This is The Morrow Project (second edition, 1981). I kind of don’t know where to begin on this, but let’s start with the thing I just learned: It was co-created by Richard Tucholka (Fringeworthy, Bureau 13). The other creators are Robert Sadler and Kevin Dockery, who I am not familiar with.

TMP is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi game. In the 60s, a group of American industrialists predict that a nuclear war is coming, so they set about building a fail-safe, a network of cryogenically frozen teams that, after the war, can awaken and, with the help of a central command hub, rebuild civilization. Naturally, the project was sabotaged at the last minute, so the teams awakened 150 years later than expected, without their central command. The mutant filled world they return to has moved on without them. World War III is just a distant legend.

If all of this sounds a lot like the Fallout series of videogames, yes, you are right. To drive this point home, there are also two-headed mutant bison, a focus on power armor (called HAAM here – Hydraulically Assisted Armored Man) and an open fetishization of military equipment and practices.

The game system is super complicated, more so than Aftermath, and I will pretty much leave it at that. But the world is extremely interesting, with play focusing not just on survival, but also rebuilding, something not often tackled in RPGs (did this also influence Death Stranding? Maybe!). One cool wrinkle: teams were put into cryo starting in the 60s, so their pre-war experiences and the tech they wake up with are potentially vastly different from group to group (or even person to person). Some can even wake up to equipment they didn’t train on, that was upgraded after they went to sleep. I love this idea.

Gotta say: I love that the cover design looks exactly like a million other training and technical manuals I’ve seen (gotta love that CNC machine aesthetic).

Definitely worth reading.