The Role Playing Public Radio Forums
General Category => RPGs => : Gorkamorka March 07, 2016, 11:07:52 AM
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This thread is for ideas I want to jot down while listening to the actual play podcasts of Redmarket. It will be story hooks, equipment ideas, NPC and location ideas. It will probably also include a lot of unapologetic backseat game design.
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FEEL FREE TO ADD YOUR OWN.
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1.
This game needs bore spears. Every latent should have one. Boar spear is a long strong spear with a crossbar just after the blade. So once you stick something you can hold it in place. Like say, hold a vector 7 feet away from you while your buddies shoot it.
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Something along those lines is happening on the current cover (sans crossguard). I imagine that the drawback is that it would be a pain to lug around. An upgrade could be to make it telescope somehow.
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Something along those lines is happening on the current cover (sans crossguard). I imagine that the drawback is that it would be a pain to lug around. An upgrade could be to make it telescope somehow.
You need those cross guards to keep the casualty/vector to just walk up the shaft and eat your face.
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Something along those lines is happening on the current cover (sans crossguard). I imagine that the drawback is that it would be a pain to lug around. An upgrade could be to make it telescope somehow.
You need those cross guards to keep the casualty/vector to just walk up the shaft and eat your face.
(https://s3.amazonaws.com/AZComics/comic299.png)
:V
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True. I was just saying it fits into the setting due to being in the cover art. But yes crossguard is very important for playing the keep away game.
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Boar spears or naginatas. You really want the naginata since, not only can you stab with it, but you can also slice. And it has the cross guard
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2.
Latent make really scary suicide bombers. All they need is to sneak into the place they hate and off themselves.
I can imagine a really scary cult leader that would style himself after "The old man on the mountain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_ad-Din_Sinan)" and have all bunch of latent cultists/assassins that he could send out to terrorise anyone settlement that does not pay the protection fee. The Red Market version of Hassassins.
"Pay up or my latent ninja will sneak into your settlement and spit into your well. And if you catch him, have fun dealing with the vector"
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3.
A deaf person could make a living teaching sign language to takers. A group of takers that know sign language would have a definite advantage of being able to communicate silently close to casualties without making them self a target.
Same with semaphore for long range communication.
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4.
In the lost everyone travels by bicycle. Ok maybe not everyone, but bicycles and drawn carts are going to be a big part of most peoples life.
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Rivers would be the fastest and safest way to cover long distances. I could even see a small-scale mobile enclave built on a collection of barges or paddle-wheelers.
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3.
A deaf person could make a living teaching sign language to takers. A group of takers that know sign language would have a definite advantage of being able to communicate silently close to casualties without making them self a target.
Same with semaphore for long range communication.
Maybe an entire enclave was made out of a school for the deaf. The Casualties didn't hit it as bad because it was quiet.
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Rivers would be the fastest and safest way to cover long distances. I could even see a small-scale mobile enclave built on a collection of barges or paddle-wheelers.
Up and down the Mississippi? Called the Huck Finners?
Alternately a former casino river cruse ship, teaming with zombies; crewed by one of The Meek, intent on moving from port to port and letting off his zombie cargo to spread the plague.
Maybe the players are a group of victims turned latents on the ship abandoned in the "zombie making" pile and they must fight towards the engine room/navigation room to prevent the ship from reaching the next port.
Might make a good one shot intro to the world/system.
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In Red Market's #3 (aka The Ballad of Drift), Caleb talked about the men, women and children of the fallen enclave that had turned into speed demon zombies.
I had a twisted idea.
Children are suppost to be very flexible. Far more flexible than adults. Add to this that zombification removes all/most physiological governors of pain and so forth from an infected physical abilities.
So imagine a classroom of five year olds running at full speed in a close knit wolfpack after some unlucky taker. Now imagine the Taker shimmies up a 40 foot wall because he can grasp the handholds.
Now imagine the classroom of moaning and sobbing infected kids looking up at him drooling, and then starting to instinctively form a human ladder with child after child doing insane olympic level acrobatics to jump onto one other's shoulders so that some of their numbers can climb the wall and bring the precious precious brains down to them.
I'm suggesting a variant of zombie that infects a group of children turning them into a super acrobatic and agile psudo hivemind.
The "bonus" to this is that the question of "how many five year olds can you beat up in a fight" meme that keeps floating around the internet can be realistically addressed in game.
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So imagine a classroom of five year olds running at full speed in a close knit wolfpack after some unlucky taker. Now imagine the Taker shimmies up a 40 foot wall because he can grasp the handholds.
Now imagine the classroom of moaning and sobbing infected kids looking up at him drooling, and then starting to instinctively form a human ladder with child after child doing insane olympic level acrobatics to jump onto one other's shoulders so that some of their numbers can climb the wall and bring the precious precious brains down to them.
I'm suggesting a variant of zombie that infects a group of children turning them into a super acrobatic and agile psudo hivemind.
Well that's terrifying. I salute your sick and twisted mind, Twisting H
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You know, given what little Caleb has described in the intro stuff he's shown us, there are two things that stand out to me.
1) Although he talks about breakdown of higher brain functions, there's nothing there that prevents Casualties from having basically a form of long-term Alzheimers where their cognition increases randomly as Twitch makes random neurons still alive in the dying parts of the brain fire. I'd imagine a lot of people got caught solely because they treated Casualties as unthinking or unable to plan in short bursts.
2) Vectors may start losing higher brain functions immediately, but I could easily see someone who was infected and starting to Vector using their weapons they died with, since they'd have enough higher brain function to remember that killing things makes them edible.
In a different tack, there's nothing to prevent Latents from living on Casualty meat.
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That just gave me some ideas for some terrifying Abberants. Also reminds me of Ross's Pontypoole zombies from The Shard.
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In a different tack, there's nothing to prevent Latents from living on Causalty meat.
You mean aside from the usual health risks of eating rotten human flesh? Oh yeah, none at all. :V
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In a different tack, there's nothing to prevent Latents from living on Causalty meat.
You mean aside from the usual health risks of eating rotten human flesh? Oh yeah, none at all. :V
Hey, at least I didn't go full Sexy Losers and mention necrophilia compulsions in Zombieland...
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So, I'm not totally up on the Red Markets lore (missed the chance to beta test so I'm just going off of the AP's and the sub-Reddit) but I was wondering if there's a Walking Dead clause in Red Markets? That is, no-one knows what a zombie is, zombie fiction didn't exist prior to the coming of the Blight, that sort of thing.
I ask this because I came across an audio podcast called Knifepoint Horror, one episode of which I thought made a great seed for a Red Markets job - but depends on the concept of zombies existing before the outbreak of the infection (in that it revolves around a director of zombie movies unable to cope with the new reality of a zombie outbreak).
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I was wondering if there's a Walking Dead clause in Red Markets? That is, no-one knows what a zombie is, zombie fiction didn't exist prior to the coming of the Blight, that sort of thing.
Zombie fiction existed prior to the Crash in the Red Markets universe - it got as many people killed, expecting slow moving zombies not vectors, as it enabled people to survive, knowing to shoot for the head.
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In that case, here's a link to the episode in question (http://knifepointhorror.libsyn.com/undead).
As you mentioned, a lot of people get killed in the Crash because they're expecting Romero, not 28 Days Later. Now, part of the premise of this episode (trying to avoid spoilers) is that a director of extremely successful zombie movies (who prided himself on realism in his speculative fiction) comes to believe he might be responsible for the severity of the zombie apocalypse, that if he'd made his movies differently then more people would be alive. He wanders out into an infected zone, leaving it up to the protagonist to go out and find him.
My current concept for what this looks like in a Red Markets game is that he's a Recession civilian who has slipped into the Loss, and the job is basically being hired to locate him, with a sizeable bonus if you can get him home before he gets declared homo sacer. The big "set pieces" of the job (aside from the daunting optional end boss of running the quarantine) revolve around the concept of this deranged creator attempting to impose a fictional narrative upon reality, recreating moments from his body of work in order to act out a redemption arc. He's setting himself up for a "suicide by horde" where he pulls the "I'll hold them off, go on without me!" death, thus proving to himself that he is a hero.
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Do the casualties produce body heat?
I'm sure vectors do, but I'm wondering about the shamblers.
If they don't. What happens up north in winter? Do they freeze solid? Is there a seasonal zombie respite up there?
If so I can imagine that winter would bring on a gold rush into the big cities. Every taker group would show up for the frozen season, trucking out as much as possible before the thaw hits. Then when it does there are always a few greedy once that left just a day to late to create a new vector outbreak.
EDIT: Does the Chicago aberrant strain function in winter and therefore mess up takers lifes every year?
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In that case, here's a link to the episode in question (http://knifepointhorror.libsyn.com/undead).
As you mentioned, a lot of people get killed in the Crash because they're expecting Romero, not 28 Days Later. Now, part of the premise of this episode (trying to avoid spoilers) is that a director of extremely successful zombie movies (who prided himself on realism in his speculative fiction) comes to believe he might be responsible for the severity of the zombie apocalypse, that if he'd made his movies differently then more people would be alive. He wanders out into an infected zone, leaving it up to the protagonist to go out and find him.
My current concept for what this looks like in a Red Markets game is that he's a Recession civilian who has slipped into the Loss, and the job is basically being hired to locate him, with a sizeable bonus if you can get him home before he gets declared homo sacer. The big "set pieces" of the job (aside from the daunting optional end boss of running the quarantine) revolve around the concept of this deranged creator attempting to impose a fictional narrative upon reality, recreating moments from his body of work in order to act out a redemption arc. He's setting himself up for a "suicide by horde" where he pulls the "I'll hold them off, go on without me!" death, thus proving to himself that he is a hero.
Or he sees himself as the new messiah because his zombie vision came true. I can see him gaining a sizable cult.
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Potentially, I suppose. I do somewhat prefer the tragic version of it.
Another version of the job might be getting hired to confirm his death (in this version he might be a Lost rather than part of the Recession) by someone who blames the death of their loved one - or perhaps even the fall of their enclave - on the movies. Say, the victim shored up their high school as a defensive perimeter, tries to operate on Romero rules and it ends up being a total massacre. Maybe not total slaughter; maybe a survivor gets away to tell the story of how movie-logic didn't work, and the Fall of Winnebago Lutheran becomes spread around Enclavers as a cautionary tale.
In this version of the tale, he's still going for suicide by horde - the tricky part is getting his stuff out of the horde to serve as proof of death.
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The band Gorillaz are a taker crew working and living in the lost.
These guys
http://youtu.be/UclCCFNG9q4 (http://youtu.be/UclCCFNG9q4)
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When will we see the aberrant casualties?
I'm especially looking forward to seeing the sparkly blood drinking type.
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Do the casualties produce body heat?
I'm sure vectors do, but I'm wondering about the shamblers.
If they don't. What happens up north in winter? Do they freeze solid? Is there a seasonal zombie respite up there?
If so I can imagine that winter would bring on a gold rush into the big cities. Every taker group would show up for the frozen season, trucking out as much as possible before the thaw hits. Then when it does there are always a few greedy once that left just a day to late to create a new vector outbreak.
I can see it being a kind of desperation thing, whereby if you haven't saved up enough harvest (rip Drift) to last the winter without seriously hurting your Retirement Plan then you need to maybe bundle up and go Snow Crashing.
I'm not sure how much the Blight tendrils that animate casualties restrain the effects of straight up decomposition beyond just keeping them old bones moving, but consider the opposite: what happens to a Casualty in the Nevada desert in the blazing, dry heat? Do they dessicate and mummify to the point where they can't walk and are just basically bitey landmines in the dunes? What about somewhere hot but humid, like the equator? Do they rot especially fast and become skeletal almost straight away?
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Do the casualties produce body heat?
I'm sure vectors do, but I'm wondering about the shamblers.
If they don't. What happens up north in winter? Do they freeze solid? Is there a seasonal zombie respite up there?
If so I can imagine that winter would bring on a gold rush into the big cities. Every taker group would show up for the frozen season, trucking out as much as possible before the thaw hits. Then when it does there are always a few greedy once that left just a day to late to create a new vector outbreak.
I can see it being a kind of desperation thing, whereby if you haven't saved up enough harvest (rip Drift) to last the winter without seriously hurting your Retirement Plan then you need to maybe bundle up and go Snow Crashing.
I'm not sure how much the Blight tendrils that animate casualties restrain the effects of straight up decomposition beyond just keeping them old bones moving, but consider the opposite: what happens to a Casualty in the Nevada desert in the blazing, dry heat? Do they dessicate and mummify to the point where they can't walk and are just basically bitey landmines in the dunes? What about somewhere hot but humid, like the equator? Do they rot especially fast and become skeletal almost straight away?
I don't know and I would love for Caleb to tell us. I can see so many possibilities for climate affected zombies.
So Caleb. Make sure you give us some basic rules of Zombie mechanics in the book so we can take them an extrapolate in strange directions.
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1) What are people using for drugs? Since nobody can import heroin, cocaine, or opium, they can't get those outside of a dedicated farming operation and even then they can't really grow in the states. Synthetic drugs would be outside the reach of most people in the Loss due to technological and supply limitations. Tobacco was produced in what is now the Recession and they won't export it if they can even grow it. The only things I can think people would be able to get or make is pot, mushrooms, things to huff, and alcohol. Are a new breed of dealers creating new types of drugs from what's left?
2) Are the vectors or casualties smart enough to dig? If someone was underground in a bunker or tunnel would they dig down or run for an entrance? If not would a collapsed mine or a landslide be a minefield of trapped casualties?
3) Would a psychopath-turned-vector attempt to deceive others into coming closer instead of shouting at them to flee? I can see a person running is away from a group a casualties towards a taker group, shouting for them to help, only to tackle one of them when they run over. Maybe an Abberant's voice sounds much clearer than the other infected and it can still form sentences?
4) Would a cult dedicated to infecting others, upon their turning into vectors, intentionally slash up and augment their mouths and hands to better transmit the Blight? I can see a taker getting grappled by a Casualty, confident his chain mail will protect him, only to find out someone drove a bunch of needles into its hands as his shoulder begins to burn.
5) Would feral people like Paddywhack or people too young to remember the Crash be bothered at all by reminders of the old world? After a while, would people be unaware the Recession even exists or would they see it as a mythical place?
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1. 5 years after the Crash, international trade has probably picked back up to some degree. Drug cartels are now legitimate trading companies since they are masters of moving products across dangerous terrain. You can grow opium in Mexico after all. It's probably far more expensive and sold to the Recession for legit painkiller meds mostly now. Meth is still being made because the demand would only increase.
2. Vectors are not that smart. I imagine they would dig through obstacles if they could sense/hear targets on the other side. So they would tear through doors and walls but not a collapsed mine shaft.
3. All vectors are the same in terms of mental ability and motivation. Saint or serial killer, you will act like every other vector. The apologies of a killer turned vector are going to be selfish 'oh god, help me, it hurts!' etc. They're dying in a painful manner so complex thinking is out of the question, I imagine.
