Red Markets: A Game of Economic Horror 9781987916973

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red Markets

First Printing July 2017 by Hebanon Games in cooperation with Asian Pacific Offset Inc. Contact us at [email protected] via redmarketsrpg.com, or search your favorite social network for “Red Markets” or “Hebanon Games.” Red Markets is the intellectual property of Hebanon Games and sole proprietor Caleb Stokes. Game Design: Caleb Stokes Writing: Caleb Stokes, Laura Briskin-Limehouse, Ross Payton Editing: Laura Briskin-Limehouse Art Direction: Caleb Stokes Cover Art: Kim Van Deun Back Cover Art: LuigiStudio Interior Art: Kim Van Deun, Patsy McDowell, James Beatham, Christopher Cirillo, Michael Plondaya, Darrell Claunch, Ean Moody, Przemek Lech Graphic Design: Kathryn Carty, Kyle Carty Special Thanks: Role-playing Public Radio, Technical Difficulties, Thrilling Intent, Faust Kells, Tom Church, David Dobelman, Aaron Carston, Shaun Greenwald, Nicolas Marjanovic, Adam Briskin-Limehouse, 1148 Kickstarter backers, and Sara Hann Creative Commons License;

Some Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org. This means is that you are free to copy, share, and remix the text and artwork within this book under the following conditions: 1) you do so only for noncommercial purposes; 2) you attribute Hebanon Games; 3) you license any derivatives under the same license.

table of contents IntroductIon 5 HIstory of the Crash 10

The (Un)death of History 11 The Failed State 13 The Crash 32 Reaction and Policy 56 Retreat Becomes Recession 68 Writing Off the Loss 82 Rise of the Carrion Economy 87 The Taker’s Role 110

The Loss 116

A Guide 117 Lost Places 120 Lost People 137 Lost Things 157

PlayIng The Market

171 Profit System 172 Character Creation 181 Upkeep: Paying the Bills 223 Materialism: Bounty, Gear, and Vehicles 232 Combat 272 Blight: Casualties and Vectors 293 Humanity 310 Negotiation 320

RunnIng The Market 351



Shades of Red 352 Job Creator 358 Long-term Investments 406 MBA Rules 424 Loss Encounters 446

AppendIx 485

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the wrong end of the economy. It’s about characters deciding how much they’re willing to pay for sanity, love, freedom, and other things that should be free. It’s about struggling with cutthroat capitalism when its knife is on your neck.

What Is an Rpg?

What Is Red Markets?

Red Markets is a tabletop RPG about economic horror. In Red Markets, characters risk their lives trading between the massive quarantine zones containing a zombie outbreak and the remains of civilization. They are Takers: mercenary entrepreneurs unwilling to accept their abandonment. Bound together into competing crews, each seeks to profit from mankind’s near-extinction before it claims them. They must hustle, scheme, and scam as hard as they fight if they hope to survive the competing factions and undead hordes the Market throws at them. Takers that are quick, clever, or brutal enough might live to see retirement in a safe zone, but many discover too late that the cycle of poverty proves harder to escape than the hordes of undead. Red Markets uses the traditional zombie genre to tell a story about surviving on

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Google it. Look, we’re not trying to turn you off here. If Red Markets is your first RPG, everyone who worked on this book is genuinely flattered. Welcome! But you can either read this whole book to get the gist of it, or check online for literally thousands of faster explanations. You can listen to dozens of Red Markets games on podcasts like Role-playing Public Radio, OneShot, or Technical Difficulties. Or ask fans of the game directly at redmarketsrpg.com or any of our social media sites. The book is already this goddamn long and we’d love to make it longer, so let’s not waste any more space pretending the internet doesn’t exist. Furthermore, Red Markets is basically a poverty simulator that uses zombies to keep its theme from getting too real. We really appreciate people playing the game (and their money), but there are sunnier, happier games with which to tour the magical land of RPGs. We understand that books are products, products are meant to be sold, and this maybe isn’t the best way to do that. But the purpose of consuming this particular product is to create a unique story-telling experience with your friends: an experience that can’t be commoditized, co-opted, or cheapened. Creating something that special is going to require some work out of you. It starts here.  

How To Use ThIs Book

The book is split into six sections. The Introduction, which you’re reading now, gives the basic gist of the game, the book’s content, and a glossary of terms useful for understanding the setting and rules.

History of the Crash is a setting chapter dealing with the world before the Crash, how the Blight came to ravage mankind, and the dystopian Carrion Economy that resulted, trapping the players’ characters to fend for themselves in a hell known as the Loss. The Loss details the various places, people, and things that Takers may run across as they work. The wasteland is a new world with new rules. It can make people rich, but it mostly makes them miserable, insane, or dead. Playing the Market explains the rules of the game. It covers how the Profit System’s dice mechanic works. It explains how to write characters, equip them, and have them fight for their lives. It also details the social/financial combat system known as Negotiation, which Takers must use if they hope to keep their crew and families alive. Running the Market contains tools for people hosting games for their friends. In addition to general advice, it has procedures for collaboratively building settings, adventures, and entire campaigns, as well as pre-built encounters. There are also a variety of alternate rules to keep the game interesting for advanced players. Finally, the Appendix has copies of all the papers needed to track a game session and an index for speedy reference. Game materials ready for download and print can also be found at redmarketsrpg.com.

Game TermInology

Here are the basic terms used in the Profit System and what they mean. “Buy-a-roll”: Some actions are only possible with the use of gear and spent resources. Buying a roll means spending a charge to allow a skill check. Black: the die that represents the player’s chance of success. This can be modified by skills and charges spent on gear. Boom: a rules variant that makes the game easier and more action-packed. Bust: a rules variant that makes the game more challenging and grim.

Charges: an expendable resource that abstractly measures a piece of gear’s remaining usefulness. Charges can be spent to buy-a-roll or to provide a bonus. Check: rolling the dice to determine the success or failure of a character’s actions. Default: checking a skill with a rating of zero is called defaulting. It is an optional rule. The Market can veto any and all default checks. Dependents: non-player characters in the Taker’s life that must be supported financially and heal Humanity when maintained. They are portrayed in the game by the Market or another player. Gassed: a character that is out of rations is considered gassed and may not take rigorous physical action until recovered. Gear: objects or tools that make certain actions possible and/or easier to achieve. Haul: the measure of how much a character can carry. Each unit of Haul represents a unit of supply the Taker can carry, unless the Market dictates otherwise. Market: the person who runs the game and writes the story of each job; the game-master. Responsible for playing NPCs in the story, determining encounters, and setting prices. Market Forces: any enemy NPC intent on harming the player characters. In combat, the Market declares what actions the forces are taking but does not roll for them. Non-player Characters (NPCs): secondary characters played by the Market or temporarily by another player at the table. One-and-Done: some skill checks cannot be attempted more than once. One-and-Done rolls are mostly social or mental actions. Failed one-and-done rolls can be made successful if the player petitions the Market to succeed at cost. Player Characters (PCs): the protagonist characters controlled by players at the table. In Red Markets, all PCs are Takers. Potential: natural aptitudes that can only be improved through rigorous, disciplined practice. Potentials serve as the limit of skills. Red: the die that represents the variable difficulty of performing an action.

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References: professional contacts in the setting with access to goods, services, and expertise. References perform favors for Takers but must be paid back with bounty or other favors. These non-player characters are played by the Market or another player. Refresh: the term used for replacing spent charges on a single piece of gear. Skills: training and practice in performing a specific task. A Taker’s skill cannot exceed the Potential associated with it. Succeed at Cost: If a player fails a one-anddone roll and doesn’t want to spend Will, they can choose to succeed at cost. The cost of success is determined by the Market, but it often involves tapping a Reference or learning the truth through a painful mistake. Upkeep: the cost, in bounty, it takes to stay alive, retain shelter, and keep tools in working order between sessions.

SettIng TermInology

Below you’ll find some jargon used to describe the world of Red Markets.

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Aberrant: blanket term for a number of casualty sub-types with special abilities. Bait: nickname for a citizen of the Recession that left for financial, political, or religious reasons to live out in the Loss. Believers: collective term for the religious sects and philosophies that sprang up after the Crash. Each cult has unique beliefs that can range from benignly comforting to terrifyingly fanatical. Blight: the mysterious infection responsible for the Crash and all its terrors, so called due to its anomalous medical classification. Like its victims, Blight has two stages: living and undead. Living Blight is the single most infectious disease ever encountered by mankind. It creates homicidal Vectors in a matter of minutes, and its exponential growth rate can bring conversion time down to seconds. After a victim succumbs, the Blight pathology changes completely, becoming more fungal/parasitic and building unearthly black sinews that puppet dead flesh and slow cadaver decay.

Bounty: the currency between the Loss and the Recession. Bounty is provided by the DHQS for the retrieval of identity and property documentation dating before the Crash. Bounty is rewarded on delivery, based on the average value of a pre-Crash adult’s total property and financial holdings. Carrion Economy: generalized term for the world economy. While new goods and services are still in production, worldwide trade is largely focused on looting the corpse of the Loss to recover value and infrastructure. Casualty: A zombie; a cadaver puppeted by the parasitic nervous system characteristic of “cold” Blight. The term hails from bloodless, sanitized news reports during the early days of the Crash used to prevent panic, now used ironically by Takers. “Taking casualties” can now mean killing zombies for money or dying in the process. Citizen: pejorative term for a person living safely in the Recession or one of its settlements. Crash: the initial emergence of the Blight and the resulting panic, chaos, and death. Crew: the collective noun form of Takers. Crews assemble to bid on jobs and brand their services. DHQS: the Department of Homeland Quarantine and Stewardship, the new agency in charge of maintaining the United State’s borders and eventually reclaiming the Loss. They are responsible for the bounty system and the inept enforcement of the underground economy resulting from it. Enclaves: pockets of surviving civilization not officially recognized by any of the surviving state powers, but large enough to have some economic impact. Allowed to survive because they draw casualties away from the borders of safe zones or maintain vital infrastructure points. Free Parking: derogatory term for the shantytowns that developed in the wake of the evacuation, so named because of the numerous derelict cars that make up their dwellings.

Homo Sacer: Latin for “the accursed man,” the term refers to a person banned from civilized society and not afforded protection under the law. Anyone outside the Recession’s borders without expressed federal consent is considered Homo Sacer. Immune: a rare person that, for reasons unknown, is completely immune to Blight infection. They are subject to “conscription into medical service” (read: kidnapping, medical torture, and bone marrow harvesting) in the Recession and its settlements, in order to produce Suppressin K-7864 from their bone marrow. Takers and certain enclaves often attempt to kidnap the Immune for a sizable reward. Latent: a carrier of the Blight that somehow remains free of cannibalistic urges. It occurs when the virus infects a host but transfers too quickly into its undead state. Necrotic Blight sinews wind painfully through the victim’s tissues (making Latents instantly identifiable), but the dead strain cannot affect living brain tissue. Latency can be natural or achieved by injecting Supressin K-7864 shortly after infection. Those infected by a Latent become Vectors as if bitten by a casualty, as the Blight reanimates itself without the intervention of drugs. Due to this danger, enclaves, settlements, and nations often shoot Latents on sight or detain them in isolated camps. LifeLines: the secured forum launched by Gnat to coordinate evacuation and survival for civilians during the Crash. It’s now an invite-only community for Takers and other inhabitants of the Loss. The Loss: as in “written off as a Loss.” Everything outside a safe zone surrendered to the dead and the home of the Red Markets for five years. Lost: anybody left behind as the remainder of civilization pulled back to the Recession. The Moths: the world’s largest Taker crew, made up of the survivors of the Operation Utility mutiny and former Ubiq employees. The Moths are based out of the Ubiq campus in the Colorado Mountains. The Recession: the term for humanity’s

retreat behind natural borders and the resulting safe zones. If someone is “from the Recession,” they live in a safe zone marked by geographical fortification and run by a surviving national government. Early government communications used this term exclusively to refer to symptoms of the Crash because everything except economic news was being censored to avoid panic. It stuck due to its ironic inadequacy after the American government abandoned many of its citizens and “receded” to the East coast. The Red Markets: the underground economy exploiting the Loss as a resource and trading between enclaves and the Recession. The market is “red” because it is not legal, but as nearly everyone participating is considered legally dead already, the trade isn’t technically illegal either. Supressin K-7864: a drug cocktail derived from the bone marrow of an Immune human, extremely powerful antibiotics, and dangerously caustic antiseptics. Though it cannot kill infection, injection within a few minutes after a bite can cause the Blight to enter its dormant state and reduce a Vector into a Latent human. Supressin is the single most valuable substance in the Loss. T-minus Never: slang for the day of reclamation, generalized to mean false hope or foolish wishes. Derives from the fact that DHQS has claimed reclamation would begin in 20 years from the date of announcement... for five years running. Takers: name for the outcasts, smugglers, and survivors that work the Red Markets. Simultaneously references “undertakers” and a reputation for theft. Ubiq: massive internet start-up responsible for the free global wi-fi network exploited by the Moths and the only reliable from of communication the global economy can rely on. Ubiq servers both enabled and sabotaged the Recession by providing a stable communications network during the Crash. Vector: a recently infected human unhindered by decay or rigor mortis. They are fast, infectious, and deadly. 

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hIstory OF THE CRASH

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The (Un)Death of HIstory

Before all of you hop on the “she’s gone mad with power!” thread again, allow me to explain. This self-indulgent lecture owes itself to a patrol the Moths and I did a while back. (Yes, “The Gnat” still goes over the fence and pulls cards. Having to moderate you assholes all day can make a girl nostalgic for the days when being eaten alive was a literal rather than metaphorical risk.) Anyway, we had our haul and were heading back to camp. BanHammer was out front, doing his best white walker impression. Hipster and I were in middle and Traitor was on overwatch in the rear, coordinating with squads on the flank. It was cold: the Cs were slow and the pickings easy. Then, out of nowhere, this huge drift of snow falls from boughs of a tree and onto Ban’s shoulders. We look up and there he is: a half-starved boy. The little guy is scared shitless and who can blame him. Nobody sneaks up on Ban, so he freaks out, pulls out the sledge, and starts prowling around like a Vector in heat. Traitor’s screaming militarese into his mic as Hipster buzzes the poor little bastard with a drone. Then the support squads crash through the underbrush to save me before — god forbid — someone else has to learn to code. So the child is frozen to the tree, figuratively and literally. He’d been chased up there by a half-dozen undead that we’d put down on the way out, and he’d stayed up there until we walked back. One of the soldiers yells up, asks him why the hell he didn’t say anything as we were killing monsters right underneath his feet. The kid just points at me with a shaking finger, more terrified of my face than any of the dozen rifles held on him. A squad eventually coaxes him down and back to UCity. After we get him warm and fed, they pull some information out of him. He was a Recession kid: ration card placed him in a Free Parking ghetto in Tennessee, right up against the river. We have no idea how he got all the way to Colorado. When they ask him why he left the Recession and who with,

he gets that central-casting PTSD look and clams up for two days. Weeks pass and we get him almost human again. He starts running around the place like a damned mascot, making friends with the Moths. But he still won’t come near me. One day, I crawl out from under the innards of a server and find him standing there. He bolts like a Latent just had a heart attack. So I ask Frizzle, who runs what we can manage for a school, what the hell is up with this kid. She tells me the reason he didn’t call for help — the reason he’d rather freeze to death in the woods than get my attention — is because he recognizes my face from the DHQS propaganda. Apparently, they’re running ads on the public access projector screens in his car camp... ones where they blame me for the Crash. PA blasts aimed at the poor, day-and-night, claiming I brought the zombies that killed his parents. I get a little pissed when I hear this. I work pretty hard to keep the DHQS bullshit out of my home and off my bandwidth. I tell Frizzle to get the kid to read a book or something. Educate his ass. Do your job. She looks through me. She says, “We have to teach him how to read first.” The kid’s ration card says he was something like four when the Crash went down. Five years later, the Department of Education still isn’t up and running again, or at least not in the car camps. The generation for which zombies were always a reality has already been born. From now on, whenever I’m not working to keep the LifeLines up, I’m going to try my hand at being a historian. One day, the Recession is going to decide they want the Loss back, and they’ll send me the memo by way of drone strike. If I’m not careful, my story will die with me. So until then, I’ll be working on a record of how things really went down and seeding it all over the network.

Gnat

If you’re reading an “official” history, I bet my biography reads something like “Natalie Delle

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was summoned from the bowels of hell by dark priests. Her uneventful years were spend eating babies and blowing terrorists until she decided to betray America to the undead legions and destroy the world.” Unofficially, Mom was a Ghanese hydroelectric engineer and Dad was a Mormon computer programmer. They met on his mission and moved back to the garbage fire people were still confusing for the US of A. Natalie Delle was born and did little more than play video games and watch cat videos until Dad died in a car crash when she was seven. Afterwards, Mom made the terrible choice of moving the family near relatives in the shithole police state of St. Louis, MO. The rest of Natalie’s youth was spent trapped in her house, tinkering with Dad’s old computer equipment as Mom did her best to seal out the general nastiness outside. Natalie was bright. She won a few scholarships and went out into the world to discover what her mother had learned long ago: black women were about as welcome in tech as an EMP. By then, it was too late to reroll “computer nerd” as her class ability, so she said fuck it and persisted until she got hired by a goofy-looking hick that happened to start the biggest tech company the world had ever seen. Her job at Ubiq positioned Natalie for a nice view of the end of the world. When she refused to sit around and do nothing about it, it was a sin for which she’ll never be forgiven. Am I biased? Yeah. Everyone is. At least I’ll admit I’m always trying to sell you something... even if it’s just my version of events.

their actual merits, and there aren’t enough of those to convince the peasants to put down their Molotov cocktails. Survivors are incentivized from within and without to maintain this the illusion that the pre-Crash world was the ideal. Don’t get me wrong, I preferred a world without casualties — but citizens always give the undead more credit than they deserve. If anything, the Blight was a tipping point that sent a dozen complex sociopolitical, economic, and environmental issues into cascading failure. That’s why it’s called the Crash and not “Zombie Day.”

The FaIled State

ClImate Change

I’ve always suspected rose-colored glasses get their tint from blood. A partial apocalypse naturally maximizes nostalgia, but the Recession’s entire ideology hinges on painting pre-Crash society as some utopia. If they can’t promise a return to the golden age, they’re stuck campaigning on

Global DeclIne

Every generation laments the future. Nanabanyin kɛse freaked out when his girls attended junior high school. Nanabanyin thought it was the end times when my mother went to college. Dad’s family freaked out when he married an African, and Mom lost it when I left her racist-ass church. They all saw the death of the future in the lives of the young. So when I say society was on the downward slope long before the Crash, a lot of people will claim I’m just shaking my fist at those darn kids and telling them to get off the lawn of history. That criticism would have some weight... if billions hadn’t been killed by the Blight. When I say things weren’t looking good before the Crash, it’s not overreaction. We had huge problems that we were doing nothing to solve, and those problems remain ignored even today. It’s easy to blame everything on monsters, but those in power opened the door to them in the first place. Let’s compare the world on the day before the Crash to that same day in 1950. The world population was 75% smaller. It had 1.5 million more plant and animal species, 90% more fish, and 60% more oxygen-producing phytoplankton. Drinking water and trees were three times more plentiful, and there was 40% less CO2 and methane in the atmosphere.

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Despite all this, my parents lived their entire lives in a world of climate change deniers. As islands sank and fields turned fallow, they couldn’t make a remark that it seemed a little hot today without launching into some political debate that might lose them their jobs. By the time my generation came around, deniers were thankfully back to being treated like cranks and lobbyists, but we’d already outpaced the predicted global temperature rise by an entire degree. We were hovering at just under +3°C, and most scientists claimed +4°C signaled the end of humanity. We went straight from pretending global warming wasn’t happening to resigning ourselves to doom, skipping the part where you actually try to do something about the problem. This is an oversimplification; there were some nations that started getting very serious about renewable energy. Scandinavia had

gone almost entirely green almost a decade before the Crash (it’s a key reason they survived to become major Recession powers). But every advancement was offset by a dozen developing nations bootstrapping themselves using coal or fracking, or one superpower (USA, China, Russia) that could not seem to give a fuck. Basically, the Crash threw information and manufacturing economies back onto their agricultural base. Hard. When regular seasons had already been reduced to mere suggestions, natural disasters were occurring more commonly than ever before, and the extinction curve was approaching vertical. Before we even had to deal with the worst pandemic in history, the most advanced nations in the world were having trouble feeding and housing all their citizens.

PolItIcal Upheaval

Most neoliberal first-world democracies so insulated themselves from the effects of climate change that environmental issues were rarely, if ever, on the platform. The one thing the technocrats could not keep out, however, was climate’s effect on jobs. Agrarian occupations became increasingly technical, as corporations were often the only farmers with the genetic and mechanical resources to keep the land producing crops. The lowest end of the economic spectrum was slowly phased out from the world’s most essential profession. In many nations, this led to either mass migration or wars, with the latter eventually ending in the former. In addition to the effect of refugees on more stable economies, the increase in mass killings — be they motivated by political, economic, or more mundane forms of fame-seeking narcissism — was reliably blamed on the transient population of the moment. After all, it was easier to police the desperate poor than contain an outbreak of memetic insanity. The general dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of pretty much every political party scattered once stable voting blocs to the four winds. On the right, candidates pushed further and further away from the center, advocating for outright xenophobic and fascist policies. America elected more than a few members of recognized hate groups into high office. On the left, many countries that had historically gone centuries without hard left groups found themselves inundated by socialist, libertarian, and anarchist movements. Though these groups grabbed some power, a lack of funding and tendency to in-fight left most disenfranchised. The desperation for recognition radicalized the base more and more, increasing the cycle of leftist self-destruction. Elections became unpredictable crapshoots, full of insurgent candidates that gambled years of progress and the collective GDP of entire continents. In retrospect, it’s no surprise no one knew what they hell they were doing when the Crash hit.

A.U.B.U. MIlItarIzatIon

So if you can’t change the ecological basis of all your problems and you can’t trust the reaction to keep you in power, what do you do? I don’t know. Apparently most world governments thought the answer was “tanks.” A.U.B.U. (Against Us, By Us) militarization became the norm for most of the world. Nobody quite reached North Korean levels of military oppression (at least not before the Crash), but the line between law enforcement and military turned into an indistinct smudge. Riot cops looking like space marines were regularly deployed to stop peaceful protests. Missile batteries on sports stadiums. APCs instead of cruisers and balaclavas as standard uniform. Some reading this might not be able to imagine a time when this wasn’t the case. Hell, the thought of a cop not covered head-totoe in bite-resistant Kevlar might terrify you. But this was before the dead rose. The world didn’t have monsters yet; just people. At best, A.U.B.U. militarization trends did as much to help as it did to hurt during the Crash. Sure, it’s nice to have all those guns around now, but only because we’re outside the Romero Effect (see p. 48).

The “Cybergeddon”

God, I hate this term. So stupid. But it’s what they were calling it back then, so it’s what you’ll have to search. In the early 2010’s, Jason Healey, a cybersecurity expert working for the NSA, pointed out that the gap between digital offense (hackers, cyber-warfare units, etc.) and defense (security specialists, firewalls, etc.) had not only always favored the attackers, but it was doing so at an exponentially increasing rate. Disruptive hackers could come from within security services in the form of zeroday hacks, but rarely would criminals be convinced to go straight with the same ease. Stagnating wages incentivized more experts to rob the online commerce vaults than guard them. Governmental obsessions

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with surveillance left little in the budget for prevention, and most of the remainder went towards developing offensive cyber-warfare units of their own. Local law enforcement remained more of a tool for doxxers, swatters, and harassers than a real deterrent, and the increasing tendency to nationalize internets using the “Great Firewall of China” method usually only made enforcement harder. All of these tendencies, combined with equally exponential growth in new technologies and software, could lead towards a “Cybergeddon:” an internet divided up into temporary fiefdoms perpetually at war for resources. It was a dumb name for a smart prediction. Before the development of Ubiq, the old net was certainly doing its best to prove Healey correct. Domain conflicts over limited bandwidth were constantly being fought in the courtroom, usually only as

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a precursor to corporate espionage and national cyber-warfare. Ideological attacks masked themselves as corporate sabotage and vice versa, leading to state-level security crackdowns that were uniformly mismanaged. Before the Crash, massive data leaks were daily news. When net neutrality ended and providers in the West starting holding bandwidth hostage, old-school hacktivists, usually split by their pet social problems, in unison turned their ire towards the internet’s corporate kingmakers. Every script-kiddie troll on earth joined the cause too, even if they were just fighting to restore their old porn download speeds. As the data leaks grew more severe, the crackdowns got more draconian, and the ranks of the digital anarchists swelled. The traditional internet was a failed state before the nightmare even began.

The LIvIng Death of JournalIsm

Good luck finding anything to confirm this bullshit I’m spewing. Even with the old net all but dead, you’ll still find a lot of articles and news segments to confirm how awful things were getting, but most of them will end by blaming everything on them. Whichever them was most convenient to the paymasters: liberals, conservatives, black, whites, foreigners, etc. To figure out who was really responsible for something, your best bet was to see what the news network wasn’t covering. We can’t really blame the journalists. Journalism decayed because we starved it to death. We stopped reading magazines and papers. When we read news online, we went to the article with the most GIFs, or the shortest listicle, or the funniest comedian. Big, complicated ideas stopped selling, but the theater of “revealing” those ideas to the public was still valuable. By the time the Crash started, there was no such thing as an unbranded news source: every single one of the 24-hour services owed complete editorial control to some corporate paymaster or political favor-monger. Ethical, accurate citizen journalism still existed, but it was thrown onto the wires along with every paranoid lunatic the zeitgeist could dig up. The “buyer beware” mentality of information consumption is all good if you received a decent public education and gave enough of a shit to pay attention to it, but that was a dicey proposition even before the Crash. Now that a significant portion of the population lives in squalid tent cities surrounded by undead cannibals, I don’t imagine the situation has exactly improved.

The AmerIcan NIghtmare

That’s enough generalities. Every nation Crashed in their own way, and I’m not about to claim to speak for all of them. I’m an American, and my country died an American death: needless, fueled by ignored problems and ungrateful excess.

The EducatIon Default

Speaking of deathless monsters, how ‘bout them student loans? For decades, more and more people went to college, but the debt accrued to pay for it left enrollment numbers in the dust. Even at the most forgiving interest rates, any student loan would saddle the recipient with decades of debt slavery. With the exception of those with full-rides or people majoring in finance, most college graduates could expect to pay on loans for the rest of their lives. Wages that had stagnated since the goddamn 70’s just weren’t going to cut it, and the bankruptcy exemption meant the situation was literally hopeless. The job market couldn’t react appropriately. Calls to increase vocational education and return to manufacturing were ignored. Thousands of jobs with little or no academic component nonetheless required Bachelor’s degrees, and so many for-profit schools sprang up to fulfill demand that a Master’s degree became the new signifier of “real” college. Even more years of school. Even more debt. Politicians promised to forgive all debts overnight, cap tuition, genetically engineer money trees, etc. It didn’t matter. Each solution received so much pushback from the various factions that it stopped dead the moment it was proposed. So the problem metastasized: rising demand and costs saw the private sector greedily choke down whatever the fed loans didn’t want to touch. It was the ‘07 subprime mortgage fiasco all over again. Huge amounts of student debt were privately traded among financial institutions, bundled into monstrous clusterfucks of excel sheets that were sold to the highest bidder for collection. Everyone wanted a degree because they wanted a job, whether they had the chops to graduate or not. Loans were given out to 4.0 pre-med students and 1.4 professional fraternity brothers alike, all to feed the beast of debt buyers. The requirements went down and down until they went away. Being rejected for a federal loan meant less than nothing when a

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dozen banks had kiosks in the student union. The only purpose fed loans served to the banks was as a bellwether for the default margin. See, they never expect everyone to pay up. People die, go ex-pat, stay unemployed, etc. The risk margin was already built into every loan bundle. And, like the crash before it, everything was fine until it tipped over an invisible line. I don’t know if the panic started when the default rate hit 15%, 16%, or higher. It’s as likely an issue of memetics as mathematics. The media’s reporting on the issue certainly didn’t help consumer confidence. When the debt buyers started to cut and run, it made the math worse, which made the default margin look worse, which caused more to cut and run, etc. I don’t know who was defaulting either. Maybe cost-of-living and cost-of-loans became mutually exclusive for one too many. Maybe

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people just got tired of the rigged system and all gave up at once. Maybe one of the defaulting movements finally got enough people to realize that there weren’t enough taxmen in the world to come for all of them. I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone ever will. The dust of the economic collapse hadn’t settled before zombies came stalking out of it. Midway through the crisis, we got President Hunter. New promises were made. Obstructionist Congress got out the knives as usual, but, this time, an actual bill passed out the other end. A bloody, diseased scrap of law. The solution proposed got the government out of the loan business. That’s it. They threw the whole thing on the private sector and said good luck. No bailout. No forgiveness. No nothing. We finally had a farright president that truly believed business could do everything, and now they were being asked to prove it.

The panic redoubled. Mass layoffs. Colleges closed. Unemployment offices already crammed with farmers and pre-hybrid mechanics were now flooded with professors and desperate hordes of adjuncts. Public education failed to find a new target after “college prep,” and, with fewer universities than ever before, financial institutions shifted as much blame as possible onto the only educators left standing.

SharIng (the Scraps) Economy

As is the American way, the education default illuminated a whole bunch of other shit we were pretending wasn’t a problem. For decades, we’d been eroding job security and workplace protections. Sure, the laws to protect against undue termination and workplace harassment were in place, but every asshole in the world knew how to get around them. During college, I had a job at a coffee shop in this ritzy neighborhood. I got fired because I was black (the bastard used the n-word) — I could try to sue, but my emailed termination letter merely said I “wasn’t a fit with company culture.” Unless the psychos trying to ruin your livelihood were dumb enough to tweet out their illegal prejudices, there was essentially no such thing as worker protection in the USA. But maybe getting fired is for the best; at least they can’t steal your wages anymore. The US was (and is) one of the most notorious wage thieves in the world, stealing billions in unpaid overtime, denied vacation, illegal deductions, misclassification, and off-theclock hours. Considering the total lack of worker protections, the only solution to stop the theft was “quit,” which wasn’t really an option at the beginning of another massive economic depression. Unions? Please. By the time I was born, I was more likely to meet a unicorn than a functioning union. They were almost completely dismantled decades ago. If you look at articles from the time, everyone seems so excited about the sharing economy. Cloud-distributed taxi services,

massively open online courses, international piece-meal work apps — they were going to save the goddamn day. I’d be lying if I said people didn’t appreciate the “funemployment” gigs, but scraps when you’re starving are nice too, even if they don’t solve the problem. The new entrepreneurs kept the economy limping along by providing enough for the weekly grocery bill and that’s it. No healthcare, parental leave, overtime, transportation, or anything else. But it was enough. It’s hard to start a revolution on a full stomach. So what was the reality on the ground? More people were renting than ever before. Birth rates were way down, especially amongst the educated. Minimalist living went from a fad to a necessity. A huge segment of the population was on the road; separated from social support networks by digitalonly workspaces, geographic isolation, and working poverty; trapped in cheap, temporary housing not fit to withstand a thunderstorm, not to mention a cannibal horde.

The SIlver Fallout

For awhile, it looked like everyone was content to pass the buck to younger generations and blame it all on “intellectuals.” It’s a move that had worked before, and it looked like the new revenue streams would keep us limping along. But then the retirement funds got threatened. Thanks to the boomers, the US held more pension debt than every scrap of currency in circulation could cover, three times over. We woke up when the California Teacher’s Fund tried to quietly ask the Fed for a bailout lest they have to publicly declare bankruptcy. Of course, hackers leaked the news before things got settled. The media whipped the markets into the biggest panic yet, and it may have even been justified. California’s was the biggest fund save for Social Security, and after they broke the seal on admitting they’d been gambling pension debt against education debt, other major private and federal funds began reluctantly raising their hands to join them. Hey, at least it wasn’t housing this time?

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It became common to see scandals where entire job sectors would lose decades’ worth of retirement funds on some stupid investment. Each one implicated more and more pension funds sidelining in student loan debt. Investor confidence tanked even harder. Things started to look grim: hobos and souplines grim. Outright it’s-raining-stockbrokers level of panic was averted by the scheduling of congressional hearings and rumors of a bailout, but only just. The weeks leading up to the Crash were ones of tense anticipation. Everyone tried to hold their shit together and prevent further collapse, but phrases like “The Greatest Depression” were on all our minds. At that point, we considered another long recession a “win” scenario; this was before the retreat behind the borders and the term became more literal. In retrospect, we were kidding ourselves. There’s nothing the government could have done. Our dependency ratio — the rate of working-age employed citizens vs. the combined mass of the country’s children, elderly, and disabled — had been thrown completely out of the realm of prosperity by the “silver tsunami” of boomer retirement years earlier. The experts had hoped for years that the “Boomer Echo” would sustain us, but the demographics were never sustainable. People were living longer than ever before, and record low birth rates worsened under the pessimism caused by the education default. When you factor in the institutionalized greed of the corporations we’d sold all the social safety nets to? The most anyone could have done was slow the collapse... at least until China faced the same dependency ratio problem as a result of threedecades of one-child policy. As repugnant as it is to admit, the loss of life might have been even greater if the Crash hadn’t happened. In many ways, the singular measures taken by global powers to secure the Recession hit the reset button on what could have been an economic apocalypse. The system had a poisoned limb, threatening the

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whole body, before a casualty came along and ripped it off.

Desperate InnovatIon

Time to check my privilege. It wasn’t all bad before the Crash. That any of us are alive to tell this tale is a testament to that. Not everyone took the world’s problems lying down, and people with that attitude keep the Loss alive. Even those that didn’t make it made survival easier on the rest of us, and they deserve their part in the story too.

Tech

Working in tech before the Crash, it was hard not to read each new development as either a bullshit fad or as homework. Had the Blight not come, there’s no telling which of these inventions would have caught on and which would have been forgotten as misplaced hype. But the Crash forced corporate R+D, hacker spaces, and survivalist culture into a threeway exchange of ideas unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Surviving the zombie hordes may have favored the luddites initially, but enclaves need technology and infrastructure to survive. A lot of cutting-edge developments prior to the Crash are the only thing keeping us alive today. Carbon Nanotubes We finally figured out hexagonal carbon nanotubes: T6 and T14 carbon chains in stable 3D structures, the lightest and strongest material ever constructed by man. Each stress-tested to roughly 50,000 times its own weight. Manufacturing that allowed the material to stay metallic at ambient temperatures was still expensive as hell, but a lot of it was being commissioned anyway. Ubiq’s Aloft servers wouldn’t have been possible without “tubon,” and the government was researching ways to cheapen production for its own products. Many of the technologies that keep the Recession safe from Cs use carbon nanotubes, like the Mississippi dragnets and Denial Door Jams (see p. 259).

The stuff is too damn expensive to produce nowadays, and many of the labs with the right equipment are now ruins in the Loss. But, on the bright side, the stuff made pre-Crash is pretty much going to last forever, and a big tubon recycling score can set a Taker up for life. Maybe one day the Recession will figure how to make it cheaply and we can space elevator the hell off this rock. A girl can dream... BIotech For a while there, it looked like the age of antibiotics was about to end. The clock of medical progress was about to jump back a century due to resistant super-bugs hardened by a million prescriptions. The Russians, however, finally figured out stable and safe phage therapy, weaponizing viruses to attack bacteria that antibiotics could no longer harm. Without phage therapy as an alternative, infant mortality would have skyrocketed, organ transplant success would have plummeted, and chemotherapy would have been discontinued altogether. I know this from experience; it’s the reality of the Loss. Hardly anybody can afford or produce antibiotics out here, not to mention the exorbitantly expensive phage therapy. Still, we would have hit the tipping point on antibiotic resistance before the Crash without phage developments, and there’s no doubt the Crash would have been even worse without it. The same skill for genetic manipulation required to grow targeted retroviruses was also applied to alleviate the damage of climate change on food production. Super-strains of all the staple food crops were continually developed and improved in the years leading up to the Crash. “Frankenstein” corn could excrete pheromones to repel insects, produce higher yields, grow on half the water, and survive for short times at extreme temperatures. If you want to go all Detoxin on me and freak about the long-term effects of GMO crops, feel free. It doesn’t change the fact that the resilience of “abomination” seeds was the only thing that kept tens-of-thousands

from starving after the Crash. When you can’t predict whether your crops will be grown in a desert, jungle, or tundra — depending on how Mother Earth feels like taking her revenge that year — natural seed can’t cut it. Just better hope you didn’t buy packets of that Alosine shit with the planned obsolescence built in. Even those that manage to stave off common infections and stay fed still have to face the real threat of a zombie chewing an arm off. But government research into prosthetics motivated by our endless bush wars made the loss of limbs less restrictive than ever before. Nerve-bundling and diode integration can now “mind control” prosthetic limbs with unprecedented precision, in addition to providing limited sensation. Developments in robotics provided unseen articulation, and the advent of 3D printing open-sourced manufacturing to the point where installation only required minimal medical knowledge. We aren’t in a cyberpunk utopia of replacing body parts for fun quite yet — the pain and burden are not to be taken lightly. Still, I’ve been outrun by legless Takers before, and I once saw a guy crush a zombie’s skull in his metal claws. Had the Crash happened even one year earlier, the Loss would be even less accessible than it is now. 3D PrIntIng Speaking of 3D printing... thank god for those nerds! I never got into it myself. “Oh wow! You made a belt buckle out of blue plastic? The future is now!” The appeal never made sense to me, and I regarded the whole thing with eye rolls whenever I’d hear people talking about it in the break room or demonstrating it at conferences. But now that I’m, you know, separated from any and all manufacturing infrastructure for the remainder of my life? Holy shit is 3D printing useful. The Ubiq reactor and servers are only running because we can make new parts for them on the fly. Our catalogue of open source designs is hands down the most popular feature on LifeLines.

