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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: RPPR DISCORD!
« on: August 29, 2017, 01:20:28 PM »
I think it may be expired again
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RPGs / Re: Red Markets Inspiration
« on: August 29, 2015, 03:09:43 AM »
So I'm finally through the Beta and I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the setting. My only real gripe, and I don't know if it's already been hashed out, is that if you look at a map of the US by population density the East side of the Mississipi is not where I'd go if I wanted to flee undead. Something of a grognard point, so I'm not gonna hold on to it so hard.
Anyway, since a big part of the fun of this game seems to be using your locale for setting, I've been thinking about California a lot. Here's what I came up with. Short version: population density maps are basically dead weather forecasts. https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/maps/thematic.html
Central Valley – Casualty Alley.
The Central Valley was the agricultural heart of California. Now it is the states necrotic sore. Though not as densely populated as the bay or the southern sprawl, average population ranges from 250-5000 people per square mile. This, combined with the difficulty of actually leaving the valley, with limited highways through winding mountain passes being the only exit – at least until they were closed down by wrecks and aggressive locals – turned the valley into a vector petri dish. The same mountain ranges that fed runoff into the deltas also feed casualties back in, keeping them bottled up. This has created a rolling hurricane of stampeding dead, following each other round and round the flatlands, pushed out by the urban development that follows the 5 through the middle of the valley, turned in by the foothills.
Ironically farming has actually become easier since the crash, as the few remaining farmers now have plenty of water to share. Enclaves in the valley enjoy an 8 month growing season, though they may be trapped inside for weeks by unseasonable dead fronts.
Escape from LA – Or not
LA was 90 square miles of concrete with insane congestion problems before the Crash happened, and gridlock traffic is a bad place to be when vectors start cutting lanes. Los Angelinos had about half the national survival rate according to conservative guesses, and a 10th by more pessimistic ones.
The Joys of Disparate Impact: In an odd twist ghettoized neighborhoods had some architectural advantages during the crash. Many of them were buffered from other populations by warehouses, industrial zones, and highways, and barred windows and security doors work equally well against Causalities as burglars, though not so much against vectors. Much as with schools, prisons and barracks, housing projects are surprisingly defensible.
I'm gonna be honest and say this feels somewhat patronizing and uncomfortable to write.
Oil!
At the bottom of the Central Valley, just north of Los Angeles over the Tehachapi Mountains lie some of the biggest oil fields in the US. While the coalition of enclaves in the area don't have access to the all the current technologies, they still manage to produce and refine enough oil to keep suped up dune buggies and muscle cars chasing each other around the Mojave for the next millennia.
The Run: But you can't eat oil, so all of that black gold has to go somewhere. Some of it is sold to independent traders who port it back up over the mountains into the great basin, but along the 5, its distributed through a process known as The Run. A single tanker is too tempting a target to let out on its own, and a convoy that stops to haggle is going to pull in too much of the teaming dead to ever get started again. So oil is delivered Santa Claus style, all in one go. Customers buy tankersfull in exchange for crypto and goods to be delivered at a later date, the convoy loads up every last semi it's managed to get its hands onto, along with a horde of escorts, including tanks looted from Camp Pendleton lashed to flatbeds, and hordes of dirt bike riders ramping up and down their own converted flatbeds to change shifts, repair and refuel. Then its a straight shot to Seattle; No stops, no breaks. At an average of 50 miles an hour this takes about a full day. Fuel is dropped off at predetermined exits, at which point it is the customers job to pick it up before the following horde swamps the area.
Once the convoy hits Seattle everything is loaded onto barges, and gradually shipped back down to the port of LA by the helpful Pacific current.
Bay Area – Bay of Pigs
The American Pacific Fleet still largely operates from the Pearl Harbor Naval base on the casualty-free, and now largely foliage-free, island of Oahu. Their duties and forces are much declined, but include trying to keep Kumatakok combatants off of mainland, and avoiding the psychotically vengeful Canadian Navy. However a large chunk of the force was commandeered by the DHQS and used to reclaim portions of the Bay Area, generally by bombarding a hill until nothing stood on it, then airlifting pre-fabbed fortifications into place and building from there. The various ships still wait off the coast, ready to lend support to the settlement
San Francisco is now the DHQS foothold on the West coast. For now it's their only foothold, as any DHQS force that leaves artillery support range is generally set upon by one of the many rebel military groups left behind by the Recession, most of whom were never noticed to evacuate.
The Boring Part With No-one In
I'm from and currently live in Far Northern California, right at the very tip of the Central Valley, also known as either Jefferson State or southern Cascadia, depending on your preferred secessionist movement. Because of that I have a personal bias against instituting sweeping general fates, and want each little bit of my home area to be a special snowflake.
Also most of the counties up here have the same population density as North Dakota, so it's a great place to avoid Casualties. There's not that much interesting stuff up here, so I just came up with some general ideas for enclaves based on whats going on. We have
Wood - Lumber mills are not a bad place to start an enclave. They're generally fenced in, have plenty of raw building material in addition to the tools too make more. They also often have their own machine shops, and historical ones may still have worker dorms.
Weed – Humboldt and Trinity counties are the home of backwoods deisel dope. These isolated, heavily armed, agricultural businesses are pretty much a Enclave starter kit.
Water – There are over a dozen hydro-electric dams in Northern California. While the engineers may not have survived, someone on Ubiq must know how to keep these things up and working, right?
During my research I also came across the fun fact that Arizona has 4 different massive aircraft graveyards, so it wouldn't be that far of a jump to have a ton of aerolights and homemade bi-planes. I realize this is not particularly economic horror-y, but man is it sweet to have sky pirates make sense in your setting. You know where they can get gas from.