4. They could, but they would probably do it while they were human.
5. Depends on the person. One question is whether the Recession is going to retake the Loss or not. If it does, then the Recession will come to them sooner or later. If not, it could become a mythic place. Is this the Wild West, a transitional period in history or is this a new permanent normal?
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I could see there still being some meth around, but given that it requires a lot of chemical precursors I don't know how big it would be. A lot of the infrastructure necessary to produce meth (and not blow yourself up) would be compromised. Certainly you wouldn't be seeing NK-grade meth any more, unless maybe your enclave is a North Korean meth lab. Trailerpark meth, sure, and the one-pot methods are so easy you can literally make meth while driving, but again I'm not sure how long you'd be able to reliably source chemical precursors necessary for even the roughest batch. There are only so many pharmacies left unraided five years into the end of the world, though chemical warehouses are probably less likely targets. My guess would be that the production cycle would have to be kind of irregular - you make do with what you can, obviously, but you really can only cook once you've managed to source all the necesssaries and it's only going to get harder to source those ingredients as the Crash rolls on. Whereas the stuff you can grow in soil - poppies for opiates; marijuana etc - would be a more reliable crop. The only reason North Korea switched from opium to the meth game was that it was having problems with agriculture but had plenty of scientists and industrial facilities going spare.
A job for morally-flexible Takers might involve raiding a chemical refinery for certain chemical precursors, or securing a building that contains a good set-up for producing on a larger scale than one-pot cooking.
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Are you an expert in this area? Could you explain what you need to manufacture drugs from the ground up? Are there facilities to make chemical precursors east of the Mississippi?
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Are you an expert in this area? Could you explain what you need to manufacture drugs from the ground up? Are there facilities to make chemical precursors east of the Mississippi?
For game reasons...Of course. ;D
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I don't claim to be Professor Drugs here. I kind of accidentally learned how to meth while researching North Korea while I was living in the South. Working in Asia is a bit crazy and drug charges are basically the worst thing to happen to a foreigner working there (and not uncommon given our relatively lax attitude to stuff like weed), so I educated myself a little.
Let's go with the aforementioned "meth while you drive" route, which is pretty easy but only really works on very small amounts. It's main appeal is you don't need much pseudoephedrine - so you can get around restrictions - but it also requires some hydrophobic solvents, ammonium nitrate, lye, lithium, salt and sulphuric acid. So while most of that is stuff you can fairly easily get hold of (pseudoephedrine from raiding a pharmacy; camping fuel or starter fluid for the hydrophobic solvent; liquid fertiliser; lithium batteries) and are fairly easy to get today, five years into the Crash a lot of that stuff is going to command a higher price if it's easily available at all. You try haggling an enclave out of the fertiliser it needs to grow food, or talking Aaron into letting you have his gadgets' batteries for meth. (And yes, the lithium in the batteries does mean this is one of the riskier meth process out there in terms of woops where did all this fire come from)
If your Taker group is out in the Midwest, or any area that was heavily agricultural pre-Crash, the Birch method is a bit simpler and easier to work on a larger scale. Again, you're reacting liquid fertilizer with pseudoephedrine and some kind of alkaline metal, such as sodium or lithium, and again you're at risk of burning down your everything. That's also not as bad as the Australian "hypo" method, which is fantastic if you want to inhale phosphene gas and/or get scorched by white phosphorous. This is all leaving aside the common practice of combining meth with other stimulants such as caffeine (no, really, meth isn't enough for some people).
That said, meth does have a history of use in the US military as modern as the Persian Gulf War - which Caleb alluded to which his evac sauce in episode 1 - so it's possible there are some US government owned facilities out there that were converted to ES production during the Crash. It's possible that the government did a lot of the work for you before NOPE'ing out, or falling to infection. Get past a few Casualties to get into a warehouse of liquid fertiliser, pseudoephedrine and alkaline metals? And the flammability/explosive risk the lithium/sodium imposes gives you a time limit or environmental complication on the mission because those commonly catch fire on contact with moisture or air - something's on fire, take what you can and go.
As to whether there are facilities to making chemical precursors east of the Missippi - honestly, I'd have to do some research on the industrial presences in the region before I commented. It's not a region I know particularly well. I do know that pseudoephedrine is produced from plant alkaloids, and that some of the plants in question (the genus Ephedra) do grow in America. That said, currently the majority of pseudoephedrine refinement and production takes place in India and China so once local stocks of that run out, you're probably going to have to start farming Ephredra plants to brew Mormon Tea.
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Mormon Tea? Great! New job ideas incoming!
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So in other words, it's exactly like in Payday 2. Got it.
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Payday 2 doesn't have zombies.
Yet.
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Who knows, maybe by the time of Red Markets someone's figured out how to improve Mormon Tea to the point of it being just drinkable meth.
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as an asthetic side note meth burns really weird colors and you, and wherever your cooking it, smells bad all the time. as to the question of meth east of the mississippi, i live in north mississippi and meth production is one of the largest criminal problems we have here. i suspect anywhere you have a lot of farming the problem is the same as it would not be as supsicious to go to a store and by a lot of fertilizer as it would be in a largely urban enviroment.
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Are you an expert in this area? Could you explain what you need to manufacture drugs from the ground up? Are there facilities to make chemical precursors east of the Mississippi?
Hmm. I don't have the time but a dive through the Department of Justice and possibly some Chemistry journals could provide some insight to these questions.
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what happens to zombies in red markets when they are hit with high voltage. i only ask cause i am prepping a game and wanted to know if an enclave built around a nuclear power plant would be safe if they ran massive amounts of electricity through there fence
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what happens to zombies in red markets when they are hit with high voltage. i only ask cause i am prepping a game and wanted to know if an enclave built around a nuclear power plant would be safe if they ran massive amounts of electricity through there fence
I'd assume it's roughly similar to what happens to Normals - the muscles lock up and tissue burns.
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Listening to the Redeemers looting the warehouse.
Just realised that RedMarket is a game about PC powerlooting.
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Listening to the Redeemers looting the warehouse.
Just realised that RedMarket is a game about PC powerlooting.
Yeah, and in some ways that's how the Reformers will continue to play. The key as the GM is risk/reward. If they had the time and patience the warehouse could be a Mr. JOLS... if they can offload all the loot, A), and if they can survive what the GM should throw at them, B). You have to ensure it's a high risk, high reward scenario.
But the players I had were cautious, so looting became a big part of their MO. Since it's economic horror, having goods to provide is a good way to survive. But they know that getting everything is one thing, selling is another. Failing those checks makes them half as valuable, which greatly affects your bottom line.
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Listening to the Redeemers looting the warehouse.
Just realised that RedMarket is a game about PC powerlooting.
Yeah, and in some ways that's how the Reformers will continue to play. The key as the GM is risk/reward. If they had the time and patience the warehouse could be a Mr. JOLS... if they can offload all the loot, A), and if they can survive what the GM should throw at them, B). You have to ensure it's a high risk, high reward scenario.
But the players I had were cautious, so looting became a big part of their MO. Since it's economic horror, having goods to provide is a good way to survive. But they know that getting everything is one thing, selling is another. Failing those checks makes them half as valuable, which greatly affects your bottom line.
I just felt it was funny, because powelooting everythin is very old style DnD thing to do.
A quick question about the job that Pixy created for herself. Do the rules have a reward/risk matrix? Because once you have all these trucks you can start to make some really big scores.
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Because once you have all these trucks you can start to make some really big scores.
Oh yeah, having a truck really affected how we played and what we did as a group.
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Because once you have all these trucks you can start to make some really big scores.
Oh yeah, having a truck really affected how we played and what we did as a group.
Speaking from the GM side, the Takers' access to a car also had a huge effect on how I planned Leg encounters. Not only did I have to reconsider where the encounters would be happening (Highways, streets, roads, etc) and what would logically be found there (Gas station, abandoned RV, crashed big rig, etc) I also had to consider how to make the encounter enticing enough to tempt them into stopping, or how to make it naturally obstruct their route so their options were to engage or spend extra fuel to go around rather than simply waving as they drove past.
Fortunately our game was in Nevada, where nearly everything important is a short ways off a major highway and everything else is just fucking desert. :V
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So is there a Reward / Risk matrix for game masters ?
If not, what should one look like?
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So is there a Reward / Risk matrix for game masters ?
If not, what should one look like?
IIRC in one of the GDW episodes Caleb said he roughly gauged how difficult a job would be by how many legs it had; this is because legs drain player resources before they get to the job site itself. 1 leg is easy, 2-3 is moderate, 4+ is hard.
Then of course you have to take into account how much the job is worth before and after negotiations, the breaking point of the Taker group, the complication at the job site itself...
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So is there a Reward / Risk matrix for game masters ?
If not, what should one look like?
IIRC in one of the GDW episodes Caleb said he roughly gauged how difficult a job would be by how many legs it had; this is because legs drain player resources before they get to the job site itself. 1 leg is easy, 2-3 is moderate, 4+ is hard.
Then of course you have to take into account how much the job is worth before and after negotiations, the breaking point of the Taker group, the complication at the job site itself...
It kind of works on two parameters. There's one table that determines how much a job is worth initially. The risk is the complication table in designing jobs, where it adds a tilt.
As the beta stood a lot of the stuff was a more narrative, 'here's some ideas, it's up to you to interpret how to use them.' What I used when planning the Reformers was to look at the complication and what I rolled for the cost and determine what risks provide enough incentive for the players to go for it.
Another issue is how you play the game. Since we hacked in the box trucks that makes it so the players can haul a lot more stuff, so they went for more goods based jobs. Because of that I made it so sometimes it was harder to move around or they had to fight really hard to load up their trucks.
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So is there a Reward / Risk matrix for game masters ?
If not, what should one look like?
IIRC in one of the GDW episodes Caleb said he roughly gauged how difficult a job would be by how many legs it had; this is because legs drain player resources before they get to the job site itself. 1 leg is easy, 2-3 is moderate, 4+ is hard.
Then of course you have to take into account how much the job is worth before and after negotiations, the breaking point of the Taker group, the complication at the job site itself...
It kind of works on two parameters. There's one table that determines how much a job is worth initially. The risk is the complication table in designing jobs, where it adds a tilt.
As the beta stood a lot of the stuff was a more narrative, 'here's some ideas, it's up to you to interpret how to use them.' What I used when planning the Reformers was to look at the complication and what I rolled for the cost and determine what risks provide enough incentive for the players to go for it.
Another issue is how you play the game. Since we hacked in the box trucks that makes it so the players can haul a lot more stuff, so they went for more goods based jobs. Because of that I made it so sometimes it was harder to move around or they had to fight really hard to load up their trucks.
One of the scores my players generated had a per-unit yield of 19 Bounty, so I ruled that the goods were big rig engines and they would need to rent a trailer for their car to haul them back. :V
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So is there a Reward / Risk matrix for game masters ?
If not, what should one look like?
IIRC in one of the GDW episodes Caleb said he roughly gauged how difficult a job would be by how many legs it had; this is because legs drain player resources before they get to the job site itself. 1 leg is easy, 2-3 is moderate, 4+ is hard.
Then of course you have to take into account how much the job is worth before and after negotiations, the breaking point of the Taker group, the complication at the job site itself...
It kind of works on two parameters. There's one table that determines how much a job is worth initially. The risk is the complication table in designing jobs, where it adds a tilt.
As the beta stood a lot of the stuff was a more narrative, 'here's some ideas, it's up to you to interpret how to use them.' What I used when planning the Reformers was to look at the complication and what I rolled for the cost and determine what risks provide enough incentive for the players to go for it.
Another issue is how you play the game. Since we hacked in the box trucks that makes it so the players can haul a lot more stuff, so they went for more goods based jobs. Because of that I made it so sometimes it was harder to move around or they had to fight really hard to load up their trucks.
One of the scores my players generated had a per-unit yield of 19 Bounty, so I ruled that the goods were big rig engines and they would need to rent a trailer for their car to haul them back. :V
So lets do a little back-seat game design here.
I think it would be wise to make a matrix as a GM reference document. Just so that they know how much pain the bounties should be worth.
something like this. I completely made up the numbers, so this is just to demonstrate the idea, not to set the numbers in any way.
(http://i.imgur.com/eFRdccW.png)
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I got an idea for a Twin Cities Red Markets setting. I live there and I think one major feature makes it a novel place to set a game. The Mississippi River. In the setting detail Caleb describes that the river is the moat to the zombie barricade. So i imagined Two Cities on each side of the river. The St. Paul Safe Zone which is part of the Recession. And Minneapolis Enclaves which are part of the Loss. This has made the Minneapolis Enclaves actually a central Red Market trading hub. Other Loss enclaves send traders there to buy and trade in needed goods that were traded across the few bridges still in place.
This makes Minneapolis (what's left of it) a Taker Mecca. It also has agents from Ubiq and DHQS embedded in the populace. It is a place of intrigue, commerce and violence.
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I got an idea for a Twin Cities Red Markets setting. I live there and I think one major feature makes it a novel place to set a game. The Mississippi River. In the setting detail Caleb describes that the river is the moat to the zombie barricade. So i imagined Two Cities on each side of the river. The St. Paul Safe Zone which is part of the Recession. And Minneapolis Enclaves which are part of the Loss. This has made the Minneapolis Enclaves actually a central Red Market trading hub. Other Loss enclaves send traders there to buy and trade in needed goods that were traded across the few bridges still in place.
This makes Minneapolis (what's left of it) a Taker Mecca. It also has agents from Ubiq and DHQS embedded in the populace. It is a place of intrigue, commerce and violence.
That's a great idea, somewhat similar to my ideas for St. Louis, Missouri (which would be a huge hub for trade and infiltration from the Loss to the Recession, since the Missouri River is the safest and fastest way to get from the depths of the Loss to the border).
I think a border-centered enclave is likely to be a major sub-setting for a certain campaign style. Working right on the border is going to have a totally different feel than a game set way out in some place like Colorado or on the West Coast.
Thematically, I'd say a border campaign would emphasize the economic horrors of wealth disparity, black markets as a response to over-regulation, and corruption. A more western/deep recession game would likely focus more on resource scarcity, environmental damage, and isolation. And a West Coast game would focus on smoking weed and surfing.
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I myself would consider about a 100 mile zone east of the Mississippi to be DHQS patrolled and depopulated. After all, if the story is that the Loss is....well, the Loss, then it doesn't help them to have cities on the river that can see Enclaves a mile away.
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So is there a Reward / Risk matrix for game masters ?
If not, what should one look like?
IIRC in one of the GDW episodes Caleb said he roughly gauged how difficult a job would be by how many legs it had; this is because legs drain player resources before they get to the job site itself. 1 leg is easy, 2-3 is moderate, 4+ is hard.