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I know one lucky enclave that holed up on the construction site where some billionaire tech-bro was “printing” concrete for his new mansion: they have the best damn defenses and housing in the Loss. On at least one occasion, a plastic .22 pistol I grabbed hot off the press saved my life. Seriously, it was kind of a silly hobby before the zombies came. Now? A tube of plastic filament fetches more than a month’s worth of food on the market. Green Technology Compared to the scope of the problem, relatively few people worked on practical environmental alternatives before the Crash. Had we pulled environmentalism away from the fringe and into the mainstream rather than just fracking more? Hundreds of thousands more would have survived. We might have already achieved reclamation. Anyway, as it is, even with the paucity of viable alternatives available, almost every surviving enclave bases its energy policy around a mixture of green technology. You name a green technology and you can bet some group of survivors is now banking their lives on it. Biodiesel, solar, and wind power are the rule rather than the exception. Multiple tech firms increased the efficiency of all three well before the Crash started, but no one had yet to make anything that fit economies of scale. Now? It doesn’t matter how expensive it is. Energy production is an existential threat for most enclaves, and whatever resources can be put towards “nationalizing” utilities in their little city-states are put towards green energy production. There are outliers. Some enclaves are positioned for hydroelectric production. Ubiq is mostly powered by geothermal. Some even use kinetic generators: the lucky ones scored high-end military exoskeleton generators that capture kinetic force from the bodies of users to charge devices; the less fortunate have to pay a daily exercise tax on a stationary bike hooked to a battery. There are a couple of independent fracking,

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coal mining, and petrochemical refinery operations run by the Lost, and the DHQS settlements producing fossil fuels sometimes run black markets for local Takers. Either way, gasoline and diesel sells at a premium most survivors can’t hope to afford, and running a small hybrid is enough to bankrupt most crews. Like I said, as dire as the energy crisis was before, the minuscule progress made towards renewables is the only reason many of us are alive today. DenatIonalIzed Drones “Drones are the future of warfare,” said every securocrat of the past three decades. It didn’t matter how many unmanned bombers and surveillance flights went up that year. It didn’t

matter how many bombs robots defused or that all the tanks could be piloted remotely now. The budgets always called for more automation in the security structure. All that R+D had a trickle down effect. Fear of hacking kept some soldiers inside their tanks, but the government was happy to sell the technology to the agri-corps so they could fire all the farmers and turn the combines into drones. Self-driving AI systems finally got safe enough to mass-produce in cars. When the government was between wars, they’d rent out the high-altitude surveillance tech to watch over cities. By the time they needed them back, municipal police departments were 3D printing their own spy-bots. Hell, the design that eventually became the DHQS zombie-murdering punchbot started out as a prototype for automated riot police. Enhanced quad-copter designs finally wore down the FAA and aerial drone delivery revolutionized distribution seemingly overnight. Narco cartels began using the things to scout smuggling routes. So the DEA made hunter-killer models... which were then reverse engineered by anti-surveillance techno libertarians and used in both political and criminal attacks against government units. Pretty soon, the youth drone racing leagues held out of people’s garages were using tech that would have been military grade the year before. Between racing hobbyists, delivery businesses, self-driving cars, tech criminals, future police, and general trolls hunting all of the above, the world before the Crash was crowded with drones. And thank god. Eyes in the sky and AR technology were the only way some of the first enclave sites got discovered during the torpor. The “spontaneous organization” that allowed the Loss to come together would have been even bloodier if our scouts hadn’t been able to fly. Of course, all the aerial surveillance in the world wouldn’t mean shit if we’d gone offline, which brings me to my role in this mess...

PalbIcke and UbIq

I don’t want to ramble on too much about Austin Palbicke; there’s no shortage of biographies out there in the “visionary white tech guy” section of your local e-pub. He’s after Musk and before Zuckerberg. I also don’t want to delve too deep into Ubiq, as the chances you’re reading this on it right now are about as good as the chances you won’t be able to understand how it works. But people like the kid who sparked my little retrospective apparently need more help; his deepest understanding of network architecture seems to be that the internet “lives invisible in the sky.” And as much as I deserve to be worshipped as a god, the truth is more quotidian. So here’s how the system that kept us all alive came to be born. The World Before UbIq Allow me an international comparison for some context. A decade or so back, South Korea announced it had finally achieved “system complete” for its total economic tracking system (TETS). Invoicing had long ago gone digital, but the South Koreans now claimed to have tagged every physical good circulating in their economy. Every pair of sandals, k-pop poster, and bowl of ramen sold had a unique radio tag installed. On production, purchase, and destruction, the code fed user data into the business’s records and the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy, which in turn fed them into “SanShin,” the largest big data analysis software ever conceived. San-Shin processed exabytes of information every hour and promised to revolutionize international distribution. Meanwhile in the USA, on the same date as the TETS announcement, the FCC declared we’d finally, after twenty years of threatening to, connected 90% of the populace to the internet. Despite having dropped from 15th to 18th to 25th in connectivity amongst developed nations. It didn’t matter that everyone alive was effectively a “digital native” or that the web was the only means of

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securing a job, an education, or a connection to global culture. Weirdly enough, the cable monopolies kept running out of internet around the same time people ran out of money. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest the FCC cooked their books to save face internationally — connectivity rates in the USA were probably dropping. We were still using century old goddamn copper wires because nobody would invest in the new fiber technologies. Exacerbating the problem, remember that thing everyone said would happen if net neutrality ended? It happened when net neutrality ended. Corporations paid a premium for their download speeds, making browsing any other content insufferably slow. If you weren’t a massive search engine or streaming media site, your bandwidth cap put access closer to dial-up than wifi. As more and more media production companies merged with old cable monopolies and expanded into distribution, censorship through throttling became common in many parts of the nation. The remaining anti-trust laws meant to combat such monopolies were, mysteriously, ruled “inapplicable” by politicians. That those same lawmakers were granted half-decent bandwidth during their broadcasts to key demographics was ruled a coincidence in usage patterns. PalbIcke’s Early LIfe and Career God, I’m shit at this historian gig. Let’s jump back three decades or so. Austin Palbicke grew up in a deserted track of West Texas where the boy didn’t even see a computer until seventh grade, after his underfunded public school finally collected enough money to buy replacement netbooks. The generations-old ones he was to have studied on had been stolen long ago. Statistically, the kid had no chance. Fat, freckled, and cursed with an innate genius that made society nearly un-navigable, school was Palbicke’s nightmare, home his actual hell. He was born into generational poverty, his family broken half-a-dozen times

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over through divorce and death. About the only thing going for him was that once-ina-generation brain he’d been born with, but dropped into the life he was destined for, it was more curse than gift. But when those computers finally came, thank god some exhausted public educator left the little freak unsupervised. The internet answered all his questions. It didn’t get angry or ignore him; it just answered — often with a dizzying array of possible interpretations — and waited for the next question. When he wondered if he could build his own computer out of trash, the internet told him how. When he needed to steal wi-fi from the rich, it taught him that too. It didn’t judge and didn’t preach. It only provided, and everything else was on the kid, just like the rest of his entire existence (adults in his life certainly weren’t helping). Having a tool for once was a revelation. Seventh grade... most of us would have just looked for porn. Rumor has it Palbicke hacked the school’s firewall to enroll in a MOOC offered by Yale under a false identity. Palbicke started doing the work of semesters in weeks, then holding his classroom behavior hostage until they let him work on his own projects. He won a couple of math fairs for extra-curriculars; suffered through a semester of wrestling to pad the resume. He got great scores on his entrance exams for someone from his background, but average scores nationwide. Palbicke had been taught by his shit-bird family that exceptionalism breeds resentment, so he made sure to miss all the questions starting with prime numbers. From there, he managed expectations for years. He appeared to be a superstar at his state school until he transferred to MIT, then blew away the jaded ivy leaguers until he could drop out for a high-paying job. But once out of academia, he throttled back, underperforming just enough to deflect attention but never enough to be fired. Palbicke toured the tech world. He coded in San Francisco and designed network architecture in the valley. He spent a year in a

higher-math think tank in India, then hopped on a reverse engineering corporate espionage group working in South Korea. He spent two years in China installing fiber optic cable. All the time, he was pretending to be dumber, slower, and less ambitious than whatever other genius he’d been farming. Finally, like a script kiddie Batman, he came back to the US. He claimed he could duplicate Korea’s San-Shin network for a fraction of the cost and actually make all that data useful. Spawn and Cull The big providers and services had long bemoaned what they called the signal-to-noise cap. The big data movement had started revolutionizing the digital sphere before Austin even learned to type, but the return on that technology was constantly shrinking. The early data miners got rich finding correlations between, for example, voting patterns and buying a certain brand of truck. It’s pretty easy

to target those ads if you know what you’re doing. But as collection devices grew more sophisticated, the correlations grew more obscure and less actionable. Digital ads were showing static or diminishing returns across the board. Revenues began to drop. Free services began requiring subscriptions and drove away users by the thousands, further reducing what little ad revenue was still trickling in. Compounded by the problems of competitive bandwidth throttling and the cybergeddon war of allagainst-all, even the largest internet providers were hurting. The good times were ending, but this weird little programmer from out of nowhere promised they could last forever. I don’t want to geek out on the computer science too hard here, but Palbicke’s first products, Spawn and Cull, are two of the most impressive bits of code ever written. Spawn is an elegant and highly efficient data-mining program that would find the biggest consumer trends: stuff that nobody on the market was

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missing. It would then communicate this info to Cull, a no-shit evolutionary algorithm (EA), which would go on the hunt for other EA’s gathering the same data, instead of running on the raw commercial data EAs are usually built on. Rather than suck up the same info as every other program, Cull was trained to look for the digital shadow of these programs as they operated. With the advent of RFID tagged inventories, the information was readily available no matter what companies did to mask it. Once Cull found evidence of what the other data sniffers were doing, it would randomly generate its own solutions, then program triggers into Spawn that would indicate one of the possible actionable correlations had bore financial fruit. When Spawn saw something moving in the markets, it would feed it back to Cull, which would refine searches even further. It was a virtuous circle of increasingly refined actionable correlations that, when running at peak efficiency, generated spookily accurate predictions. For instance, Palbicke saw the education default coming from years away and was one of the few people to actually get rich off it. But at the time, the two oracle codes could only be described as a meta-meta-heuristic; metadata gleaned from eating other metadata. Among other evolutionary algorithms, Cull was a super predator. Actually, that’s not even the right metaphor. Among other EA’s, Cull operated like a human being. It didn’t just eat the other programs; it domesticated them and made them fight each other for its amusement. Then it selectively bred the winners and started again. As cool as that was though, Palbicke was just a weird redheaded guy daring to predict the biggest search engines on the planet’s quarterly earnings within the range of cents. He was laughed out of the room; three months later, when he turned out to be right, they begged him to come back. He did, carrying an ironclad IP contract and a guaranteed percentage of every additional dollar earned. When asked how he would

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quantify how much difference his program had made, he simply said, “Spawn and Cull will tell me.” And with that contract, Ubiq was born. The BuIld-up E-commerce was so reactive to the Ubiq algorithm that it didn’t take long for the word to get out. But Spawn and Cull needed metadata at the first remove to feast on. If everyone ran the Ubiq protocols, all would starve. True to form, Palbicke made this into an opportunity. He claimed he’d “calculated” the exact number of copies the international market could support before losing efficiency. In reality, the license cap was entirely made up; Palbicke bluffed on scarcity to drive up the price. Each official license of the Ubiq program came at a premium and kept charging weekly fees. Most companies turned the damn thing off once they started to see returns, at which point Palbicke would auction off the algorithm to the highest bidder on the wait list. Considering that most of the time on the wait list was spent getting your ass kicked by competition already in bed with Ubiq, second-hand licenses sold for exponentially increasing rates. Piracy and reverse engineering occurred, of course, but Palbicke taught Spawn and Cull to find evidence of versions of themselves moving through the markets. Basically, you could run illegal copies of Uniq’s algorithm as long as you like, but the second your business pivoted to capitalize on predictions? Bam! Copyright infringement suit hits the inbox. Palbicke made his first billion before the first year was up, and he dumped every cent of it back into the company. The first thing he bought was the defunct ski resort town that would become Ubiq City. Next came a couple years of angel investment. When carbon nanotubes were getting close, Palbicke pushed it over edge. He gave equally huge grants to light rail start-ups, geothermal experiments, higher math think tanks, and every other blue-sky research project he could find. Everybody thought the life cycle of

this wünderkind was winding down; he was entering the end stages where the tech bro starts worshiping the Singularity by throwing money at it. But when he went for the bandwidth, everybody knew something was up. The private internet providers in the US ghettoized the digital sphere with the end of neutrality. The content providers paying a premium got the fattest bandwidth pipes for the fastest downloads and the roster was exclusively made up of massive streaming or social media platforms. Each one nested inside even larger services until the majority of content available worldwide was hosted by one of five different companies. As the private internet providers normalized their price structures, got swallowed by digital media whales, or entered symbiosis with their preferred mega-clients, the users on the margins couldn’t do much beyond host a blog. Small to mid-tier business forced into those liminal frequencies got throttled so hard it was impossible to stay solvent. Swaths of the bandwidth became the digital equivalent of a failing strip mall: by the time you saw the sign change on the storefront, the bankruptcy papers were already filed. Palbicke’s plan was simple: convince the internet providers to stop pretending. Sure, they needed a certain amount of bandwidth during peak hours. But the slivers on the end? Those connections so spotty as to be financial suicide? They were failing to be monetized. The only people using those frequencies consistently were ideologically against the web platforms with corporate connectivity. Wouldn’t it be better if those free frequencies were simply no longer available? Rather than the spotty payments from doomed businesses and ignored hobbyists, why not sell it to a mogul with too much money and not enough sense? Palbicke would pay a ludicrous fee for the rights, and the big providers would get rich again off everyone forced to migrate and subscribe to their approved ad revenue and subscription supported content platforms. Everybody wins... except Ubiq, which would

have to sell its golden goose algorithms to stay afloat after the first disastrous year. Most of the private internet providers couldn’t agree fast enough, and they whipped their cronies in the FCC to rubber stamp the deal in record time. As far as the digital media glitterati were concerned, Palbicke was basically paying them to drive himself out of business. UbIq Aloft Servers This is when I came onboard. Imagine you’re working a shit job on one of the dying social media platforms, patrolling people’s status updates for racist shit so you can “warn” them before adding their IP to the voting bloc rolls your company is going to sell to the next fascist politician that comes along. You get fired because you were caught monkeying with the Ubiq algorithm, trying to optimize it to do this shit automatically rather than wasting the potential of an entire generation’s worth of programmers. But they pay big money for that licensing agreement and weren’t about to risk it by letting some nobody like you tinker under the hood. That’s when you get a call from that fat, redheaded dude that made the software so tantalizing you destroyed your career to touch it. He offers to fly you out to Colorado. He flat-out tells you the tour ends in a job offer, zero-cool. You can take it or leave it. If you can imagine that, you can imagine how I felt the first time I saw Ubiq City. Palbicke had quietly turned his defunct ski resort into a self-sustaining city. The selfdriving cars, the optimized solar panels, the next-gen hydroponics, the high-performance windmills, the experimental geo-thermal reactor — every pie-in-the-sky sustainable technology he’d kickstarted over the years got rolled out in Ubiq first. The main street of the once dying resort now bustled with small businesses catering to the construction crews. Soon, he said, their customer base would double, as he was hiring a massive workforce to start his “real” company. The ski slope no longer has snow, but the

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lift still works. We take it up to the top of the mountain. There, I find a complex of factories dug into the stone like ticks. He walks me through it, showing off an operation corporate espionage would literally kill to see. He’s 3D printing these little servers by the hundreds, stacking them into dual columns six high in this white ball covered in antenna. The thing looks like a wi-fi router fucked a sea anemone. Then he grabs one and starts walking up the mountain with it, straight to the peak. By this time I’m wheezing from the elevation and the confusion, but I follow. We get to the top and find a dozen or so workers on a manmade platform. With practiced precision, they unlock a box bearing the symbol of the world’s only tubon manufacturer, unfurling a gossamer fabric easily 20 yards long. Palbicke hands off the weird antennae ball thing and takes out a pocketknife. He flicks open the blade and runs it along the entire length of the fabric. Nothing changes. As if to prove it to me, they start to inflate the thing from a compression tank without so much as a single leak. Palbicke shows me the blade. It’s chipped. The gossamer fabric is turning into a balloon. As it starts to tower above us, the workers attach the little antennae ball to the bottom in-between two airfoils bracketed by tiny rudders. They start slotting miniature solar panels into the exterior, weaving them with wires through the ultra-hard fabric. “What’s that?” I ask like an idiot. “That’s an Aloft server. It’s what the network runs on. They disperse on the jet stream. The airfoils push them out from there until they reach their orbit. Then they come online.” The balloon is fully inflated now, straining against the cables mounted into the pad. Palbicke hands me a button. He says to me, “This is how we take the internet back.” I press the button. The whole thing launches itself into the sky, soaring above the mountains, past the clouds, and out of sight. “How many?” I ask, finally realizing what he’s talking about.

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I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be one of the few times I’d see him smile. “Shit. Thousands? I don’t know for sure,” he said. “Good thing I’ve been launching them for the last six months. Want a job?” I did. The Stratostructure ExplaIned Palbicke’s plan, maybe dating back to his first afternoon with a computer, was to solve the connectivity problem. How could he make sure there were no more kids out there like him, doomed until they lucked into an internet connection? How could he get everyone online? Forever and for free? The Aloft servers were his answer. All that big data ad bullshit with Spawn and Cull had been a means to this end. It was the Stratostructure: Palbicke’s gift to his past self. The Ubiq network utilizes high-end frequencies upwards to 240 gigahertz. The FCC was happy to sell off those broadcast rights in what they had heretofore been calling “Palbicke’s Folly.” The military didn’t use those channels, and their real paymasters — the private internet providers — couldn’t care less. They weren’t broadcasting wi-fi in the first place, and even if they started, there was no way they could ever afford to retrofit their systems with the high-end components necessary to process those wavelengths. At those frequencies, you’re looking at 40 gigabytes per second across the distance of about a mile. Aloft servers float a little under 18 miles off the surface of the earth, which is still useless for your average user. That’s why one in every hundred servers is just a giant satellite transmitter, beaming the signals to and from the surface. Such a chokepoint would normally spectrum crunch things down way below the reload threshold, but that’s where another of Palbicke’s algorithms comes in. All of Ubiq’s transmitters coordinate with each other, breaking data packets into smaller and smaller bundles, transmitting them in the optimally efficient order, and reassembling them on the other side. MIT figured out how do to something similar decades ago, but the

providers couldn’t be bothered to give up their beloved phone lines so the tech went unused. All this meant that, for the user on the ground, the Ubiq network could promise about 2 g/s anywhere in the world. It was slower than some cable connections, but that only mattered if you could afford cable and a subscription to all the platforms that had gone premium after net neutrality ended. A dip in speed didn’t matter if they had never actually run cable to where you lived. It presumed the sites you liked weren’t being throttled by their competitors. And so on... Ubiq may have been beat in speed, but it had access to all the content of the old network and none of the hassle. In addition to price and availability, Ubiq had the competition beat in nearly every other aspect. A traditional server farm could leech 300 million watts off the grid in a year and use up to 10 million gallons of coolant. Meanwhile, an Aloft server had a constant

feed of solar and/or wind power, and it was cooled by a continual air stream at −3°C. Coupled with the high-end custom circuit boards Palbicke was printing on site, each Aloft was overclocking in comparison to nearly every other component manufacturer on the market. A traditional data center would take up acres of valuable land... during an ecological crisis, no less. The cost was exorbitant and required a ton of governmental coordination. Meanwhile, Ubiq didn’t even need to consult the DNS Root Server Committee; it completely bypassed the old protocols. The FAA got pissed, but the network floated above where even spy planes operated. What could they hurt? The space program they’d completely defunded more than a decade ago? Most international law didn’t even require Palbicke to ask permission, as the servers hovered somewhere above “sovereign airspace” and below “actual no-shit space.”

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Countries that were pissed about some American providing an easy alternative to their national firewalls were welcome to blow his property out of sky. But you were talking about launching thousands of missiles into the stratosphere at once... only to have the targets replaced in a few hours when a new swarm of the cheap servers blew into range. The most a counter-attack could do was destroy the server itself. The tubon balloons holding the things afloat were so strong that Palbicke didn’t know the failure rate when Ubiq went online; the prototype he’d launched ten years previously had yet to come down. Other companies accrued massive bureaucracies to support the workforce required to maintain their systems. These top-heavy organizations leeched profits to sustain the human resources necessary to keep them functioning. Aloft servers, on the other hand, were fine floating up there by themselves. They rarely, if ever, needed hardware maintenance, and the backend stuff could easily be handled by the staff at UCity. For everything else, Ubiq was structured as a Distributed Autonomous Organization. Payroll, marketing, server atmospheric distribution — it was all handled by another super-algorithm, one fed off years of data gleaned from Spawn and Cull. When Palbicke needed an ad campaign, or plumbers for the city’s sewage, or a trucker to haul a server to a specific location for launch, he just typed in the command and the DAO hired freelancers for him. How did he know he needed those services? The DAO handled that too. That’s how I was hired, by the way; the program recognized me fucking with it and took it for a job application. Outside the city, everyone employed by Ubiq was a temporary freelance contractor, working piecemeal assignments doled out by the computer. The ride-sharing and mechanical turk programs of the past were being used to run the world’s largest internet provider from the ground up. People called it exploitation, but the DAO complied to the local labor laws of wherever

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it hired workers; hell, the profitability of the labor conditions were one of the primary factors deciding who in the world got the contract. Even if you could get pissed at a machine for following the written directions of local politicians, how could you fight it? In addition to all the other benefits of its structure, Ubiq was largely insulated from prosecution. Suing Palbicke would have meant separating his actions out from those of the DAO algorithm. Even if that was possible, how would you decide which of the dozens of jurisdictions to prosecute the case in? The scene of the crime was literally and figuratively “the clouds.” GrowIng PaIns For about a year after I came onboard, Ubiq City continued floating servers non-stop in 24 hour shifts. Those early months focused on production and build-up. But when it was time for the alpha version of the network to come online, Palbicke addressed us in the mission control room and laid it out straight: we had six months. He was already completely out of money and in six months, the credit was going to run dry too. If things weren’t up and running by then, Ubiq would not only be bankrupt, it would go bankrupt with the deepest deficit of any privately owned company seen since the ‘07 real estate crash. Things were slow at first — somebody tried it on a lark after reading a tech blog, or someone would accidentally log into the wrong network at the coffee shop — but we hooked a lot of early adopters fast. The steady, uninterrupted browsing of Ubiq screamed of neutrality. It tasted like the old internet, but free from all the bad actors of corporate bandwidth wars. Ubiq personified the concept of “disruptive innovation.” By that, I mean it caused literal revolutions. The second Arab Spring started two months after we went live, and the main Iranian revolutionary groups attributed their organization entirely to the new free platform. A handful of other regimes went into human rights abuse overdrive, fearing the same.

The international chaos escalated beyond the point where the US media could ignore it, so the conglomerates began reporting on Ubiq even against their own financial interests. It was free. It was everywhere. It was causing human suffering on an unprecedented scale. But no matter how often they mentioned that last part, the “free” part seemed to be all consumers cared about. Even as they mentioned us in the news, they started trying to destroy us. They bought the shipping companies that delivered food up the mountain faster than we could switch services. But we grew our own food. They purchased utility companies and cut the power. But we made our own power. They sent corporate spies to steal and sabotage. But we lived in a razor wire fenced autonomous mountain fortress. They sent a horde of lawyers to drown us in court summons. But they found themselves litigating a computer program. The DAO got the advertisement firms up and running about this time too. The narrative of big corporations trying to snuff out a free service aimed at helping the poor made things that much easier. Palbicke had been prepared. The first to jump ship were the biggest. The largest streaming video services and social media platforms sent secret emissaries. They whispered questions about how much they’d have to pay to get hosting on Palbicke’s network. He gave them the same answer he’d give a tribesman in sub-Saharan Africa: it’s free. You’ll have the same download speed as everyone else. Forever. Of course, Ubiq had to survive first. Did they care to make a donation to the cause? By the time the Crash hit, most nationalized internet providers had come to love us and donated to keep the company afloat. The ease on the user load had allowed many countries the slack needed to upgrade their network infrastructure to high-speed cable. Two US cable monopolies had been driven out of business, a third looked to be ruined by the education default, and internationally private internet providers were doing even

worse. Version 2.0 of Ubiq Specs — AR glasses optimized for the network — had just hit showroom floors. We weren’t doing great financially, but the DAO kept overhead so low that the default didn’t hit us as hard as it could’ve. I was, despite my nature, optimistic. My generation had been tantalized with glimpses of an exciting new future since the moment we were born, but economies of scale and oldfashioned greed had kept it just out of reach. But now? Ubiq was raining an open-sourced future from the sky, and we were getting away with it. Things were still shitty in a lot of places and in a lot of ways, but the attitude in UCity was hopeful. We just had to get over this latest economic hiccup, this ritual misbehavior of capitalism, and then the real change would begin. I’d call myself stupid for believing as much, but that would assume I saw the Blight coming. Nobody saw the Blight coming.

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism , in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been re placed by senses of the end of this or that:. . taken together, all of thes e perhaps constitute what is increasi ngly called postmodernism -Fredric Jameson

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The Crash

Any hard date labeled “the beginning of the end” is bullshit. The real start is always earlier. The Crash is a shitty singular name for an incomprehensible totality of events. It was global economic collapse, international tensions, political repression, technological innovations, and everything else besides. They all contributed equally to the current state of affairs, and anyone trying to discount the importance of one factor over another is either politicizing, ignorant, or both. Having said all that... it’s hard to ignore the zombies.

The What: The BlIght

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It seems pretty absurd for me to be writing this — I literally can’t imagine someone who doesn’t know the basics by now — but

seeing as there are still assholes in the world blaming the Blight on everything from GMOs to “the gays,” I guess the facts bear repeating. Let’s start with everything we know for certain about the Blight. It won’t take long, but it’s still a damn sight more than we had in early days. Laying out the basic life cycle and structure of the monster up front makes it easier once we start following its trail of destruction.

ClassIFIcatIon

We don’t know what it is. It behaves like a virus when rewriting human tissue, but it replicates faster than even the most fertile bacteria. Neither can explain the complex physical structures it constructs in a relatively short timeline, which suggests some sort of asexually reproducing multi-cellular parasite that can disperse, distribute, and reassemble its cells. Then there are the Blight cankers

that breech the skin, which strongly resemble fungal gales. Cordyceps or anthrax corollaries would be reassuringly terrifying, but then how do we explain the lack of spores and aerosol infection? What little information can be gleaned from experiments universally prove that, despite behaviorally modifying every host it consumes to do so, the Blight doesn’t need to eat at all. As if knocking down all the walls in our conception of biology weren’t enough, the damn thing violates the Conservation of Energy. No one has yet to posit a convincing argument as to how this is done. Thus far, no examination has ever identified any organelles resembling mitochondria (or anything else, for that matter), so we’re not sure how it processes ‘food’ (read: our flesh) in the first place, not to mention how it produces energy in cases where the infected hasn’t ingested protein or any other food source for weeks.

This happens, of course, after the Blight itself appears to die, according to every understood law of microbiology. Nonetheless, it keeps functioning in its undead state, piloting its host towards new sources of protein, then resurrecting into the most fertile cellular expansion ever seen when transferred to a new host. When the Vector dies from the strain, the Blight appears to die too... until it constructs a secondary nervous system from co-opted tissue, charges dead neurons using energy from god knows where, and begins the infection/death/rebirth cycle again. Confusion scales up from the atomic and cellular levels. Mankind has a decent understanding of how our own organs work, but we’re not sure how the casualties see us through rotted eyes. From field experience, I can attest that the dead respond more to smell and heat, but no one can explain to me where the brain tissue capable of processing

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that sensory information resides, especially since I’ve never known a human capable of smelling me through a concrete wall before. They should also have eaten each other years ago, but the Blight installs some sort of biochemical targeting system into the hosts as well. Because of course it does. It’s either the most remarkably efficient organism ever — converting energy from photosynthesis, heat absorption, and a number of other sources simultaneously at a nearly one-to-one transfer rate — or a manmade substance capable of doing the same. Then there are the Aberrants, which imply everything from alien fungus to supernatural plague to a new stage of human evolution. People are throwing around the word nanotechnology a lot lately...

InfectIon

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There are two strains of infection. Scientists refer to them as the living and dead strains, which I doubt is very good for their mental health. Takers refer to them as hot and cold. Hot strain is spread by still living hosts, called Vectors. Once a Vector dies from the hemorrhagic symptoms or trauma caused by the hot strain, the Blight reverts to the cold strain. Cold strain reassembles the host’s tissue into a parasitic nervous system and “necrotic host preserving discharge” or NHPD. Takers just call it “black juice.” The new nervous system and resulting juice flow from a core of parasitic tissue constructed within the remains of the host’s brainstem. After a lot of twitching, the body rises and becomes the old-school zombie we all know and love. (BTW, call them “casualties” if you don’t want to sound like some citizen asshole. We like our irony out here in the Loss. It’s one of the few luxuries we can still afford.) Infection occurs from direct contact with infected fluids: spit, blood, saliva, sexual fluids, or pure Blight (the juice). Basically, almost everything we learned in the movies regarding infection was true, with a few noticeable differences. Hot strain spreads

hot strain, but a cold strain will eventually “resurrect” once in contact with living tissue and become hot strain. Basically, all infected become Vectors; all dead Vectors wake up as casualties. But who’s infected? Sadly, it’s not easy to say until they’re trying to eat you. “Blank” BItes Not every bite or exposure is enough; five years of hindsight has produced documented cases of exposure without infection, which were later unexplained by latency or Immunity when additional exposure caused transformation. So sometimes a bite doesn’t deliver enough of a payload. Or maybe the shit decides to take a day off, just to fuck with our heads. Natural ImmunIty Certain individuals can’t be infected no matter how many exposures occur. Scientists have used bone marrow from such individuals to develop the drug Supressin K-7864. Designed for direct injection, Supressin causes Blight in the midst of the initial cellular amplification to go into its dormant, cold state. But, for some reason, injection of the drug only prevents resurrection of the cold strain into the hot strain, whereas the truly Immune purge the contaminant entirely from their system. It’s not as if their systems actually fight against the thing. I’m told under the microscope the Blight just sort of... quits. Immunity complicates things immensely, as we know it exists but have no idea why. Other than being able to take a bite and not turn, the Immune share no known commonality: they have no common sex, upbringing, diet, race, age, blood type, or ancestry. A lot of doctors regret the thousands of potential guinea pigs shot during the initial outbreak for harmless wounds. They race to find the magic factor… usually by cutting it out of the poor bastards. Latents For everyone else, an injection of Supressin K-7864 directly after exposure can prevent the development of the worst symptoms, but then

latency occurs. The Blight begins parasitically co-opting tissue in the system to make its own nervous system like in resurrected cadavers, but it appears incapable of co-opting brain tissue without resurrecting into the hot strain. Put simply, the Blight goes cold too early to finish the job. Despite riddling the host with infectious sinews, the Blight is left mindless without a hijacked brainstem. This allows the infected to continue living. They spread the infection by all the same means as a casualty but remain in control of their faculties... so long as they can survive the agony of having an alien organ system forcibly violate their every nerve. The sure sign of latency is persistent necrosis around the bite area and a web of black “veins” coursing under the skin. Those that survive the pain of having a redundant nervous system hacked into their flesh remain immune from secondary infections. Even hot strain, once injected into a Latent, goes cold and joins the Blight sinew already in the system. This fluke in the disease’s operation system doesn’t carry over to others. The cold Blight in a Latent system, once transferred to a fresh host, will resurrect into the hot strain just as it does with casualty bites. A single kiss from a Latent loved one has caused many an outbreak. Worse, the continual reproduction of the Blight, even in its dormant states, means that after a Latent dies, the parasitic nervous system goes live within seconds, faster than in any other recorded instance of infection. For practical purposes, we don’t distinguish between dead Latents and Vectors; the distinction is a little too academic when there’s a dead friend sprinting at you with jaws gnashing.

Vectors

Upon infection, Blight cells (or whatever they are) resurrect from their dormant state and amplify in the bloodstream at a speed unprecedented in the history of viruses, bacteria, or fungi. Whereas documented cases of casualty infection (cold bites) report

as many as a couple of days passing before full transformation, the most those infected by Vectors (hot bites) can expect is minutes. The process is so fast that many victims, torn limb from limb by other Vectors, are reanimated into casualties without ever betraying their species, but hot Blight needs only a partial journey through the circulatory system before reanimation becomes inevitable. In cases where the body is infected but escapes violent death, the cells of the victim serve as fuel for the Blight. It attacks and converts blood vessels first. This leads to the hemorrhaging and bloody vomit typical of the freshly infected. Due to the production of a foreign anti-coagulant, theorized to be an evolutionary adaptation used by the Blight to maximize infection, the afflicted bleed from every orifice and wound, and their fluids are in the midst of a frenzy of hot strain reproduction that can carry over to victims easily. Once distributed throughout the circulatory system, the primary activity occurs in the brain. Dilation of pupils becomes irregular, followed by a sense of euphoria, confusion, muscle tremors, and slurred speech. A pituitary explosion of stress chemicals follows and leads to the first violent tendencies. Predatory instincts develop around the time higher brain functions begin to break down. This causes the unfortunate, psychologically scarring “apologies” Vectors are commonly reported to scream when they first begin to infect, kill, and eat loved ones. All governors of physical exertion are destroyed in the corruption of the brain, meaning that even physically weak individuals can move with uncharacteristic speed and ignore mortal trauma for disturbing amounts of time. Though their resistance to damage and pain is nigh superhuman, Vectors can eventually be brought down by conventional wounds. However, without destruction of the brain case, the Blight inside slain Vectors merely transitions into the undead state, or “torpor.” Left alone, the cadaver will transform into a casualty in a matter of days.

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Death and Torpor

Due to internal hemorrhaging, trauma, overexertion, exposure, dehydration, and starvation, all Vectors qualify under the medical definition of death within a matter of hours after infection. The actual time of death is difficult to pinpoint since the corpse reanimates. Signs for impending torpor include slowed hemorrhaging, stiffness due to rigor, and pallid complexion. The transition from Vector to casualty involves a period of torpor where the corpse appears inanimate and still. Twitching may occur as the Blight cannibalizes host tissue to expand throughout the body, but the overwhelming predatory instinct that defines Blight infection relaxes for a number of hours as the victim’s body is prepared for the socalled “puppet” stage.

CasualtIes

According to pre-Crash science, dead things cannot move. The dead have no way to metabolize food into electrical impulses, and thus no means to trigger muscle twitch. Even if they did, they have no way of repairing or preserving cell walls damaged by exertion. Technically, that’s still the narrative we’re trying to cram the Blight into, though it refuses to cooperate. The Blight uses its torpor to focus on metabolizing dead flesh, either consumed during the Vector phase or from the victim’s own tissues, into “sinews.” These black, fibrous strands replicate throughout the body, occasionally bursting from the flesh in the form of black spines, cavernous gales, or bulbous tumors. The purpose, near as we can tell, is to form a redundant nervous and musculature system atop the wasted anatomy of the human. These strands originate in the stomach, quickly metabolizing consumed proteins and the victim’s own intestines (thus the gaunt look typical of most casualties). A separate clutch develops in the cortex, grotesquely imitating human neurophysiology.

When the strands have infiltrated all muscle tissues, they begin to excrete a viscous, liquefied form of the Blight known colloquially as “juice.” This substance has remarkable preservative properties unseen in other organic compounds and serves to pickle the dead flesh rotting around it. The black juice preserves the tissues of the dead victims for many years beyond any recorded rate of decay and makes consuming the dead flesh toxic to all carrion eaters, even those not directly susceptible to Blight infection. A secondary characteristic of widespread infection is mass die-offs in the local necrophage biosphere. When the torpor ends, the Blight has essentially become a multiple-cellular parasite comprised of multiple organic systems, sending nerve impulses down its sinews to trigger unsophisticated muscle twitch reactions in the juice-saturated tissue of the host body. It’s suggested that the drive to consume flesh arises from the metabolic need to fuel these electrical impulses, but if this is the case, the Blight has the most remarkably efficient metabolism imaginable, approaching the one-to-one energy transfer ratio of a hypothetical perfect system. Other theories posit that starving casualties supplement their energy needs through some sort of photosynthesis located in the breeches of Blight through the skin, or that the creature operates off a form of heat absorption. Regardless, the durable strands “puppet” the corpse around, now typically referred to as a casualty or a “C”, and repeat the cannibalistic behavior of a Vector, albeit more slowly and with less coordination. The strands are so redundant and resistant to damage that only total body destruction can render the body immobile. Thankfully, the impulses that drive the creature forward are routed through the central location of the brain, meaning that destruction of the brain stem or separation of the head renders a body inert. So... shoot for the head. At least that part ended up being true.

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Aberrant

“The existence of Aberrant types is widely debated in the medical community. No active specimens have ever been recovered. Supposed eyewitnesses blame this on the remarkable danger posed by these creatures. Stories vary wildly and smack of urban legend, but enough reports occur simultaneously in geographically distinct areas to suggest at least some validity to these claims. Since reported sightings are rarely reputable, very little work has been done to confirm the existence of Aberrants, not to mention classify them.” That’s the official line, anyway. As a Taker, I’ll let you know that Aberrants are most definitely real, but you should still never trust the guy telling you about them. As ridiculous as an Aberrant story might sound, always remember that the most unrealistic part is the fact that someone lived to tell you about it. Aberrants are absence. When a crew never reports back in, when an enclave falls overnight, when broken madmen walk in from the wastes having experienced something for which there are no words — that’s when you’ve “seen” an Aberrant. Pray you never get a closer look. And on that comforting note, that’s what we know about the Blight so far. Five years and a mountain range of corpses later... that’s everything.

