Bacchanalian Retirement

This post takes as its inspiration the pirate lifestyle around which my Scoundrels of Tortuga RM/period piece campaign is set. The core question is this: what do you do with this setting's equivalent of the "Lost for Life" archetype? That is, someone who eschews dreams for the future, and to whom the Bartholomew Roberts quote below seems to apply perfectly:

In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labour. In [piracy], plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst is only a sour look or two at choking? No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.

— Bartholomew Roberts, quoted in Captain Charles Johnson, 

A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates (1724)

1. Debauchery as Political Protest

There's plenty of evidence for the fact that most pirates or adventurers did want to retire - at the high end, to buy a pardon and a plantation and live out the rest of their lives as Governor of Jamaica, or buy a ship of their own and give orders instead of taking them; or, more modestly, slink off back home or to the colonies under a new name and live not as a Lord but simply as someone not on the knife edge of starvation. To that, in the context of an RPG, we can add the weird dramatic goals of "pay the old witch woman to remove the curse on my sister" or "buy back the family silver, stolen by el Draque", which may not have happened all that often in real life but are certainly viable narratives for RPG characters and perfectly compatible with the RM retirement model.

However, at the same time, it's important to recognize that the 17th-19th C pirate epoch was one in which social and economic conservatism went hand in hand (see, for example, the existence of sumptuary laws); against this backdrop, some authors have found it possible to recast pirates who "just want to have fun and drink rum" as political activists - flaunting their illicit wealth, dressing ridiculously, and pissing away their plunder not just because it was fun but also as a giant middle finger to the normie world.

In this case, rum-swilling pirates do have a "retirement goal", which is to drink and carouse and overspend enough that they feel - perhaps deep down, perhaps even unconsciously - that their point has been made. At this point, the pirating lifestyle loses its allure and they retire, perhaps even to poverty, but feeling like they have had their fun and defied the finger-wagging authorities to a pleasing degree. The real question is: can they do so while foregoing rational (i.e. sober, emotionally rewarding) relationships, and before the drink kills or cripples them?

2. Drink and the Devil had Done for the Rest

Four rules obtain for the Bacchanalian Retirement Plan. Most of the time I'll be using booze as the core example, but really any kind of excessive consumption might count.

• Your first Dependent gets listed as "Bacchanalian revelry" or "Gambling buddies" or "Whores of Baltimore" or just simply "Rum-soak." It requires Bounty, provokes Vignettes, and heals Humanity just like a regular Dependent; but it never gets Needy or Strained until you make it so (see below).
• Beyond this special Dependent, any regular Dependents you have are always at least Needy. If you want to use them to remove Damnation, you need to throw in a Booty just to get their grudging attention, and they go back to Needy at the beginning of the next session even if you make their upkeep. Missing their upkeep worsens the relationship as in the regular rules. 
• Every time you have a Vignette featuring Bacchanalian Revelry, increment the Upkeep of your Thirst by 1.
• Spending Booty to directly remove Damnation gets you a freebie: every time you do so, you get an extra unit of Damnation to remove, for free.

Treat the rising costs of feeding the character's habit as an addiction, whether it is or not; in other words, a character will prioritize paying Upkeep on their Thirst before their gear or dependents.

3. Cleaning Up

Should a character decide to kick their habit mid-campaign, three things must take place:

• They have to allow their relationship with their "booze dependent" to decay to Severed. This means not only failing to pay its upkeep, but also not removing Damnation through any other means during that time.
• Once the booze relationship is Severed, the character needs to mend bridges with any other dependents (i.e., stop them being Needy)
• They take a Regret, as usual for losing a dependent.

When these three steps have been successfully completed, the character can go back to removing Damnation by paying Booty or relying on the revived Dependents in their life, if any. 

Optionally, going clean like this can become a prerequisite for characters on the Bacchanalian Retirement plan before they can actually retire.

Ships, Crews, and Plunder

The ruleset below is a work in progress, intended to complement the naval combat rules I have already written for my On the Account campaign. They're still a work in progress, but once they're complete my intention is that they will fill out all the ship-side concerns around taking, fighting, and plundering ships introduced in the naval combat rules. They're also more up to date than those rules, so any contradictions should be resolved in favor of the concepts below.

1. Ships!

If you want to go a-plundering, you're going to need a ship (even if it's a canoe) and some crew (even if it's just the player characters)

It's easy to get caught up in and intimidated by the sheer volume of nautical terminology out there in the world. For the purposes of managing this onslaught, in these rules we drill down to really just one core statistic for setting up ships, which is the number of masts they have. Mast number runs from ½ to 3, with ½ representing small oared ships with an optional mast. Everything else really derives off of that number, which is referred to below as Scale.

Here's a partial list of common ships of the overall pirating period. The categories aren't rigid (fluyts can have 1, 2, or 2 masts, "galleon" and "frigate" are sometimes used as adjectives and sometimes as kinds of boat, etc.), and terminology changes over time as well), but it's something to get you going.

Scale ½	War canoe, bark, Barca Longa, Dhow, Ship's Boat
Scale 1	Sloop, Fluyt/Fly-boat, Pinnace, Junk
Scale 2	Brig/Brigantine, Schooner
Scale 3	Frigate, Galley/Galleon, Man-o-War

Small-Scale ships are cheap to operate, but lightweight in combat and incredibly fragile. Large-Scale ships hit hard and take damage well, but are expensive to run, repair, and crew. Most Crews settle in around one-mast ships (e.g., a Jamaica sloop, Scale 1); more ambitious Crews may choose a two-masted ship (e.g., a brig or fluyt, Scale 2). This leaves Scale ½ and Scale 3 ships for Market forces or special occasions.

All other things being equal, these rules are set up to grant an advantage to a ship that is configured for fighting versus one that isn't, and a ship with more masts versus one with fewer.

