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.

Latency in RM: Wasteland

This campaign uses a somewhat modified version of Latency from the core Red Markets RPG. In RM:W, Latency can be concealed by those afflicted, if they abstain from four things:

1. Heavy exertion (defined as: spending extra Rations to boost a roll such as Athletics)
2. Emotionally intense experiences (defined as: failing any Self Control check)
3. Physical trauma (defined as: taking Kill damage)
4. Close proximity to Blight infection (for example: grappling a Casualty, failing an exposure roll)

Absent any of these things, a Latent looks like everyone else. But for each of these things that the Latent experiences, they increment a 10-charge Hunger counter. 

Triggering experiences that produce multiple points of effect (e.g., a Latent burns four extra charges of Rations, not just one; or loses three points of humanity to a failed Self Control check rather than just one) also increment Hunger by the same number of points.

At 0 Hunger, Latents can pass for a normal, uninfected person. At 5 points of Hunger, they have clear signs of infection - localized black sinews and veins, sunken black eyes, and so on. At 10 points, they are indistinguishable from a Casualty. Most Latents who are not Takers or living in relative wealth in the Recession permanently hover at around 5 points of Hunger, and as such cannot pass for uninfected.

Hunger can be reset with Bounty. To a limited and variable extent this can involve the use of various home remedies, such as alcohol and drugs to blunt emotional affect, and so on: but primarily, it involves the consumption of raw red meat to assuage the enormous hunger that the Latent experiences as their Blight tissues stir.

Various rare substances are rumored to be even more effective than red meat at resetting Hunger.

Using Hunger

A Latent can burn Hunger before rolling to add points to most rolls involving raw physical or social action, e.g. Resistance rolls to lift heavy weights, Intimidation rolls to unsettle people, and so on. This represents consciously activating Blight-infected tissues for some desired effect.

Other uses for Hunger may be possible, but are not widely known.

Session 2: Lilacs and Blood Oranges

[Soundtrack: Roborg - 100 000 101 111]

The convoy crawls east on its last few gallons of fuel. With Francine and Prairie in the cab holding things together, the Takers face a pressing choice: either continue on to Flamingo Springs, taking the chance that an enclave is in fact located there and that its inhabitants will be happy to see them, or stop the truck in the ruins of Salton City and scrounge what fuel they can from amidst the casualty crowds?

Knowing more about the drone and its maker seems to be useful for making this decision, so Ash calls up Avi, an old weapon-dealing contact of his in the Recession, while Billy consults some old military reference manuals to learn more about its components. Avi advises Ash that while the drone is clearly the work of someone who knows his stuff, and has certain strong points as a device (remote-guided munitions and great linger time among them), it would also be expensive to operate without access to reliable hydrogen generation facilities and is only worth about 8 Bounty overall.

Given this relatively low perceived payoff to returning the drone, and the risk of wandering in to Flamingo Springs blind, the Takers elect to instead pin their hopes on scavenging fuel. After a half hour of consulting Ubiq Maps and switching back and forth from old and new satellite and drone photo footage, Francine lands a jackpot: an apparently undisturbed municipal vehicle yard near one of the city's canals, filled with Casualties but apparently also isolated since the Crash. The Takers elect to raid it and gun their sputtering vehicles into the city itself.

The Takers select a peeling strategy to deal with the yard's twenty or so residents. With the help of Hurley and Jason, two volunteers from the convoy, they will pick the padlock on the yard's chain link gate, draw off the Casualties scattered around the vehicles, and then drive the truck in to begin siphoning.

After initially being forced to flee from some roused Casualties, Ash and Hurley proceed to make the peel with no trouble, and thirteen Cs shamble off after them as Billy, Prairie, and Jason each take out one of the remainder and Francine brings the truck in. But just then, something goes wrong, as high-pitched and insistent barking begins to ring out from somewhere within the yard and every Casualty for a block rises from Torpor to investigate - including ten of the thirteen peeled Casualties. The Takers in the yard are sandwiched.

