red Markets First Printing July 2017 by Hebanon Games in cooperation with Asian Pacific Offset Inc. Contact us at [email protected] via redmarketsrpg.com, or search your favorite social network for “Red Markets” or “Hebanon Games.” Red Markets is the intellectual property of Hebanon Games and sole proprietor Caleb Stokes. Game Design: Caleb Stokes Writing: Caleb Stokes, Laura Briskin-Limehouse, Ross Payton Editing: Laura Briskin-Limehouse Art Direction: Caleb Stokes Cover Art: Kim Van Deun Back Cover Art: LuigiStudio Interior Art: Kim Van Deun, Patsy McDowell, James Beatham, Christopher Cirillo, Michael Plondaya, Darrell Claunch, Ean Moody, Przemek Lech Graphic Design: Kathryn Carty, Kyle Carty Special Thanks: Role-playing Public Radio, Technical Difficulties, Thrilling Intent, Faust Kells, Tom Church, David Dobelman, Aaron Carston, Shaun Greenwald, Nicolas Marjanovic, Adam Briskin-Limehouse, 1148 Kickstarter backers, and Sara Hann Creative Commons License; Some Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org. This means is that you are free to copy, share, and remix the text and artwork within this book under the following conditions: 1) you do so only for noncommercial purposes; 2) you attribute Hebanon Games; 3) you license any derivatives under the same license. table of contents IntroductIon 5 HIstory of the Crash 10 The (Un)death of History 11 The Failed State 13 The Crash 32 Reaction and Policy 56 Retreat Becomes Recession 68 Writing Off the Loss 82 Rise of the Carrion Economy 87 The Taker’s Role 110 The Loss 116 A Guide 117 Lost Places 120 Lost People 137 Lost Things 157 PlayIng The Market 171 Profit System 172 Character Creation 181 Upkeep: Paying the Bills 223 Materialism: Bounty, Gear, and Vehicles 232 Combat 272 Blight: Casualties and Vectors 293 Humanity 310 Negotiation 320 RunnIng The Market 351 Shades of Red 352 Job Creator 358 Long-term Investments 406 MBA Rules 424 Loss Encounters 446 AppendIx 485 4 5 the wrong end of the economy. It’s about characters deciding how much they’re willing to pay for sanity, love, freedom, and other things that should be free. It’s about struggling with cutthroat capitalism when its knife is on your neck. What Is an Rpg? Google it. Look, we’re not trying to turn you off here. If Red Markets is your first RPG, everyone who worked on this book is genuinely flattered. Welcome! But you can either read this whole book to get the gist of it, or check online for literally thousands of faster explanations. You can listen to dozens of Red Markets games on podcasts like Role-playing Public Radio, One- Shot, or Technical Difficulties. Or ask fans of the game directly at redmarketsrpg.com or any of our social media sites. The book is already this goddamn long and we’d love to make it longer, so let’s not waste any more space pretending the internet doesn’t exist. Furthermore, Red Markets is basically a poverty simulator that uses zombies to keep What Is Red Markets? its theme from getting too real. We really appreciate people playing the game (and their Red Markets is a tabletop RPG about money), but there are sunnier, happier games economic horror. with which to tour the magical land of RPGs. In Red Markets, characters risk their lives We understand that books are products, trading between the massive quarantine products are meant to be sold, and this zones containing a zombie outbreak and maybe isn’t the best way to do that. But the the remains of civilization. They are Takers: purpose of consuming this particular product mercenary entrepreneurs unwilling to accept is to create a unique story-telling experience their abandonment. Bound together into with your friends: an experience that can’t competing crews, each seeks to profit from be commoditized, co-opted, or cheapened. mankind’s near-extinction before it claims Creating something that special is going to them. They must hustle, scheme, and scam as require some work out of you. hard as they fight if they hope to survive the It starts here. competing factions and undead hordes the Market throws at them. Takers that are quick, How To Use ThIs Book clever, or brutal enough might live to see retirement in a safe zone, but many discover The book is split into six sections. too late that the cycle of poverty proves harder The Introduction, which you’re reading to escape than the hordes of undead. now, gives the basic gist of the game, the Red Markets uses the traditional zombie book’s content, and a glossary of terms useful genre to tell a story about surviving on for understanding the setting and rules. 