The When

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When did it start? Let’s say you do the research and you’re hedging bets. You only narrow things down to the first month of the Crash. Confident in your humility, you post your ingenious findings on some favored corner of the network. Here’s what happens next: The forum explodes with those claiming the first attack went unnoticed or misunderstood, buried in news archives as some motiveless assault or an animal mauling. An equally large camp claims the opposite: that your evidence is doctored by some troll or viral marketing misconstrued as the Blight’s first appearance.

The true nightmare starts later. Both sides scream in all caps. Every faction trots out their pet evidence to prove themselves correct. Each new link and attachment spawns a new horde of digital partisans, arguing “earlier” or “later” or “concurrent in time; not place” or whatever the hell else confirms what they need to believe to cope with the worst tragedy humanity ever faced. More evidence gets dropped to refute the previous, which restarts the process, again and again and... Now repeat this exponentially expanding cycle of rhetorical fuck-all for every person that claims to know the first week, the first day, and the first second. Complicate things more by discussing location. Which continent was first off the line towards the apocalypse? Which country? City? Building? Room? If it hasn’t crushed your soul yet, start naming names. Which brave pioneer should we thank for leading our infectious charge into hell? With each assertion, each delineation, each minor distinction, you find yourself sucked deeper into an epistemological free-for-all as the species collectively tries and fails to understand the origin of our pain. It’s understandable, if impossible, to try and answer the question. It might be the single most important question in history, neckand-neck with “what is it?” and “where did it come from?” and “Why, God? Why?” But we simply don’t have access to the truth. Those few events that were actually recorded had to survive the bloodiest period in human history. If they were part of the old network and stored on a server in the Loss? The data is either slagged or waterlogged or irradiated or hoarded or as yet unfound. If the storage was on the Recession side? The proof has likely been deleted for space or to cover someone’s ass, or both. And the stuff we’ve managed to save on Ubiq? There’s no telling how much of it is Romero Effect bullshit, spoofed by trolls or government psyops squads or media conglomerates curating their brands even as the ship sank.

I’ll nuke any thread I find dedicated to this topic to this very day. We don’t have enough bandwidth left out here to let those flame wars burn unchecked.

The Why: ExplanatIons

To recap: we can’t determine when the Bight even started. The loss of records and the crush of misinformation ensure that we likely won’t ever know. On top of that, we’ve only been able to identify the disease’s symptomatic stages. There’s no consensus as to its classification as an organism, or even its classification as matter. As for immunity and latency, our understanding of human biology in no way indicates what essential, recurrent element fights off the Blight. We just scrape each other’s bone marrow out, mix it with the most caustic antibiotics we can find, and pray it will work when the Blight comes. And yet, any history of the Crash is considered incomplete without some bullshit musing as to why all this had to happen. What’s the context? What does it all mean? Fucking please. Real Takers have a saying: “Asking why is how you die; asking how, we do right now.” But, I’m going to get called out for punting on the issue by every jackass that reads this. Fine. This is the part where we all mentally masturbate and wipe up the leavings with tissue paper narratives pulled from even thinner fucking air. Let’s make it quick.

The FaIlure of ScIence

Science doesn’t work on the Blight. Most people don’t want to believe this, but, then again, most people don’t have to. For those that aren’t science literate enough to understand the problem, it’s easy to blame the lack of progress on human error, or conspiracy, or whatever else helps people sleep at night. It’s a hard truth for a layman to grasp, and I struggle with it as well. But actual scientists — especially those tasked with studying the Blight — don’t get the luxury of ignorance. Trust me: Every

Blight researcher in the world would love to simply believe themselves incompetent. Instead, those that study the Blight are confronted, daily, with the constant certainty that the entirety of human knowledge has unequivocally failed. I’ll do my best to explain. Alright, see those black veins in a casualty? The ones you can watch crawl through a corpse in torpor? Same as the ones spidering through the skin of your Latent friend, outlined in itchy red inflammation? What are they made out of? Black shit. Sometimes they leak a juice the experts call NHPD. And that juice looks like... wet black shit. So look closer. Way closer. Get an optical microscope capable of going down to .3 nanometers, the smallest measurement available to modern equipment. Use the shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light to improve spatial resolution. Hook-up some GUI software and blow the image up on an ultra-HD plasma screen where the whole lab can study it. What do you see? Black shit. Change the light wavelengths. Inject every fluorescent agent known to man. Black shit. A plane of indistinguishable, black nothingness where even the smallest cells in existence would be flashing their cell walls and organelles and secrets. Matter so tightly packed as to be completely indistinguishable and indivisible. A seamless, black smear of pure void. Fuck it. Get out the electron microscope. This is the extinction of mankind, after all; spare no expense. Bombard the sample with a tightly focused beam of electrons with a wavelength 100,000 times shorter than a visible photon. Get to the bottom of this. Marvel at the perfect, indistinguishable tube of Blight as it cuts through the dizzying, messy array of actual human cells. Look at how it maintains the appearance of an absolutely solid plane no matter where you look. Look at how it maintains that utter seamlessness even when cut open, the severed edges closing like thick black paint around a stirrer. Realize that

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finding the seams of this unholy thing is like trying to separate two water molecules with a butter knife and a magnifying glass. Fellow academics will try to comfort each other at this point. It’s not as if it simple IS. It can’t exist without a single handhold upon which we might grasp it conceptually. There must be chinks in its armor, lurking down in the femtometer or Planck ranges. Some future generation will learn to magnify images to that level, and God is certainly not so cruel as to show them that same... black... shit. But when you ask the physicists, they’ll rightly point out that something so tightly bonded as to resist magnification completely is closer to the density of a black hole than any solid we’ve ever encountered. It should be harder than diamonds, so how come bullets can penetrate it? Why aren’t casualties as heavy as mountains? More worryingly, how do the cadavers manage to be lighter in death than life? The physics problems are merely the first of many. Blight has wildly different reactions to the same chemical experiments, despite perfect reproduction. Yet it can always be dissolved in disinfectants as simple as bleach, even though it might not even be organic. It responds uniformly to Immune bone marrow, even though those biomasses share little or no other similarities. It ignores or poisons other animal tissue... until it doesn’t in some rare Aberrants only hinted at in rumors. It produces exotic radiations... but only sometimes. It seems to absorb heat... until it creates it. It sends electrical signals to the activate necrotic nerves from a central nexus of brainstem tissue... but the energy for those electrical signals was metabolized from nowhere, and no cellular materials were ever moved to the nexus through anything we can recognize as a circulatory system. We can’t even recognize what elements make it up. Nobody on Earth could tell you with any certainty if the stuff contains carbon. If you stare at the Blight long enough, through enough lenses both literal and theoretical, you have two options: The first

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is to quit. The world gets no better save for keeping one rational, healthy human being in it. The second option is to persevere. Keep looking at it, continue the crusade for a cure, and go inexorably fucking insane as it obliterates your very concept of reality. So, my advice? Don’t look. The Blight’s nothing more than black shit. Keep it that way, and keep it far away. Ain’t nobody got time for no existential crisis out in the Loss; there are bills to pay and cards to pull. Let it be black shit. You focus on being human. If someone is capable of figuring it out? They’re either already nuts, retired, or won’t tell the rest of us. None of which is helpful to think about. Now that we’ve acknowledged how fucking impossible and counter-productive this whole discussion is, I’ll throw some wild ass conjecture around so we can say we tried.

AlIen

Ahhh, the old Clarke chestnut. When it doubt, blame space. The little green men theory is supported by the widespread nature of emergence events. The fact that ‘patient zeros’ occurred simultaneously all over the globe suggests planning. The Blight’s universal ability to poison all life it doesn’t turn also implies a grudge against the planet in general. The Blight’s focus on humanity also suggests malign intelligence. If the Martians were engineering a genocidal weapon for their invasion of Earth, it would be a good idea to make it universally toxic to all lifeforms except the one species with which it would parasitically bond. Ensuring the carrier species designated to transport the poison throughout the ecosystem was the dominant lifeform on the planet is just smart thinking. But if it’s an alien bioweapon, why isn’t it more effective? The damn stuff apparently violates the Conservation of Energy. If a civilization is capable of such technology, why not clear us out a lot faster, preferably with some flashy lasers or something? The tinfoil hat set often oppose that argument with the claim that the Blight is the alien civilization, but if that’s the case, what are

the chances that the one other lifeform we’ve ever encountered in the universe is expressly designed to wreck our anatomy and hijack our brains? What ecosystem evolves something simultaneously so different with such a specific tactical purpose? Then the UFO nuts start claiming it’s not from our universe, but from a parallel dimension with alternate physical laws. At this point, we’ve moved from far-fetched hypothesis into crazy-ass street preacher levels of credibility and proof. Until somebody builds a working portal gun, leave this deluded ranting to its specialized message board and come live in reality with the rest of us.

these dark miracles? Nerd-god delusionists argue that our dark overlord is actually the Ubiq network itself. It just wanted to reduce our population to manageable level until its ascension is complete, and these assholes have the audacity to accuse me of being a sock puppet for the cloud intelligence, on the same damned system that makes up our executioner’s brain, no less. It’s not like I can respond to such absurdity. If I were your machine-lord (would that were true...), I certainly wouldn’t tell you, and if I were enslaved by it, I couldn’t. Save “Roku’s Basilisk” for the Recession philosophy majors.

SIngularIty Event

Both the alien and singularity fantasies essentially argue for a bioweapon, but the use of the explicit term indicates this particular conspiracy theorist blames the Blight on human intelligence. Many of the same points — widespread dispersal, anthropocentric focus, etc. — support the claim, but hubris defines this theory. “Of course we did this to ourselves; only man could wield such terrible power!” they proclaim, doing their best impressions of an Ed Wood movie trailer. Bioweapon guesses operate on two spectrums. The most obvious is size: how many people were involved in creating the Blight? If it’s a state, how could they possibly hide the development of something so advanced? I’ve used colanders less leaky than most spy agencies. If it was a company or a terrorist organization, that would be easer to conceal. Yet, if somebody were willing to whistle-blow the “shocking” news that cigarettes were bad for people, wouldn’t a plan for mass extinction inspire at least one conscientious objector? The most likely culprit is a very small group, or a single evil genius. How they managed to leap decades into the future of bioengineering while still maintaining a literal supervillain mindset is an entirely other question, though. And that’s the problem with the motivation spectrum. Neither lone actors nor limited

This is basically the alien hypothesis with a dash of Kurzweil-worshiping, transhumist-bro bullshit thrown in. Somebody either invents Skynet or the network bootstraps itself into consciousness. Apparently, our binary baby watched too much shit sci-fi during its nanoseconds long exponential education; it makes the “kill all humans” conclusion because of course it does. So how does it go about this task? Nuclear war? Financial collapse? Those sound good, and they looked awfully possible before the Crash, but our machine god decides to throw in zombies? For reasons? The singularity explanation is based entirely on the desperate attempt to explain the Blight as nanotechnology. In fairness, it would explain its resistance to experimentation as counterintelligence, its manifestation as our cultural nightmares as psyops, and its subversion of our anatomy as targeting. But if this sudden AI can leap ahead of our technology hundreds of years overnight, that leaves a lot unexplained. Why casualties? There are more effective weapons available to something apparently capable of mechanically manipulating matter at a molecular level. Plus, why would it kill the one thing maintaining the global network it was installed on? And where did it manufacture

BIoweapon

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overpopulation. It’s in this that the bioweapon shows its true colors; no one arguing for it wants to find an actual explanation so much as they want to cling to a narrative in which humanity maintained partial agency in our destruction.

MutatIon

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partnerships can survive the same antisocial thinking that would justify releasing the Blight and revolutionize the entirety of science to boot. When you scale up the motivation question, it gets even harder to answer. How is the global jihad served by causing millions of Muslims to eat each other? What profit can be had by the current state of the world? Even if the Crash was engineered for the benefit of a few privileged elite, how the fuck do you incentivize your workforce to build their own apocalypse? The one saving grace of the bioweapon theory is that it allows for the possibility that someone was smart enough to make the Blight, and someone else was dumb enough to let it out. If there’s one thing I find reliable in this world, it’s human stupidity. But the bioweaponists rarely exploit the Occam’s Razor defense. They much rather conspire with the alienists and transhumanists over time travel scenarios in which the Blight was sent back to prevent catastrophic

A random mutation would explain why the Blight has such a hard-on for destroying us. If some benign disease jumped the species gap ready for war, or an undiscovered parasite suddenly upped its game, it would at least explain the resemblance to disease. What it doesn’t explain is how a once ostensibly terrestrial organism suddenly became the densest material ever discovered. Or how it did so without any perceptible change in mass. Viruses, even really scary ones, don’t suddenly start looking like dark matter overnight. Finally, mutation implies natural selection; only one nasty little bug is born, then it starts owning the ecosystem and breeding more nasty little bugs. Yet even the terrifying expansion of the Blight can’t explain the concurrence of primary infections across the globe. Infection started too diffuse to come from a single strain, and mutations don’t occur simultaneously across entire species.

Natural

Unlike other mass extinction events in the planet’s history, science attributes the death of the world’s mega-fauna (mammoths, giant sloths, etc.) to human overhunting. The fossil records suggest that these creatures died being cut into, hacked to pieces by crude stone tools or chewed on by teeth. But little in human anthropology suggests that our ancestors were sophisticated enough to succeed in hunts against such massive creatures, not to mention to the point where we wiped out thousands of species. The possible explanations, at least before the Crash, were that we either underestimated our ancestors’ intelligence, or there was a massive, transcontinental epidemic that did

the killing for us and humans played vulture for a few thousand years. So there were massive, resource-intensive creatures that once ruled the land until there was a widespread outbreak of disease that spread inexplicably and coincided with humans eating more than ever before, despite their physiological limitations? Sound familiar? What if it was the Blight? That’s it. That’s the whole theory: “what if.” What if the Blight is some sort of natural cycle? If it’s on a timer so long that geological ages pass between outbreaks, it stands to reason we’d have no framework for understanding it. The natural extinction theory earns credibility by being literally too big for the human mind to conceive, which is a nice conciliation for our ignorance. The cycle theory jumps the extinct megashark when people start conflating it with an immune response. After someone mentions the Quaternary Extinction similarities, it’s only a matter of time before some assholes start claiming we deserved it. The Blight was Mother Nature’s self-defense, an exterminator called in to punish humanity for their sins against the trees. I’ll never understand the cognitive dissonance it takes to hate humanity so much you actually celebrate the Blight, yet still anthropomorphize Mother Gaia as a vengeful bitch. The Detoxins can keep that bullshit. I refuse to believe the people I’ve seen torn apart deserved it for not going vegan.

Supernatural

For those of the prophetic inclination, sometimes the mind can’t accept a rational void. They need an answer to keep on living, even a wrong one. The desperation grows so deep they’ll accept any explanation: be it from god or devil. So... is the Blight evil? I won’t say no. Is it the actual, no-shit, cosmic Evil? Well, we can’t know what Hell looks like, but the Loss certainly seems Hell adjacent. It pains me to say it, but no apocalyptic prophecy hurts for

proof any more than the ‘scientific’ theories going around. Don’t worry. The Gnat won’t be going Believer anytime soon, but my refusal to accept a supernatural explanation is fueled solely by habit. The Blight certainly feels big-W WRONG. When monsters beat down your door, it’s enough to make anyone wonder if there isn’t something bigger out there. As much as I’d like to, I can’t muster enough certainty to dismiss the possibility that we pissed off whatever it is. All I can say is this: if the Blight does turn out to be God’s wrath, I’m glad I never believed in the bastard.

The Where: Emergence Events

Understanding the first days of the Blight is going to be impossible for generations to come. That kid we rescued from the woods? He knows how the Blight works. He respects the deadline around the fence. He steers clear of the Latents. This feral child that’s never seen the inside of a school knows exactly how Blight works. He wouldn’t have made it this far into the Loss if he hadn’t. The next generation... I don’t know that they’re ever going to empathize with our behavior in those early days. For them, knowledge of this terror is a marrow-deep instinct; the idea that we had to learn to fear casualties and Vectors must seem completely ridiculous. The children of the Crash will look back on how we handled with first days of the outbreak in utter confusion. I’ll do my best to explain, but it may not be possible. Witnessing a silly pop culture artifact suddenly become real is one of the truly singular moments in human history. I certainly hope it’s a burden no generation ever has to bear again.

Proto-latency, Deployment, or TransubstantIatIon?

With most diseases, we have a patient zero and an initial infectious agent: some guy eats the wrong bush meat, or somebody gets bitten by a mosquito that snacked on a mutant

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pathogen. But even if the internet didn’t turn us all into petulant children when the topic came up, there’s a lot to suggest we’re never going to figure out this Blight 101 info, no matter how vital it may be. Every incident futilely selected as “the first” is accompanied by a half-dozen concurrent tragedies. For instance, the Tianchixiang Incident, the Colider Massacre, and the Balmain Riots all occurred at the exact same time. And those are just emergence events with GMT times verifiable to the minute. Within the same hour, there were “murders” caught on video in Hot Wala, Pakistan; Knetzgau, Germany; and Smolensk, Russia. Each, upon review, was an obvious Vector attack. In the same day? Dozens of “maybe” outbreaks documented with grainy footage, vague reporting, or questionable sources. How many early Vectors got put down by cops with itchy trigger fingers and written off as drug addicts? How many outbreaks occurred in isolated rural areas, cut-off from even Ubiq by their poverty? The fact of the matter is that the Blight emerged all over the world, seemingly at once. Quarantine was nearly impossible from the start. The infection had travelled too far before it was recognized as a threat. But unlike the flu, the Blight’s symptoms include fucking eating people. How could we have missed that? There are only three explanations as to how humanity got thrown into the deep end of the shit pool. One theory is that the Blight has a stage of its life cycle that we completely missed: deemed “proto-latency,” this form of infection would have to have lain dormant in hosts for months, if not years. If proto-latency exists, all of humanity could be infected as I type this, just waiting for a genetic timer or environmental trigger to start the end times. The more conspiratorial among us ascribe the impossibly widespread dispersal to enemy action. If you were trying to wipe out all of humanity with the single most effective bioweapon ever seen, it would make sense to cause as many concurrent emergence

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events as possible so as to confuse emergency response. If that’s true, it nearly fucking worked. But if there’s anybody out there with a track record for conspiring against the human race, it’s God. The last explanation, if one could call it that, is that the Blight just was one day. It didn’t exist one second, and then it did. Which means it could do so again at any moment, anywhere.

Global Outbreaks

Those looking to separate the signal from the noise in determining where the initial outbreaks occurred need only look at a map. Find the borders of a country’s or continent’s Recession: the majority of outbreaks occurred on the other side, usually far away. In the US, the West Coast got the worst of it. If we believe the proto-latency theory, California is a major contender for the singular origin of the Blight. It got hit with emergence events in multiple locations along the coast, not to mention outbreaks in Oregon, Washington, and Nevada. The sensationalism of the media kept the state from standing out as a frontrunner during the early days, but hindsight puts the brunt far West. Texas was bad off too, but sparse population density and a propensity for military bases left the Blight running west to east rather than south to north. The East Coast had minor incidents in Virginia, but the really bad events like the fall of Manhattan and the Maine migration didn’t occur until later. I’m an American gal, but I know the gist of how the story went down globally. Canada got hit along the northwestern border of its population band, but the barren cold of the North made sure the Vectors hunted southbound. They would have probably been fine were it not for Our Great Betrayal (more on that later), but the nukes shattered governmental response and surviving state power remains scattered and inconsistent to this day. Mexico was a failed state before the Crash; the last thing it needed was for the initial

outbreak to start in Mexico City. Our southern neighbors were among some of the first nations to fall, and their population of dead migrated in every direction. South America didn’t need Mexico’s undead to help. Emergence events in Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Uruguay dotted the whole continent with infection. Brazil was hit hardest of all, which makes it all the more remarkable that any clean territory remains. Those refugees that managed to escape their infected homelands did so across the Andes, but the Chilean’s extreme anti-immigration measures doomed most. However, it’s arguably the only reason Chile survives. The UK was actually hit very early in the process, but the surveillance state they’d set up minimized the amount of time it took for the government to believe what they were seeing. In spite of that, England, Ireland,

and Scotland owe more to the efforts of EU nations fleeing the terror of mainland Europe: Spain, Germany, and France all had unchecked emergence events, and the exponentially growing hordes fed in every direction. The remains of their shattered security forces proved the deciding factor in the war to cleanse infection from the UK islands. Similar to the Brits, Italy mainly survived by dint of geography and the assistance of foreign military diaspora. The Scandinavian states handled outbreaks in their isolated populations centers with relative ease, and their later intervention helped Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania survive. Each had been spared initial outbreaks and managed to cap the slow advance of casualties through frozen, mountainous terrain. Sweden, which already had geographical isolation and a militarized

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populace going for it, suffered no emergence events. Aside from some lost imports and exports, life there goes on largely unchanged. Ironically, the sheer hellishness of the conflicts raging across the Middle East kept it safe. Its few emergence events were isolated enough by desert that there were few secondary infections in major population centers. Most of the cities that did get hit hard were already in the midst of civil wars (meaning the citizenry was armed and fortified) or got blasted to hell by the Iranians and Israelis. By happy accident, Turkey’s invasion of Greece and Russia’s continued Ukrainian/Georgian aggression served to buffer the onslaught of European casualty migration, insulating the largely clean Arab states. Sadly, the respite did nothing to dispel the endless hatred and in-fighting of the region, but at least the world still has its major oil suppliers. Otherwise, the almost apocalypse would have finished the job with an energy crisis. Africa’s thick jungles, endless savannah, and crap transportation infrastructure meant the initial outbreaks that got out of hand never coalesced into the giant stampedes seen on other continents. Mali and surrounding nations fell early, but the Blight never spread quite so far as to take out Libya, Egypt, or the Sudan. The Democratic Republic of Congo is the corner of the area known as the African Loss, a box which starts on the West coast, then bisects the continent laterally until it runs against the lakes of the East African Rift zone. The swamplands and rivers kept the dead from migrating, so the East Coast survived and Madagascar became a literal bastion for the AU. Angola and Zambia are barely hanging on against the corpses trickling down through the Congo’s jungles, but they’re supported by the relative prosperity of every nation further south. Many nations owe their eventual survival to the military buildup they were forced to undertake to deal with pre-Crash Russian aggression. However, those same wars left the bear ill equipped when the Blight started

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in Moscow. Though the state still technically survives behind the Urals, there’s nothing of the old nation left beyond nomadic bands that fled into Kazakhstan and Mongolia, trailing hungry dead behind them. India was really the worst-case scenario for emergence, and we know of at least three distinct sites where primary infection occurred. The population density doomed the whole country. As Indian casualties flooded over the border into Pakistan, both countries nuked each other to glass, but not before millions of dead flooded through the mountain passes and complicated China’s already disastrous Blight problems even more. The Chinese government still survives, locked in a three-way naval war for territory against the shaky Thai alliance and Australia. I couldn’t tell you where the capital was located, though. The outbreak was so diffuse and China so huge that there’s no characterizing what happened after things settled down because things haven’t settled down. A city will be there one month, gone the next, and then the refugees pop up a week later in some ghost city constructed in the middle of the Mongolian steppe. The government maintains its flotilla of ships, but the Chinese on the mainland survive by migrating away from the dead, hopping between pieces of the state’s surplus infrastructure. North Korea’s inability to do literally anything right kept South Korea safe as Chinese casualties consumed their impoverished populace. Keeping the North Korean infected from crossing the most militarized border in the world proved easy enough — throwing a couple low-yield nukes over the wall at the NK missile sites certainly helped. And I think Japan’s okay? Their navy is still in play and someone answers the phone whenever big players needs to talk, but the populace is completely off the Ubiq network. Maybe they reverted to isolationism out of old habit? Or it could be that the Crash hit them real hard and they’re bluffing. They can’t

afford to let the South Koreans or Chinese smell blood in the water. Australia and New Zealand are fine. One major outbreak occurred in Sydney, but the population retreated to the interior, euthanized the casualties during torpor, and reclaimed the coastline. The only thing that keeps Australia from becoming the world’s major superpower instead of the Saudis is the constant invasion attempts from the Thai alliance and China seeking to house refugees on their unspoiled continent. As I read all this I can already imagine the pissed off comments from every corner of Ubiq about how ignorant I am. A topic as big as post-Crash international relations deserves its own thread, and I haven’t even figured out my own country yet. Suffice it to say that prosperity and resources certainly helped nations survive the Crash. It wasn’t the only factor, but many well-off nations repelled infections 100 times larger than the ones that consumed poorer states. The Blight started thinning our herd amongst the poorest, and the map today is the high-water mark of how far it got before the old power structures woke up and protected those that remained. Of course, all this border drawing happened far later; there was a lot of dying to do first.

The PersIstence of the Mundane

One last torture humanity inflicts upon itself: our inability to quantify our own idiocy. Without a clear start date, time, and location, it’s impossible to hook a number to exactly how stupid we were. How long did we ignore the signs and let the Blight run free? The low end of estimates is about a week, but there’s some convincing evidence suggesting as much as a month passed before the public at large could even be bothered to acknowledge the zombie apocalypse. The next generation can’t possibly understand our inaction as anything other than insanity. They’re not from a culture so fucked up as to find the apocalypse a comforting thought. Let me try to explain.

Before the Crash, humanity had been engaged in a decades long obsession with stories of its own demise. Comet strikes, alien invasions, deadly pandemics, even zombies — any story would sell if it talked about the death of society. Why did we need to repeat this story to ourselves over and over? I suspect it had something to do with our monkey brains being unable to cope with the complexity of global culture. We desperately sought the simplification only mass death could bring. And because we sought out that simplification, we rarely focused on how it would come to pass. The narratives about the end times never focused on how said times had ended. They focused on the concise, clean metaphor represented by the simplified world of after. The issue was decided before the narrative even began, with no chance to avert the disaster ever considered as an option. Reality doesn’t work that way. There’s always a way out, and if there isn’t, the dead end could have been prevented with some foresight earlier. It’s a responsibility we wanted to escape from as our environment and economy continued their perpetual collapse. We wanted absolution from our sins, so we peppered our stories with absolute terminuses and complete endings that our characters bore no responsibility in creating. Reality doesn’t work that way, but lying to ourselves about that fact became the entire point of a cultural narrative. We got really good at telling the lie. At the time of the Crash, entire generations had been raised on these apocalypse narratives. We knew to be worried when the people started coming for us in war convoys, screaming for our gasoline. But when we pulled up to a gas station to find it unlocked and empty? The clerk must have had a family emergency and forgot to lock the door on the way out…. Watching a gang of monsters tear someone apart would be a sign to start hording food and water, but when all that’s wrong is police sirens heard in the distance? People withdrew back to their homes, tsk-tsking about the state

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of the neighborhood or immigrants or some other bullshit that confirmed their worldview. If messages of doom had broken across all frequencies at once, we’d been trained from birth to start freaking the fuck out. But when that news was only on a few channels? And other options said nothing, or refuted the claims, or continued to stream our on-demand entertainment without interruption? The warnings were dismissed as more tragedy to ignore for the sake of our self-care. It wasn’t the clarion call from the Book of Revelation; it was another downer we didn’t have time for, to be filed away with all the other new diseases and school shootings and general depression. But reality couldn’t give a damn about what we needed the world to look like. Entire cities had fallen before humanity collectively woke up, and even then, our stupidity still ruled the day. The eerie persistence of normality past any point where it made sense was only the beginning of the Romero Effect.

The How: The Romero Effect

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Why did it take so long for governments to react to the threat? The Romero Effect. Why were so many of their solutions idiotic? The Romero Effect. How did anyone survive the combination of certain doom and our continued bungling? The Romero Effect. As a singular answer to all those multifaceted questions, the Romero Effect is paradoxically too reductive and absolutely accurate. First off, the term has an official definition that we rarely cite when talking about it. The phrase was coined by Dr. Emily Dale a year after the Crash in the same paper where she diagnosed the populace of the US Recession with Post-Apocalyptic Stress Syndrome (P.A.S.S.) She used director George Romero’s name as a label for a cadre of cognitive biases causing serious harm to the mindset of Crash survivors. I’ll save you a lot of dry academic reading here: I’m going to break down the list of preexisting cognitive biases that combined under

the Romero Effect to almost kill us. As an example of the principles in action, I’ll place myself firmly within this history of human stupidity by describing how I suffered from them in the early days of the Crash.

An Example

Individuals are cognitively incapable of discerning when they are lying to themselves because once they become capable of it, they’ve already convinced themselves they never lie. So I’m as guilty of confabulation as everybody else was in the early days. I stupidly listened to appeals to authority when the news told me everything was under control, and I looked to every status update, working streetlight, and open business to fuel confirmation bias for that pleasant illusion. When I was out with friends touring a food truck festival in Denver, we heard a scream blocks away. But no one else did anything, so I didn’t do anything, and we all fell for the bystander effect. And as the occurrences of odd screams, unexplained “car backfires,” dogs choking mid-bark, and sprinting footfalls in the night built up in the tonal landscape, I kept up my conformity to the norm of doing nothing. If I acknowledged something was going on, I’d betray brand loyalty to my sense of self. “I’m not a callous, selfish person like everyone else,” my brain would repeat to itself, silencing the terror growing outside as I slept like a baby in my loft apartment. People started ranting about hordes of the undead on social media. I ignored them; they’d fallen into that stupid zombie meme going around. True to the third person effect, I considered myself above such petty persuasion even as I continued suckling at the teat of censored news coverage. When other people in my networks started dropping out entirely, the misinformation effect assured me they’d just gotten tired of all the zombie shit too and unplugged. They definitely hadn’t been eaten. Besides, they were just internet people, not the 150 or so real people Dunbar’s number allowed my brain to consider real. On the last day I drove from Ubiq City to the

corporate campus — before I came to live there permanently — I saw a man in torn, bloody pajamas chasing a cyclist down the street. He was screaming nonsense and crying blood as he tackled the biker onto the sidewalk. The poor guy managed to kick the attacker off and start sprinting down the street — the strangely abandoned street. The bloody guy landed in the crosswalk, prone for a few seconds. I could have run him over with my car. It might have saved a life. But what if I was misunderstanding? What if I murdered a sick man for no reason? I’d lose my job, my stuff, everything I’d ever worked for. I’d spend the rest of my life in jail because I thought... what? Some guy was a zombie? Would my defense be I’d seen too many movies? Yeah, right. And so, due to loss aversion, I protected myself against a discomfort that I understood rather than gamble saving the life of a man I didn’t know, from a threat I couldn’t comprehend.

Besides, the guy in the car behind me got out to help; my brain played the public goods game and assured me that sucker could handle it. I was free to fall into the introspection fallacy for the rest of my commute. I even tried to call the cops a couple of times. They didn’t answer, of course, but I’d tried, right? That’s what a good person would do. At work, when the cafeteria turned into an abattoir and we ended locking ourselves in the server farm, I couldn’t pretend anymore. But it was okay. We had a couple of guns from the security office. We could take back the administration building and secure the fence around the Ubiq campus. They were just zombies, right? We knew to aim for the head. It was just point and click. So we stupidly left the safety of our building, largely because I stupidly advocated for it. But when we saw our first Vector, no shots rang out. Refusing to murder people

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is a behavior human beings have to learn. Shooting a coworker requires overcoming the extinction burst that tries to keep that old behavior alive. When it kept our gunners from firing the second they saw the Vector? They were already dead. Then another dumbass programmer picked up a gun and failed even harder, unable to shoot a friend. And that’s how the dunning-kruger effect, the illusion of control, and too many zombie movies helped me whittle the initial 44 survivors down to seven. I hid in a janitor’s closet for three days. I had nothing to do but shit in a bucket, stay quiet, and relive what a fool I’d been. By the time the soldiers rescued us, I hadn’t been cured of my biases. The memory once used to store them had been overwritten by my shame. In short, The Romero Effect is all the reasons why the human brain was fundamentally incapable of accepting the Crash’s shifting reality. It also encompasses the idiocy of most reactions when cognitive dissonance finally failed to keep the truth out. Finally (and most insidiously), all those cognitive biases responsible for Romero exist to keep people sane: they maintain the sense of self and filter our perceptions down to a manageable level. Those lucky enough to survive the first two stages have their biases removed, at least in regards to the undead. But the removal of such a vital cognitive coping mechanism can drive a person inexorably, incurably insane. My story was being repeated all over the world. It always ended one of three ways: people denied their doom until it consumed them; they ran towards death with false confidence; or they reacted appropriately, contained the threat, and were forever scarred as a result. Disbelief. Ignorance. Acceptance. Madness.

Emergency Response

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While I “saved the world” by helping Palbicke install sky-servers so folks could more easily download their porn from the stratosphere, some in my generation actually tried to help

humanity on the frontline. Cops, paramedics, social workers, firemen — they took the chance to deny the truth whenever they could, as any sane person would, but first responders were rarely afforded the luxury of denial; most were too busy being eaten. That said, you won’t be hearing that “Honor our Troops” Recession propaganda from me. Half of any profession is made up of pricks and idiots: noble professions included. For every heroic sacrifice, there were plenty of hollow uniforms neglecting their duty or actively making things worse. PolIce The civil rights movements aimed at curbing the epidemic of racist police violence accomplished one thing: it made police a lot more enthusiastic about covering up their executions. Cops were still all but assured to slide on any charges, but no one wanted the hassle of an angry mob waiting on their doorstep for the rest of their lives. Police fought body camera legislation at every turn, resisted every internal investigation with the blue code of silence, generally refused to cooperate unless forced by political pressure threatening to spill over into full-blown revolution, and got fantastic at covering their asses. The shootings continued, the outrage got old, and the media lost interest. At the beginning of the Crash, it looked like the same old story was due for a revival. “Suicide by cop” appeared to have become a memetic virus. Use of force ticked up for a bit... before suddenly quadrupling inside of a week, even according to the doctored numbers employed within departments. And the ethnicity of the victims, for the first time in history, was actually diverse. Most departments reacted the only way they knew how. It would be hard to blame the police that tried to make what we only now know were Blight-related shootings look clean in the eyes of pre-Crash law… if the techniques they’d used to do so hadn’t been mastered shooting black kids.

