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Questions to Vet Other Time-Displaced Persons


BoloOfEarth

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Before my question, a little background:

 

I'm running a Morrow Project Hero game on RPoL -- for those who don't know, MP is a post-apocalypse game where teams are trained, outfitted, and frozen before the coming war so they can help rebuild after the worst has passed.  However, instead of waking up a few years afterward as planned, they wake up over a century later on their own.  In my game, 130 years after the big one.

 

In the original MP game world, teams were frozen in the 1970s and early 80s, with the war happening in 1989.  I altered the war's start to 2016, with most of the current team having been frozen in 2014 but the knew that some Morrow teams had been frozen decades earlier. 

 

However, the PCs are going to be communicating by radio with another Morrow person who was originally frozen in 1975, then woken up in 2014 for retraining and re-equipping, before being re-frozen in 2015.  So he has extensive early 1970s knowledge, and just a smattering of 2010s info (some of which may be misconceptions).  He also has good reason to be paranoid and not implicitly trust that they are who they say they are.  So he's going to ask them questions to make sure they're the real McCoy.

 

I'm figuring he'll ask when they were frozen, and who was president then.  Maybe a question or two specific to the Morrow Project, though different teams had different training, and a lot of the Project was top secret, so the teams won't know a lot of the inner workings or details.

 

He'll want to ask a trick question or two (maybe "who was the first woman president"), to see how they answer.  (And he's a crotchety old man, which will color his interaction with them.  I plan to have some fun with this.)

 

What other questions might somebody like that ask to make sure the PC team is who they say they are?

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Logically, if the Morrow Project inteneded for individuals frozen at different times to interact with each other, the program should have developed a series of passwords to deal with this problem. These passwords should be something easy to remember, but unlikely to be decoded by enemy agents in casual conversation. Also, if the questions are intended to out foreign agents it might be a good idea to base questions on things that are commonly misunderstood by non-Americans.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Ask about the World Trade Center (completed 1973, and we all know what happened in 2001).

 

Ask questions whose answer changes after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Berlin Wall, break-up of Yugoslavia, where the big American military hospital in Europe is, etc. The name "Leningrad" might be a tip-off, too.

 

Ask them how many Euros to the US dollar, approximately, when they were frozen (since the Euro didn't exist at all until circa 2000).

 

Ask about volcanoes in the US. Genuine MP personnel would think of Hawaii and Alaska only; Mt St Helens exploded in 1980.

 

Ask them about big nuclear reactor accidents. Until Three Mile Island in 1979, most casual civilians would know of none. The Soviets were still suppressing knowledge of theirs, and the US was still having reasonable success in "keeping a lid on" various weapons-related nuclear accidents of their own. Chernobyl happened in 1986, Fukushima Daiichi in 2011.

 

Ask them who was Pope. Paul VI died in 1978; John Paul I reigned for a few weeks in 1978; John Paul II until 2005; Benedict XVI until 2013; then Francis.

 

Ask about Hong Kong (which reverted to Chinese control in 1997), the Panama Canal (treaties signed 1977, handover to Panama 1997), Viet Nam (Saigon fell 1975, reunification official in 1976).

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