6 History of the Crash is a setting chapter Charges: an expendable resource that dealing with the world before the Crash, how abstractly measures a piece of gear’s the Blight came to ravage mankind, and the remaining usefulness. Charges can be spent dystopian Carrion Economy that resulted, to buy-a-roll or to provide a bonus. trapping the players’ characters to fend for Check: rolling the dice to determine the themselves in a hell known as the Loss. success or failure of a character’s actions. The Loss details the various places, people, Default: checking a skill with a rating of zero and things that Takers may run across as they is called defaulting. It is an optional rule. The work. The wasteland is a new world with new Market can veto any and all default checks. rules. It can make people rich, but it mostly Dependents: non-player characters in the makes them miserable, insane, or dead. Taker’s life that must be supported financially Playing the Market explains the rules of and heal Humanity when maintained. They the game. It covers how the Profit System’s are portrayed in the game by the Market or dice mechanic works. It explains how to another player. write characters, equip them, and have Gassed: a character that is out of rations is them fight for their lives. It also details the considered gassed and may not take rigorous social/financial combat system known as physical action until recovered. Negotiation, which Takers must use if they Gear: objects or tools that make certain hope to keep their crew and families alive. actions possible and/or easier to achieve. Running the Market contains tools for Haul: the measure of how much a character people hosting games for their friends. In can carry. Each unit of Haul represents a addition to general advice, it has procedures unit of supply the Taker can carry, unless the for collaboratively building settings, Market dictates otherwise. adventures, and entire campaigns, as well as Market: the person who runs the game and pre-built encounters. There are also a variety writes the story of each job; the game-master. of alternate rules to keep the game interesting Responsible for playing NPCs in the story, for advanced players. determining encounters, and setting prices. Finally, the Appendix has copies of all the Market Forces: any enemy NPC intent on papers needed to track a game session and an harming the player characters. In combat, the index for speedy reference. Game materials Market declares what actions the forces are ready for download and print can also be taking but does not roll for them. found at redmarketsrpg.com. Non-player Characters (NPCs): secondary characters played by the Market or Game TermInology temporarily by another player at the table. One-and-Done: some skill checks cannot be Here are the basic terms used in the Profit attempted more than once. One-and-Done System and what they mean. rolls are mostly social or mental actions. Failed one-and-done rolls can be made “Buy-a-roll”: Some actions are only possible successful if the player petitions the Market to with the use of gear and spent resources. succeed at cost. Buying a roll means spending a charge to Player Characters (PCs): the protagonist allow a skill check. characters controlled by players at the table. Black: the die that represents the player’s In Red Markets, all PCs are Takers. chance of success. This can be modified by Potential: natural aptitudes that can only skills and charges spent on gear. be improved through rigorous, disciplined Boom: a rules variant that makes the game practice. Potentials serve as the limit of skills. easier and more action-packed. Red: the die that represents the variable Bust: a rules variant that makes the game difficulty of performing an action. more challenging and grim. 7 References: professional contacts in the Bounty: the currency between the Loss setting with access to goods, services, and and the Recession. Bounty is provided by expertise. References perform favors for the DHQS for the retrieval of identity and Takers but must be paid back with bounty or property documentation dating before the other favors. These non-player characters are Crash. Bounty is rewarded on delivery, based played by the Market or another player. on the average value of a pre-Crash adult’s Refresh: the term used for replacing spent total property and financial holdings. charges on a single piece of gear. Carrion Economy: generalized term for the Skills: training and practice in performing a world economy. While new goods and services specific task. A Taker’s skill cannot exceed the are still in production, worldwide trade is Potential associated with it. largely focused on looting the corpse of the Succeed at Cost: If a player fails a one-and- Loss to recover value and infrastructure. done roll and doesn’t want to spend Will, they Casualty: A zombie; a cadaver puppeted by can choose to succeed at cost. The cost of the parasitic nervous system characteristic of success is determined by the Market, but it “cold” Blight. The term hails from bloodless, often involves tapping a Reference or learning sanitized news reports during the early days the truth through a painful mistake. of the Crash used to prevent panic, now used Upkeep: the cost, in bounty, it takes to stay ironically by Takers. “Taking casualties” can alive, retain shelter, and keep tools in working now mean killing zombies for money or dying order between sessions. in the process. Citizen: pejorative term for a person SettIng TermInology living safely in the Recession or one of its Below you’ll find some jargon used to settlements. describe the world of Red Markets. Crash: the initial emergence of the Blight and the resulting panic, chaos, and death. Aberrant: blanket term for a number of Crew: the collective noun form of Takers. casualty sub-types with special abilities. Crews assemble to bid on jobs and brand Bait: nickname for a citizen of the Recession their services. that left for financial, political, or religious DHQS: the Department of Homeland reasons to live out in the Loss. Quarantine and Stewardship, the new agency Believers: collective term