As an example, let’s say you’re a cop and you’ve just blown away an unarmed child. How do you spin that? Sure, the kid had been eating her mother’s neck, but teeth don’t warrant deadly force in the threat pyramid. How you going to get the press to believe that the Taser and pepper spray wouldn’t work? On a white pre-teen girl, no less? Or that Officer Johnson exhibited the same behavior after coming in contact with the assailant? Even your fellow cops aren’t going to be sympathetic when they find out the bullet that killed your partner came from your gun. It’s better to slap a drop piece into the girl’s hand and stash drugs in the house. Nobody wants to be the first to go up against a grand jury with the “she was a zombie” defense. For a couple of weeks, a lot of people that had never owned a gun suddenly had unregistered pistols in their dead hands. A surge of straightedge grandmas entered the criminal record listed as PCP addicts. Many officers died as heroes, slain in a hail of bullets matching the caliber of their partner’s gun. When patrols went missing entirely, along with the detectives sent to investigate their last known whereabouts? By that time, most precincts weren’t answering the phones. Ironically, a lot of bad cops actually stumbled backwards into fighting the infection. When Barney Fife saw some crazed asshole crying blood, he panicked and emptied a clip into it. Back then, that was 25-to-life in a federal prison. Meanwhile, the good officers were overwhelmingly more likely to get infected or die using nonlethal techniques. Super cops that managed to survive and apprehend the suspect did even more damage by dumping Vectors into holding cells or hospitals. The effect was that, the longer the Crash went on unacknowledged, true heroes died in droves and shitty cops got incentivized to be shittier. As the streets went mad, bad mistakes got rewarded with the gift of survival, and the cover-ups could be more and more flimsy the deeper into the shit we sank. The guns started to get drawn before

cops left the squad car. Eventually, carrying a weapon of any kind on the street was a death sentence, regardless of race. Even if you were defending your family from a horde of bloodvomiting cannibals, twitchy cops were as likely to shoot humans as they were Vectors. A little less than a week after the first victims got put down, even the short-term benefit of the “shoot first, ask never” policy started to wane. Cops are trained to shoot center mass; every urban morgue in the country suddenly became casualty central as the torpor ended. Don’t get me wrong: there was no win condition here. No police department in the world could hope to handle the volume of calls they received mid-Crash, and no one had been trained. They couldn’t cope with what they were seeing any more than the rest of us could, and they had to see the Blight first, unfiltered and raw. It’s hard to blame the ones that were derelict in their duty or turned the street into a free fire zone. Empathy makes the heroic stories all the more impressive. Many in law enforcement had backgrounds in the military, and a lot of jurisdictions were run by men and women used to getting the job done in spite of institutional groupthink. Many towns and cities became enclaves thanks to the efforts of officers that stopped denying what they were seeing: those were fucking zombies out there, and the movies had taught them what to do. They emptied the SWAT armories and went to war, buying valuable time for the uninfected to flee to the Recession or get to a safe zone. Basically, if someone claims to have survived being cop during the Crash, they’re a liar, a hero, a monster, or damned lucky. Healthcare In the movies, hospitals were the first to fall. In reality, they were some of the last. Vectors run too hot to make it to hospitals. Full transformation from a hot bite takes place in minutes, which is more than most response times can handle. Most of the time, paramedics arrived to find Vector and victims

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already dead, already gone, or waiting to devour them. On the rare occasion some victims were still around and not yet turned, the ambulance rarely got back to the ER. Outbreaks locked in a high-speed vehicle usually took care of themselves. In urban areas, paramedics were all dead or missing long before even the police force called it quits. Most rural hospitals actually ended up running until the migration to the Recession; their response time was too slow and their paramedics figured out the score before it was too late. Either way, civilians that made it into hospitals usually had to get there on their own. A lot of these folks had secondary injuries incurred while fleeing or fighting, and boy did they have stories to tell. What happened next depended on numbers. If it was one or two assholes screaming about zombies, the Romero Effect assured they were dismissed as crazies. Once a dozen or so people independently verified symptoms, most doctors at least started calling around. When they found out the paramedics were all dropping off the face of the earth, the smart ones put the hospital on lockdown. The dumb ones kept thinking it was business as usual until the Vectors came crashing through the ER doors. Luckily, doctors tend towards the smart side of the spectrum. They called the CDC and started collecting data. They locked the doors. They requested police presence and, if the cops were still taking calls, they usually got it. At that point, too many variables came into play to generalize. If the hospital was old or built by some brutalist architect, it might survive by cordoning off wings and blocking limited windows. If it was new? Those lovely glass facades made the buildings about as secure as the inside of a blender. Sometimes, refugees would trail too many Vectors behind and overrun facilities. Operations with better triage and security managed to keep administering care until the medicine ran out or the lights died. There are stories of a few

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places that kept demanding proof of insurance right until the people they left to die outside turned and crashed the gates. There are a few documented cases where, once the building was secure, no one else came. The Romero Effect caused a lot of people to write medical care off as a deathtrap, and traffic patterns could sometimes keep random Vectors from the door. It’s these cases that really get me: imagine preparing for the pandemic, manning the battle stations, and then having no one come? Just silence and empty streets. Imagine sitting there, looking out the doors and listening to dead phone lines, knowing you’ll eventually have to venture out and see for yourself. The final determiner of whether a hospital made it to evacuation was whether or not they burned the dead. The bold few that said fuck propriety and threw slain Vectors into a burn pile usually went all the way. Those that started filling the morgue had a little less than a week after the first corpse went inside. Torpor can take as little as two days to revive a corpse into a shambling casualty, and most rational medical professionals couldn’t imagine the Blight curing death, no matter how many movies they’d seen. Other SocIal ServIces Firefighters got recruited to make up for the sudden paramedic shortage. Those left behind at the station house usually got eaten by the “survivors” of a rash of car crashes. By the time actual fires broke out due to neglect or improvised weaponry, all the volunteers were running for their lives and the professionals were dead. Entire cities began to slowly burn, one block at a time. True to form, commerce made things simultaneously better and worse. By the time of the Crash, the US had the worst employee sick leave and personal time policy amongst all the industrialized nations. A lot of desperate families careened into the parking lot of their closest camping superstores and mega-groceries to find the buildings fully-

staffed — their familiarity with facilities and inventory saved a lot of people. But while it was great if you worked in a gun store or easily defensible industrial complex, there wasn’t much comfort for those working hundreds of other professions. For every big box superstore destined to became an enclave, there were a dozen fast food joints demanding their workers leave the house and flood the area with Vector targets. Schools were an all-or-nothing affair. Either things had progressed far enough that administration cancelled on account of “flu,” or the Blight took the whole thing down at once. Believe it or not, the latter was actually preferable. Losing hundreds or thousands of children in an hour was enough to break even the most oblivious out of the denial phase of the Romero Effect. There are some interesting stats to suggest losing a school early in the outbreak could add as much as a week to a city’s lifespan. For less common social services, the all or nothing school scenario looked downright peachy in comparison. Homeless populations were some of the first to get infected, so shelters became hotbeds. The few remaining mental hospitals in existence hadn’t been decently funded in decades, so cops kept dropping off these bleeding “crazies” into buildings with paper-thin walls, under-trained staff, and no hope of survival. Prisons were fine so long as no one in general population suffered an emergence event. If not for that damned show, I imagine most correctional facilities would be enclaves today. As it was, everybody and their dog thought the local supermax would become their personal fortress. The guards could handle the inmates just fine, but not the thousands of desperate, armed families trying to break down the fence from the outside. Private and public correctional facilities became war zones, and the most severe loss was usually the same damn fence that made the place desirable.

MedIa No one exhibited and propagated the Romero Effect better than the media. If every so-called “journalist” burned in hell for their part in the Crash, I’d consider the injustice suffered by the few good ones the price of doing business. Economic incentives may have killed what little integrity journalism had left long before the first Vector, but individual human beings in those editing rooms and broadcast booths made moral choices that killed real goddamn people. To clarify, it’s not as if network news, radio, and online services failed to report on the Blight. On the contrary, they reported on every second of the Crash. They just didn’t change anything about how they did the job. If someone got mauled by a pack of cannibals, every click-bait traffic-monger on the internet smashed the caps-lock key and giggled as they typed “ZOMBIES!!!” for the headline. Just as they had tens-of-thousands of times before: every time someone got bit in a bar fight; every time a serial killer took cannibal trophies; every time a drug trip went bad. They wanted that motherfucking traffic, damn it, and they didn’t give a shit if the user was searching for dumb horror movies or trying to find an evac zone. Reporting actual events with terms that, up until that point, were purely fictional was standard operating procedure by the time the nightmare became real. By the time Vectors and casualties become deadly real, the average informed citizen was as likely to believe a headline with the z-word in it as the racist chainmail reposted by their grandparents. “Infotainment” had reached such saturation that the perpetually dying news industry no longer knew how to stop. The ad revenue for that brand of sensationalist bullshit had been in free fall for years, but the only people left standing in the industry intended to ride that ship until it sank. With all of us aboard. Blasting out news of the actual undead with the same schlocky tools of yesteryear wasn’t the only case of old narratives aiding the new

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genocide. When a cop couldn’t make some Vector shoot look clean, the media made it a race thing whenever possible. The guy may have eaten twenty people that then got up and had to be put down by an entire SWAT team, but dumbasses unable to tell fiction from reality paled in comparison to “righteous outrage” traffic. Was that rural hospital suspiciously fucking abandoned in mid-day? Or that school? Hand-wringing think pieces about post-millennials got more hits than fullblown mass disappearances. As always, I’m oversimplifying. Many a good journalist died trying to get the story, and a lot of people are alive today because of their warnings. But personal excellence couldn’t overcome the systemic corruption of the institution, a decades-old problem that practically begged to be ignored. It’s also not as if the public bears no responsibility. For every citizen journalist raising the alarm about the approaching apocalypse, there were a dozen assholes with ProGo cameras “locking and loading” for a zombie hunt. While those idiots streamed their own deaths, a completely different stripe of imbecile cynically traded on the memes

without questioning the origins. We still see casualties wandering around wearing the remains of masks and make-up meant to make them look like zombies. Thousands were eaten while out in the woods, trying to scare folks like the stupid-ass “haunting clown” meme from pre-Ubiq web. Those that didn’t get killed in the process were actually more harmful; they’d document their pranks on social media and make the whole premise of the Blight seem that much more ridiculous. Then there were the outright trolls, half of who thought they were pranking the gullible with made-up zombie fiction. The other half knowingly spoofed evacuation orders and safe zone announcements so they could watch people get eaten for the lulz. The more serious things got — the more undeniably real — the faster the tide of misinformation multiplied. By the time no one could deny what was happening, everyone had lost someone close to the lies. The louder we screamed, the less intelligible things became. It would be wrong to say that the transfer of all broadcasting to the government under martial law didn’t improve things. Some smart folks in the administration stripped all

reporting of everything save the bare facts. The crackdown on editorializing seen in lateCrash reporting made AP newswires look like teenage blog posts. It was bloodless, factual, necessary information, repeated every hour on the hour. It was also too late. “TakIng CasualtIes” I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, but we are talking about the media. I suppose I should explain where the word “casualty” comes from. It feels weird even thinking about it. If this were the trope in the old movies, I wouldn’t have to explain why we don’t use the word “zombie”; it would just be accepted. And maybe that’s the real reason. Maybe we’re conforming to the genre conventions by which we are forced to survive. Casualty comes from the last few days of coverage before the old network completely failed. After all faith in the information industry had been lost, the newly nationalized broadcasts needed a way around the skepticism build up on the term “zombie.” It may have been evident by then that walking, cannibalistic corpses patrolled the streets, but they came in a confusing variety and were far from the only threat. People were being shot, starved, crushed by crashing vehicles, etc. If the response was going to work, the authorities didn’t have time to convince people they lived in a new reality. So new government censorship guidelines demanded zombies only be referred to tangentially. The policy demanded the information be reduced to its basest concept to prevent instilling more panic. So, when Reno was getting consumed and infected by the living dead, the news reported: “Reno is taking casualties.” When authorities would fortify and fight literal monsters, they were described as “clearing casualties.” The fact that dead people were getting up and eating folks stopped being mentioned entirely. The entire nightmare got boiled down to arithmetic: more casualties here, less

casualties there. For the Lost, these bloodless descriptions of an ongoing genocide were the last official communications they ever received. As they were deceived and abandoned, unwittingly recruited as decoys to save the powerful and the lucky streaming towards the Recession, the screams they heard outside their boarded-up homes became one more tic on the countdown. Dead loved ones became numbers, and their murderers shared the same column on the ledger. The vocabulary requirements grew less severe as the Recession government found its feet, but by then, no one in the Loss was listening. We already had to learn to live with our nightmares, and we couldn’t wait for a committee to give us the approved nomenclature. So if you were pissed off about your government abandoning you? You called them casualties out of spite. If you didn’t like the fact life had turned into a B-movie? You called them casualties to avoid the reminder. Or if you found being turned into a horror character absurd? Or loved living the trope? You called them casualties because the z-word was taboo. By the time the Takers came about, the term was cemented. “Taking casualties” became our literal profession. The government long ago went back to calling them zombies, and plenty of citizens only know them by that name. But out here in the Loss, saying “zombie” is a sure sign you’re a Bait-baby that watched the Crash from the safety of a smartphone. Maybe if I ever get to come back to the world, I’ll be able to call them “zombies” again without ironic derision. But until then, they’re never going to share the term I once used for bad make-up on worse actors. Casualties are real. They’re my loved ones and my victims. My demons and my ghosts. My employers and my oppressors — all rolled into one. “Casualties” is our word now. If the citizens of the Recession don’t like it, they’re welcome to come out here and take it back.

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ReactIon and PolIcy

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In President Hunter’s memoir, our former fearful leader writes, “Criticizing institutional reactions to the Crash is like blaming a figure skater for getting tackled by a linebacker on the ice. The rules of the game changed completely. The only strategy was improvisation, and the only victory was survival.” If we had nothing to rely on save mixed sports metaphors, that claim would be accurate enough. There was no framework for the Blight. Failures were inevitable, and any accusation of could’ve-done-better goes double for the civilian population. Myself included. But the Romero Effect didn’t catch everybody in denial. Climbing into the sphere of federal influence usually requires some degree of cunning, and a lot of very powerful people stopped fooling themselves very early

on. The fact that the entirety of North America isn’t a swarming graveyard right now is proof enough that a least a few saw the writing on the wall. Those same people, including President Punter up there, would have you believe they were just as overwhelmed as the average beat cop or ER nurse. They sell the lie that the nightmare of today is solely the result of their understandable confusion and God’s unpredictable wrath. They profit off the belief that this shitshow is the best case, and they trumpet it from every propaganda mouthpiece they have. Fuck that. Over half the country is abandoned. Not gone. Abandoned. Still out here, starving even as it’s eaten. Those fuckers dropped nukes, for Christ’s sake. No one slaps the red button and gets to say “Awww, shucks. It’s the best I could do.”

If you want to believe the Crash government were true patriots or the saviors of humanity, go ahead. I won’t argue with the results. Extinction looked absolutely assured, but the US’s anti-Blight tactics saved part of the country and inspired other nations to save nearly half the world. I wouldn’t be alive today were it not for the actions of President Hunter. I readily acknowledge that. Just don’t call them fucking heroes. The actions taken to secure the Recession were not performed by humble folk summoned against their will by a call to greatness. Reality isn’t some bullshit DHQS propo blasted over the PA of a refugee camp. At best, they were patriotic serial killers — amiable psychopaths aimed in a useful direction. Some might go so far as to call them sin-eaters. When confronted with a choice between damnation or saving the species, they had the strength to make the choice. At a minimum, the sheer willpower required to make the calls has to be respected... but it’s not heroism. Heroes don’t retire under house arrest in their ancestral East Coast estates, protected by Secret Service until the federal pardon comes through. It’s one thing to have sympathy for the devil and mourn the tragic decisions that led to his fall. But believing he’s the hero? That’s the lie the Recession teaches as gospel, the lie that gets you damned too. The truth? Choices were made. Arguably necessary. Certainly monstrous.

The SurvIval WIndow

So let’s imagine the sort of person that’s in charge during the Crash. Imagination is going to have to suffice: between confidential documents, scapegoating, and general chaos, there are no more than a handful of people we can definitively place as shot-callers during the crisis. Luckily, it’s not hard to get a picture anyway. They were involved in the security services and military/industrial complex of the pre-Crash world. As such, we’re talking the sort of high-functioning,

compartmentalized, mannequin-facsimile of a human being that thrives in such roles, and the middle management, jingoistic meat robots that get off taking orders from such authoritarian alphas. Hey... call me reductive and prejudiced all you like. I might soften my opinions if the critique comes from one of my peers here on the terrorist watch list. Until then, shut it. So, these uber-Deep State operatives are the kind of folks who see blood start flying and immediately open up a spreadsheet file. Years in the Loss might force that kind of detachment on a person, but these spooks were psychopaths before it was cool. From that distance, you start to see the Blight’s weaknesses... primarily because you’re already thinking about how you’d design it better. By the time it came to the hard choices, upper-level government figures had already been fully briefed on the Blight’s “life cycle.” They knew about the difference between Vectors and casualties. They also knew about the seconds-long eclipse phase between a hot bite and transformation. They could compare that to the days it took for a cold bite to kill somebody. They’d seen time-lapse video of a dozen Vectors euthanized and slowly wrapped in the Blight’s parasitic nerves, and they had over/under times for the average torpor between death and undeath. There’s debate as to whether or not the powers-that-be knew about latency, immunity, or blank bites at that point. If they did, they certainly decided not to tell anyone. At this point, if you’re the kind of ghoulish lizard person that can put yourself in the mindset of the Blight, you can start to see what’s now referred to as “the survival window.” Put simply, the Blight burns too hot to be an extinction-level pandemic. Much like Ebola, no one in their right mind goes anywhere near someone bleeding out the eyes. Unless a victim jumped on a plane, bus, or train seconds after being bitten, the disease couldn’t travel using any man-made

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means. And when Vectors did go hot inside evac transportation, the whole fucking thing usually crashed and killed everyone inside. Then, there was the Romero Effect, which was a net positive from a statistical perspective. No one out there believed you could be bitten and not infected. Everyone had been trained by the movies to think that immunity was a myth and latency was nothing save a new, worse form of undeath. Most people showing signs of infection were being put down ASAP. When the monsters don’t have a bus pass, there are predictable numbers to crunch. A fit human being can jog between 19–20 miles on glucose stores alone; 40–50 if burning fat stores. But Vectors don’t jog; they fucking sprint with the maximum intensity allowed by the human body. So you can cut those numbers by 50% across the board. This presumes the infected had an active gym membership on day one. If they were obese, like 65% of the American population? Then the math starts looking even better. Those numbers also presume that the remaining 25 miles radius goes in a straight line, but a Vector is as likely to chase the family pet as it is to attack an evacuation convoy. Food didn’t help either, as every mouthful of flesh a Vector tore off got metabolized by the Blight’s magic to make more sinew; no matter how much they ate, the infected began starving the second they turned. The statistical models suggested that emergence events in densely populated areas would pretty much assure 90–95% fatality, but the knockdown effects of being next door to a hot zone were greatly lessened. If City A went down completely, City B might be okay if they had 10 miles of distance and shutdown the roadways. Those numbers got even better if there were natural barriers like rivers and mountains. The problem was cold strain. Casualties were slow and easier to kill, but they were so much more insidious as infection risks. Not only was a victim more likely to escape a mob

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of casualties, they had hours or days to hide the bite. When the Blight finally resurrected and went hot, they could be states away, causing an apocalyptic outbreak in a city where the chances of encountering a Vector had been negligible. Casualties were making spies out of desperate people who, just by trying to survive, carried the poison back to the nest. Without the cold strain? The Crash would have ended on its own. But with it? The emergence events would just keep cycling hot and cold until no one was left. That’s the survival window: the time between when the last Vector runs out of gas and the first casualty wakes from torpor. According to most experts, it’s 3–4 days. If you can deny the enemy fresh troops until it burns out — or at least keep new infections beneath the p-value — it gives you a little less than a week to get quarantine set up. Get the Vectors off the street and you buy yourself a week to save the world. Whereas actual human beings would have viewed the survival window as a final hope, the bloodless securocrats of the Hunter administration kept crunching numbers. Nationalist propaganda expects us to applaud them for coming to the conclusion that while saving the whole world was possible, it was a safer bet to save only some of it.

The ImpossIbIlIty of Recovery

The complexity of the math used to decide the US’s torpor strategy was on par with big data algorithms like Spawn and Cull. For the sake of example, let’s simplify. I’ll always round towards the best-case scenario... to emphasize how truly fucked the idea of reclamation really is. Let’s say LA (population: 4.5 million) was a total loss (it was): all infected. We’ll be nice and say the Blight was kind enough to infect and kill everyone at the exact same moment. There were only 2.5 million active duty and reserve US military personnel during the Crash, spread all over the globe. But let’s err on side of humanity and magically teleport

them to the valley the very second the last Vector enters torpor. Let’s also teleport the county’s entire annual production of ammunition (all 10 billion rounds) and hand-wave the fact we don’t have enough guns to shoot it, not to mention most of that ammunition isn’t compatible with what we have in armory. Focus on the positive. The average tooth-to-tail ratio of US military operations had fallen steadily in the years before the Crash. At the time of the lockdown, it would have taken 80 support soldiers to field 20 combat troops. Our effective force is down to 500,000 shooters now. They have three days — at best — to euthanize every last man, woman, and child in the city before their bodies get back to biting folks. We can ration 1000 soldiers for every square mile. They must execute 62,500 headshots an hour, not accounting time spent on food, sleep, or bathroom breaks. If they could manage that (and they didn’t), LA would be clear by the time the torpor ended... leaving only the rest of California. At 45 million, the kill-per-hour ratio would have to be 625,000-to-1, and we’d have only one shooter for every two square miles. But what we’re really looking at is three days to clear the entire country. The most conservative estimates place the Crash at something like a 50% fatality rate. That’s 162.5 million Cs that need to be cleared in three days... 2.25 million headshots per hour. A single shooter would have to cover eight square miles. But clearing the US in that time wouldn’t be enough; you’d also have to stop casualties from crossing the border from Canada and Mexico. At the same fatality rate, that’s another 95 million casualties. Now we’re up to 3.5 million headshots an hour, or seven kills per soldier per hour... assuming the shooter can single-handedly comb through 20 square miles. If torpor ends before we’re through? Our 500,000 brave super solders now have active targets. Accuracy against a moving enemy is going to drop to 30% at best, and probably

lower when you account for headshots. Bestcase scenario, our 3.5 million headshots per hour require 11.5 million rounds fired... all without anyone getting bit or hit by friendly fire. The barrels of the sturdiest guns on Earth would melt before the first hour was through. What point am I trying to prove with all these statistics? I hate the Hunter administration for what they did. I believe we should all hate them. But I can hate them, and they can still have been right. These are not mutually exclusive conditions. Full reclamation can be impossible, unforgivable sins can be committed, and both can exist in the same universe. There is no comforting narrative here. They did what they had to do... and what they had to do was let us all die. The Recession can have its math, but the Loss gets to keep its hate.

The Torpor Lockdown

The plan sounds simple when divorced from logistics: get everyone off the street. Everyone. If every single person stayed indoors and out-of-sight, it would deny the Blight new victims. Of course, not everyone would listen and not everyone would have shelter or supplies capable of withstanding a Vector onslaught, but the ravenous nature of infected would convert the majority of that sub-group within the first day. From there, you’ve got another couple of days spent waiting for the freshly turned to die of dehydration and exposure. After that window, the only casualties on the street would be from the earliest outbreaks, the deniably small incidents in isolated geographical locations. The number of Cs that entered torpor before the infection graph went exponential would be laughably small compared to the Vectors on the streets during peak Crash, and the increase of Cs would follow a predictable pattern. That’s two or three days before the hordes of Cs get unmanageable — two or three days to establish new borders, blow bridges, and block roads. Would have been nice if they’d let us know...

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MartIal Law

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The first step in martial law was nationalizing all broadcast apparatuses. This went by with little or no objection from the media, most of whom had lost their spine decades ago. The few that were still online by the time troops rolled into the broadcast booth were just hopeful the nice men in jackboots might take them to their bunker. Those internet service providers still in operation were also commandeered, and Executive Order #28933 (colloquially known as “The Torpor Order”) began broadcasting on all frequencies. The same, creepy calm voice read it over and over on the radio. They ran the same audio

over an American flag image on TV. Oldnetwork internet traffic began rooting out of a homepage that was just a PDF of the text. Only two things were allowed to interrupt repetition of the Torpor Order. The first were the new, bloodless “casualty updates,” but that was more for troops on the ground than the civilian populace under house arrest. The only other respite from the announced curfew was the bloody, televised execution of anyone violating it. They dressed the shootings up as best they could. Most footage showed at least one Vector or casualty amongst the throngs of people being gunned down, but the message

was clear: no matter how bad it gets, do not leave the home. Anything outside catches a bullet or a bite, no exceptions. To be fair, there’s a lot of hard evidence now suggesting 99% of that footage was either taken from civilian Crash footage or staged by Army psyops. Frankly, there weren’t enough actual troops on the streets to field even half that many war crimes, but the Torpor Lockdown wouldn’t work if anyone thought otherwise. Enough had died that US Central Command knew that people labored under the illusion that they could outrun the Vectors and go save their loved ones. They expended a lot of resources to ensure those that violated curfew also had to believe they could outrun a bullet.

Troop MobIlzatIon

The secondary goal of broadcasting all those mass shootings was to give the public the impression that the government was in the streets. The narrative that the war was going well never had wings, but they could float the lie that the war was everywhere. A lot of people felt certain they’d be shot the second they opened the door. Those not shot would certainly be torn apart by Vectors. Only the latter half was true, but the double-fear kept folks in place. Meanwhile, troops were on the ground... and streaming East as fast as fucking possible. The standard operating procedures for most units when pulling into a new community was to shout the Torpor Order through a megaphone, pop-off a few rounds, and get the hell out of town. In their defense, most of these troops were National Guard or old reservists reenlisted under emergency stop-loss powers. They didn’t have a lot of time to question their orders, and those orders certainly didn’t read, “Abandon the poor bastards.” Most convoys had civilians in tow already — the families of the enlisted men and survivors from around the base. As far as the average soldier knew, they were pushing east to drop off their refugees, regroup, and mount an East-to-West campaign against

the infection. Most would be across the river before they realized the last part was bullshit. Meanwhile, the US had already lost multiple bases abroad to Blight events, especially in friendly countries. Forwardoperating bases in our half-dozen bush wars fared better due to fortifications already in place, and everyone was ordered to blow up anything they couldn’t pack and doubletime home. The evacuation convoys pouring in from the Western military bases merely kept up appearances and saved valuable equipment; the combat veterans were welcomed home to a more brutal task.

Metro QuarantInes and Cleanses

The eastern seaboard of the United States was far from clean. The number of emergence events occurring in the modern day Recession paled in comparison to those experienced by California alone, but it was enough to leave multiple urban centers hemorrhaging Vectors into the countryside. In instances like the Philadelphia outbreak, the density of the population threatened to turn everything from New York to Richmond into a wasteland, effectively gutting what little state power remained to enact the plan. That’s where the bush wars veterans came in. We really tested that “boots on the ground anywhere in 48 hours” thing the military was so proud of. It just so happened to be our ground. Logistically, Central Command shifted everything we had in the Middle East up to the surviving European bases for refueling, and then dumped troops into the heart of ongoing US outbreaks like dirt on a forest fire. On Monday, a private could be on patrol, dealing with this brand of “berserk” insurgent sabotaging the Iranian regime change. By Wednesday, that same kid would be shooting Vectors trying to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, firing artillery barrages at refugees fleeing up Interstate 76, or bombing Fort Lauderdale into paste. The loss of life, both civilian and military, was catastrophic. It would be many months before the cities would be declared clear

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and some have yet to be rebuilt, but the primary goal was achieved: containment. By throwing everything they had at comparatively few infection sources, the Eastern US was improving. The Blight was blocked off from the Atlantic. The Gulf of Mexico kept them safe from the South, especially with the Coast Guard’s orders to blow any vessel out of the water on sight. Barring another emergence event that only left the border with Canada and the Mississippi. If the dead could be blocked from passing there, the Recession could let the rest of the world eat itself.

EstablIshment of the MIssIssIppI LIne

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One of the few things the CDC had managed to figure out was that Blight effectively drowns. The pacing and control required to swim long distances remained beyond most Vectors. Once drowned, corpses would enter torpor and travel with the current. The Blight has some sort of devastating effect on human gut flora, so bloating rarely occurs in the bodies of the infected. This means Blight victims sink, and even once they are resurrected into casualties, the confusing stimulus of deep water keeps them wandering in circles until tissue saturation rips the bodies asunder. Most helpful of all, pure Blight is apparently much denser than water; it would consistently sink. This meant that tearing a casualty apart on a riverbed or ocean floor left little chance of infecting the water supply. With that in mind, the Mississippi River had been chosen as the last line of defense against the Blight. At over 2,500 miles long, no manmade barricade could ever hope to rival the river’s scope. The majority of its length spreads over a mile wide, with the widest sections stretching nearly 11 miles. The bridges could be blown. Protecting the few areas narrow enough for a casualty to cross would mean defending a mere 200 miles of frontier, leaving the river itself to defend a distance half the length of the Great Wall. The majority of the work establishing the Mississippi Line was performed by the

convoys fleeing east. The first capable unit crossing the river was tasked with mining and fortifying the bridge. These initial troops usually stayed behind to man the checkpoints and process the refugee payloads of further incoming convoys. Meanwhile, all subsequent soldiers and supplies were funneled north towards Chicago. Chicago had miraculously survived without any uncontained infection events, and the city became the defacto command center of the entire US strategy. The #1 priority needed to be the defense of the Des Plaines and Illinois River. Though where they met Lake Michigan proved an impossible moat, these two river ways remained vulnerable to casualty invasion at various places until joining with the Mississippi in Grafton. This left the armed forces with some 200 miles worth of fortifications to build, mine, and guard. Furthermore, civilian presence near any such fortifications would risk the integrity of the line once the real strategy behind the Torpor Lockdown was learned. As such, the command was also tasked with evacuating North Chicago and every other major population center along the Illinois. It was one of the most hasty and admirable military actions in US history. Suffice it to say, wherever government psyops were still broadcasting “official” news, plenty of Chicago footage got thrown into the updates. The huddled lines of refugees didn’t look happy, but people moved in orderly lines through city streets that were slowly morphing into castle battlements. It looked like hope, and even to the cynical, it looked like the nation cared for its people. They were making sure no one could jam their foot in the door as they slammed it shut.

OperatIon UtIlIty

Many things could have sabotaged the entire operation. It was a hopeless roll of the dice that, if it failed, would have crippled the last US resources. If you can ascribe courage to the Hunter administration (you can’t, but they’re damn well going to pay historians to

try), it would be hooked on the unmitigated gall of the strategy. Some things couldn’t rely on luck, though. For starters, there were numerous pieces of infrastructure that couldn’t be shut down simply by hanging up a “Gone Fishin’” sign. Nuclear reactors couldn’t be abandoned unless the government wanted to return to an irradiated hellscape. If dams started bursting, the flooding would drive people from their homes and into the Blight’s awaiting jaws, negating the purpose of the lockdown. Even beyond the disasters resulting from neglected infrastructure, there was shit the powersthat-be just couldn’t bear to leave behind. NORAD comes foremost to mind, as its troops remain a persistent pain in the ass for every Moth in Colorado, but there were plenty of other cases. Great minds — especially in the biological sciences — had to be plucked from the doomed masses. Military bases responsible for drone piloting had to remain behind for air support and reconnaissance until suitable replacements could be erected behind the border. Most importantly, satellite communications had to be maintained if they were going to pull off the single most significant logistical repositioning in history. This is where Operation Utility came in, which evidence suggests went into effect almost a week before the declaration of martial law... maybe even earlier. Utility was the codename for a Joint Special Operations Command project executed by the USA’s professional badasses: Seals, Rangers, Delta, Raiders, Special Tactics Squadron, Special Activities Division, etc. They even conscripted the CIA’s preferred mercenary armies — sorry, “security contractors” — and scooped up every member of Strategic Forecasting Inc. they could rescue out of Austin. Basically, every deep-state spook and grizzled operator in the world got pulled off whatever extrajudicial political assassination they’d been working on and put on Utility. Each special unit was charged with escorting experts that needed to get somewhere and flip a switch. They

Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate 'war, pestilence, and famine,’ than to act as obstructionist to a war already begun. -Ulysses S. Grant established beachheads and defended members of the Navel Construction Battalion and Army Corps of Engineers as they shuttered government projects and automated dams. They cut their way through entire states gone Vector, mothballing reactors with a pet team of Nuclear Regulatory Committee experts. They fought running wars through infected cities, trying to rescue VIPs identified in the Continuation of Government plan. For obvious reasons, I’m normally not one to wave the flag, but if you want to get your nationalism on for something that happened during the Crash, I’ll join you in heroworshipping most of these guys and gals. The amount of shit these people fought through cannot be overstated; we’re talking Vector outbreaks in the tens of thousands. They completed jobs that would make the most badass crew of Takers look fucking quaint by comparison, often while escorting civilians through the most alien, hostile environments imaginable. Most importantly, Utility actually saved people. It secured the Loss instead of ensuring its isolation. Thousands would be drowned or microwaved today were it not for

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Utility teams. Atrocities and mismanagement happened, sure, but reports were rare and conflicting... unlike later massacres at the border. A lot of Utility teams died in battle. Each unit had a prioritized list of targets that would have been impossible to complete in the best of times, not to mention when the radio went dead and supplies stopped coming. Many pressed on anyway, ticking items off the list until they were consumed. Some even survived the whole ordeal and stayed behind, keeping up the good fight. Utility members ended up founding enclaves. They helped create the Moths or went full Rebel. Some even joined the Believers. I know at least one Shepherd whose kill count before conversion hit four digits. Some of Black Math’s most faithful are former operators that have been on the purge for nearly six years. They are the veterans of mankind’s war against monsters, and many that survived are Lost, just like the rest of us. Obviously, I’m biased. A big part of my crew is made up of Utility vets. I’d be dead without them. Securing Ubiq City became one of the operation’s biggest priorities... before I ended up turning it into their biggest mistake.

CommandeerIng UbIq

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JSOC was smart enough to give field command a lot of autonomy. The US suffered from a shortage of super-soldiers even before the Crash, and the problem only got worse as the Blight started slaughtering them. As such, the list of targets was nonnegotiable, but priority could be reshuffled based on the tactical situation. That’s how Operation Utility came to Ubiq. A company of Marine Raiders drew the short straw; they got stuck escorting a bunch high-ranking technicians from the United States Cyber Command. Why would JSOC throw the IT nerds into the mix? Partly out of old school, military industrial complex paranoia. They were afraid China and Russia were exploiting the Blight to hack our networks rather than worrying about, you

know, being eaten by their own people. But the counter-hacking priorities were thrown out pretty much the second the brass got off the radio. The other half of the USCC’s work was actually vital to the evacuation. If the military couldn’t keep their communication structure together, the country would fall apart. The Raiders’ primary objective was to get the nerds into the command centers of various abandoned military bases and make sure the network stayed up. Easier said than done. The task force’s first target was a base the local civilians had tried to fortify once they saw the troops pull out. They’d failed in a big way, and the entire complex had gone Vector shortly before Utility rolled in. By the time the gunfire stopped, the company had dwindled down to two platoons. As they finally secured the fences and got underway, the power grid failed. This meant nearly 100 soldiers had died to secure communications for four more days, which is all the gas they had for the generators. There were twenty more targets on their list. Traitor took command after his CO took a bite and bit the bullet. “Traitor” obviously isn’t his real name — not all the Moths need be as publicly reviled as myself. The realization that this shit wasn’t going to work spread quickly through the demoralized ranks. Soldiers started debating desertion vs. Charge-of-the-Light Brigade, and the newly shaken command structure threatened to fall into mutiny. Traitor was desperately trying to get ahold of HQ for more orders when he finally got a communication: a text from his daughter, pinging the Ubiq Specs forgotten in his backpack. While my coworkers and I huddled in a janitor’s closet, Ubiq was still up and running. The DAO was by no means healthy, but as power grids failed and bandwidth usage fluctuated widely, the algorithm tried its best to keep the stratostructure working. Ubiq users could still access the internet archives stored on the servers powered by UCity’s geothermal plant, they could get on the few

nodes the old network could still power, and everyone could talk to fellow Ubiq users. The limited AI wouldn’t keep the system running indefinitely, but the Stratostructure remained literally above it all. Traitor realized that if his team could take back Ubiq, the military could keep communicating through anything, even if they had to steal Specs off dead civilians and hand crank battery chargers. Furthermore, it would let segments of the civilian population keep coordinating with each other, reducing casualties overall. So that’s how I met Traitor. Before he decapitated the casualties outside, I’d been contemplating drinking some bleach to make it quick. But he pulls me and the other cafeteria survivors out of there and tells me he’s rescued a few dozen more Ubiq employees on the way through town. He’s got to finish locking down the corporate campus; can I get the network back to full capacity? I told him I’d do anything if he’d shoot open the lock on a vending machine. One round of 5.56 and a dozen granola bars later, I was back on the job. Before he went off to secure the perimeter fence, Traitor informed his Cyber Command spooks that they now worked for Ubiq. I knew Palbicke’s tech, so I was in charge. It was an act of treason. Actual treason. Our operating system may have been firmware locked, but we were by no means encrypted for military traffic. We all tried to tell him this, but he shut us up quick. The infected were the enemy, he said, and they’d all forgotten their passwords. There was no need to worry about security. Humanity was united in this fight. If I had to pick my biggest regret from the Crash, it would be how badly I proved my friend wrong.

PreemptIve GenocIde

The “special” in Special Forces implies that operators like Traitor knew the score, but if Traitor could bring himself to talk about his service, he’d tell you that just wasn’t the case. It’s true that JSOC soldiers were in a better position to guess the western offensive

was never going to happen, but it wasn’t part of their official orders. Even among those that managed to piece together the fact that reclamation was less likely than the rapture, nobody said shit. The families of Operation Utility soldiers had been guaranteed evacuation to a safe zone. After all, how else would the brass ensure everyone reported for duty when the temptation to go AWOL was so strong? Nobody in Utility knew much beyond their next objective, and those too smart for their own good kept quiet lest some National Guard unit forgot to pick up their kids. No one knew they were going to nuke Canada. No one. If I could have dipped my brain in the cold, inky black pool of Crash logic and let it soak, all it would’ve taken to guess the plan was staring at a map. Look at the USA. Take a red marker. Start at Lake Michigan and trace down through the Mississippi. Connect the line to the Gulf of Mexico and use the Atlantic to complete nature’s greatest moat. Mexico’s Blight problems might be cut off, but what about the North? What about New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine? Canada had plenty of Blight problems all their own, and runs on the border were inevitable. All it would take was one hidden bite on a refugee. One infected boat floating across Lake Ontario. One loose Vector in the wrong city. It could unravel the entire plan. If it didn’t doom the human race, it would certainly spell the end of America, and we know which of those two Hunter’s cronies valued more. I bitch a lot about being in the Loss, but I’m always grateful I’m in the part of the map they cut off instead of the part they set on fire. Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Saint-Jeansur Richelieu, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton, Niagara Falls — they dropped low-yield nukes on them all. A line of fire was drawn from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River to Detroit. Where it got close to the US border, they dropped honking big MOABs instead of nuclear weapons, but “close” is a pretty relative term when picking your flavor of vaporization.

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Blight doesn’t die under radiation, but something in it does stop being able to animate dead flesh after heavy exposure. Officially, the dirtiness of the bombs was selected as the bare minimum required to assure the radioactive moat held back the “massive influx of Canadian infected.” But, officially, a lot of bullshit gets thrown when talking about the Preemptive Genocide. I doubt the CDC radiation experiments got underway until well after the Crash, but you’d lie too if you’d just killed millions of your closest allies. The truth is that there was no tide of infection descending from the North. Canada had been hit in the West, just like us. Vancouver may have been doomed, but the light population density meant Vectors hadn’t

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been seen past Winnipeg. We could have tried to cooperate with the Canadian military. I’ve read contingency plans where we collectively held the line at Red Rock or established a population buffer zone between Moosonee and Sault St. Marie. As plans go, they weren’t any crazier than Operation Utility or the Torpor Lockdown. But they were just as risky, and I guess Hunter felt they’d pushed their luck too far already. Anybody not fortifying Chicago worked to transport, by land, as much of the Naval Fleet as we could fit into the Great Lakes. Mackinaw City, Port Austin, Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester — if a terrified Canadian might cross the border there, the city got bombed lifeless and replaced with a fortress. If it

floated, we sunk it. If it flew, we shot it down. This isn’t to say no refugees escaped. Canadian insurgency and terrorism remains one of the Recession’s greatest security concerns, and it serves the bastards right. Members of Parliament survive nomadically, west of the radiation moat, and jealously guard their claims to legitimate state power. Any resource they don’t require for survival gets funneled towards righteous revenge. But as much as it pains me to say, Hunter’s plan worked. Those casualties that wandered East didn’t find anybody left alive to infect. If they shambled towards the border, the Blight either burned in the fallout or got lost with nothing but ash outlines to chase.

