Red Markets

Red Markets

by Caleb Stokes

When the tired joke of the zombie apocalypse clawed its way out of our subconscious and into terrifying reality, our cultural obsession killed as many as it saved. After the chaos finally subsided, the apocalypse ended up unevenly distributed...just like everything else.

Humanity survived by leaving a part of itself behind. The world is now divided: haves and have-nots, living and dead, The Recession and The Loss.

In Red Markets, characters play Takers: mercenary entrepreneurs unwilling to accept their abandonment and forced to risk their lives trading between the quarantined zones and the remains of civilization. The game uses the traditional zombie narrative as a tool to tell an all-too-real story of life on the wrong end of capitalism.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Horror

496 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2017

Reviews

[Taddow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: Let me start out by saying that I backed the Kickstarter of this project. I have been a longtime fan of the crew of Role-Playing Public Radio (RPPR) and Caleb Stokes’ scenarios were some of the best (so good that I converted some of them so that I could run them in my Dark Heresy gaming group- I still hear them talk about Lover in the Ice).

When I heard that Caleb was working on a zombie apocalypse-themed RPG setting (and after hearing some of the actual plays on RPPR) I was definitely interested. I have been looking to run a zombie apocalypse RPG after I retire my Dark Heresy game (which has been going on for nearly a decade now and counting) and didn’t really like the Dead Reign, All Flesh Must Be Eaten and End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse systems. I have finally finished reading Red Markets cover to cover and I think this is the system I’m going to use.

Caleb spins a great story (over a 100+ pages) of how the zombie apocalypse happens in the near future. I found the story to be entertaining and more plausible (as much as a zombie apocalypse can be) than other zombie apocalypse setting explanations. Some critics have pointed out that the book seems left-leaning in its writing (which the author has acknowledged) but I’m interested in using the book as a RPG game system/setting and not as a political reference, so I’m not put off by this.

Players make characters called Takers, which are people trapped in the dangerous wasteland of the zombie-infested “Loss” seeking escape to the still-government-controlled “Recession” (or other desired retirement plan). In order to reach their goal, Takers form a crew that takes on jobs to earn “Bounty” (the new currency). Characters can negotiate for jobs or try to find “Scores” to make profit on. In campaign play, characters must save Bounty to reach their goal, while balancing life and work expenses (new equipment and the upkeep of old, advancing their skills and potential, and other misc. expenses). Characters also have a Humanity tracker, which basically tracks three different parts of their sanity and its possible for a character to never make retirement and become unplayable due to mental instability.

I’m not going into an in-depth review of the game system (you can find a review on that in other forums or, better yet, listen to some of the numerous actual plays out there on RPPR and other sites) but I will say the system is different than those used in traditional RPGs. Basically players roll a black and a red D10. The black (and it’s modifiers from the player’s character in a skill) is compared to the Red result (the Market or opposition) and if the black result is greater the player succeeds (the Markets wins ties). There are also critical successes and failures (determined by even or odd ties) that skill points cannot modify but players can use a character’s limited amount of Will points to manipulate.

The game play, with the dice rolls and their success or failure, encourages role-playing the results and this might discourage gamers who are not into this. There are numerous ways that role-playing is important to the game- Vignettes with Dependents (to heal Humanity), Interludes between characters on the job, and Negotiations (and the various scams to assist in negotiations) offer ample opportunities to role-play (some of which have results based on the die rolls).

There is combat of course (this is the zombie apocalypse) but I feel that the combat rules are more abstract when compared to other games (such as Dark Heresy and Dungeons & Dragons 4th and 5th editions). There are actions and reactions, loosely interpreted ranges but combat is not as exact as some of the grid-based systems that some players enjoy (I do think the rules are adequate enough for players to come up with a grid-based combat system if they prefer that method).

Overall, I like the game system and the main theme, characters trying to survive and escape a very harsh world where fighting and killing is not the sole path to success. Surely killing zombies, raiders and corrupt government agents will help a Taker survive but without proper budgeting of resources, negotiating good pay for jobs and some luck, the Loss will eventually claim the characters.

