Regular games of Red Markets tend to range around the fixed point of an enclave because while the takers are mobile, their dependents are not and an enclave is where those dependents live out their vignette-producing lives. At the same time, having a home enclave gives a good opportunity to tell society-level stories and provides a good place to "bank" a bunch of NPCs to serve as clients, antagonists, references, and the like. All well and good. However, if what you want to do with your RM game is something a little more continent-wide in scope, a fixed point enclave home base might end up feeling restrictive. In this case, consider the road trip format as detailed below.
1. Campaign is a (i) bust style, (ii) tontine-retirement, (iii) alternating score-and-job Red Markets campaign in which the PCs, their dependents, and some number of NPCs are based in a small convoy of vehicles who wish to undertake some substantial journey (e.g. from San Diego to the Mississippi).
i) Bust style with NBNB because being mobile means more need for forward planning and fewer opportunities to recover from screwups
ii) Tontine retirement because everyone arrives at the destination together, if they arrive at all
iii) Alternating score and job to reflect the difficulties of networking on the run, and hence the increased necessity of opportunistic looting and scores as a way of getting hold of Bounty. If your campaign has the Loss as being quite densely populated with enclaves, this artificial split might not be necessary; if your Loss is super depopulated, maybe two scores to one job session.
2. Retirement milestones are replaced by Trip Milestones as follows. Each costs 20 Bounty. Anyone can contribute to a milestone. With 3 milestones per player, I've calibrated the list below to 4 players and thus there are 12 Trip Milestones - add or subtract 3 milestones per extra or missing PC. The easiest Additionally, we're imagining a "West Coast to the Miss" setup here, with the convoy starting out as guests of a West Coast enclave but itching to leave and head East. Adjust as necessary.
i) Fitting New Tanks, new Fuel, Fixing up the Scavenged Bus
ii) Stocking up on Food and Medicine for the Trip
iii) Arranging updated Maps and Route Guidance
iv) First Distance Milestone: Making it over the Mountains
v) Paying off Road Agents, Raiders and Tolls
vi) Buying a Mobile Still to tow behind the Bus
vii) Converting the Bus to Ethanol for the Second Half of the Journey
viii) Second Distance Milestone: Making it to the Cornfields
ix) Contacting the Smugglers
x) Arranging Papers for Everyone
xi) Arranging a Safe House
xii) Last Distance Milestone: Making it to the Wall.
Optional) Leave the Dependents and Head Back for a Mr. JOLS?
3. Each game, you play either a score or a job as mentioned above. In general you drive the bus to a safe-ish distance away, make camp/post guard, and then hoof it out to the job site to get your regular legs in. But unlike a regular RM game, I suggest that you do either the score generation or the looking for work section at the END of each session, and use this to produce your route map and determine where the action of the next session will take place - in other words, use the map "ahead" of the convoy to locate each job or score roughly in space, so that the jobs or scores you pick end up driving the group in their preferred direction. ("I heard there was an un-looted Staples in Barlow"). Depending on how well your group does per session, it might take two or more sessions to reach each milestone - just keep an eye on your established distance milestones and present jobs, scores, and complications which preserve that structure (so, in the example above, don't provide jobs east of the Rockies until your group has achieved that Trip Milestone).
NBNB budgeting and selling of gear also take place at the end of each session. You're literally driving to the seller/buyer/trainer's location or arranging somewhere to meet them, and if something goes wrong you don't get the item.
4. Freewheeling etiquette: picking a road trip enclave means that both you and your group agree to pretend that the convoy vehicles aren't really vehicles except when they need to be. By this I mean, your group agrees to not use the armored bus(es) that everyone's riding in to cheat on jobs ("we'll just go back and fetch the bus, drive it back here, ram the horde, no problem") and you agree to not expose the bus-bound dependents to any risks over and above those that dependents in a conventional brick and mortar enclave would face. So, no "highway bridge falls, everyone dies" from you, but also no arbitrary food or repair costs: in this game, all the fuel and maintenance costs for the convoy vehicles are paid by the takers' contributions to their tontine retirement fund, and they only need to pay extra if they add personal, e.g. tactical, vehicles to the convoy. And in that case, they can ram these personal vehicles into casualties as much as they like.
5. Pimp my Ride Sounds Awkward in a Game of Economic Horror: If the takers want to pay extra bounty to trick out their bus, that's great roleplaying and should be rewarded even if the Trip Milestones and Freewheeling Etiquette mean that those extra armor plates or solar panels won't ever actually come in handy because the bus will arrive "when it arrives," based on the tontine. Budgeted bus improvements of this kind form a pool of points (1 Bounty, 1 point) which can be spent by anyone to buy or boost social rolls including, at your discretion, Stress rolls made during jobs (because knowing that your dependents are safe back home is good for the soul). Budgeted bus upgrades can also be spent to heal Humanity damage, perhaps at some preferential ratio (like, every point spent heals the taker who is spending it but also someone else. Narrate a vignette as you work on the bus together). Unbudgeted bus upgrades are a great way to implement the costs of the NBNB system, because hey, you have unexpected surplus Bounty, but the bus needs an air filter drone-dropped in from Distributy, so you're not going to be able to buy a laser sight or extra gas.
6. Hitchhikers and people picked up on the side the road provide great opportunities for folks who are dropping in to the game for one night.
Cool idea. I like! No reason you can't acquire some similarly nomadic enemies as well.
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