Then of course you have to take into account how much the job is worth before and after negotiations, the breaking point of the Taker group, the complication at the job site itself...
It kind of works on two parameters. There's one table that determines how much a job is worth initially. The risk is the complication table in designing jobs, where it adds a tilt.
As the beta stood a lot of the stuff was a more narrative, 'here's some ideas, it's up to you to interpret how to use them.' What I used when planning the Reformers was to look at the complication and what I rolled for the cost and determine what risks provide enough incentive for the players to go for it.
Another issue is how you play the game. Since we hacked in the box trucks that makes it so the players can haul a lot more stuff, so they went for more goods based jobs. Because of that I made it so sometimes it was harder to move around or they had to fight really hard to load up their trucks.
One of the scores my players generated had a per-unit yield of 19 Bounty, so I ruled that the goods were big rig engines and they would need to rent a trailer for their car to haul them back. :V
So lets do a little back-seat game design here.
I think it would be wise to make a matrix as a GM reference document. Just so that they know how much pain the bounties should be worth.
something like this. I completely made up the numbers, so this is just to demonstrate the idea, not to set the numbers in any way.
(http://i.imgur.com/eFRdccW.png)
The most obvious issue I see with something like this is that Casualty numbers aren't really fixed--they're randomly generated anytime circumstances would summon a mob.
I think a much less number-crunchy method would be to keep track of what the players could encounter on a job rather than how much: Casualties, Vectors, Raiders, Rival Takers, DHQS, Aberrant, etc. There's actually already a random roll chart in the beta book that does this, though it doesn't have any pay numbers like you're talking about. I'd suggest giving that a look.
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And a West Coast game would focus on smoking weed and surfing.
The idea I had for a West Coast enclave is Alcatraz; the prison-turned-tourist attraction was turned into an internment camp for displaced citizens when the Blight hit San Fran. When the National Guard heard the order to fall back to the Missisipi, they realised they were hosed and went Rebel. Since then, Alcatraz has become something of a military dictatorship, where the major power blocs are the Guardsmen (rebel National Guard), the Boatswains (former Coastguard, ferrymen etc, run the ships that connect Alcatraz to the mainland) and the Inmates (the "civilian" bloc). Plenty of security but not much room for agriculture, so a big part of what keeps the Guardsmen and Boatswains as the dominant political groups on Alcatraz are their ability to launch supply runs in the city or out across the bay.
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And a West Coast game would focus on smoking weed and surfing.
The idea I had for a West Coast enclave is Alcatraz; the prison-turned-tourist attraction was turned into an internment camp for displaced citizens when the Blight hit San Fran. When the National Guard heard the order to fall back to the Missisipi, they realised they were hosed and went Rebel. Since then, Alcatraz has become something of a military dictatorship, where the major power blocs are the Guardsmen (rebel National Guard), the Boatswains (former Coastguard, ferrymen etc, run the ships that connect Alcatraz to the mainland) and the Inmates (the "civilian" bloc). Plenty of security but not much room for agriculture, so a big part of what keeps the Guardsmen and Boatswains as the dominant political groups on Alcatraz are their ability to launch supply runs in the city or out across the bay.
Personally if I was running/playing a game in the Bay area I'd put an enclave on Angel Island instead of Alcatraz--it's larger, has preexisting buildings all around the shore, and even it's own forest for lumber. And it's just as safe against Casualties, being an island in the middle of the Bay.
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I can see that (not American so freely admit my knowledge of the local geography is going to be patchy and flawed at best). I think Alcatraz would still make a pretty good "set piece" for a game set in the region if nothing else, if for no other reason than its history and reputation. Perhaps it could be the base of a rival crew, or an outbreak site, perhaps somewhere the government had staged Blight research. (Perhaps it was restored to working order in the dystopian near-future before the Blight, and the subsequent unlucky inmates were deliberately infected in their cells and left for observation)
Keeping it in California, but looking at some of the smaller towns and cities, how about Monterery and the aquarium? Drain the tanks and you've got a lot of space to work with as a location; some medical supplies for veterinary care; right by the sea so fishing is an option, plus the structure would be pretty solid due to the amount of water etc it's built to take. Plus Monterey is a way smaller population centre than Los Angeles or San Francisco, so it's way less likely to become a horrific Vector nightmare (followed by a slightly less horrific Casualty nightmare) meaning an enclave might plausibly last a lot longer. Also, otters! Otters are great for restoring Humanity.
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I myself would consider about a 100 mile zone east of the Mississippi to be DHQS patrolled and depopulated. After all, if the story is that the Loss is....well, the Loss, then it doesn't help them to have cities on the river that can see Enclaves a mile away.
I don't really imagine a lot of people in St. Paul. It would mostly be offices of DHQS and military. There is an actual CDC ficility and hospital in St. Paul so it would be a lot like a military base town. Highly controlled, but still supported with some civilians given clearance.
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There is a lot of potential in it. I like your idea with the Missouri. You could frame a whole scenario or campaign as a "Taker Boat Ride" down the missouri. Fill it with all sorts of Alllusions to americana like Mark Twain. They could meet a strange fellow on a ferry ride who keeps talking about the "Famous Jumping Zombies of Calavaras County." Would make an interesting leg or scenario unto itself. Perhaps they need to find and capture a specimen. :)
I got an idea for a Twin Cities Red Markets setting. I live there and I think one major feature makes it a novel place to set a game. The Mississippi River. In the setting detail Caleb describes that the river is the moat to the zombie barricade. So i imagined Two Cities on each side of the river. The St. Paul Safe Zone which is part of the Recession. And Minneapolis Enclaves which are part of the Loss. This has made the Minneapolis Enclaves actually a central Red Market trading hub. Other Loss enclaves send traders there to buy and trade in needed goods that were traded across the few bridges still in place.
This makes Minneapolis (what's left of it) a Taker Mecca. It also has agents from Ubiq and DHQS embedded in the populace. It is a place of intrigue, commerce and violence.
That's a great idea, somewhat similar to my ideas for St. Louis, Missouri (which would be a huge hub for trade and infiltration from the Loss to the Recession, since the Missouri River is the safest and fastest way to get from the depths of the Loss to the border).
I think a border-centered enclave is likely to be a major sub-setting for a certain campaign style. Working right on the border is going to have a totally different feel than a game set way out in some place like Colorado or on the West Coast.
Thematically, I'd say a border campaign would emphasize the economic horrors of wealth disparity, black markets as a response to over-regulation, and corruption. A more western/deep recession game would likely focus more on resource scarcity, environmental damage, and isolation. And a West Coast game would focus on smoking weed and surfing.
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And a West Coast game would focus on smoking weed and surfing.
The idea I had for a West Coast enclave is Alcatraz; the prison-turned-tourist attraction was turned into an internment camp for displaced citizens when the Blight hit San Fran. When the National Guard heard the order to fall back to the Missisipi, they realised they were hosed and went Rebel. Since then, Alcatraz has become something of a military dictatorship, where the major power blocs are the Guardsmen (rebel National Guard), the Boatswains (former Coastguard, ferrymen etc, run the ships that connect Alcatraz to the mainland) and the Inmates (the "civilian" bloc). Plenty of security but not much room for agriculture, so a big part of what keeps the Guardsmen and Boatswains as the dominant political groups on Alcatraz are their ability to launch supply runs in the city or out across the bay.
Personally if I was running/playing a game in the Bay area I'd put an enclave on Angel Island instead of Alcatraz--it's larger, has preexisting buildings all around the shore, and even it's own forest for lumber. And it's just as safe against Casualties, being an island in the middle of the Bay.
don't forget 1/2 of the Navy's Pacific mothball fleet is in the bay area. including all of the decomissioned subs.
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And a West Coast game would focus on smoking weed and surfing.
The idea I had for a West Coast enclave is Alcatraz; the prison-turned-tourist attraction was turned into an internment camp for displaced citizens when the Blight hit San Fran. When the National Guard heard the order to fall back to the Missisipi, they realised they were hosed and went Rebel. Since then, Alcatraz has become something of a military dictatorship, where the major power blocs are the Guardsmen (rebel National Guard), the Boatswains (former Coastguard, ferrymen etc, run the ships that connect Alcatraz to the mainland) and the Inmates (the "civilian" bloc). Plenty of security but not much room for agriculture, so a big part of what keeps the Guardsmen and Boatswains as the dominant political groups on Alcatraz are their ability to launch supply runs in the city or out across the bay.
Personally if I was running/playing a game in the Bay area I'd put an enclave on Angel Island instead of Alcatraz--it's larger, has preexisting buildings all around the shore, and even it's own forest for lumber. And it's just as safe against Casualties, being an island in the middle of the Bay.
don't forget 1/2 of the Navy's Pacific mothball fleet is in the bay area. including all of the decomissioned subs.
Alcatraz is a good idea.
Don't forget Monterey has the Army base that produces linguists. http://www.monterey.army.mil/Tenant_units/229th_mib.html (http://www.monterey.army.mil/Tenant_units/229th_mib.html)
Beautiful area. Lots of winding roads, gorgeous seaside cliffs and golf courses. Very interesting area topographically.
Angel Island would be an interesting place to base a Bay Area campaign. Literal island of safety where you could run raids into SF proper, UC Berkeley, urban Oakland (and the steel factories in the area), Alcatraz (as mentioned above), the cyclotron at LBNL and other labs in Stanford.
Also plenty of interesting sea encounters because the Bay has very erratic weather.
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There is a lot of potential in it. I like your idea with the Missouri. You could frame a whole scenario or campaign as a "Taker Boat Ride" down the missouri. Fill it with all sorts of Alllusions to americana like Mark Twain. They could meet a strange fellow on a ferry ride who keeps talking about the "Famous Jumping Zombies of Calavaras County." Would make an interesting leg or scenario unto itself. Perhaps they need to find and capture a specimen. :)
I got an idea for a Twin Cities Red Markets setting. I live there and I think one major feature makes it a novel place to set a game. The Mississippi River. In the setting detail Caleb describes that the river is the moat to the zombie barricade. So i imagined Two Cities on each side of the river. The St. Paul Safe Zone which is part of the Recession. And Minneapolis Enclaves which are part of the Loss. This has made the Minneapolis Enclaves actually a central Red Market trading hub. Other Loss enclaves send traders there to buy and trade in needed goods that were traded across the few bridges still in place.
This makes Minneapolis (what's left of it) a Taker Mecca. It also has agents from Ubiq and DHQS embedded in the populace. It is a place of intrigue, commerce and violence.
That's a great idea, somewhat similar to my ideas for St. Louis, Missouri (which would be a huge hub for trade and infiltration from the Loss to the Recession, since the Missouri River is the safest and fastest way to get from the depths of the Loss to the border).
I think a border-centered enclave is likely to be a major sub-setting for a certain campaign style. Working right on the border is going to have a totally different feel than a game set way out in some place like Colorado or on the West Coast.
Thematically, I'd say a border campaign would emphasize the economic horrors of wealth disparity, black markets as a response to over-regulation, and corruption. A more western/deep recession game would likely focus more on resource scarcity, environmental damage, and isolation. And a West Coast game would focus on smoking weed and surfing.
Someone HAS to do this.
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I got an idea for a Twin Cities Red Markets setting. I live there and I think one major feature makes it a novel place to set a game. The Mississippi River. In the setting detail Caleb describes that the river is the moat to the zombie barricade. So i imagined Two Cities on each side of the river. The St. Paul Safe Zone which is part of the Recession. And Minneapolis Enclaves which are part of the Loss. This has made the Minneapolis Enclaves actually a central Red Market trading hub. Other Loss enclaves send traders there to buy and trade in needed goods that were traded across the few bridges still in place.
This makes Minneapolis (what's left of it) a Taker Mecca. It also has agents from Ubiq and DHQS embedded in the populace. It is a place of intrigue, commerce and violence.
That's a great idea, somewhat similar to my ideas for St. Louis, Missouri (which would be a huge hub for trade and infiltration from the Loss to the Recession, since the Missouri River is the safest and fastest way to get from the depths of the Loss to the border).
I think a border-centered enclave is likely to be a major sub-setting for a certain campaign style. Working right on the border is going to have a totally different feel than a game set way out in some place like Colorado or on the West Coast.
Thematically, I'd say a border campaign would emphasize the economic horrors of wealth disparity, black markets as a response to over-regulation, and corruption. A more western/deep recession game would likely focus more on resource scarcity, environmental damage, and isolation. And a West Coast game would focus on smoking weed and surfing.
So if Minneapolis is Mecca, what would then be the Lost equivalent of the silk road? And where would that road go. It would have to be the road of least resistance from a big east hub to a fairly large west enclave as an end point. You could do it from east to west where things like antibiotics go from trader to trader ever increasing in prise as they go further west with bandits/warlords on the way taking their cut.
Or you could figure out some frivolous non necessary material that the west can produce and the east wants. In ancient Rome it was silk and therefore the name silk road. Rome didn't need it, but the rich where still willing to fork over unimaginable wealth to look good. So what can the Lost produce that the Recession can't?
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Well, it seems like the Pre-Crash United States had a major energy and environmental crisis of some sort. Since that probably means most laws and rights were suspended, maybe some private or governmental organization tried to crack into the Yellowstone Caldera? The geothermal output would be staggering, and even if they couldn't finish or implement the system correctly an industrialized enclave could set up crude turbines over the geysers. Yes, Old Faithful would be an ugly mass of piping but exporting electricity in batteries or setting up charging stations could mean a massive profit if the surrounding enclaves don't have a sustainable source of energy. Not to mention the lumber, stone, wildlife, and geographic security and isolation Yellowstone would contain. An energy-independent Enclave with massive amounts of resources and security could be sharpening their knives in Wyoming and daring the Recession to try something.
In terms of exports that the Recession cannot produce, the vast majority of the US mining industry is located in what would be the Loss, so outside of international trade precious metals would largely be confined to there. However, the place that has the highest chance to produce something that the Recession cannot is California. It has a diverse climate, advanced infrastructure, is responsible for the largest proportion of America's GDP, has many institutions and companies based out of it, and is entirely coastal. If I was in the Recession, I would be terrified of California getting it's shit together and resisting integration. That or China invading it for loot. In addition to the above Geothermal scenario, most of the solar panels in the U.S. are located in the American Southwest, as is Hoover Dam. The potential energy output of the Loss is HUGE.
Route 66 goes from Chicago to Santa Monica, so it could get a taker group from the West Coast all the way into the Recession. A silk road, with plenty of roadside services and attractions to loot and settle.
I grew up in California and can personally attest to the strangeness of the Bay Area weather. Alcatraz would be amazing! I would be worried about raiders from Pelican Bay, though, no matter how secure it was.
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I got an idea for a Twin Cities Red Markets setting. I live there and I think one major feature makes it a novel place to set a game. The Mississippi River. In the setting detail Caleb describes that the river is the moat to the zombie barricade. So i imagined Two Cities on each side of the river. The St. Paul Safe Zone which is part of the Recession. And Minneapolis Enclaves which are part of the Loss. This has made the Minneapolis Enclaves actually a central Red Market trading hub. Other Loss enclaves send traders there to buy and trade in needed goods that were traded across the few bridges still in place.
