More background on the Morrow Project Cryosleep program is outlined briefly in "Fallback" stating that the Project was experimenting with this tech as far back as the 1960s.

The 1960's era cryosleep was mentioned in the 3rd edition rules stating plainly that the Project perfected the science of cryogenics early in 1964. It also fits well with my picks for the Counsel of Tomorrow members and the Rich 5, since I include Charles F Adams IV, Chairman of Raytheon from 1960-1962 and 1964-1975. Raytheon purchased Amana Refrigeration in 1965 and bundled their microwave technology under the Amana name for the consumer market. As the canon description of the cryosleep process mention the use of microwaves to inhibit ice formation, it just worked for me.

As for how the US government got cryosleep, I suggest secret DARPA project. When cryonics got started in the late 1950's and early 1960's, there was one experiment where a rat was frozen to 0 Celsius and reanimated with microwaves in 1955. So no need for the US Government to have stolen it, just throw money and researchers at it.

honestly i don't see this darkness that everyone keeps painting. yes the project failed(for any of a dozen plausible reasons listed) but even with that failure there are still survivors who the teams can help. as for the teams only spending a few weeks in an area that would be silly hen you think about it. each of the teams is given an AOR and generally put in a bolthole fairly central to their area of responsibility. this is done so that even if completely cut off they can still accomplish their small piece of the mission. one should also consider that the project wouldn't really be recruiting many "well adjusted" people. those who would be well adjusted to civilization would die rather quickly with civilization taken away. they would recruit and select people who could operate individually or in small teams with little external guidance because in a nuclear war and the aftermath thereof anything could happen. teams would carry out their initial orders, react to their unique situations, make reasonable attempts to contact their next higher headquarters, and mostly stay in their AOR. if each team spends a few weeks in each village or settlement, helps where they can, and keeps running a circuit within their AOR, it won't be that long until they can establish a more permanent patrol base and just send out help as it is needed.

it's no darker really than life as a colonist back in the old days, brighter in fact because at least the teams know that even in extreme contingencies they have a chance. compare that to the donner party.

I think you are missing a lot of the problems. Ignoring the massive losses of people due to the Project's absence, the Project was depending on the knowledge and resources available immediately after the war, and without those resources the Project will see a lot of people suffer or die that otherwise could have been saved.

Worse, the intervening century and a half has given despots like the Rich Five and Krell time to entrench themselves and flourish, meaning that an organization designed to bring order out of chaos must now also serve as an insurgency. The Project can still defeat them (presumably) but again, how many more (Project and civilian) will be lost?

The Project has lost both it's leadership and a decent chunk of its membership, and has awoken into a world vastly different than the one they were expecting with challenges that are both far greater and different in nature compared to their original mission. Given that the Project's remaining resources are never spelled out, it really is not possible to know whether or not they will be able to succeed or even survive.

don't get me wrong it's still a Charlie Foxtrot but the project wasn't going to save anyone. 5 years after the bombs drop almost everyone that was going to die from it will have already died. 150 years after they drop there's a larger population pool to work with. Project losses from the KFS are, of course, problematic but even in KFS territory there are still teams that can be awakened per canon. Krell is a threat but per cannon they lack the ability to work without leadership, a handicap that the Morrow Project personnel lack. the only group better prepared for the situation than the teams of the Morrow Project would be the snake eaters and only by merit of having more training time before they were put on ice.

Then what was the point??

I wholeheartedly disagree. Not only do you have people suffering from the direct (cancer, chemical poisoning, military/militia/criminal violence) and indirect (nuclear winter reducing crop yields) consequences of the war, you also have the negative health effects from the absence of modern technologies and materials that save so many lives every year in the US alone. These are all issues that TMP was intended to mitigate.

Yes, but they are, by and large, a population pool with an education that would be underwhelming in the old west. TMP now has to educate the population up to the level where they can even be effective in helping themselves... and they were never trained to do that! 5 million (or however many survivors there were) people with a modern education are going to be able to produce a lot better quality (and duration!) of life than 100 million people with a 19th century education. Can you imagine how hard it is to explain public health to people who have no concept of the idea? Or of how hard it is to convince people who HAVE slaves that it is not okay?

KFS is a much tougher foe than you give them credit for. In 3E at least KFS has more than 10,000 trained soldiers (not counting Air Force or Secret Police), a complete (if small) combined-arms military, as well as the ability to draft even more if necessary from their own populace. Their headquarters is under a mountain. They will be an extremely difficult nut to crack even for a fully-functional Project.