So it's not all set up to use as enclaves and such, but I hope you guys like these ideas and can find something for your own games.
Anyway, since a big part of the fun of this game seems to be using your locale for setting, I've been thinking about California a lot. Here's what I came up with. Short version: population density maps are basically dead weather forecasts. https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/maps/thematic.html
Central Valley – Casualty Alley.
The Central Valley was the agricultural heart of California. Now it is the states necrotic sore. Though not as densely populated as the bay or the southern sprawl, average population ranges from 250-5000 people per square mile. This, combined with the difficulty of actually leaving the valley, with limited highways through winding mountain passes being the only exit – at least until they were closed down by wrecks and aggressive locals – turned the valley into a vector petri dish. The same mountain ranges that fed runoff into the deltas also feed casualties back in, keeping them bottled up. This has created a rolling hurricane of stampeding dead, following each other round and round the flatlands, pushed out by the urban development that follows the 5 through the middle of the valley, turned in by the foothills.
Ironically farming has actually become easier since the crash, as the few remaining farmers now have plenty of water to share. Enclaves in the valley enjoy an 8 month growing season, though they may be trapped inside for weeks by unseasonable dead fronts.
Escape from LA – Or not
LA was 90 square miles of concrete with insane congestion problems before the Crash happened, and gridlock traffic is a bad place to be when vectors start cutting lanes. Los Angelinos had about half the national survival rate according to conservative guesses, and a 10th by more pessimistic ones.
The Joys of Disparate Impact: In an odd twist ghettoized neighborhoods had some architectural advantages during the crash. Many of them were buffered from other populations by warehouses, industrial zones, and highways, and barred windows and security doors work equally well against Causalities as burglars, though not so much against vectors. Much as with schools, prisons and barracks, housing projects are surprisingly defensible.
I'm gonna be honest and say this feels somewhat patronizing and uncomfortable to write.
Oil!
At the bottom of the Central Valley, just north of Los Angeles over the Tehachapi Mountains lie some of the biggest oil fields in the US. While the coalition of enclaves in the area don't have access to the all the current technologies, they still manage to produce and refine enough oil to keep suped up dune buggies and muscle cars chasing each other around the Mojave for the next millennia.
The Run: But you can't eat oil, so all of that black gold has to go somewhere. Some of it is sold to independent traders who port it back up over the mountains into the great basin, but along the 5, its distributed through a process known as The Run. A single tanker is too tempting a target to let out on its own, and a convoy that stops to haggle is going to pull in too much of the teaming dead to ever get started again. So oil is delivered Santa Claus style, all in one go. Customers buy tankersfull in exchange for crypto and goods to be delivered at a later date, the convoy loads up every last semi it's managed to get its hands onto, along with a horde of escorts, including tanks looted from Camp Pendleton lashed to flatbeds, and hordes of dirt bike riders ramping up and down their own converted flatbeds to change shifts, repair and refuel. Then its a straight shot to Seattle; No stops, no breaks. At an average of 50 miles an hour this takes about a full day. Fuel is dropped off at predetermined exits, at which point it is the customers job to pick it up before the following horde swamps the area.
Once the convoy hits Seattle everything is loaded onto barges, and gradually shipped back down to the port of LA by the helpful Pacific current.
Bay Area – Bay of Pigs
The American Pacific Fleet still largely operates from the Pearl Harbor Naval base on the casualty-free, and now largely foliage-free, island of Oahu. Their duties and forces are much declined, but include trying to keep Kumatakok combatants off of mainland, and avoiding the psychotically vengeful Canadian Navy. However a large chunk of the force was commandeered by the DHQS and used to reclaim portions of the Bay Area, generally by bombarding a hill until nothing stood on it, then airlifting pre-fabbed fortifications into place and building from there. The various ships still wait off the coast, ready to lend support to the settlement
San Francisco is now the DHQS foothold on the West coast. For now it's their only foothold, as any DHQS force that leaves artillery support range is generally set upon by one of the many rebel military groups left behind by the Recession, most of whom were never noticed to evacuate.
The Boring Part With No-one In
I'm from and currently live in Far Northern California, right at the very tip of the Central Valley, also known as either Jefferson State or southern Cascadia, depending on your preferred secessionist movement. Because of that I have a personal bias against instituting sweeping general fates, and want each little bit of my home area to be a special snowflake.
Also most of the counties up here have the same population density as North Dakota, so it's a great place to avoid Casualties. There's not that much interesting stuff up here, so I just came up with some general ideas for enclaves based on whats going on. We have
Wood - Lumber mills are not a bad place to start an enclave. They're generally fenced in, have plenty of raw building material in addition to the tools too make more. They also often have their own machine shops, and historical ones may still have worker dorms.
Weed – Humboldt and Trinity counties are the home of backwoods deisel dope. These isolated, heavily armed, agricultural businesses are pretty much a Enclave starter kit.
Water – There are over a dozen hydro-electric dams in Northern California. While the engineers may not have survived, someone on Ubiq must know how to keep these things up and working, right?
During my research I also came across the fun fact that Arizona has 4 different massive aircraft graveyards, so it wouldn't be that far of a jump to have a ton of aerolights and homemade bi-planes. I realize this is not particularly economic horror-y, but man is it sweet to have sky pirates make sense in your setting. You know where they can get gas from.
So it's not all set up to use as enclaves and such, but I hope you guys like these ideas and can find something for your own games.
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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Red Markets Alpha Playtest
« on: August 26, 2015, 03:53:33 PM »
Same as KillItWithFire, this finally got me to make a post. I'd love to read the beta, and, if my group isn't too flaky, give it a run and record it.
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