201 ADP SkIlls ADP skills are a grab bag of traits prevalent in survivors of a zombie apocalypse. These skills are one-and-done checks. If the Taker fails, they can succeed at cost (according to the Market’s discretion), spend a point of Will, or accept the consequences. They can’t just keep trying until success comes. In situations that allow for such leisure, they shouldn’t be rolling in the first place. Awareness Awareness goes beyond sharp eyes. Taker’s need to have the maps of an area memorized, noses sniffing for the stench of dead flesh, and ears open for the click-clack of a rifle bolt. If the Taker has the opportunity to notice something that might help them out in the future, check Awareness to see if they pick up on it. If the story can’t continue without the clue or information, the Market just tells the players what they see. Awareness determines whether the Taker gets useful information; it does not determine whether the player gets to hear the game’s story. There are no specializations in this skill. Self-Control The ability to control one’s emotions, or at least defer them long enough to finish the job, is vital for a Taker’s survival. The Market calls for Self-Control checks whenever characters witness something horrific, depressing, or otherwise stressful. Success means that damage to the Taker’s Humanity is minimized or negated; failure means one of the character’s threats to Humanity increases. There are no specializations in this skill. Scavenging The ability to find useful things out in the Loss is what the business is all about. It’s an essential survival skill, as well as an effective method of controlling overhead and keeping a crew profitable. Scavenging is used to find materials to repair existing gear or build new tools. It’s used to loot the backpacks of slain enemies and find the best salvage at a job site. SPD SkIlls SPD skills require power with precision. Dodging out of the way of machine gun fire is certainly something a Taker would put a lot of effort into, but going too far could just as easily mean jumping into the path of some bullets. Only one SPD skill requires rations to buy-a-roll (Athletics), but none of them are available if the Taker is gassed. Shoot It does what it says on the tin. The Shoot skill is added to Black in addition to whatever extra charges a player might spend to ensure success. Specializations are needed to operate military grade weapons (e.g. mortars) or archaic projectile weapons such as bows or muskets. Athletics Check Athletics to see if the character can get somewhere quickly. Athletics can also be used to dodge any incoming attack, so long as the Taker has a twitch to spend in that combat round (see p. 278). Need to climb a tree to escape the undead? Athletics. Need to reach that cover to flank the sniper? Athletics. Need to run to the next enclave and warn of the raider attack? Athletics. Characters missing a leg need to specialize in this skill to move effectively with their prosthesis. Stealth Hiding, belly crawling, and staying quiet all require the muscle memory and grace represented by the Stealth skill. Stealth can be used to flank in combat without provoking an attack. Stealth doesn’t cost rations to use, but if the situation calls for speedy sneaking, the Market might rule that rations need to be spent. Bust Rule: Accuracy Counts In this rules variant, rations used for STR skills are only charged when spent on Resistance. For Unarmed and Melee checks, the rolls must always be made at precision difficulty. It doesn’t matter how hard you swing if you don’t hit anything.
202 Foresight Thinking that’s been done beforehand is often mistaken for quick thinking. The Loss demands preparation for every possible contingency. The Market can call for Foresight rolls to see if a player is allowed to Refresh an item if using the High-Stakes Refresh rules (p. 242). More commonly, Foresight is used to get tactical information “on the ground.” For instance, no one is going to know for certain if there are Causalities roaming around in that coal mine or not, but a successful Foresight check can guess which tunnel they would likely congregate in. Want to know what the weather is going to do? That’s going to be a Foresight check to see if the character remembers to check the forecast. There are no specializations in this skill. Research Research is essential for getting the scoop on lucrative contracts and arriving to negotiations prepared. It’s also useful for scanning networks for any intel that could save lives out in the Loss. Research is only rolled when learning a bit of information might help characters succeed or profit. Clues essential for moving the job forward are just given to the players without a skill check. Players that want to know some unrelated bit of knowledge can simply narrate that bit of the setting. Research requires some electronic gear (or at the very least a library) in order to access the information. There are no specializations in this skill. Mechanics You find a device that runs on electricity: can you fix it, hack it, build it, and power it? Make a Mechanics check to find out. This also includes a general understanding of physics and construction techniques required to make, repair, and repurpose items with moving parts or construct tools capable of withstanding repeated stress. A high score in this skill means you can carve a war club, take apart an engine, or build a chair with enough materials and time. Mechanics is a Most commonly, Scavenging determines just how much bounty can be found amongst the disgusting rags of slain casualties. There are no specializations in this skill. Driving Driving a car is something every character can do. Driving a car down a wreck-strewn, abandoned country road with a Vector trying to punch through the windshield is not something every character could do. Drive checks are only called for in this latter instance. If there is no danger in failure, assume the character knows which one is the gas and keep the dice in the bag. Specializations in Drive can be taken for unusual vehicles that require extensive training to operate: tanks, planes, boats, etc. Criminality A character’s general knowledge of bad behavior, ranging from how much weed is in a dime bag to the best place to hide a body. If someone needs to pick a lock, spot a pickpocket, or figure out which one is the gang leader, those are all Criminality checks. There are other skills for more high-tech crimes like computer hacking or insider trading. Criminality specifically measures the analog bad behavior only mastered in the slums of society. There are no specializations in this skill, as any specific forms of larceny (spying, pyramid schemes, etc) would best be represented by a Profession (see p. 203). INT SkILls INT skills are one-and-done checks. The Taker either knows how to do it or they don’t. Failing INT skill checks should never hold up the story, though. Tapping References (p. 210) is the primary way to succeed at cost while still getting the desired information. As mental actions, INT skills don’t require spends to buy a skill check. However, since INT skills are widely applicable, the Market may call for charges to be spent on associated gear. For instance, using Research to find some juicy gossip on Ubiq wi-fi would require a charge from a laptop’s battery life.
203 with Profession: Security Consultant or Profession: Computer Science could take a shot. Likewise, the best car mechanic in the world is screwed if trying to shut down an overheating nuclear reactor, but the lady with Profession: Nuclear Physicist has a chance. Profession skills describe what a Taker did before the Crash. Anything that helped them survive in the wasteland should become a tough spot (p. 185). So no one should be taking “Profession: Zombie-killer” or anything else sufficiently game breaking. Jobs too silly for a good character backstory don’t deserve representation on the character sheet. Furthermore, the real-world difficulty of specializing in multiple skill sets is emulated by the mechanics. The first Profession skill can be bought regularly, but the price for a second Profession jumps to 2 skill points per +1 bonus. A third Profession skill would only reach +1 after 3 skill points were dumped into it. Loading up on Profession skills shows diminishing returns. CHA SkILls Skills under this Potential are unique because they have two distinct uses. In the majority of gameplay, they are one-and-done checks made as players interact with NPCs and other Market forces. A success means the PCs get what they want. Failure means the Taker must try a different social tactic, suffer the consequences, or tap a Reference to help (if applicable). However, the negotiation rules complicate CHA skills and provide each one a unique role in securing prices and contracts. These special cases are explained in depth in Negotiation (see p. 320) CHA skills do not require any charges be spent to buy-a-roll unless a piece of charged gear is being used to facilitate communication (such as battery life on a communication device). There are no specializations in CHA skills. measure of general handiness, so there are no specializations in this skill. Any devices sufficiently advanced to need a specialization should be covered by a Profession skill instead (see below). First Aid First Aid refers exclusively to battlefield medicine. If you want to nurse someone back to health over a period of months or stop the enclave’s dysentery epidemic, take Profession: Doctor. If you want to keep your gutshot friend from bleeding out, invest in First Aid. First Aid doesn’t require any charges to make a check, but it is one-anddone for each injury. Charges from a first aid kit or scavenged supplies don’t actually heal hit boxes. Spending more charges merely increases the chance of success. The amount healed depends on the Black, and it spends at a 2-to-1 ratio: it takes one Black to turn a box from Kill to Stun damage, and another to erase Stun damage. This means that a success in First Aid can only stop a character from bleeding out and heal some damage. There are no specializations in this skill. Profession: X Profession skills are essentially free specializations. Every Profession skill must have some sort of recognized occupation attached to it, and the skill rating refers to anything the player can reasonably argue is part of that job’s skill set. For instance, a character with the skill “Profession: Doctor 3” would have a +3 to treating a flu, stitching wound, prescribing medication, researching the Blight, reading a medical chart, and much more. Though they are more versatile than other specializations, the function of Profession skills is similar in that it allows a chance for success where there was none before. Let’s say a player wants to use Criminality to break into a vault, but the door is guarded by a biometric security lock. An average street thug wouldn’t know where to begin bypassing such advanced hardware, but someone
204 Sensitivity Sensitivity is a combination of empathy, psychology, and sociology. This skill check picks up on aspects of characters’ personalities that they would prefer stay hidden. Sensitivity in negotiations is vital for figuring out a client’s spots in the moment. Deception Tell a lie and be believed. Deception in negotiation moves Sway by utilizing false promises, or it can be used to maintain a poker face when a client exploits a PC’s spot. In either instance, failing a Deception test always has negative consequences. Intimidation Scare an NPC with words and actions. Intimidation is used in negotiations for a “walk away” bluff that can end negotiation early. Networking Make a Networking check to find the person with the goods you need. Networking can be used to get leads for jobs, source gear for purchase, or contact References. If a Reference is paid off, a Networking check can replace a listed reference with an NPC more useful to the current situation. Most negotiations start with a Networking check that gives the crew a lead on the job. Persuasion Checks for Persuasion are limited to situations in which the PCs are trying to convince an NPC of something that is true; misinformation or coercion call for different skills. As with all CHA skills, players should roleplay their rhetorical appeal to the NPC rather than merely “make a Persuasion check.” In negotiation, Persuasion is the primary means of gaining Sway (see p. 327).
205 Dependents are people the Taker loves and cares for at their home enclave. Were it not for these loved ones, the Taker might work a small job, get paid in rations, and never risk leaving the fence. But life in the Loss is short and brutal, and life in the Recession cutthroat and competitive. The Red Markets are the only hope for these Dependents to get out and the Taker is their only lifeline. Dependents aren’t totally helpless, but for one reason or another, they don’t fare well in the cutthroat survival capitalism of the Loss. Exactly why is up to the player to describe. Perhaps they were crippled physically or emotionally by the Crash. Maybe they’re too young or too old to earn their keep in an enclave. More than likely, they just lack the skills the carrion economy demands and their labors don’t rake in enough bounty to pay all the bills. Whatever the reason, Dependents can’t thrive without the financial assistance of a Taker. The bounty they receive might literally keep them alive by stocking food and medicine. Or perhaps the death waiting beneath the Taker’s safety net is more figurative. For instance, one character might risk death in the Loss to keep her sister out of a brothel, or to protect a delicate child’s musical genius from being dulled by brutal physical labor. It’s up to players to name the NPCs that make up their character’s family, develop their backstories, and explain why the Taker supports them. The Market (or another person at the table named by the PC) is responsible for playing the Dependent in any scenes where they interact (see “Vignettes” p. 415). Narratively, these characters make up the populace of a crew’s enclave. They serve as a reminder that no one chases wealth out in the Loss without good reason. Innocent people back home have their lives on the line... the bottom line. AssIgnIng Dependents Example Morgan figures Mal survived the initial outbreaks due to her isolation. She lived far away from her family. Her few friends at the Leadership Leadership differs from Persuasion in both size and circumstance. Want to get a merchant to give you a discount? That’s just a Persuasion check. Want to get the whole enclave to agree to an income tax? That’s Leadership. Convince a date meet you at a restaurant? Persuasion. Convince an army to follow you into hell? Leadership. This skill also determines the length of negotiations by measuring general assuredness and body language. AssIgnIng SkIlls Example Mal only ever worked to pay for her tinkering habit. She’s trained her whole life to be a mechanic, phoning in every other occupation. So Morgan takes Profession: Full-time Mechanic 3, figuring it represents her character’s past and is more versatile than wasting points in something more general like “Mechanics.” She got First Aid 1 in a CPR course, Research 1 from public schools, and Foresight 2 for having her head screwed on straight. There’s nothing quite so fun as exploding a zombie skull with a wrench, so Mal has Melee 2. Still, close combat is a bad idea because Mal is neither Latent nor Immune. She puts one skill point in all the SPD skills so she won’t be totally helpless at range. Mal’s always on the hunt for parts. She takes Awareness 2 and Scavenging 2. Drive 2 helps navigate the clogged roads on her supply runs. She throws in Self-Control 1 because the Crash hardened her. Finally, while Mal is too standoffish to be much use negotiating contracts, Morgan figures she’s okay at reading people and takes a point in Sensitivity. Dependents CHA determines the number of Dependents a Taker has to support and be supported by. The more social a character is, the easier it is for them to become tangled in messy relationships.
