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.