Red Markets Rules Sidebar: In Medias Res Character Generation

Although we're fortunate enough to play weekly, my gaming group and I don't have a ton of time per individual session, so at the outset of our new Red Markets campaign I was keen to cut as much fat off as possible. Specifically, I wanted an in medias res beginning, but I knew we also had to generate characters from scratch for 4 out of the 5 players. Could the two be combined? Turns out they could.

How to Do It:

Start with an all-hands-on-deck scene in which there is all kinds of trouble going on and everyone is going to have to do something to get the team out alive. 

Because our own campaign is based around a convoy-style road trip, I used a multiple-vehicle car chase with an unspecified cargo (contents to be determined later) and a bunch of noncombatants (the characters' Dependents) caught in the crossfire. 

I'd thought ahead of time that the one thing SOMEONE must be doing in a car chase is driving, so I asked the players: which of you is the best driver? When Christine's hand was the first to go up, I asked her to allocate 1-3 points to Driving right there, drawing from her starting pool of 20 points. She chose a 2, so I asked, "OK, you drive a big 6x6 truck well enough to make a living from it. How did you get that skill?", which led Christine to say, "Maybe I was a firefighter who drove the big rigs for my station house?" Now Christine had a skill, part of a backstory, and a name - Francine. She made a Driving roll with her new +2 to swerve out of the way of incoming fire from the raiders who were attacking the party, and the spotlight moved to a new player - but while it was off of her, Christine was able to start jotting down some more ideas right away, adding a few more points here and there to flesh out this new firefighter idea.

OK, on to the next player. I asked Paul: "Who were you before the Crash, and what are you doing right now that's so far from your old life that it's hard to believe?" So from there we get that Paul's character Billy was a software engineer and that right now he's emptying a pistol clip into an armored raider on a dirtbike. My follow up question: "OK, this gun - is it yours? Are you any good with it, or are you acting in desperation, having scooped this gun off a dead body?" Paul considered this possibility, but then decided to allocate one of his 20 skill points to Shoot, and a Handgun to his gear list. So now we know he's a guy who goes around armed and knows how to use his gun, which again gives Paul some new info about his character; now, like Christine, he can do a little more chargen between when the spotlight leaves and when it comes back to him.

And so on, and so on. If your players are new to Red Markets, make sure that they understand, roughly, how stat caps work and what some skills that they may need going forward are, but in general just keep putting them in tight spots and seeing who steps up. Some further questions I asked:

• Someone in the convoy is wounded. Who is it, and who is helping them?
• You're transporting a cargo. Where is it, and which is up there, exposed, keeping the raiders away?
• You need a rifle to hit that faraway target. Who do you get it from, and why do they give it to you - love? Fear? Something else?
• One of your dependents comes to your aid. Who are they, and how are they trying to help?
• Someone who matters to one of your dependents is in danger. Which dependent, and who is the person who matter? (RIP Barky the Dog, btw)
• Someone dies. How well do you handle it?

This style of question-asking is a fundamental of the Powered by the Apocalypse game engine, which is something I've played once but never run, but the modification I have injected here is using it for skill, gear, and Dependent allocation. What you end up with, I think, is characters who are competent at the kind of things their players are drawn to do in dramatic moments - and that makes for, I think, good character-player fits.

Now, notice that there's a mix of skills being prompted here - social ones (giving orders to NPCs), support ones (Alertness, Driving, First Aid), Self Control for Humanity checks, etc. I tried hard to resist the temptation to just make this a I-hit-the-orc-with-an-axe slugfest, and to remember that this was more like a chance to discover all sorts of things about each character! So although I didn't end up needing to, I was also prepared to ask questions like: what exclamations do you use when the Airstream is rammed? You're wounded, how do you react? And so on.

By the end of the short combat scene, everyone had most of their points allocated and a pretty good idea about their characters' backstory. All that remained was to allocate Stats, smooth out and reallocate any skills that were higher than their new caps, and come up with Weak, Soft and Tough Spots that matched what we now knew about each character. All told, we were able to have a big sprawling combat and character gen within the first 90 minutes of the game, including a couple of rule and setting sidebars, which is a huge success in my book. With that done, we handled the job setup via flashback, and then flashed forward to the post-combat epilogue. I couldn't be happier with the results of the experiment from my side: we'll see what the players think next week.