206 of Humanity damage, which is the currency of a character’s emotional well-being. Humanity is tracked along three “threats” that endanger sanity out in the Loss: Detachment, Trauma, and Stress. The complete Humanity rules are explained later (p. 310), but the only other way to recover Humanity is by spending bounty to relax and recover between jobs. Time used relaxing, healing, and recovering is not spent scavenging, repairing, and working towards survival. The opportunity cost of trying to stay sane eats up capital like anything else, and the price of healing invisible wounds can really stack up after a particularly horrific mission. Dependents help alleviate the burden by providing quality time. At the beginning of the session or the end of the current job, players get a vignette scene between their character and a Dependent of their choice. The player, the Market, and any other PC stepping in to roleplay a Dependent can negotiate any kind of scene they wish, picking from the three themes or narrating some other kind of interaction. Perhaps one Taker spends newfound wealth building his kids a swing set. Another might buy a rare book to cheer up an ailing grandparent. The grizzled veteran of the Loss could spend his free time nursing an old war buddy back to health using medicine purchased with hardwon bounty. Regardless of the narrative details, the goal of these vignettes is to show the PCs recovering from the trauma of the Loss in the company of loved ones. It’s a regular reminder as to why these characters fight. Restorative downtime with a Dependent can heal up to an entire column of Humanity damage. The term column is meant literally. Let’s look at an example: garage were casual. As the news grew worse and they stopped showing up for work, Mal just picked up more shifts. By the time things got out of hand, there was no one worth the risk of saving. She lived through the few months of terror alone and was starting to wonder if survival was worth it just before she found an enclave. That’s where she met Janice. Morgan figures Mal has no patience for useless people, so her attraction to Janice originally came from her expertise as a chef. Sadly, cuisine out in the Loss is more about calories than taste, so there is little Janice can do to earn her way beyond basic cooking and physical labor. Morgan decides Janice is one of the few people in the world that can make Mal laugh and that her character would kill to protect that. Morgan writes Janice down on her sheet in as a Dependent. When it comes time to roleplay scenes between the two, Morgan can pick among the three themes for vignettes (see p. 416). If Mal needs help, the lovers can try to pretend the terrors of Mal’s job stay outside (the “Cope” theme). If Janice has problems, the player assuming her role might ask Mal to secure some spices so she can show the enclave how to really make broth (the “Support” theme). If Morgan just wants to define the enclave more deeply, she could narrate the pair’s trip to a driving range set up on the roof of an abandoned building (the “Engage” theme). Since the Market has to manage the scene and play different roles depending on the theme, more detail on the themes is included in “Structure of a Campaign” (p. 413). Players need only remember that vignettes can either focus their characters, their Dependents, or their community. The BenefIts of Dependents Dependents are more than resource drains. The emotional support they provide is essential to any Taker’s survival. For every fully supported Dependent available (not Needy, Strained, or Broken), the Taker automatically heals one column’s worth Friends are a costly luxury, and when one invests one’s capital in a mission in life, one cannot afford to have friends. -Henrik Ibsen
207 GRAPHIC: Show the Humanity threats with 2 Detachment, 3 Trauma, and 3 Stress. An eraser streak cuts through the 3rd Trauma and Stress, an arrow labeling the erasure ‘Janice’ Now, if Mal had a second Dependent, she could reduce her Humanity damage down to 1 Detachment, 1 Trauma, and 1 Stress. This scene doesn’t even have to be roleplayed. The Taker receives the support of additional Dependents “off-screen”. A third Dependent would have removed all of Mal’s Humanity damage after only a single vignette scene. GRAPHIC: New eraser line goes through the 2nd box of Detachment, Trauma, and Stress. New line is labeled “2nd Dependent.” Another eraser cuts through the 1st box on each threat, labeled “3rd Dependent.” In this example, Mal has healed two points worth of Humanity damage for the 1 bounty it took to keep her Dependents healthy and happy. Had she two loved ones, she would have healed 5 points for 2 bounty. At three? 8 Humanity for 3 bounty. Compare that with the 8 bounty it would cost to heal that much Humanity by paying to heal each individual box. Maintaining relationships makes sense economically even before factoring in the emotional penalties for neglecting a Taker’s loved ones. NeglectIng Dependents If a Dependent doesn’t receive at least one bounty in a session, the relationship with the Taker begins to degrade. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone in the Taker’s life is a gold-digging monster. The bounty spent on the Dependent often represents opportunity cost. The cost might not mean someone is starving; it might mean that daddy had to work and missed daughter’s recital. The exact form financial stress takes is up to those roleplaying the Taker and the Dependent. VIgnette/HumanIty Heals Example Mal picks the “cope” theme, meaning time with her Dependent is meant to help the Taker forget the horrors she’s recently witnessed. Morgan picks a fellow player, Bailey, to play Mal’s girlfriend, Janice, leaving the Market to help describe the scene and represent the haunting trauma of Mal’s job. Morgan says that Mal has organized a date with her fiancé back at the enclave, complete with solar-powered iPod jazz, candles, and actual spaghetti (this represents the bounty spend on the relationship). As the goal of the scene is to simply help Mal recover, Janice expresses gratitude for the lovely dinner and asks about her partner’s day. The Market, as the reminder of everything the Loss won’t let a Taker forget, narrates that Mal hears screaming, faintly, just beneath Kind of Blue playing in the background. It sounds a lot like that soldier she saw crushed under a tide of Vectors not two nights ago. The Market calls for a Self-Control check to inform Morgan’s roleplaying. Morgan rolls. The success or failure of the dice doesn’t have a mechanical penalty in a vignette unless the group is using Bust rules; they merely inform roleplaying. Even a bad night spent bickering with family is better than a night alone with the undead. If the dice check fails, Mal will become distracted or uncomfortable with Janice’s questions, the trauma of the past intruding on her carefully planned evening. If the Self-control check succeeds, Mal turns up the music, redirects the conversation away from her crew’s “adventures,” and asks Janice how her work at the kitchen is going. Mal has a Humanity damage of 2 Detachment, 3 Trauma, and 3 Stress. After roleplaying the vignette, Morgan begins healing on the track with the most damage. She erases all the tic marks in the 3rd vertical column because that’s the most Humanity damage she’s taken. A column’s worth of Humanity restoration would restore the Taker to 2 Detachment, 2 Trauma, and 2 Stress (the Detachment threat wouldn’t change because the 3rd dot hadn’t yet been filled).
208 Regret (see p. 313). There’s no way to mitigate the damage; it hurts to lose the ones you love. Relationships can be healed much the same way as Humanity: one bounty erases one dot of damage. If a relationship is Needy, spending one bounty on the Dependent for that session would only keep the situation from getting worse; it would take another bounty to erase the damage done. When roleplaying a strained relationship between Taker and Dependent, remember that the consequences of poverty are extreme, multi-faceted, and often permanent. One recent study by the NCBI shows that a recently unemployed person is 25% more likely to die of cancer, 18% more likely to get divorced, and can expect a year-and-ahalf knocked off their life expectancy even if they recover. Chances of suffering from mental illness skyrocket, as do chances of imprisonment. A .01% increase in the national Mechanically, there are three levels that track a relationship at risk. After one missed bounty, the Dependent is “Needy.” This means the NPC has to do without and suffers for it by going hungry, cold, alone, or any other way the Market describes. The Taker must make a Self-Control check against Stress upon seeing the struggling loved one. After another missed bounty, the Dependent is “Strained,” hanging on by a thread physically, emotionally, financially, or all three. The Taker must make another SelfControl check against Stress as the situation worsens. At “Severed,” the Taker loses all contact with the Dependent. The Market might kill them off, have them lose contact, or inflict a fate worse than death. Regardless, a severed Dependent is lost forever. The Market picks the threat that most fits the tragedy and rounds up Humanity damage to the nearest
209 to do another scene at all. That’s okay. Since the Taker’s share a vignette, both can heal Humanity as if they role-played their scenes separately, or they can do vignettes with different Dependents. • It could get awkward. All the standard penalties for neglecting Dependents apply. Letting a relationship become severed isn’t going to result in anything as extreme as one of the Takers dying, but neglect breaks the relationship so severely that the Humanity damage is the same. Players are expected to roleplay accordingly. If Lug and Nut become estranged, the rest of the crew can expect some really awkward conversations as they trek between job sites. • Love hurts. If Lug watches Nut take an arrow to the throat, the emotional trauma typical of such tragedy gets much, much worse. Any Humanity damage suffered for seeing a fellow Taker harmed gets compounded by the damage of seeing it happen to a Dependent. So, if a member of the crew dying would call for a level-3 Self-Control check, that Humanity damage is only going to be added after the Market rounds a threat up to the nearest Regret (the penalty for losing a Dependent). If you get your Dependent killed, expect to go very crazy, very fast. unemployment rate contributes to over 1,500 additional suicides the same year. And all of this horror is in a mundane world without the undead. In conclusion, when Dependents are hurting, the Taker feels their pain. When Dependents are happy, the Taker still suffers the deprivations of the Loss, but at least they don’t have to do it alone. Takers as Dependents So you want to be in a relationship with another Taker in the crew? It’s allowed, but it’s dangerous as hell. Office romance is generally discouraged, especially when the office is a deadly apocalyptic wasteland. As unpleasant as it may be to shoot a Blight-infected peer in the head, it’s way worse when it’s a best friend, sibling, or spouse. But for groups that want a more intimate cast of characters, using fellow Takers as Dependents can help focus on the crew’s interactions both inside and outside the fence. For players that want their characters involved despite the risk, here are the rules for writing other Takers in as Dependents. • It must be reciprocal. If Lug writes Nut in as his Dependent, Nut must accept Lug as well. Life is too short for one-sided love affairs. Dependents must be equally invested in each other. • Money is time. Time is money. Among Takers, the bounty required to support Dependents always represents opportunity cost. This means that characters don’t merely exchange currency. The bounty is spent on shots at the bar, batteries for the game console, birth control pills, or whatever other costs accrue from the pair spending time together. • It isn’t exclusive. Just because Nut decides to have vignette with Lug, it doesn’t mean Lug has to do another vignette with Nut. Lug might need to see his ailing mother, or he may not want MBA Rules: Work/LIfe Balance In the basic rules, all players get a “work” scene and “life” scene every session. The work scene is always a Scam or negotiation. The life scene is always a vignette with Dependents. In advanced play, life scenes can be traded for extra work scenes and vice versa, but messing with Work/Life balance always has consequences (see p. 434). Only groups playing with the MBA rules have to worry about Work/ Life balance; otherwise, everyone gets one vignette per game.
210 collar, an IT professional working in Ubiq City. The enclave’s best pickpocket can be subcontracted for a scam if someone calls in a favor with Sister Sticky-Fingers. Basically, References operate like additional Will points for certain rolls. They can’t help a bullet find its target, but they can score you ammunition if you give them a few hours. Unlike Will, however, References must be cultivated over time and require work to maintain. The Use of Favors Getting favors from a Reference requires some role-playing. The overall goal of these vignettes is for the Taker to explain how exactly they want the contact to help. As long as the relationship is in good repair and the Taker makes the call, the Reference agrees to help. Rather than actually negotiating, the Market instead uses the scene as an opportunity to explore the character’s history. More on roleplaying a reference scene can be found in “Roleplaying References” (see p.211). Mechanically, as long as a Reference would reasonably have the expertise to help and be able to telecommute, the dice check is an automatic success. So while Greasy Sue can’t drive the car over the phone, she can walk someone through how to repair it if they have a working webcam. References can be used to succeed one-and-done rolls that failed, and Takers can loan their References to each other. References aren’t an automatic win; they represent success at a cost. Failure is less interesting than how much characters are willing to pay to succeed. Each Reference favor costs a bounty that must be paid back in time and favors from the Taker. If the Reference’s generosity isn’t returned, the relationship decays just like a neglected Dependent. Once a Reference is “Needy,” they require a Networking test to contact. At “Strained,” Networking is required to contact them and the player needs to use a Charm skill successfully to convince the Reference the References In addition to the number of Dependents a Taker has, CHA determines the number of References the character can rely on at any given time. Whereas the relationship between Dependents and Takers is based on mutual financial and emotional need, References are purely professional contacts. Their opinions of the PC can range from devotion to loathing, but the Loss doesn’t care much for sentimentality. As long as it pays to stay civil, people work together. Rather than help a Taker stay sane between jobs, References are specialists that fill in gaps in the character’s skill set. They’re almost always contacted remotely and can be located both in and out of the Recession. If a crew is tapping its References, it means they’re outsourcing expertise they can’t manage themselves. But even in the midst of an apocalypse, consultation fees can be a bitch. ReputatIon Economy References are professional contacts made out in the Loss. DHQS Stewards, rebel militiamen, believers, other Takers – these are people the character has worked with before. Aside from their useful mechanical benefits, References are an opportunity to explore a character’s past. Nobody made it clean through the Crash and five years of hell. Why is the Taker working with the current crew and not with the Reference? What happened on those early jobs? How did the Taker make it through those chaotic early months? Tapping a Reference is an opportunity to explore all these questions and more. See “Roleplaying References” p. 211 for more on roleplaying a reference scene. Mechanically, References offer a way for players to recover from failed one-anddone INT and CHA skill checks. Using Ubiq specs or a laptop to contact experts allows for success at a cost (see p. 175). That failed Research check can become a success with one call to Whitey White-
211 Market can make them a believer in the Black Math cult (faction). Try to bring up moments in the character’s past while negotiating for whatever favor the Taker needs, especially if other members of the crew are listening. The golden rule of improv applies to these quick vignettes: don’t negate. Try to always respond to new information with “Yes, and...” or “Yes, but...” For example, if the Market, roleplaying as a Steward spy, mentions the time that Mal did some sabotage for the DHQS, Mal’s player should try to resist stopping the game dead to say that didn’t happen. For instance, Morgan can say, “Yeah, Mal pulled that job for DHQS... in an attempt to get vital intel about a settlement she later robbed. Good thing this citizen sap never got wise to how she scammed the whole contract.” A Reference may think the player did some deed in the past and suggest as much to others, but only the player can decide if it’s true or a misconception. A player always has control of what the character actually did in the past. By refusing to negate each other, Mal gets her favor and the Market gets a juicy plot hook if Mal ever severs ties with the Steward. The other unalienable right players possess in a Reference scene is naming the NPC, though they can abdicate to the Market if they’re short on ideas. BuyIng Gear The gear list is described in more depth on p. 245. New characters start off with 10 bounty to buy starting equipment. Everybody gets a backpack and one unit of rations for free. Normally, purchasing gear in game requires using References and Networking to find sellers, but players can buy whatever they want at the outset. Gear is typically priced at its upkeep x2, but starting equipment is sold at upkeep in bounty. Gear in Red Markets drains resources as long as they are owned. Life-saving equipment requires constant maintenance, replacement, and recharging, so there are few things a character is ‘good for it.’ At “Severed,” the Reference no longer returns the Taker’s call and they may be actively seeking retribution for unpaid debts. Any debts so neglected permanently eliminate that Reference slot as the carrion economy learns better than to accept the Taker’s false promises. As the use of a Reference is somewhat contextual, wait to assign them until they are needed in play. Any reference that isn’t currently “Needy” can be reassigned. So if a computer specialist was useful in the last job, but what the team really needs now is a demolitions expert, Mal can sub in a new reference by erasing the old NPC and writing in a more useful personality. RoleplayIng References The relationship between a Reference and a Taker is a collaboration between the player and the Market. After all, it was hard to be picky about one’s friends during the Crash. Five years on and there isn’t a survivor left that hasn’t made some compromises. But with that said, no player should have their character’s past completely defined by the Market. It’s good to have a give-and-take when roleplaying a scene with a Reference. The easiest way to define the relationship is to focus on faction and attitude. Split the duties of describing those two elements of a reference. For instance, if the Taker wants to know someone in a group of radical Canadian rebels (faction), the Market gets to say that the reference “always knew they’d come crawling back one day” (attitude). Conversely, if the Taker really needs a best friend (attitude), the Bust Rule: Interest Reference relationships decay, just like neglected Dependents. So, failing to pay back a favor for one session wouldn’t require one bounty to make things right. One bounty would only keep the References from going strained; two would be needed to clear the debt.