[Steven Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a fan of the zombie subgenre, and tabletop role-playing games has been an interest of mine for a long time. I first learned about Red Markets while it was still in development when Caleb Stokes was recording about the design process on podcasts. I became fascinated by the entire process and every step along the way it felt like he was going after subjects that I found interesting to explore in a game within this genre. When Red Markets went to Kickstarter I gladly backed it.

I have read the entire book cover-to-cover, run it as the GM (or Market), and played it as a player. I think this is a remarkable game and system. When I play other games I often find myself thinking about elements of Red Markets that I'd like to use or import.

I could go on and on about what I love about Red Markets, but I'll do my best to be succinct.

First, the backstory, setting material and game material is excellent. The section explaining the backstory could be entirely left out by people who just want to play, but the content inside is enriching and brings a lot to setting the overall tone and logic of the world of Red Markets. At the same time the world is not constraining, not really. Red Markets can be fairly easily adapted into other settings or contexts.

Second, the mechanics are very simple and create really great stakes for the players and GM. The profit system involves two D-10 dice. You roll them, add your modifiers and compare the numbers. It's simple and doesn't require a lot of work to figure out how something is going to resolve.

Third, the game balance and sharing for storytelling and campaign creation. The book lays it out that the Market, Players, and Dice share about a third each of how to tell the story. In my experience it has been a very collaborative and fun way to create a campaign. Players really buy in because they have ownership and the burden on the GM is much less. There's a lot of great things to say about NPCs and vignette scenes where players take on secondary roles. Great moments and characterization can emerge from that.

Fourth, the sort of stories that can be told in Red Markets are really amazing. Stress and trauma are very important components to the game systemically and narratively. Players can, and will, become broken husks, struggling to cope without the right care and attention. This game is not a power fantasy for big damn heroes to rule the wasteland.

Fifth, related to the above, this game is about economic horror. The tension in Red Markets just as often comes from fear of not being able to pay the bills or something breaking and you're not sure how to fix it, or a loved one getting sick than getting shot at or chased by a zombie.

I wish to be clear that Red Markets is not a grim, miserable game. My friends and I laughed to near tears playing it, had fun being silly at times, but we also were genuinely brought to tears by the emotion of some scenes, witnessed tragedy, were filled with rage, and heartbreak. I felt like nearly every person I played with came to love their characters because of the challenge and circumstances.

I love Red Markets and would highly recommend it.

[Ken Ringwald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a monster of a book. It's become the largest book on my role-playing game shelf, weighing in at nearly 500 pages in hardcover. So this is a long review of a long book. (If you just want the take-home points, scroll down to "Overall:")

Some RPG books are so long because they are jam-packed with spells, feats, and equipment for players in addition to very complex rules. Red Markets isn't one of those books. There's plenty of options for making characters unique, but it's based on their connection to the world more than skill/feat packages. In fact, the base system for Red Markets is quite simple and many of the mechanics are modular - so the game can be as complex as your group wants.

It's not pages and pages of mechanics making the book long. Instead, Red Markets is huge because it's introducing a new genre - economic horror - and the world that brings the genre into focus.

Backstory and introduction:
The first sections of the book introduce the world through in-character writing. In very brief: the zombie apocalypse started five years ago, but it's not equally distributed. The US Government decided to cut its losses and barricade off the Mississippi. Everyone West of the Mississippi was left for dead - then legally declared dead. The Eastern half of the country is ruled by an increasingly authoritarian government and is commonly called the Recession. The Western half, "written of as a loss" is called the Loss.

The thing is - and one of my favorite aspects about Red Markets - is that it challenges many of the increasingly set "rules" of zombie apocalypse stories. If you picture a zombie apocalypse movie or show, you probably picture small bands of loners moving through empty cities. Red Markets has that, but it rejects the idea that all technology will fail immediately. It rejects the idea of one gruff survivor making it on their own because they're cold enough to do what needs to be done.

Instead, Red Markets has pockets of near-future technology still working. It has people in the Loss banding together into groups called enclaves against the rest of the world. And most importantly it has the player characters, called Takers. Takers are experts at getting the things that their Enclaves or clients in the Recession want. If they're successful enough, the Takers can even buy their way into the Recession - earning a retirement away from the zombie-infested Loss.

