I've had a busy week have another chapter of my Red Markets retrospective. This time I'm trying a different way to write my thoughts as end notes.
Please let me know if you like it better than the other way of doing it!
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Second session in our Year in Red campaign. This time the crew decided to invest into the negotiations.*
Instead of looking for more jobs, they researched and manipulated the few they knew about.
And when they negotiated with Max Security, Blue Diamond enclave's head of security, they aced it and got Expenses covered.
Max was worried about raiders attacking from Enterprise area. A merchant caravan had recently gone missing, most likely to raiders, so Max hires the crew to take them out. And recover the supply, if convenient.
They locate the caravan easily enough and find it looted. There are two sets of tracks: a bigger group moving north and a lone, bleeding person moving south. They split with our ex-soldier and hunter going to scout the raider camp and the latent, fenceman and doctor going to find the survivor.
Survivor had fled a mob of C's to a warehouse, where the rescue party soon gets trapped after they accidentally lure another mob in. They soon realise that only the latent has any firearms, so they are outnumbered and almost useless against the dead. Fenceman tries to buy the doctor some time to open another door, but the doctor does not have skills to pick nor force it open. In the end, the latent manages to save the day.
Meanwhile our ex-soldier uses his steward contacts to hack a call to the raiders' laptop. He's noticed that one of their prisoners is about to go Vector and uses it as a leverage to intimidate the raiders. His banter buys the hunter enough time to sneak in. The Vet snipes the raider leader (who had been guarding the roof) and the hunter intimidates the rest into submission. Raider's are taken as prisoners so they can be executed properly at the enclave.
This time they were well compensated for the job well done and they opened Max Security's job line. This Job went very well for them, but they did generate some bad blood with a rival Crew that might come bite them in the back soon.
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Notes from 2025:
* Negotiations are an interesting part of Red Markets: Job Rewards are not set, instead they're determined by a minigame, where the PC Negotiator (helped by other PC's) plays tug-o-war with an NPC. In theory I really like the idea: it represents the reality of current-day freelancer market (well, the time RM came out. Currently, at least where I live, most freelancers have very little space to negotiate their prices). The Negotiation scenes were also very entertaining in RPPR's Brutalists campaign, so I looked forward to running them.
In practise, at least in my game, they weren't as well received. My players saw them as a mandatory road bump before the actual fun part: the Job. I also felt that the GM's toolbox didn't have much variety: in our campaign, our players fumbled the first negotiation, then played maybe one or two "as intended" before they cracked the code and knew how to get the best possible result every time.
Apparently others have shared my experience and the coming 2nd edition is trying something else.
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