As for Krell, what are the odds that the Project starts wide-scale activation and he doesn't get a wake-up call? And the Project lost their entire headquarters, so even with full activation their leadership is pretty handicapped.

The Snake Eaters should not be a large problem. First because they are relatively few in number, second because they are more likely to align with TMP than oppose it. Worst case they are likely to partner up with TMP and then try and steer it more towards where they want the country to go... because that is exactly what they started training to do in SF in the first place!

The darkness comes from the lack of support from even villages close to each other.

Survivors are a selfish, uncooperative bunch. They are the descendants of those that took what they needed. Often this was at the expense of others or the greater good. They are clannish and have a well learned distrust of outsiders due to raids, robbery, and disease. Villages cooperate on a barter system and often operate as feudal society with a chief or warlord that is the sole authority.

Trade still happens but, trade with outsiders happens infrequently and outside the village. Two armed groups meet somewhere in the middle of two villages and barter. Mistrust at best.

Ignorance..... Knowledge died. Sure, there are some C and B level groups and those would probably be the ones built around a preWar school or University. Most of the rest are focused solely on skills that make food, shelter, and warmth. People don't have time for nice things, some story telling and music for a few hours in the evening before rising at dawn to begin again. Most cannot read, and those that can mostly can read only at a grammar school level. People can't build more than simple machines because math has degenerated to simple arithmetic. Health is a terrifying mix of superstition, misunderstood lore, and fiction. The average person won't live to see 40. Most children will grow to be adults if they can just survive past their fifth birthday.

Technology is lost.... The plagues and the destruction were pitiless and did not care if the victim was a high school drop out or held a PHd. People that knew how to build things or repair things may have lasted longer if they were valuable to a collective whole, such as a mechanic who could fix cars. People were only able to pass on some of their knowledge and without formal education, some was lost in context. Some skills had to be learned and often without someone possessing the skills to begin with such as blacksmith or log cabin builder. Other things are consumed and cannot be replaced, like some tools. There is no hardware store when your last file is dull or the chainsaw chain has broken for the 34th time. Making a replacement may not even occur to them because no one in their collective tribe ever knew how to build any of it.

all of this is true but as far as the situation goes there are far worse scenario's to wake up to.

lost knowledge and technology are handicaps. i'm assuming roughly 15% literacy rates that aren't very well spread out through the populace. some areas such as settlements built around universities and larger schools will be better off in this regard. the thing is even if the 5 year plan worked there would still have been a major deficit in skilled labor, massive drops in the literacy rate, and the project would be spending most of their resources teaching people how to survive in the long term. the world the teams wake up to has experienced the loss of technical knowledge and technology but the people already know how to survive long term. they've been doing it for 150 years.

xenophobia would be a major handicap that would also have to be handled on the 5 years plan. the big change is that there is no longer a major war in recent memory or possibly still raging. if the teams would have been able to bypass that barrier with mushroom clouds still branded in the commo memory they should still be able to after much of that memory has faded. they also have the advantage of having valuable skills and trade goods to aid them in getting around such barriers, never underestimate how far even a good cup of coffee can go in winning hearts and minds.

before we get to likely aggressors/allies we need a few basic assumptions. first i am assuming Recon Team G-9 from Operation Damocles is successful and sends the wakeup signal. i am also assuming that the project fails to implement even rudimentary COMSEC and that the wakeup signal will be received by everyone with cryo tech. allowing Krell's warriors to have a chance.

as for the likely aggressors/allies. the Snake Eaters could go either way. these are teams of highly trained Green Berets who in 3rd edition are described as being reasonable and having a primary goal of figuring out what the project is up to. assuming the party does not antagonise them they will likely fall into the allies category where their training will make them invaluable in reconstruction. specifically considering the fact that they are specifically trained to be teachers and mentors. if the team forms an alliance with them the lack of education is easily offset by these heavily armed teachers. they would also very likely take an adversarial approach to both Krell and the KFS so even without a formal alliance with the snake eaters those that RT G-9 would wake up if they deal with the AI on the UP could easily present a major stumbling block to the other major hostile factions.

Krell and his forces are known hostile. unless the destruction of Prime Base was so rapid that nobody was able to send a message out, the teams should wake to a warning about this threat. they are limited in technology and lack the ability to react to changing situations without direct oversight. unfortunately assuming RT G-9 is successful their leader will likely be awoken along with surviving Morrow Assets and the Snake Eaters. this makes Krell a credible threat to teams operating within reach of any Krell forces but again unless they destroyed prime base before a message could be sent they should be a threat the teams are able to prepare for.