This makes Minneapolis (what's left of it) a Taker Mecca. It also has agents from Ubiq and DHQS embedded in the populace. It is a place of intrigue, commerce and violence.
That's a great idea, somewhat similar to my ideas for St. Louis, Missouri (which would be a huge hub for trade and infiltration from the Loss to the Recession, since the Missouri River is the safest and fastest way to get from the depths of the Loss to the border).
I think a border-centered enclave is likely to be a major sub-setting for a certain campaign style. Working right on the border is going to have a totally different feel than a game set way out in some place like Colorado or on the West Coast.
Thematically, I'd say a border campaign would emphasize the economic horrors of wealth disparity, black markets as a response to over-regulation, and corruption. A more western/deep recession game would likely focus more on resource scarcity, environmental damage, and isolation. And a West Coast game would focus on smoking weed and surfing.
So if Minneapolis is Mecca, what would then be the Lost equivalent of the silk road? And where would that road go. It would have to be the road of least resistance from a big east hub to a fairly large west enclave as an end point. You could do it from east to west where things like antibiotics go from trader to trader ever increasing in prise as they go further west with bandits/warlords on the way taking their cut.
Or you could figure out some frivolous non necessary material that the west can produce and the east wants. In ancient Rome it was silk and therefore the name silk road. Rome didn't need it, but the rich where still willing to fork over unimaginable wealth to look good. So what can the Lost produce that the Recession can't?
The first and most obvious is food. The bulk of America's agricultural heartland is on the wrong side of the fence to feed the bulk of its surviving citizens, so the DHQS has drone combines remote harvest fields of grain and other crops. Enclaves in the Loss probably can't produce anywhere near the amount of food required to compete with that, but an enclave that grows something more exotic than grain could likely sell that for a fair profit over the fence. Fruits, vegetables, weed, poppy, etc.
The second, which is mentioned in the beta document, is the currency that the entire Loss-Recession exchange economy is built upon: Bounty. IDs, hospital death records, birth certificates, land deeds, green cards, etc etc--the only ones worth anything belong to the dead, and the dead occupy the Loss. The Recession wants all of that so it can sort out who gets what when the T-Never finally comes around, and to incentivize the exchange they placed a fixed value on it.
Third, access. The DHQS undoubtedly operates numerous bases in the Loss, but helicopters and Humvees need fuel that's in short supply nowadays. They can't afford to send a Blackhawk to every site of interest like the Harding ammunition factory in Episode 4, but they can afford to pay Takers to do it for them.
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I think we found a strech-goal for the Kickstarter. A trade network chart for the lost. Also a "do it yourself" trade network kit.
EDIT: So your players have to decide if they take the Realdolls over the mountain and sell the to the Lonley-Blue-Boys for twice the bounty or skip those 5 legs and sell them for less here.
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"Realdolls Over The Mountan" was the name of my high school ska band.
Nobody came to our shows. :(
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Chemotherapy + Infection should be a way to make Aberants.
I want to run a game that involves the takers going through a hospitals chemo ward.
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Chemotherapy + Infection should be a way to make Aberants.
I want to run a game that involves the takers going through a hospitals chemo ward.
I'm properly terrified. Please record that and post to the community APs so the rest of us can listen too.
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So, being a tea-swilling imperialist Brit, I have been giving some thought as to how to apply Red Markets to the UK. I know Caleb talks about doing more setting material as a stretch goal, but shh, I'm impatient.
So, the first aspect I wanted to grapple with was what the UK's Missippi is. That is, the dividing line that would split the Loss from the Recession. We don't have any Mississippi-tier rivers but the big geographical feature to divide the country would be the Pennine Mountains, which more or less run up and down the centre of England like a spine. It wouldn't be a perfect barrier, they're far from totally impassable, but there's pretty dangerous moorland and tarns up their for zombies to fall in and die, so you wouldn't be getting more than a trickle through.
Bringing socio-economic class into the mix, you could also go for a North/South split. Essentially the North of the UK and the South are very culturally and politically different, with the South having more money and political power (especially the South East, where London squats and distorts the landscape like a huge, grimy toad); healthcare is better in the South, property prices are higher, local governments have more authority, good luck trying to get anywhere in literally any art or creative platform if you're not in London. Of course, "the North" is also a very contentious and poorly defined area without a clear boundary and there's a lot of debate as to where "proper North" is, but it is generally accepted to include The North West (the Lake District, the Peaks etc), the North West (Northumberland, County Durham etc), Yorkshire and the Humber, Scotland and Northern Ireland . The Midlands, of course, are the boundary, but given West Midlands have some of the most economically deprived regions in the country it might well be that "the North" now basically means everything north of Cambridgeshire.
London itself, being a huge and very socio-economically divided city, probably got "interesting" during the Crash. It's one of those cities that is actually just an amalgam of multiple cities and towns sprawling out to meet each other, so I'm imagining that it might have just split back along those old lines. Some boroughs would fall but London has enough money in it (by some estimates the largest metropolitan economy in the world, with a per capita equivalent to Iran or Sweden) and is the centre of power such that a lot of soldiers probably die securing at least the nice bits of it. A lot of foreign money has been pouring into the city (a lot of dirty money especially) buying up property, meaning property prices have been spiking in recent years and pushing people to the outer boroughs; so you could turn that into inner London being the formal "settlement" with walls, guards and spotlights, and outer London being more wild-west. Alternatively it could be the opposite; the inner city is too dense and tunnelled-through by the Tube to meaningfully hold defensively, so the government falls back to the outer boroughs and a common Taker job is delving into the financial districts etc to reclaim deeds of ownership, business transactions etc going on in The City - with all the money that passes through London, a lot of it might would be interrupted and frozen by the Crash so naturally people might want to get their hands on, say, the land deed to some farmland that just became way more valuable.
There's also the issue of, well, guns. Can't have a zombie apocalypse without shotguns! Well, the largest groups of gun owners in the UK are the military, the police, the crooks, the farmers and then (distant fifth) sports shooters. BUT there's a lot of industrial infrastructure still lying around Up North and in the Midlands where guns were made in the good old days and could be made again. A job could also involve a run on the Royal Armories in Leeds, which is basically the "spare" Tower of London that doubles as a military museum of arms and armour.
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So, the first aspect I wanted to grapple with was what the UK's Missippi is. That is, the dividing line that would split the Loss from the Recession.
Forgive this tea-swilling colonist rebel, but my immediate thought on reading those two lines was 'Hadrian's Wall'. I know, not a real fortification any more, but there might be something interesting in there.
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So, the first aspect I wanted to grapple with was what the UK's Missippi is. That is, the dividing line that would split the Loss from the Recession.
Forgive this tea-swilling colonist rebel, but my immediate thought on reading those two lines was 'Hadrian's Wall'. I know, not a real fortification any more, but there might be something interesting in there.
I had considered that, but the wall is 2000 years old and while it used to be about 20 feet tall, the highest places it has in the modern day are only about 10 feet (and those are the best bits; most of it is closer to 3ft high now), so it's not a great barricade in and of itself. That said, Scotland does have a lot of open space to fall back to, a lot of military and nuclear power facilities taking advantage of the miles upon miles of bleak, raining depression.
Oh man I just realised what we would call Red Market zombies in the UK.
"Blighters".
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Oh man I just realised what we would call Red Market zombies in the UK.
"Blighters".
NICE
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I imagine they would be more vermin than weather. Rotters is also good.
Would be a good way of tapping in to all of the disaster fiction (Day of the triffids etc).
The two questions I have would be a) the difference of space the UK would feel a lot more chllaustrophobic I reckon. B) Guns? We aren't really a gun culture by any means but it would be naive to think they weren't available and I imagine regulations would loosen if people were willing to do some pest control.
In short it would be the best 28 Days Later/ Guy Richie movie ever.
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I imagine they would be more vermin than weather. Rotters is also good.
I think a lot of it depends on where you are; a challenge in London is going back that the tubes are just PACKED with casualties and though stations might be sealed off, there might at any point be a wall collapse, or a horde bursting through the gates into the street, or casualties finding their way into other areas through the many obscure and eldritch tunnels winding below the capital. A little like vermin. Outside of London, where underground train systems aren't really a thing, you'd probably see a more traditional zombie model.
The two questions I have would be a) the difference of space the UK would feel a lot more chllaustrophobic I reckon.
Definitely. We're a small country with a much higher population density and put frankly our economy is super-dependent on imports to feed us, so the end of the world means a sharp population drop from resource scarcity if nothing else. There's a great film called War Book (2014) which is about a bunch of government workers and ministers brought together to run through a totally hypothetical war game and "what if nuclear war broke out, how does the UK cope with sudden geopolitical turmoil, health risks etc" that I think would be very useful watching for this, if you're interested.
And overall, yeah, our streets are narrower, our buildings are smaller and our city planning is less grid-oriented (more twisty, bending roads) so there is going to feel like there's a lot less open space. But that choking claustrophobia is really a very London thing; as you head north, you'll find people have a lot more space and aren't nearly as crowded. And since London is proooobably a necropolis death trap at this point, the game would likely not be set there (or at least it would be in a vastly depopulated London).
Guns? We aren't really a gun culture by any means but it would be naive to think they weren't available and I imagine regulations would loosen if people were willing to do some pest control.
I mentioned this before but there ARE guns in the UK, they're just not super-easily available. So, yeah, I imagine the early days of the Crash are going to go pretty badly for us due to the difficulty most people will have about putting infected down without getting infected themselves. But we are kind of one of the largest arms dealers in the world, so there could plausibly be stockpiles of stuff fresh for the raiding. And, yeah, people are pretty soon going to turn things on their head and adapt to new realities; I mentioned this in terms of re-industrialising the North and parts of Birmingham.
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Yes I did read an article about the arms "trade shows" I always think of selling missiles etc to people. But yes I didn't say it was impossible I might not have phased that sentence right.
How would Homo Secor happen do you think? I know the tories are happy to let the poor and homeless die and do terrible things to the NHS but why would would everyone else let people become non-people.
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Keep in mind guns aren't that hard to manufacture, at least simple ones like shotguns, low caliber pistols, and the like. Places like like the UK will see a new industry in workshop guns, kind of like the Pakistan gun markets
! No longer available (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FinRqCocwGE#)
Also, I think given the importance of London real estate in the global economy, a UK campaign could focus on retaking London, block by block and securing it for its foreign clients or reclaiming it for the government - finding deeds and so forth in the abandoned buildings.
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Aw man I had an article from years ago from before 3d printers were a thing about people making guns with CAD programs etc and how easy it was to make a home made assault rifles etc. Add 20 years+...
Yes I believe The Smoke would be a priority for reclamation since it's the big juicy yolk of the south what with the seat of government & The City and Buckingham palace etc. No way HM Government is going to let it's banker friends go high and dry.
Also I'm imagining the equivalent of the DHQS would be very similar to The Thick of It.
Edit: Found it! Don't know how much value this is.
popehat.com/2011/10/06/the-third-wave-cnc-stereolithography-and-the-end-of-gun-control/ (http://popehat.com/2011/10/06/the-third-wave-cnc-stereolithography-and-the-end-of-gun-control/)
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So, remember how I talked about how an infected London would have a major concern about tunnels, roads etc collapsing to spill out hordes of undead Tube commuters?
This happened today. Oops. (http://"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/36275847") Add in 25 years of Tube strikes and crumbling infrastructure and expect that to be happening way more, and with bloodier results.
Oh, here's a fun thing we still have to put up with in England in the modern day: unexploded German bombs slowly deteriorating under our towns waiting to remember how to explode (http://"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-36279782"). So imagine you've managed to shore up your enclave pretty good, the walls are strong and - wait, what's that sudden boom? Oh, the wall's coming down and the noise is drawing the dead. Smashing.
Also I'm imagining the equivalent of the DHQS would be very similar to The Thick of It.
In my head, you've got The Met (basically The Machine and named because it evolved out of the Metropolitan Police, which is sort of militarised and operates as a kind of domestic intelligence agency) and it operates out of The Shard because obviously the evil government agency's main base of operations is called The Shard. I like the idea of them running a Black Math style operation as a common job line where they pay bounty for blighter heads as proof of "confirmed kills", and this is the steady job line/score that the players can go on if they don't fancy any of the main jobs there (or are just in a killy mood); just find somewhere full of zombies, kill 'em, get the Latent to collect their heads and bring them back for profit. I also had an idea for a plot line about some Takers who were gaming the system by kidnapping survivors, chaining them up in a drained swimming pool and infecting them to then kill them and collect the heads.
Then you've got The Establishment, which is the legislative arm of the surviving government - former government ministers, Lords, minor royals etc. Maybe they're shored up in Westminster? But yeah it would be pretty Thick of It, a lot of bickering and infighting over petty nonsense, and I like the idea that they've thrown themselves into the pompous formalities and do the whole "if we pretend the apocalypse isn't happening hard enough, maybe it'll go away!" thing pretty much. All frilly robes and ritual, still supping and dining and pointedly not acknowledging the outside world.
How would Homo Secor happen do you think? I know the tories are happy to let the poor and homeless die and do terrible things to the NHS but why would would everyone else let people become non-people.
The Establishment has always been good at protecting its own and voting in its own interest.
That said, if we were going to make it a real social commentary on the British government's slow, venomous hate of the people, we should draw more on the whole JSA and Disability Allowance thing of recent years whereby people have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop to prove they're definitely NOT a zombie and if they fail even one for whatever reason (including improperly filled out paperwork or the assessor not liking their tone of voice) then their file gets stamped BLIGHT and nothing makes that stamp come off. At that point they're homo sacor, yeah, government seized assets etc but this way it looks more like it's their fault. This could also be a way you get a group of Takers together for a game; they're assembled in the whatever the equivalent of the JobCentre Plus is in the zombie apocalypse (but it's totally called The Dole) and do workfare (http://"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workfare_in_the_United_Kingdom") contracts. (Maybe this agency's acronym can be IDS, just to hammer the point home by getting a little stab in at Ian Duncan Smith. "Interior Department of Security??)
