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POPSICLES OF THE PAST
AKA
"WHAT YEAR IS THIS?  WHAT YEAR?"
-Kyle Reese, The Terminator
  Popsicles of the Past is an alternate beginning for Rifts characters.  I recommend it only for experienced players, since it requires good problem solving skills, quick thinking, and the ability to handle fluid situations.  Some beginning players might be able to handle it though, you never know.
  All too often players come to rely on their equipment, not their innate abilities and the canniness of the players.  It becomes harder and harder to justify knowledge the player is using for the PC.  I ran a group of six people, only one of whom had never been in the military, so we ran heavily toward military interests.  We wanted to have justification for our knowledge, so the PC's could use their modern day knowledge in Rifts.
  My solution?  Popsicles from the past.  Adapted from an article in Best of the Dragon #1, an alternate beginning for Metamorphis Alpha.  (Jeez, does that date me!)
  In the early 1990's, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (or F.E.M.A.) was revealed to not be a disaster management agency, but instead a government agency devoted to ensuring the continuation of human life and civilization.  Many news agencies reported it as an agency devoted to making sure the current government stays in power.  Not entirely true.
  For the purposes of this page, the FEMA operation has been carbon copied into what I plagerized from the Death Lands saga by James Axler (Or whatever hack is now writing it, since the two men who wrote under the pen name of Axler have quit for health reasons, I think one may even be dead).
OVERPROJECT WHISPER
  Overproject Whisper was activated in 1946, when it became apparent that the Soviet Union would soon have the bomb and was well on it's way to becoming a world power.  General George Patton of 2nd Armor Division was drafted to oversee the engaging project.  Patton's death was faked, and Overproject Whisper was put into effect, encompassing as many genius minds as possible, and using as much captured Nazi hardware, Nazi experimental records, Manhattan Project spinoffs and everything else they could get thier hands on.  To keep the Senate happy with the funding, it was Code Name FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and explained to congress as an agency designed to keep them alive in the event of a (then) atomic war.
PROJECT CEREBUS
  Named after the multi-headed hound of hell, the Cerebus Project covered all of the military applicable projects, everything from hardsites (read: nuclear hardened facilities), nerve gas, non nuclear weapons of mass destruction, high energy weapons, space platforms, biological weapons, and (later) computer viral weaponry.

Of Course, there are many other projects and subproject underneath it, if you want to plagerize like I did, but the first 5 Deathlands books (In no particular order: Neutron Solstice, Crater Lake, Pilgrimage to Hell, Red Holocaust, and I think: Homeward Bound) for more information on the infamous Cerebus Project.

Now, underneath the Cerebus Project, was one I codenamed Project Hela, a cryogenic storage project.  Here, is where the PC's come in.  Here's the crunch.
  PC's are chosen from Ninja's and Superspies, military or espionage O.C.C.'s from the other games, and translated to Rifts by the DM.  Allow NO magical, or psionic abilities aside from sensitive, and allow them to pick NO equipment.
  Background:  They were a military black ops team who made the ultimate mistake.  They got caught introducing Tabun VII Nerve Gas into a Soviet research facility, got a very public trial, and were sentenced to lethal injection.
  Fortunately for the PC's, the military hates to throw anything they haven't wrung every last drop from.  Stripped of any cybernetics, they were put under and put in cryogenic storage, the PC's assured that it would only be for "fifty or sixty years, just until the heat dies down."
  The last thing the PC's will remember is the lid closing on the cryogenic capsule.

  Have everyone give you coma/death rolls, five of them.  If anyone fails all five, sorry dude, your dead in stasis.  Pick someone to knock off if you want (A nice way to elimate cheaters...) and let them wake up all together.
  The first thing they will notice is the extensive damage to the facility.  It suffered a direct nuclear hit, but survived it.  Massive earthquakes destroyed 90% of the facility, but luckily for the PC's, they can still get out.
  Problem # 2; the entryway has been discovered by a tribe of DB's that look like spindly little goblins.  There are little to no weapons available in the area that the PC's awaken in, most of them are in the hands of the goblins on the forward parts of the facility, or locked behind doors..
  Problem #3:  Upon exit, they will find themselves in Louisana, or perhaps Red Stone Arsenal in Alabama, just south of the Huntsville NASA facility.

