to a support base of a science team with a fixed base, 
  but I assume the Project wouldn’t recruit anyone who is too unfit to handle physical labor.  Team 
  members who don’t learn much in the training course still have at least one usable skill from their 
  previous lives, if not more.
  A significant part of the training is teaching.  Everyone gets to teach at least one course, 
  preferably more, either in their specialty or in an area of personal interest.  In order to fulfill the 
  goals of the Project, the team members must be able to pass on their accumulated knowledge to the 
  locals, so this may in fact be the most important part of the training cycle.  They not only have to 
  teach the locals, but they also have to teach their teammates enough that any of them can fill in for
  each other with at least a modicum of skill.
  Rather than arbitrarily say that everyone can use all of the Project equipment, I allow a pool 
  of skill points due to training (over and above the professional skills brought into the Project by the 
  character), enough to cover one field well, several fields poorly, or all of them at a bare minimum.  
  The player allocates these points based upon his character concept.  I absolutely do not want my 
  characters to all be able to drive the Science-1, fly an Air Scout, and fire the Rh-202 equally well.
  I also created a new skill.  Okay, I shamelessly plagiarized it from the Traveller role-playing 
  system.  In Traveller it’s called “jack of all trades” but in my version of the Morrow Project, I call it
  “Heuristic Problem-solving”.  The idea is that the characters are taught in the training cycle to 
  approach problems in a new way.  Basically, if you can’t solve the problem the first time, you can 
  “think sideways” to come up with another plan for tackling the problem.  In game terms, for any 
  repeatable task that requires a skill check, if the character fails the task, then makes a successful 
  
  Heuristic check, he can try again, without limit, until he runs out of time, gets a critical failure, or 
  succeeds.  This allows people with a low skill level in a field of study to still fill in for the specialist 
  character, though he’ll likely take longer to accomplish the same task.  In fairness to those who get 
  it right the first time, a critical success is only possible on a first attempt.  Simple success is the 
  best you can do on a second or subsequent attempt.  If it’s a non-repeatable task, then Heuristic 
  skill counts for nothing.
  My main reason for using Heuristic Problem-solving as a skill is to eliminate the unrealistic 
  game convenience of everybody on the team being able to use all of the equipment equally well, while 
  still allowing those less proficient characters a reasonable chance of success.
  For my biggest heresy, player characters cannot be psionic.  I have decided for my games 
  that psionic powers are the result of a favorable mutation, and thus cannot be held by prewar 
  characters.  Player characters may still have a psionic strength score for the purpose of 
  determining whether or not they can resist telepathy or other psionic attacks (though I use a 
  characteristic called willpower instead).  When you look at the occurrence of psionics in the modern 
  world, even including unproven cases, it’s so statistically insignificant as to be nonexistent.  You don’t
  have to agree.  Your game, your house rules, after all.  Maybe in your game there is a strong push to 
  recruit people who have such powers.  I just think that I’ve seen too many games in which the team 
  has a psionic (or more than one!) in a team of five.  If you allow prewar characters to possess psionic
  powers, I’d suggest making them a lot more rare, and to only allow nonviolent psionic skills.  The 
  postwar characters (the locals) can have just about anything regarding psionics.  It gives them an 
  edge against a Project team with technology on its side.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Morrow Project, The/Unofficial/The Supply Bunker/Outside Contributions/Character Creation Variant.pdf