Acting quickly, Francine closes the chainlink gate, which will at least buy the Takers some time safe from the Cs in the street. Prairie, Billy, and Jason keep swinging and shooting, downing Cs left and right and opening a path for Abalene to sprint from the truck in search of fuel. She finds it, and also the source of the barking - a large dog lying in a huddle far back under one of the trucks. After downing a Casualty that leaps on him from a window, Billy sees this too - and, after a brief tussle with Abalene, shoots the dog twice to silence it. Abalene retrieves two puppies from nearby the dog's body, and discovers that it was already wounded and sick with an infection.

Elsewhere, Francine is piling diesel fuel drums onto a dolly and Prairie has blasted a parked motorbike with a flaming crossbow bolt to blind and disorient a large cluster of the approaching shamblers, making them easy targets for the rest of the team but drawing even more attention from the street. Ash and Hurley have, by this stage, looped back and rejoined the team. The diesel is loaded just as the chainlink begins to bulge in under the press of dead bodies from outside, and the Takers roar off just as it caves in.

[Somewhat later, on the road]

No longer needing fuel, the Takers head northeast towards the Chocolate Mountain Impact Area and their rendezvous with Prairie's uncle. Their path is momentarily blocked by a burned-out evacuation convoy which is clogging up an overpass. Francine is able to guide the vehicles past the block by going off-road, but the silhouette of a salvageable mounted weapon on the lead truck convinces a handful of the takers to try for a pickup.

All goes well for a time, as the Takers move along the side of the sand-blown column of blasted vehicles, keeping far away from the reach of the few dessicated casualties still stuck in the wreckage. But with the target nearly in hand, they step into an area where a five shrapnel-riddled Casualties, blown clear when the convoy was bombed, lie dormant under the sand drifts. With C's rising from the sands all around them, the Takers fight a desperate battle to extricate themselves, but Jason is bitten in the face, with Hurley and Billy escaping the same fate by the thickness of a garment alone. The spreading webs of black veins around Jason's wound speak volumes: he is a secret Latent, a biological time bomb that has lain right inside the convoy this whole time. 

Before anyone can speak, Billy draws his gun to defend Jason. Ash and Hurley draw on Billy in return, and the four stand motionless until Abalene fires her shotgun in the air and demand that Billy calm down. Billy concedes, kicking his pistol over to Abalene, but seems unrepentant, and even the arrival of his brother Dale on the scene does not help him seem any less firm in his manner to the other survivors. With some indications that the debate about Billy's actions is not over, the Takers return to their vehicle with a heavily bandaged Jason and the salvaged weapon in hand, and all are soon back on the road to Chocolate Mountain.

Presently, the fortified enclave built on the remains of Slab City looms into view. After negotiating what purports to be a complex minefield at its entrance, the Takers are ushered in by a handful of gunmen, each of whom wears the blue and white flag of Guatemala. As Uncle Bob greets Prairie and whisks her away, the rest of the Takers hear one gunman remark to another: "La Reina is going to love this..."

[Flashback to yesterday: A deserted building in Resettlement Camp 2, outside Ramona]

As the Takers and their dependents are putting the final elements of their convoy together in the last few hours of daylight, Billy and Dale address the boy's fears of leaving the safety of the camps and re-entering the Loss. Billy makes Dale a guarantee: they will reach the East Coast safely, whatever it takes. Later, Abalene shares a concern with Billy: will his complete focus on reaching the East in safety, provoke a moment in which he is choosing between himself and Dale, and everyone else in the convoy? 

Tune in next week for Session 3: Not Russian at All!

Kenny R's Rules of Taking

This tongue-in-cheek remix of Rogers' Rules of Ranging appeared on the Lifelines a couple years back and has become something of a meme among more media-savvy Takers. Generally invoked as a joke with a mix of deadpan seriousness or mock gravitas, the Rules have nonetheless found more than a few adherents in the Taker community, who swear that each jokey command holds a grain of deep truth at its core.