Once you have the Scale of your Crew's ship, go ahead and assign it the following stats:

• Hull: 10 points x Scale, for a range of 5 to 30. Locations 1, 4, 7 in ship-to-ship combat
• Sails: 10 points x Scale, for a range of 5 to 30. Locations 2, 5, 8
• Guns: 10 points x Scale, for a range of 5 to 30. Locations 3, 6
• Crew: varies, for a range of 5-250 - see below. Location 9
• Cargo: Twice Scale, for a range of 2 to 6. Location 10

Your ship also has a couple of stats that come up when it's involved in ship-to-ship actions: pursuit, fights, and so on. These are derived from the highest skill available among the player characters. Each character can contribute their skills to up to 2 ship stats. If you have skills that are not covered by any PCs, write a default value of 2 down there. If a character is contributing a skill, they're either officially in the position listed next to the skill, or doing that person's job for some intriguing reason:

• Awareness (contributed by the Lookout or Sailing Master)
• Close Quarters (Captain or Boatswain)
• Ranged Weapons (Captain or Master Gunner)
• Profession (Gunner) (Captain or Master Gunner)
• Navigation (Captain or Quartermaster)
• Seamanship (Captain or Sailing Master)
• Leadership (Captain or Boatswain)
• Naval Stores, derived from Adaptability (Boatswain or Quartermaster)

Each of these stats begins the session 1 point lower than its actual value, which represents the back-breaking effort or expense required to keep a ship operating at full effectiveness:

• Awareness - drilling and/or providing rewards to those who spot prizes
• Close Quarters - drilling and/or buying/maintaining weapons, keeping the crew well fed
• Ranged Weapons (Captain or Master Gunner) - drilling and/or buying/maintaining weapons
• Profession (Gunner) (Master Gunner) - drilling and/or buying/maintaining weapons
• Navigation (Captain or Navigator) - drilling and/or purchasing up-to-date charts
• Seamanship (Captain or Sailing Master) - careening the ship and/or replacing worn fittings
• Leadership (Captain or Boatswain) - building relationship with the crew, cultivating persona
• Naval Stores - conducting inventory, buying new stores

Historically, most buccaneers skated by on one or more of these indices; the player characters in your game, however, may be cut from different cloth. Small crews that want to take on big targets will certainly want to pursue these eight modifiers. This means bribing or bullying the ship's crew into compliance, which requires either:

1. A roll of the skill/potential from the character in charge of that skill. If there is no character in charge of this particular ship skill, then the roll isn't possible as there's just no-one who is interested in leading the crew in their training. If the roll succeeds, the negative modifier is cleared; if it fails, it is not cleared but the company's Thirst score increases by 1 (see below), or 
2. Expenditure of 1 Booty x Scale, per skill. This can come from any combination of the Ship's Chest or the pockets of the Player Characters. This fee can be paid even after a character has tried and failed their roll, above.

Example: The Dagger is a 2-masted pirate brig (Scale 2). Getting all 8 ship skills up to maximum will take 8 Skill rolls and/or 2 Booty per ship skill (16 for all of them).

Different Uses for Cargo Space

Merchant ships, of course, use their cargo space for cargo. In fact, they tended to use whatever space is available, skimping on cannons and crew to fit more pallets and barrels below decks. To reflect this, the following equation applies:

10 crew = 4 cannons = 1 Cargo

A three-masted man-o-war configured for nothing other than war on the high seas, for example, might take the six cargo it is entitled to based on its Scale, and reallocate 5 of those to extra guns; this would give it 20 guns on top of its usual complement of 30, for a total of 50 guns. Conversely, a one-mast Bermuda sloop running cargo from island to island might give up 8 cannons and 30 crew for 2+3=5 extra Cargo, bringing its Cargo capacity to 7.

If a ship isn't using its Cargo for actual trade goods, extra passengers, or Plunder, it can allocate these slots to Naval Stores instead, each unit of which contributes a +1 to the ship's Naval Stores skill.

2. Crew!

Ships have three numbers when it comes to crew: skeleton, light, and maximum. A skeleton crew is the minimum number required to sail the ship; a light crew is the minimum required for combat effectiveness; and the maximum is just that, the total number of souls that a ship can carry.

• Skeleton crew number = Scale x 10
• Light crew number = Scale x 10, plus 2 per Gun
• Maximum crew number = Scale x 40

Everyone in a Skeleton crew must have a Seafaring skill of at least 1 to count as crew. Between this number and the Light crew number, the additional crew can be landlubbers of one form or another, but everyone still has to work. Between Light and Maximum, the additional crew can be both non-sailors and non-workers (passengers, soldiers being transported, slaves chained below decks, etc.).

Remember that a ship can sacrifice cannons and cargo space to carry additional people. A three masted ship with only two cannons and no non-human cargo could thus carry a maximum of 120+70+60=250 people on board. However, each additional increment of crew taken as Cargo temporarily decreases the ship's max Thirst by 1, to a minimum of 1. If the welfare of these additional crew is not of concern, this increment size rises to 20 additional crew per Cargo slot, and in this case, whenever the ship would increment Thirst, it loses 1d10 of these additional crew, per slot, instead. If a ship is Gassed, this number rises to 2d10 per slot.

We can therefore see that cramming hundreds of people into a ship for a long period, a la slave ships or prison hulks, is a recipe for a mutiny at least and a colossal death toll at worst. But in point of fact, slave ships sometimes carried far more than 250 people. We can model this here by suggesting that these vessels were operating on minimum crew (let's say 30 individuals) and no cannons, which gives them an additional 9 Cargo slots for a total of 9+7+6 = 22 Cargo, or around 450 slaves. This doesn't get us all the way up to the 600 slaves that these ship sometimes carried, but it's close enough to give a sense of the extreme disregard for safety and human life that packing a slave ship entailed. It's also a good way to see why, if we replace slaves with looted gold plate, the enormous Spanish treasure ships were game-changing scores for the early buccaneers. In the system we have here, such a vessel would net each officer of the ship that captured it 32 Plunder or around 320 Booty - enough to retire five times over. Señor JOLS, one might say.

3. Plunder!

"Plunder" is On the Account's scale-sensitive abstraction to cut down on the amounts of bookkeeping associated with jumping back and forth between a human scale of operations, and a ship level. In general, the takings from seizing ships and the chores of ship repair and maintenance deal in Plunder; when Plunder is cashed out, it devolves to Booty (see below).

