Author Topic: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.  (Read 118101 times)

wilzuma

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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #60 on: April 18, 2016, 11:12:12 PM »
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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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #61 on: April 19, 2016, 12:12:45 AM »
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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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #62 on: April 19, 2016, 04:07:34 AM »
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

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.
« Last Edit: April 19, 2016, 04:11:06 AM by Twisting H »

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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #63 on: April 19, 2016, 04:12:52 AM »
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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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #64 on: April 24, 2016, 05:13:13 AM »
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?
« Last Edit: April 24, 2016, 05:14:46 AM by Gorkamorka »
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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #65 on: April 24, 2016, 12:05:24 PM »
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.
« Last Edit: April 24, 2016, 12:12:19 PM by SynapticError »
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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #66 on: April 24, 2016, 02:37:11 PM »
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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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #67 on: April 24, 2016, 02:58:32 PM »
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.
« Last Edit: April 24, 2016, 03:04:12 PM by Gorkamorka »
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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #68 on: April 24, 2016, 04:36:00 PM »
"Realdolls Over The Mountan" was the name of my high school ska band.

Nobody came to our shows. :(

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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #69 on: April 26, 2016, 05:43:13 AM »
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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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #70 on: April 26, 2016, 05:21:58 PM »
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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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #71 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.
« Last Edit: May 07, 2016, 05:10:27 PM by RadioactiveBeer »

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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #72 on: May 07, 2016, 08:32:12 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.
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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #73 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".
« Last Edit: May 10, 2016, 10:38:20 PM by RadioactiveBeer »

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Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.
« Reply #74 on: May 11, 2016, 10:28:21 AM »
Oh man I just realised what we would call Red Market zombies in the UK.

"Blighters".

NICE
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