1. Don't forget nothing.
2. Have your gun clean as a whistle, machete scoured, batteries fully charged, and be ready to hustle at a minute's warning.
3. When you're on the march, act the way you would if you was sneaking up on a deer. See the enemy first.
4. Tell the truth about what you see and what you do. There is an paycheck depending on you for correct information. You can lie all you please when you tell other folks about Taking, but don't never lie to another Taker or on the Lifelines.
5. Don't never take a chance you don't have to.
6. When we're on the march we march single file, far enough apart so one Casualty can't jump up and bite two Takers.
7. If we strike swamps, or soft ground, we spread out abreast, so it's hard to track us by smell.
8. When we march, we keep moving till dark, so as to give the enemy the least possible chance at us.
9. When we camp, half the party stays awake while the other half sleeps.
10. If we take prisoners, we keep 'em separate till we have had time to examine them, so they can't cook up a story between 'em.
11. Don't ever march home the same way. Take a different route where there might be fresh salvage.
12. No matter whether we travel in big parties or little ones, each party has to keep a scout 20 yards ahead, 20 yards on each flank, and 20 yards in the rear so the main body can't be surprised and wiped out.
13. Don't sit down to eat without posting sentries.
14. Ain't no such thing as a single C. Always act like you're surrounded by a superior force.
15. Don't sleep beyond dawn. Dawn's when raiders and Casualties attack.
16. Don't cross a river by a regular ford - even odds that there's a half-sunk Casualty nearby. Put your gear in a bag and swim across where it's deep enough that they can't stand up.
17. If somebody's trailing you, make a circle, come back onto your own tracks, and ambush the folks that aim to ambush you.
18. Don't stand up when the enemy's coming against you. Kneel down, lie down, hide behind a tree.
19. Let the enemy come till he's almost close enough to touch, then let him have it and jump out and finish him up with your machete. Unless it's a Casualty. Then snipe his ass from as far away as you can.

What can I do with....?

STRENGTH SKILLS

Unarmed: Punch, kick and grapple. Pull away from someone who is grabbing you. Assess someone's skill level and fighting style. Study it for weaknesses.

Resistance: Lift heavy things. Win a shoving contest. Tip a vending machine. Flex. Know good recipes for steamed chicken and broccoli.

Melee: Strike with knives, clubs, or axes. Throw a weapon that is capable of being thrown. Recognize and maintain most hand-to-hand weapons.

SPEED SKILLS 

Athletics: Dodge an attack. Run from danger. Climb a rope. Do a handstand. Throw a rock for accuracy and distance.

Stealth: Hide. Sneak up on someone. Figure out where to look for someone who is hiding. Adopt a disguise. Cover your tracks.

Shoot: Operate, recognize, and maintain most civilian firearms. Relentlessly list off technical specs for various weapons. Get in online fights about gun control.

ADAPTABILITY SKILLS

Awareness: Find something you're looking for in the physical world, or notice things you weren't looking for.

Self-Control: Keep it together under pressure. Resist emotions. Process your feelings. Bottle it all up until you explode in a tornado of violence.

Scavenging: Know where best to look for a specific item or kind of item. Once you've found it, extract it and get it ready for transport/sale/use.

Driving: Drive all kinds of civilian vehicles. Do minor maintenance, e.g. changing tires. Understand mechanics when they talk car jibberish at you.

Criminality: Pick a lock. Lift a wallet. Eyeball a gang and figure out who is in charge. Know where to go to score something illegal.

INTELLIGENCE SKILLS

Foresight: Assert that you packed something or prepared something ahead of time. Predict the likely consequences of an action. Pump the Market for a glimpse into the future.

Research: Get access to a broad range of information on a specific, already-identified topic. Make good use of a library, social gathering, or online resource to do the same.

Mechanics: Fix a thing. Build a thing. Hack a thing to do something else than it was designed for. Recognize what a thing is, if it's mechanical. Figure stuff out about who built/hacked a thing by the way its built/hacked.

First Aid: Use first aid kits, crash bags, etc. to convert Kill to Stun damage or remove Stun damage from a patient.

Profession (X): Do something that people would have paid you for before the Crash. Manage others in that job. Handle finances and procurement for that job. Recognize and use specialized items associated with that job. Socialize or bond with others who used to have the same job.

CHARM SKILLS

Networking: "Know a guy who knows a guy." Find jobs. Find buyers for gear. Replace a listed Reference with a new one.

Persuasion: Convince someone to believe something you think is true. Win an argument.