But the Takers aren't just trying to get themselves out. Each character has at least one dependent - a child, spouse, pet, or friend that they are providing for. The Taker has to keep the dependent fed and sheltered. But in return, spending time with a loved one helps keep Takers sane in their dangerous line of work. So Takers are saving to take care of their families as well.

The dependents aren't just notes on the character sheet - they provide tangible benefits by restoring damage to the Taker's psyche. They're also played out in vignette scenes at the table that do a lot to establish the characters' home lives and flesh out the enclave where they live. These can be the most moving scenes in a session as they remind the characters why they keep venturing out into a zombie-infested wasteland.

Dependents also make character death a little more meaningful than it is in other RPGs. In other games, when a player character dies, it can be a major moment. But it can also pull that player out of the game, as they make a new character or just disengage with the story. In Red Markets, if your Taker dies, their dependent is still there. The other players have to decide whether they take care of the dependent - taking on yet another mouth to feed or not. Otherwise, the dependent may have to become a Taker themselves. Now the dependent has to undertake the hard life that the Taker tried to protect them from. It provides an immediate (but potentially emotional) source for replacement characters to fit into the game's ongoing story.

So all of that is the basis for the economic horror. The game's tagline is that "the world has ended, but the rent's still due." Civilization is barely hanging on, but your characters still have to earn - often by doing unsavory and dangerous jobs.

There's more to it, but that should serve as an overview. The writing in the introductory chapters is excellent; the narrative characters have distinct and compelling voices. I don't want to spoil it, but the book presents a stark picture of economic horror even before the zombies show up. There's a lot of it, so if you aren't as interested in the setting material right off the bat, you might want to skip to...

Mechanics:
The mechanics are the next major section of the book. As I mentioned, despite the book's size, the core mechanic is simple. You decide to do something, the GM (called the Market in this game) determines what skill applies, you decide how many charges to spend, and you roll two dice. You add the charges to the number on a black die, then see if the total is higher than a red die. If it's higher, you succeeded. If the total is lower or tied, you failed.

Of course, there's more wrinkles to it (like critical hits) but that's the core. The charges mentioned above reflect your resources - anything from bullets in a gun, to bandages in a first aid kit, to the calories from the food you've eaten. Rather than keeping track of every single bullet, band-aid, and can of beans, charges function as an abstraction.

And it works. I have played a lot of RPGs. Many of them consider extensive book-keeping necessary to evoke a sense of scarcity or planning. Red Markets collapses this resource management down to the simplest form that I've seen - and makes it more compelling in the process. Characters run out of the things they need and have to scrounge for more. They have to make due or - if they don't earn enough money - watch their precious equipment break.

It's not a power fantasy game. It's not pages of gun-porn. The more stuff you have, the more you have to pay to keep it working and the harder it becomes to ever escape the Loss. In the end your stuff owns you, too. This fits the economic theme perfectly.

It also means that every roll in the game becomes significant. At the very least, every roll puts charges on the line, and you only have so many.

The book also has some great advice on when to call for a roll versus when not to. In short, the GM should only call for a roll when there's really something at stake and when failure would be interesting.

The game also has extensive advice on putting together jobs for your players. Red Markets' take on zombies (called the Blight) is interesting and compelling. It's a constant, high-stakes mystery that drives researchers insane trying to figure it out. In game terms, you get the shambling hordes (called casualties), terrifyingly fast fresh zombies (Vectors), and one in a million freak occurrences called Aberrants.

As a microbiologist, I love that the Blight acts a little bit more like a real disease than most zombie viruses. (Okay, sure, it violates several laws of physics but most zombie diseases do.) What makes the Blight interesting is that it is not transmitted 100% of the time and it's not actually fatal in all infections. This means that a casualty bite is a secret roll, providing a lot more uncertainty and tension than the "one bite means one bullet" approach.

And when it's not fatal? Some people are Latent - infected but not turned to zombies. (There's a drug that can artificially cause this state, too.) They become immune to further infection but remain contagious to others and immediately turn to vectors upon death. So they're often discriminated against and kept separate from the rest of an enclave. Others are entirely immune to the Blight, which sounds great. But immunes are incredibly valuable for research, so they have to keep their status a secret or risk being harvested for bone marrow for the rest of their lives.