for the religious in charge of maintaining the United State’s sects and philosophies that sprang up after borders and eventually reclaiming the Loss. the Crash. Each cult has unique beliefs They are responsible for the bounty system that can range from benignly comforting to and the inept enforcement of the underground terrifyingly fanatical. economy resulting from it. Blight: the mysterious infection responsible Enclaves: pockets of surviving civilization not for the Crash and all its terrors, so called officially recognized by any of the surviving due to its anomalous medical classification. state powers, but large enough to have some Like its victims, Blight has two stages: living economic impact. Allowed to survive because and undead. Living Blight is the single most they draw casualties away from the borders infectious disease ever encountered by of safe zones or maintain vital infrastructure mankind. It creates homicidal Vectors in a points. matter of minutes, and its exponential growth Free Parking: derogatory term for the rate can bring conversion time down to shantytowns that developed in the wake of seconds. After a victim succumbs, the Blight the evacuation, so named because of the pathology changes completely, becoming numerous derelict cars that make up their more fungal/parasitic and building unearthly dwellings. black sinews that puppet dead flesh and slow cadaver decay. 8 Homo Sacer: Latin for “the accursed man,” retreat behind natural borders and the the term refers to a person banned from resulting safe zones. If someone is “from civilized society and not afforded protection the Recession,” they live in a safe zone under the law. Anyone outside the Recession’s marked by geographical fortification and borders without expressed federal consent is run by a surviving national government. considered Homo Sacer. Early government communications used this Immune: a rare person that, for reasons term exclusively to refer to symptoms of the unknown, is completely immune to Blight Crash because everything except economic infection. They are subject to “conscription news was being censored to avoid panic. It into medical service” (read: kidnapping, stuck due to its ironic inadequacy after the medical torture, and bone marrow harvesting) American government abandoned many of its in the Recession and its settlements, in order citizens and “receded” to the East coast. to produce Suppressin K-7864 from their The Red Markets: the underground economy bone marrow. Takers and certain enclaves exploiting the Loss as a resource and trading often attempt to kidnap the Immune for a between enclaves and the Recession. The sizable reward. market is “red” because it is not legal, but as Latent: a carrier of the Blight that somehow nearly everyone participating is considered remains free of cannibalistic urges. It occurs legally dead already, the trade isn’t technically when the virus infects a host but transfers too illegal either. quickly into its undead state. Necrotic Blight Supressin K-7864: a drug cocktail derived sinews wind painfully through the victim’s from the bone marrow of an Immune tissues (making Latents instantly identifiable), human, extremely powerful antibiotics, and but the dead strain cannot affect living brain dangerously caustic antiseptics. Though it tissue. Latency can be natural or achieved cannot kill infection, injection within a few by injecting Supressin K-7864 shortly after minutes after a bite can cause the Blight to infection. Those infected by a Latent become enter its dormant state and reduce a Vector Vectors as if bitten by a casualty, as the Blight into a Latent human. Supressin is the single reanimates itself without the intervention most valuable substance in the Loss. of drugs. Due to this danger, enclaves, T-minus Never: slang for the day of settlements, and nations often shoot Latents reclamation, generalized to mean false hope on sight or detain them in isolated camps. or foolish wishes. Derives from the fact that LifeLines: the secured forum launched by DHQS has claimed reclamation would begin Gnat to coordinate evacuation and survival in 20 years from the date of announcement... for civilians during the Crash. It’s now an for five years running. invite-only community for Takers and other Takers: name for the outcasts, smugglers, inhabitants of the Loss. and survivors that work the Red Markets. The Loss: as in “written off as a Loss.” Simultaneously references “undertakers” and Everything outside a safe zone surrendered to a reputation for theft. the dead and the home of the Red Markets for Ubiq: massive internet start-up responsible five years. for the free global wi-fi network exploited Lost: anybody left behind as the remainder of by the Moths and the only reliable from of civilization pulled back to the Recession. communication the global economy can The Moths: the world’s largest Taker crew, rely on. Ubiq servers both enabled and made up of the survivors of the Operation sabotaged the Recession by providing a stable Utility mutiny and former Ubiq employees. communications network during the Crash. The Moths are based out of the Ubiq campus Vector: a recently infected human unhindered in the Colorado Mountains. by decay or rigor mortis. They are fast, The Recession: the term for humanity’s infectious, and deadly. 9 hIstory OF THE CRASH 10