[Tombot]

Within the polish adventures my group started to develop a second character for almost every player, to have a back-up if the first one dies.
Most of them were actually locals, cause the NATO-characters had a lot of difficulties with the fact that they did´nt know the language. And even the few who did were easily identified as western foreigners... (so KGB-agents had not a to hard time to track them down).

As long as i gave every "secondary" character his own background and specific goals for the scenario, the players really enjoyed "switching" beetween their PC´s from time to time.
F.e. one of our guys had an american seargent which had to heal up on a wound outside of krakow. A fighter which had to do a lot of killing, before the group arrived in the vincinity. But his second PC was a local smuggler, which was familiar with krakow, had contacts withhin the city, and so on. When the player switched to him, he had a total different gameplay. A bit like in some PC-games, where you can switch between different characters, with unique skills, background-information, etc.
I guess in "Bears Den" it would´nt hurt to have at least some local PC´s on your side, too.

PS: After reading through "Bears Den" again, i realized that the rumor-section includes a lot of "stalker"-like rumors (of ghosts, muties, and so on).
I never used the "twilight nightmares" and i do appreciate the fact, that T2k is a much more "serious" postapocalyptic setting (only humans and animals as enemies, instead of giant toy-robots and mutated bikini-girls with boob-lasers - i´ll keep those strictly to my machowomen-with-guns-sessions, i swear!).
But... the ukraine will introduce some hints of (mutated) horror.
Like with the sasquatch in the other thread - most things will never appear above the rumor-level, made up by superstitious people (zombies, vampires).. but there will be a chance of encountering some messed-up/mutated animals, and maybe even something really monstrous in a few desolate places. Since i never confronted my players with "Horror/Mystery"-elements within our long history of T2k-games, this will be good, as long as i do it subtly (meaning only a few, well-placed encounters, without giving the players too much information about possible "monsters".)
A bit like in a good cthuhlhu-campaign. Muhaahaa - iam looking forward to that!!!