Since workfare is all about the private sector getting around minimum wage laws ("we don't have to really pay them if it isn't called a job!") workfare contracts are about Enclavers farming out jobs too stupid or low-paying for REAL Takers to the Dole Takers who are sat outside the Enclave walls hoping to eventually get "a proper job" by "building up their CV" by killing zombies. So, the crushing end of crushing poverty. This could be an introductory job, even, a group of on-the-Dole Takers ("the Skivers"?) being given a job to do for "benefits" (just enough bounty to not starve and the very bare minimum upkeep on their gear) in the hopes of getting into Shard-controlled territory once they have enough "work experience" or completed their "internship". ("Inverted commas")
That's how you get your population to accept turning people into non-people. You look like you're giving the "legitimate survivors" out there a real chance while also maintaining borders and quarantine to keep out the work-shy scroungers who are coming to take YOUR jobs! The ones who get declared homo sacer are the ones who failed the test or were deemed "threats to enclave security" or whatever reason they weren't the right sort of people. Basically fold class warfare rhetoric into anti-immigration rhetoric. "We don't hate refugees, we hate economic migrants". Maybe toss in some anti-Muslim terrorism concern in there ("what if we let them in and they turn out to be some kind of slow-turning zombie double agent?! What if they turn out to be a Latent jihadist?")
Also, I think given the importance of London real estate in the global economy, a UK campaign could focus on retaking London, block by block and securing it for its foreign clients or reclaiming it for the government - finding deeds and so forth in the abandoned buildings.
I mean, a lot of really dirty money is in the London real estate market so you could have pockets of the city taken over by survivors that used to be, say, Russian oligarchs who are definitely not connected to the KGB/Russian mob why would you even suggest that would you like a cup of glowing tea. I don't know how much a global market would exist after the crash, though. I mean, the Chunnel is going to choked with casualties even harder than the Tube (probably going both directions), and I don't know how global the spread of the contagion is. As I mentioned earlier, London has a lot of economic inequality that would probably translate to pockets of enclaves in a sea of urban Loss come the Crash, so reclaiming quarters and districts, streets and neighbourhoods definitely fits.
Yeah, one of the jobs I had in mind when I was thinking for Red Markets In London was a raid on Bishopsgate (http://"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishopsgate"), which is where a lot of financial institutions and other business have their offices (so, a lot of documents that could be pulled out of that and turned into crypto) and the Bishopsgate Institute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishopsgate_Institute) has a special collection kept underground that might be plundered as a job for, say, some Archivist offshoots. Also, Bishopsgate was the site of an IRA bombing in the 90's and it looked like this:
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b1/IRA_Bishopsgate.JPG)
That already looks like a Fallout location. Just add some zombies!
That said, I think the focus shouldn't be too much on London because I think that's part of the spirit of Red Markets, to move the focus away from the economically wealthy areas to the poorer and less explored areas. So that's why I was talking about games set in the North, or the Midlands.
Lots of canals in Birmingham that would serve as great transport routes that are safe from Blighters and enclaves can form around locks. Birmingham is also one of the areas I think would most easily adapt back to gun manufacture (as in, it literally has a district imaginatively named "The Gun Quarter (http://"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Quarter")" which still contains gun manufacturers - Brummie Takers will have no shortage of Enfield rifles and Webley revolvers so long as they keep the Gun Quarter stocked and safe). Birmingham is also home to Ladywood, one of the worst areas in the country in terms of unemployment (http://"https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jul/14/ten-things-unemployment-statistics") (a TV show called Benefit Street was filmed there and was accused of being 'poverty porn') and plans on regenerating the area have raised accusations of being plans for slums (http://"http://www.birminghampost.co.uk/news/local-news/icknield-port-loop-developer-warned-3914663"). That said, Ladywood and Edgbaston were where where J.R.R Tolkein spent childhood (http://"http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=Lib-Central-Archives-and-Heritage/PageLayout&cid=1223202752160&pagename=BCC/Common/Wrapper/InlineWrapper") so you might have a job delving in there to try and get hold of some Middle Earth memorabilia?
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Oops, accidental double-post.
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@RadioactiveBeer If you ever want to run a UK based Red Markets game over Skype/GoogleHangouts/The Internets, I'd love to play - that is an amazing amount of thoughtful background. I'll figure out the time difference for that.
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@RadioactiveBeer If you ever want to run a UK based Red Markets game over Skype/GoogleHangouts/The Internets, I'd love to play - that is an amazing amount of thoughtful background. I'll figure out the time difference for that.
If you guys are running a game on GMT (Greenwich mean time) I want in...Please.
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Also Same.
I was thinking of a couple of thematic elements particularly how you could play with immigration "We can't let anyone else in, we don't have the resources" and "All it takes is one bite, we can't risk letting potentially infected in." . Also you could really play with the concept of "Blitz Spirit" and how uneven the apocalypse is.
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@RadioactiveBeer If you ever want to run a UK based Red Markets game over Skype/GoogleHangouts/The Internets, I'd love to play - that is an amazing amount of thoughtful background. I'll figure out the time difference for that.
I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to run, I missed the open beta so I'll have to wait until the Kickstarter later this month before I'd be able to get my hands on the rules. But thanks for the kind words.
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@RadioactiveBeer If you ever want to run a UK based Red Markets game over Skype/GoogleHangouts/The Internets, I'd love to play - that is an amazing amount of thoughtful background. I'll figure out the time difference for that.
I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to run, I missed the open beta so I'll have to wait until the Kickstarter later this month before I'd be able to get my hands on the rules. But thanks for the kind words.
If we are serious about this and can find a time that's good for everyone (that's probably the hard part), we might want to talk to Caleb and ask him to lend us the rules, with the promise that he would have another Actual Play from us to use as promotional material in the Kickstarter. A few ifs and buts, but might be worth a thought.
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I don't want to be a moocher, though, I know Caleb's sunk a lot into this and, you know, needs to eat. I'd happily run it after backing the KS and getting my hands on the rules legit, or writing fluff for someone to run who has the rules.
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Maybe you could pledge super early once the KS goes live, get the rules as quickly as possible, and start running it then. Heck, if you want it to be promotional, and you feel like you've got the chops, you could "do it live," releasing recorded episodes with minimal editing while the Kickstarter is still in process. I suspect you'd still want to get Caleb's permission to do that, though.
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Honestly, it would involve getting the rules, learning them well enough not just to run them, but also enough to be able to figure out and implement the homebrew rule modifications necessary to make a UK setting work (like mentioned above, that would probably involve upping the cost of firearms to represent their being slightly rarer, that sort of thing)... I don't think that's realistic in given the KS goes up in a little over a week even if I got a copy of the rules right this second.
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Here's a good question, having listened to the Technical Difficulties playthrough - how much sentience do you give newly created Vectors?
I mean, it seems to be an article of faith in the Romero line of zombies that they don't know how to climb stairs well or negotiate ladders or push obstructions out of the way - it makes them basically dumb cattle and can make a lot of combat anticlimactic.
I would think the virus, while it DOES attack the higher functions of the brain, neither works instantly nor does it work so efficiently that people lose everything except a fragment of coherent thought related to speech. So how terrifying would it be at your table that a Vector remembers how to climb a ladder or can open doors?
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They can swarm up things certainly. Door handles are a tricky one. Door knobs no, door handles that you grab and pull down on possibly.
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From what I gathered there is a frightening amount of sentience in Vectors, but it also depends on how they go Vector. Regardless, IMHO they're going through such agony as their body is taken over that fine motor skills are destroyed. Opening a door? No. Breaking through it? Yes.
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Well, by definition a Vector is sentient because it's still most of a person, it's just that the Blight-hijacked bits of their brain aren't the higher functions. The reason a Vector apologises is that language, cognition and so on are still in the control of the human, whereas the Blight can see you and has control over bodily functions.
So that just raises the more worrying question of "how smart is the Blight?"
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Somewhere out there is a cultist that "collects" child casualties. Herds them into a big pen and keeps them. Because one day there will be a cure and you have to "save the children".
Now imagine being the taker that runs into that pen...You open up the warehouse doors and see...
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Great London stuff
These are good ideas.
Periodically good threads come up on /tg/ about Fallout set in London or the UK.
Here are the sup/tg/ (archive) links. Might be adaptable for Red Markets.
Fallout UK ideas: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/15808361/ (http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/15808361/)
Fallout London Burning ideas: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/13664828/ (http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/13664828/)
Oh man I just realised what we would call Red Market zombies in the UK.
"Blighters".
Fantastic
Somewhere out there is a cultist that "collects" child casualties. Herds them into a big pen and keeps them. Because one day there will be a cure and you have to "save the children".
Now imagine being the taker that runs into that pen...You open up the warehouse doors and see...
Terrifying. Reminds me of some of the darker scenes in True Detective Season 1.
Chemotherapy + Infection should be a way to make Aberants.
I want to run a game that involves the takers going through a hospitals chemo ward.
Absolutely. The Last of Us did a great job of level design and post apoc considerations for a science lab/hospital ward setting in my view.
Without reviewing the most recent literature, I can say a couple things about chemotherapy.
Very very broadly there are two types of chemotherapy drug design approaches.
The first type of drug targets cells that are dividing more rapidly than others. Though cancers are radically heterogeneous when compared to each other,(malignant) cancerous cells all divide much faster than normal cells (p53 is mutated/missing, contact inhibition is gone, etc.). This is the rational for delivering drugs to the patient that are not specific for cancerous cells vs normal cells; the drugs accumulate in or get taken up by cancerous cells more often than normal cells because the difference in the rate of replication. Naturally the side effect is these drugs also kill off normal cells or other rapidly dividing cells (ie cells in the immune system) so the patient is weakened.
The second type of "drug" (really therapy) attempts to target the cancerous cell directly, to the exclusion of any other cell type. Broadly, the specificity of targeting a specific cell type in general in the human body is a nut we really haven't cracked yet. Anyway, these therapeutic attempts range from genetically engineering viruses, to trying to stimulate the body's own immune system to directly attack the cancerous cells (autologous tumor vaccines), injection with engineered antibodies to specifically designed liposomes with cancer cell specific receptors carrying a chemical payload of highly concentrated chemotherapy drugs. All sorts of methods under the sun.
Now, in a situation where a disease is ravaging mankind I could see governments ordering scientists/medical professionals to increasingly throw caution to the wind and try any and all combinations of anything they can get their hands on. In such a scenario, an author has fictional licence to describe some terrifying synergistic effect that makes a super-zombie or whatever zombie variant.
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Apart but somewhat related to this in terms of medical experiments and Aberrants, I was thinking about the "axiom" in Red Markets: Shoot them in the head and they are dead.
What if a headshot doesn't kill a zombie? How could such an Aberrant come about in a Red Market's universe?
My first thought was, what if Takers come across an Aberrant that has two or three heads (redundancy) grafted on to it. The creature dies only if all three heads (motor control centers) are shot.
Maybe such a creature could arise if some evil scientist carried out some sort of vascular (assuming the Blight in this case requires the vascular system to invade and operate it's human host) and whole head transplant of one zombie onto another. Naturally this could only be a post Blight operation. Why? There my creativity fails me as I mumble "supersoldiers I guess" and kick a can down the street.
Alternately Aberrants are rife for Dead Space style "must cut off every limb to destroy it's motor control" but the mechanism for such a horror is not something I have an idea for at the moment.
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Or redundant neural tissue along the spine like they used to think dinosaurs had or Ultimate Tony Stark or that dude from Invincible.
the only way to kill it effectively would be to blast it a couple times with a shotgun or similar and we all know what that particular milkshake brings to the yard.
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I have a couple horrible ideas I feel like dropping. First a very low-key abomination.
The Evervector
Ordinarily, when someone goes vector, niceties like food, water, and not literally running yourself to death fall by the wayside and they die of exhaustion, exposure, etc...
Occasionally; a vector will slow down and start looking after itself after the first few hours of insane murder-sprinting. Rather than running the host to death the Blight reduces the victim to a hunter-gatherer mindset. When not in sight of a potential victim, an evervector will seek out food, water, and shelter. They do not bleed as much as full vectors, with only a slow weeping of blood around the eyes, gums and fingernails. Because of this, they can be mistaken for non-infected madmen.
In play, they act like vector land-mines in areas that one would expect to find only casualties. They may be foreshadowed by dead animals in the area, as they still get the full 'human without the brakes 'benefit' of being a vector when running down a deer. On the plus side, they have enough brain damage to have stopped apologizing.
Like I said, very low key for an abomination, I only call it that because it doesn't fit the mold of the normal vector/casualty.
It's just an unusual form of vector that can upset players who think they have the zombie apocalypse 'under control'.
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I have a couple horrible ideas I feel like dropping. First a very low-key abomination.
The Evervector
Ordinarily, when someone goes vector, niceties like food, water, and not literally running yourself to death fall by the wayside and they die of exhaustion, exposure, etc...
Occasionally; a vector will slow down and start looking after itself after the first few hours of insane murder-sprinting. Rather than running the host to death the Blight reduces the victim to a hunter-gatherer mindset. When not in sight of a potential victim, an evervector will seek out food, water, and shelter. They do not bleed as much as full vectors, with only a slow weeping of blood around the eyes, gums and fingernails. Because of this, they can be mistaken for non-infected madmen.
In play, they act like vector land-mines in areas that one would expect to find only casualties. They may be foreshadowed by dead animals in the area, as they still get the full 'human without the brakes 'benefit' of being a vector when running down a deer. On the plus side, they have enough brain damage to have stopped apologizing.
Like I said, very low key for an abomination, I only call it that because it doesn't fit the mold of the normal vector/casualty.
It's just an unusual form of vector that can upset players who think they have the zombie apocalypse 'under control'.
Very cool idea. I like it.
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Something else for the Red Markets UK files, a recent report (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36356363) on local councils issuing animal permits has revealed a profile of exotic (and potentially dangerous) pets across the United Kingdom. So, Lions of Chicago all over the place.
Highlights include:
- Pumas, vipers and big cats in Cornwall
- Black widows, alligators and crocodiles in Bedfordshire
- 15 wolves are registered at private addresses
- Over 400 bison and 2000 boar in private fields
- A Black Mamba
- 145 ostriches
- Gila Monsters in Central Bedfordshire, North Kesteven, North Lanarkshire, Stevenage, Walsall and Winchester councils, and Northern Ireland
Remember, this isn't zoos or animal sanctuaries; this is people with permits to keep dangerous animals in their homes.
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Would be like those urban legends of big cats on the moors but for real.
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I've been thinking of believer sects and I came up with a few that might come up as 'heretic' sects of existing cults. Here's one from the Meek.
The Sin-Eaters
There are rumors going around that somewhere in the Loss there is a group of the Meek who regained whatever sense of spiritual responsibility they had before the Crash, and now fear for their immortal souls. Instead of seeing the Casualties as holy, they began to see them as the embodiment of sin. After atoning for their sins by slaughtering their brothers in the night, they took over a small church and converted it to fit their needs. They removed the dividing wall of the confessional, hanging a restrained Casualty there instead. This was done to force a person to confront their sins face-to-face as they confessed, which is described below. A Sin-Eater will find a willing or unwilling person he believes has sinned and force them to list every single one of them, while restrained in the confessional and required to maintain eye-contact with the Casualty. During this, a chunk of flesh will be removed from the Casualty and given to the confessor to hold . After the sins are listed, the Sin-Eater rotates the casualty to face him. The Sin-Eater will then recite all of the sins of the confessor, taking personal responsibility for all them (i.e "I killed Mary Helwig.", "I stole food from my Enclave.", etc.). When that is complete, he will ask the confessor to hand him the chunk of flesh, which he will then eat. A metal screen will drop between the turning vector and the presumably traumatized victim, as the mangled apologies of the Sin-Eater absolve the confessor of his sins as he is forced to watch the victim fully turn into a vector. The confessor is then unceremoniously ejected from the church while the vector is put down and incinerated. The group, while not intentionally malevolent, is known to have a fanatical hatred of Latents because they believe they are sustained entirely by sin and should be purged at every opportunity. They are known as well to venerate the Immune but have yet to find one willing to stay with them, rumored to have kidnapped at least one, who they treat as an unwilling messiah.