When a prize is encountered, the Market will have rolled a Black and Red die combo to determine cargo, ship type, and flag. After the battle is completed, the Plunder total is based off of these as follows:

• Base plunder = cargo value as rolled, i.e. 1-10
• ADD to this the number of cargo slots carrying lootable items. Although the usual way to do this would simply be to multiple Scale by 2, most cargo ships have given over some of their crew and gun contingent to cargo as shown above, so for a cargo ship multiply Scale by 3 or 4 to determine cargo size (3 for a somewhat cautious captain, 4 for a more careless one). 
• In addition, not all ships will be fully laden at all times, and some valuables will have been hidden by the crew, so the player characters get to choose a representative to roll both Awareness and a CHA skill of their choice. Success or failure on each roll increases or decreses the Plunder total by 1; critical successes and failures increase or decrease it by 2. 
• Every hit to the cargo hold during the fight drops Plunder value by 2.
• If the victorious ship does not have the capacity to carry its entire prize, 1 Plunder can be converted to a B/R roll's worth of Booty on the spot, and added to the Ship's Chest.

Example: The Fortune's Folly takes a well-captained two-masted Portuguese galleon in a brisk surprizal. The Market's initial roll was B3R8 to generate cacao, galleon, Portuguese. So the base value of the Plunder is 3, for cacao, plus 6 for a moderately laden merchant ship. The boarding party rolls a success on Awareness and a critical success on Sensitivity to search; this increases the total haul to 12 Plunder. The officers of the Folly can either try to put a prize crew on the galleon, risking mutiny or separation, and sail the full value of the Plunder back to a friendly port, or it can load its own 2 Cargo slots with 3 (base value)+2 (slots)=5 plunder's worth of cacao and head out on its own. Because this latter option leaves some plunder on the prize, the Folly's crew can also add 1 B/R roll's worth of Booty to the Ship's Chest.

What can Plunder be used to do?

Lots of stuff.

• Repair/replace up to 10 points of hull or sail damage
• Repair/replace up to 5 points of gun or crew damage, or add new guns and crew
• Replace 1 unit of Naval Stores, or purchase 1 Cargo's worth of additional Naval Stores
• Zero the crew's Thirst
• Cash out the crew (see below)
• Swell the Ship's Chest (see below)

Selling a prize ship gets 1 Plunder plus 1 per 5 points of remaining hulls, sails, and guns. Buying a new ship costs 5 Plunder plus 1 per 5 points of remaining hulls, sails, and guns. So, for example:

• To buy a brand new sloop (Scale 1) of 10 guns: 5 + 6 = 11 Plunder
• To sell a battle-damaged brig (Scale 2, 50% damage to hull, sails and guns): 1 + 6 = 7 Plunder

Translating Plunder to Booty, i.e., cashing out the Crew or swelling the Ship's Chest

The process of cashing in Plunder strongly invokes the Scale mechanics introduced above, with every unit of Plunder translating into individual Booty according to how large the characters' current crew contingent is.

At default, each unit of Plunder translates into a single, Black-and-Red roll's worth of Booty to be split among the characters. This measure, however, is calibrated to the 15 to 40-person crew typical of most small buccaneer outfits and should be adjusted as follows:

• Characters have less than 5 crew = each unit of Plunder translates to 3 Booty rolls
• Characters have less than 15 crew = each Plunder translates to 2 Booty rolls
• Characters have more than 40 crew = 2 Plunder for 1 Booty roll, or 1 Booty gives a halved roll
• Characters have more than 80 crew = 3 plunder for 1 Booty
• and so on, with each additional 40 crew adding 1 to the number of Plunder to give 1 Booty roll

Once the correct ratio has been determined, make any Booty rolls needed and split the result among the characters. For every character that spent their Prep action this session on finding buyers, +2 can be added to the Black die. If the Black die is higher than the Red, the transaction to convert the Plunder into Booty is more-or-less legitimate, i.e. handled by a competent fence who pays the right bribes; otherwise, each point of Plunder thus converted burns a point of Notoriety.

Reveries: A Parallel System for Reference Tapping

Page 210-211 of Red Markets outlines not only the rules for tapping references but also the themes that this subsystem is supposed to invoke, as follows:

• Your character gets 1 Reference slot per point of Charisma.
• When, during the game, you fail at an INT or CHA skill roll, you can "tap" (i.e. contact) a Reference, who is a person that will lend you their expertise for a price. You write this reference's name into the Reference slot, mark that they are "Needy," and are treated as having succeeded in the roll.
• You can only keep as many Needy References on a string at once as you have available Reference slots on your character sheet: once a Reference is "Needy" it locks that slot until you settle your debts. Subsequent uses of that Reference advance it to Strained and then Severed.
• You can dynamically swap out non-Needy references at any time. 
• Severed References permanently lock out that Reference slot as fewer people out there are willing to lend their expertise to you, someone who never pays back what they owe
• The rationale behind the subsystem is that outright failure is less narratively interesting, in a tale of economic horror, than success at a price: the question of "can I do the thing?" is thus reframed as "how much is doing the thing worth, to me?" or "how much will I sacrifice to do the thing?"

So far, so good. However, the system as written assumes a dense communication network and/or large clusters of people available for the characters to fall back on, which is not true of some game settings - such as On the Account, my 17th Century pirate campaign which runs using the Profit System. For such situations, I substitute the following rules:

• If you need to succeed at cost AND you actually have access to a reservoir of people who are better than you at the skill in question, just pay the 1 Booty and move on after the necessary roleplay. You don't add the person you contacted to any lists, as you pay them off immediately.
• In all other cases, you experience a Reverie: write the name of the skill in under Reveries, narrate a flashback to some moment in the past in which you were called on to develop exactly the skill that you are currently falling short at, and explain what held you back from doing that (i.e., why you never learned to do the thing you're currently trying to do). The flashback can involve a Dependent if you like (see below).
• Following your Reverie, you achieve a bare-bones ugly success as pure desperation and the memory of your past drives you forward
• Reveries can apply to any skill, not just INT or CHA ones.  
• Only one Reverie per skill per session. Experiencing a fresh Reverie on top of an existing one advances it from Needy to Strained, or Strained to Severed. 
• As with References, you can have as many Reveries as you do CHA. If you draw on a skill more than once, take that Reverie from Needy to Strained and then to Severed.