212 Mal wants to use her Reference and have access to technical specs on the fly, so she buys Ubiq Specs: AR glasses that double as a wearable computer and phone. She upgrades the gear by hosting GhoulNet, allowing any of her teammates with electronic communications into a tactical network. That’s 4 bounty gone, but Mal is now the hub of the team’s communications. As a mechanic, Mal’s responsibilities are scavenging loot, repairing vehicles, and breaking into secure doors. She buys a toolkit and the “tailored” upgrade so she doesn’t have to worry about the noise. That’s 7 bounty spent of her starting 10. Nobody goes out in the Loss without a weapon. As much as Morgan liked the idea of wrench fighting, a tomahawk just sounds too cool. She spends a bounty to buy the weapon and another to get the Sturdy upgrade. Mal could really use a ranged weapon, but Morgan thinks she could scavenge one at some point during the job. The only problem is avoiding a casualty bite in the meanwhile. After some deliberation, Morgan spends another bounty on the “weighted” upgrade. She figures Mal can keep her distance by throwing the tomahawk if things get bad. Owing to her scavenger tough spot, Mal has 10 more bounty to spend than the rest of her crew. However, she’s already up to 6 bounty in equipment upkeep (upgrades don’t count towards upkeep). That’s without factoring in the 3 bounty needed for rent, food, and keeping Janice happy and healthy. Morgan doesn’t want to saddle her character with too much overhead before the game even starts, so Mal banks the bounty for a rainy day. Gear Packages Don’t want to dive into the full gear list yet? That’s fine. Here are ten packages of gear and upgrades designed for roles crews often need. Copy one over to your character sheet and get started. All Takers start with a backpack and rations for free at character creation. Taker can purchase and forget about. Players should understand that, though they may buy whatever they wish at the outset, the characters are going to be expected to meet the upkeep of all that gear by the end of the session. BuyIng Gear Example Morgan sees her fellow players investing heavily zombie-slaying skills and equipment. She’s always figured Mal earned the respect of the crew with her technical expertise; Morgan tells everyone she’s going for utility rather than firepower. Mal, like every other character, starts with a backpack and rations. She’ll be responsible for paying upkeep on those items at the end of the job (1 bounty each), but for now, they are completely free items.
213 MedIC Built for: battlefield medicine, infection prevention and care Gear: First Aid Kit, Suppresin K-7864, Handgun Upgrades: +0 Upgrades Scout Built for: stealth, casualty avoidance, intelligence gathering and relay Gear: Binoculars, Handgun, Scent Blocker, Ubiq Specs Upgrades: +2 Upgrades SnIper Built for: overwatch, ranged attack, damage Gear: Heavy Rifle, Ubiq Specs Upgrades: +3 Upgrades Tank Built for: Melee, chokepoints, frontline casualty engagement Gear: Chainmail, Machete Upgrades: +1 Upgrade TechIe Built for: surveillance, salvage, comms Gear: Drone, Electronics Kit, Ubiq Specs Upgrades: +2 Upgrades Doorman Built for: Casualty management, chokepoint control, breaking and entering Gear: DDJ’s, Lockpicker’s Kit, Warhammer Upgrades: +2 Upgrades Grease Monkey Built for: finding value, dismantling scrap, repairing salvage, and starting vehicles Gear: Shotgun, Toolkit, Ubiq Specs Upgrades: +4 Upgrades Hunter Built for: movement, sustainability, efficiency, animal handling Gear: Bicycle, Bow, Dog Upgrades: +5 Upgrades Latent Built for: infected melee, running point Gear: Axe, Carpet Gauntlets/Greaves, Handgun Upgrades: +3 Upgrades Manager Built for: power negotiation, leadership, social engineering, communications. Gear: Club, Laptop/Pad Upgrades: +6 Upgrades
214 CampaIgn Play If the group is only playing a one-shot or trying out the system, character creation is done. Extended play is called a campaign. Groups looking to play through a large series of jobs have two additional steps: retirement plans and enclave generation. Retirement plans provide characters with a financial means of visualizing personal development, a long-term goal, and an exit strategy. Enclave generation places all the characters in a shared community that they must fight both to protect and to escape. The Market is in negotiations with the players for both of these processes (see p. 413), but everything players need to know can be found in this section. RetIrement Plans Retirement plans are for long-term campaign play. For shorter games, feel free to make characters that don’t have retirement plans, or at least don’t stat them out. It’s fine for a oneshot character to talk about her dream of one day founding her own enclave. It’s not going to come up again beyond this one job, so don’t worry about it during character generation. A running subplot in any campaign, however, is just how expensive dreams can be to realize; the retirement plan reflects that struggle. Takers don’t want to do this forever. They can’t. No matter how experienced, life in the Loss wears people thin. Wounds stack up. Emotional trauma strains relationships, making future hardships all the more maddening. Clients take the bounty and run, leaving crews with dead friends and nothing to show for it. Nobody’s luck lasts forever. A bite still means a bullet and it only takes one. The stress is omnipresent and shattering. On a long enough timeline, the Loss always wins. The only thing that makes the job bearable is the hope it affords. A lot of enclavists are going to die on the wrong side of the border. They might be felled by some long extinct disease or dogpiled by Vectors in the next outbreak. Whatever does it, they’ll never know another day without the stench of death. CHARACTER ADVANCEMENT Character Advancement is achieved in the game like everything else: by spending bounty. Time spent reading about or practicing a new skill uses resources and detracts from the everyday tasks of maintaining an enclave. Bounty is spent on the material requirements of practice (i.e. ammo, books, online courses, parts, battery life, etc.). Time not spent scavenging, performing maintenance, or seeking employment costs bounty as well. Advancing a skill to +1 point, costs 1 bounty. Advancing skill to +2, costs 2 bounty. To +3, 3 bounty... and so on. Each additional point of Potential costs 10 bounty each. All other bounty is spent on upkeep, healing health, restoring Humanity, buying gear, installing upgrades, or, in campaign play, is banked towards the retirement plan.
215 detailed description and some inspiration, check out “Uniform Plans” on p. 216. Dreams and Central Motivation Characters good enough to survive as Takers are skilled enough to earn a safe living inside an enclave. But that’s it – just a living. Most enclaves survive by the work-or-die philosophy. Rations earned must be split between the worker and any Dependents unable to care for themselves. Don’t expect vacation, or benefits, or mercy if anybody gets too sick to work. Workers that never venture into the Loss trade all their freedom, hope, and joy for the privilege of security. Everyone else is willing to cower and pray for someone else to come save them. But Takers fight for hope every day, tooth-andclaw. They literally find life as an enclave slave scarier than the myriad of deaths promised by the Loss. A good retirement plan needs to be more than a financial goal. It’s the central motivation and driving force in the Taker’s life. No Danger = No Game Characters that retire are out of the game. They no longer go out on jobs. This could be because they’ve smuggled their whole family into the Recession, become the leader of a new enclave, stocked an isolationist compound atop a mountain, founded a management company for multiple Taker groups, etc. Regardless, nobody that retires is coming back. A quiet life free from the dangers of being eaten, infected, and shot was the only reason to be a Taker in the first place. Retired characters can stay in contact as References, but that’s it. Keep in mind: just because characters have enough bounty to retire doesn’t mean they have to pay the bill instantly. Takers can choose to sit on their escape plan until the rest of the crew can afford to get out too. But the casualties don’t care that you have a mansion waiting for you in Florida. The he-was-two-days-from-retirement cliché isn’t as funny when you could have been sipping scotch instead of getting your face eaten off. They’ll never be able to promise their kids a world without monsters. The most they can look forward to eking-out just enough to keep being afraid and miserable. While the Taker life is awful, it pays. Takers can expect horror, pain, gnawing terror, hopelessness, futility... and fat stacks of bounty. The careful and the lucky can survive long enough to beat the odds and cash out. The legendary Takers aren’t the ones that took down the most casualties or pulled the biggest jobs; they’re the ones that smuggled their families to the land of hot showers, clean clothes, and safety. Any Taker worth his salt has a retirement plan. The one without an exit strategy hasn’t been over the fence, or has been over to often. Lost for LIfe Some players might not want to make a retirement plan for campaign play, either. That’s fine so long as the player realizes that, without a retirement plan, the character is doomed and knows it. A campaign character without a retirement plan is considered “lost for life.” Perhaps they’ve fooled themselves that they’ll get around to it one day, or maybe they have a legitimate deathwish. Whatever the reason, Takers without a retirement plans endlessly grind away in the carrion economy until their Humanity, health, or luck runs out. Still, it can be narratively interesting to have a lifer amongst a crew where everyone else is just trying to get out. As Takers fulfill their retirement plans and head to safety, roleplay the heart-wrenching goodbyes. If they reenter the game as new Takers, the “lost for life” character faces harder and harder SelfControl checks as more fresh faces march on towards the grave. Components of a Plan Retirement plans are about safety: for the Taker and their Dependents. Players can plan and save for whatever they feel meets that goal. What follows are the components of a successful retirement plan in the broadest possible terms. For those that want more
216 can never dictate a retirement plan or its milestones to a player, but the Market does get to negotiate the price of those milestones. UnIform Plan It may be free from the Blight, but the Recession is far from perfect. Smart Takers don’t just jump the fence into a refugee camp. Nobody wants to risk the undead only to get enslaved, killed, or exploited like every other sap. The Loss is as often a resource as an executioner, and most Takers risk sticking around long enough to make a safe place for themselves on the other side. A house, a straight job, legitimacy – such modest dreams seem downright grandiose when you’re out on a job. As such, most retirement plans have the same simple milestones. Get Papers Anyone with some luck and the cover of night can hop a border into the Recession. But everyone caught out in the Loss is homo sacer: legally dead. For the audacity of surviving in the wasteland, the reward is a total surrender of all rights and protection under the law. Those caught back in civilization without proper identification can be robbed and killed with impunity... and that’s just what the neighbors do. Law enforcement and the military shoot on sight for the crime of giving the proles hope their families might still be alive out there. Staying in the Recession for any amount of time is going to require forged documents and that means getting in touch with criminal elements. Fraud is as illegal as it is common; quality IDs require a combination of identity theft, social engineering, and bribes, all of which are expensive. The first milestone requires working with a Valet or other criminal faction to secure forged papers. Get a Safe House Legitimacy only gets people past checkpoints; documents don’t keep them warm and fed. Takers and their Dependents need a place to stay while they get on their feet in the Naming Successors A player that retires has the right to name their replacement in the crew. It could be one of their References, an NPC from earlier in the campaign, or a completely new character. They can also gift the new player any gear they want, but it’s up to the new Taker to pay for the upkeep. Milestones Getting out of the Loss is a step-by-step process. Each retirement plan is made up of smaller milestones that the player must purchase and roleplay. For instance, Dono can’t just whisk his family away to the Recession and live happily ever after: they need forged papers, smugglers to get them across the border, a place to live on the other side, etc. Players save up for each milestone. The default cost of milestones is 20 bounty, but it can be more or less depending on the Market’s quote (see below). Once a milestone is reached, the character’s next vignette is dedicated to roleplaying it out. The financial reality gets played out in the narrative world. Long-term Investment A Taker’s retirement plan doubles as a savings account. If the character comes up short on upkeep that week, they can raid their retirement plan if they’re willing to risk a Self-Control check against Stress. Retirement plans can be changed at any time, but every milestone reached goes away once plans shift. Changing plans after reaching a milestone also requires a Self-Control check. Nothing threatens Stress quite like watching hardearned bounty frittered away on a distraction. Market Quotes The standard retirement plan is three milestones long and costs 20 bounty per milestone. But players might have extravagant retirement plans, or the Market might want to run a shorter campaign. In these instances, the player and the Market work together to customize a retirement plan. A Market
217 Get to Safety Takers have to hop fences all the time to bid for jobs in the Recession. But running the border is one thing if you’re a hardened veteran, quite another if you’re a soft enclavist that hasn’t seen wasteland since the Crash. Organizing transport, hiring smugglers, bribing guards – all of it takes bounty and, more importantly, luck. Protecting Dependents from the cruelty of the Loss is the reason most people get into this job, but a Taker can’t shelter family forever. They’ll have to survive at least one mission out in the wilds before they’re quit of the nightmare forever. This final milestone sees the Taker negotiating safe transport for Dependents, removing them from the enclave and limiting the Taker to online contact for the remainder of the game. Mr. JOLS JOLS... that son of a bitch. So tempting, but such a bastard. Recession. A generous gift of bounty can alleviate the burden of feeding and clothing new refugees, but the risk of harboring quarantine violators is omnipresent for a citizen. One noisy neighbor can see a Good Samaritan enslaved to a work gang or exiled to the Loss. As if that weren’t enough, stories of betrayal are common on both sides of the divide. Many Takers have sent their families ahead to a safe haven only to find out their loved ones arrived at a den of human traffickers. Bounty isn’t enough when establishing a safe house; both the Taker and the citizen have to trust each other completely. Bridging the gap of resentment and misunderstanding between the Lost and citizens requires more than contracts; each party must owe the other a blood debt. The Taker needs to contact and roleplay out a scene with an estranged loved one or friend living in the Recession, convincing them to take on the risk of harboring their Dependents. Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. -Adam Smith