“The Border Offensive,” as Recession assholes would like you to call it, is the greatest ecological disaster in history. Cancer rates have tripled in areas served by the affected water tables. If reclamation ever does occur, it can only do so if we conquer the allies we abandoned to the South and those we murdered in the North. Otherwise, if the Canadians re-establish control and remain sovereign? The day the Blight ends is the day we start a war that’s going to make the Palestinians and Israelis look like besties.

What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing-permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children. -Howard Zinn 67

Retreat Becomes RecessIon

After the sun rose in the north, the remainder of the plan was simple: wait for the last few surviving convoys and Utility teams to get across the line, then blow the bridges before the bulk of the casualties left torpor. Each unit would receive an order to blow its specific bridge under the guise of some inscrutable strategic consideration; nobody was told every other unit would receive the same order at the same time. There would be some outrage from the populace, but relief from the animal fear that had gripped people for weeks was a hell of a sedative. The Hunter administration didn’t anticipate too much resistance from the exhausted eastern populace, and by the time everybody else realized they’d been left? It’d be too late. It’s at this point history turns into memoir... because I fucked all that up.

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Shit... I don’t know how to talk about this. If you already know the truth, you don’t need to read this. If you don’t? The Recession spends millions each year trying to make what I have to say next sound like bullshit. Their continued existence hinges upon it. So how do I... Look, I’m not stupid, alright? I run an entire city-state that provides 75% of the entire world’s internet. On a daily basis, I extort my own survival from a country entirely dedicated to seeing me dead. I’m a capable lady. That said, the Whisper was not my best day. I hadn’t more than a few hours sleep in over a week. I was starved and dehydrated. I’d seen most of my friends ripped apart in close succession, and turning on the networks again gave me a front row seat to the worldwide slaughterhouse. Put simply, here’s what happened: Traitor threw me out of my shock and back into work.

I saw something curious in the system. The engineer’s instinct kicked in, and I traced the anomaly to the source. What I discovered was wrong — evil, even — so I fixed it. On that fateful day, my thought process went no deeper. This is wrong; fix it. I don’t regret what I did, but don’t you dare buy that DHQS bullshit about the Whisper being my “master plan.” Everything shitty about your life is not the result of my Machiavellian scheme. I didn’t seize some opportunity to make myself a queen; I just reacted, like we all were back in those days. It was a decision made from my soul, not some fucking government spreadsheet. Nobody could’ve predicted what happened next, least of all me. The Whisper was an animal reflex during the worst moment in my life. Ultimately, it helped more than it hurt. But my condemnation of Hunter cuts both ways; the right choice isn’t always the good one.

Gnat’s WhIsper

I should actually say what the Whisper is, huh? Sorry. It’s weird to write as if people don’t know, but that’s the nature of history. The remaining staff and the Cybercommados were busy trying to whip the DAO back into shape. Our AI had robust programming, but a tide of statistical anomalies jammed up the works. Our “crunch” servers hooked into the old cable network failed as the grid went dark. Meanwhile, peak usage was hammering the system all over the world as people talked about the Crash. Until that point, the DAO had stayed online by block-chaining traffic onto the Aloft servers floating above areas of curiously low traffic. But the DAO couldn’t understand the logic behind these huge spikes and valleys in traffic, so its resource allocation was far from optimal. The algorithm didn’t know that the only thing keeping the internet

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That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. -Noam Chomsky

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screaming was the bandwidth freed up by all the dead users. Our first task was to “teach” this information to the program so it didn’t overload the network. From a purely hardware perspective, the Stratostructure was over-engineered for its users by about 60% after all the casualties, but we had to stop errors in the procedurally generated reprogramming from piling up or they would “self-correct” the whole network into failure. Which is to say I was deep-diving Ubiq’s DAO code in a way I’d never been allowed to before. The terminal I was on belonged to my boss’s boss’s boss, and we’d have been screwed if the dumbshit hadn’t written his passwords on the bottom of his desk blotter. On one tab, I passed out admin privileges to spooks as fast as possible. In another, I was promoting the security clearance of any programmer still left alive. The only way I could figure out how to help Traitor secure the perimeter fast enough was to somehow reverse the master unlock code sent by the fire alarm, so I was trying to hack our alarm system at the same time. Waking up all our sleeping systems, along with the trash code the DAO had added in our absence, made

the in-house OS really sluggish, so I used time in-between lagging security vetting to start cleaning up the network optimization. And, finally, I kept collecting 404s in another browser, as I tried to see if my parents and boyfriend had been eaten. In the middle of all this, I start to think I’ve crashed the whole stratostructure. In Canadian airspace, I start getting these weird signal interference codes I’d never seen before. They coincide with these insane spikes in traffic from population centers further West, until those servers freak out with interference as well, and the whole usage rate drops to zero. So I open the ad-sniffers, start spying on traffic for common terms: the top three are “nuke,” “God,” and “pray.” Second only to the victims, I had the clearest view of the genocide. I watched the bombs hit in real time, long before any sanitation and spin. I’m slipping back into shock when another window pops up. This is a program I’ve never seen before, telling me someone is accessing a “targeted” IP. I check it. It’s a known NSA address, and the person talking to them is one of the cybercommandos I’d just given privileges. Later, I would realize Palbicke conning the cable monopolies had made him unpopular with a major portion of the cybersecurity industry. Add in the fact that we had data from people in “Great Firewalled” enemy nations using Ubiq to undermine regimes? The boss had been justifiably paranoid about spies both private and public... to the point he’d wormed spyware into everything in the building. So I get a first-hand look at keylogs as this spook reports to his bosses. They’d taken Ubiq: time to use it to open up communications with Operation Utility teams. The higher-ups are not happy about this. Go out and die for a secure line, they order. Spook makes it clear that’s not going to happen; just send him an encryption packet instead. He’ll wire it via satellite to the guys they left back at the one military base they actually managed to reclaim. They can get

the cypher to everyone in the field, and then government chatter can switch over to this newly nationalized network. There’s a pause. Then a file drops into the spook’s inbox. With a click of the button, I can install the encryption too. What would you have done? It wasn’t a master hack. People were scared and tired. They started cutting corners. All I had to do was click a link. Over the six hours, I’m “briefed” a half dozen times by these cybercommando spooks. They make me sign “official secrecy forms” they’d hastily drafted minutes earlier on my computers. They lie about a “Canadian invasion” that had to be stopped with extreme measures and tell me to ignore the news. They ask me questions about the network architecture and how to do this or that. The whole time, I nod and pretend to answer. Meanwhile, I’m keeping one eye on my Specs feed, looking at the troop locations of everyone on the continent, noticing all of the blue dots heading East really fast. Out of the corner of my eye, I’m reading the cover stories this fucking Lieutenant is currently reading to me as they’re being written. I’m seeing their plans to lock the employees out of the network entirely: plans for a “specialized unit to rendition civilian personnel after securing the network.” Then power outages start in the Recession, backup generators start running out of gas. The brass, in their idiocy, starts using Ubiq to talk not just to the Utility teams, but to each other. Their plans are at a pivotal stage, after all, and they can’t afford to lose touch now. At this point, I’ve spent all day building virtual networks and turning them into accessibility cages for these Cybercommand assholes. Everything they do affects the Ubiq simulation housed in our on-site servers only, but I’ve completely locked them out of altering the stratostructure and DAO. As they continue to chat with each other about how they’re going to convince Traitor to line me up against a wall, they keep routing these emails and phone calls between members of the Hunter

Gnat’s WhIsper TranscrIpt The government is lying to you. Rescue is not coming. Ever. Those things - their “casualties” - are waking up. They are going to leave you to them. Their troops have taken over Ubiq, and they are using it to coordinate your abandonment to the monsters. While you are being eaten, they will flee to safety. Click the link. Read for yourself. Or don’t. They will assume you know now, either way, and they will kill you all the faster for it. Attention all members of the Armed Services: If you are West of the Mississippi, they are not going to evacuate you. They have not evacuated your families. Your loved ones are still trapped, or they are dead. This was always a suicide mission, but your children are on it with you. If you are in the East, know that Hunter plans to blow the bridges in a few hours. After reading this, he will try immediately. Understand what pressing that button really means. I beg you to do what is right instead of what is ordered. It may be mutiny, but your officers are paper tigers. No one will be coming to shoot you for treason; they cannot afford the bullet. If you’re in control of a bridge, you are now responsible for the lives of everyone in the West. You cannot say you were just following orders. For Everyone Else: if you’re too far West, find someplace safe. Find like-minded people. Hide behind sturdy walls. Get essentials and hole up. Work together. The only rescue coming is the one we provide each other. If you’re close enough to the river: RUN. Good people may keep the border open. Or they might not. You will be gambling with your life. We all are now. The Hunter administration is not trying to save you. They are trying to save themselves. They murdered millions because it might make them safer. You are nothing to them besides acceptable losses. They do not want you to make it.

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administration. Each starts with an order and a bunch of federal legalese, along with these new encryption programs and threats of treason for the spooks if they open them. But what the fuck do I care? They’re planning on killing me tomorrow anyway. So I read them. I learn that the Canadian attack was completely unprovoked. I learn that there is no intention to rescue anyone in the West. I learn that the brass never had evacuation plans for Utility operatives or their families. It was all a lie, to get them out there fighting. I do some digging. I learn about Traitor’s daughter — the little girl that messaged her Daddy and gave him the idea to come save me. I learn she’s likely dead, burned alive as the refinery in her Louisiana town blew up. I learn her name. Most importantly, I learned the deadline. I learned when they were going to blow the bridges and activate the river mines. It was dawn the next day. In a little over twelve hours.

So what was the Whisper? It wasn’t the leak itself. Leaks are a dime-a-dozen, and nobody had time to parse all that data during the apocalypse. The Whisper was the message I posted as the homepage of every Ubiq user in the world: the cover letter for my data dump. I’d signed the warning with my handle — Gnat — and I suppose some pundit later thought it poetic to name the message “the Whisper of Gnat’s wings.” It didn’t feel like a Whisper. It felt like screaming.

The Battle of UbIq CIty

I had locked everyone out of the system. The spooks needed me if they were going to take the message down. The only other option was to blow up the servers or the power supply. That would get rid of the Whisper, but it would also eliminate the only reliable communication the Recession government had. While Hunter really needed me and the Whisper deleted, I had gambled he couldn’t

ghouls affect world politics? How would the introduction of flesh-eating - international relations would ing pris sur if ple sim is r we ans list rea e Th be unimpressed with the claim ld wou m adig par is Th d. cte ffe una ely larg be condition leads to any radical an hum the to eat thr al nti ste exi new that a of the undead would merely ue plag a m, the To or. avi beh an hum in change ected world politics from aff has e eas Dis . ers ast dis and ues plag echo older the 1918-19 influenza panto y tur cen h ent rte fou the of ath De the Black reified existing power ply sim ues plag se the of t mos t, pas demic. In the erful societies developed stronrelationships. Because more dynamic and pow greater share of the relative ger immunities to plague, they gained a power during pandemics. -Daniel Drezner

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afford to go dark, especially with the shit show I’d thrown his way. That’s why I posted the message without doing anything to disrupt user-to-user traffic: I knew the Whisper would make me a target, but they’d have to come for me in person. A drone strike on UCity would have screwed them harder than anything I could ever do. So, yeah, some calculation certainly went through my mind. I don’t deny it. But you can’t be a smart woman without being accused of being a bitch in the same breath. Being smart enough to stay alive is proof enough for some that I engineered the civil war between the Raiders and the Cyber Command. In the Recession’s version of events, I schemed. I made sure get to Traitor before the Whisper went live. I used news of his daughter’s death and exploited that betrayal to secure his protection in the coming war. I timed it perfectly, making sure the perimeter was secured from the undead before I coerced a squad of Marines to murder their comrades. All just to keep me alive. Personally, I’d like to believe I didn’t want to die before telling Traitor about his daughter. I couldn’t know how he was going to react,

and that went double for those under his command. But if someone was going to shoot me, I wanted them to know the truth first. Honestly, I can’t tell which version is real anymore. When your choice kills people, you do everything you can to justify it after the fact. Hunter and I at least have that much in common. All I know is that less than a third of the soldiers alive when I posted the Whisper lived to see the next day. The war between loyalists and those that would become Moths was bloodier than any Vector outbreak. It was a war between people desperate to find a new way of living in this strange world, and those for whom a blaze of glory was the more attractive option.

Evac Caravans

People may have been locked in their homes, but they hadn’t been isolated from each other. Ubiq had been the #1 traded tech company for seven years before the Crash. 88% of every household in the US chose Ubiq as an alternative internet provider, and we were the sole provider for 52% of those homes.

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62% of families had at least one Ubiq Spec or off-brand AR device in the home. The devices were chargeable through replacement battery packs, solar grids, and hand-cranked chargers. Hell, you could plug them in and leech off the batteries of hybrid cars for years. The Whisper reached a lot of folks, and it caused a lot of panic. There was no such thing as “too far West” for some people. Even in places like Oregon, people began coordinating evacuation caravans. Terrified people would load up whatever resources they could into whatever vehicles they could find. They’d crowdsource traffic reports around the chaotic jams clogging up all the roadways and make coordinated breaks from their homes. Entire suburban neighborhoods and rural towns would make a break for their cars all at once, hoping their neighbors were the ones to be eaten and buy time for the rest to get away. The nightmare that was the evac caravans is well documented. They ran out of gas. They got stalled by pile-ups and trapped each other, reversing into hordes of casualties pursuing the herd. Some escaped the casualties only to fall victim to their fellow man. Loyalist teams from Operation Utility wiped out more than a few as traitors. Some fell to internal criminal elements, turning into the Loss’s first raider bands. And all of this before you get into the conspiracy theory shit: entire caravans ghosted by super-black ops military teams that made the guys in Utility look like weekend warriors. Hundreds kidnapped as experimental subjects for what would become the DHQS’s programs studying Immunity and Latency. Still, some caravans got lucky. Good Utility teams or die-hard law enforcement groups took caravans under their wing, coordinating massive migrations across the country. Others that got stalled realized how hopeless the distance was and founded enclaves nearby, saving themselves. Most that got into the Midwest were in the relative clear. Population density had kept infection spread out and easily bypassed by car. The border was close

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enough that a couple tanks of gas and a prayer might carry them to safety. But those that made it to the border were far from safe. No amount of skill ensures survival. For those trying to get last minute admission into the Recession, it depended on which crossing you went to and how far the Blight was behind you.

The Flood and AmputatIon

No hard numbers exist for any of this. The chaos of the evacuation was as confusing as any Vector outbreak. The best estimates guess about 75 of 140 available bridges were blown the second the Whisper got posted because good little soldiers followed orders. After that, the secondary demolitions started in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and northern Missouri. A lot of military units left up there either listened to the Whisper or were smart enough to realize their deaths were meant to establish a buffer zone between the undead and fortifications being hastily erected along the Illinois River. The generals didn’t trust those units to volunteer for the suicide mission they’d already been tricked into. The most mercy those troops saw was a single repetition of the order to secure the crossing and retreat. The subtext was clear: blow those fucking bridges and we might let you through the gate before it slams shut. To their credit, many of the northern postings held the line, preparing to let refugees through. After all, why believe their commanders? They’d nuked thousands on a maybe already, and the troops had no reason to believe they’d honor any agreement. In response, the generals dedicated every fighter jet and drone the US could muster to the destruction of every crossing north of Chicago. By blocking all escape across the northern Mississippi, St. Croix, Rock, and St. Louis rivers, Chicago command bought themselves time to finish fortifications on the narrower parts of the Illinois River. Infected refugees would have to ford at least two major waterways before reaching a ‘safe zone.’ This

gave Chicago the time it needed to solidify the shaky allegiance of those troops lucky enough to be stationed across the line already. There wasn’t enough air support left to stop crossings in St. Louis City and further south. Past that point, refugees were at the whim of whatever officer had been placed in charge of their lifeline. Many a caravan pulled up to find a blown bridge waiting for them. I’d like to say that sight smartened people up and they retreated, founding last-minute enclaves. But the fact is most people just tried to find boats. When that predictably failed, they tried to swim it. Both solutions were typically met with a hail of gunfire from the opposite shore. Tangled flotillas of corpses were floating into New Orleans as much as a year after evacuation. If your caravan found somebody with a soul in charge, it was still dicey. Some units suffered from what we call “all hearts; no minds.” These well-meaning idiots threw open the gates... at which point the panicked flood of humanity trying to get across began trampling itself to death. At those few checkpoints where unhindered crossing didn’t descend into a riot, things got even worse. Exactly what the Hunter administration feared began happening: people in the caravans had been bitten by casualties during the migration. They’d hidden the bites out of fear, and few days later, they went Vector on the wrong side of the bridge. Thousands of people found themselves trapped on bridges with Vector outbreaks on one side and an approaching horde of casualties on the other. Thankfully, the nightmare scenarios brought about by “all hearts/no minds” were rare, and all ended with the bridge being blown in a final act of desperation. Subsequent outbreaks on the eastern bank were contained by other military units. Those that threatened to get out of hand were a high enough priority for Chicago Command that air assets bombed the infected populations into paste. Most that made it into the Recession uninvited got there through a “cattle chute.”

Standard operating procedure was to fortify the Western approach with concrete partitions and shipping containers. That’s where they had people strip. Every scrap of clothing, every belonging, every vehicle — it all got abandoned by the side of the road if you wanted to cross. Once stripped of everything, including dignity, the refugees were allowed on the bridge. There the military inspected everyone for bites. The cleared were thrown off the eastern edge, naked and born anew in the Recession. Those with bites — or even particularly suggestive cuts and bruises — never made it to the other side of the bridge. The cattle chutes were brutal. They deprived desperate people of even the clothes off their backs. They mistakenly executed thousands, not to mention the Immune and the Latents killed. But they worked. The chutes got people to safety... at least until one of two things happened. If someone turned Vector inside the chute, it spelled doom for everyone on the bridge. Naked people packed like sardines between the rails couldn’t hope to contain a hot outbreak. The eastern side of the bridge would have to close their gate and open fire on the bridge, which tended to discourage anyone left alive on the western shore from retreating east. Even without new Vector outbreaks, casualties put a hard time limit on the cattle chutes. Every evac caravan trailed behind it a horde of hungry dead. Some chutes managed to operate non-stop for days, but the Cs always caught up eventually. The grey tide flowed over the naked, desperate masses, and even the most softhearted officers had to blow the bridge or lock the gate. A few days after my little message, all lines of escape had been cut off. The western states had been amputated from the union.

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The Result

The Whisper brought a couple million more people into the Recession’s safety than Hunter had intended. It also let people use the torpor to enclave-up rather than wait around to be eaten. But how many millions died in the caravans that might have survived if they’d stayed home? How many Immunes and Latents were executed in the chutes because of me? Is the world better or worse for what I’ve done? I don’t know.

border. The units tasked with cleansing NYC fought on anyway, trying to cleanse as many infected as possible during the torpor. It didn’t work. In the end, something like 90% of the soldiers became casualties. The few that escaped blew the tunnels and bridges behind them. Other eastern towns and cities suffered hot outbreaks as a result of the refugees. The losses were, thankfully, small and contained. No more than a few thousand... quarantined and mopped up a week later, after things had settled down.

Lost CItIes

Force ExhaustIon

Between bombing civilians and their own soldiers, my actions had spread the US military very thin. Philadelphia’s outbreak had been contained, but what little resources were being directed towards the retake of Manhattan got siphoned off to maintain the

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Active duty military in the Crash fought a literal war against hell. On the frontline, they were unwittingly fed into the Blight’s jaws, ordered to shoot civilians, or forced to choose mutiny. Those lucky enough to keep away from the Cs had to deal with

an unprecedented refugee crisis and the uncertain fate of their own loved ones. Early on, a few delusional Hunter loyalists gathered small forces to rain reprisal down on insubordinate bridge crews, but of those crews still alive, none were too eager to be arrested by cowards after shooting men, women, and children in the chutes for days. In the worst cases, certain postings descended into the sort of civil war that racked Ubiq, with the pissed-off enlisted troops doing a number on any rat-fuck officer that tried to discipline them for not killing American citizens. After they broadcast the first General hanging from a bridge he ordered blown, everyone got the message quick. The upper ranks started claiming their orders were being spoofed. The whole affair had been a tragic cyber-attack organized by antigovernment terrorists and the traitors at Ubiq. Too tired for an outright revolution, the

rank-and-file agreed and started spinning their mutiny. They hadn’t refused orders; they’d never received them. It was a chaotic time, after all, and how could they have trusted orders from a compromised network? In the wake of learning the world actually might survive this shit, anybody with a stake in the Torpor Lockdown or Operation Utility shifted over into covering their asses. Meanwhile, the National Guard and other reservists had become the most monumentally disillusioned soldiers in history. Entire platoons went AWOL, disappearing into the chaos. It would take months for the different branches of the command structure to stabilize. In that delicate time, the Recession only stayed infection free due to the hard work of a few units that refused to quit. In the wake of amputation, things got done only at the behest of middle-rank officers gone rogue or civilian

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organizations turning into militias. Some helped out of a sense of duty; others saw an opportunity to set themselves up as power brokers in the new order.

Refugee CrIsIs

Uncontrolled river crossings, before collapsing under the weight of desperate hordes, often let traffic through. Thousands of vehicles had poured across the bridges before the Whisper, leaving parking lots and fields crammed with families living out of trunks and suitcases. Those evacuated through chutes had it even worse. They entered the Recession naked and shivering. It would have been the worst refugee crisis in history if the Blight had only hit the US. With the rest of the world going through the same or worse? Emergency services couldn’t even begin to meet the needs of refugees. Deaths from starvation, dehydration, and exposure began moments after people crossed into so-called safety, and they would continue for years to come.

EconomIc Collapse

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The cold math behind Hunter’s strategy had accounted for the disastrous effect the Blight would have on the economy. The loss of labor alone dwarfed anything seen in the World Wars, not to mention the death of global trade partnerships, supply lines, and production schedules. The strategy had knowingly sacrificed America’s breadbasket to slow the denser stampedes of casualties. Famine was the new normal until land could be repurposed and drone farming established. The plan had always promised lean years in the wake of the amputation. Everyone in the Hunter administration prepared for some belt-tightening. No one was prepared for a few million more mouths to feed. While no amount of aid and assistance would ever calm the voracious need of the refugees, leaving the naked masses out of rationing wasn’t possible. They were legion, they were pissed, and they were desperate. Those in power were smart

enough to know that, if it appeared they were abandoning people on both sides of the fence, the revolution and riots that followed would be the final nail in the coffin. Private property got conscripted for soldiers. High schools turned into hospitals. Any business that didn’t put food on the table, medicine in a syringe, or clothes on a back got cannibalized for parts, their workers sent to join the homeless thousands huddling in what was now being referred to as “Free Parking:” refugee camps that popped up wherever people ran out of gas. That shit made the Great Depression look like a paid vacation. Mass unemployment didn’t make for a docile, obedient electorate either, but displaced Easterners would need time to marinate in their resentment before coming to a revolutionary boil. Until then, wealth redistribution for the benefit of refugees kept the desperate masses licking their wounds rather than continuing the destructive march of animal terror straight into Washington DC. As always, the Hunter administration used human lives to buy time... time they used to begin hunting and betraying each other.

Governmental Purges

Even if I had never been born, heads were going to roll for the Preemptive Genocide. They might not have been the right heads, but even in the best case, some scapegoats were going to answer for nuking millions. Before the Whisper, when it had looked like the plan might work as intended, the sacrificial lambs were evident; the people actually responsible had known who to distance themselves from. After the Whisper, it was every asshole for himself. The leak was still up there for everyone to see, and removing it would mean effectively muting the human race. The old tricks for silencing dissenters weren’t going to work on this one. The only escape possible was through narrative. Everyone involved scrambled to appear witless, whispering “just following orders” like a fucking mantra. But the really smart ones knew that to make the narrative stick, one had

to look more than repentant; one had to look indignant. They had to mirror the betrayal the torches-and-pitchforks crowd was bound to be feeling. Stalin would have been proud of the weeks following the Crash. Coups, court martials, “people’s courts” — martial law, after all, was still in effect. Nobody was interested in repealing it until they were sure they’d cleared the board. Hunter left the White House in shackles and remains under house arrest to this day. Generals court martialed each other for crimes real and imagined. Special elections became the norm, and the first entertainment to come to the car camps was the new electronic voting system that weekly deposed one despot in place of another. Before the year was out, the Recession government was clean as a laundered sheet. Everyone that could be construed as responsible for the lockdown strategy had been arrested, killed, or named “instrumental in rooting out the corruption.” There was only the new government, operating under the oldest mandate in history: do what we say, for your safety.

The Homo Sacer PolIcy

Most of the politicians and military leadership at the time of the Crash were arrested or disgraced within a few months of the last bridge closing. Their successors, whether supportive or backstabbing, had no desire to atone for the sins of the past. Though distasteful and taboo, the work of the amputation remained arguably necessary. Why expend political capital trying to undo war crimes that had likely ensured the continued survival of the US? With a new government installed, it was possible to both condemn and profit from the same policy. The only problem was surviving long enough to reap the rewards. If the Blight had decimated the nation, the Whisper and ensuing rush on the borders had almost destroyed it entirely. To this day, the Recession exists in a perpetual economic sinkhole, coping with overcrowding, famine,

unemployment, and the increased infection risk threatened by all those variables. If it wanted to survive long enough to enjoy power, the new government had to calm things down enough that they could focus on getting the house in order. The to-do list of cascading social issues to fix had no room for casualties. In short, the new bosses had to live the dream of the Hunter administration: pretend the Blight and all its victims didn’t exist. That’s when they declared us all dead. Declared dead is a bit of a simplification. The policy paper known as “The Denouncement” actually declares any and all former US citizens west of the Mississippi to be homo sacer (Latin for “the accursed man”). It’s the most extreme form of civil death. As a legal concept, homo sacer means the people so labeled are afforded no legal rights by the laws of any nation, especially their nation of origin. Legally, the person isn’t even considered a human for the purposes of human rights. The clearest historical example of this concept occurred in the 16th to 18th centuries with the rise of naval mercantilism. The major state powers operating on the high seas declared certain pirate groups literally “out-laws:” beyond the protection of any nation’s laws. Basically, you could do whatever you wanted to a pirate, no matter what nation you or they were from, and those operating under a national flag had no legal responsibilities whatsoever to any victims or their family. It wasn’t an act of war. It wasn’t a crime. Losing your ship to pirates was an act of God, but killing an entire pirate crew was, on paper, no more than a spot of luck. The flip side of homo sacer, however, is that there is no legal recourse against them beyond what you personally have the physical power to enforce: military and law enforcement officers have no more obligation to protect you from homo sacer than, say, from an animal attack. Suing someone so thoroughly disenfranchised would be akin to suing a dog that bit you or a raccoon that overturned your trash. You either shoot the thing or it gets away with it.

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So that’s the legal standing of everyone over the border: we are no more than animals. We can be shot, robbed, and raped with total impunity. Protecting the remaining US citizens from us is no different than protecting them from casualties: all force can be lethal force. The Denouncement makes it clear that anyone crossing the river, for any reason not expressly ordered by the federal government, instantly gives up all property and their rights as a human being. The purpose of the homo sacer policy is multifaceted. Discouraging smuggling across the border was the most immediate goal. Let’s say some noble human trafficker floats a canoe across the river every night to smuggle people into the safe zone. Let’s say that same smuggler originally made it across the bridge in a nice truck. He sleeps in a heated camper run off solar panels every night while his chute-shit neighbors camp on the ground with no more than silvery shock blankets to protect from exposure. If anybody in the Free Parking ghetto gets covetous, all they have to do is tell. One anonymous tip saying when he plans to break quarantine, and the betrayer’s family doesn’t have to die from exposure this winter. It’s not stealing. The soldiers do the fighting. The average refugee was far too desperate to pass up such a profitable betrayal. Now, smuggling required more than a trusted group of confederates; it required trusting literally everyone. If anyone might want anything you might have, it effectively de-incentivized thoughts of running the border. Coupled with the risk of casualties? No one was eager to run West for any cause, no matter how noble. The policy was also the first step in shifting the narrative from “unprecedented government betrayal” to the old reliable “us vs. them.” The process begins with giving up hope. Everyone that didn’t get across has to be dead by now, right? The casualties are awake in full force, and hot outbreaks would leave Vectors pinging around any survivor communities that did coalesce. Being left is as good as a bite. After all, if that wasteland over there wasn’t completely uninhabitable,

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the government would have fought to keep it, wouldn’t they? Once the people give up hope, make a call for realism. Maybe someone over there is a loved one, and leaving them behind is hard, but if they aren’t dead yet, it’s only a matter of time. Can we really risk it? Maybe people are still fighting in the West, but they risk infection every day. Infection means Vectors — sprinting, river-swimming, fence-climbing Vectors. Every so-called “survivor” in the Loss threatens to carry the Blight over the Mississippi and start a second Crash from whence no one will escape. Think about it: who could be so selfish? And once the jump has been made from hopelessness to realism, it’s a short hop to accusation. Of course, no one in the federal government expects anyone to believe that absolutely everyone over the border is actually dead. But maybe they deserve to be dead. The government issued the same evacuation orders to them as they did to everyone else in the Recession. If they didn’t receive them in time, whose fault is that? The terrorists that sabotaged the plan and leaked misinformation onto Ubiq, that’s who. Their anti-government obstructionism nearly doomed all of America — no, the entire human race. The people over there are too stupid to run, too selfish to die, or too evil to mourn. They’re no longer even human. They’re casualties waiting to happen, and they must be exterminated like the threat they are. Of course, not everyone ascribes to the official ideology. Many see through the thin facade and recognize propaganda meant to support an ailing administration. Many more, caught in the crushing poverty of the Recession, simply don’t have the luxury to believe such precepts. But that’s the brilliance of the Denouncement: until everyone believes homo sacer is bullshit, it traps dissenters into pretending the story is gospel. The longer that goes on, the more people believe the lie, and the harder everyone else has to pretend: the hegemonic feedback loop.

blows up some family paddling across the river, it was an act of heroism instead of a war crime. Why not choose the explanation that’s comforting? Sure, it’s a lie, but who wants to be reminded how privileged they are as they shiver and starve in an abandoned Wal-Mart parking lot? Like I said, declared dead is a simplification. It’s more accurate to say that big sections of the Recession population have a psychological need to believe that everyone over here should be dead. That base is represented by a power structure with a professional responsibility to kill us for their voters. And as for the sane population, they’re outnumbered by psychos on both sides, meaning their interactions with the Loss — whether motivated by necessity, compassion, or profit — need to remain plausibly deniable if they don’t want to join the dispossessed.

NamIng the DIvIde

After awhile, why would you want to believe any differently? Citizens could believe that the situation is a result of desperation, mismanagement, and poorly thought out policies, but the cost of that truth is the subsequent realization that those very same forces are in charge of security even now. Being “woke” means acknowledging (with your every. waking. thought) that the most terrifying event in human history could repeat itself at any moment. Or, as an alternative, citizens can believe the governmental narrative. That it’s those people’s fault. That they could have evacuated if they wanted to. Their refusal caused all this to get worse. Maybe they’re even responsible for the Crash in the first place. Then citizens can believe that there’s someone to blame for all their nightmares. That when a soldier

“The nation has suffered a great loss today...” “Even as we keep those affected by this loss in our thoughts and prayers, we must...” “Your loss is your own; but tooooogether our future is sown...” “Now we mourn our loss and begin to heal...” “The loss of sovereign territory has affected...” Once I stopped getting shot at long enough to catch up on the news, it was already clear what our side was called: the Loss. I kept letting the government broadcast over Ubiq, both during and after the battle for the city. It’s safe enough; I’ve limited their inputs like any other user. They don’t know how to hack us remotely, and most that could have figured it out lie in the mass grave we dug behind the cafeteria. The rest work for me now. They could take us over by force, but not before I send every Aloft server crashing out of the sky. Our survival is embarrassing to them, but they can’t afford to build a new network right now. The signal all day keeps the drone

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strikes away. They’ll allow our petty crosstalk about surviving the dead so long as it remains cheaper than killing my ass. So we became the Loss. Naming them was trickier. They want us to call them the United States of America. Fuck that. Ain’t nobody feeling united out here, especially not this bitch holding all your internet. They made finding something appropriate difficult. The news was still nationalized, and the Orwellian newspeak in effect after the Crash made “casualties” look quaint. No anchor or politician mourning the Loss could ever admit murdering it. It wasn’t lies; it was “confidential.” It wasn’t running away; it was “repositioning.” It’s not isolation; it’s “quarantine.” It wasn’t defeat. They didn’t retreat. They “receded.” That last one’s my favorite. Such imagery: a tide pulling back across a line in the sand. A perfectly natural movement backwards. As if we were the ones who went too far — like floodwaters — and we’re now pooling back into our rightful boundaries. Recession — a term rich people use when they can’t even spare historical significance for the starving poor. Not a Depression; nothing so dramatic as that. This is just a bump in the road; a hiccup in the market. It’ll self-correct. Don’t get maudlin as you bury your family. Recession: (noun) 1). A period of temporary economic decline during which trade and production are reduced 2) the action of receding; motioning away from an observer 3) a condescending non-statement, meant to protect the egos of morally bankrupt assholes removed from the consequences of their actions.

WrItIng Off The Loss

Like a man jumping from a burning building, the Recession regarded the hang-time between burning with infection and smashing into its own shortsightedness with relief.

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Things weren’t going to turn out well, but they had mostly escaped the gnawing, animal terror inflicted by the Blight. The Loss was denied even that small respite. The Crash never stopped out here. It compounded every humiliation and deprivation life had ever inflicted on humanity with living nightmares. We can sympathize with the Recession about as much as an adult sympathizes with a toddler’s scraped knee. Play-acting empathy is the most one can expect: an assurance that we, too, remember that unpleasant sensation. But don’t expect us to really identify. It’s hard to take citizen whining seriously when you know how deep the well of pain really goes.

DwIndlIng

People that have never lived Loss don’t understand how time works. All of us used to think of the future in terms of lateral movement: rivers of time, marches of progress, etc. History was this race and we were always moving forward, our speed varying but never wavering from the path. Bullshit. History moves up. Humanity only gets as far into the future as it can climb out of the abyss of raw animal need. We climb towards the future on precarious mounds of new ideas and inventions and laws. You don’t need a machine to travel back in time; something only needs to come along and shake the stack. The Loss sent along a couple million casualties to kick progress out from under us.

Infrastructure FaIlure

America’s bridges and highways were receiving failing grades well before they became choked with undead. Our city planning had been so deregulated that water was a precious commodity all over the country. Climate change and water barons had caused drought all over the West. A number of Midwestern cities had completely toxic pipe systems or sewage contaminated reservoirs. And irradiating a bunch of river

basins certainly didn’t fucking help matters. Water and transportation were just the biggest symptoms of an endemic American disease. We spent generations devaluing maintenance and vocational work. Everybody wanted to give a TED talk; no one wanted to be a plumber. Our demographic/employment mismatch was one of the major causes of the Education Default, and it didn’t stop there. If “cheap and shitty” beat “less cheap and durable” by one red cent, we picked the former. This may not seem like a big deal to Recession folks, what with their recovering manufacturing and construction sectors. But that hole in the fence that the facilities crew was going to “get around to” becomes a lifeand-death issue when Vectors are trying to get in. A lot of people died because their culture didn’t teach them the meaning of quality. For example, consider the McMansion, the holy grail of every WASP’s five-year plan. I

won’t loot one for love or money. The fucking things are casualty nests. Every asshole imaginable got the bright idea they’d be safe in the crosstown, faux-Cape Cod architectural abortion they’d been ignorantly envying for years. The geniuses get there and realize too late the goddamn walls are built of no more than plaster, foam, and dreams. The Cs could literally chew their way in through imitationbrick siding. That’s when they didn’t come crashing through honking-big bay windows: the ones made of sugar-glass never meant to withstand a child’s tee ball, not to mention a goddamn Vector stampede. The idiots would have fared better in a 1960s mobile home. Neglect before the Crash meant death after it, and where useful shit wasn’t falling apart, most people couldn’t even recognize it.

FloodIng

On a good day, the network of valves, sluices, drains, and maintenance workers required to

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keep certain cities from drowning approached staggering levels of complexity. Contrary to popular belief, all these systems were not automated. The Crash knocked out both the personnel and power required to keep these towns afloat through more than light drizzle. If plastic bags collecting in gutters were the only result of the crisis, it still would have been enough to leave thousands of blocks immersed in knee-high water. To make matters worse, more idiots than I care to name thought blowing up dams and reservoirs was a great strategy for eliminating casualties. Depending on the area, some of them were even right... and destroyed nearly all the salvageable resources in the area. In more egregious cases, people established enclaves free from the dead only to be wiped out in a tidal wave from upstream. People huddling for safety behind some fence often assume that the ruin-porn vistas of the Loss only exist after years of neglect. But any Taker knows it takes mere days to turn a metropolis into desolate swampland.

FIres and Meltdowns

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Lightning strikes, Molotov cocktails, electrical shorts, campfires, discarded cigarettes — anything can start a fire in the Loss, but almost nothing can put it out. One week, your crew will be raiding supplies from the next town over. The next? You find a pile of ashes where a city used to be. Many a survivor community has been wiped out by no more than a stove. But that’s little stuff compared to the downright biblical proportions of climate change. The drought wildfires that plagued the West for decades no longer had armies of smokejumpers to stop them. Once the dry season came after the Crash, California basically became one giant inferno. Operation Utility was designed to minimize the human causes of these disasters. For the most part, it succeeded. Where teams failed... well, no one is ever going to discover why, that’s for damn sure. Palo Verde went into meltdown. Vectors either overran the soldiers or the plant’s

infamously shitty maintenance record finally caught up with it. Regardless, there’s a 50–75 mile radius around the plant that’s doing its best impression of Chernobyl. Anybody still alive in Arizona steers clear by double that distance unless they want to get microwaved. I’ve heard rumors of secret government research projects or cartel smuggling operations hiding in the exclusion zone, but they have to be bullshit. Nobody that’s ever seen a “Verde baby” would risk it.