At the end of the game session, when you're doing Upkeep, each Needy or Strained Reverie that you have accumulated must be resolved in one of three ways:

• Buy a new level in the Skill (this erases even a Strained Reverie)
• Take a Dependent who was featured in the Reverie one step towards Severed as the memory complicates your relationship with them
• Move the Reverie itself one step along from Needy to Strained, or Strained to Severed.

When a Reverie reaches "Severed", erase the Reverie and put a circle or some other annotation next to its associated Skill. No further Reveries can be suggested with that skill, nor can the skill ever be raised in future: the character essentially just turns their back on the painful self-doubt associated with that part of their skillset. However, they don't lose their Reverie slot as they would have for a Severed Reference. 

Using the Profit System to run naval engagements in the Age of Sail

Battles between ships at sea begin when the lookout of one ship spots the sail of another ship on the horizon, and the lookout’s ship elects to give chase and become what is referred to in these rules as “the Hunter”. Following this, one of three logics obtain:

• The pursued ship (referred to henceforth as “the prey”) elects to close for battle immediately, or
• The prey attempts to flee, either in a genuine attempt to escape or in an attempt to find an advantageous place to do battle
• The hunter attempts to approach by stealth instead of force, and effect a surprizal (see below)

Logics 1 and 2 are the most straightforward, and are handled the same way. Logic 3 (surprizal) works a little differently and is discussed after the straightforward rules.

1. Engagement Tracker and the notion of “Gage”

This tracker is used to model the competitive sailing contest that was ship-to-ship combat in the Age of Sail. A key element of this contest was the pursuit of the “weather gage”. A ship with the “weather gage” had successfully used wind, currents, landmarks and even wave height to maneuver itself into an advantageous position relative to its opponent, and this position sometimes made the difference between a relatively cost-free victory, and a suicide run into the guns of a waiting foe. “Gage” thus replaces “Sway” as it appears in the standard RM rules. Other deviations and addons are outlined below. 

This layout assumes the players are the Hunters and the Market Forces are the Prey. Simply reverse the positions of the starting dice if the opposite is true.

2.1 Prep work

Prep work takes place ahead of the chase, and focuses on characters doing something to increase the effectiveness of their crew and vessel, or gather leads for a good ship to attack, or make and maintain contacts with the fences who shift stolen goods on to the American colonies. In port, appropriate skills for prep work tend to draw from CHA and ADP pools; at sea, more from INT skills and specifically Profession skills like Profession: Seamanship, Profession: Gunnery, and Profession: Carpenter. Each character gets one Prep work action; each success gives +1 Gage for the confrontation to follow, or increases the eventual Plunder value of the prize by +2.

• Port Prep Actions: gathering intel about ship capabilities in taverns (Networking), intimidating other crews, discovering the sailing schedule or intended route of a target (Research), careening the ship (P:Seamanship), upgrading combat stores (P:Gunnery or spend-a-Bounty)
• Sea Prep Actions: bolstering the crew, seeing to the sails, bracing the mast (P:Carpentry), adjusting the load of the cannons

2.2 Sail Ho!

Roll Black and Red and consult the table below to generate a potential prize, including the value of its cargo and its nationality:

	Black (value)	Red (ship type)	Difference btw the dice
1	Timber	Trading canoe (.5)	Spanish
2	Dry goods, preserved foods	War canoe (.5)	French
3	Ginger / Cacao	Barca longa (1)	English
4	Passengers	Armed pinnace (1)	Dutch
5	Sugar / Molasses	Fluyt (1-3)	Portuguese
6	Alcohol / Tobacco	Sloop (1-2)	Buccaneer
7	Slaves / Soldiers	Brig (2-3)	Danish
8	VIP / personal effects	Galleon (2-3)	Swedish
9	Bar silver / situado	Frigate (3)	Genoan
0	Bar gold / payroll	Man of War (3)	False flag: roll again in secret

2.3 Leadership Opens

As per RM core rules, the result of this opening Leadership roll determines not only number of Pursuit Rounds in the chase (approx 2 hours of chase time per duration rolled), but also the range at which the prey notices the hunter, i.e. where to place the Hunter at the start of the engagement. On a roll of a Crit success, the the Hunter starts at Extreme range; on a roll of a Crit failure, the  hunter starts at Horizon. All other results begin at Spyglass range. The prey always starts at Boarding range on Engagement Tracker. 

2.4 Pursuit round

Each round, the Captain (designated leader for this engagement) rolls a skill from the pool given by their range band on the Engagement Tracker. Success moves the Hunter up one range band. 

The Prey, in the meantime, moves down one band if it chooses to. Moving down the tracker in this fashion doesn’t mean slowing down or even getting closer; the distance between the two ships is always read off the Hunter’s position. Instead, moving down for the Prey means choosing a style of sailing which permits the use of gunnery and prepares for a fight. Well-armed vessels that want to provoke an exchange of cannon fire will move down, ensuring that the Hunter will encounter them sooner but will face them broadside on; ships which would prefer just to put their heads down and escape, or who are deficient in cannons but seeking to win in a boarding action, will instead stay high on the Engagement tracker and bank Gage points instead of moving (much like a Client electing to find out Taker spots in conventional RM).

2.5 Market Forces

Each target vessel comes preloaded with 0-3 Gage to reflect the difference between fighting a panicky merchant and a hardened privateer. If the Market Forces fought the characters and/or their ship before, they get +1 Gage. If they’re veteran fighters, they get another +1. If they have the better ship (any two of: faster, bigger, better armed) they get another +1. 

2.6 Crew actions

These replace “Scams”. In between rounds, characters other than the Captain can roll any skill from the skill pool to provide the captain with either +1 Gage, or a +2 to their next roll.