KFS is one of the more serious threats. fortunately they haven't seen any significant actions in more than a century. if there are any Snake Eater teams awoken in their controlled territories by RT G-9 the KFS will predictably be met with a threat that they are completely unprepared for. yes they have an advantage in that they have Armor and Air Support, but, as Iraq and Afghanistan have showed us these advantages can be offset. that said an armed confrontation with the KFS is a less than ideal solution. if a team could somehow subvert the ruling body of the KFS to align along Morrow Project ideals they could provide a technological base for a more rapid reconstruction. after all what's a little velvet revolution between friends?

I will have to check when I get home from work, but I do not believe the Krell agents ever shown themselves to the forces from Prime Base. They implanted themselves as insurgents and agitators. I think when they captured the Morrow team members and negotiated, they present only as part of the large angry mob of survivors. Like I said, I am at work and may be wrong but that is what I think it said. If true, Prime Base could only send out a message along the lines of, "Oops! Pissed off some survivors and botched a rescue. Be careful out there!" Far from identifying a group of hostiles.

According to 4th edition, pgs. 477 & 479, Bruce Morrow knows of Krell and the fact that they oppose the MP in the future. Whether he tells the COT or the upper command units of MP is not provided in the book. During Bruce's excursions into the future we can assume he knew of or heard about Krell, the Frozen Chosen, and the KFS. Based upon the implications in the book, Bruce was more concerned with Krell the either of the other two. Maybe the MP defeats the KFS and Frozen Chosen but in doing so weakens themselves so much as to be easily conquered by the horde of Krell.

Guess that's what we are supposed to play out and discover.

True, 4th edition does not expressly say whether or not he informed others about Krell. It does indicate that Bruce was very reluctant to interfere with the timeline. The stopping of the 1989 nuclear war was done reluctantly. After Bruce goes and spends two years in the future after that, he comes back even more resolved to not interfere with the timeline ever again and with the desire to know who Krell is. Given that, I would assume he kept all threat data to himself to avoid contaminating the timeline. How bringing back powerful lasers and portable fusion technology does not do that I will conveniently ignore or assume Bruce saw no significant change in the future as a result of bringing those back.

well back to third edition(i don't have fourth edition yet) in prime base it says that the staff at prime base learned of krell before being wiped out. the fact that his forces were able to secure a nuclear weapon would have pointed to them being a significant threat even if the nuke at the refugee camp was detonated before it could be deployed against morrow in the time between that and the final fall of the base it would have been negligent of the Morrow HQ staff to not send a message warning of this threat before their last stand. add in what i'm being told from fourth edition and there is no feasible way for the the Morrow HQ to have still been in the dark about this threat and fail to send some kind of warning to the teams to be read once they wake up.

Don't buy it until it is revised and properly edited.

well i'm waiting on the modules to be brought up to speed on it as well as the Errata. i don't like having to guess and improvise to make a module work with a new system only to find out halfway through the campaign that they're releasing the module with accurate updates in a week and i did everything wrong.:D

I was really going to pick this up too...cant wait to see the production stuff. Is there a plan to update the 4th book or just a hope?

I would be surprised if there was an update or revision any time soon. It's my feeling that sales have been underwhelming, and that they are likely attributing that to the genre or gaming in general than to any shortcomings of the actual product.

Maybe this should be moved to the Prime Base thread, but rereading the 4th edition rulebook it says that both Prime Base Alpha and Prime Base Beta, for lack of a better way to differentiate Prime Base and the alternate, have an awake staff through the war. This means that at the very least, Prime Base Alpha should have been able to send a message to Prime Base Beta talking about the events in real time, including the nuclear blast. Even if they do not name Krell specifically, Prime Base Beta would know there is a group with the ability to use nukes. This also means that the Project should go on according to plan right at the wars end using Prime Base Beta to awake teams, but that is a discussion for another thread.

Wait... what??? The backup had staff awake during the destruction of Prime Base?? And is still there, frozen?? That makes zero sense to me. What stopped them from waking the Project?

Yup, here is the text, copied from my PDF of the 4th edition:

As a final failsafe, an alternate base was constructed, so that the teams could be revived even if some unforeseen catastrophe overwhelmed Prime Base. This base had the same libraries as Prime, and many of the same facilities, albeit on a rather smaller scale. However, it had only a relatively small frozen staff of specialists in addition to its small “awake team”.

And there is no explanation given for why this alternate base completely failed in its intended design as a failsafe???

this is why i tend to like the idea of software design screwup. it requires less handwavium to cause the Charlie Foxtrot.