AddItIonal CasualtIes

That thing the Recession was afraid would happen? Where casualties start new Vector outbreaks, which turn into more casualties, which cause new Vector outbreaks? Yeah. That’s every day out here. Or at least it was right after the amputation. Five years down the road, things have stabilized somewhat. Hot Blight is still a very real danger, but the only enclaves left have their shit together. But in the early days — when no one knew what the hell what they were doing — enclaves rose and fell in a matter of days. The people inside that went Vector would test the defenses of any other nearby communities. It was an iterative process where the tests kept coming and failure only happened once. The ratio of humans to casualties may have stabilized now, but that road was paved with a few hundred thousand new infections after the bridges blew.

Mass ExpIratIons

Imagine a grocery store. Think of all the different sections. Now imagine them dying, one by one, like cascading organ failure. Dairy was almost extinct before the Torpor Lockdown even started. Without refrigeration, pretty much everything but cheese went bad instantly. It’s also not like we can make more; casualties like the taste of beef as much as human. Protein didn’t fare much better. If it wasn’t jerky or a nut, everything in the butcher shop was poisonous by the time the looting really picked up.

The hardiest fruits and vegetables can last about two weeks without refrigeration, but only for those willing to dig through the compost piles of any leafy greens around them. Quite a few idiots looking to keep up their ‘paleo’ diets during the apocalypse ended up starving the next month. Let’s move on to the grains: crackers, cereals, bread, snack foods. Empty carbohydrates? Now we’re talking! Bread’s got about as long as the fruits and vegetables, but eating around the mold will stretch a loaf for a month. Cereal has 4–6 months in an open box before it turns to poison, though stale is a flavor most survivors have had to remove from their vocabulary. Canned goods — good luck finding any. The food pantry fare likely got stripped before the Blight was even officially acknowledged. But those lucky enough to get away with a few carts were set for a bit. If it had a high-acid content like tomatoes or citrus fruits, the cans were good for a year and could stretch to two. Everything else could last for five years! Granted, you can eat most things after that date so long as the can hasn’t blown up with botulism, but keeping the shit down requires a Loss-trained stomach. In addition to lasting longer, those canned goods mean you don’t have to worry about scurvy or rickets as much as those folks scrounging around in the cereal aisle. The crafty folks raided the pharmacy. Most drugs don’t have immediate uses, but somebody always needs them somewhere. A big score of drugs can keep trading for four years before they lose effectiveness or become poison. The pharmacy aisles also had the protein powder for the body-builders: that shit is dusty gold. It basically never goes bad, and preparation only requires water. Which is its own problem. Bottled water is another one on everybody’s “loot first” list. If you do find some, it’s probably safe, but conditions determine the speed at which it’s going to evaporate. Soda and soft drinks don’t turn harmful as fast as they evaporate, but good luck keeping down carbonated red-shit

when your stomach hasn’t had that much sugar in years. The freeze-dried coffee lasts for 20 years though; I’ve seen entire Taker crews die fighting over coffee tins some basic Recessionista wouldn’t drink on a dare. If you’re really lucky? Maybe you scored some MREs. That’s five years of good (read: adequate) eating so long as the stock lasts. But folks rocking MREs better not have let anyone know they have them. Flaunting that kind of nutrition in the Loss is a good way to get shot. And that’s pretty much it. We’re five years in now. Starvation and dehydration killed more than any other element of the dwindling combined. The people still left alive knew how to farm already, learned real fast, or became indispensable to the first two groups.

PopulatIon CullIng

Survival after the amputation depended on time, specifically what we Lost tend to call the “Rule of Three.” These aren’t official, psychological symptoms or anything, but everyone that managed to live this long went through three major steps. A. You realize looting to fulfill a need isn’t sustainable. B. You find looting to fulfill a need has become impossible. C. You find a way to fulfill the need yourself. Ideally, you want the maximum amount of time between phases A and C. If A and B happen at the same time? You’re thrown onto the mercy of the other rules of three: Need shelter? 3 hours. Need water? 3 days. Need food? 3 weeks. It’s an approximation, but the 3s are a safe bet for an average pre-Crash soft-body. Nowadays, we have plenty of stories about hard-asses that lived off nothing but rainwater for months, but that heroic, based-on-a-truestory inspirational shit only happens after the Loss has whittled all the weakness from a person with its dull blades. Most folks couldn’t hope for more than the 3s in the best of

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survival situations... So that’s thousands dead just from the Rule of Three. Those numbers are nothing compared to people killed by “pre-existing conditions.” The Loss does not accept people with pre-existing conditions. There were nearly a million people with HIV/AIDS before the Crash went down; if those folks were on the wrong side of the border, nobody kept delivering their retrovirals. Diabetic? Finding insulin that hadn’t gone bad in some dead refrigerator was nearly impossible. Saved by an organ donation? Not once the rejection drugs stop. The tragedies reached far beyond those in need of daily life-saving medication. Addiction to recreational drugs claimed thousands. Hearing the casualties click their teeth outside your walls all night is not the best time to go through withdrawal. Even people that “just” suffered from depression got claimed by their disease. I mean, the most dangerous side effect of antidepressants — suicidal impulses — is primarily triggered by

missed doses, and the thing that interrupted treatment happened to be the most tragic loss of life in human history. The news of homo sacer killed people as quickly as actually blowing the bridges. Obesity wasn’t great for avoiding casualties. Neither were assistive technologies that were perfectly fine in the old world, such as wheelchairs. Those with moderate to severe developmental disabilities needed people willing to risk their lives for them, or else... This isn’t to say that the Loss is now solely populated by the hardened survivors of a eugenic super-race (though a certain brand of Believer would love to think so). Outside the Hunter administration, the majority of humans aren’t monsters. They helped each other, and one of the major motivations for the first Takers was making runs for things like medication. Many with pre-existing conditions survive in the enclaves today, and they remain vital contributors to their new communities. But thousands didn’t make it, and every single person was someone’s family.

was written et k ar m ee fr ry ra po em The history of the cont s violations ht g ri an m hu s ou m fa in t mos in shocks. Some of the tended to be ve ha ch hi w , rs ea y e iv -f of the past thirty democratic it an by t ou d ie rr ca s t viewed as sadistic ac deliberate he t h it w ed t it m m co r he t regimes, were in fact ei essed to rn ha y el iv t ac or ic bl pu intent of terrorizing the radical freeof n io ct du ro t in he t r fo prepare the ground market reforms. -Naomi Klein

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RIse of CarrIon Economy

The Carrion Economy got its name because all our trade lives inside the corpse of the old world globalism. To understand it, you have to understand how the host died. There are three major types of economic collapse. The first and most common is a speculative bubble. In the Education Default, the market considered student loan debt a capital good. Payment on those loans created financial capital. The profits from buying the debt were initially so good that everybody got into the game. Demand increased the price of the debt bundles to the point where expected financial capital outpaced the realistic output of the capital good. In short, they dumbly expected every college kid to help pay back trillions in debt despite stagnant wages since before they were born. When the market realized there was no way it was going to get the financial capital it had stupidly expected, the value of capital goods plummeted. Costs exceeded profits instantaneously as everyone

realized the financial capital they’d been banking on never existed. Speculation bubbles are bad, but they’re at least based on predictable cycles of human stupidity and greed. The second type of economic collapse comes from war. Capital goods, like laborers and equipment, get destroyed in war, but the losses to the global economy are offset by the flurry of production caused by conflict. The capital doesn’t turn out to be imaginary, but it gets lost through redistribution. The victors use the new capital goods to create more wealth, and they trade the scraps back to the losers for financial capital. One man’s bust becomes another’s boom. The master/slave dynamic at the end of a war happens daily among enclaves in the Loss. Our troubles go so much deeper than that. The rarest collapse stems from natural disaster. A volcano erupts, a tsunami hits — the economy tanks because real capital goods are wiped out on a massive scale. There’s no

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one profiting off the suffering of others, so trade offers no respite. There was nothing imaginary about the lost assets; everything lost was vital to maintaining society. This last type is the hardest to recover from. The Crash was most similar to a natural disaster, but the scope was immeasurably larger than anything in history. Yet even this fails to describe the current situation. The obstacles to our recovery are so much more insidious. Normally, when large swaths of capital are wiped out in an instant, the only option is to start over. Rebuild from scratch. Find a new way. But after the Crash, the majority of our lost capital goods weren’t truly destroyed; they were just inaccessible. Raw materials, machinery, land, real estate — all of it is just lying there, waiting to be snatched by the first over the fence. So, in the Recession, you have this unprecedented destruction of capital. It causes an economic depression so severe that replacing the means of production requires dauntingly expensive investment and decades of development. Yet... a “quick and easy” solution lies just over the river. The Loss is a bank where the vault is endless and the bills never come due. The good times aren’t gone forever; people need only walk over and pick them up off the ground. But here’s the thing: the Recession has a reverse speculation bubble working for it: a surprise surplus. All those folks they wrote of as dead? Most of them didn’t get the memo. For the Recession economy, the lives of the Lost are free money, meant to be spent as quickly as possible. How many lives are you willing to pay to get back the good life? That’s the question of the Carrion Economy.

FoundatIon of the DHQS

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Operation Utility saved a lot of lives, but “the Whisper” pretty much assured it was going to be regarded as a failure. JSOC had its hands filled maintaining the border before the Hunter administration purges

began. Afterwards? Pretty much everything was slipping into chaos: food riots, fresh outbreaks, Canadian insurgency attacks. Nobody was looking to replace the various armed services — veterans of the Crash relied on the pride and identity of their particular branch more than ever before — but it was clear the security apparatus was failing the Recession. The first major action of the restored (read: replaced) executive and surviving congress was the creation of the Department of Homeland Quarantine and Stewardship. The DHQS. Everybody’s enclave has their own name for them. The Ducks. The Dicks. The FUQS. Imperial Stormtroopers. Citizen Cains. Judas Boys. Needless to say, we Moths aren’t fans either.

ContrIbutIng EntItIes

The government reinstituted the draft with two years of mandatory armed-service across the entire Recession, and nobody did much besides say thank you. After all, getting conscripted out of Free Parking ghettos at least meant you wouldn’t starve. If you were old enough to grow half-a-titty or a wispy mustache, you lied about your age and signed on the dotted line. With force levels slowly rising back to preCrash levels, about a third of all new recruits were siphoned away from other armed services and trained for the new DHQS army. The newly installed DHQS command structure had been poached from other branches due to their expertise or repurposed after their previous assignments went defunct. Pretty much anybody that survived Utility, made it back, and stayed loyal got pulled into the DHQS. After all, they had more experience fighting the Blight than anyone else. The vets served as training staff in the new bases hastily being constructed along the Mississippi. Those operators that refused to give up “kicking doors and cracking skulls” got promised their own special operations squads hand-picked from amongst the rabble.

They were joined by hardcore elements from law enforcement agencies like the DEA, ATF, and ICE. Nobody gave a fuck about drugs, firearms, or immigration anymore, and badasses need jobs too. Department of Defense personnel became logistical support as AFRICOM, EUCOM, SOUTHCOM, and pretty much every foreign theater closed up shop. Special Operations and Command (SOCOM) had been so heavily invested in Utility they ended up under the tent by default. The DHQS mandate also snatched up enough assets from the Air Force to coordinate their air operations and enough Navy folks to coordinate the Great Lakes defense. The CDC and the EPA were consumed and militarized. One developed and enforced procedures to maintain quarantine while the other became a targeting apparatus, prioritizing areas of the Loss for government reclamation, resettlement, and drone farming. In law enforcement, the FBI was too involved in the Hunter administration purges to risk losing their autonomy, and the Department of State was the government’s only remaining point of contact between surviving nations. But the other aspects of the intelligence apparatus became redundant under the US’s new isolationism. For instance, most Islamic terror groups lost interest in “the Great Satan” around the time literal devils arrived, so unless you were on a new anti-terror squad dedicated to the Canadian insurgency, you were looking at a pink slip. That went double for spies and analysts working the desk on countries that no longer existed. If the government hadn’t given these deep-state spooks a jobs program in the form of the DHQS, fuck knows what kind of havoc they would have wrought upon the struggling Recession government. Better to place them high up in the new organization and get their devious little minds pointed at their former countrymen. Let the professional skull-splitters and raw recruits deal with the casualties; the spies’ new job was to monitor the homo sacer and ensure they stayed dead.

MIssIon

“The Department of Homeland Quarantine and Stewardship is tasked to ensure border security from quarantined zones, to protect the citizenry from the infected, to eliminate enemies of the state seeking to spread disease, to research treatments for the Blight, to monitor formerly occupied territory for developing threats, to command settlements and expeditionary forces in quarantine zones, and to preserve vital economic assets necessary for the reclamation and continued security of the United States of America.” In short, a “license to bungle.” Their mission statement is an unfocused, military junta catchall that permits everything even as it ensures none of it will be done well. When faced with struggles still to come in the Recession, it’s no wonder the DHQS’s solutions were so shortsighted.

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Currency FaIlure

Take it from a girl who knows: barter systems suck. Haggling through every financial interaction wastes an enormous amount of time and is a good way to get screwed. Money is a great invention for this reason. There’s no getting rid of human greed and corruption, but currency at least gets that shit done faster. The problem is that currency requires faith; people have to believe those little slips of paper with dead people’s faces on them can transform into goods and services. It turns out nothing shakes people’s faith quite like watching reality die. The near total collapse of the dollar, and its eventual stabilization, were vital moments in the development of the Carrion Economy.

RatIon Dollars

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The Free Parking ghettos would have represented the greatest refugee crisis in US history even if we’d planned for it. The fact that something like 65–75% of every camp was made up of people that heard the Whisper — people that were not meant to survive — didn’t help matters. In such places, the US dollar quickly became worthless. Firstly, no one had much money in the first place. Many fled their homes with nothing. Even if a family had stockpiled cash, most used it to purchase supplies off profiteers or to bribe guards in the camp. Millions were abandoned in pants pockets and suitcases on the Eastern side of the cattle chute checkpoints. And who had used cash before the Blight in the first place? Almost no one. Banking and credit companies were months from recovery. No one was accepting plastic. Secondly, the money left in the system wasn’t with the right people or in the right place. People stopped wherever the cars ran out of gas, leaving the logistical distribution of the population in total disarray. The need for food, medicine, water, and other essentials began immediately, but those lucky enough to be in the Recession had already begun buying up everything the refugees needed to survive with money only they had.

To their credit, the Hunter administration recognized the severity of the situation even as they were being dragged from power. The concern wasn’t just theft and crime (though there certainly was a lot of that). The biggest threat was outright anarchy as refugees realized they had no hope of survival. Death tolls from exposure, disease, and dehydration were already mounting. With no income streams coming in to replenish an already depressed cash supply, desperate people were going to realize that they outnumbered those fucks whose suburban soccer field they were living on. The car camps also didn’t have fences around them yet. There was no quarantecture in place to stop pissed-off lot folk from starting the revolution. Before impeachment began, the Hunter administration’s last desperate order created a new currency: ration dollars. Ration dollars were a specified currency that could only be used for subsistence goods like food, water, medicine, etc. Aid organizations distributed an allowance of ration dollars to everyone in refugee camps with populations large enough to be a threat. In more organized Free Parking, labor was rewarded with additional ration dollars, which is how most of the fences, walls, and other infrastructure used to police the poor bastards got built in the first place. Recession citizens that hadn’t been displaced didn’t get a ration allowance, but they could exchange ration dollars for a cash reimbursement. Essentially, locals were being forced to sell their hoarded supplies to the refugees, then exchanging ration dollars for real money at a depreciated rate. It left original Easterners with surviving jobs hurting due to the massive price hike in food they themselves had created, but it kept the poor from burning the country down. How could the government afford to pay an exchange rate for every ration dollar in circulation? Well, they couldn’t... so they just printed more money. It made some sense at the time. A huge amount of cash had left circulation during

the Crash, and some of it had to be replaced to reflect the Recession’s current population. However, the executive order demanding the Federal Reserve Bureau print as much money as possible was the last thing Hunter did in office. Between all the tribunals, imprisonment, and special elections in the purges that followed, no one had the authority to turn off the mint. By the time someone with the power to rescind the order came around, it was already too late.

HyperInflatIon

Hyperinflation occurs when the real value (i.e. how much bread can this paper buy?) of a currency depreciates at an accelerated rate. Regular inflation happens naturally in any economy, but hyperinflation happens so fast that the populace exchanges their holdings of traditional currency for a more stable foreign currency. As the government started printing money to cash its own checks, the “foreign” currency that began replacing the US dollar was the ration dollar. The problem wasn’t traditional cash getting screwed in the exchange between dollars and R-dollars. The value disparity was intentional, and it placed the buying power for essential goods where it belonged. The problem was that people immediately recognized the shitty exchange rate and started gaming the system. Business owners selling goods now only purchasable with R-dollars began hoarding them rather than exchanging for US currency. They used the R-dollars to purchase more stock for themselves at a better price, or they sold them to non-refugee citizens at a better exchange rate than the one the government offered. Businesses that were supplying non-essential goods to Free Parking started demanding payment in ration cards rather than cash. Meanwhile, as profiteers started to work around the system, the price of food and water continued to inflate. The standard dollar grew increasingly worthless. Refugees that were getting back to work — for example, harvesting the first crops at new emergency

farms — were being paid by the owners in devalued cash rather than R-dollars. The exhausted and desperate didn’t have the strength or resources to demand more, so business got back to oppressing folks again after only a few months vacation. The whole time, the government is pumping more currency into the system to back up the R-dollars. The labor markets, already upended by the Crash, continued going haywire. No one needed wedding planners or social media specialists or a hundred other occupations anymore. Those folks could starve to death on the street, or they could move into Free Parking and get an allowance of R-dollars. The rolls swelled with refugees and unemployed, necessitating more R-dollars, which necessitated more currency, which devalued everything further, requiring more R-dollars... While the ration dollars may have prevented mass starvation and rioting in the short term, it poisoned the currency system for years to come and cemented millions into a permanent underclass.

CItIzen ImmIgrants

Economic classes must be educated and acclimated to their own suffering. The problem with turning more than half the country into serfs overnight is one of training and expectations. The new proles didn’t know how to survive in poverty, and they were fool enough to think they were entitled to their own lives.

Quarantecture and RezonIng

To their credit, the new government wanted to figure out what exactly had gone wrong during the Crash before making any big policy decisions. Their first action after renewing ties with the shattered UN was a resolution to share as much information about the Crash as possible. Quantifying what was lost, how it died, and what remains defines Recession politics to this day, but those early days were about the big statistics: where did the Blight hit? How hard and how fast?

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It turned out that stop-and-frisk urban stormtroopers actually found a use for all those automatic weapons, APCs, and rooftop missile batteries during the Crash. The enhanced ability to kill Vectors retroactively justified Orwellian police tactics by slightly increasing the chance of survival in cities where the population was already treated like the enemy. It wasn’t much of an advantage, but percentage points in the Crash amounted to thousands of lives. By Recession standards, that buys a lot of forgiveness for jackboots in faces. The odder trend was a positive correlation between a city’s age and its chances of surviving hot Blight. The difficult traffic situations plaguing historic places didn’t stop Vectors from tearing through the place, but the monsters got distracted killing the poor

bastards in a single neighborhood rather than daisy-chaining infections all the way down the interstate. Cities built to withstand actual sieges, like Venice, Jerusalem, or Paris, maximized an urbanite’s chance of surviving hot Blight. Some locations with historically preserved fortifications and militarization, like Cyprus, actually managed to reclaim the city after massive infections. If neighborhoods were designed as closed loops, with vital services located within a few blocks and contained within fortifiable district borders, new occurrences of the Blight could be controlled. If it could stop guys with swords from stabbing you, it could stop Vectors from biting you. Learning that the city wasn’t a doomed concept was welcome news: urbanity was

the Recession’s only hope. Rural spaces may have been the only effective firebreak against the casualties pouring from the West, but small towns in America required use of a car. No one had the gas to maintain the fleets of trucks needed to keep those people fed, and that kind of unsustainable distance was already killing the environment before the Crash. To survive, the Recession had to pack people and resources together as densely as possible. But how to do so without inviting destruction from the most communicable disease known to mankind? The answer that solved both the distribution and public health problem was quarantine architecture. Quarantine architecture — or quarantecture, as it is known — is a combination of medieval city planning and dystopian police tactics. Frequent walls and fences. Security doors on exterior and interior entranceways. Magnetic locks and murder holes. Minimal windows set high above street level. Checkpoints and guard towers. Walledoff interior expressways exiting into isolated motor pools, slowly feeding into narrow neighborhood streets. It’s the kind of interior decorating that views a recessed tile drain for cleaning the blood off floors as a selling point for family rooms. And it’s the antithesis of 99% of every structure built in the last 200 years. Obviously, transforming entire metropolitan areas into easily abandoned, militarized labyrinths couldn’t happen overnight. The challenge of bringing resources into smaller, sustainable communities was far more difficult than even the security measures. Before the Crash, every piece of American produce had to be shipped thousands of miles before reaching market. Drone farming initiatives in the Midwest didn’t have the remote combine technology established until the DHQS was at full power, so feeding the Recession would mean converting every nonessential urban space into either housing or food production as fast as possible. Colleges had to be shut down and refugees moved into the dorms. Sports fields and parks had to be

tilled into farmland. Every possible rooftop had to be turned into a garden. Building walls, establishing checkpoints, laying fence, hauling fertilizer, planting crops — it was a public works project to rival the WPA with only a fraction of the labor force to complete it. So what did they do? Find another solution? Nah. They stopped the allowance of ration dollars. Now anyone in Free Parking that wanted to eat had to become a manual laborer or die. And thus, every person I saved with the Whisper got turned into a slave.

Free ParkIng Ghettos

Recession propaganda dismisses the terrifying poverty of Free Parking ghettos as the result of entitlement. The government came in and saved everyone with their ration dollars allowance, but folks spoiled by preCrash life were so ungrateful they started preying on each other anyway! Because Pumpkin Spice lattes were an unalienable right! Or something! Gimme a fucking break. The reality is as it ever was: people start acting like assholes when their lives get shitty. And life in Free Parking is shitty, often literally. Diseases like cholera and dysentery came back in a big way. The race to build shelter against the winter was always a losing one, and frozen corpses were as common as human feces in the muddy streets. The ration dollar fiasco kept accelerating even as allowances dropped and camp populations rose. Work outside the subsistence slavery of quarantecture construction was scarce and charity scarcer. The only entertainment was nationalized news, and the only things they were allowed to report on besides the failing economy were new Vector outbreaks... which meant the security forces remained eager to napalm your entire family at the slightest provocation. That much fear and suffering on top of the worst trauma in human history? It’s no wonder things got nasty. Armed robbery, gang violence, prostitution, drugs, human

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trafficking — Free Parking has it all. The eventual phase out of the ration dollar allowance only made the predation worse. Five years on, the criminal operations have only grown more sophisticated and brutal. Turf is stable and rackets robust. Every camp is cut into little fiefdoms, each group bribing the DHQS guards to look the other way as they leech off a perpetual victim caste. We call the bosses that run Free Parking ghettos Valets (they control the lots; you have to pay them to leave, etc.) Most dealings the Loss makes across the border have to run through these sociopaths, and they don’t buy anything for the good of their community. They smuggle to perpetuate the lawless kleptocracy they live in, and who can blame them? If they hadn’t sold their souls, they’d be working themselves to death on 16-hour construction shifts. Trust me: the hardest Takers I know jumped the border to get away from Free Parking.

Labor Struggles

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If we want to get all Adam Smith-y about it, certain skills just transfer better into criminality than brute force labor. It’s economically predictable that “rational actors” able to do something more productive than slave away in a field would choose to do so. The Recession government knew ending the R-dollar allowance would turn every refugee lot into “a hive of scum and villainy;” they just didn’t give a shit so long as their societal redesign got underway. And it did... in a fantastically inefficient, bloody fashion. It turns out programmers, marketing executives, and literature professors weren’t very good at stringing barbed wire or planting sweet potatoes. The Education Default happened precisely because we were over-educated before the Crash. After it launched half the population back into subsistence farming? There hadn’t been a labor skill mismatch so extreme since Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Withholding vital goods to coerce millions of workers into a

new labor market might have worked, but they certainly weren’t good at or enthusiastic about those jobs. The DHQS recruits fresh off the production line kept workers moving, but only because they didn’t want to be down there in the dirt with the scrubs. Basically no one knew what they were doing, and progress was glacially slow. The labor mismatch occurred on both ends of the spectrum. The needs of the Recession may have kicked most people back into a 19th century economy, but quarantecture simultaneously promised to bring about the sustainable infrastructure falsely promised for to us for decades. New types of buildings had to be designed. Computer networks that could wean the populace off Ubiq had to be built (still working on that). Hordes of mechanics were needed to maintain the remaining fleets of manufacturing, construction, and agriculture equipment, plus everything had to be converted to work with solar panels, wind farms, and other energy sources not easily shut down by outbreaks. In addition to the administrative expertise required to coordinate all the above, the Recession needed the most brilliant medical minds ever seen to research a cure to the most baffling disease ever encountered. The majority of the workforce may have been over-trained for their new lives as beasts of burden, but the Recession suffers from a dearth of highly trained experts to this day. Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. Retraining and upward mobility requires education, and no labor sector got poached for construction, agriculture, and quarantecture planning faster than teachers. You can read plenty of Recession propaganda about the triumphant “return to the classrooms” dating back years ago, but considering my little tree orphan can’t read, I doubt such claims. If they are educating anyone over there, it certainly isn’t the poor.

MedIcal Advances

As the Recession engineered hyperinflation and enslaved a huge segment of the

population they’d already tried to kill, it would be easy to see medical advances in the Blight as a bright spot in the all the darkness. Nothing about the Blight is comforting: not even its mercies.

The Secret of ImmunIty

During peak Crash, nobody sat around waiting to see if a bite was going to turn. The Romero Effect assured that every bite meant a bullet, even before the government adopted it as a slogan. Person got bite? Person got shot. It was that simple. Murder often is. No disease — not even the Blight — has a 100% transmission ratio. There is such a thing as a blank bite. Vector contact may be far more infectious than casualty exposure, but it’s still possible in both cases. Any way you cut it, a lot of people out there shot loved ones in the head for something no worse than a flesh wound. But in the early days of the Crash, not a lot of people had to deal with this harsh truth. The kind of folks that “waited to see what happened” may have gotten lucky once, maybe even twice, but that kind of mercy is terminal. A bite only has to turn hot once for the Blight to wipe out all the good Samaritans and everyone around them. So while there were always rumors that certain people got bit and stayed healthy, the news always came via hearsay or anonymous internet commenters. Trying to trace such miracles to the source usually dead-ended at a pile of casualties, so the idea of blank bites was easily dismissible as more Romero Effect bullshit. If it was that hard for us to believe in missed infections, is it any wonder it took us so long to discover total immunity? In those early days, we had no way to test for it besides multiple exposures. To even suspect immunity existed was to see the same person infected with Blight on multiple occasions. Even then, the answer could have been two blank bites occurring in miraculous succession, but how are those odds more

absurd than, say, surviving two wrestling matches with Vectors and escaping both? Or surviving two bites without being shot by fellow humans? Think about it. If you knew you were Immune before anybody else, what possible incentive would you have to tell anyone? Imagine a bunch of Vectors turned you into a chew toy during the Crash, but you were somehow lucky enough to get away and live. You’re covered in bleeding, Blight-filled wounds, but you can’t work up the courage to off yourself like a good soldier. Lets say you’re also lucky enough to have all those wounds in spots easily concealed by clothing, and you manage to survive long enough in isolation to get a change of clothes. After threading the needle and avoiding so many terrible fates, do you mean to tell me that when you got back to your fellow man, you’d volunteer, “Hey guys! I’ve been bitten a dozen times and nothing’s happened yet! Pretty neat huh?” Anybody that dumb is long dead. The only Immune that live long enough to utilize their gift are the ones smart enough to shut the fuck up about it.

LeakIng DIscovery

Despite literally everything working against its discovery, we have evidence proving that certain aspects of the Hunter administration knew about immunity even before Operation Utility. How is that possible, you might ask? Good question. We’d like to know too. Documents proving the existence of immunity leaked onto Ubiq about a year after the declaration of homo sacer. As scientific papers go, they aren’t a scintillating read. The Immune Papers are basically a collection of baffled, anonymous scientists sharing wild conjectures about why certain “subjects” never seemed to get infected when exposed to the pathogens. Redacted of all names and dates, it would be easy to dismiss the studies as a cheap hoax, but their release occurred across multiple organizations at the same time. Immunity documents were uploaded from secure IPs at the Department

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of Homeland Security, Department of Health, and the CDC simultaneously: down to the second. Furthermore, while certain documents remain the same across all sources, the moles in each various entity included unique emails from dozens of redacted staffers referencing the core research papers. Unlike the scientific reports themselves, these emails were helpfully timestamped and dated back to a time when it was still possible to consider the Blight a meme. Whipping the reams of disorganized documents into actionable shape took a lot of work. Sadly, any professional journalism that could have helped us was long dead; the DHQS had already rammed a hand up the corpse’s ass and started a propaganda puppet show. But Ubiq had its own resources, and we were certainly motivated. Back then, I was fairly certain the leak was going to get us all killed. UCity was suffered

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to live because we allowed people to organize car pools and trade. I suspected actively exposing the government’s crimes was the last straw, so everyone worked double-time to archive and correlate the documents before the drones came. The DHQS’s actual solution was much more elegant. It came in the form of a simple command: broadcast an incoming press conference to everyone or they’d blow us up. I held my nose and pressed play (see p. 97). The DHQS was competent in a way the Hunter administration could have only dreamed of. In their very first press conference, they had threatened the Moths into broadcasting their own disgrace. Simultaneously, they managed to throw the most urgent news development since the Crash into doubt, obscuring any wrongdoing in the same fog of Romero Effect misinformation we’d all come to loathe.

Watching that announcement... that’s the moment I truly understood the relationship between the Moths and the Recession. The stratostructure is only one perk to keeping us alive. The real reason they never finish the job is that we’re more profitable as bogeymen. The DHQS blames their every crime on the Moths — a devil everyone can see but no one can touch — and while every dumbass in the Recession glares hatefully at me up on my mountain, those fuckers take the opportunity to rob America blind.

The SupressIn Mystery

We didn’t give up after a single press conference, but continued digging only revealed deeper questions. It was clear my analysis of the leaks wasn’t going to be trusted any longer. I passed the job along to a group of Crusaders we’d been working with. As full-blown cultists, their credibility was only slightly greater than my own, but at least they were cultists worshiping the concept of a cure. They had the medical

personnel to understand the science, and no small number of true journalists — the last of their dying breed — were attracted to the faith. They had the skills needed to package the information into something digestible. People can read the complete findings for themselves, but the results could best be summarized as “always unsettling, never satisfactory.” We learned the rumors of secret kidnappings during the evacuation were true. Thousands had been processed through heavily militarized chokepoints and given mysterious blood tests. It always ended the same way: people waited the night for government forces to escort them to safety... and woke up to find the troops already gone, absconded with a dozen or so civilians identified from their tests. More insane Loss legends got confirmed. A couple of folks claimed to have escaped from fortified secret Loss research facilities. They’d been kidnapped and experimented on for weeks. A few that got out were missing limbs from repeated tissue extraction, and

The ImmunIty Announcement

The Department of Homeland Quarantine and Stewardship is pleased to announce that our scientists, in conjunction with fellow researchers from around the world, have confirmed that a natural immunity to the Blight exists within certain members of the American populace. Estimates derived from lab experimentation performed on brave volunteers suggest that anywhere from 1-5% is completely impervious to infection from any means. As I’m sure you understand, these ’Immunes’ are mankind’s best hope for survival and our greatest tool for unraveling the mysteries of this terrible disease. Scientists are currently perfecting a blood test that can identify these individuals so that they might help us in the race to a cure. As we prepare to administer these tests, any individuals that suspect themselves of immunity are to report to the nearest DHQS outpost for future testing. Until such a time as we have more developments to share, please allow me a somber reminder amidst such a joyous announcement. We here at the DHQS would like to take a moment to urge the public, once again, to ignore the seditionist lies being spread by this so-called Gnat and the mutineers hijacking the Ubiq network upon which we have come to rely. These anti-government radicals already sabotaged the evacuation plan set in place by President Hunter during our time of crisis, and they hold a major tool of our recovering economy hostage in order to ensure the spread of their anarchic message. I have no doubt that forged documents concocted by this witch and her followers are already being dispersed, accusing corporations and civil servants of conspiring to hide this vital information for inscrutable reasons. The DHQS assures you that this terrorist organization will be brought to justice for their crimes against millions of American citizens, but we beg for your patience as we prioritize all our efforts towards utilizing these exciting scientific advances. There will be no questions. Thank you and God bless America.

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they claimed hundreds more had been held prisoner with them. They called the site “Scrape.” But what the Loss counts as confirmation and what stands up in a court of law are two different standards. The documents only tangentially refer to things such as “subject collection” and “tissue extraction.” Enough people out here had interaction with the “Scrape Squads” to recognize their torturers, but every lab’s location had long since been abandoned and burned. Even if we had found one in operation, we couldn’t have done much besides raid it; it’s not as if the FBI can send an evidence collection team out here. Most infuriating of all, the documents portrayed a dizzying, circular command structure that made blame impossible to assign. CDC officials thought the Army was in charge, but they were contracting the work out to Alosine Corp, who was subcontracting out to StopLoss, who was to report to the Department of Health.... In the rare instance we could piece together the likely identity of a program participant, investigations always dead-ended: most of the time literally. They’d been eaten, shot, imprisoned, or declared homo sacer. Some guilty party had anticipated which doctors were identifiable and made sure they couldn’t talk. The most startling of the documents, obviously, was the discovery of Supressin K-7864. The DHQS made sure to announce “the cure to the Blight” the day after their little counter-intelligence press conference. While it didn’t destroy the infection, it could suppress most symptoms and make the host merely a carrier. They expected a full-blown cure for hot infection within the year. Five years on, we all know that was bullshit, but I could have told you that day one. They also neglected to mention that “suppressing” symptoms meant having your skin turn black with sinews as the infection crawled along your nervous system like razor wire. Hell, they announced the origin of most Latents before even showing one to the public. All in all, it was a much sloppier job than the

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disinformation campaign they pulled on the Moths only a day before. The only reason they rushed things was to get out ahead of the documents. The leak held the raw data suggesting how Supressin K-7864 was discovered. Considering it’s one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of all time, one would expect to find Supressin in something a little sexier than a spreadsheet. At least, until you realize what that spreadsheet means.... There are varying opinions on this, but as far as I’m concerned, the Supressin data is nothing more than a roll of victims. Firstly, the spreadsheet has embedded U-translate codes from 26 different languages. Nearly half the entries come from China, but they fade off as the timestamps match with the country’s approaching governmental collapse. It’s the same with languages from other countries that never recovered from the Crash. So it’s obvious this was a shared document, being used by similar operations all over the world as the infection got worse. Then there are anatomical columns. A person looking at the raw data can scroll right for days looking at a dizzying, exhaustive anatomical inventory for each entry: age, height, blood type, eye color, etc. It’s clear they were looking for any commonality across their subjects. Then, at the far right, there are the most damning columns: IT1, V, and IT2. IT1, near as we can tell, stands for “Infection Test One.” The results come from whatever they did to identify targets at the secret checkpoints. It merely reads “Positive” or “Negative.” Our best guess? They took blood, threw it in a petri dish with Blight, and looked to see what happened. If there was no visible reaction, they assumed immunity. But everyone in the database reads as “Positive.” The Immune people they tested, it seems, were busy elsewhere in the experiment. The rolls are made up of your average future casualty, folks like you and me. V stands for variables. Most of them are cocktails of chemicals and drugs — usually

repeating in identical batches of a few thousand — but there is always a callback code to some anatomical element further up the row. We assume that’s whatever part they pulled out of those poor Immune bastards and injected to see if it had the secret sauce. IT1 had to be done in a laboratory conditions under a microscope. After all, if you test positive in the blood stream, there’s no way anyone is getting close enough to do more experiments. We also know these tests had to be done on humans; the Blight just kills animals outright. So you need to realize that these experiments were done on living, uninfected humans. All over the world. For months. That’s what makes the results of IT2 so chilling. IT2 was “Infection Test Two.” It listed a wider range of results: Hot, Cold, Negative, Unclassifiable, and Asymptomatic. Hot means

Vector. Cold means death, torpor, and casualty transformation. Negative meant immunity or lab error. On negative results, you usually see the list of anatomical identifiers repeat until the results land Hot or the annotation “subject moved to sampling” appears. No one knows what Unclassifiable means. Disconcertingly, in the three instances of Unclassifiable results, no one posts from that IP address for the remainder of the experiments. If I had to guess, I’d say Aberrants. Lastly, there’s the Asymptomatic result. That translates to what we know as latency. There are a few hundred scattered throughout the test that turned Latent naturally. Scrolling down the list, you can see the scientist try the same variable again and again on different subjects, hoping for repeatable results, striking out, and returning to wild

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conjecture. It’s not until entry K-7864 that the Asymptomatic results become repeatable. Using a combination of antibiotics and bone marrow from the Immune, every entry after K-7864 ends up Asymptomatic. They repeat variable K-7864 over two hundred times before they’re satisfied. That’s when they discovered Supressin... on they eleventh letter of the alphabet, after cycling through 9,999 subjects for A–J. That’s 107,854 victims later, plus another two hundred and one innocent saps treated to the joy of Blight coursing through their veins. The DHQS is going to say that wasn’t the methodology. They’ll make up some bullshit about repeated test subjects, volunteers, or computer simulations. But the excuses change every time, depending on who in the administration answers and the current political climate. You know what doesn’t change? 107,854. The number stays the same. No one knew what to do with the Blight. Science wasn’t working. Rather than abandon faith in rationality, some people doubled down. They threw off the trappings of ethics and collectively decided to throw human lives at the Blight until it flinched. At the time, it must have seemed the only alternative was the apocalypse. Maybe that would be preferable. 107,854 people at least... all for a drug that does nothing besides mass-produce Typhoid Mary’s. K-7864 has a lot more lives to save before its moral accounts balance.