2.7 The Moment of Truth

After the number of pursuit rounds generated by the opening Leadership roll have elapsed, check the position of the dice.

If the dice are not heads up, the prey has managed to keep the chase going until nightfall or the arrival of bad weather, and has a chance to slip away. The Hunter should roll Seamanship.

• On a Critical Fail: spend 1 from the ship’s Rations, lose 1 Morale, and the prey is lost. 
• On a simple Failure: Spend 1 Ration OR lose 1 Morale, and the prey is lost. 
• On a Success, the chase is back on: spend 1 Ration, and roll Leadership to generate a new starting position and number pursuit rounds. 
• On a Critical Success: spend 1 Ration, maintain current positioning, but roll Leadership again to generate a new number of pursuit rounds.

If the dice are heads up: roll Leadership to determine if hunter moves up to prey (success) or prey moves down to hunter. Accumulated Gage should be spent at this point to see who actually has the weather gage in this fight. If the Hunter is not at least at Long range after the heads up is resolved, the chase is over and the Prey escapes.

2.8 Coming to Blows

Consult range category to determine how each round of the fight plays out. Unspent Gage can be used like Will points at this stage. Each character gets to take one action over the course of the combat - either leading the attack (see directly below) or rallying the crew to resist incoming violence (see after the "Leading the Attack" section). If the combat persists after all characters have acted, the ships crew continue to fight using their ship default skill of either 2 (if the skill was prepared during the last rest between voyages), or 1.

2.8.1 Leading the Attack

Only one character can roll per round, and they must pick an appropriate skill from the skill pool for that range band. This represents how they are contributing to bringing the Hunter into range of the Prey. In any given round, unless it is specifically stated that combat ends, the Hunter should keep rolling until the Prey surrenders, combat ends, or they move up to a new range band.

For each of these rolls, the ship with more cannons (and long or broadside range) or more fighting crew (at boarding) has advantage, meaning that after success or failure are resolved, the player(s) or the Market may flip the dice, for free, in whichever way suits them best to resolve damage on their own ship.Remaining Gage points can, of course, be used to flip any or all of the dice back. This flipping can be used to target specific ship areas (sails, hull, crew, etc.) and to maximize or minimize damage in strategically useful ways.

Example: Hunter ship has advantage. At broadside range, Hunter rolls R8B7 (failure) and spends 1 Gage to flip to R7B8 (success). Normally this would do result in both ships taking 8 points of damage to Location 7 (guns) - but the Hunter player has the option to switch the damage to their own ship, to 7 points at hit location 8 (hull). Seeing as guns are more expensive to replace than hull planks, the player switches the locations accordingly, and tacks hard into the swell to take the Prey's incoming fire to their sides while raking the Prey's gundeck. The Hunter is now taking on water, and will suffer another 2 points of Hull damage per round until combat is over.

At Long Range: Hunter’s roll is resolved as follows:

• Crit Fail: Hunter vessel takes full gun damage, combat ends
• Simple Fail: Hunter vessel takes half damage, OR combat ends
• Success: Hunter inflicts half gun damage on Prey, and moves up 1 range band if desired
• Crit Success: Hunter inflicts full damage on Prey, and moves up 1 range band if desired

Broadside: Hunter’s roll is resolved as follows: 

• CF: Hunter vessel takes double gun damage, and drops back 1 range category
• F: Hunter vessel takes double gun damage, OR takes regular damage and combat ends 
• S: Hunter vessel takes and inflicts full damage, move up 1 range category if desired
• CS: Hunter vessel inflicts double damage, takes regular damage itself, and moves up 1 range band if desired, OR inflicts regular gun damage on Prey, takes no damage itself, and moves up 1 range band if desired

Note that Prey may surrender before boarding if crew or ship trackers drop too low; see ship damage tracker. In this case, move to 2.8, Taking a Prize.

Boarding: Hunter’s roll is resolved as follows: 

• CF: take double damage (choose; two hits on crew or one on crew, one on ship) and roll Leadership to prevent surrender. 
• F: Take regular damage to Hunter crew or ship (Market’s choice).
• S: Inflict regular damage to Prey crew or ship and roll Leadership to force Prey surrender. 
• CS: Inflict two hits (choose as above) and roll, OR inflict regular damage and guarantee surrender.

Damage

Regular damage inflicted during a ship-to-ship engagement is Stun damage. Heavy cannon and heated shot do "heavy" damage, which means that the black die is applied both as Kill and Stun damage. When a location is full of Stun damage, it begins to take Kill damage. Special effects (e.g., under sails, -1 to Seamanship) apply regardless of Kill or Stun.

The Price of Leadership

There are plenty of safe places to hide on a wooden ship under cannon fire, but being where the crew is and directing operations exposes one to potential danger. Each round that the Hunter ship takes damage, regardless of range, the acting player (i.e., the one who is making the Hunter’s rolls that round, as above) should roll Athletics: 

• CF: Roll black and red. Take Red die as killing damage to Black location and stun damage to all others
• Fail: As above, but choose the killing OR the stun
• Success: As above, but it’s stun damage to one location OR half damage as stun to all locations
• Crit Success: No damage suffered.

2.8.2 Rallying the Crew

Rallying the crew mid-fight to reset upended guns, patch holes in the hull, hoist fresh sails, or tend casualties is treated like a First Aid roll using Profession (Gunner) or (Carpentry), Seamanship, or First Aid / Profession (Doctor). On a success, the Black die can be applied to one damaged location. If a location is rendered damage-free, any penalties associated with damage also disappear.

Remember that each character only gets one action - leading the attack or rallying the crew - per engagement. If there are no more characters on hand to perform Rallying actions, then that's that: no more Rallies while the cannonballs fly. 

Unlike those leading the attack, characters rallying the crew are not exposed to personal damage.

2.9 Repairing after Combat

In a port, Plunder can be used to remove ship damage as laid out in the Ships, Crew and Plunder rules. Should the company find themselves with Bounty but no Plunder, a 10-1 ratio applies.