The game is also built around the narrative structure of hitting milestones on the character's path towards retirement (or their demise). I like that the end of the game is in sight (even if distant) from the beginning. Many RPGs don't have a set end state and many campaigns don't actually finish, but Red Markets is always building towards that resolution. Like the rest of the system, it fits with the theme - as the Takers must decide how much to save towards getting out versus how much to spend on staying alive right now.

This all may sound like a lot. But you can get it to the table quickly - when I ran a playtest of the game, everyone was up to speed and ready to play after about 20 minutes using pregenerated characters.

There's even tables at the end of the book, providing you with ways to quickly roll up jobs for your players and example encounters. In fact, the d100 table of encounters is tremendously fun to read and tells you a lot about the Loss. There are a lot of resources available for the game to make it easier on GMs, especially if you venture over to the game's website at http://redmarketsrpg.com/resources/ .

Red Markets also encourages collaborative enclave generation, to make sure that your players care about the community they helped create. If you just want to jump in, there's several very interesting enclaves described in the setting section, too.

If you want examples of how the whole thing works in practice, there are two Actual Play campaigns involving the game's author at Role Playing Public Radio (RPPR). There's also an RPPR series called Game Designer's Workshop that chronicles how the book went from idea to 500 page juggernaut. I found both extremely useful and entertaining, but since they are not part of the book directly, they don't affect the review score. However, if you have any doubts about how compelling economic horror might be, they are excellent resources.

As an aside: if you are just done with zombies, you could reflavor the game to work in a different setting. I think you're missing out because of how rich the setting is and how well it complements the mechanics. But the Profit system that underlies the game is elegant enough that it could be adapted to any setting or campaign where scarcity and difficult choices are the main themes. I know that there are adaptation projects online, if that's your cup of tea.

Production values:
This book is an amazing work of art. Many styles are used throughout but it feels like a unified whole. The full-color artwork ranges from propaganda posters to pictures of Takers (and casualties and aberrants) to conceptual splash pages. It's all excellent and it pulls you into the book.

The layout also deserves mention - the formatting makes it easy to find what you need. The font size is larger than many RPG books, while design and side bars are used to more clearly convey information.

The pages are heavy-weight and glossy. I have not seen better quality even from major publishers such as Wizards of the Coast or Paizo. The binding seems very solid - and it has to be, to hold the good-quality paper and thick cover.

I even love the simplicity of the spine on my shelf - like the rest of the book, no detail was overlooked and it comes together in a triumphant whole.

Overall:
I've gone on at length about the book because it really excites me, both in terms of the story and the mechanics. It is one of my favorite RPGs, alongside Delta Green and Eclipse Phase.

When running the game, I've found that the enthusiasm is infectious. My players have wanted to plan enclaves, to know more about the Blight and aberrants, and told me how this was the first game where they really cared about their equipment. Different parts of the game click with different players, but I've had an extremely strong positive response.

That said, it's not for everyone. It's not a straightforward dungeon crawl and it's not a power fantasy. Like other horror games such as Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green, characters are more likely to be battered and ground down by their adventures rather than grow stronger after each one. But they keep trying - because there's a chance that they can escape.

I'd recommend this book if you have any interest in a fresh take on zombies or if you've ever stared at bank statements with a sinking feeling in your gut, realizing the numbers aren't going your way. If you would like to abstract that feeling with a set of quick, lethal mechanics in a fascinating setting, I can't recommend Red Markets highly enough. I can't wait to take it off the shelf and run it again.

[Benjamin]

A bundle of holding purchase: the collected Red Markets, which are

* the core rulebook (~480 pages), the game of zombies and the have-nots trying to survive with less;
* Veblen Goods (an equipment book);
* and three locations (with adventures):
* Elevation (a grain elevator town, where the grain is going bad and they want to hire the PCs to get a train)
* Corbusier (a Brutalist-architected community college, still riven by a sort of town vs. gown factionalism)
* Trabajo (a fortified meat-packing plant, where they now process meat and zombies)

OK, so I gave a quick gloss on what this game is: a zombie post-apocalypse about scraping by, but I want to dig in a little deeper to try to understand what this game is doing:

A. The core rulebook is really long (almost 500 pages!) and opens with a really long in-character description of the world (over 100 pages). Why?