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Listening to the Brutalists episode 7... I was struck by the idea of a dronky that has an upgraded voice modulator that was programmed to cry for help in the voice of a child to lure pcs into a trap. Screemers style...
Perhaps the trap is a car alarm system that then attracts casualties.
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So, here's what I've got so far as a rough break down of the UK Crash so far.
- Chunnel as primary route of infection from mainland Europe. First outbreak centres are Folkestone in Kent (where the tunnel first exits the Channel) and St. Pancras, central London (the end point for the Eurostar train).
- London falls almost immediately, but is also the centre of the fiercest and longest resistance against the Blight and the strongest reclamation efforts. London is now mainly split between the north and south sides of the Thames river (north side Lost, south side Receded)
- The bulk of the Horde pushes mostly north out of London, eventually splitting when it hits the central Pennine mountain range.
- The largest split goes up the east side of the Pennines, towards Hull. The smaller western horde eventually devours Birmingham. The canals in the Midlands break up the herd into smaller, more manageable swarms which makes the north-west a little less risky.
- The fall of Whitehall (where the Civil Contingencies Secretariat headquarters were) has meant the military are the primary governmental body.
- The military pulls south and east towards older, crumbling infrastructure that pre-dated the centralisation of authority in London.
- RAF Rudloe Manor, the former Central Government War Headquarters, is now home to the provisional replacement government.
- The Rudloe government has been pouring almost all its resources into the reclamation of London - and only London.
So, broadly speaking the UK is divided into three kinds of areas: the Recession, which is most of what's south and west of the Thames (except for Kent as the Chunnel is still pouring out Casualties); the "good" (well, "less terrible") Loss, which is north of the Thames but west of the Pennines; and the "bad" Loss, which is north of the Thames but east of the Pennines. As a general rule, the further north you go the rarer zombies are (due to the sparser and smaller human population centres up north pre-Crash) but even into Scotland you'll find Casualties wandering around. Bristol is the largest Recession city, though many have flocked to Truro in Cornwall to get as far away from the quarantine line as possible. Five years into reclamation, London's southern half is a mostly-secure patchwork of enclaves and martial law patrolled by the officers of the Met; Rudloe and the Met have been financing efforts to push north of the Thames and keep expanding the reclamation; a common Taker job in London is extermination, simply getting a kill-quota from the Met to take out zombies north of the river, or "tunnel-ratting" which involves handling the masses of Casualties packed into the London Underground - sealing tunnels, clearing stations and so on.
(http://i1366.photobucket.com/albums/r777/patrick_harkin/redmarketsmap2_zpsrcoacw03.png)
Everything under the red line is Recession, controlled by the Rudloe government. Everything west of the green line is the Severn (the "less terrible Loss"), where the largest enclaves are around what's left of Cardiff, Manchester and Birmingham; the Barrelmen supply guns all around the Severn, Wale's quarries and farms still produce and Manchester's primary export is still football hooliganism. Everything east of the green line is the Loss (the really bad part of town, where the herds are more common - good luck setting up an enclave south of Hull. The largest single settlement in the Loss is within the medieval walls of York, and the Shambles are not somewhere to be after dark.
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Ok, we've got a bunch of people who played and ran the beta here. I asked this in the Kickstarter update it was in, but I'm curious as to your take on this.
Simply put, the Profit mechanic is very very nice, but it falls down for me in one particular place - combat damage location.
Damage itself, as whatever the Black is, is good. But location is problematic, simply because the distribution of successes will orient damage towards legs (because lower numbers on Red are more likely to be successes) when Takers attack, and when Takers fail to dodge (because, of course, it's more likely to be higher numbers on Red if you fail), the damage will be smaller and the locations will be higher.
What's your suggested mechanical fix to give a better distribution? Should damage location be rolled seperately after the combat roll?
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Ok, we've got a bunch of people who played and ran the beta here. I asked this in the Kickstarter update it was in, but I'm curious as to your take on this.
Simply put, the Profit mechanic is very very nice, but it falls down for me in one particular place - combat damage location.
Damage itself, as whatever the Black is, is good. But location is problematic, simply because the distribution of successes will orient damage towards legs (because lower numbers on Red are more likely to be successes) when Takers attack, and when Takers fail to dodge (because, of course, it's more likely to be higher numbers on Red if you fail), the damage will be smaller and the locations will be higher.
What's your suggested mechanical fix to give a better distribution? Should damage location be rolled seperately after the combat roll?
Yes, this has been a very well-discussed issue through the beta. It came up in The Reformers campaign a lot. I think Caleb's planning on simply adjusting the hit location ranges, so it's something like only one number for each limb and head, and the rest torso. Personally, I think I would reroll for location instead. I think that's a very simple solution that doesn't slow the game down but adds a nice little moment of suspense.
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Latest interview on Technical Difficulties podcast seems like Caleb is already redistributing the locations a bit. As has been mentioned.
I know some of the ORE games have a similar problem.
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I just had players roll damage separately and it worked fine.
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So, I mentioned this in another thread but I think an interesting inversion of the typical Red Markets dynamic would be to have a group of Recession-based "Takers" who make their money by scavenging from the consumerist culture that still exists in the Recession (last-gen electronics, medicine etc) and taking it out into the Loss to sell to nearby Enclaves at a sizeable mark-ups. (This is based on the real-life group of Polish students who would run West German electronics, which the West Germans had upgraded into obsolescence, and selling it in Communist - and thus tech-poor - Poland at a huge profit).
From a campaign structure, the idea changes enclave generation a bit because the enclaves you create are customers, rather than your home, and what's really important is how you get in and out of the Recession on the regular to make your business work. Maybe you're paying "tax" to your local Stewards to look the other way, maybe you're in good with the people-traffickers on the border. You also need to think about where you're getting your hands on things that the Recession doesn't mind losing - who hooks you up with surplus Barrett REC7's now that your local militia have equipped REC9's as standard? On the player level, you're richer but also more pampered, meaning your gear is nicer but you need to spend more on things like luxuries and amenities, your dependants have higher demands etc.
Of course, things get really interesting when you get found out and declared homo sacor for breaking quarantine (repeatedly, for fun and profit). Now your relationship with the enclaves who were your customers changes drastically. Now they have something you want - walls to get behind, food to eat. And your "choice of jobs" becomes "choice of enclaves you have to prove yourself to". And if you've stiffed them over in the past, those jobs are going to be pretty risky. And being used to a higher standard of life suddenly comes back to bite you in the ass.
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Why didn't any of the player is the Brutalists pull of a heist movie stile double cross and run with the money before it was split with the other takers.
There are actually a few times in this campaign where I have thought. Why did he not just cut and run. Just take the loot and leave the rest of the party in trouble.
One example is the video images of DHQS atrocities in the recession. It probably could have been all the retirement fund for IP ever needed if he just booked it.
Another example was with the drug score. The Mauve, who got the money into his criptocurrency account could just have booked it before the party split the loot.
And now finally in this last Aberrant episode (Ep 9). Kowloon missed a great opportunity there. Could have retired. All it would have taken was to let a few hundred people die. Just have the aberrant eat the godly and then call the DHQS and collect his 100 bounty. Wouldn’t even have had to tell the rest of the gang. GILF would have paid up anyway for the Brutalists finishing the job of emptying the retirement home. Kowloon could have walked away clean. Clean as in “soaked in the blood of the insistent, but rich”
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Sometimes it's constraints of the medium. Also because it's a beta and they needed the campaign to cover specific things?
Also sometimes as a player it's a polite thing to not do the dick move, I don't know. Outside of my experience. ☺
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Gorkamorka: I had that same thought about the drug score. I was a little unclear as to why they felt like they had to pay Sythenia the drug money. To keep her from getting mad at them? A 9mm to the skull would have solved that problem a lot more cheaply.
On the other hand, I was a little surprised by how hostile they were to the Ivory Plains folks in the Episode 9. Okay, so they've got a bunch of rich self-righteous jerks surrounded by impoverished masses...which makes them different from Le Corbusier how, exactly? Maybe in degree of success, I guess.
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Sometimes it just doesn't occur to the player to screw over their fellow players.
As to Synthenia, the money was to keep the price of the stability drugs down to affordable levels in their own enclave, thus keeping their home base from having instability problems.
As to the Ivory Plains folks, well I can only speak from my experiences, but as my levels of hostility seemed to match the Brutalists, maybe it'll be instructive. There is something incredibly of putting about the hypocrisy of rich self-righteous jerks who claim membership in Christianity (a religion which preaches compassion for the poor, humility, and doing good deeds) justifying their their distain for the poor through prosperity heresy and using folks being poor as evidence that they are insufficiently Christian to be worthy of assistance. In addition, there was a strong 'conform and accept our believes or you're not people' vibe I was getting from Ivory Plains. Well, maybe specifically Pastor Tomlinsinburg. Which for me as someone who does not naturally conform to mainline norms in a variety of areas is flat out terrifying. Or would be if I wasn't so used to it as a day-to-day reality. It's like Caleb's roofer analogy: at some point it just becomes your baseline.
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This discussion is very fascinating. It could very well be used as a standard example of "murder hobos" and player logic. You guys are ONE HUNDRED PERCENT RIGHT! They should double cross eachother to get their bounty, but they don't. That seems... counter intuitive but it feels more real. People tend to be collectivist. They want the guy they are in the foxhole with to be not just a comrade, but someone they can trust. And they have to put that trust out there too, and show they can be trusted as well. This is how they are heroic.
I think the RPPR guys play it that way on purpose. Killing anyone innocent or not, bares repurcussions and responsibilities. They also are playing characters who want to still look themselves in the mirror each day. I think it's interesting, especially when you consider mauve's philosophy that we are already dead. Why didn't he just take the DHQS deal? or at least try to. He has respect for his comrades, but i like to think that he's a bit of a hypocrite. He proclaims we're all dead, but his reactions sometimes betray this notion. They feel more real to me. I don't think real people would try to double cross their crew most of the time.
Just my thoughts.
Also, I think it's interesting how Mauve and Kowloon, probably the most broken human beings in the group both commit acts of heroism, putting themselves in harms way ahead of someone else. Especially Mauve. Mauve did not have to be the one to lure the aberrant to the trap. That logically should have been Malleus. But he did it. He made a value judgement that he thought Malleus would die, so he took the heat for him. This is why i want to play this game. Sadly i'll probably be the one running it!
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Just think we give David shit for dropping that kid.
I had some to say but the edits got eaten by my tablet.
What it boils down to is that old phrase "at what price victory". Caleb has talked about how you have to maintain what humanity you have out in the loss lest you become the bad guy from a zombie movie.
I'm reminded of the line im dungeon world about the lack of pvp. You might hate each other but you're goddamn professionals.
Also Wilzuma is spot on about murder hobo ism.
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It's possibly not as easy as it sounds. After all, each one has a goal that requires them not only just to think about themselves, but their dependents. It's one thing if you think you can screw over your coworkers with no repercussions, but the truth is SOMEONE would have been left standing who would have known that they just ratted out their partners. That sort of thing tends to backfire, as anyone who's worked in an office will tell you. Good luck getting anyone to help you with Mr. JOLS or getting your family across the border when it's public knowledge that you can't be trusted.
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A lot of the talk about betrayal hinges on the premise that it is "more logical" to not want to split the pot and keep it all for yourself. Now, we can debate the logic of that premise at length but a central problem of economics is that it's not completely logical, or rather it's an attempt to apply logical models to systems of behaviour that sometimes veer into irrational territory. Caleb has already mentioned this in discussions about things like the Tulip Craze, how an entire nation based ruined its own economy in the name of some pretty flowers with no use or intrinsic value.
Let's then move on to the "betray, run, keep all the loot for yourself" - that only holds up under some very specific, hopeful circumstances. First and foremost, you better be absolutely sure those other guys who worked for the money are dead, because they're going to want the profit of their labour and a few pounds of your flesh in interest if not. So, you know, headshots are handy. You also don't want to get a reputation as a betrayer - otherwise good luck getting work again, or finding other people willing to form a Taker crew with you - and in a setting with Ubiq and Lifelines, even one survivor of your last Taker party who can, say, post footage of you, say, shooting your friends and running with the loot, that just made the trek through the Loss to the Recession a bit longer and a bit harder. If your money isn't enough to buy your way out of the Loss, and your name is out there as "that murderer who murdered all those people (you know, his murder victims)", you're going to get treated like a Raider, not a Taker. Remember, being reliable is a positive quality, not a negative one, when it comes to negotiations on both sides - you want someone who you know will pay you and they want someone they know will get the job done.
Let's return to the fundamental problem here of "should people backstab each other in survival situations"? It's a fundamental tension within capitalist economies - you want to rip other people off for your own profit - and philosophy. This is literally just The Prisoner's Dilemma - in a situation where it is "logically sound" that to betray someone is more profitable than co-operating with them, no-one can be rationally expected to co-operate with anyone, ever. Ripping off everyone is not sustainable unless you have a monopoly on what you're using to rip people off. And no-one wants to be ripped off themselves. This is where the social contract (for want of a better term) comes in. Namely, "I won't screw you if you won't screw me - or at least let's find sustainable ways of mutually screwing each other". And, of course, this is where literal contracts come in so that agreements are made, can't be changed and have some form of exchange. Look at The Reformers, how they early on fleshed out a social contract for how loot would be divided up between them. None of them have gone hungry over the course of the game so far, and even with the miscalculation of the last job's loot they were well in the black. If your group takes a different approach - say, "keep what you kill", your only profit being what you can physically take - and in the absence a formal legal system then yes, there's no reason why you shouldn't backstab the other Takers in that group. But there's also no reason why they shouldn't backstab you - so try and do it first. That's the thing about contracts - they provide you with protections and rights as well as the obligations and covenants, so they're very valuable.
And don't forget, no person is an island. You need other people. That means giving to them, but it also means receiving from them, which is an inherent part of the setting and the system - you provide to your Dependents and in return are healed of Stress. We're a social species, no one individual is capable of total self-sustainment and thus must (or should) act in a somewhat-social fashion in order to receive the benefits of participating in a wider society. I hate paying tax, but I love the NHS so I put up with a little garnish from my pay to know that if my liver decides to die I can get that sorted out. So, if a backstab is going to come it's probably going to be in a MR JOLS job - where the payoff may well be enough to offset the risk inherent in, you know, murdering all your friends and departing from civil society.