Pulled up on a beach, limited (or "Jury-Rigged") repairs can be done by the crew at the cost of time and Thirst. Each location can only be targeted for repair once. The cost to the company is (Ship's Scale) in Thirst; a single black die should be thrown and applied to that ship location to remove Stun damage or convert Kill to Stun. Any stun damage that remains after the die is applied should be marked as Kill damage.

If at sea, the same rules apply as above, except that the Thirst cost is doubled and Kill damage may not be converted to Stun damage. 

3. Surprizal

Wherever possible, combatants in the Age of Sail preferred to take prizes by guile or stealth rather than costly and dangerous chases. However, while the payoff for such “surprizals” was high, the costs of being discovered mid-surprize were high, and the costs of trying to surprize a foe who had in fact seen you coming and was priming its weapons as you approached were almost inevitably fatal. N

(still being written up)

Card laying system for postapocalyptic chase scenes or urban crawl

The system presented here is intended to assist an RPG narrator for a postapocalyptic game (in my case, Red Markets by Hebanon Games) in two main situations:

• Characters are slowly picking their way through a low-density urban area, looking for stuff
• Characters are panickedly fleeing from point A to point B, or chasing someone 

With this system, you'll be using a standard poker deck (minus Jokers, for now) to lay out a kind of brick-pattern grid, and then letting the characters choose a path forward.

This approach is a development of/hack for Steve Winters' 2012 post about doing chase scenes in a tabletop game, with a few inspirational elements provided by polarizing/problematic OSR dude Zak S's really cool Vornheim supplement, which I own.

How It Works

Use Steve Winters' steps 1-7 as written, but substitute the following table for his:

I've tried to have this system do more than the original Winters system, which is where the last 2 columns come from. To decode the weird shorthand that appears there, here's a breakdown:

Linkitecture: You won't always need these if you can visualize or narrate on the fly how one location segues into another, but this is my shorthand to handle the fact that a lot of postapocalyptic action scenes in media seem to not happen at a location as such, but in the spaces between locations. I originally had these as a whole suit, but that made the urban area feel boring and too open. In addition, I wanted to model the way that urban area usage "as designed", and usage "when there are goddamned zombies" means that you might need to cross space in a somewhat unusual way. Parkour, baby! So, when you go from one location to another, the "difference between cards" tells you HOW you get from one to the other. If you're going from a 6 of Diamonds (Gas Station) to a 4 of Hearts (Slum Housing), for example, you're crossing railway tracks to do so because the difference between those two cards is 2. If something ever doesn't make sense, and you're on the spot, just say the two locations are linked by a parking lot instead. Face cards inherit the value of their parent location. 

Note: This also tends to group like buildings "together", narratively - i.e. you just walk along roads ("use as intended") to go from a hotel to a park to a ritzy McMansion, or from an apartment to a clinic to the DMV, but you have to do increasingly egregious and weird detours ("goddamned zombies") to get from one place to another if they probably wouldn't be next to each other IRL. In these cases, you should assume that there IS a direct route, but it's too dangerous or its obstructed, hence you're climbing into a sewer or clambering down an embankment or whatever. 

Elevation: I like the idea that you can see what's ahead in a chase or scavenge scene, but the Winter model doesn't allow that. So, I like to lay cards out in advance. When the cards are the same color, great, you can see what's ahead, so deal that card face up. When they're not, it's because there's an obstruction (e.g. highway sound barrier) or topography that blocks line of sight. I've used "hill" here for parsimony, but it just stands for "rising terrain so that you can't properly see what's up there" - could be just a four foot embankment. 

Condition: Five years of neglect means at least fifty percent of the world looks like an actual warzone, in my mind's eye. So whenever you go from an even to odd card, or vice versa, here's what the condition of the place you're headed to is. Condition doesn't affect locations based around face cards, but when you're going from a face card to a number card use the face card's parent location to determine lootedness.

Other stuff: Chases are going to turn into "the character with high Athletics rolls a lot and everyone else sits around like idiots" if you're not careful. So I take a leaf from the Negotiation minigame; one person rolls Athletics on behalf of the characters, and then everyone else gets to do something constructive - cut off an exit, try and get ahead, boost others over an obstruction, rip a gate open, shoot an obstruction or hazard, slam a door closed, call out a route, whatever. Each success gives the main roller a +1. The Market forces also get to modify things, if they're sapient - so the chaser rolls Dodge to avoid something they've thrown behind them, or whatever. If they fail, they lose ground, perhaps even despite the assistance of their teammates and their own Athletics roll. Use the basic Gridiron, and take your cue from your favorite chase scene, but I like this one from Casino Royale a lot.

Face Cards: Face cards are treated as a continuation of whatever terrain the chase scene just left, so if you run from a 3 of Clubs into a Queen of Diamonds, there's construction out back of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Must have been putting in a new youth hall or repaving the parking lot. In general, Aces and Kings are super bad, while Jacks and Queens represent a genuine opportunity for a Salvage roll and some good stuff (if you have the time to stop, or are willing to risk doubling back).

Example:

Characters are chasing a runner, so they're the pursuer. First card draw is a 9 of Hearts with two exits. I drew a queen of Spades for exit one and a Jack of Clubs for exit 2. So:

• the first chase location is a Town Hall (or 4H Club, or Scout Hall, or whatever)
• both exits are blind exits, because they're an exit from a red card to black cards.
• both exits also don't take the chase out of the town hall, because they're face cards.
• Exit 1 leads through a closed door past a Wailing Wall (perhaps on the municipal bulletin board)
• Exit 2 leads past a side room where bottled water was being distributed during the Crash.