218 to convince the group, in character, to help with the plan. If everyone agrees and the elements are decided, the group is committed. The Market goes home and writes up the adventure. Next session, the group tries to pull off the job of their lives... maybe literally. The payoff is always higher than usual for the group: the crew helping out in a Mr. JOLS always gets paid expenses and incidentals. This means that any equipment owned at the start of the job – plus any bounty spent after the job to heal health, replace gear, or regain Humanity – is compensated by the proceeds of the job. Otherwise, the rest of the crew doesn’t profit from the task. They literally risk their lives, but that’s it. Any bounty found on Legs of the journey is split amongst the unretired crew. The retiring Taker, on the other hand, earns a fortune in finder’s fees. The bounty earned in a successful Mr. JOLS can’t be expressed as a number; it’s a life of luxury and ease. But it’s also motive for murder. If Mr. JOLS is caught and doesn’t kill everyone, there is one more scene to play out: does the crew say goodbye, or does one of them try to steal the golden ticket for themselves? TontInes For some players, the thought of leaving the game because a retirement plan has been funded isn’t appealing. While it makes sense that the character would want to leave the Loss behind and never look back, retiring a well-established character because of success can feel like undeserved punishment. For groups that don’t find a cycling roster of Takers fun, Markets should suggest a tontine. In reality, a tontine is an annuity scheme in which a large sum is invested using the funds from a number of investors, but no one is given authority to control the account. The interest accrues in the account, until the last surviving member is granted ownership of the whole account. In Red Markets, a ‘tontine’ is just a way of saying ‘group retirement plan.’ It means all the Takers have agreed that, regardless of circumstance, they are going JOLS is a Taker acronym for Just One Last Score. It represents the all too common occurrence of a Taker saving up enough for their retirement plan, going out on one last job, and getting killed. A retirement plan represents safety, but that’s it. It’s just enough to get established somewhere safe, not nearly enough to thrive. Nobody that funded a retirement plan and left that same day ever sent their kids to college. They still work six or seven days a week managing an enclave business or working boring-ass Recession service jobs. Younger Takers deride them as citizens or ‘clave trash and, for some, that happy ending isn’t enough after years of suffering invested in the Loss. So every Taker has, hiding in the back of their mind, an idea for Just One Last Score. A plan so crazy, so lucrative, that it would set them up for life. JOLS can do more than establish a meager enclave; he can make it a self-sufficient beacon of the Loss. JOLS can not only buy children out of Free Parking ghetto; he can set them up in a new house and enroll them in a private school. JOLS always has enough left over to ensure that nothing short of another apocalypse ever forces the Taker to risk death for a few bounty ever again. A retirement plan buys some security, but Mr. JOLS buys power. He will also likely kill your ass. Mr. JOLS is saved until the very end of the game because he’s dangerous as hell. There’s a reason no one has gone after the Score already, after all: the competition is too sane or too dead. In mechanical terms, JOLS occur after a character has paid for their Retirement Plan. The Score itself is proposed by the retiring character using the In-Character Collaborative Method (see p. 399), but instead of rotating element proposals, the player of the retiring character starts every round. The other difference is that the Market can add ANY number of complications for the job in keeping with the Golden Rule (Reward = Risk). Betrayals, Aberrants, Stampedes, Snowstorms, DHQS death squads – it’s all fair game. It’s the responsibility of the player
219 In the end, the words that I write here are meaningless. Enclaves A crew needs a home. Every Taker is based out of an enclave: a large community of survivors self-organized for defense and economic diversity in the wake of the Crash. The more submissive (or sane) members of the community accept their subsistence living and keep the home fire burning while Takers gamble their lives on the other side of the fence. In one-shot play, the Market can have the characters operate from a small compound, or the group could be based out of one of the major enclaves described in “Lost Places” (see p. 120). But in extended play, it is important to give players influence over where their characters live. The enclave is their customer base, home, fortress, and burden all rolled into one. Their actions as Takers can bring both prestige and calamity upon the rest of the community. The enclave itself is a recurring character in any campaign, serving alternatively as ally, antagonist, and prop. Everyone is going to want to make sure they find the enclave interesting. Generating a city of survivors is a group process that the Market facilitates. The input comes from everyone at the table. Players answer the Market’s questions, hashing out any disagreements out-of-character or letting the dice decide. For information on generating an enclave for extended play, see “Enclave Generation” on p. 406. to cash out together. Everyone gets rich, or everyone dies trying. In game terms, this means that milestones are bought off for individual Takers as they become funded – just like regular retirement plans – but nobody leaves the Loss until everyone is ready to go after Mr. JOLS. Those that fund their retirement milestones early find it in their best interest to float loans to their lagging comrades. After all, every job spent waiting for their peers to catch up risks life and limb. In narrative terms, a tontine demands a foreshadowing scene. The Market explains that the group has a plan – a daring, audacious plan that could get them all killed. Every member is smart enough to know that such a huge payday would be suicidal, but they’re equally aware that they’re not going to be able to resist the temptation. Players give the Mr. JOLS job a name: something vague and evocative like “Operation Curtain” or “The Money Order.” Once the tontine is titled, the Market starts the first scene of the campaign right after the plan has been decided upon, at the moment each member of the crew must agree to go through with it. The PCs roleplay their oath with the rest of the team, and the foreboding presence of the tontine now hovers in the background of every job. Actually planning the tontine early is not advisable. A lot of changes can occur in a campaign, and it’s unlikely the plan would hold up over extended play. Rather, when the time comes, have the group generate a Score normally (see p. 397), but know the name beforehand. Thus, every time a PC refers to “Lotto Ticket,” the idea of the job takes an increasingly mythic significance in the campaign. When one of the Takers cracks, his buddies calm him down by talking about that bar they’re going to open with the Lotto Ticket. Mal may have accidentally shot an innocent man, but the Lotto Ticket can buy a lot of forgetting. Just hold on. Just one more job, one more day, one more slogging step through the blood and offal...
220 Premade Takers Presented below is condensed information for several Takers. Absentee Crew: Moths Weak Spot: No Change Without Blood Soft Spot: Sympathy for Survivor’s Guilt Tough Spot: Fenceman (+1 against Casualties/Cracked) Dependants Sarge (Mentor) PotentIals and SkIlls STR 2 • Resistance 2 SPD 3 • Shoot 3 (+1 vs Casualties) o Shoot: Heavy Rifle (+1 vs Casualties) • Stealth 2 • Athletics 2 ADP 2 • Awareness 1 • Self-Control 1 • Drive 1 INT 2 • Foresight 1 • Research 1 • Mechanics 2 CHA 1 • Leadership 1 WIL 1 Gear Package Sniper Greasy Crew: Moths Weak Spot: Externalized Frustration Soft Spot: Round Pegs in Square Holes Tough Spot: Roach (cracked in all Humanity threats) Dependants Pat (Spouse) PotentIals and SkIlls STR 2 • Resistance 2 SPD 1 • Shoot 1 • Stealth 1 • Athletics 1 ADP 2 • Awareness 2 • Self-Control 1 • Scavenging 1 • Drive 2 INT 3 • Foresight 2 • Research 1 • Mechanics 3 • First Aid 1 CHA 1 • Networking 1 • Sensitivity 1 WIL 2 Gear Package Greasemonkey
221 Loman Crew: Moths Weak Spot: Squeamish Soft Spot: Animal Lover Tough Spot: Lost Dependants Gilly (Spouse) Hunter (Brother) Leanne (Mother) PotentIals and SkIlls STR 1 • Melee 1 SPD 3 • Athletics 3 ADP 2 • Awareness 1 • Self-Control 1 • Scavenging 2 INT 1 • Foresight 1 • Research 1 CHA 3 • Networking 1 • Persuasion 3 • Sensitivity 1 • Deception 2 • Leadership 3 WIL 1 Gear Package Manager McStuffIns Crew: Moths Weak Spot: You Need Me More Than I Need You Soft Spot: Hippocratic Oath Tough Spot: Immune Dependants Wes (Son) Philomena (Daughter) PotentIals and SkIlls STR 1 • Resistance 1 SPD 2 • Shoot 1 • Stealth 1 • Athletics 2 ADP 2 • Self-Control 2 • Criminality 1 INT 3 • Foresight 2 • Research 3 • Profession: Doctor 3 CHA 2 • Networking 1 • Persuasion 1 • Deception 2 • Intimidation 1 WIL 1 Gear Package Medic
222 Control Crew: Moths Weak Spot: Punish the Old Prejudices Soft Spot: Selfless Service Tough Spot: Scavenger Dependents Disha (Wife) Ragsdale (Dogs count as Dependents even above Support limit) STR 1 SPD 2 • Shoot 2 • Shoot (Bow) 2 • Stealth 2 • Athletics 2 ADP 3 • Awareness 1 • Self-Control 2 • Scavenging 2 INT 2 • Profession (Drones) 2 • Profession (Animal Handling) 2 CHA 1 WIL 2 Gear Package Hunter AND Techie Smoke Crew: Moths Weak Spot: Compassion is Weakness Soft Spot: Protect the Next Generation Tough Spot: Latent Dependents Philly (Adopted Daughter) PotentIals and SkIlls STR 3 • Unarmed 2 • Melee 3 • Resistance 3 SPD 3 • Shoot 3 • Athletics 3 ADP 1 • Awareness 1 • Self-Control 1 • Scavenging 1 • Drive 1 INT 1 • Research 1 CHA 1 • Intimidation 1 WIL 2 Gear Package Latent
223 Sustenance Sustenance upkeep is just what it sounds like: the bounty a Taker needs to survive. Failing to meet this minimum upkeep has serious repercussions on the Taker’s health and relationships. The day-to-day motivations of a Red Markets character are entirely wrapped up in this number, so it’s used to calculate the “break point” on the Crew Sheet and plays a major role in contract negotiations. Maintenance Maintenance upkeep is required if the Taker is to avoid all hardship between jobs. It accounts for the character’s current equipment, desired upgrades, and time spent improving skills or improving Potentials. Failing to meet the required bounty for maintenance might mean the Taker has to give up some equipment, go without, or stagnate professionally. But lean times are common in the carrion economy. Takers can’t expect to meet maintenance upkeep with every contract, but they sure as hell try. Upkeep: PayIng the BIlls Everything costs in Red Markets. There’s no such thing as enough. There is no stability. You’re either getting fat or wasting away. Feeling flush or bleeding out. Growth or atrophy. Upkeep is what a Taker has to pay to get by until the next job comes along. If there’s bounty left over, it can purchase better gear, invest in a retirement plan, or improve skills. If coffers run dry, Takers find their gear busted, their Dependents desperate, and the enclave pointing towards the door. Calculating and controlling upkeep is vital if a crew expects to turn a profit, and a Taker’s personal upkeep informs the severity of the risks the Loss demands. Three CalculatIons: Sustenance, MaIntenance, and IncIdentals Upkeep is calculated three ways.
224 Dependents +2. That’s the amount of bounty owed. Survival costs one bounty per Taker and is self-explanatory: food, water, clothing, heat, etc. Takers that can’t afford this bounty starve to death in the enclave streets as their neighbors pretend not to see. Fellow Takers can float them a loan to get them through the hard times, but only if they have the bounty to spare. Rent has to be paid to the enclave. Takers actually have to pay far less than most residents, and a single bounty secures shelter for the Taker and any Dependents. This discount is in consideration of the dangers Takers encounter daily and the trade they bring to the community. But too many people resent Takers as reckless thugs; no enclave can get away with charging them nothing and remain politically stable. Failing rent means the Taker and their Dependents have to live off the Loss until the next job comes around. Even if they manage to escape the mortal dangers outside the fence, the psychological damage of living like a hunted animal for weeks takes a serious toll. Finally, Dependents need to be supported if they are to remain a source of stability in a Taker’s life. The single bounty that a Taker pays for each Dependent covers that NPC’s survival, rent, and other expenses. The consequences of failing to support Dependents aren’t immediate, but they can be quite serious (see p. 207). Sustenance upkeep ends up being about the same for most characters: 3-6 bounty per Taker, depending on how many Dependents need to be supported. MaIntenance Becoming a better Taker costs. Guns don’t regrow bullets like fruit. Batteries don’t magically charge. Paying maintenance upkeep refreshes the charges on gear in-between sessions, but that’s only the beginning. Equipment, skills, Potentials – everything necessary to remain effective in the field requires bounty, which is the only reason Incidentals Incidentals can’t be calculated before a job like sustenance and maintenance. These costs accrue as the Loss wears away at the character. Bounty can be pulled from savings to help heal a Taker’s body and mind, but many a crew has burned their entire profit paying incidental costs. It’s possible to neglect Incidental upkeep for a time, but it always means the Taker is a greater risk out in the field. Sustenance Sustenance upkeep is derived from survival, rent, and Dependents. The quick way to calculate sustenance is count the number of UsIng the Bank In One-Shots For short games, the banking part of the character sheet is unnecessary. In fact, upkeep can be tracked in a myriad of other ways. There’s a place for recording upkeep in each item slot on the inventory page. Healing can be tracked on the hit boxes. Humanity has its own track. As long as the player knows the cost for each operation, it’s pretty easy to deduct bounty on the fly and keep all the numbers straight. But being a Taker means being proactive – no one survives the zombie apocalypse without some forward thinking. The bank is on the character sheet to help visualize financial planning the player might need to do. Whenever a character gets bounty, it gets recorded in the bank box. If that bounty gets invested in a retirement plan, it gets recorded on the milestone it’s saving for and can’t be moved back to the bank without the SelfControl check required. Bounty from the bank can also be saved in any of three upkeep accounts (sustenance, maintenance, and incidentals) and kept in reserve for those expenses. There’s nothing stoping a player from taking directly from the bank pool, maintaining gear and healing damage directly. The bank on the character sheet visualizes where the bounty is being spent for players that need the graphic organizer.
