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.
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