The quarry flees through Exit 1, past the wailing wall (Stress check to just run past all that wealth!), and again I generate exits and lay new cards. 3 exits this time; one back to the Jack of Clubs, one to a six of Diamonds, one to a 2 of Spades. So:

• The first exit is blind due to a black-to-red elevation change, so I know that there's a gas station back there over the hill behind the church, but the characters don't. Maybe even the quarry doesn't, unless this is their home turf. Linkitecture from the Town Hall to the gas station is a (9-6=3) bridge or skyway, so let's make it like a wooden walkway with a guard rail going from the town hall tourism pamphlet section, to a lookout site on the hill with one of those coin-operated viewfinders, and then back down to the gas station on the other side of the hill. 
• The second exit is visible (black to black) and leads through a FEMA tent city. Definitely getting the sense that this Town Hall was where people sheltered in the first few days of the crash, between the wailing wall, the water distro, and the tents. Linkitecture is a (9-2=7) cut-through, meaning you need to go in the front entrance of something and then out the back, so that's easy: the kitchen of the town hall.
• The Town Hall card was odd, and the gas station and tent city are both even, so we know that both exit locations are fire sites. Maybe someone siphoned gas clumsily and started a fire, or maybe incendiaries were used sanitize both locations?

Again, quarry flees - let's say through the kitchen and the tent city (because quarries will avoid blind exits when possible). Two unique exits this time: 4 of Spades, 9 of Diamonds. In condensed notation (elevation, linkitecture, condition), that means:

• Tent city (2 of Spades) to Extant Barrier (4 of Spades) via level ground, railway tracks, lightly looted. So: one side of the tent camp is up against railroad tracks (or a bike path, or a canal), but on the other side of the tracks there's barbed wire, sawhorses, and Jersey barriers.
• Tent city (2 of Spades) to Police/Sheriff's Office (9 of Diamonds) via blind exit (hill), cut-through, heavily looted. So: there's a big tent linking the FEMA camp to the back entrance of a looted building whose function can't be determined from down here because it's up an embankment from the level the camp is on.

Lather, rinse, repeat until the quarry is captured or your characters get eaten, and happy card laying!

Post Publishing Thought: 

I wrote this to use cards because I always have a deck on hand to handle turn action in combat, and because I like the de facto town map you get from laying the cards, but you could totally just use dice instead and do this as a straight up point-crawl. For instance - if you have a d4 in your dice bag, just roll a "d40" for location, with rolls of 11, 21, 31, and 41 representing a face card, and so on. 

Session 3: Not Russian at All!

[Soundtrack: Red Dead Redemption OST]

Slab City is revealed to be part post-apocalyptic fortress, complete with anti-Casualty quarantecture and barbed wire, and part enormous terrarium with every cubic meter of the interior ruthlessly leveraged for vertical agriculture. Above it all, a huge crane arm has been tilted towards the sky and holds a one-person observation post.

The enclave's five-story car-pile walls are each two cars layers thick: the outside layer packed with rubble and barbed wire to serve as a wall, and the interior layer converted into small family cubbies of one or two emptied-out cars. Embedded here and there through the interior are larger vehicles whose hollowed-out interiors serve as communal and storage space.

With the enclave's human space thus located entirely within its walls, the interior space inside the walls is all agriculture: trellises and rope platforms bear low scrubs, fruit-bearing vines, and high-density food plants of all kinds. The ground level, which is as dark and humid as the floor of any rainforest, is packed with livestock pens.

The various members of the convoy split up to attend to their own individual concerns. Billy finds himself in the enclave's canteen, where he turns to looking for a job in the area. Also in the cantina is a roving taker called Nitro, with whom Billy joins forces. Billy finds two online jobs before he and Nitro are approached by two of the enclave's Fencemen and taken to a meeting with "La Reina" herself.

La Reina's "court" is located on a tented wooden platform on the top level of the enclave. There, amidst tables loaded with luxurious fresh produce, light musical accompaniment from a guitarist, and her inner circle (an older man referred to as "the General", and a younger man referred to as "Supple") she reveals that she too has a job to offer. Some research and negotiation follows before Billy and Nitro accept her offer to pay them 14 Bounty to transport two pallets of the enclave's produce northeast into the mountains.

The next day, Billy and Nitro set forth carrying a pair of enormous packs. Billy's shoulders and back are soon rubbed bloody from the load, but he refuses to quit, even after a long detour to avoid a washed out road puts them hours behind schedule and walking late into the night. At the rendezvous, they meet Ben, JP, and Hector Turbo - a trio of "pharmers", the self-taught post-crash salvagers and refiners to whom enclaves turn for their chemical compound needs. These pharmers specialize in synthesizing high-explosives from raw materials salvaged from the unexploded ordnance that litters the Chocolate Mountain Impact Area.

The next morning, JP springs some unexpected news on Billy and Nitro: there was an unnegotiated second half to the job, namely taking two backpacks of unstable nitroglycerin back to Slab City. Luckily, the Takers have an ace up their sleeves: a huge hive of wild honey bees in the back seat of a deserted car that they spotted on the previous day, and which they had planned to loot on their return journey. Offering Hector a half share in the honey buys the use of his scooter and JP for the day, and Billy and Nitro are soon headed off down the road while scrolling through online how-to apiculture articles.

Midway through the harvest, there is a moment of terror as a hand reaches from within the hive to grip Nitro by the hand and a casualty fights its way loose from the hive that had been built up around it. Some panicked effort manages to dislodge the Casualty onto the roadside, where Nitro smashes its honey-sodden head in. By nightfall, the Takers are back at Slab City, where they receive a warning from Marisa (a woman from the enclave's Moldovan contingent) and some details about La Reina's ruthless past dealings before packing in for the day. The job has earned them less than they needed to come out even, but the enormous honey haul they have brought in will more than compensate - if they can find someone willing to pay well for a taste of sweetness!

Tune in soon for the next session of RM:W: In the Mountains, There You Feel Free 

Joining the convoy

The overall concept of this campaign is like a three-season TV show. Across all three seasons, we follow a group of desperate but committed people as they struggle to cross the continental US, West to East, against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. Although there will be core characters who appear in almost all game sessions (i.e. "episodes" of the show), there will also be cast members who join midway, and guest stars who show up once or recur. If you're reading this page, you might be one of the latter categories!