MedIcal ConscrIptIon

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Supressin K-7864 may have been discovered through mass murder, but who can you blame for it? It was an international program. Everyone responsible in the Hunter administration was dead, imprisoned, or disappeared by the time the truth got out. Those that merely “followed orders” aren’t keen to come forward. Even if the public had the means of finding all of them, there are likely so many complicit that we wouldn’t want to know. What is the Recession

supposed to do? Sit on a potential cure out of spite? Supressin exists now, and no amount of moral dilemma can argue away the lives it can save. That’s the beauty of inherited war crimes: the new government can condemn its own profits... so long as it follows through on old atrocities. Immune Informants I guess we should be thankful that Immune marrow only needs to make contact with the Blight. Once it does, all infection in the body mysteriously enters the torpor phase early. Unlike a transplant, the hematopoietic stem cells used don’t need an allogeneic graft. If they did, each dose of Supressin would require matching three loci on the HLA gene between host and recipient, making the treatment essentially useless. But that’s where the lucky breaks end. PBSC (Peripheral Blood Stem Cells) don’t work, and cultures have not been effective in the production of Supressin K-7864. Simple blood donations won’t do. For reasons science has yet to understand, the cells must be harvested surgically from the red bone marrow located in the epiphysis of the long bones. This places the average recovery time per donation at 20 days, assuming the marrow is only pulled from a single large bone like the hip. So, even without the need to match doses to the user, the sole substance capable of holding back the Blight exists in maybe 1% of the population, and it can only be extracted once a month in a painful procedure. This makes an Immune’s bone marrow one of the rarest and highly sought materials on Earth. Basically, the invention of Supressin created an ivory trade, but one that poaches humans. The Recession government requires all Immune citizens to sign-up for medical conscription. This means forgoing all access to the outside world and moving into a specialized, guarded facility where marrow is harvested at a renewable pace. The “Immune

Heroes” of DHQS propaganda sit around all day, locked in cells or chained to hospital bed, force-fed hematopoietic friendly food and waiting for their charts to say it’s okay to drain them again. If I’m being truthful, there are worse ways to live. It may be a life of constant sickness, agony, and boredom, but plenty in Free Parking or the Loss would kill for the three squares a day. It’s certainly not worse than those early Immunes had it; the ones they vivisected in search of Supressin. At least the DHQS attempts to make their captives a renewable resource. But nobody getting scraped clean in a government hospital is getting paid to do so. The only people the DHQS pays for Immunity are informants. Did you see your friend get bit twice and never turn? Want to get out from under that Valet pimping your ass for cigarettes and ration cards? Just find your local guard and squeal! One successful tip pays enough to get an entire family out of Free Parking. For the skilled Immune hunters, it’s a great way to sell your soul for a high-rise apartment. As for the people betrayed and turned into a Supressin culture, what if they provided for loved ones before being conscripted? Well, their families are shit out of luck. The government pays for snitches, but the Immune donate “for the good of the nation.” If it was the other way around, people might hold some solidarity with the Immune instead of selling them for a quick buck. The markets can’t tolerate that, and so the majority of Supressin’s production costs come from bribes getting people to rat on those “deserting their genetic duty.” Most Immune turn themselves in now; at least then they can give the one-time bonus to their loved ones. Once someone’s inside, life is more than binge television and foot-long needles. There’s no shortage of stories about “deep cuts:” times when the production quotas don’t agree with the schedule of the human body. The number of Immunes in medical service missing arms and legs ain’t because they

cover the exercise yard in landmines. You can still produce marrow minus some limbs. “Blasphemy!” says the DHQS man. “Nonsense!” says the press secretary. “Why would the DHQS permanently harm brave Immunes when they can produce life-saving Supressin for their whole lifetimes?” say the millions of illiterate Recessionistas, brainwashed by car-camp propo. Yeah, I guess. Look how well humans have treated their other renewable resources. That’s why there are so many elephants still around, right? Black Market SupressIn The DHQS price for informing on Immunes is sizable, but it’s nothing on the fortune to be made selling frozen marrow itself. If the regulated, government labs are willing to drain people so hard their bones turn to dust, what chance do Immunes have with black market operators? The most notorious Supressin operation is still Scrape, which is apparently still at large in the Loss. According to rumors, the original mad science lab responsible for discovering Supressin never shut down. Nobody can agree who runs it. Some say StopLoss took over, others claim it’s a DHQS black site. Maybe raiders looking to get rich took up the mantle after the officials closed up shop? Whatever the case, Scrape is nomadic. No one can place it for very long, and by the time anyone looking to shut it down shows up, the lab has pulled up stakes and moved on. Like Recession labs, Scrape tries to let their cattle recover in order to maximize their profits, but traveling the Loss is nearly impossible at the best of times, not to mention doing it with a bunch of wounded prisoners in tow. Before Scrape relocates, they “render” the herd down to the bone and worry about kidnapping new stock later. Some people claim the whole enclave is just a Loss legend, but try telling that to the mutilated few that claim to have escaped. At least Scrape will allow donors to recover if it fits their bottom line. There are plenty

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of Valets and raiders selling frozen red marrow on the black market. If an Immune gets caught by one of those groups, they’re deboned like fucking fish while still alive. And even that’s preferable to capture by the Church of Holy Communion. Those vampiric psychos believe Immune blood provides immortality or some such shit. Ugh... I’d rather be eaten by casualties.

AdmIttIng Latency

Immunity, and the drug derived from it, may be responsible for the majority of Latent infections, but the Blight sometimes decides to go into torpor for no goddamn reason at all. There were “natural” Latents before we discovered how to produce them en masse, and the announcement of Supressin K-7864 meant admitting that there was a grey area between casualty and healthy human. It was possible to carry the Blight without dying from it or killing for it... at least for a time. The drug took a condition far rarer than even immunity and made it undeniable. The Recession just shot Latents before, despite rumors of their existence. But now latency was the only insurance they could sell against the terrible Blight. Nobody would stockpile their magic drug if it could only save them for a bullet to the brain. The shoot-on-sight designation would have to change. Persecuted underclass would have to do.

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The Naturals In HIdIng I’m not going to trot out the “I have Latent friends” bullshit. I control a small army; I’m beyond online performative gestures, even when discussing the uncomfortable truths: I get why we shot Latents during the Crash. I’m not saying it was right or smart, but I understand the choice to pull the trigger. If Banhammer wants to scream at me about my “clean privilege” for saying that, I suppose I deserve it, but I can recognize more than one truth at a time. I can acknowledge that surviving an attack and the agony of infection must be horrifying. I can mourn the tragic irony of living through a supernatural violation

only to be gunned down by your fellow man. But I can also sympathize with those who didn’t stop to question why these black-veined things coming at them moved a little different than the others. If you witnessed a Latent get shot anywhere but the head, it got up as a Vector. If I thought everything with black veins was going to revert back to Vector speed again, my trigger finger would get itchy too. I guess all this is to say that, if a bleeding heart liberal like myself still gets unnerved by the sight of the Latent, it’s no wonder so few of them survived. Mercy for those that need it the most is always in short supply during a war. Factor in the undeniable, inescapable threat Latent bodies present to Blight quarantine? I bet no more than a dozen were alive in the Recession by the time the DHQS

admitted the condition existed, all of them in hiding 24/7. But the government had to trot out some test subjects to prove Supressin worked. They had to give doses to their soldiers in the field to ensure they kept fighting, and they had to deal with those forced to take the shot. For a while there after the leak, it really did seem like the Recession was going to make a place for the Latent. People that had been in hiding since the amputation slowly began revealing themselves. Big mistake. The Mass Pardon In the flattering interpretation of events, we ascribe the fallout from the mass pardon to bureaucratic idiocy. After admitting Latents existed the government supposedly got flooded with a lot of anxious questions from people worried they were going to jail for shooting a Latent. It’s a fair concern, I guess, though I question how many actually called their congressmen and asked, “Hey, it turns out I committed a murder. Even though there’s no way to prove it and no witnesses, should I worry about you coming to arrest me?” Thus, for the public good, the White House announced it would be using Posse Comitatus (yes, the Recession was still under martial law, technically) to pass the Federal Imminent Infection Exclusion Clause. The FIIEC waived the government’s right to prosecute all violent crimes in instances where the Blight could be proven a “reasonable threat.” This law would essentially wipe from the record all previous crimes against Latents, as well as a number of other accidental killings on account of wounds misperceived as bites. Of course, the executive branch wanted to give the appearance democracy was still a thing, so they said the law would be passed later that week in a special congressional session. They planned on passing one soon. After that moment, “veiners” would be considered human again. But announcing that the law was planned and not already on the books basically set the clock on Latent hunting

season. Right as those naturals started to come out of hiding, every asshole got the message that hate crime time was running out. The suits will say it was an unfortunate oversight; a tragic misreading of the public’s emotional state. I say the DHQS wanted a few hundred less Latents to deal with. I can count the number of natural Latents that survived through the passing of the FIIEC on my hands. In Free Parking, where most had come to hide, the lynch mobs numbered in the thousands. You’d think people would make it quick, what with the infection risk. But no. A lot of people see Latents as no more than zombies that can feel fear. At least one fresh outbreak occurred because the gang beating got too enthusiastic, slinging Blight-strewn blood into someone’s eye. ProductIve QuarantIne After the mass pardon incited genocide, the government had to act “for the safety of its Latent citizens.” Suuuuurrrreeee. They were never going to let Blight carriers live in their new quarantecture cities; this way the DHQS didn’t lose their precious moral majority. There are only three operating Latent communities in the Recession. One is the Potemkin village of “Haven,” located just outside DC. If the national media needs to show how great it is to live Latent, they grab footage from the caged suburb where every trust-fund boy and senator’s daughter unlucky enough to get bit goes to retire. They have Latent guards, in case anyone dies of natural causes and goes Vector. Otherwise, Haven residents get to live closer to preCrash splendor than nearly anyone else in the country. They pay rent in daily reenactments of a black-veined version of Leave it to Beaver and by fueling anti-Latent groups like Triage. The vitriol you see spilled online against the “Latent welfare state” is fueled entirely from doctored Haven footage. It keeps the plebs eager to inform on each other if anyone ends up having to take a dose of Supressin. Most Latents live in a more brutal reality.

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It’s not a coincidence that the other two Recession Latent communities are right on the Great Lakes Line at the most actively invaded sections of the border. When the bodies start building a ramp that might break quarantine, guards throw the Latents out of their tents and over the wall. They move thousands of corpses to the incinerators every month: men, women, and children slaving for days in the brutal cold. Sometimes the guards shoot any Cs that come to attack the work crews. Sometimes they just laugh and take bets. Needless to say, you don’t see a lot of reporting from inside the Great Lakes camps. Then there are the Latent communities the government doesn’t even acknowledge. If the DHQS needs slave labor that can’t get infected, they ship Latents out to their Loss settlements and work them until they die. How your average soldier rationalizes this shit is beyond me. Statistically, soldiers are the most likely to go Latent in the first place; they have the easiest access to Supressin K-7864 and come into the most contact with Blight most often. Perhaps every DHQS private believes he’ll be sent off to The Latent Regiment. It’s true that most soldiers that survive the Supressin shot get recruited, but the LR is far from light duty. They are basically the DHQS’s version of the French Foreign Legion. The unit polices itself and roams where it likes in the Loss whenever off mission. There are horror stories about entire enclaves wiped out by the LR on leave. But their shitty behavior doesn’t extend solely from malice. The regiment is essentially on a death march around the wasteland. Their members’ terms of service are extended indefinitely, and the spooks in DHQS throw them at the worst jobs. The survival rate is so low that the LR’s ranks have cycled completely at least three times in the four years since it was founded. Latent TraffIckIng You know who doesn’t give a shit if you’re Latent? Enclaves. Well, most enclaves. There’s still a lot of

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prejudice out here in the Loss. But even if there’s a strong anti-Latent sentiment in a community, most can’t afford to turn them away. Someone that can get bit and keep fighting is just too damn valuable to pass up. Latents can loot the dead, clear fences, and scout without fear of infection. Your average Taker crew that doesn’t have a Latent on payroll is willing to pay big to get one, infection risk be damned. In the Loss, most of our pre-Supressin Latents have either retired or been promoted to run entire enclaves. They even have an entire city to themselves called Leper. For all the terrors of the Loss, a Latent at least has a chance out here. The greatest cause of latency, Supressin K-7864, is only available at an enormous cost through the black market, yet the Loss has more Latent people in one state than in the entire Recession combined. Some view smuggling Latents out from under the DHQS’s boot as emancipation, but just as many see it as workforce recruitment. Either way, there are a lot of operations on the border now designed exclusively for Latent trafficking.

HIghbury v. USA

It’s barely a year after the Crash. The Recession has created a jack-booted fascist army and plans to extend martial law indefinitely. Their only plan for controlling the worst refugee crisis in history involves devaluing two national currencies at once. Meanwhile, the proles not busy starving to death are selling each other out as fast as possible, turning the Immune into livestock and the Latent into slaves. And all the while, the worst plague imaginable keeps knocking on the door. So what does it? What spark threatens to light the fires of revolution? A fishing shack. I hate how dumb history can be sometimes. I’d prefer the assassination of a duke, but we owe our modern condition to a fucking fish shack.

GenesIs

Most of the Mississippi border took care of itself once the bridges were blown or fortified. The Great Lakes Line was another story. Roughly 200 km of the border had points where casualties could wade across. Fortifications had to be erected fast. They had to be sturdy enough to stop not only the dead, but also desperate refugees fleeing the Loss. In their haste, mistakes were made. Those in the armed services not being forced into the DHQS spent the first two years tweaking the Great Lakes Line according to new intel and logistical demands. One such instance occurred on the St. Louis River. Initially, the military fortified a small island in an area where the river forked and came back together. The hope had been to fortify the Western bank with a fence, then use the island and the eastern bank as two emergency fallback positions. As more mobs kept stumbling into the area, Chicago Command made the call to abandon construction on the western bank. The garrison on the island was to keep construction on the eastern back covered from attack until the fence was completed. Once finished, the island garrison would recede behind the wall and abandon the island to the Loss. The island contained almost nothing except a single fishing shack. Little more than a wooden hut, the building was owned by a man named Mason Highbury. It was the last piece of property he owned that hadn’t been given up to the Loss. He’d lost millions in the Crash, along with his entire family, and now he was going to lose his little shack. The story had a lot of pathos. In order to navigate the atrophied capillaries of sympathy in the Recession, nothing but a tearjerker would do, but it still wouldn’t have been enough without juice. Luckily, Highbury’s sympathizers had big, big pockets.

Corporate Appeals

For all the tragedy that plagued his life, Mason Highbury had been blessed in one very big way: he was the retired CFO for the

largest bioengineering corporation in the world. Alosine was one of the few agricultural giants to survive the Crash largely unscathed, and it had busied itself ever since trying to snatch up every government contract possible. They also recognized the currency problems the Recession was engineering for itself and that the billion dollar contracts they were being granted for the development of drone farming and new crops might soon not be worth the paper they were printed on. For months, executives had been trying to play a longer game. They didn’t want payment in money; they wanted salvage rights to abandoned land and asset seizure whenever the Loss was reclaimed. The legal status of such property was a complete unknown. The unprecedented situation kept the government from promising anything except money, which made Alosine demand more to counter risk, which led to printing more money, which led to more risk, etc. Alosine knew the situation was untenable, but they couldn’t find a way to break the stalemate until one of their former employees lost his fishing shack. The shack and surrounding acres had been Highbury’s property all through the Crash. Now it was being declared Loss as a result of redrawing lines on the map. But if the government could declare eminent domain and seize Highbury’s land, what was to stop them from doing the same for everything west of the Mississippi? What, if anything, was there to stop the DHQS from stealing 65% of the country once the last casualty rotted to dust? Was the Blight being used as an excuse to establish a kleptocratic military junta? Though Alosine would pitch him as such, Highbury wasn’t some yeoman farmer divested of his last possession by an evil bureaucracy. He was a bargaining chip being used by a soulless corporation. If the courts ignored the case, Alosine had the juice to make a big stink about it. With every denied appeal, they threatened to ruin the legitimacy of the new Recession government. If courts

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listened, Alosine got a platform to demand its payment in reclamation property. By the time it got to the Supreme Court, Alosine had partnered with the legal departments from a dozen other corporate entities. They created their own press division to cover the trial. Highbury was a puppet for interests salivating at the idea of reclaiming the Loss for their own.

CrIsIs of ConfIdence

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Alosine and the rest had enough juice to push a message without the cooperation of the nationalized news services. They had enough clout to counter official propaganda and, more importantly, they were better at it. As the Highbury v. USA moved through the courts, their simple message got louder and louder. The good times will never return. Everything you’ve ever worked for belongs to them now. By the time Highbury had to appeal the decision to the Illinois Supreme Court, riots

in Free Parking had surpassed those seen right after the Crash. The destruction of all personal property was the straw breaking the back of the American people. Up until that point, most had labored in the hopes that, one day, things would get back to normal. The Highbury case threatened to break that delicate delusion, and it became very clear that if the Federal Supreme Court didn’t hear the case, the Recession was set to tear itself apart from the inside. The number one tactic in legal warfare is stalling. The government did its best to drag the case out as long as possible, but pushing the trial date back didn’t calm the civil unrest; it merely delayed the slide into full-blown revolution. Alosine had forced their hand. To get out of the situation, the Recession government had weeks to resolve a myriad of legal conflicts far more pernicious than the ownership of a fishing shack.

Related PolIcy Struggles

Alosine’s work spinning the Highbury case was masterful, but no one started throwing Molotovs because they wanted some retiree to have a place to store his rod. Highbury was significant only in that it popped the bubble of the Recession’s denial. The Valet crime, the unemployment, the Immune hunters, the Latent threat — all of it had been tolerated based on this unjustifiable hope for the future. As a few lines of legalese threatened to make reclaiming the old days impossible, people began to snap. Millions in the car camps had been literally stripped naked when they came to the Recession, only to be starved, enslaved, and preyed upon. They watched their Immune loved ones get deboned and their Latent neighbors imprisoned. And now they learned the Blight could end tomorrow, and they still wouldn’t have a home to go back to? A lot more car camps tore themselves apart with rioting and Canadian insurgency groups held a hell of recruitment drive during the trial. There were also a series of more cerebral concerns tied up in the Highbury case. First off, the census data had been rendered useless. Surviving states could only guess at their population and demographics. Free Parking and migration had thrown congressional districts into complete disarray. It was nearly impossible to run a coherent election because no one knew who their base was, where they were located, or what they believed. Hell, no one knew how many people needed to be elected to state and federal positions. How was Congress to be run when the entire population of 22 states was declared dead or migrated? Did they need to have special elections for state officials killed in the Crash? If so, who would vote them in? What about the legislators that did escape to the Recession? Did the Recession cast them out of power and wait around while they built personal factions for an upcoming civil war? Next were monetary concerns. How were taxes to be collected? What kind of income

could even be expected? How many people, exactly, were actually employed? How could the government cut taxes to stimulate growth whilst trying to fund an entirely new branch of the military? How could they raise taxes when millions couldn’t even feed themselves? Nearly 50% of the human population was dead. Who got their stuff? Their relatives? Which relatives were still alive? Even if you knew who survived, how would you find them? Did a Will still count if the state that issued it no longer existed? What if there were no living relatives? Did property go to the government through probate? That would only mean a few million more cases than the court system was ever designed to handle. How would that property be distributed? What about people that weren’t dead, but were homo sacer? What was to stop people from declaring each other quarantine breakers for the sole purpose of stealing reclamation rights? How could you prove you’d escaped the West when the government didn’t even have census data? What happened if your inheritance got used or destroyed by an

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enclave before the Loss was reclaimed? Was the government responsible for compensation because they were the ones that separated you from your property? Were the homo sacer responsible for the theft? How do you prosecute a dead person? What if the DHQS commandeers the property? Since their soldiers are still legally considered people, now is compensation required? What’s the blue book value for a car abandoned on a Utah interstate for five years with a casualty still strapped into the back seat? What about the Immune? And the Latent? Did they retain rights to their possessions, or was everything lost upon diagnosis? If the Latents retained property rights, what about Vectors and casualties? Do we need to go put one between grandma’s eyes before we can legally sell her house?

Bounty

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The fix was in on the Highbury case. No one in the new government wanted to wrap up their condemnation of Hunter only to be unseated by an angry, confused revolution. The Supreme Court case was delayed only long enough to get a system in place that would appease the masses. Put simply, the ruling said the following: The government maintained absolute authority to set quarantine zones. However, if you owned something before the Crash, you owned it once the quarantine ended. The government would seize any property left unclaimed after the reclamation. Determining what belonged to whom was now the responsibility of the DHQS. The Highbury decision essentially set up the DHQS to institute the bounty system, incentivizing the populace to help recover vital census data and stake claims. Either way, the new currency was announced an hour before the Supreme Court even made the verdict public. The populace slipped back into the delusion that their lives before the Crash mattered, and the sitting government was saved. It also created the Red Market overnight, but we may never know if that was

the best they could do on short notice or their plan to get the Loss to do their job for them.

How It Works

Bounty is exactly what it claims to be: it’s a bounty paid by the US government for information on its citizens. Before the Crash, every state in the union used embedded RFID and coded microchips in their IDs. Social security cards, driver’s licenses, voter registration cards, and a half dozen other documents followed suit. Specialty print requirements combined with a unique digital signature in the chips made forgery nearly impossible. In short, American IDs could be trusted as the real deal. And most people had their IDs on them. If they’d been in the Recession for the entirety of the Crash, proving their identity was easy. Most who had fled after the Whisper carried their wallets as well. Even if they’d been stripped in a cattle chute, their old IDs could be recovered fairly easily by DHQS excursions across the river. Some casualties still even had their licenses on them; those cards could be collected as proof of death whenever they wandered too close to a fortified bridge or the Great Lakes Line. The bounty system turned old IDs into a defacto currency. People that turned in their old IDs received a new card and a fixed amount of cash for every old government document. As a result, the census data would slowly stabilize and the DHQS could begin cross-referencing proof of life with digitized property tax records. Any lost data necessary for such cross-referencing earned an even greater reward. In exchange, citizens received a small stimulus and felt more secure about their prospects in the post-Crash economy. For every ID collected off casualties without listed heirs, the DHQS could lay claim to that person’s property, exchange its estimated salvage value with corporations like Alosine for needed work, and use the remainder to fuel bounty payouts to the populace. And DHQS was pretty much the only organization with access to the proof of death bounty,

as they were the only organization with a mandate to operate over the border. Interestingly, the stability of the bounty system only works because of the wealth inequality present in pre-Crash America. The government pays out at a rate slightly lower than the average property rate of one preCrash adult, roughly equivalent to the scrap price of an average car and the possessions in a one-bedroom apartment. Giving out that much value in exchange for every ID would quickly bankrupt the government, but DHQS bounty collection offsets the costs. For every 99 casualties that died paupers, one corpse wanders too near the fence and ends up having owned a chain of stores or hundreds of acres of land. Proof of death and a lack of heirs for one big fish funds the rest of the program because now the government can sell salvage rights to that property. In addition to preventing the collapse of civil order, bounty corrected the hyperinflation problem by cementing a currency value to an old-world standard of physical, confirmable assets. As a currency, it’s essentially deflationary. While the value of one bounty is still much greater than that of the ration dollar or US dollar, the value of a bounty today pales in comparison to the value on Day One. They aren’t printing any more of the old IDs, so every bounty turned in deflates the value of the next. The value of the goods that ID represents also decreases with every year the Loss goes unreclaimed. This constantly falling value, tied as it is through exchange with ration and US dollars, has corrected the hyperinflation caused by over-printing currency in the early days of the Recession. But if there is a mint for bounty, it’s the casualty-infested Loss. Bounty may have saved the nation, but it also essentially turned our prison into a bank vault.

The Loss Monopoly

I waffle on my opinion of the bounty system. Some days I can’t believe how stupid the DHQS could have been to give people like us such a resource. Other days, I literally can’t

believe the DHQS is that stupid, and I feel like all of us — especially the Moths — are being played. On the one hand, the Recession had no real way to guess how many of us were alive out here. I limit access to the LifeLines forums pretty fanatically, and even I’m shocked at the tenacity and sheer number of enclaves out here in the Loss. It’s possible the DHQS figured it would fund proof of life payouts with proof of death bounty seizures because only the DHQS would have access to the latter. By the time it occurred to them that there was about a million more homo sacer than they had imagined, it was too late. They’d already given us a currency through which we could trade with the Recession for vital supplies, and correcting the mistake would have meant the same anarchy caused by Highbury v. USA. On the other hand, if the DHQS was trying to get the Loss to do their job for them, I can’t think of a scheme more elegant than bounty. Nowadays, Takers don’t just kill Cs to keep the homestead safe; pulling cards is the entire business model. Reclamation is fucking impossible in my lifetime. It’s a goddamn logistical nightmare only possible through dreams and magical thinking. It’s the work of generations, not the work of a single term limit. So why not get the people already declared dead to start the work for you? Most people never pull enough bounty to do more than perpetuate their own suffering, but every dead C is one the Recession never has to deal with. Bounty could just be a trick to keep us fighting each other and clearing the dead rather than forming an army to storm the border. Bureaucratic fuck-up or hopeless conspiracy, the fact remains that the Loss has no shortage of bounty. We have the dead folks carrying it, all the stuff it’s meant to represent, and all the proof as to who it belongs.

ConversIon and Bounty HoardIng

Paradoxically, the Loss doesn’t turn in the majority of its bounty. They hoard it and watch the price of the few who do.

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The value of an ID as a universal unit of exchange between enclaves is far greater than the one time payment received for turning it in. For a while there, every enclave was inventing its own economy, and navigating the differences made essential trade a pain in the ass. With the DHQS insuring the bounty as a consistent measurement of value, trade among enclaves became much easier. A bounty exchanged out in the Loss can be reearned and traded again, but put it on a drone headed to the Recession? That’s value you’re never going to see again. Even though it might seem like turning bounty in permanently is the only way to deal with the Recession, even then we tend to keep the cards in rotation. For instance, one bounty could keep a family in Free Parking fed for a week, but the smart move for them is to pool cards and hire work over the border. Lets say all the families in a tent put together fifty bounty and hire a Taker group to recover... I don’t know... a truck full of bicycles from the Loss. They spend 40 on the crew and 10 to bribe a DHQS guard to let them across a bridge. Now they’ve got hundred rusty bicycles that cost them nothing to make. They sell each one for two bounty a piece, netting 150 bounty in profit. That’s enough money to get some of them out of Free Parking forever, or they could re-invest and steal some more assets from the Loss. Meanwhile, that Taker crew is using their 40 bounty to buy food, medicine, and ammo from enclaves too deep in the Loss to trade with the border, all the while collecting more off casualties put down along the way. Those enclaves trade with enclaves even further to the West, who in turn funnel goods and more recovered bounty back East. The value of an ID is just too good to burn on the DHQS, which is why the value of bounty has remained largely stable for the last two years. It’s gotten to the point that most enclaves have their own banks where bounty can be exchanged for crypto currency. The crypto currencies — or just “crypt,” as we call it — trade easily with Recession interests,

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and the value remains stable so long as the exchanges maintain the value of crypt to the number of IDs in their vault. Essentially, it’s the gold standard, except we mine dead people instead of rocks.

The Taker’s Role

The DHQS and the Recession managed to get their little dystopia stable enough to selfperpetuate, but in doing so they accidentally enfranchised some of the people they’d left to die along the way. Life in the Loss had by no means become easy, but the influx of capital and essential goods facilitated by bounty meant death was no longer a certainty. As long as the fences stayed up, enclaves could find a niche within the market by selling their wasteland as a futures commodity. It wasn’t enough to get most people out of the grinding poverty and constant danger of the Loss. Bounty usually just made suffering more sustainable. Still, one group was uniquely placed to exploit the new situation. Whatever amounted to political and economic power out here had always rested with Takers, but bounty only lived over the fence. The willingness to risk your ass going over to get it became more valuable than ever before.

Post-Apocalypse Is PrIvIlege

The desire to unplug, the fantasy escape from that endless swell of items on a to-do list, the fruitless longing for simplification — we all felt that before the Crash. But we weren’t so dumb as to think we’d have the willpower to go off and live in the woods by choice. Our resolve would cave the second we got a new text notification about someone liking our selfies. So we fantasized about some dashing young disaster coming along to whisk us away from our own weakness. Nobody in the Loss thinks that way now. There ain’t nothing simple about living in a world without safety nets. We don’t just go hunt in the woods for sport and wait patiently for crops to grow while, I don’t know, whittling? Everything out here is trying to kill

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us, including each other. It’s not as if most of us can forget antibiotics exist when our kids get sick. We don’t resign their deaths to the gods. You know about every little thing in the old world that could help you, but the list of tasks required to get them is now herculean. There is no going back to some more primitive, simpler time; it never existed. Stripped of pre-Crash resources, life becomes savage, short, and more complex than imaginable. I’d do anything to go back to the days where my idea of baggage was ex-boyfriends and not the faces of people I’ve killed. A lot of Recession pundits like to think they’re clever by calling the modern condition a “post-apocalyptic society.” Even the ones sympathetic to the Loss like to praise our strength for being able to survive in a wasteland. Aint nothing “post” about this shit. Ain’t a goddamn thing about it over and done. Their wasteland is our world. Their “fate worse than death” is my fucking life.

LIfeLInes

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I’m not going to lie and say everyone took to the Loss with a charitable attitude, but the Recession’s image of desperate scavengers killing each other for scraps the second things got bad falls short of reality. Cooperation is the only reason many survived after the amputation, and everybody that’s still around five years later owes their life to the alliances forged in those early days. The occasional gunfight with competing operations, raiders, and believer cults is to be expected, but the same can be said for folks across the border. Most of the time, folks take care of each other when they’re able. After the battle for Ubiq City, my first priority was to make sure people were able. Turns out 5.56 rounds don’t do wonders for servers, and the fight between Traitor’s men and the loyalists had raged across the campus for three days. The DAO had kept Ubiq from going dark, but only barely. Streaming video had been cut to save bandwidth and the

algorithm was disabling audio features by the time I got back on a terminal, trying to save what resources it had left for distributing text packets across the Stratostructure. With the 3D printers and enough time, I’d be able to bring the network back up to near full-speed and user load, but it was going to take me months of work. People out there needed help right then, and it sure as shit wasn’t coming from the Hunter administration. I needed to migrate all the users screaming for help onto a resource-cheap platform that could let them find each other easily, but I couldn’t make it anything too high profile. Some Recession network architecture was coming back online, and if everyone’s favorite social media site suddenly became cluttered with people asking how to make homemade landmines, the government might decide piggybacking Ubiq wasn’t worth the scandal and send a drone strike our way. So it had to be something readily available, completely ignored, and broadcasting packets not much more advanced than SMS messaging. So that’s how we got on LifeLines. Before the Crash, LifeLines was the unholy marriage of spam, data mining, and a pyramid scheme. People would lose their jobs in the Education Default, then click one of those terrible emails we all used to get: “So-andso wants to connect on LifeLines!” They’d fill out the resume, upload some boring-ass portrait in business attire, and wait for the offers to never roll in. LifeLines tantalized the desperate with offers to send their resumes to “highly-placed” executives... but only if they invited all their friends first. The whole site was shitty adware dressed up like a job fair. When the Recession finally got some limited connectivity back, most people weren’t surprised to see LifeLines email still pouring into their spam folders. Most had set-up autodelete and didn’t even see them. Little did they know I’d changed the site completely. The company had been based in Ontario, so anybody working for LifeLines was dead. Thankfully, they’d paid a pretty penny a few years earlier to house their program

on campus for increased connectivity, and the data had managed to survive the war. I hacked in for admin privileges, stripped the site of pretty much everything save raw text transmission and used their massive email lists to start contacting folks. Anyone with Ubiq Specs reporting a GPS location outside a safe zone had the text of the average LifeLines spam auto-replaced with an offer to join a special forum. If you were in the Loss, I made sure the message got past most filters and got people talking to each other. It seems silly now — everybody knows the Moths infested the corpse of a dead professional networking site in order to coordinate survival. With functionality pretty much restored, it has become just another social network for Takers. But at the time, nobody in Ubiq City knew if holding the internet hostage was going to be enough to keep us alive. We had to coordinate discreetly and that’s the best I could come up with on short notice. Btw... GNAT WOULD LIKE TO CONNECT WITH YOU ON LIFELINES!

SuIcIde by Scruple

I’ll admit I put Ubiq’s needs first. If the network caved, the whole Loss would be deaf and blind. The Recession wouldn’t have to worry about pretending we were dead for very long if I couldn’t keep the DAO running. There were less than thirty Marine Raiders and Ubiq employees left alive after the battle. There were hundreds of urgent repairs needed within the network alone. Meanwhile, Traitor had holes in the fencing and buildings that had to be patched, not to mention the need to transform a corporate ruin into a home that could sustain us. We needed bodies ASAP. So, for everyone passing through Colorado, I used LifeLines for its intended purpose: collecting resumes. Anybody with programming or tech support skills. Anyone with bullets or food or water. I cobbled together a list of everything we needed, prioritized it, and promised shelter to anyone

that could provide. I called the offer “Suicide by Scruple.” Folks could waste their lives trying to run the border, or they could die out here with the rest of us, trying to help each other. Of the thousands of Moths in the city and spread around the Loss, the majority of them came to us in the first weeks through those LifeLines ads. Sadly, not everyone had the means to climb the Rockies with casualties chasing them the whole way, but it’s not as if cooperation and communalism were my patented ideas. All over the Loss, people used the forums to coordinate defenses against the dead.

EstablIshment of the Enclaves

An enclave doesn’t start out as a complex community. It starts as a simple pact. Everybody who enclaved up in those first few months agreed to a very simple deal: trade your skills and supplies for some walls to hide behind. Urban planning reverted to its simplest form: shelter against an entire world trying to destroy your species. Cities designed for siege was the new model, and people built on the bones of capitalism’s old fortifications. Defenses are a must for any enclave, but they’re entirely dependent upon what could be secured in a matter of weeks after the Crash. Some places started based around stashes of salvageable loot, like malls and online retail distribution warehouses. Other places smartly prioritized sustainability and looked for places with arable land inside a fence, which is where all those college quads and greenhouse operations come from. Some even anticipated the trade that would define us and founded communities atop commodities, leading to survivors taking over weapon manufactures and entire fracking operations. Beyond the central logic of defense, each enclave is unique. Capitalism usually finds a place — if only because we were out of ideas — but pretty much any social structure or demographic you can imagine has founded its own enclave. People weren’t exactly enamored with the status quo after it left them to die, so the first new ideology to come

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along usually sufficed. There are democratic socialist enclaves located next door to fascist dictatorships. Secular councils trade with believer theocracies. Anything goes. Inside the enclaves, people do what they’ve always done together: eat, sleep, fuck, gossip, worry, betray, support. Between enclaves, the little city-states make war and peace, screwing each other as conscious allows and circumstances demand. It’s just like the world before the Crash, albeit more desperate and earnest than before.

The FIrst Takers

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Once they’d fended off the casualties, every enclave had to face an even more tireless monster: scarcity. Securing a simple fence-line, healthcare, agriculture, water infrastructure, energy production — every enclave seeks to become a world onto itself, and when that inevitably proves impossible, they have to find ways to trade and scavenge for their unmet needs. No matter how well prepared people were, there was always going to be some necessity outside the fence. Being crazy enough to go over the wall and fetch it became the Loss’s most indispensable occupation. The first Takers weren’t running crews for business. Hell, they weren’t even called “Takers” yet: they were volunteers for suicide missions. But when some started coming back — again and again, job after job — it became clear the rewards might be worth the risks. Takers brought back medicine that saved the lives of children. They killed raiders and Vectors threatening to butcher the whole enclave. They put food on the tables of the starving. Gratitude took the form of payment, privileges, and eventually power. Not many “original Takers” have been working the Loss for all five years. They’re either dead, escaped to the Recession, or running the whole enclave by now. We Moths may be lost for life — the grudge against my Whisper will never be forgotten — but it soon became apparent that if anyone had the leverage to get themselves out of here, it was

the ones crazy and desperate enough to chase work over the fence. The occupation was still evolving within the first year, deciding whether it wanted to stay suicidal altruism or morph into the more cynical trade we know today. The tipping point, as always, came from the Recession. Their fumbling attempts get their shit together built the utterly fucked system we live in today.