Just think we give David shit for dropping that kid.
You know what I realised listening to the recent Delta Green episodes? David killed a Dark Young.
A Dark YOUNG.
Even when he's killing monsters, he's killing children.
(Also, the criticism there wasn't that he killed the kid so much as that it was unnecessary because Ross had wrestled him and gotten control of the weapon, so Malleus wasn't in danger and they were literally right on the edge of escape when POP POP. But David being David, he's never going to admit to it. The Indigo Infanticide strikes again!)
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Sometimes it just doesn't occur to the player to screw over their fellow players.
As to Synthenia, the money was to keep the price of the stability drugs down to affordable levels in their own enclave, thus keeping their home base from having instability problems.
As to the Ivory Plains folks, well I can only speak from my experiences, but as my levels of hostility seemed to match the Brutalists, maybe it'll be instructive. There is something incredibly of putting about the hypocrisy of rich self-righteous jerks who claim membership in Christianity (a religion which preaches compassion for the poor, humility, and doing good deeds) justifying their their distain for the poor through prosperity heresy and using folks being poor as evidence that they are insufficiently Christian to be worthy of assistance. In addition, there was a strong 'conform and accept our believes or you're not people' vibe I was getting from Ivory Plains. Well, maybe specifically Pastor Tomlinsinburg. Which for me as someone who does not naturally conform to mainline norms in a variety of areas is flat out terrifying. Or would be if I wasn't so used to it as a day-to-day reality. It's like Caleb's roofer analogy: at some point it just becomes your baseline.
I think I understand that, and I think Caleb did a pretty great job of making Pastor Tomlinsenberg hateful. But it wasn't like they were just going to kill off the church folks. All those poor helpless people in the slums were going to die, too. Maybe they never got a chance to develop any empathy with those people, since they were only ever dealing directly with Tomlinsenberg and his cronies.
Which leads to a stray observation: a big part of the whole campaign's tension comes from how willing the Brutalists are to work for really horrible employers, and Caleb testing their limits on that. At least the Grimecloth farmers seem like fundamentally okay guys.
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At least the Grimecloth farmers seem like fundamentally okay guys.
Aren't they the ones trying to introduce hardcore meth to the area? La Abattoir is strongly tied with MS13 (a hyper-violent gang) and so far have been just as dishonest in their negotiations as the DHQS - their negotiator didn't mention the Raiders specifically to keep the job cheaper (according to Abuela) AND their "gift" was useless until they spent bounty on loading it up. Even Harding, toxic jackass that he was, gave them a working gun!
Yeah, so far the only ones we haven't discovered horrible things about are the Union (and they're just kind of sad and depressing between the lions and the sex dolls.) But give Caleb time, I'm sure they'll be, I don't know, building their economy around kicking puppies soon.
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Also Wilzuma is spot on about murder hobo ism.
oh the murder hobos. I have played with so many... pretending to be maniacal geniuses... but ultimately... it's just how harder they can hobo.
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@RadioactiveBear I believe I made that comment on the episode comments. Didn't want to repeat myself.
Narratively getting a rep as a backstabber probably jacks the price of retirement way up because people are not going to trust you. Market help you if you still can't afford to gtfo of the loss because your former crew are going to hunt youas far as it takes. Just think about regular office where every one isn't armed & desperate.
On the whole it benefits everyone to treat everyone except the client etc with respect.
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Yes of course the obvious reason the game isn't full of betrayals is the Meta reason. Don't mess up the playtest, don't screw over your friends fun.
But if we imagine it's a real world scenario. I think you could trust everyone until the second to last or the last score. By that time all the people should be desperate, mentally tired and have probably had to do some really horrible things to get to where you are now. And you should realise that if you all survive the last big score then all of you get a little less money to live on in the recession then if fewer people survive. Hell if only one survives you will be filthy rich. And you don't have to worry about the rep, because you are getting out anyway.
The thing with Kowloon, the godly and the aberrant was different. All he had to do was not do anything and then claim the money. As I said, his friends would never have had to find out. They would even have gotten paid. That was just a true moral chose. One that I think Kowloon/Ross would probably have done differently if he could do it over again with a clear mind and no time pressure. I think the rescue the people was a knee jerk reaction of Ross "the normal human" while I feel that Kowloon "the desperate survivor" would have taken the money. Ross has said as much about Kowloon before. "He just wants out as fast as possible".
Now I would love to hear Ross take on this.
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Kind of remimds me of the Kane & Lynch multiplayer where it's beneficial to work together right until the end of the heist then it becomes resevoir dogs.
in character I dunno man human nature's a funny thing and logic is overrated. I would think it would be a completely different thing to commit mass murder by proxy. Sorry if I misunderstand I made the mistake of having a soft drink and am fighting off anxiety issues.
I'd love to hear what Ross has to say but we might have to wait for the post mortem.
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I think Kowloon/Ross would probably have done differently if he could do it over again with a clear mind and no time pressure.
Counterpoint: doing so is a Detachment stressor and that acts as a mechanical disincentive even without time pressure; carrying out the "feed the Christians to the goop-lion for profit" plan is a very "That Guy from the Zombie Movie" thing to do, which is what the Humanity system represents.
Also, you're kind of ignoring the context of their entire previous relationship with DHQS, who were repeatedly established as monstrous and murderous. As previously mentioned in the thread, a central tension in the game is how much money it takes for you to overlook the client's shadiness and I think the DHQS are just the most extreme example of that. It's not just a question of "what do I do in this instance" so much as how everything leading up to this point shapes your thinking about what to do next. And there's rarely going to be a time when you're not pressured to make a choice, so I think saying "he would have made the right choice if there wasn't pressure to make the choice" isn't a great argument. Perhaps he decided he didn't want to be like the Vowels, regardless of profit loss and risk. Perhaps he was learning to value something other than blood money - or had found a level of bloodiness to his money that he didn't want to take.
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Also isn't Kowloon's Zombie Defence designer spot a thing to factor into this too. I don't mean talk for Ross here.
I appreciate RadBear doing what I mean more eloquently.
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Yes of course the obvious reason the game isn't full of betrayals is the Meta reason. Don't mess up the playtest, don't screw over your friends fun.
But if we imagine it's a real world scenario. I think you could trust everyone until the second to last or the last score. By that time all the people should be desperate, mentally tired and have probably had to do some really horrible things to get to where you are now. And you should realise that if you all survive the last big score then all of you get a little less money to live on in the recession then if fewer people survive. Hell if only one survives you will be filthy rich. And you don't have to worry about the rep, because you are getting out anyway.
The thing with Kowloon, the godly and the aberrant was different. All he had to do was not do anything and then claim the money. As I said, his friends would never have had to find out. They would even have gotten paid. That was just a true moral chose. One that I think Kowloon/Ross would probably have done differently if he could do it over again with a clear mind and no time pressure. I think the rescue the people was a knee jerk reaction of Ross "the normal human" while I feel that Kowloon "the desperate survivor" would have taken the money. Ross has said as much about Kowloon before. "He just wants out as fast as possible".
Now I would love to hear Ross take on this.
@Gorkamokra
I disagree that their unity is not purely meta. The logic of betrayal and the big score all to yourself, logic isn't necessarily as pure as mathematics and a clear profit margin.
Economics take human nature and behavior into account. While the score would be divided by the Takers, and you get less money you don't necessarily get more out of it. There are too many abstracts you can't name a dollar value to when it comes to work. The emphasis is that even in an Apocalypse, civilization endures and it's worst and BEST qualities thrive. Self-reliance and self sufficiency is a lie. People NEED people.
If you take from your crew, you are literally a coworker stealing from the cash register. There are consequences. To your soul, to your life and to your career. The value of being trusted, of being fair, and not a murdering raider has an ephemeral value you can't equate with the cash value you'd be earning in return for betrayal or underhanded-ness.
Kowloon knows that Le Corbusier NEEDS Ivory Plains. They need communities to trade with. They need people. They need civilization to survive. Especially now that he knows the DHQS is trying to "cleanse" the enclaves to preserve their cover up AND take land back. His community his family is in danger. His neighbors and friends are in danger. Word gets out he led an aberrant to a community and stood by and watched as they were devoured, he would be blacklisted. And you can't pretend someone won't get away or won't find out. DHQS would know. They would blackmail him.
What he did was TRULY logical. Not mathematically or profit driven logic, but emotionally logical.
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@Wilzuma
Yet at the same time history is rife with examples of people taking short term individual gain over long term gain for the whole.
But in reality it is actually about what was done. Not what I or anyone else feels should have been done.
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I have been thinking a lot about enclaves recently. I was watching the District 13 movies and there is a whole ton of evocative imagery in those movies and the concept of a load of high rises surrounded by a high wall that is perilously close to the city limits is really interesting to me.
Also I'm listening to Tim Power's Declare and the parts with the Bedouin made me think it would be interesting to see how a nomadic group would act in RM. Would they have several mini enclaves that they move between? Or a mobile caravan enclave like in the latest Monster Hunter? Hm.
Finally I'll be playing in a campaign of Stars Without Number soon and I just thought how perfect it would be for a port with the Profit System. Your spaceship would be the equivalent of an enclave I think.
Edit: My brother's watching Person of Interest and I just thought of doing something like Night's Black Agents where you would have a Visibility/ cover score (instead of bounty?) and you would have to make the decision to do things to keep/ raise your cover or spend it to benefit yourself in some way have players make some of those RPPR brand difficult choices. It's late but I thought these were interesting enough that I'd share them.
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So, after listening to ep1 of Fallen Flags, I was toying around with ideas for characters based around the whole Immune thing and here's what I came up with. (Posted the idea in the FB group) If you like 'em, use em! If not, you can never un-read em so I win either way!
BOGOF (Buy One, Get One Free) are a brother-sister team who have set themselves up in the Loss as a small independent fixer outfit. Near-identical twins, they have taken great care to resemble each other as closely as possible, down to the model (and repair) of the equipment they use to make them unrecognisable as individuals. As the name suggests, they come as a package; you hire one, you get both of them.
They used to be Gregor and Imogen Thompson, a pair of medical subjects "rescued" from a DHQS facility by a Moth raid about year into the Crash. The rescue was great, but the problem was that the Moths - being Moths - promptly uploaded all the project's medical data to the Ubiq network. This is where most people learned that immunity is apparently not a genetic factor as the medical tests showed Imogen as immune but Gregor not to be immune. Due to the high price that the immune have on their head, the Moths "outing" Imogen as immune effectively ruined their lives and the pair soon fled the Moths too.
BOGOF is short and skinny, with black hair swept over to the right and a cat-scratch style scar down their left cheek. They have narrow, pinched features and are cleanly shaven. They wear long, heavy overcoats to conceal their general body shape and under that is a complicated mess of straps, harnesses and holsters that somewhat baffle the eye. In combat, they both use large, chrome-plated automatics that appear to be (like them) one of a paired set.
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It's slowly dawning on me that Europe has all the best buildings for enclaves.
(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_LlrUC31bbbk/S_SlIGDnbxI/AAAAAAAABTM/OoisQRM2jTw/s1600/1BurgHohenwerfenAustria.jpg)
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It's slowly dawning on me that Europe has all the best buildings for enclaves.
it's almost like they have been surviving hordes for thousands of years
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It's slowly dawning on me that Europe has all the best buildings for enclaves.
it's almost like they have been surviving hordes for thousands of years
And they had pre-Industrial Revolution economies, too!
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And they had pre-Industrial Revolution economies, too!
Hey, it looks like those are coming back in style pretty soon!
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And they had pre-Industrial Revolution economies, too!
Hey, it looks like those are coming back in style pretty soon!
The Icelandic viking raids have started already...
(http://i.imgur.com/q93M4i7.jpg)
Sorry could not resist. :-)
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Oh, the best part of that? "Iceland" is the name of a low-tier supermarket in the UK, that kind that basically just sells cheap frozen ready-meals and gets D-grade pop singers for their ads. "That's why mums go to Iceland" is their slogan and it just became this sick burn against the England team.
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Because all latent/immune characters need one, here are my stats for weaponised chainsaw:
Chainsaw:
Upkeep 3
Charges ooooo ooooo
Effect: Kill damage
Qualities
Charged: Charges can be spent in addition to buy-a-roll to aid check
Cumbersome: Can’t be quick drawn
Hungry: two Charges must be spent for every one used
Loud
Manpower: spend rations to buy-a-roll
Messy: Any sucksessfull use agains Vector/Casualty causes anyone in melee range to have to make infection checks
Requires prep: Takes one action to start before it can be used.
Specialized: (Melee: Chain-Saw)
Tool: Charges can be used to aid some scavenge and mechanic checks at Markets discretion
Potent: add +1 Kill damage
Uppgrades:
Hybrid: Buys of Hungry.
Upgraded motor: charges may be spent after the check for additional damage
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Halberd/Dane Axe
Upkeep 1
Charges ooooo ooooo
Effect: Kill damage
Qualities
Cumbersome: Can’t be quick drawn
Manpower: spend rations to buy-a-roll
Melee
Reach: weapon can attack Casualties from one Shamble away
Specialized: (Melee: Halberd/Dane Axe)
Uppgrades:
Spearhead: weapon can hold a casualty or Vector in place for a Resistance check
Sturdy: buys off wear ‘n tear
Weighted: Spend a Charge on the weapon for knockback
Potent: Add +1 Kill damage
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@Caleb
I think stats for NPC shield carriers / torch-bearer / spear carrier would be interesting to add to the equipment list.
What I mean is how much is it to hire someone to carry stuff for me on one job. Not a combat person, just someone to carry all the haul. Sort of like the dog or horse stats, just for a person.
Coming to think of it it might be a part of a larger list of services a Taker could buy on a job to job bases.
Other possibilities of job to job bases services could be
- Drone flyover footage.
- Cab driver
- Extra fire power (person with gun)
- Medic
- Drone delivered care packages en route. Food, ammo, medpacks...
What else?
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Aberrant idea!
The Cenotaph appears to be a variant of the Scarecrow, a Casualty whose Blight seems to have solidified like amber and 'frozen' them in place. The Blight then winds up and round into a pillar-like construction, wound through with grooves and holes; it looks like an H.R. Giger totem pole with yawning faces trapped behind glassy black Blight-stuff. The crenellations catch the wind queerly and make a haunting, song-like sound that carries for miles. A peculiar quality of this sound is that they seem to attract other Casualties like no other, like ringing the dinner bell. Having a Cenotaph in your neck of the woods is bad news because it means your enclave is about to have a stampede. When players are near a Cenotaph, the Market rolls Mass/Shamble each turn, regardless of whether or not loud weapons were used.