Sensitivity: Read a room. Read a person. Tell when someone's lying. Detect, in face-to-face conversation, one of their Spots.

Deception: Convince someone to believe something you think is untrue. Keep a poker face. Make up crazy stories.

Intimidation: Threaten someone and have it be believed. Get a sense of what someone is scared of. Know when to back off before someone breaks down completely or attacks you.

Leadership: Project confidence. Present a plan. Seem competent. Cultivate loyalty. Get someone to put a group's needs before their own.

How a road trip framework can work in the Red Markets RPG

So, why base a campaign around a 6x6 truck and an Airstream trailer, anyway?

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.

Inspirational Material!

This is an open page upon which to post links, images, or video that you think the rest of the group would find interesting. Please put newer posts at the top of the page so that old content gets slowly pushed down and out of sight ;)

Living Without Laws: Slab City, USA. Details the anarchic desert community from which, in our game, an enclave has arisen.

Scrapper. A documentary about the buggy-driving outlaw salvagers of the Chocolate Mountain Impact Area. [In-game, this is the community that Prairie's uncle was hooked into before the Crash].

Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea. A documentary (narrated by John Waters!) about the unbelievably weird locale known as the Salton Sea.

Red Market Rules Sidebar: Wasteland Gear

Weapons

Double Barreled Shotgun
Upkeep: 3
Charges: 10
Effect: Kill damage to mid-range
Qualities: Charged, Capped, Cumbersome, Double-Tap (gain Spread and Clunky for next attack)
Upgrades: Slugs, Tactical Sling, Sawed-Off (buys off Cumbersome, becomes Close range)

Vehicles

Electric Battle Buggy (as profiled on IOL Motoring)

Haul Rating: 7
Fuel Demand: 5
Upkeep: 3
Qualities: Off-Road, Alternative Fuel
Upgrades: Reliable (+2 Upkeep), Light Machine Gun (+4 Upkeep)

Other Gear

Hand Crank Generator
Upkeep: 1
Charges: 10
Effect: Spend a charge to transfer any number of Rations as charges to a powered device.
Qualities: Charged
Upgrades: Backup battery: spend 5 charges to refresh a powered device.

Heavy Pack
Upkeep: 1
Effect: Increase Refresh by 1, but decrease Haul by 1. Discard extra Refresh at any time to reset.
Qualities: Static

Glowsticks
Upkeep: 1 (PO)
Charges: 10
Effect: Allows Awareness checks in darkness.

uPhone (aka Burner or Spike)
Upkeep: 1
Charges: 10
Effect: As Ubiq specs, but cannot run apps.
Qualities: Capped, Hungry
Upgrades: Flashlight, Extended Battery (buys off Hungry)

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.

Session 1: Cruel April

[Cold Open]

[Soundtrack: Juno Reactor and Don Davis - Mona Lisa Overdrive (2:20 onwards)]

The convoy's 6x6 truck and Airstream trailer speed down a mountain road as the Takers and their dependents exchange shots with heavily armed raiders on an ATV, a dirt bike, and an armored bus. We meet the Takers:

• Francine, the Latent ex-firefighter who is managing to keep the truck on the road and out of the raiders' gunsights
• Billy, the techie Roach who is blasting away at the dirt bikers with his handgun
• Ash, the ex-Mossad gunrunner who has already blasted out one of the ATV's tires and is lining up his shot for another
• Abalene, the vet and community leader who is struggling to stabilize a wounded child back in the Airstream, and
• Prairie, the crossbow-toting grease monkey who is firing bolt after bolt at the dirt bikers

A desperate exchange of fire leaves the Takers momentarily on top, as Ash takes out the ATV and Prairie takes out the dirt bike despite the riders' heavy police-surplus armor. But at that moment, a huge masked gunman on the raider bus opens fire with a heavy rifle, killing Barky the dog and placing the entire convoy in danger. When Ash wounds the gunman and damages the raider vehicle by dropping a C4 charge on the road behind the Airstream, he appears to heal himself by seizing and biting into the neck of a member of his band, before tossing the man's limp body aside. Before he can level his heavy rifle again, though, Abalene throws a propane tank out of the Airstream's shattered back window, and detonates it with a lucky rifle shot as the bus swerves to avoid it but still loses its front left wheel and axle. The raiders fall back as the convoy speeds ahead to safety.