225 (see “Negotiation” p. 320). Or, for simplicities sake, Market’s can waive upkeep costs for that session and the effect is the same. Either way, players should factor in equipment costs regardless of whether or not they are using the No Budget, No Buy rule (see p. 228). The price of equipment upkeep always has an effect on the game. Failing upkeep on gear has consequences ranging from mild to severe. But, though a jammed gun could mean death in the field, gear upkeep is still nonessential and doesn’t factor into the character’s break point. Gear can malfunction and a job can still get done. The short-term demands of a Taker’s survival and the needs of Dependents always take precedence. to risk the Loss in the first place. After meeting their sustenance upkeep, players have to budget between saving towards their retirement plan and increasing the character’s effectiveness. Invest too heavily in gear and the Taker becomes a lifer, despairing at the thought of ever escaping the grind, waiting for the inevitable day when preparedness isn’t enough to trump bad luck. In contrast, those that think solely in the long-term rarely stay alive long enough to see it. Maintenance upkeep is the price of everything on a character’s wish list. It can be met, partially met, exceeded, or completely unpaid, all with various consequences. It has no direct effect on contract negotiations unless “Expenses” are paid, but knowing the number at the outset helps players roleplay better decisions for their characters. But, no one in Red Markets is rewarded in experience for merely showing up. Everyone pays to get better. Hell, everyone pays to stay the same. Takers that fail to invest in themselves get ground into dust by the slow, scraping misery of the Loss. When calculating maintenance, Takers consider three things: equipment upkeep, gear purchases, and professional development. EquIpment Upkeep Every piece of gear has an upkeep cost, represented by the number listed in its stat block. To refresh charges in-between sessions and prevent upgrades from being lost due to malfunction (p. 240), a Taker must pay that much in bounty. If the gear is “fed” its upkeep in bounty, it gets refreshed and remains in working order. The refresh earned in-between sessions doesn’t cost any of the Taker’s refresh points, slotted through their ADP Potential. The total upkeep cost of all owned equipment is added together to calculate the equipment cost. If a group can manage to push up to the “Expenses” level on negotiations, the combined equipment cost of the whole group gets added into the contract
226 they wish, or they can just leave it unspoken. Alternately, the Market might suggest roleplaying a “tutoring session” with one of the character’s References. To advance a skill from zero to +1 point, it costs 1 bounty. To advance skill to +2, it costs 2 bounty. To +3, 3 bounty... and so on. Each additional point of Potential costs 10 bounty each. IncIdentals Incidentals can’t be fully planned for – no one musters the courage to step outside the fenceline without suppressing some imagined consequences. But the Loss always collects its tax in pain. Incidental costs arise when things go wrong. Fail a check and need to use a favor? That’s going to cost later. Get your arm munched on by a casualty? That’ll need a doctor. See something out there that haunts your dreams forever? Drinking to forget may be the only option, but that booze won’t be free. It’s possible to save up for incidentals or ignore them for a time, but if maintenance is how characters grow stronger, ignoring Incidentals too long is how they wither away. Healthcare Healing damage depends on the type and where it is located (see “Combat” p. 280). Some in-game healing can be handled using First Aid checks and supplies (see p. 281), but the number of hit boxes that can be healed are limited. Healing between jobs works differently. For free, any Taker can erase all Stun damage from a single hit location. Healing Stun damage in multiple locations requires extra rest: erasing additional Stun damage costs 1 bounty’s per additional location beyond the free heal. So, for example, Mal could erase 19 boxes of Stun damage from her torso for free between jobs, but getting rid of the additional 1 Stun in her arm and the 3 Stun in her leg would cost 2 bounty. Purchases Players purchase gear by successfully making a Networking check to find someone selling that piece of gear and paying upkeep x2. Consider the upkeep on purchased equipment as paid until the end of the next job. Upgrades that are purchased after character creation cost 1 bounty a piece. Each is recorded in the appropriate box on the stat block, along with any notes the player needs as to their function. Upgrades are one-time costs: they don’t add to upkeep overall, but they can be lost if upkeep isn’t paid and a malfunction occurs (see p. 240) Whether buying new gear or improving it, the total cost gets put into the purchases category. If using the No Budget, No Buy rule (see p. 228), these costs must be calculated before the Takers leave for a job. Otherwise, this box can go blank and the cost of improvement can be paid directly from the bank. ProfessIonal Development The amount of bounty a character wants to spend improving skills and Potentials is called Professional Development. If using the No Budget, No Buy rule (see p. 228), these costs must be calculated before a mission. Otherwise, this box can go blank and the cost of improvement can be paid directly from the bank. Economists would describe the cost of improving a character as opportunity cost. The time spent reading about or practicing a new skill uses resources and distracts from the everyday tasks of maintaining an enclave; it is time not spent on activities more profitable in the short term. The cost represents the material requirements of practice (i.e. ammo, books, online courses, parts, battery life, etc.) and the wasted time that could have been spent scavenging, performing maintenance, or seeking other employment. If some professional development can be afforded, players may narrate the out-of-game montage of activities leading to the character’s growth however
227 Let’s say Mal has a really bad day of work. Her left leg was maimed in the field and she almost bled out. She also took a nasty blow to the head from that crazy raider’s crowbar, leaving her head filled with an 8 box mixture of Kill and Stun damage. Now safe and convalescing back at the enclave, Mal’s on the mend. She pays Maggie Sawbones one bounty to remove the hobbled effect from her left leg and another to convert all the Kill damage in her leg to Stun. Mal uses her free heal to remove all the Stun damage from her leg. Her head is still pretty hurt, but she’s only got one bounty left. Mal converts the Kill damage in her head to Stun. That’s all she can afford; she’ll have to go back to work feeling concussed and with two black eyes. HealIng HumanIty If physical health isn’t free, mental health is a downright luxury. Humanity tracks the ways in which the Loss shreds the emotional well-being of all those it touches (see “Humanity” p. 310). But few things are as frustrating and difficult as healing the mind, and no psychologist is trained to fight continual trauma on a quasi-apocalyptic scale. The ability to regain Humanity is limited. Recovering from Detachment, Trauma, and Stress requires time off. That time costs in lost wages. The rules for recovering Humanity are simple: one bounty recovers one Humanity. There are no “free” recoveries outside those provided by Dependents. No one may recover Humanity past the last Regret they suffered. There’s no coming back from some things. Kill damage is something else entirely. Lacerations, gashes, punctures, breaks, toxins, disease – these conditions require careful monitoring by experts even once the healing process has begun, more if the Taker has suffered enough to endure a status effect (see “Combat” p. 280). Most existing enclaves have doctors and surgeons merely because those without them long ago died off, but they don’t work for free. Healing a status effect costs 1 bounty, but it doesn’t erase any Kill damage. Converting all Kill damage in a location to Stun costs 1 bounty, but it’s limited to one location at a time. Finally, if a doctor has to risk infection by working on a Latent individual, it costs an extra bounty for hazard pay. After all that, healing Stun damage works the same as above. “Healthcare is a Right!” Get real, hippy. Big sections of the world outside this book are perfectly fine with letting people die for no reason other than they’re poor. In Red Markets, where starvation and violent death are slightly more prevalent than the modern United States, no one with a skill as valuable as medicine can afford to work for free. That’s why healthcare is on the advancement side of upkeep; people work while hurt and sick all the time. Feel however you wish about it while the world continues to murder you apathetically. Being healthy remains a privilege. What if another character might have the medical skills necessary to heal teammates beyond battlefield trauma? Maybe they could work pro bono? Well, who is going to pay for the bandages? For the salvaged or smuggled antibiotics? Asking a medical character to heal you for free basically means asking them to pay the fees for you; very few healers are callous enough to charge for labor during the apocalypse anyway. Maybe the team could salvage the supplies themselves, but that means they aren’t selling them to keep their own families healthy. It’s economics. It’s omnipresent and inescapable. Deal with it... or don’t. It doesn’t matter to anyone but you..
228 without them for a short time. That’s why repaying References is calculated as an incidental. In No Budget, No Buy, repaying favors calls for Self-Control checks unless the Taker planned for their need. Bust Rule: No Budget, No Buy In Red Markets, wealth is a source of constant anxiety. Having it, not having it – doesn’t matter. When living on the razor’s edge, it’s more comforting to have something go reliably wrong than find a surprise blessing. The No Budget; No Buy (NBNB) rule only applies in extended play, and, considering the level of difficulty it adds to the game, it might not be appropriate for all groups. Essentially, the rule demands that players need budget all their bounty before they leave for the job. Keep in mind that maintaining the sanity of a Taker isn’t the only concern – those Dependents may be suffering too and straining relationships. One bounty per game is set aside for the sustenance cost of every NPC in the Taker’s care, but extra attention for neglected loved ones is just that: extra. For accounting purposes, healing relationships with Dependents for previously failed upkeep counts as additional Humanity incidentals. Favors It’s a really, really bad idea to screw over one’s professional contacts out in the Loss, but if comes down to having enough to eat or not returning a call, there isn’t much contest. Bounty paid in time or crypt keeps References available for favors, but it’s possible to survive Why use No Budget, No Buy? In terms of story, the No Budget, No Buy rule represents one of the psychological tortures unique to poverty. Anyone that’s grown up poor can attest that it does strange things to one’s relationship to the very idea of money. The anxiety when things are tight doesn’t go away when faced with a windfall. In fact, it gets worse. For those caught in cycles of generational poverty, wealth’s only perceived purpose is to keep the plates of disaster spinning. Having money means more is going to go wrong; the idea of capital sticking around and accumulating seems, after so many years barely scraping by, simply absurd. For those caught up in the logic of the vicious cycle, the only way to get any enjoyment out of a sudden surplus is to spend as quickly as possible, draining the coffers before some tragedy does it first. So, for instance, you waste that tax refund on a fancy TV before your car breaks down and “steals” it. This is a stupid, superstitious way of thinking. But what those that haven’t lived through it don’t realize is that everyone realizes how backwards such thinking is, especially the people trapped in the lower classes. Realization doesn’t stop the irrational thoughts. Consider how many people still knock on wood, throw salt over their shoulders, or perform other superstitious actions despite being normally rational humans. Or compare the concept to addiction: most addicts are aware what is and isn’t good for them, but putting that knowledge into practice is a struggle they are losing. So, no, realizing that money isn’t a resource to be spent immediately least it be lost to disaster doesn’t stop the irrational certainty that the world works exactly in such a manner. The only thing such a realization does achieve is making a person feel like shit. And that’s why poverty is so nefarious: it never stops accusing its victims of causing their own suffering. Spend big for a little relief? “No wonder your life is in such shambles,” say the oppressor and oppressed alike. Resist the temptation and save? The temptation is still there, nagging at you, waiting for you to succumb and make this moment of self-denial pointless. Meanwhile, whatever work you do for the money only seems that much more unbearable and pointless. Now imagine that, on top of all this anxiety, zombies were trying to eat you. That’s what the No Budget, No Buy does to a character.
229 CalculatIng Personal Upkeep Calculate personal upkeep on the character sheet. From there, transfer each character’s break point to the Crew Sheet. This speeds up calculating the price of contracts considerably once the game reaches negotiations. If using the No Budget, No Buy rule, players will also want to transfer their projected earnings so the crew can seek out the job that best fits their needs. For the remainder of this chapter, the core rules that ignore the No Budget, No Buy option will be referred to as “simple.” Anything that explains how to use the optional rule will be marked “NBNB.” DetermIne Sustenance Order of Operations: Sustenance (Both) 1. Add one bounty for survival. Record this under “Survival.” 2. Add one bounty for rent. Record this under “Rent.” 3. Add one bounty per Dependent. Record this under “Dependents.” That’s it for sustenance. Any additional upkeep is calculated elsewhere. All boxes in the sustenance row get added together to form that Taker’s break point. Record the break point on the Crew Sheet, add it together with the others, and calculate the crew’s break point for the purposes of negotiations. That number is now the low end of acceptable payment before the Taker’s start really hurting. DetermIne MaIntenance Order of Operations: Maintenance (Simple) 1. Add up the upkeep for all existing gear. Record this under “Equipment.” Record the Taker’s equipment costs on the Crew sheet to calculate the whole group’s equipment upkeep. This number is every crew’s aspiration; beyond this number, profit is almost assured. When playing NBNB, eliminate the bounty bank from the character sheet. Now, Takers can only possess bounty in two ways: in a budget, or in a retirement plan. So, anything that needs to be spent on sustenance, maintenance, or incidentals must be budgeted before the characters leave for the job. Budget 4 bounty for Healthcare but come through the job unscathed? Well, like a lot of people trapped in poverty, the Taker treats that windfall as “free money” and blows it. It goes away. The player can narrate the character frittering away the funds however they wish, but the bounty is lost. It’s not spent on skills or gear; it’s blown. Any Humanity regained by the splurge is balanced by the guilt that follows. Budget nothing for Healthcare and get torn up? The Taker can pull that bounty from the retirement plan and nowhere else (the bank doesn’t exist anymore, remember). As is always the case, withdrawing from a retirement plan causes a Self-Control check against Stress. Every incidental cost and unplanned expense is a tangible reminder of how far the character is from escape. Basically, in NBNB games, Takers either lose bounty by not budgeting enough towards savings (just like most people’s real-life finances), or they lose sleep over everything taking away from their savings (just as reallife finances damages Humanity). The only way to protect the character against lost profit and psychological damage is to guess the next job’s expenses and earn enough to cover it. No Budget, No Buy makes Red Markets substantially harder in the long-term, so it may not be for groups that aren’t running a Bust mode campaign (see “Boom and Bust” p. 172). It also increases the importances of book keeping in the campaign; groups that don’t like the idea of doing such calculations before the job should ignore the rule and use the bank normally. However, NBNB drives home the game’s theme of economic horror exceptionally well and presents the players with a unique challenge akin to investing in stocks for PC futures.