Samson Aberrants have developed a strange symbiotic (or at least non-toxic) relationship with local insect life. Their bodies are tunnelled through and hollowed out, turned into nests for the creatures they unknowingly harbour. A Samson might be surrounded by a horde of stinging wasps or bees who want Takers to keep away from their walking hive; Takers have to use their Twitch action to keep the wasps off. Alternatively, a Samson's abdominal cavity might contain hordes of Blight-covered (and thus infection) crawling insects like cockroaches and millipedes who spill out when the Samson takes damage; this probably inflicts a Humanity test to see and spreads infectious Blight across the ground near the Aberrant.
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Because all latent/immune characters need one, here are my stats for weaponised chainsaw:
Chainsaw:
Upkeep 3
Charges ooooo ooooo
Effect: Kill damage
Qualities
Charged: Charges can be spent in addition to buy-a-roll to aid check
Cumbersome: Can’t be quick drawn
Hungry: two Charges must be spent for every one used
Loud
Manpower: spend rations to buy-a-roll
Messy: Any sucksessfull use agains Vector/Casualty causes anyone in melee range to have to make infection checks
Requires prep: Takes one action to start before it can be used.
Specialized: (Melee: Chain-Saw)
Tool: Charges can be used to aid some scavenge and mechanic checks at Markets discretion
Potent: add +1 Kill damage
Uppgrades:
Hybrid: Buys of Hungry.
Upgraded motor: charges may be spent after the check for additional damage
I get what you're going for with having both charged and manpower (it's unwieldy so you have to wrestle with it in addition to spending gas for the saws to spin) but mechanically speaking they do the same thing. Otherwise I think I need to steal this for my next game/campaign.
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Because all latent/immune characters need one, here are my stats for weaponised chainsaw:
Chainsaw:
Upkeep 3
Charges ooooo ooooo
Effect: Kill damage
Qualities
Charged: Charges can be spent in addition to buy-a-roll to aid check
Cumbersome: Can’t be quick drawn
Hungry: two Charges must be spent for every one used
Loud
Manpower: spend rations to buy-a-roll
Messy: Any sucksessfull use agains Vector/Casualty causes anyone in melee range to have to make infection checks
Requires prep: Takes one action to start before it can be used.
Specialized: (Melee: Chain-Saw)
Tool: Charges can be used to aid some scavenge and mechanic checks at Markets discretion
Potent: add +1 Kill damage
Uppgrades:
Hybrid: Buys of Hungry.
Upgraded motor: charges may be spent after the check for additional damage
I get what you're going for with having both charged and manpower (it's unwieldy so you have to wrestle with it in addition to spending gas for the saws to spin) but mechanically speaking they do the same thing. Otherwise I think I need to steal this for my next game/campaign.
Yeah I see where you are coming from. But having used one, those things aren't light or easy to swing around.
On a side note, i'm quite proud of the Messy quality.
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I think that most of the islands (Angel, Alcatraz, Santa Catalina, even Hog Island) would wind up under Navy/DHQS control pretty quick as staging areas and links to Hawaii. Which I imagine is now seen more as an "unsinkable" aircraft carrier and bulwark against China. I also think most of the famous islands are going to be the sites of massacres from everyone having the same clever idea on where to go.
Also I'll toss this map out:
http://choices.climatecentral.org/#15/38.5816/-121.4944?compare=scenarios&carbon-end-yr=2100&scenario-a=unchecked&scenario-b=extreme-cuts (http://choices.climatecentral.org/#15/38.5816/-121.4944?compare=scenarios&carbon-end-yr=2100&scenario-a=unchecked&scenario-b=extreme-cuts)
I'm having trouble using it but I'm in China and internets are hard here. But I like it because I am a little sad I can't set a game in the flooded ruins of New York. I think I really want a town reclaimed by the ocean for a setting.
More thoughts looking at the At-A-Glance section. A lot of them come out pretty severe, anything that starts you with a crack kind of makes dependents, not useless, but not helpful against the other two cracks. Same with some of the others, I can't tell if they're supposed to even out or not. Scavenger can use their extra bounty to raise ADP and "buy off" their problem, hustlers can skip checks but likely wind up owing 5ish bounty a game, if the game goes say 10 sessions that turns into most of a retirement plan. On the other side, the Migrants are paying between 1-5 extra bounty a game for a 20 bounty savings, so a low CHA migrant can come out ahead and a high CHA comes out behind, where the Lost are paying 20 bounty for 2 skill points. (Milestones are 20 bounty right?)
On the other hand, I'm glad IP's thing where he knows people but they don't like him is gone. It seemed too easy to all but buy will for 1 bounty extra when he tapped a reference.
I think I'd like to see the design notes on this section to get a better idea of how they're supposed to be presented. Right now I'm thinking more of pick your poison.
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I think that most of the islands (Angel, Alcatraz, Santa Catalina, even Hog Island) would wind up under Navy/DHQS control pretty quick as staging areas and links to Hawaii. Which I imagine is now seen more as an "unsinkable" aircraft carrier and bulwark against China. I also think most of the famous islands are going to be the sites of massacres from everyone having the same clever idea on where to go.
Also I'll toss this map out:
http://choices.climatecentral.org/#15/38.5816/-121.4944?compare=scenarios&carbon-end-yr=2100&scenario-a=unchecked&scenario-b=extreme-cuts (http://choices.climatecentral.org/#15/38.5816/-121.4944?compare=scenarios&carbon-end-yr=2100&scenario-a=unchecked&scenario-b=extreme-cuts)
I'm having trouble using it but I'm in China and internets are hard here. But I like it because I am a little sad I can't set a game in the flooded ruins of New York. I think I really want a town reclaimed by the ocean for a setting.
More thoughts looking at the At-A-Glance section. A lot of them come out pretty severe, anything that starts you with a crack kind of makes dependents, not useless, but not helpful against the other two cracks. Same with some of the others, I can't tell if they're supposed to even out or not. Scavenger can use their extra bounty to raise ADP and "buy off" their problem, hustlers can skip checks but likely wind up owing 5ish bounty a game, if the game goes say 10 sessions that turns into most of a retirement plan. On the other side, the Migrants are paying between 1-5 extra bounty a game for a 20 bounty savings, so a low CHA migrant can come out ahead and a high CHA comes out behind, where the Lost are paying 20 bounty for 2 skill points. (Milestones are 20 bounty right?)
On the other hand, I'm glad IP's thing where he knows people but they don't like him is gone. It seemed too easy to all but buy will for 1 bounty extra when he tapped a reference.
I think I'd like to see the design notes on this section to get a better idea of how they're supposed to be presented. Right now I'm thinking more of pick your poison.
Set it in the Gold Coastal Australia. It's going to go under
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Set it in the Gold Coastal Australia. It's going to go under
I think the world has Australia being kind of zombie free and shooting at the Chinese fleet.
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Set it in the Gold Coastal Australia. It's going to go under
I think the world has Australia being kind of zombie free and shooting at the Chinese fleet.
Correct. But you can make up your own if you want to.
A few of us on the Red Markets Facebook page made up the following.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1713530785583721/permalink/1719514141652052/?comment_id=1719515824985217 (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1713530785583721/permalink/1719514141652052/?comment_id=1719515824985217)
Since you said you are behind the Great Firewall of China I will copy the gist of it and paste it here.
- I was thinking the Brisbane Line for Australia.
- Same here. North of the Brisbane river is safe, south is not. And perth is REALY hoping that the beefed up rapit proof fence will hold, because eventually some casualties are going to cross the desert.
- Hmm interesting, after a chat I was lucky enough to have with Caleb I was figuring the Australian version of the evacuation was to pull back into the centre.
Which makes sense politically ("oh well we have to protect the capital") and the coast is where our population zones(& infection zones) are all at.
But the Brisbane think makes sense.
The rabbit proof fence idea is good. I can't really imagine hordes of C's crossing the red centre, but it makes good propaganda!
- i mean, the centre has so few resources, trade would just shut down and good luck farming. At least QLD has some farmland and trade ports.
- Yeah I said centre, I guess I just meant away from the coast. But if you were going to clear out a city, Brisbane makes sense.
- We are also all forgetting Tasmania. Tasmania is by far the most defendable place. A nice mixture of waterways, mountains and food producing regions surrounded by water.
So here is my headcanon for RedMarket Australia. There are three separate Recession areas. Perth, North of Brisbane and Tasmania. The leaders in each of them all of them consider them self the one true leaders of Australia and none of them officially acknowledge the other two. All of them send hire out takers to go into the lost and do things. Sometimes for the community, sometimes in competition with another Recession area and sometimes to sabotage the other Recession areas. You are the Takers/Mercs caught in the middle of all this.
- Oh I like the idea of Australia fracturing into 3 competing states.
- Aussie slang for casualties could be toads or rabbits. I mean, their just another invasive species right
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I posted this over on the Facebook group, but I should post here too:
Reading reputation rules, I want to create a variant where Rep spots decay after a while. People have short memories after all. I'm thinking each spot, + or -, would have a set number of uses, sessions, or contracts they'd be valid for. I'm thinking maybe a Sensitivity check for the Takers to know how many they get, otherwise the Market rolls in secret. Imagine the negotiator's consternation trying to use a spot and it not working because they didn't know no one cared about it any more. Downside I see is creating more bookkeeping for the Market.
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Also from the Facebook group, an elaboration/write-up of an idea I'd had for a job and setting element.
"When Ubiq launches their first generation AR specs, the products shipped with the uBeasts game pre-installed as a 'proof of concept' that the Specs could be used as a gaming platform. Successive generations of Spec came with the next iteration of uBeasts and Ubiq Aloft's premiere brought uBeast World, a worldwide MMO version of the popular monster-collecting game.
When the Crash came, the world ended. People moved, infrastructure collapsed, the States were divided. But people still use Ubiq Specs and Ubiq Aloft servers still operate. Which means uBeast World still exists. As things calm down in the Recession, a bizarre sub-market has evolved among what's left in the uBeast fanbase, an extension of the so-called 'gold farming' industry that existed in other MMO's. Some people call it 'blight farming'.
'Blight farming' became necessary when a feature of uBeast World's creature spawning became especially inconvenient with the new realities of the zombie apocalypse. Certain special monsters could only be found at specific times, within specific regions, to encourage exploration and attendance at certain events. Ubiq City being in Colorado meant many of these mythic beasts would only ever spawn in Colorado, for example, to encourage people to visit. Colorado being in the Loss, Recession-based uBeast fans mostly gave up on ever getting their hands on these lost uBeasts. But many are willing to pay for the rare, the lost, or just for having their collection filled out. (Look, nerds pay a lot for weird stuff. Is this really surprising to anyone at this point?)
And so people began using Lifelines to arrange jobs with Takers to go 'blight farming', seeking out uBeasts that now could only be found in the Loss. They ship out cheap Ubiq specs with game installed, the Taker goes to the site the uBeasts spawn and try to remain uneaten until they can catch the Beast. The Taker then sends back the Specs with the captured uBeast on back to the client, who trades it with their main account. Some gamers might even ship out their primary gaming specs, if they can bear to be away from their main digital device for that long. From the Taker's perspective, blight farming is paying work but it's humiliating. No-one likes being the guy indulging the manchild (at least crypto can't get cheeto dust on it). The idea that your food or your child's medicine is dependant on this frippery, that you might get killed or become a monster in the name of an imaginary electric hamster, is incredibly demeaning to a lot of Takers. Blight farming jobs are usually considered 'bottom of the barrel' - taking one might even be a Humanity test as the Taker realises just how long they've sunk."
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Might just be my own silly interest in the concept and idea of taking ARGs into such a direction or seeing how far this thing advances, but I really like this idea. I think I might have to borrow or pull inspiration for a leg, job or even the basis of a game. I also love the "keeping it current" social commentary of this.
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Also people have been laundering money through online games for a while so there's probably an angle there too.
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I think I might have to borrow or pull inspiration for a leg, job or even the basis of a game.
Feel free. Some ideas I've had for Leg-sized "bites", rather than a full job include:
1) A variant on the Bitten Taker random encounter from the table. The Takers get a broad-spectrum signal, a live-feed from a Taker. "No, damn it, no! I just got Gorriliath! I got it! I'm out of bullets but now I'm bit!" Put her out of her misery, maybe a check to understand the reference to uBeasts and that her Specs probably contain data worth selling.
2) A "Trainer Battle" - two Blight-farmers are vying for the same spawn point and it's become a stand-off; both are armed and taking cover behind cars in the street. They might try to haggle the Takers to kill the other trainer, or in their paranoia believe the party are the other Blightfarmer's "back up" and open fire.
3) A "critical success" - the Takers are heading through the ruins of a Ubiq store when one of their Specs flares to life and fills their feed with colour and sparkles as the mythical uBeast Sahalit, Mother of Storms appears before them. The Taker in question has just Willy Wonka'd their way into a random encounter with the store's local sustainable server which has netted them an extremely rare, possibly unique, uBeast. Their Specs can now be sold at a major mark-up from what they were previously worth just by having this data on them. (Think people selling iPhones with Flappy Bird installed, or games consoles with the P.T. demo on when that software stopped being available)
4) A "critical failure" - the same situation as above, the Ubiq store. Unbeknown to our heroes, an Aberrant has taken up root in the basement, its tendrils winding into the store's systems, which has tainted the connection which would have previously netted them the mythic uBeast. Instead they receive a jumbled mess of pixels and audio glitches whose name appears to be [A1A~pokm2]. Treat [A1A~pokm2] as an app for the purpose of Specs, taking up a Charge of memory permanently. It cannot be deleted and each session will grow to take up another Charge of memory in the Specs. Eventually it will "eat" the other apps installed on the Specs. In addition, the Taker wearing the Specs can no longer entirely trust their visual perception while wearing the Specs; the Market can, once a session, lie to the Taker in question about what they see. Has the Blight gone digital? Is [A1A~pokm2] a data-based Aberrant or just a really nasty bit of corrupt code? (Tl;dr you found MissingNo instead of Mew, and now he's eating your save-game files)
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It's make a funny service contract, here are some ubeasts:
Quachile the walker of sand was a cross-promotion with the National Park Service and can be be found in national parks across the Southwest.
[Not too bad, mostly consuming rations and trying not to die of desert.]
Hobor was an Amtrak deal, it can be found in train stations.
[Most stations were used in the evacuation, many fell to infection with large populations trapped behind barricades.]
Chandrazar was a special limited time one at a nearby nerd convention, but with The Crash on nobody remembered to turn it off.
[Okay, this is just to make convention jokes and get the players to run around a hotel.]
Thoyhoohar is findable at the locations of Renaissance faires.
[Many such places turned into failed enclaves.]
Patrior appears at military bases.
[The ones not reclaimed by DHQS are either full of mines or raiders.]
Recoveron was a limited edition uBeast that cycled through several Mid-Western/West Coast children's burn wards.
[Self control checks as far as the eye can see in the dark hospital corridor.]