I mean, the world is not _that_ complex and can be summed up: there was a zombie apocalypse with both slow zombies (the dead animated by the Blight) and fast zombies (the living, infected with the Blight); the sudden rise of zombies led to large parts of the US being abandoned (this is the Loss); except of course there are enclaves of survivors out in the Loss and also the people trying to rebuild the old economy/retake the rest of the US, which requires people to be proven dead (so their property can be inherited/taken). This is where the PCs come in and is the core activity of the game: PCs take jobs killing zombies or otherwise going on adventures in the Loss to recover material, but also to make enough money so that they can retire somewhere safe. There's also a whole thing about how the internet still exists through (if I skimmed correctly) floating relays that also sometimes need to be serviced/fixed; and also some information about people who are infected but have taken a suppressant drug to keep the Blight in stasis, which drug is created from the bone marrow of people who are naturally immune.

OK, that's basically the setup: fast & slow zombies; the wilderness with its fortified towns & the safe space you can't get to; a primitive internet; infected & immune people.

So why is the first 100+ pages of this book in-character history of the world? I don't think it's an accident and I don't quite think it's a case of "well, I did all this backstory, might as well put it in my novel" that we see with a lot of fantasy novels. I think author Caleb Stokes wants to hit every beat of the history -- and from in-character -- in order to make it seem plausible. (Even if that means the character narrating the history says things like “god, I’m shit at this historian gig” (p24).) Or put another way: he wants the economic and ecological disaster to be plausible even before he introduces zombies so that they can seem plausible too.

B) Why are there 300 pages of rules?!

I did some reading up on the game, and here's a paraphrase of my favorite summation of the game: Red Markets is a game about poverty, with zombies to make it less depressing. Or to revisit the subheading, this is a game of economic horror. So, for one instance, you can get equipment that makes your life easier, but it costs to keep that equipment up and every time you use it, that may degrade that equipment. (So there's a lot of rules about upkeep.)

(Compare to the D&D fantasy of getting a sword and using it until you find a better one. Here, you not only have to pay to keep your sword sharp, but you might not find a better one.)

You not only need money to keep up your equipment (that will keep you alive on the job), you also need money to keep up your dependents. Why would you pay to keep people alive? (I mean, in a game, yeah?) Because these connections help keep your characters sane and their trauma manageable. So there's rules about the three tracks of mental damage you can take, when you take it, and how you can heal.

OK, fine, there's a lot of reasons you need money, so let's just get a job and make some money, right? Not so fast: in order to get a contract at a profitable rate, you have to go through a negotiation, which isn't just a "I roll my business + charisma against the client" -- though there is something like that too, because while one of the characters is engaged in negotiation, the other characters are digging up dirt or trying to keep the competition away to decrease the labor supply, etc. So that negotiation is its own little mini-game, essentially.

Then there's a lot of very fun random charts for random encounters, rolling up a settlement, etc.

So to recap: in addition to the RPG rules that most RPGs have (character creation & advancement; combat), this has three other systems (equipment, mental health, contract negotiation). It sounds, to me, like a real bear to keep track of, but I'm guessing in action it's actually pretty smooth, and each piece contributes to the thematics of the game. Or as the book notes: "zombies are not the antagonists" (p296), the real antagonists are other people and what they will do to ensure or preserve their surplus in the face of scarcity.

It's all... well, I find some of the choices here to be things I wouldn't have done or that don't resonate particularly with me (I do not like in-character world-building most of the time), but you can understand why every choice was made; and the thematics, unfortunately, feel very relevant. I may not play, but I've got some actual play podcasts cued up to listen to.

[Denny · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not laid out well for readability
Game begins after 100+ pages of introductory setting material.
Renames familiar concepts without referencing those concepts.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Holy shit this needs an editor.

[Mikael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very Resource-management heavy and deadly but both the system and the depressing post-apocalyptic world really grows on you.