[Play Report] Introduction to Red Markets & Year in Red campaign

 

Around 2017-2018 I ran a campaign of Red Markets, the economic horror game with zombies by Caleb Stokes of the RPPR fame. The game had a lot of ideas I found (and still find) interesting, and while I had some problems with the system, I also had a lot of fun with the campaign.

So far I’ve never picked up the system again, but now and again I spot it in my bookshelf and spend a while daydreaming about a potential second campaign.

Back when I was running the game, I used to write sort play summaries for the game’s Facebook group. Now I hear there’s a second edition on it’s way, so I’ll share these reports here with occasional commentary from the present me.

So, what is Red Markets?

Red Markets is a game of economic horror: it’s set in the near-future, there has been a (partial) zombie apocalypse - and your PC still has rent to pay.

In the publisher’s own words:

In Red Markets, characters risk their lives trading between the massive quarantine zones containing a zombie outbreak and the remains of civilization. They are Takers: mercenary entrepreneurs unwilling to accept their abandonment. Bound together into competing crews, each seeks to profit from mankind’s near-extinction before it claims them. They must hustle, scheme, and scam as hard as they fight if they hope to survive the competing factions and undead hordes the GM throws at them.
Takers that are quick, clever, or brutal enough might live to see retirement in a safe zone, but many discover too late that the cycle of poverty proves harder to escape than the hordes of undead.
Red Markets uses the traditional zombie genre to tell a story about surviving on the wrong end of the economy. It’s cut-throat capitalism with its knife on your neck. 

Source: Hebanon Games

Red Markets has been on my mind recently, because I have a growing interest in games with overt political messages. This game wants to be critical of modern Capitalism, but ultimately cannot imagine or offer an alternative to it. (The game actually supports the modern lie of lie of “anyone can make it big if they work hard enough”!) 

I have more on this thought, but I’ll save it for a later post.

The Year in Red Campaign

Back in 2017 I was finishing my thesis and actually had time to run more than one game simultaneously.

The campaign’s premise was simple: the Takers (game’s term for the PC party) learn that their community faces disaster after twelve months. They have one year to find the means and funds to abandon ship, hopefully to a better life than what they had now.

Each month the PC’s took on one Job and after maximum of twelve jobs they would either retire or perish with their enclave.

Clear end point both kept the Campaign’s scope from growing too big (as we were generally able to complete each Job within one session) and encouraged my players to balance out saving their money and using it to improve their PC’s.

I’ll share more in later posts, now lets move on to…

Session Zero

Yesterday we had the Session 0 of my campaign, Year in Red. We began with creating the Enclave our PC’s lived in and worked from: my players wanted to set their enclave somewhere urban, yet remote, and eventually we settled on a fortified casino in Las Vegas. Apparently the enclave is made up from people too stubborn to leave the Mojave Desert. (Yeah, I'm gonna take a lot of inspiration from Fallout: New Vegas.)

So far the enclave has managed to survive by trading high-grade alcohol and other luxuries looted from Sin City to other enclaves, but by the game's beginning the supply is about to run dry: the Takers reckon' their home has about a year before it collapses.

We are going to play for 12 sessions, each session being one month. The Taker's need to meet their retirement goals, or they will fall with their enclave.

So far our group has

• A doctor with Crusader sympathies. He actually made it to Recession, but jumped fence so he could study the Blight better. And be with his mostly-Latent family.
• An ex-scout soldier that still upholds the martial law. Secretly a Steward.
• A short-tempered Latent mostly here to kill Casualties.

(Commentary from 2025: Blight is the game’s name for the zombie virus, with Casualties referring to traditional slow zombies and Latents being infected people who were somehow able to retain their minds. Recession means the remaining US Government, while Stewards are its undercover agents. Crusaders are a group of medical professionals obsessed with studying the virus.)
Plus one player was absent, so he'll roll his character later.

We chose the Bust mode, but without most of the optional Bust-rules. (C2025: Meaning the more action-y game mode vs. Lethal and gritty.) As our group is mostly new to Red Markets, we'll play a session or two without No Budget, No Buy before giving it a try - we're intrigued by it, but we need to get a better feel for the system.