230 References, etc). Spend bounty to erase physical damage, heal Humanity, and rebuild strained relationships with References. Order of Operations: Incidentals (NBNB) Spending on incidentals needs to be predicted – accurately – to avoid wasted bounty or damaging Stress. The accounting area on the second page of the character sheet is where players bet against their Taker’s continued health, happiness, and good reputation. With either rule set, if there isn’t enough bounty for incidentals left at the end of a job, prepare to suffer the consequences of those burdens during the next contract. Calculate ProJected EarnIngs Projected earnings are only useful if the group uses the NBNB rule. Once all sustenance, maintenance, and incidental costs are listed, add every number in the account section up to come up with the projected earnings for that Taker. Then, add each Taker’s projected earnings together to form the crew’s combined projected earnings and record that number on the Crew Sheet. The projected earnings of the crew is the bounty the job must earn if the Taker’s are going to get everything they want. Anything over that number is either thrown into retirement (if the Taker bet low on incidental costs and was right), or frittered away (if the Taker bet high on incidentals and was wrong). The crew now has a number they need to come back home with, or else. Projected earnings serve as a powerful motivator for crew’s using NBNB. Those that have yet to reach their projections have to take bold risks in the hopes of scraping together enough bounty to meet their marker, whereas those that already have their bounty promised need to balance conservative tactics with allor-nothing gambles on huge profit. If the group isn’t using the NBNB rule, all the bookkeeping is now done. The player can continue planning out expenses using the tools on the character sheet, but it’s just as easy to pay any other costs out of the bounty bank. If the group does employ the NBNB rule, a few more steps are required. Order of Operations: Maintenance (NBNB) 1. Add up the upkeep for all existing gear. Record this under “Equipment.” Record the Taker’s equipment costs on the Crew Sheet to calculate the whole group’s equipment upkeep. This number is every crew’s aspiration; beyond this number, profit is almost assured. 2. Add up the cost of any upgrades the Taker plans to add to preowned gear. Record this under “Purchases.” 3. If the Market says there is a source, add up the cost (upkeep x2) of any new gear the Taker plans to purchase. Add this to “Purchases.” 4. If spending bounty to improve skills or Potential, determine the cost. Record this number under “Pro. Dev.” This bounty can’t be spent until after the contract where the spending was planned. 5. After the contract is completed, if there isn’t enough bounty to meet all the costs, pick and choose which items have to wait until later. The Market rolls a malfunction check for any gear that doesn’t meet upkeep (see “Malfunctions” p. 240). DetermIne IncIdentals Order of Operations: Incidentals (Simple) In the simple version of upkeep, one doesn’t need to plan for incidentals. The costs still need to be paid at the end of the session, but there is no penalty for doing so beyond the bounty lost. There’s also no need to use the accounting area of the character sheet to track the costs. Anything that might result in incidental costs is tracked elsewhere on the character sheet (hit boxes, Humanity threats,
231 If the Taker didn’t plan enough to cover an expense – for instance, only planning 1 bounty for healing but needing 3 bounty instead – then the Taker has to make a Self-Control check against Stress for every box on the accounting form that doesn’t meet the budget. This check, and the Stress that may result, represents the nightmare of seeing a nest egg slowly consumed by unexpected “bad luck” costs. The Self-Control checks are still made even if nothing is pulled out of retirement to cover the expense; it’s never fun to do without. Remember that the NBNB doesn’t allow for the existence of a bounty bank. All earnings are either planned for on the accounting sheet, frittered away, or invested in retirement. The only away to avoid all negative consequences is to accurately budget for the character every job, which is nearly impossible. Using the NBNB rule makes Red Markets a game about getting the hell out of the Loss before the Stress kills you. SplIttIng the Take At the end of the job, divide the total number of bounty earned from the score or contract by the number of Takers that participated. That’s how much each Taker earns. If the bounty doesn’t split evenly? Well, the group can decide who gets the remainder any number of ways. If your players believe in performance-based incentives, give the extra to people that most contributed to the success of the job. Or bring incentives from outside the game and give the bounty to the best roleplayers. If you’re more socialist at heart, the extra could go to the character with the most Dependents to support. Alternatively, the remainder bounty could be invested into some resource owned by the whole crew, such as a vehicle or small business. Once everyone knows how much each Taker earned, it’s time to plan for retirement. Invest In RetIrement Simple Retirement At the end of a session, anything not spent on the sustenance, maintenance, or incidentals can be invested in a retirement milestone. The Taker doesn’t have to invest everything and can keep some bounty in the bank as “petty cash.” Any bounty already invested in a retirement plan and moved to the bank requires a Self-Control check against Stress. NBNB Retirement If playing NBNB rules, the only bounty that goes into retirement milestones is the bounty above and beyond the projected earnings. Calculate the difference between how much the Taker planned to spend on each element of the accounting space and how much the Taker actually spent. If the Taker planned to spend more than they actually did, the difference subtracts from the total bounty earned. If Mal planned to spend 3 bounty on healing but only spent one, then that 2 bounty is subtracted from the total amount earned for the job. This represents the character spending the “extra” on something frivolous and regretting it later.
232 a job. Some gear is uncharged and provides a static bonus to certain skills so long as the tool receives proper maintenance. The main thing to remember is that, in many ways, Takers are their gear. No amount of practice, grit, or luck can hold out against the pressures of the Market forever. The Loss may be a wild place, but that doesn’t mean it’s free from the rules of the capitalism. You either meet its price or you don’t. Either way, the Loss takes its due... in bounty or in blood. MaterIalIsm: Bounty, Gear, and VehIcles Being a badass is useful, but even badasses need food. More often than not, a Taker’s possessions are the deciding factor between life and death. Some gear makes the use of skills like Shoot, Melee, or Profession: Computer Science possible. Other gear makes skills more likely to succeed by spending charges, such using a data mining service to research
233 The exact worth of one bounty fluctuates depending on the exchange rate of various online currency launderers and the value DHQS currently assigns to the average property owned by a pre-Crash citizen. Out in the Loss, bounty is physically exchanged in the form of IDs, most commonly driver’s licenses. Other forms of official government documents serve as well, though which legal papers are accepted and “changed” into the ID standard depends on the enclave. People in the Loss tend to horde Bounty Bounty is the currency of Red Markets. Its value is determined by the interaction between the DHQS census efforts and the various crypto currencies used to trade between the Loss and Recession. Each unit of bounty is a futures investment on salvage commodities. Confirming the death of a former citizen is a service that the government, families, and other entities compensate for with a portion of the capital earned by seizing all the deceased’s assets.
234 of the descriptions are common sense, but the effects are still useful to read for their mechanical bonuses and setting-specific uses. The effect of a piece of gear can be altered by upgrades (see p. 239). Charges Charges are a way of measuring a tool’s condition and remaining usefulness. Each charge is represented by an empty bubble on the character sheet. If the gear has less than the ten charges, cross out the extra charges permanently. When a charge is spent, place a tic mark in the bubble to keep track of how many have been spent. When charges are refreshed, erase the tic marks. For simplicity’s sake, almost all gear has its number of charges abstracted to ten. What exactly those charges represent depends on the gear. A single charge on a handgun might represent a single bullet, whereas a charge on an automatic rifle represents a burst’s worth of rounds. Charges measure remaining space in a backpack, fuel for a vehicle, and battery on a laptop. Sometimes, charges are a measure of repair and only get used when the item takes damage. Whatever the charges might represent in the narrative, mechanically they represent how many more uses and/or bonuses that item can provide without having to be refreshed, repaired, or repurchased. In the qualities section of the item’s entry, the gear’s spend-type describes how charges are used and refreshed (see below). QualItIes All gear has qualities that describe its utility. Some qualities describe the gear mechanically whereas others describe the limits of its use in the narrative. What follows is a list of qualities described and sorted into criteria. Not every piece of gear needs qualities from every criteria, but gear must have at least one quality to have utility in the game. Some qualities are included more than once because they describe how gear is used across multiple game mechanics. physical bounty rather than trade it into the Recession, as there is no getting physical currency back once the confirmed death has been traded in. Thus, IDs stay out in the Loss to function as a currency for physical trade, and other forms of documentation taken from the dead are used to negotiate trade with the Recession across the border. To put it in real-world terms, other currencies like crypt, rations cards, and the dollar are used for everyday transactions, whereas bounty acts as a sort of gold standard that stabilizes the value of those different units. Trading in physical ID cards is like trading in precious metals; the cards can be used to purchase goods directly or “changed” for a variety of exchange values. All Takers start with 10 bounty, a backpack, and rations. Players may use their initial bounty however they wish: buy gear, install upgrades, or save it for upkeep. After character generation, all bounty must be earned through jobs and any gear purchased must be first sourced with a Networking check. How to Read the Gear LIst The gear tables contain brief descriptions about what each piece of gear does, how much it costs, and how much of it a Taker can carry. As long as the Market knows the rules, players should have enough information to start shopping right away. The extra detail in this section is intended as a rules reference and tool for those looking to design unique pieces of equipment. DescrIbINg Gear The functionality of gear is described in a number of categories. These are all listed on the gear list, but the categories are explored in more depth here. Effect The gear’s effect is its most important aspect. The effect describes what a piece of gear can do in narrative and mechanical terms. Most
235 By right means if you can, but by any means make money. -Horace adds +1 to the Shoot skill. In Red Markets, spends on charged gear must be made before the die check, unless the gear has a specific upgrade to allow spends after the check. Manpower gear uses the human operator to fuel the gear’s effect. For example, you never have to reload a machete, but your arm can get tired. Manpower gear is charged but spends the Taker’s rations rather than any charges on the item itself. On a success, a charge might be taken off the gear if it has the wear ‘n tear quality, but this can usually be bought off with the upgrade sturdy. Static gear doesn’t have charges. As long as the Taker continues to meet the gear’s upkeep (see p. 223), it continues to provide its effect. For example, as long as the binoculars aren’t damaged, they continue making it easier to see things further away. Spend Type Most gear exercises a mechanical bonus through the use of charges. There are four qualities describing how those charges may be spent. Capped gear needs to spend a charge to gain its effect, but only one charge may be spent at a time. Spending extra charges does not add to the chance of success. For example, if a Taker wants to use Ubiq Specs to find a client’s soft spot, burn a single charge off the specs and make a Research check. Burning extra battery life does nothing to help improve the Taker’s chances of finding some juicy intel, so the Ubiq Specs are capped gear. Charged gear needs to expend a charge to gain its effect, but spending more charges adds bonuses to the check. Let’s consider firing a gun. It takes at least one round to score a hit, so a charge needs to be spent in order to buy-a-roll. However, trained combat experts in the real world barely average a 20% hit rate against active targets. If the Taker wants to throw more rounds down range to increase chances of a hit, each extra charge ”But my gun holds X bullets!” You are correct. That specific brand of firearm does hold more/less than ten bullets. So you get more/less than ten charges, right? No. Charges abstract the sense of dwindling security that characterizes economic horror. They turn physical reality into what economists call opportunity cost: the loss of the possible gains from many alternative futures when a single option must be chosen. Charges are a way to picture your character’s power and the methods by which it drains. What charges don’t do is force a player to spend the entire game counting individual bullets in the clip, rips in the jacket, or volts in the battery. Specifics are great. If your character uses a cricket bat instead of a plain old club, describe the killing blows in loving detail. Give it a name. Carve notches for every casualty it has killed. While those details don’t affect the mechanics - it’s still a club - it adds a lot of fun to the game and gets the players immersed in the setting. When your rifle clicks on empty, narrate your character’s desperate search through her pack and the panic of finding only empty plastic sleeves of spent P90 clips. That’s cool and makes the combat more tense. Do NOT argue with the Market about how your character would have perfect fire control in a heated gun battle surrounded by undead monsters. Cater the narrative to fit whatever the charges are supposed to represent on that gear; do not alter the simple charge rules to fit a fetishistic image of an imaginary item. Red Markets is intended to invoke a mood of desperation and scarcity. The mechanics are much worse at simulating reality. Except for the zombies. The zombies are totally scientifically accurate.