The Setting, Briefly:

Five years ago, zombies swarmed across the planet, all but wiping out humanity. Nobody can agree on where the outbreak (now referred to as "the Crash") started: there are literally hundreds if not thousands of theories. It spread quickly. Some countries fell within days. In the US, an enormous motorized evacuation from the center of the country led to small surviving outposts on the East and West coasts ("the Recession"), separated by a desolate no-man's-land ("The Loss"). Northeastern Canada was obliterated with nuclear weapons to seal that country's borders with the US, and so nuclear fallout and strange weather patterns dot the land. 

The remaining government is a paramilitary one dominated by the Department of Homeland Quarantine and Stewardship (DHQS). Under DHQS rule, some survivors live in relative opulence in walled coastal cities; many more toil in those same cities, penned inside a maze of "quarantecture" designed to contain zombie outbreaks; and millions upon millions live out of tents and their long-dead cars in refugee camps ("Free Parking") outside the quarantecture walls, waiting for their chance to be processed at a DHQS screening center and put the Loss behind them. Above it all, UBIQ, an outlaw internet architecture run from balloon-lifted servers, serves as a kind of neutral chat forum and online database, allowing the citizens of the Recession and the inhabitants of the Loss alike to communicate with one another and exchange information.

By DHQS mandate, anyone leaving Free Parking and entering the Loss is a quarantine breaker and subject to penalties ranging from asset and citizenship forfeiture, to summary execution. People who disobey this law but who hope to one day "go legit" and return to a settled life in the Recession, tend to adopt fake identities and colorful aliases to protect themselves. On the other hand, some survivors have decided, or been forced, to live in the Loss for the foreseeable future. These people gather in concealed communities called "Enclaves." 

Although a range of currencies exist in this world - Reclamation Bonds, Ration Scrip, barter, and a variety of online cryptocurrencies - only one serves as a real unit of value: Bounty, or the payout value of one proof of death from the zombie epidemic. Bounty value is most commonly transferred using documents which constitute proof of death, such as a drivers' licence. It is therefore not an uncommon practice for goods and services to be paid for using a handful of drivers' licenses and death certificates. Eventually, someone will trade these in to the DHQS for a "real" currency, but until then and between the inhabitants of the loss, Bounty serves as a direct medium of exchange.

The Zombies:

A freshly created zombie starts out as a "Vector": fast, feral and monstrously strong. In this stage the black, oily substance which animates the zombie - "Blight" - is like a parasite in their still-living tissue. These "Vectors" can clear walls with a single leap, tear a car door from a chassis, and bite through a baseball bat. When these feats inevitably cause the Vector's host body to die from massive shock and stress, the zombies slow down and sometimes even go into a dormancy called Torpor. In this stage, it is the Blight alone which moves the rotting creature around. In this form, the zombies are called "Casualties" as a nod to the initial confused news reports which surrounded their appearance.

The Convoy:

This campaign started with a group of people deciding that they could no longer afford to wait their turn for DHQS processing in a camp outside San Diego, and striking off East hoping to reach the Appalachians and the East Coast Safe Zones. 

But vehicle travel requires fuel and spare parts. The characters are therefore caught in a constant need to hustle, doing jobs and scores for a variety of patrons to earn Bounty and trade it for fuel in Enclaves as they travel East. Often, this will require them to cut in local muscle or guides: equal stakes is the informal rule for all such deals in the Loss. Your character will probably be one of these "contractors" at first; but who is to say you don't manage to convince them to give you a seat on their trip East? Perhaps you have some pressing reason of your own to go...

Before your first session:

Red Markets doesn't have "character classes" or any other technical jargon to consider. All you need to do is think of someone from our world - a barista, a gal who stocks shelves at a CVS, an account manager at an ad agency, a nightclub bouncer - and then consider what they might do to survive five years of famine, rioting, murder, gangs, and the walking dead. Might they develop a nose for scavenging? Hoard and sell medical supplies? Organize survivors into self defense groups? Go to ground in the wilderness and live off the land? Once you've done that, consult this list of the game's skills and flag a couple in your mind that seem like things you're REALLY going to want to be decent at. New characters get 20 points to split up between this list of skills. A 2 in a skill means you could do it for a bare-bones living, a 3 means you're a pro. Starting characters don't have higher than a 3 in anything. You don't need to allocate all of these ahead of time, we'll do it in-game and neaten up the math afterwards.

Speaking of math: in Red Markets you roll one black and one red die together for each time you try to do something. If you have an applicable skill, you add it to the black die. You succeed if the modified black die is higher than the modified red die. Almost every roll requires you to spend a "charge" from something: guns expend bullets, feats of strength expend your body's energy, using a laptop drains battery. Get used to crossing something off every time the dice roll - after all, the game wouldn't feel much like a postapocalypse without some scarcity!

Then, think about a Weak Spot and a Soft Spot. Weak Spots are quirks that all your friends would recognize. The stories they tell about you all probably feature you doing this kind of thing. Are you longwinded? Neurotic? Affectionate? Vengeful? Think of a word or phrase that articulates this nicely. Then, do the same thing for your Soft Spot. If your Weak Spot is a thing you (perhaps unconsciously) LIKE doing, maybe even a thing that your personality revolves around, then your Soft Spot is something you can't help doing, a weakness or human vulnerability that anyone who sees might exploit. Are you a sucker for a hard luck story or a pretty face or a kid in trouble? That's your Soft Spot. Whereas your Weak Spot is something that everyone around you knows about even if you don't, your Soft Spot is the one that perhaps no-one who met you would know about until it revealed itself. 

Long term characters also get a Tough Spot. You'll get one as soon as your character comes to a second game session. But there's no need to select it right now.

So - a backstory, some flagged skills that you intend to throw some numbers at later, and a Weak and Soft Spot. Then lastly, your name. Nobody who intends to leave the Loss one day uses their real name, in order to keep their identity off the DHQS list of quarantine breakers. So are you "Mojo"? "Doctor Pain"? "Firebird"? The name doesn't have to be cool, because sometimes people come up with really dumb nicknames for themselves. But it's the one you go by now. With that as your final touch, you're good to go. Browsing the session summaries on this very blog will tell you where the convoy is currently located and where your character will start off.