Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

[Redroverone]

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?

[Adam_Autist]

 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.

[The Lost Carol]

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.

[RadioactiveBeer]

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?"

[Gorkamorka]

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...

[Twisting H]

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/

Fallout London Burning ideas: 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. 

---

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.

[Adam_Autist]

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.

[Moto42]

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'.

[trinite]

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.

[RadioactiveBeer]

Something else for the Red Markets UK files, a recent report 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.

[Adam_Autist]

Would be like those urban legends of big cats on the moors but for real.

[SynapticError]

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. 

[Claive]

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.

[RadioactiveBeer]

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.



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.

[Redroverone]

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?