First of all let me start by saying that I changed the start of WWIII from 11/18/89 to 11/18/99 for my campaigns. Feel free to alter dates to make them suit your needs. I also decided that the cause of WWIII as listed in TM 1-1 (a computer glitch) was actually just one small piece in a larger puzzle.

Bruce E. Morrow, time traveler & founder of the Project, knew the date of WWIII, but because of the risks involved with traveling to that time period he only had some of the details. He knew what would happen, generally, and when the main act took place. What he didn't know where all of the events immediately preceding the war or the immediate after effects, nor all of the specifics of exactly what happened where.

The grand MP plan was to take advantage of the technology advances the late 1990's offered, up until mid 1999. The grand Project plan called for everything to be in place by the 4th of July, 1999.

That was the plan anyway. What BEM didn't know was that an outbreak of a devastating virus was the eventual cause of the war. The computer glitch that triggered the US full-scale launches would normally have been recognized. If it happened today most people would assume it was more likely a mistake than anything else, but the world situation was so unstable & violent at the time that it was assumed to be real and the "hair trigger" was set off.

The virus swept through civilization in just a few months, starting widespread havok around Christmas of 1998. War, in various forms, broke out nearly everywhere in short order. Most of the planet was in a real mess almost overnight. Fighting varied in scale & intensity. Sometimes it was armies fighting each other, sometime armies fighting civilians, and sometimes it was just pure chaos. Eventually, things stabilized to a nervous cease-fire in most places. Every country had sustsained staggering losses from the virus & the fighting. Then in November 1999 the nukes flew and things, as bad as they had been, got even worse.

The outbreak of the virus & the immediate chaos it caused caught the Project by surprise. They thought the disaster wasn't due for almost another year. Still, most teams were long tucked away & really it was just the final phases that needed completion. But the largest number of teams to be put into place at once was to take place in the last days of June 1999. It seemed reasonable- that way more teams would have the latest gear, training & skills, knowledge, and so on.

Things had to be accellerated. The remaining teams were put away fast, sometimes with whatever was handy. Some scheduled gear was still not off the production lines yet, so equipment came from whatever was available- private collections of weapons, vehicles used at the Morrow Training Center, even clothing bought off the store shelves. It was very simple really- a live team with less-than-ideal equipment was vastly preferable to a dead team with the latest gear! Besides, the MP prided itself that their best weapons were the minds of it's troops, not their guns. Another concern was to tuck the teams away before they could be contaminated by the virus. If a team emerged from cryo only to possibly reintroduce the nastiest virus in history to the survivors of WWIII, then the Project would have the opposite of its intended effect!

These are the Omega Teams, the last Morrow Project teams into the freezers. Equipment, training, and even the personnel varied from Project standards. This is your chance to have some fun, throw additional challenges at your team, and so on.

I had several Omega teams I ran games for. My favorite was a team equipped entirely with German WWII-era weapons (mostly MP-44's and KAR 98k's) and vehicles, but had standard Project uniforms & other gear at least! Another was a recon team whose specialty was jungle and swamp areas, destined for the Florida Everglades, that woke up in northern Michigan. Here they are, put into cryo & equipped for hot swampy terrain, but things had gotten so bad that the Project put their tubes into the closest place available to the cryo labs, which were located in Michigan. The team woke up and there was three feet of snow everywhere. One team was composed of regular personnel, but none had met before they were frozen so they had to get to know each other out in the field.

I used some interesting NPC's as part of the Omega teams too. Once, the regulars thought they had seen it all, until they woke up with Bruce Morrow's Executive Secretary as part of their team. Another team had one of BEM's most trusted & secret advisors added (without their prior knowledge) to their team, a "cat person" mutant who had saved Morrow's life on one of his trips to the future. Once I added Bruce Morrow's daughter to a team. These unique characters don't have to be NPCs either- you may have a player who'd like to play someone unique & different. Just don't let anyone but that one player to know what's up until the team awakens because that's half the fun.

Remember, these teams are a chance to add new challenges and unexpected plot twists. They work best with experienced players, especially if they think they've seen everything before. Just don't go overboard and turn a potentially good plot twist into something downright silly that the players won't take seriously. The GM has to use his own judgement here. You want to add a twist or provide a new, unexpected challenge without getting carried away.