Messages

46

RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: May 13, 2016, 11:13:32 PM »

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. 

47

RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: May 13, 2016, 12:40:40 PM »

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.

48

RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: May 13, 2016, 07:20:23 AM »

@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.

49

RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: May 12, 2016, 09:50:40 PM »

Oops, accidental double-post.

50

RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: May 12, 2016, 09:48:21 PM »

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. 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. 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 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, 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 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:



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" 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 (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. That said, Ladywood and Edgbaston were where where J.R.R Tolkein spent childhood so you might have a job delving in there to try and get hold of some Middle Earth memorabilia?

51

RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: May 11, 2016, 10:32:45 PM »

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.

52

General Chaos / Re: What Vidja games are you playing?

« on: May 10, 2016, 10:35:12 PM »

dark souls 3 is gud

i am not gud

yet

i too also am not gud

i put down ds3 because i got the new ratchet and clank and nostalgia'd my little buttocks off and then came back to ds3 and oh no all my gud was gone

53

RPGs / Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!

« on: May 07, 2016, 10:00:01 AM »

In the Shadow of Heshbon

In the aftermath of the 2014 Carlton Complex Fire, the largest wildfire in Washington state history, a group of forest rangers, local deputies and volunteers go out into the ravaged wilds to assess the damage, search for the missing and map the devastation.

Where the lightning struck which sparked the fires, they find hatches leading to an underground facility. It appears that the heat from the fire has caused the pressurised air in the facility to expand and "break the seals". This former MJ-12 research facility contains files, objects and even a few "subjects".

This works as an intro scenario ("hey guys, oops, looks like you're DG now!") but also as a frame narrative ala Final Revelation; essentially, we can use the files, objects and subjects as leaping-off points for, say, a one-shot in the 80's about hunting goatmen in Missouri, or a 1940's scenario set in one of the internment camps the government ran for Deep Ones.

54

RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: May 07, 2016, 09:25:07 AM »

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".

55

RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: May 06, 2016, 10:22:57 PM »

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.

56

RPGs / Re: Technical Difficulties Gaming Podcast: Red Markets Beta Campaign: The Reformers

« on: May 05, 2016, 08:51:22 PM »

Oh good, I wasn't the only one who encountered that (was worried it might have been a download error or something like that on my end).

Yeah, I had the same thing; they get to the restaurant, get kind of inside and then it jumps to them spotting her backpack in the shoe check. For a while I thought maybe it was because of the trigger warning at the start, that you had moved the distressing content.

57

General Chaos / Re: Image Thread

« on: May 04, 2016, 07:26:04 PM »

Meanwhile, in Canada:

"President Trump sworn in"

58

RPGs / Re: Eclipse Phase - What happen in the first 24hrs of the Fall? - Thoughts?

« on: May 03, 2016, 10:07:13 PM »

(I happened to be replying to this on the EP forums when I saw you posted it here as well, so I'm posting it here since I use this more often)

Well, "the Fall" was already well underway before the first nanomolecular nightmare ate the first baby. The TITANs had encountered something weird in space, gone a bit loopy and covertly repurposed much of the US military-industrial complex' digital and manufacturing infrastructure to serve its own purposes. This probably took place over a period of at least weeks.

This all takes place against a backdrop of geopolitical tension and environmental, uh, "issues". In that regards, the first few hours of The Fall Proper would be a confusing mess of sudden strikes and then finger-pointing. Not everyone KNOWS that the TITAN AI's have gone rogue and nom-nom-nom brains; they're detonating WMD's and making it look like Pakistan finally nuked India, so that India fires a response, watching everyone dance the Mutually Assured Destruction tango and do the heavy lifting for them. Since they're wormed into the military communications network, it's going to be a while until people figure out that this isn't actually the case.

So your players are probably going to experience, say, an attack by unmanned drones that appear to have crossed the Pacific from (let's say) North Korea. Uh oh, better get to safety. (Except this is when the TITANs start preying on the mass of people heading to "safe spots") When the players evacuate to a safe location, they have to contend with dust storms blown in from the Second Dust Bowl in the Midwest (which also happens to blow in dangerous nanoswarms). They get delayed by the storm and by the time they reach the safe point, it's fallen to headhunters. At this point start throwing full on "what is this I don't even" tier awfulness proper at them to suggest that this is more than just human militaries - fractals, exsurgents. WMD's start going off; the TITAN stranglehold over communications is sufficiently subverted that people are now able to talk to each other properly and GET TO THE SPACE ELEVATOR GO GO GO.

My two cents at least.

59

General Chaos / Re: Introduction

« on: May 02, 2016, 12:10:12 PM »

I can't believe that I didn't notice this thread earlier.

Hi, I'm Ben, a fellow Missourian and soon-to-be college graduate.  I got into RPPR in 2013 because I wanted to listen to some Eclipse Phase APs and I've been a fan ever since.  It has been really important in expanding my RPG horizons beyond Pathfinder and they've introduced me to the wonders of Call of Cthulhu, GUMSHOE, and Unknown Armies.

thats exactly what a mind controlling fungus puppeting a human host would say

IM ON TO YOU

That's exactly what an ACTUAL fungal puppet would say to divert suspicion from itself and its dread myconid agenda!

60

RPGs / Re: Red Markets Inspiration

« on: April 26, 2016, 10:33:54 PM »

Maybe they also insist that the Takers wear trackers on themselves, just in case they get bitten and join the herd.

Oof, that's grim, I love it. I can imagine if there's a Latent in the party that all eyes just kind of awkwardly turn in their direction... ("I mean, you're most of the way there already?")

Or maybe for a secondary complication, the tagging process isn't actually the real experiment -- it's actually a social behavior experiment studying the responses of the Takers themselves as the scientists ask them to do stranger and more dangerous things. Homo Sacer, after all, make excellent test subjects -- especially since they don't have any human rights or anything.

I'm sure there could be some social scientists studying "the Taker subculture" or the economic desperation of the the Loss ("no really, what would you do for a Klondike bar?")