[Flash Back]

[Soundtrack: Bladeslinger Original Soundtrack ("Deserted Train Yard" onwards)]

We learn about the Takers' most recent home base: the "Free Parking" refugee camps piled up around the wall separating San Diego from the burned-out city of Ramona. There, they have spent months or years painstakingly hustling to scrape together the funds to buy an Airstream trailer and a salvageable 6x6 military truck for their trip East. But - they're coming up short. They need a job to provide the difference, and they need that job to pay something in advance so they can make up the difference.

Francine and Billy both try to reach out to Ignacio, a representative of the criminal Valet networks that pervade the camps. Ignacio puts them in contact with a mysterious patron named "Elle", who needs six heavy duty footlockers moved from Free Parking to a set of GPS coordinates in the abandoned town of Borrego Springs. Abalene leads the negotiations by talking up the team's competence and commitment, with Ash backing her up and providing some credible threats about what will happen to any rival Taker groups should Elle hire them instead. In the meantime, Billy hacks the camp wireless to prevent competitors accessing the Ubiq Hangout that Ignacio has been circulating as the contact point for the job. A deal is struck, and Elle advances sufficient funds to let the Takers pick up the last of the fuel, supplies, and spare parts that they need to get started.

[Flash Return to the road to Borrego Springs]

[Soundtrack: Cliff Martinez, Drive Original Soundtrack ("Rubber Head" onwards)]

After ensuring that the raiders are no longer in pursuit, the convoy pulls over to assess damage. Apart from the vehicles and their inhabitants, they are surprised to find that a hole in one of Elle's crates is leaking blood. Ash uses an endoscope to investigate, revealing that the sealed crates are packed full of ice blocks, glowsticks giving off a steady purple light, and foil envelopes fat with blood. A brief debate takes place between Billy and the others over whether this is smoking-gun evidence of some kind of conspiratorial mass-murder program taking place in the camps, but the debate is resolved in favor of taping up the crate and continuing the delivery. Francine conceals this fact from her dependents who come over to investigate, further straining their relationship.

Moving on, the Takers pause to investigate a casualty who is tangled up in some kind of weather balloon off to one side of the road. They discover that the deflated balloon is in fact the lift system for a weapon drone carrying a payload of six grenades, and bearing a label that they believe identifies its owner ("Magoo") and his location ("Flamingo Springs", a likely enclave a few hours further down the road from Borrejo Springs).

Upon reaching the dropoff location, some misunderstandings between the Takers and the two jumpy gunmen who are waiting to load the crates onto a small helicopter results in a Mexican standoff. Luckily Ash draws on his expertise as a smuggler to ID the gunmen as Yakuza soldiers, and is able to defuse matters. The crates are loaded and the chopper takes off, but barely gets a half mile away before it explodes in a massive fireball. As the first pieces of debris begin to land, Francine's headset rings: it is Elle, who tells Abalene that she is very satisfied with their work, and hopes to be able to call on them for future jobs. As she hangs up, notification comes through that they have received the remainder of their payment for the job.

The Takers now have some surplus funds, but are low on supplies and need to shelter and repair their battle-damaged vehicles. They head east, intending to search for a long-lost relative of Prairie's, who was last heard of salvaging discarded military munitions from the Chocolate Mountain Impact Area bombing range.

Tune in next week for Session 2: Lilacs and Blood Oranges

Introducing:

Dependents

• Paris - Abalene's teen sister, who she is training to be a medic
• Dale - Billy's kid brother, who has a freshly bandaged wound from a shotgun pellet
• Simon Stiles - Prairie's nerdy best friend
• Dan - Francine's tortured artist husband, and their two young boys
• Abigael - Ash's younger sister, who has autism and is a mathematical genius
• Barky the Dog - RIP Barky.

Supporting Cast and Antagonists

• A giant gunman with a skull face
• His raiding band, all decked out in police gear
• Magoo, drone owner
• Ignacio, a Valet
• Elle, mysterious patron with a Southern accent 
• Three unfortunate Yakuza soldiers