236 and never malfunctions once in a character’s possession. As a trade-off, in demand can’t be refreshed between games or or during play using the Taker’s ADP. The use of charges consumes the gear (no getting back exploded grenades). Once all the charges are spent on this piece of gear, it has to be sourced and repurchased (see Networking p. 204). Improvised gear operates almost exactly like the in demand quality: it costs no upkeep once owned and doesn’t malfunction, but it can’t be refreshed by any means. Unlike in demand gear, improvised equipment can’t be bought again once it is used up; it’s too abundant for vendors to bother selling. The Taker must Scavenge or craft a new version to replace improvised equipment (the cost listed in the gear list is only for purchase of improvised gear at character creation). Memory is used exclusively for electronic devices with upgrades that come in the form of apps. For every upgrade installed, more battery life is used. Extremely versatile machines have fewer charges than those optimized for a simple task. Single-Shot means that, before another charge can be used, a tactic (see “Economy of Actions” p. 273) must be spent reloading the weapon. This is different than refreshing all charges; that still takes an entire task action. For instance, a bow can fire one arrow, but another must be strung before it can be redrawn. There may still be arrows left in the quiver (the remaining charges), but that tactic must be used retrieving another arrow. Similarly, there may be more shells for the mortar, but each must be dropped into the tube one at a time. Certain upgrades can downgrade the cost of reloading a single-shot weapon from a tactic to a twitch, but the principle remains the same. Wear ‘n tear means that success degrades the gear. This quality is used for all melee weapons. Stabbing through a casualty’s skull dulls a knife. Beating down a door cracks an axe handle. Though manpower (see p. 235) is used to buy and boost the check, wear ‘n tear Refresh and Charge Use There are a variety of qualities that describe how to refresh charges and the situations in which they can be used. Most of this information is common sense for anyone familiar with the items in question, but the Refresh and Charge Use qualities codify the information in the Profit system. Armor is worn on certain hit locations, depending upon the specific type. This quality also lists what types of damage armor can prevent (some scavenged carpet can stop a casualty bite, but it won’t do much for a bullet). Charges spent on armor can do one of two things. Firstly, certain armors can convert all Kill damage to Stun on that hit location for the cost of a single charge. Second, charges can be spent to negate Stun damage altogether. For instance, if Sierra wants to prevent that 11 Kill damage she just took to the chest, she can spend one charge on her Kevlar to change all the Kill over to Stun damage and the other nine to negate damage, reducing the blow down to 2 Stun. However, eating that much of the bullet’s impact has rendered the Kevlar useless in the future. Most armor shares the in demand quality. Armor is rare in that its charges are always spent after a check. Essential gear can’t be done without. Every Taker starts with this for free at character creation. If the gear malfunctions or is otherwise lost, the Taker must rebuy it to remain effective. The only essential gear is rations and a backpack. Both are included on the first page of the character sheet. Hungry gear uses more charges than normal. For a capped item, it costs two charges to buy-a-roll. For charged items, it costs an additional two charges to get a +1 bonus to the check. The hungry quality can often be bought off with an upgrade. In Demand gear is just that. Nobody is making more of it and even if they are, they sure aren’t handing out free samples. The upkeep on in demand gear only indicates its purchase price. It costs no upkeep to maintain
237 Clunky gear makes a lot of noise when moving around. It rattles and clanks and shifts. Characters cannot use their Stealth skill while carrying a clunky item. In Boom games, they can make a default attempt and hope they get lucky. If not, the gear shifted around and made too much noise to succeed. Cumbersome items are too long, wide, or unwieldy to carry comfortably in a backpack. That means that unless the item is held in the Taker’s hands, it takes a task action to remove the gear from whatever sling or storage case contains it. Basically, cumbersome describes what weapons can’t be quick drawn in combat. It’s only included to prevent the tendency towards video game characters loaded down like pack mules. Takers that bristle with an armory of long guns while retaining the ability to sprint like an Olympian break the game. Use common sense and the cumbersome quality will take care of itself. is used in event of a success, costing one of the item’s charges after the check. To simplify bookkeeping, most wear ‘n tear items can be upgraded to “sturdy,” which negates the wear ‘n tear quality. Any melee weapons scavenged from the Loss are considered to have the wear ‘n tear quality; lying around in the rot and rain isn’t good for structural integrity. Encumbrance Red Markets is pretty laissez-faire when it comes to how much a Taker can carry (see below). However, a few items are so unwieldy as to have special requirements. Armor, in addition to indicating how charges prevent damage, also dictates where the specific type of armor is worn. Armor cannot stack with other pieces of armor on the same hit location. It can be worn with clothing on the same location. How much can I carry? The simple answer is you can carry as much as the Market says you can. Need more? Red Markets is meant to evoke the psychology of economics, not the actual work of economics. The game includes elements of resource management and inventory, but it tries to cut out as many of the other variables related to those topics as possible. One of the things it doesn’t waste time on is factoring the weight of every item a character is carrying. This is not to say that Takers are capable of lugging around everything they’ve ever touched in a black hole of a backpack. There are multiple factors limiting a Taker’s carrying capacity. The most obvious is Haul, which equals a character’s STR. When out on Scores, Takers can only carry back units of supply equal to their Haul. This limits the amount of profit one Taker can provide without the crew investing in a vehicle (see Vehicles p. 265) Refresh is another way carrying capacity is limited. Gear is useless without charges, and Takers can never refresh gear more times than their ADP rating. Finally, upkeep is the strongest limit. Nearly every object in the game has maintenance costs; past a certain point, collecting gear stops making a Taker more useful and starts hemorrhaging capital. Like any business, Takers operate with minimum overhead out of necessity. But if none of these factors deter the crew’s resident hoarder, the Market always gets final say. When a player claims to be dual-wielding crossbows while sprinting over a tight rope wearing a backpack full of gold, the Market - or any other player, for that matter - is entitled to call bullshit. Basically, if you don’t try to break what accounts for Red Markets’ encumbrance rules, they won’t break. If someone does try to break them, politely ask that player to stop.
238 Loud weapons attract casualties. A gun is a dinner bell to the undead. For every loud weapon used in an unsecured area, Markets rolls for another mob to arrive whenever they see fit. Casualties do not arrive for every shot used. Jerry can take two shots with his rifle and only attract one mob, but if Ashley uses her shotgun as well, another mob will arrive. SpecIalty Some pieces are rare and odd, yet they remain useful to Takers in the Loss. Here are a few of the qualities that describe these anomalies. If Markets invent new qualities when designing new gear (p. 244), it’s suggested they go under the specialty criteria. Addictive describes a game mechanic where absence of the item causes mental and physical distress. The Taker must make a Self-Control check against their Stress threat whenever they go without. It should be noted that, mechanically, this describes rations. We are all “addicted” to food and water, after all, and it’s very stressful to go without it. Going without rations harms health as well. Range and Sound Range is a pretty common concern for Takers as sound plays a major role in attracting casualties. These traits are given to weapons to help establish the logistics of each conflict. Melee weapons are only used up close. For the purposes of casualties, a melee weapon allows attacks at 1 Shamble away. Otherwise, use the rule that if Takers are close enough to use a melee weapons, so are their enemies. The only exception would be if the weapon has an upgraded “reach” or can be thrown. ________-Range describes the range at which a weapon can effectively hit a target. The Market determines range to the target in any situation. A weapon cannot score a hit beyond its effective range. Explosive weapons deal damage to all hit locations on a hit, or damage to a random hit location on multiple nearby targets. So, if an enemy gets hit in the left leg for 4 Kill damage, an explosive weapon would do 4 Kill damage to every location, or an additional 4 Kill damage to a random location on the enemy standing nearby. It can’t do both.
239 nonexistent metal toes. Similarly, even though it “replaces” a leg, that Taker loses no hit points if casualties rip it off. There is no concrete benefit or disadvantage to contextual gear outside what the dramatic situation dictates. This quality is just a warning that certain rules might need to be adjusted in regards to the gear. Fragile gear breaks with a single hit. If an enemy strikes it or if a Taker spends Will to shift damage to a piece of gear (see “Lucky X” p. 283), the item can’t be repaired and needs to be replaced. Organic gear isn’t really gear at all. It’s a living creature that serves the Taker. Organics require sleep and rations to refresh their charges. If someone were to own a pet for therapy, the pet would be listed as organic gear. If that pet could perform function in game, it also has the autonomous quality. Destruction of organics provokes a level-2 Self-Control check as a beloved animal companion dies. Specialized gear can’t be used without a skill specialization in that gear. For instance, nobody can pick up a mortar and just know how to target the rounds. Shooting a bow is very different than firing a rifle. Training in how to wield a spear is rare in the modern day, but it’s required to use one effectively. Upgrades Upgrades are specific to the gear they are listed on. Read the the gear list to see the options for each item (see p. 245). Though some upgrades share the same name and have self-explanatory descriptions, it should be noted that the alterations on a piece of gear are purely mechanical. Players are free to describe how they mod, patch, hack, and customize their gear using any narrative terms they wish. Whether the player says their Taker bought some specialized ammunition or traded in that old pistol for one of a higher caliber, buying the Potent upgrade increases damage all the same. Upgrades are one-time purchases that do not add to the item’s total upkeep. Each Autonomous things operate off the user’s voice or sign commands through either sophisticated training (animals) or limited AI (drones). Among other narrative and mechanical benefits provided by the specific “item,” autonomous means the Taker gets another action in combat. On the owner’s initiative, the Taker can issue a command and have the “autonomous” gear perform a tactic or twitch. Want to make sure your dog doesn’t get shot? Shout “Fido! Hide!” Want the drone to distract the sniper? Whisper “Execute haircut protocol” into the microphone. The command and any checks only consume the Taker’s freebie; the character keeps a tactic and twitch. All autonomous gear requires specialized training to operate, and it’s the Taker’s skill that is checked in combat, not the animal or machine’s. Charges spent on autonomous gear boost the Taker’s associated skill. If autonomous gear runs out of charges, it’s either exhausted, unable to follow more directions, or killed. Refreshing charges depends on whether or not the specific item is organic. As always, if a check isn’t interesting the Market shouldn’t call for one to operate autonomous gear. Outside combat, the “item” is just a crew mascot. For instance, there’s no need to keep rolling dice to ensure your dronkey doesn’t get lost; it can stay on its user’s flank with sophisticated GPS. Falcons and drones maintain a bird’s-eye view of the party. Horses and dogs can hear a whistle, etc. Contextual gear only works in certain situations, determined by the player and Market’s common sense. For example, a prosthetic leg allows its owner to run and jump using a specialized skill, but it doesn’t mean the Taker can pick things up with Things are in the saddle And ride mankind. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
240 so long as the Taker pays the laptop’s upkeep. If upkeep isn’t met, the item malfunctions. In narrative terms, refresh between game session occurs because the Taker purchases replacement parts, solar panel utilities, ammo, the time off required to do personal inventory maintenance, or whatever else is required to keep the gear in working order. Failing to refresh between sessions represents rust, rot, circuit burnout, fuel shortages, ammo rationing, or whatever else explains the gear’s decreased usefulness. upgrade costs one bounty and modifies the effect or qualities on the item. Upgrades DO NOT add to the gear’s upkeep. They may be purchased in any order. Upgrades are lost whenever their item is lost; they do not carry over if the item is repurchased. Failing to meet upkeep can also have an effect on upgrades. Upkeep and Purchase Much like charges abstract the remaining usefulness of a tool, upkeep is an economic measure of the cost to maintain equipment. Upkeep represents the lost time spent cleaning the item, buying fuel, sourcing parts, replacing batteries, and everything else that might be required to keep an item in working order. All of these activities take place “off-screen” so as not to bog down the game with a lot of routine screw tightening. For game purposes, if upkeep is paid, then the Taker diligently found the time and resources between game sessions to check, repair, and refresh equipment. Meeting upkeep is required to keep gear operating. If a Taker can’t make upkeep on a piece of gear, they have to make a malfunction check (see sidebar). When purchasing gear, the price is upkeep x2. The increased cost represents the price of having the item delivered or made, along with the profiteering of the seller. The exception to this is character creation, at which point gear costs upkeep only because the Taker is presumed to already own the gear. Refresh Refresh means replacing spent charges on an item. Refreshing gear can happen at two points in the game: upkeep and in the field. Refresh DurIng Upkeep If upkeep is met on a piece of gear between game sessions, it refreshes automatically. A laptop battery that’s down to one charge jumps back up to 10 at the end of the game, Failing Upkeep and Malfunction For every item that doesn’t have its upkeep met, the Taker must check for malfunctions. This check is untrained and involves no skills. The results are final and can’t be affected by Will spends. The only way to increase the chances on a malfunction check is to partially pay the upkeep. Each bounty contributed towards the total required provides a +1 on the check. For instance, if the Taker only has 4 bounty and the upkeep for the gear is 5 bounty, she can spend 4 bounty and get a +4 on the check. The malfunction check still has to be made, but the chances are now much better that the failure won’t be catastrophic. o Critical Success - The gear doesn’t refresh any of its charges but remains fully functional. o Success - The gear doesn’t refresh any of its charges and loses one upgrade to malfunction. o Failure - The gear doesn’t refresh any charges, loses up to two upgrades, and won’t function without a successful check on an appropriate repair skill. o Critical Failure - The Taker lacked the time or resources to keep the item in any kind of working order. The item no longer functions and would be cheaper to repurchase than repair. Any upgrades lost due to malfunction must be repurchased.