  The PC's will awaken in a heavily damaged room, the majority of the 75 cryotubes heavily damaged.  The medical bots that had resusetated them and reinstalled their cybernetics while they were un cryo-stasis sputtering and sparking as they die from age and damage.  Their only gear will be anything they scavenge off the bots or out of the cryo-room, and their leotards (Ala Aliens).  One intrepid group broke free some pipes, tore the midsections out of their jumpsuits, got some of the shattered duraglass, and made spears, spiked clubs and hatchets.
  The air will be thin, stale, and smelling of ozone.  3/4 of the lights will be out, and 1/2 of the working ones will be flickering.  The glowstrips will have all dimmed down to next to nothing.  Any player who asks should be told that glowstrips have a 1/2 life of at least 150 years, and these are far beyond that.
  The computer equipment will fail constantly whenever meddled with, and tell the players is decades of disuse, damage, and just plain age causing it, not them.  Tell them about the cracks in the walls and cielings, exposing sparking or dead power conduits, empty pipes.  The paint on the walls is faded, and in one spot, let them find a large piece of Lexan, covering a blank spot on the wall, with a label that states: "FACILITY MAP", and a strip of letter tape stating "<---YOU ARE HERE!" on the floor.  No map, and no idea where.on the Lexan the tape was.  Big fucking help.
  There will be rag dressed skeletons scattered here and there, with dog tags, and wallets.  Most of the paper and rags will be heavily stained by bodily fluids that were reduced as they decayed.  The odd thing will be the fact that the bodies are more mummified than rotted, thanks to the enviromental controls of the facility.
  By now, the Players should be coming up will all kinds of exotic theories of where they are.  One player went so far as to figure that they were on some kind of space station that had slammed onto a planet surface, or on an asteriod base that had been badly damaged in the Outsider War.
  Hallways that end in collapses, or sheer rock faces where earth slips had dropped that side of the facility down will confound the PC's, heavy, MDC doors gaurding security area, an odd camera here and there still active, and sometimes tracking the party.  Sometimes is a robot manned security station, other times, just a semi-active camera.
  The bodies will all be badly busted up, with multiple broken bones and evidence of internal injuries sustained from impact.  Even weaponry will be damaged.  It will look as if the people slammed into the walls or cieling, then the floor, while secured equipment will be twisted and warped, but possibly functional.  The impact of the mass driver (or a nuke if you want) close by literally lifted the ground the facility was in almost 25 feet in the air, then dropping it back down, devastating the complex.

  OK, what happened.  The FEMA site was heavily damaged and presumed destroyed during the First Colony War, when a mass driver shot hit nearby, knocking the shit out of the facility.  The facility, hardened against nuclear attack, survived, although heavily damaged and the entrances covered by dirty and rubble.  The facility was written off, in the recovery from the various wars that occured after the first Colony War, and nobody ever got around to looking for it again or trying to recover it.
  The site still had computer control and power, being supplied via multiple reactors, and blithely went on keeping the cryogenic prisoners safe and secure until orders were given to release them.  Years went by, the facility gradually succumbing to age and damage, until the tribe of goblins found the entrance to the motor pool, uncovered by a land slide.
  The PC's were thawed out due to two reasons:  The cryogenic storage systems were failing, and the PC's were the computers only charge after the mass-driver hit.  Two: It needed someone to fend off the goblins before they reached critical systems.

  I was very stingy in giving out equipment in the beginning, restricting most people to light firearms, mostly SDC, except for the M-20 assault rifle out of Rifts Underseas.  An attack by some 15 goblins, armed with Moltov cocktails, rude spears, and one apprentice shaman, was handled with some diffiuculty.  The M-20's, switched to burst and using AP's, managed to cut apart the goblin quasi-shaman, who was 5th level and enveloped in an Armor of Ithan, after 17 good hits (concentrated firepower by 5 PC's), and while some people got badly burnt, the good players, (6 of the 9 playing) flipped over a table, and while 5 concentrated fire, the other picked off stragglers.  It took awhile for them to get out of the facility, but only 4 of the 9 died, and since the Players got irritated at the goblins and deliberately went after them when they could have escaped, they kind of shouldered some of that resonsibility.
  In the secondary motor pool, where the goblins are entrenched, is where