241 already, and keeping track of every refresh is too much trouble. Groups have two options for keeping play moving quickly while still being able to refresh charges on their gear. Boom Rule: BasIc Refresh Refresh rating equals the ADP. Basic Refresh only measures one thing: the number of refreshes a Taker can use. Takers don’t have to waste time detailing every single item in their possession. They write down only their gear, and the presence or absence of ADP determines if it can be refreshed in play. The benefit of using Basic Refresh is that it keeps the game moving. It saves time listing the spare parts for gear the group already mulled over in the pregame. It also gives players the benefit of the doubt every time. If they need it – no matter what it is – remaining refresh means they have it. The ease with Refresh In the FIeld For every point of ADP, a Taker can refresh a single piece of gear during play. As an example, let’s assume a Taker that’s out of rations and handgun ammo. The PC would be fine if they had an ADP 2. The Taker could erase all the tic marks off of both the gun and the rations. It wouldn’t even cost an action; the ADP rating indicates they had the resources to hustle both spare ammo and extra food before even heading into the Loss. A spare MRE and clip are already sitting ready in the backpack. If the same Taker only had ADP 1, it would be a choice between more food and more ammo. The ADP required to find a surplus of both ammo and food was beyond the Taker’s Potential. Takers never need to assign their ADP to refresh gear before absolutely necessary. There’s a lot of bookkeeping in Red Markets
242 skill. A character that can plan ahead becomes important to the crew logistically as well as tactically. High-Stakes Refresh makes the game more difficult, unpredictable, and suspenseful when the tools of survival become even less reliable. It better fits a Bust-Style game (see “Boom and Bust” p. 172). The downside of High-Stakes Refresh is, well, the stakes. The disconnect between what players feel their characters would pack and what the dice say can feel like a frustrating lack of agency. If the group wants more control, use Basic Refresh. SCAVANGING AND CRAFTING Why pay for gear when there are so many materials just lying around? What use is having an apocalypse if it doesn’t reduce some costs? Well, if Takers have the time and skill to perform the labor themselves, gear can be built rather than bought. To craft a piece of gear, the Taker must pay the listed upkeep cost to buy materials and then check an appropriate skill to assemble it. It’s important that the cost be paid before the check; if the Taker fails to assemble a working item, they still have to pay for the materials they used to try. All crafted gear starts with the basic qualities, and upgrades must be purchased normally. Crafters must have access to a workshop, such as those found in most enclaves and settlements; only the simplest of items can be made out in the Loss. Takers that want to lower the cost even further can use the Scavenge skill to find materials. For every successful Scavenge check, reduce the crafting cost by one; on a critical success, reduce costs by two. The only restriction is that Scavenging must take place out in the Loss (anything worth having in an enclave is already claimed). This means at least one potential encounter per Scavenge test. SellIng Gear Takers started because people needed salvage from over the fence. Though pickings look slim five years after the Crash, crews still pry which Basic Refresh resupplies charges makes it the best choice for a Boom-Style game (see “Boom and Bust” p. 172). The weakness of Basic Refresh is that, while it represents the dwindling power of economic horror, it has a predictable difficulty curve. As the game progresses, progress gets harder as refresh dwindles. It doesn’t matter what difficulty the Market throws at the players because the characters are perfect planners limited only by the finite space in their backpacks. Some players might like the added strategic challenge of having to anticipate what they might need. Bust Rule: HIgh-Stakes Refresh High-Stakes Refresh still equals ADP. The amount of gear that can be carried is still hand-waved and subject to veto by the Market. The only difference from Basic Refresh is that, when trying to refresh, the Taker must make a Foresight test. If Foresight fails, the Taker wasn’t able to secure the right type of refresh for that piece of gear between jobs. It’s not that a failed Foresight check means the character didn’t anticipate needing, for instance, bullets for fighting zombies; a failed Foresight checks could mean ammo was scarce or priced too dearly for the Taker to buy “just in case.” The character knows going out without adequate supplies is risky, but, then again, they’ve been forced to accept that scarcity every day since the Crash. Foresight tests to refresh gear are restricted to in-the-moment rolls. Most players find backpack inventory management less thrilling than zombie killing. When a refresh is needed, the suspense of that Foresight check is going to be far more engaging for the table than a painstaking account of everything on a Taker’s person and where it is stored. High-Stakes Refresh better models the imperfect logistics that can spell doom in any survival situation, but it keeps the game moving quickly by abstracting all that planning into a single skill check. This increases the importance of the Foresight
243 character gets to keep all the profit rather than sharing with the crew, but no one is required to help them do the work of retail sales. Pay Work/LIfe Balance In the most basic form, Red Markets maintains a very simple Work/Life balance: each Taker gets one Scam and one Vignette for Dependents. A boost for the contract and a boost for the self. In MBA Rules, the demands for the “work” side of the equation grow exponentially, and players have the choice to emphasize making profit over mental health and vice versa. Selling equipment eats into these demands as well. Selling anything requires legwork. If selling online, the Taker has to troll message boards and the remaining Ubiq auction sites. They have to take pictures and videos of the object for sale, sometimes providing detailed measurements. Payment has to be arranged through clandestine crypto-currencies, and the Taker needs to shop for the provider offering the best exchange rate for bounty. Hell, even if the purchaser pays for shipping, the Taker needs to figure out the right web of drone smuggling operations required to get the piece to its destination. Selling within the enclave isn’t any easier. Now the character wanders the market, looking for a corner to set up shop amidst a hundred other vendors hocking wares. They have to pay protection or scare off guilds protecting their turf. Or maybe they’re just going door-to-door, asking if anyone needs a spare land mine or whatever. Selling gear costs on the Taker’s work/ life balance. The PC can sell any amount of gear they have in that time, but the time spent selling it isn’t spent hustling contracts or hanging out with loved ones. FInd Customers Crews can operate businesses and attract random customers with a brand. Individual Takers only see success based on personal treasures from the Loss’s dead fingers. But what to do with all the junk? No matter what piece of gear it may be, somebody needs it. Need is the only thing the Loss has in abundance. The only problem is finding the neediest person: the one willing to pay the highest price. When players want to sell off their excess gear, follow this procedure. 1. Is the transaction a business (shared amongst the crew) or an auction (one Taker selling gear for personal profit)? If it is the former, consult the MBA rules for small businesses (p. 424). If it’s the latter, continue. 2. If using the MBA rules, selling gear eats up a scene in the Taker’s work/life balance. Decide which it is before pursuing a sale. Multiple pieces can be sold in one scene. 3. Find a customer with a Networking check - Critical Success: the gear sells for upkeep x 3 - Success: the gear sells for upkeep x 2 - Failure: the gear sells at upkeep cost - Critical Failure: no one wants the gear 4. Market determines any unintended consequences of the sale (rep spots, SelfControl checks, etc.) BusIness or AuctIon? Some Takers make a full-time business pawning off whatever bric-a-brac they find while out on jobs. That’s fine, but small businesses have their own concerns dealt with in the MBA Rules (p. 424). Entrepreneurial crews that want to start a pawnshop in their enclave are encouraged to do so. The only difference from pawning and the typical small business rules is that every unit of supply has a unique value, depending on what piece of gear is for sale. Regardless, players that want to start a storefront should consult the MBA chapter. But most Takers just want to off-load the excess loot quick. In that case, the Taker is “auctioning” the goods personally, in what amounts for spare time. This way, the
244 pleads. He spent their entire savings on this. So what does the Chance do? It’ll take at least three hours for the drone to get to him. She’ll likely turn before then, and if she doesn’t? An old man gets to save his wife only to never touch her again – skin gone black with latency. And they’ll probably starve this winter, too old to earn their keep. So what does the player do? If the sale goes ahead, the Market calls for a Self-Control check against Detachment: after all, Chance knowingly profited off the desperation of a doomed man. If he provides a discount to the price, maybe the Self-Control goes after his Stress... but, then again, maybe the drugs will arrive in time. The old couple could be saved and have enough bounty left to get through winter. It could even provide a +Rep Spot for the crew. It doesn’t matter what Chance chooses to do: either way, it tells us more about the character than an influx of new numbers on the character sheet ever could. Leave it to the players to seek financial benefit by selling gear. It’s up to the Market to turn such instances into storytelling opportunities. DESIGNING NEW GEAR The gear list is far from exhaustive and players might want something not listed in the book. In that case, the player first describes what the device does narratively and then works with the Market to describe the item in terms of qualities, upgrades, and upkeep. EXAMPLE: Cheyanne’s character is a former kung fu school owner that survived the Crash using her martial arts. Cheyanne puts her skill points into a lot of specialized Melee skills like Sword, Spear, and Rope dart. A Chinese rope dart – a weighted metal spike that is thrown and retrieved via a rope – is not included in the book, but Cheyanne really loves the idea of expertly entangling and perforating casualties in a deadly, twirling dance. She asks her Market, Megan, if they can build an item. Both Megan and Cheyanne can agree that the rope dart definitely needs the specialized acquaintances and standing in the Loss. Therefore, the price of gear sold is determined with a Networking check. For each piece of gear being sold, check Networking: • Critical Success: the gear sells for upkeep x 3 • Success: the gear sells for upkeep x 2 • Failure: the gear sells at upkeep cost • Critical Failure: no one wants the gear A character with the Hustler tough spot can’t fail a Networking check, but the damage done to their trustworthiness prevents big profits. Hustlers always find buyers for gear at upkeep x2. Considering their constant debt, they’ll need all the bounty they can get. UnIntended Consequences Once the price is determined, the Market and the player need to role-play the sale. The Market doesn’t get to change the price during this interaction, but they don’t have to make it easy on the Taker either. Red Markets is never just economics; materialism is the prompt meant to inspire stories of economic horror. Selling gear is great opportunity to give Taker’s powerful story moments. EXAMPLE: Let’s say Chance scored a critical success on his Networking check to sell a spare dose of Supression K-7864. That’s 18 bounty! Then Chance opens up Ubiq chat to finalize the deal. The Market describes the feed opening up on the interior of a dingy, corrugated metal hut. Framed in front of the webcam is an elderly man with desperate, hollow eyes. In the background, an older woman writhes against where she’s been strapped on the bed. Her whimpering can barely be heard above the angry shouts and pounding on the door. The old man says it’s his wife. She got too close to the fence and got bit. The Fencemen found out and want to kill her before she turns. But they don’t have to now, right? Chance’s going to send the drugs? Please, he
245 called light chain that lets her peel zombies from mobs by entangling them. The Market doesn’t know how realistic that is, but she’s already vetoed something Cheyanne wanted and decides to let it go. A full tactic to pull the dart back in sounds like a lot, so she adds auto-spool to downgrade the tactic required by single-shot into a more versatile twitch. Lastly, Cheyanne asks if she can have potent to add damage. Megan says sure. It’s up to the Market alone to determine the upkeep for new items. Megan considers the way the dart would dull with use, the frays that would appear in the rope, and the rarity of such an item. She calls it three upkeep, making a purchasing cost of six. But, finally, Megan tells Cheyanne that the item is indemand – they ain’t making ancient Chinese weaponry like they used to – so her character won’t have to pay upkeep on the item unless it needs to be replaced. Now the rope dart is ready to go and Cheyanne can start the game as a ribbondancing cyclone of murder. Gear LIst Weapons Axe: Fire axes were the first weapons many picked up during the Crash; some opted to stick with them. In the years since, they’ve been sharpened, reinforced, and optimized to kill casualties. The basic principle remains the same: swing for the head. quality because of the enormous skill required to wield it. They also decide it should be capped (it’ll be hard enough keeping one under control) and single-shot (a tactic has to be used to pull the item back). Cheyanne has done her research, and though the weapon is ranged, it is only effective within 10-20 feet. They decide on short-range. Megan reminds Cheyanne that the weapon will need wear ‘n tear to represent the damage of repeatedly caving in zombie faces. Cheyanne asks if it gets manpower too, but Megan says no. The dart isn’t that heavy, and doing damage is more about precision than throwing harder or faster; spending extra rations wouldn’t have a measurable effect. Cheyanne doesn’t know about this, but the Market gets final say. Lastly, Megan gives the rope dart ten charges to represent its condition and says it will do Kill damage. Cheyanne wants one of the upgrades to be sturdy, which stops her from worrying about wear ‘n tear. She makes up a new upgrade
246 Crossbow and Quiver: Before the Crash, zombie movies advertised the crossbow as the ultimate weapon against the undead. A number of companies put out cheap, plastic versions to capitalize off people with too much money and not enough sense. When the nightmares actually came true, many found out the hard way which crossbows were actually effective. Still more died realizing they were shit shots. Flamethrower: Casualties don’t feel pain and they don’t stop moving when on fire. Breaking out the napalm is usually just a roundabout way to burn down your enclave. But if you’ve got stonewalls or work the deep wasteland, the flamethrower cleans AND disinfects. Bow and Quiver: In many ways, bows are the best possible projectile weapon for the undead. Takers can keep their distance, reuse their ammo, and be quiet about their work. However, the accuracy required to score a headshot on a slow moving casualty is considerable and keeping steady as mob closes in doesn’t make things any easier. Those with reliable archery skills can name their price in the Carrion Economy. Club: Sticks are one of the few things still plentiful in the Loss. Others have less practical reasons for using clubs, such as an attachment to a childhood baseball bat.
247 Grenades: Though unreliable for headshots, grenades tend to mangle casualties beyond the point of mobility anyway. Humans fare even worse. Handgun: Whether it is the family revolver found amidst a group suicide or the spec-ops sidearm pulled from the corpse of a fallen checkpoint guard, anything that can shoot gets salvaged in the Loss. Luckily, the insane number of guns in the US before the Crash (and the propensity for current users to die) keeps prices down. Flashbangs: During the Crash, the staple of SWAT teams everywhere couldn’t have seemed more useless. But now, as people invade each other’s entrenched positions to steal bounty, flashbangs have reentered the market.
248 Machete: The preferred choice of many Takers that work in close, machetes provide more reach than a knife, require less skill than a sword, and can be used in conjunction with a shield. Heavy Rifle: Finding ammo originally meant to destroy engine blocks is a struggle for your average Taker. But the psychological benefits of turning an enemy into paste from two kilometers away is too much for some crews to pass up. Knife: Stabby-stab-stab. Light Machine Gun: During the withdrawal to the Recession, space and weight were at a premium. Precision weapons were given preference over rate-of-fire. This left a glut of military, automatic weapons in the Loss, but few with the ammo or expertise required to use them.
249 Plastic Explosives/Detonator: A surprising amount of plastic explosive was left behind during the Crash, and it’s the first thing corrupt DHQS guards pilfer from their ammo dumps to sell across the border. Since most Lost have no idea how to use the stuff, they figure it’ll just end up blowing up the purchaser. Molotov Cocktail: Unless you get the fire hot enough to melt a skull, setting a casualty on fire is only a slightly faster method of disposal than waiting for them to die of old age… but engulfing the bastards in flames makes it real hard for them to track you. It also kills Vectors that are too dumb to stop, drop, and roll. As for humans? No one forgets the sound of a raider burning alive. Mortar: Though aiming is complicated, weapons don’t come much simpler than a mortar. They are overkill when it comes to casualties, but artillery is usually the first choice in enclave sieges and defense.
250 Spear: Though the skills required to accurately target a thrust to the head are archaic, spears have made a big comeback among the many Fencemen. Some Takers have grown so comfortable with polearms that they take their stickers into the field. Sword: Every douche that thought the zombie apocalypse sounded fun went straight for a sword when the Crash happened…and promptly got eaten by Vectors. To be fair, anyone still using a sword this late in the game is probably pretty damn good with it. Hopefully they’re also deaf to all the sniggers and insults it’ll attract around the enclave. Rifle: The average Taker’s first experience with a firearm was executing a loved one. In the Loss, range is valued for more than its tactical benefit. The further away one can get from the ugliness, the better. Rifles are the best choice in the intersection between expense, skill, and distance. Shotgun: Once a crew is sure the Bait knows to keep the barrel pointed down, a shotgun is usually the first weapon for a new Taker.