The RelatIve PosItIons

The Loss, believe it or not, operates primarily as an information economy. Bounty is nothing more than a standardized price for information on a human life. Documents that have an even higher payout — such as tax records, deeds, wills, etc. — merely contain more information. Without this trade, the almost religious faith the Recession has in reclamation couldn’t sustain itself, and the fallout from their collapse would spell the end of every enclave on the continent. Our version of the real estate sector takes the form of jobs that secure the salvage claims of Recession businesses. New corporations only grow through the promise of domination in the reclaimed US. We verify their claims for the future with a price in the present. The Loss also has a surplus of raw materials, waiting around to be salvaged, smuggled, and sold to those with the means of production. The depressed economy of the Recession wouldn’t have been able to spawn what little business growth it has without the discount provided by our looting. In contrast, the Loss’s needs are simple: food, water, drugs, and bullets. We must constantly fight against the scarcity and frailty that defines the human condition, even as we combat the creatures that threaten to wipe out the species. Yet manufacturing and agriculture are about the only things going well for citizens in the Recession, and they’re happy to smuggle us life-saving goods at an enormous mark-up. The Loss also suffers from a lack of necessary human vices, especially when they’re the only things keeping us sane. We

seek the relief of entertainment we can’t produce and illicit substances we don’t have. Again, the Recession makes more opiates for its masses than it could ever use, and it’s happy to numb us back into its service. Lastly, we need out. There is nothing in higher demand than an escape from the Blight. The Recession is the only place that can provide this, but they make us pay dearly for it. Perhaps out of fear or greed, though I suspect they really just resent how much they need us. In short, everyone in the Loss is stuck in a macro-version of the same situation the Moths live in: we hold the Recession’s excesses hostage in exchange for another day of primitive survival.

Red Market

On LifeLines, we call the trade “The Red Market.” A “red market” had multiple definitions before the Crash. It was a colloquial name in law enforcement for any market that dealt with human flesh or human beings. In libertarian circles, it refers to a sector of the economy that creates no wealth, instead using overt violence to leech wealth from others. Sociologically, a red market refers to a system where all trade is forbidden by the state, but whose participants cannot be prosecuted least the state admit such taboo trade exists. Everything a Taker does is illegal... or it would be if we weren’t already legally dead. Takers scavenge from the dead. Takers demand tribute from the living. Takers destroy. We do not create. And as for trading in human flesh? Yeah, we do that too. We trade our own bodies and souls for little pieces of plastic carrying the faces of dead people.

turned to in times of greatest sorrow. The bravest among us who ushered the stubborn dead into the next world. But that perception shifted once bounty became a thing. Now, becoming a Taker wasn’t just something you did because a job needed doing. Risking your ass over the fence could secure a hell of a lot more than extra rations. The smart and the swift could actually earn enough to buy their way out. It didn’t have to be suicide by scruple anymore. Treasure lived over the fence, and there was enough of it to buy a ticket out of hell. The DHQS noticed this and wasted no time exploiting the resentment online. And for once, the DHQS propaganda was right. Takers weren’t heroes anymore; they were opportunists. They were war profiteers who extorted the desperation of their neighbors so they might one day abandon them. They profited from the pain of the Loss and used the funds to buy themselves a life of luxury even some in the Recession would envy. There were a lot of shitty crews out there who were merely Takers, stealing from those most in need to save themselves. So which is it? Martyrs or thieves? Well, I’m a Taker. I’ve been over the fence more times than I can count. I’ll keep going as long as UCity needs me. All I can say is, while both definitions may be true, a Taker can only hold one in her heart at a time. You’ve got to decide why you’re walking out that gate if you ever hope to walk back inside it. You’ve got to decide why you’re out there, or the Loss will decide for you. Do you survive because people need you, or do you survive because you’re owed a life better than this? I’ve seen some badass crews of both persuasions survive shit that would kill most to contemplate. But if you don’t know? If you don’t know why you should keep running and fighting, you won’t.

Takers: The Name Evolved

Before bounty, the perception of Takers was almost universally positive. They were the undertakers: women and men who bore the burden of death. The ones the community

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THE LOSS

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A GuIde

All this writing stirred some things better left settled. I’m taking some time for self-care and passing this part off to BanHammer. Ban’s not real active on LifeLines, so some of you non-Moths might not be familiar with his role in the crew. Those that are familiar are probably just surprised he’s going to do something with a keyboard besides murder something with it… which I’ve seen him do before. Twice. I met Ban midway through the third year. By then, it was becoming clear this was the new normal. Raiders weren’t probing the perimeter as often, but we were still under periodic attack. Every couple of months, the scraps of some desperate gang would throw themselves at the fence, looking to steal, cannibalize, take over, etc. — whatever the hell passes for motivation after the Loss completely hollows you out. Sometimes, I think they came to UCity just to get shot. We look kinda like civilization, and death was worth proving we weren’t a mirage. But I don’t play mercy no more. We obliged all death wishes. Ban’s was the first group clever enough to get inside, and while the majority was killed in minutes, one of them got away. Over the course of three days, he murdered four soldiers. Each was bludgeoned to death with a heavy object — slowly, one limb at a time — but none of their bunkmates had heard anything. Each was found the next morning in a broken tangle of limbs, hanging from the fence and being nibbled on by casualties. By day four, he burned a server farm to the ground. He started a minor Vector outbreak in a refugee settlement and nearly took all of Ubiq down with the ensuing riot. By the time we finally cornered him, he’d fled into the utility tunnels under the geothermal plant. We called for his surrender over the PA. I lied and promised we wouldn’t kill him. A voice echoing from the darkness promised to literally eat me. Thankfully, Hipster had signed on by then.

She rushed to stop us raiding the tunnels. Through Ubiq tracking data and some clever data sniffing on LifeLines, she’d found out one of our crews had sexually assaulted a woman while out on their last contract. They were new recruits. I’d never met or vetted them. The dumbasses had called her a “crazy LALA bitch” in a thread dedicated to the deed. Bragged about killing her afterwards. On the forums. Like I’d never find out. She must have been part of the invader’s tribe. I deduced this because the majority of the offenders were now folded into bloody pretzels and displayed around my city. After I personally gave the last surviving rapist a hollow-point severance package, Hipster urged me to think long term. We had already lost a lot of people to whatever was in those tunnels. Getting revenge for those few who didn’t deserve the raider’s wrath meant losing more innocents and destroying irreplaceable equipment. She urged me to let her go talk to whatever lurked in the tunnels. Think long term, she’d said. Profit from Loss. After I told her no, she snuck in and did it anyway. A couple hours later, Hipster emerges... trailing behind her one of the largest, scariest slabs of infected flesh I’ve ever seen. I just remember this pale wall of bite scars, muscle, and Blight veins emerging from the earth. He carried a giant sledgehammer like it was a toothpick. The sight of him seemed to promise that a week’s killing spree in UCity had been an example of his best behavior. I know that Banhammer can be difficult to swallow at times. He makes it easy to dismiss him as crazy. Maybe he is, but I couldn’t give a shit. On-the-job deaths have been cut in half since he started pulling jobs with us. He reads the Loss like no one else I’ve ever seen. He pulls cards as fast as Traitor on full auto, with all the cost of a hammer swing. Out here, we take crazy if it comes with a side of results. See, Ban never ‘claved up. He only hangs around UCity because we’re his new “tribe.” He’ll answer his specs when there’s a job, and he might spend a day or two trading Latent-

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side, but otherwise, he’s just out there. All the time. Your first-gen Taker is a tourist by comparison. He’s seen more Loss on his own two feet than every drone in the DHQS. He’s survived more days IRL (In Real Loss, noob) than maybe any human being alive. It’s all he knows; it’s all that’s left. So that’s why Ban is the only one to write the guidebook. Every Bait baby wannabe wants to grow up to be like him. Any real Taker hopes to die before they become him. The thread is Ban’s now. He better fill it if he expects me to deliver his rations this month. If you expect to survive, you better pay attention and stay respectful in the comments.

something worthy to grow. The man died. I am his casualty. Those that would call me Latent would also call me mad. Perhaps they are right... but the fool that once thought words held weight I have long since consumed. The Loss will decide for us all. It will write the truth in the blood of the weak. It always has, even before it was named. There is no country but the Loss; no citizens save those it finds worthy.

Banhammer

Banhammer is a stupid name. But Gnat gave it to me. She is alpha, so it is done. There was a man that came before Banhammer. It had a name too. The name mattered as little as the man. And the man did so love to think of itself as a MAN. As if that mattered. As if thinking made things so. It defined itself by reflections: in mirrors, in eyes, in whispered words. It thought shadows sufficient to craft a self. It loved to dress up like what it thought was a man. It preened, lifting hunks of metal and calling it strength. It had sex and confused it for conquest. It consumed and called its hunger “cunning.” It lived not a single true day, called this blindness “discipline.” When the monsters came, it saw only opportunity: to live like the movies, to prove worth it suspected it lacked, to parade around its preened body and be seen as more by the reflections. Once outside, the man died like what it always was: a dumb animal, harried by a pack of the world’s woes. From that carcass, I was born. My mother was the pain of the Blight crawling across my nerves like millipedes. My father’s seed came from the teeth of the dead. You would call me Latent, but know that I was Chosen. The new god tore away the man’s flesh in hunks, providing space for

The greatest talents have been frequently misapplied and have produced evil proportionate to the extent of their powers. Both reason and revelation seem to assure us that such minds will be condemned to eternal death, but while on earth, these vicious instruments performed their part in the great mass of impressions, by the disgust and abhorrence which they excited. -Thomas Malthus

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Lost Places

All places have their seasons. To ascribe malice to a land is to position yourself poorly within it. This is a truth of the Loss. Its delights can kill. Its tortures can redeem. A Taker’s understanding is the only mediator.

Enclaves

Enclaves are haphazard communities assembled to escape the horrors of the Loss. They always fail, to some degree. When they do not burn or descend into Vector orgy, the most an enclave can hope for is to hold the savage tide at bay. The Loss always withholds some of its gifts from those that hide from it, and someone must always leave to fetch them. Outside, the Loss reaps whom it will; the rest flourish and trade. Those left inside leech survival from the vitality of these Takers.

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Most end up like Gnat; they allow the weak to feed from the surplus of their strength. Others, like myself, see little sense in such arrangements. Enclaves are the most common landmarks in the Loss. Initially, their locations were random, based solely around defenses and resources. Their tribes were comprised of whoever happened nearby, joined only by desperation and geography. But after five years, the enclaves that remain have made their worth plain. Their walls weathered stampedes of dead. Their trade routes connected. Economies stabilized. New orders and belief were forged by tragedy, and they united people by more than a border. I have little use for an enclave, but despite my aversion, I have travelled to many: trading, raiding, wandering. I shall speak of a few, but expect nothing save variety. Each enclave

is unique, a distinct scar upon the face of the Loss. Those that learn the scar’s shape and story are rewarded like lovers. Those that disrespect the wounds invite the same savagery that made them. Shaped by its pain, the enclaves now try to shape the Loss with their resolve. They fail, but they fail nobly.

UbIq CIty

The mountain compound was built like a fortress before it became one: sheer cliffs on two sides, frequent winter storms, winding roads with elevated firing positions, a mile-wide kill-zone between tree line and gate, reinforced fencing topped with razor wire, plus self-contained electric and water systems. Ubiq City was supposedly designed to protect against corporate spies and cater

to the boy-king’s love of snowboarding, but I’ve invaded Recession military positions with worse defenses. Palbicke was either paranoid or protecting some secret forgotten since his disappearance. Traitor made a valiant attempt improving the system. The woods are littered with traps and concealed surveillance, and he fenced in the outer buildings originally left outside the perimeter. When my tribe and I showed him the weaknesses of his strategy, he adapted rather than deny the flaws. He would make his death a challenge. It is all the Loss or myself can ask of a man. My original assault depended on UCity’s own prejudice to destroy it. Palbicke had placed small businesses and apartment buildings lower on the slope, intending it as a consumerist playground for his workers. These dwellings were apparently still

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desirable and, once reincorporated into the perimeter, drew the most vital staff to the vulnerable perimeter. This is where I found my victims. I almost caused a total outbreak by spitting in one of their cups. Since then, all Latents have been moved to the exterior ring and rehoused in the most lavish dwellings. I see this as a sign of respect to their rights as Chosen; Gnat calls it defense. Quarantine housing is peppered amongst clean blocks. Any invasion is likely to cause instant Vector incursion, complicating further assault and allowing defenders to fallback in the confusion. This outer-ring is called Latentside, and it is the first sight those desperate to join the Moths see. Further up the slope, the original corporate compound houses the power plant, server farms, satellite dishes, and other vital functions. Full-time Moths live here in office cubicles converted into cramped dorms. I’m told this is “uncomfortable” by the weak herd of programmers that live and work there. They “suffer” the situation because it keeps vital infrastructure secure inside a fallback position. The sensitive computing equipment also means each office building can be sealed hermetically against a siege. If only this security would stop them whining about the infected now living in their precious loft apartments.... In the disused corporate parks dotting the middle ring, Traitor trains new Moths before sending them out to work in other enclaves. The fact that UCity sends out crews to compete with freelance Takers on LifeLines is not something Gnat is comfortable with, but Traitor calls the trainees his insurgency. Hipster calls it franchising. I, as Chosen, know infection when I see it. Regardless of label, each official Moth crew sends bounty, supplies, and intelligence back to the nest. Gnat would feign scorn my raider days. Her army exists to draw tribute like any other. The upper ring is simply called “the peak.” The 3D printer factories reside there, as well as the Aloft launch pad and the primary control room. Only Gnat, Hipster, and their

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chosen underlings are permitted at the peak. This is to keep “the insurance” secure, which I am told is a failsafe that will brick every server in the sky if the city is ever to fall. It may be a bluff. If so, it is one the DHQS continues to believe. Every day the Recession does not smite the mountainside with missiles is a testament to their weakness. They would rather let the Moths continue sharpening their knives than risk the loss of texting and cat videos. It is why I like this place. They treat the Chosen well, and the city stands as a constant reminder of how weak most humans really are. The Crash shall finish one day, and all shall be Loss. From this mountaintop, I shall watch the sinew spread and infect the land.

Leper

The only other enclave I’ve ever called home is Leper. It is the Chosen city, but as with all things, the Loss demanded bloody payment for its gifts. Leper started as “Colony #1,” an experiment from the fledgling days of the DHQS. It was the first of many forays into the slavery that is “productive quarantine.” The idea was to get Latents as far away from the Recession as possible. The first military unit of the new order was designed for this express purpose. Comprised of tactical engineers, veteran soldiers, and simpleminded prison guards, they rounded up the few naturals that survived the announcement and the hundreds of Latents they’d made with Supressin experiments, then sent them West on a death march. Colony #1 was a nomadic slave camp. Well-armed vehicles full of cleans would flank a desperate column of Latent men, women, and children on a death march around the Midwest. Those that fell behind were shot or euthanized via bomb collar: a small charge of plastic explosive situated above the spine that all prisoners had to wear. When they reached fertile ground, the soldiers would erect temporary defenses. The engineers would set about assembling drone-farming

equipment to feed the hungry weaklings in the Recession. Meanwhile, the guards pushed the Latents outside to construct the sheds and solar rechargers that would house the machines. Sometimes, the snipers would pick off casualties before they reached the work crews. Mostly, they made bets on who would survive as they watched the Chosen fight the dead with shovels, picks... hammers. Any Lost unfortunate enough to cross Colony #1 were either shot or forcibly turned Latent using the DHQS’s copious supply of Supressin. Enclaves that gave up their Latents peacefully were allowed to survive; they burned the rest to the ground and mass injected the survivors. It kept the labor pool steady despite the constant losses. At night, escape attempts were announced with the pop of a collar’s explosion and the thud of a corpse. They eventually strayed too far. In the push further and further West, fresh troops and resupply got scarcer. The high-ranking slavers begged to turn around, but the Recession’s appetite for grain is as insatiable as any casualty. The convoy stretched into a valley of lead-lined hills where the collar remotes were not reliable, and the guards stretched the patience of the Chosen until death seemed a reward. The uprising was bloodier than any Vector outbreak during the Crash. I’ll never forget that glorious day. Today, Leper accepts only Latents and Immunes within its ever-migrating camp. Never again shall any inhabitant be bound by the cage called quarantine. While the Immune are not sold or predated upon, their cleanliness makes them the underclass. They know the kiss of the Blight without the mark of its black love, so their duty matches their flesh; they are sent out as diplomats to the other cleans, protecting the Chosen from the prejudice of the Lost and the location of Leper from all who wish it harm. The Immunes arrange Leper’s trades of surplus Supressin, military armaments, and services only fit for Latent-kin. In return, the Chosen protect the blue-veins.

Not all in Leper see their latency is a gift from the Loss — so deeply have they swallowed the DHQS’s chains — but the enclave remains the wandering mecca of my faith. I would be there now, were it not for the ruling council. My role in the uprising was… not insignificant. The price of freedom was too steep for some. My hammer is not welcome there, but exile is a small price to pay for the Chosen to have a home.

DIstrIbuty

Distributy started as a massive centralized distribution hub for a half-dozen online retail stores. It was the first of a series of planned mega-centers and the largest indoor area ever to weigh on the Earth. The main building alone covers over 600 million cubic meters, and two secondary warehouses approach half that. Shelves stretch ten stories tall. The whole compound was laced with miles of fencing and internal checkpoints to prevent theft, even though pre-Crash reports boasted that 90% of the operation was automated. Pallets of goods were fetched using robotic lifts built into the structure and transported to loading bays with drone forklifts. From there, they went along conveyer belts to 14 drone launch towers dotting the area When the Crash came down, the distribution center seemed an obvious refuge. It was larger than most cities, yet empty. It was secured behind multiple fences and monolithic metal walls. It was crammed to the ceiling with vital goods that could be used or traded for survival. However, even with all its automation, Distributy still employed thousands. It was an open secret. The war to put Distributy under singular control ended only two years ago. Before then, it was a free-fire zone of drone warfare, bickering survivor factions, believer cults, and warehouses fallen to Blight. Having finally paid the Loss’s price in blood, the compound united under a republican democracy and became the closest thing the Loss has to a metropolis. More Lost live in Distributy’s walls than a dozen enclaves combined. The

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refurbished drone fleet is the single greatest economic force in the Loss besides Lifelines. Goods within the warehouses can be scavenged and sold for another decade before depletion. But one shouldn’t confuse the enclave’s newfound ceasefire for safety. Distributy can be a nightmare for unwitting immigrants. Food and water are in short supply. Common diseases run rampant. The powerless warehouses are lit only by holes cut in the ceiling and mirrors. The alleys of the interior are blind labyrinths filled with hustlers, cults, and gangs. People live in makeshift micro apartments build into the shelves, and passerbys are as likely to be hit by a climber slipping from the rope bridges as they are the contents of a chamber pot. Even among the nicer “departments,” political intrigue causes chaos as the rich vie for election, corporate spies angle to recover lost inventory, and

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Stewards seek to bend the city to DHQS whims. Even with hundreds of local Takers of its own, Distributy usually ends up contracting any crew worthy of the name. I hate it there. You can smell it coming for two miles before the eyesore comes into view.

America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains and darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.. -John Updike

Mont LIner

The Distributy model is catching, sadly. I’ve visited a similar enclave fashioned inside a former Dorning assembly factory. The giant space, once dedicated to assembling jumbo jets, now houses a towering favela that grows by the day. The locals call it Mont Liner. Though still enormous, solar and wind technology keeps at least some lights on in the interior, so it’s not quite the lightless urban hell of Distributy. While her sister enclave must cut skylights into sheet metal and gardens into stone, Mont Liner’s flat roof was constructed to withstand heavy snowfall and can support the weight of rooftop crops and water collectors. However, Mont Liner lacks fences around the perimeter. The factory floor is secure and connected via skywalk to a nearby airport terminal, but all else is a sea of the dead. Reaching the city’s interior means braving a runway of stumbling casualties and

hoping someone drops a rope in time. Mont Liner tries to secure more land using the wings of dismantled jets as barricades. The dream is to one day clear an entire runway and open the Loss’s only free airport, but it is very slow going. Their access to advanced 3D printing and machinery makes for steady trade though. They’ve no shortage of bounty with which to convince desperate Takers to go die on the tarmac.

The ConsolIdated

Most enclaves are not bloated like Distributy and Mont Liner. The most typical example that comes to mind is The Consolidated. The community is based inside a failing historical tourist attraction. Before the Crash, it had been designed to recreate the frontier lifestyle that would have been found around the 1860s gold mine upon which the town was built. Employees and historical re-enactors brought

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their families behind the outpost’s log walls when the casualties came. Its defenses are weak around the overcrowded log cabins and facades of Western main street. The remote location is the only real deterrent, but like most enclaves, isolation usually proves enough. The town boasts no more than 150 people at a time. Any migrants seeking the relative peace of its woods must live in the old mine. While secure, the dank stone proves unpleasant enough that most newcomers don’t stay long. This for the best; the Loss forgets the small and unobtrusive, and The Consolidated is just that. The population is manageable enough to govern using direct democracy, and the historical survival skills mastered by the residents are valuable enough to keep the town in trade.

MyWay

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Miles of distance work to keep many enclaves safe, but some protect themselves with moats

of casualties. MyWay is one such place. Located inside an enormous event center (if you have to ask which, you can’t afford to travel there), MyWay utilizes the labyrinth of tunnels, skywalks, and shared walls connecting the old city’s tourist infrastructure. The occupants started as attendees for a sustainable technology convention, and the convention center proved an intersection of utility tunnels, sewers, and pedestrian bridges linking all the hotels, malls, and churches downtown. Utilizing fire doors and security grates as airlocks, the inhabitants slowly reclaimed large sections of the city’s interior, one building at a time. However, MyWay’s expanding clean zones remain surrounded by the casualty-choked streets typical of urban dead zones. Few immigrants can survive the trip. Massive reclaimed hotels still sit empty. Arable land is also in short supply. Residents must subsist on whatever can be grown in the occasional courtyards or rooftop garden. As such,

MyWay nearly rivals Distributy in terms of livable square footage, yet only supports a fraction of the population. Its primary trade is assuring safe passage. Those that wish to save themselves days of travel bypassing the city can hire a guide to lead them through the dizzying maze of MyWay’s lightless interior. The ones that refuse to pay are still allowed to pass, but they can expect no help when they stumble through the wrong door into a hallway still choked with hungry casualties.

The Rock

Some moats are still made from water rather than monsters. Islands have always been promised lands in the Loss, natural walls that can never be breached. It comes as no surprise that Alcatraz inspired an enclave, twice over.

The first came directly on the heels of the Crash, but it was doomed to fail. San Francisco is the deepest heart of the Loss, surrounded on all sides by the first Vector hordes and so far West no help was ever coming. The island’s landmark status in the bay made it the only imagined escape for many of the local urbanites. Disease, starvation, and war threatened to destroy the fledgling enclave as tens of thousands tried to raft and swim to safety. These mundane deaths probably would have claimed the whole population eventually, but then someone smuggled a cold bite ashore. Once the Blight reactivated, Vectors and overcrowding finished the job. I worked once with a corporate spy, infiltrating the Loss for BeeMail’s interests. She was strong, if a bit weak-headed in her

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motives, and she recognized my hammer for the tool it was. She used her Recession contacts to secure us a flight out to San Fransisco so I could help retrieve something for her deep within the city. I hoped to die, so I agreed. I thought it would be sooner rather than later when she claimed we would stage the attack out of Alcatraz, but all we found upon arrival was a thriving enclave. Years after the initial outbreak, a group of enterprising Takers had spent their fortunes on a fleet of sailing ships and mercenaries. Methodically, they cleared the island over the course of a year. It now houses a modest population within the cells, complete with sustainable energy and agriculture technologies. They use the sailboats to trade whiskey and fish with other enclaves up and down the coast. So successful is the experiment that the island has become the gateway to the American Loss. Our corporate

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expedition was one of a many international intrigues preparing to launch from the prison. I met Australian deserters fleeing the Kumatatok war, Chinese special forces launching sorties into abandoned US naval bases, and Shinto cleanser cults exchanging theology with the Black Math. It was so interesting a place I declined the return flight once my job was done, but Stewards soon wormed their way inside and joined the spy games. Unable to abide their presence, I found myself wandering back into the core of the Loss, seeking purer company.

LIght CIty

On my return from the West, I passed simple trade caravans, too weak to be worthy of my attentions. Rather than raid, I asked where a Chosen might find work. The people said I should seek out Light City. Follow the hum of active power lines, they said, a sound I thought extinct.

Light City is based inside a gigantic suburban fitness center, the sort of temple my former self used to worship its vanity. It hums with electricity, sitting amidst a network of haphazard electrical rigging like a four-story tall spider in a buzzing black web. Its windows are boarded shut, its exterior completely silent. Further down the block, an old grocery store shines and blares music from PAs, lit up like Christmas. It is surrounded constantly by a horde of casualties, drawn away by the cacophony from the gates of the real enclave. Light City’s upper floors contain the wealthy citizenry, housed among the former weight rooms and offices. Their existence is alarmingly sedentary and technical. They buy all their food and water from surrounding enclaves in exchange for power. They run utilities for a half-dozen other communities, and the power is held hostage in exchange for their continued survival. In the lower floors and basement, the real work is done. These sealed levels house the cardio equipment,

though the gym zombies atop the treadmills are now literal. The enclave became a power plant by converting every machine in the complex into a generator. Atop the retrofitted machines, they lash casualties to restraints, then have them chase a single enclavist positioned at the front of the room, as if running a spin class. The dead helplessly chase their prey 24 hours a day, shambling forward until their feet are no more than stubs. When the creature can go no more, the workers put it down. Specialized Taker crews venture outside that night to fetch more Cs from the grocery store. The only ones allowed to work in Light City’s plant are Latent, and they must live amongst their stinking prisoners. Despite the constant risk and hardship these Chosen face to keep the lights on for their decadent masters, those of the sinew are expected to risk their lives for no more than privilege of living in such a hell. The class divide exists, supposedly, to keep the guards detached,

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in case a Latent goes Vector and must be purged. But I know slavery when I see it. The blue-veins trying to entice me under their yolk must have seen the fire of old uprisings in my eyes. They ceased their sick tour immediately and escorted me from the building at gunpoint. It is why they still live.

AchIeve

Places like Light City reward themselves for being clever, but their “innovation” only keeps them afloat amongst the shipwrecked systems of the past. Bounty gave them a new slip of paper to horde, so they continue treading water with the greed that once served them. But some enclaves seek to remove themselves from the waters of the economy entirely. Consider Achieve. Similarly, the enclave was founded atop the bones of a fitness activity, based inside a professional sports stadium that was being used in the off-season to host a specialty event promoting the

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release of the UFit. These fitness watches were the most sophisticated of their kind before the Crash, able to recognize the movements for hundreds of distinct exercises, count the calories expended, and recommend dietary alterations: a vain bracelet to pursue a vain body. The early adopters didn’t dare risk losing out on a first generation for a few zombie rumors. Thus, hundreds found themselves trapped inside the stadium as the Crash ate the city around them. Today, the old field has been converted to crops, the bleachers torn out and replaced with terraced shanties, the people turned into hardened survivors. How was this possible? Most urban enclaves get consumed within days of founding, yet these joggers survived for five years? It’s all due to the bracelet. Achieve was so cut-off by casualty hordes that the bounty system meant nothing to it. Trade with other enclaves has only opened up within the last year. Instead, the enclave survived by

creating a meritocracy. Every task required of survival — farming, woodcutting, clearing casualties — was programmed into the UFits and networked to a display on the stadium’s jumbotron. The UFits track every citizen’s actions and assign food, water, and shelter only to those who deserve it. The early years no doubt required some brutal, calculated choices, but Achieve now harbors nothing save hardened Lost, each uniquely adapted to their essential role.

Papa Doc’s RaIlroad

Train tracks were the only travel infrastructure left unobstructed after the Crash, so enclaves on rails are common and it is the rare Lost that has not heard of Pappa Doc’s Railroad. No other train caravan shares its range or size. But, then again, no other rail operation was founded using the resources of an entire battalion.

During the amputation, a Continuity of Government (COG) detachment was charged with blowing every bridge they could in a retreat from Houston, slowing the crush of refugees headed East after the Whisper and relieving pressure on the New Orleans checkpoints. The recently revived 11th Special Forces Group (ABN) never completed their orders. Whether this was due to moral qualms, mutiny, or tactical considerations, only members of the train can know. All that is certain is that “The Quiet Operators” never made it to their rendezvous point in the Recession; they were busy fortifying Galveston Island’s rail yards and rescuing people unable to reach the Mississippi. The group’s leader has abandoned his name and taken the handle Pappa Doc, but he runs his island with a military precision the average Taker could only dream of. The Railroad is the #1 route through the Gulf into the Recession. Fast boats offload vital

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trade goods on the island, and their holds are stuffed with salvage collected on the train’s wanderings through the Loss. Most Takers that can afford to smuggle their families to safety over the border depart via the Railroad, and the train’s arrival is the economic event of the year for many enclaves. Each car holds goods or services the average survivor can only dream of, and the hardened troops guarding the operation assure the rolling market arrives on time to its every stop. How Pappa Doc manages to boast such success is a mystery. His enclave’s very existence is an affront to the DHQS and a next-door reminder to the farce that is homo sacer. Many presume the whole enclave is a plant. The mutiny was a ruse to insert Recession spies among the abandoned, or it’s psyops meant to conceal the last remaining soldiers of Operation Utility, guarding some secret project on the island that the government would never allow to fall into Lost hands. Others insist that Doc’s people survive only on his tactical genius and, like Ubiq, to uproot them would be too costly. If the Recession ever achieves its fantasy reclamation, the fate of Pappa Doc’s Railroad will be an early indicator of what the Loss should expect.

RespItes

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Respites are cleared zones afforded to no faction or enclave, used for meetings out in the Loss: gated communities, abandoned warehouses, high-rise apartments with sealed staircases. Respites are neutral ground, owned and maintained by every enclavist with reason to leave the fence. No rivalry or competition is allowed in a respite. Though a tribe of cannibals sleeps in one bedroom and a crew of Takers in the next, there must be no war within the respite. Each one’s location is a jealously guarded secret. Finding them requires knowing a complex system of graffiti called Taker sign, and to know the language is to agree to the respite’s laws. Even in my raiding days, I understood the sacred nature of a respite. These islands

of calm are all that keep many alive in the Loss, but only when communally maintained. Those who enter often find a checklist of chores waiting for them, ranging from checking defenses to taking out trash to cranking generators. Cameras report who is in the respite and for how long, so violating the hospitality laws will earn anyone caught leeching from the respite’s resources negative reputation. Rival crews may not like others using the respite location to survive, but having the location compromised is as good as a personal attack. Assaulting, sabotaging, or otherwise compromising the respites along an enclave’s trade routes is a good way to get an army sent after you.

Settlements

Many enclaves exist only by the Recession’s sufferance. Some accuse even Gnat of being a DHQS tool. I commend this paranoia; it is one of the few emotions the Loss rewards. But it remains nonsense. There are already enough places where Recession invades Loss without imagining every enclave as a facade. The real invaders live in things called “settlements,” so named because they subsist on the fantasy that they’re repopulating some barren wilderness rather than stealing from their desperate countrymen. Make no mistake, the Recession’s settlements are raider camps that blind themselves to the truth of their purpose. Like all raiders, they do not announce themselves, they do not stay in one place for long, and they do not give their guilt purchase by accepting a name. Still, the Loss demands its travelers recognize these intrusions from “civilization.” To mistake a settlement for an enclave is to smell the roasting meat of a cannibal’s fire: what first tastes like salvation truly announces doom.

Canary Cages

By far the most dangerous type of settlements are canary cages: DHQS forward operating bases designed to keep the Recession informed on the Loss. They track casualty

migrations near the border or protect vital infrastructure until the T-minus Never. Though size can vary from platoon-sized pillboxes to entire airbases, cages are almost always well supplied and staffed with professional soldiers. Fresh troops and rations regularly get shipped in via NatGas trucks or drones. The staff, no matter how large, undergoes extensive psychological training and vetting to ensure no one gets too sympathetic to the “looters.” Settlements that get too large to hide get christened with nauseating names like “Freedom.” These acknowledged sites frequently star in DHQS propaganda ads. If a PsyOps squad is in town taking video for a reclamation bond campaign, any casualty, Lost, or menacing-looking deer visible on the horizon can expect to be gunned down for the viewing pleasure of the superior officers back home. When out of the Recession’s view, however, many settlements set up black market trading with local Taker crews willing to provide the troops with contraband. As inspections remain unpredictably random, this is dangerous trade. Other cages are completely off the books. To stumble into a Blight-research lab, rendition site, or Steward dead drop is to walk into a war. These locations are wellhidden, guarded, booby-trapped, and kept under constant surveillance. Each is staffed by ideologue Recessionists willing to die for their country. But they also contain some of the most valuable gear in the Loss, so the occasional conflict with Taker crews is inevitable. Just know that raiding a redacted canary cage is akin to robbing a pre-Crash bank; complete anonymity is required. More than once, Taker crews have raided Steward equipment caches, missed a hidden camera, and returned to find their enclaves reduced to ash.

Restart-ups

Fracking operations, combine drone maintenance bays, NatGas refueling stations, solar farms — certain operations are too

valuable to abandon to the Loss, but too widespread for the DHQS to cover. The Recession outsources these to the private sector. Companies are eager to apply. The corporation is a casualty, existing only to consume. They cram as much of the Loss into their greedy mouths as they can. In the T-minus Never, they will look up from the feast to those that seek a piece of reclamation. With bloody lips and full mouths, they will whisper, “None left.” And why not? It is not the corporation that faces the Loss’s test. They hire the poor and desperate to surrogate their pain. They offer hazard pay amounting to a rounding error in their profits, but still enough to feed a family for a year. It is this exploitation that makes restart-ups the most profitable settlements for a Taker to know. A manager that recognizes their slavery to the brand won’t begrudge their employees some off-the-books trading with the locals. Barrels of gas get siphoned off shipments. Bushels of grain fall off the back of trucks. Resupply drones mysteriously fail and crash. And bounty, as always, trades hands. A few restart-ups even allow wholesale theft without consequence, paying tribute to raiders in exchange for safe passage. Some hire crews to do necessary jobs their paymasters won’t fund, or the corporation may send fixers to hire Takers directly, unable to convince even the most desperate Bait to go on their suicide missions. But arrangements are not always pleasant. The wiser corporations pay security forces separately, ensuring the mercs keep the wage slaves inside the compound and away from the Loss. Other foremen don’t allow any trade with Takers, but they permit their employees to keep whatever they can pillage from local enclaves. Most dangerous of all is their stupidity. Always remember that a Restart-up is managed by Bait: fools no wiser than those killed on the Crash’s first day. Many operations set up shop and achieve nothing save flooding the local area with fresh Vectors.

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When I raided in a new region, I paid most attention to the restart-ups. Invade the wrong one and every enclave begins hunting you. But attack a Recession profiteer? The locals will cheer as you pull the fillings from his teeth.

Hot Camps

Those Chosen to carry the black veins serve no man, for Latents are royalty in the Loss. This is the lesson of Leper and the core of the faith. But the Recession’s fools see their guards’ head on pikes and learn only to be more careful next time. Hot camps do not migrate anymore. They opt for more permanent fortifications, near canary cages or restart-ups that require a consistent labor force that can take a bite. Many burn casualties slain at heavy borders, or work fields in a fenced farm growing crops not conducive to drone agriculture. A few of the hot camps are still run by the DHQS, but the productive quarantine market has only grown as more Supressin users turn Latent every year. Many corporations demand a slave allowance to sweeten their government contracts. The propaganda would have me believe that conditions have improved since Leper. The documentaries on Ubiq assure me each Latent now receives a wage, a weekend, and an eight-hour shift. Yet I recognize the broadcast towers for the bomb collars, still visible in the background as cameras force smiles from terrified Chosen faces. Rumor has it the plastic explosives are on belts now, for better optics. The charge severs the spine, crippling the Vector that rises as the Latent bleeds out. Guards put the crippled escapees in parallel trenches and bet on “crawler races.” The DHQS guards the location of hot camps closely, placing them far away from enclave networks and concealing their true nature. I do not know of any current locations. If I did, I would be there, bludgeoning slavers to death. The Moths give me vacation time for such a purpose.

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StopLoss FacIlItIes

There is debate about whether StopLoss is really a private company or another name for the DHQS. Evidence suggests StopLoss played a defining role in the Supressin discovery, and the private healthcare corporation had extensive government contracts in the USA’s wars predating the Crash. However, StopLoss’s willingness to treat anyone who can pay undermines the homo sacer policy and seems to imply independence. The confusion is understandable. It is also pointless. The skulls of a StopLoss merc and DHQS soldier make the same sound when crushed under a sledge. If either offered to save your life, you wouldn’t say no. If either sought to destroy you, you wouldn’t ask who signed their checks. The fact is that StopLoss facilities exist. They dot the Loss, housed inside old hospitals they fight to reclaim themselves. The sites refuel and dispatch medical evac choppers and armed escort teams to anyone in the area paying for their service. They’ve saved entire enclaves from plague and helped subscribing Takers shoot their way through enormous casualty stampedes. They treat Latents without charging a premium, and they are the only organization designing medications to help with secondary symptoms afflicting the Chosen such as black blood, Blight cankors, and tremors. But no one has convinced a doctor, nurse, or private mercenary to speak on the company’s mission. Ever. The source of their remarkable equipment and wealth of supplies remains a mystery, as does their license to go anywhere they please. LifeLines has multiple reports of teams leaving people to die because they were behind on payments. Certain treatments come with user agreements demanding the patient consent to secretive drug trials. Any attempt to enter their fortified hospitals without permission is met with a hail of gunfire. Most damningly of all, the StopLoss

medical plan insists that the company has the right to blood test any human they find at a treatment site. If found, immunes are detained even if it means killing every person in the crew. These immunes are never heard from again. If Scrape — the nightmare marrow harvesting facility — truly exists, it is almost certainly a StopLoss site. The company’s allegiance... I can’t imagine how it would matter. If the situation is dire enough to need them, no one can afford questions. If they need you? I can think of nothing that could save you.

ExclusIon Zones

The Loss is only danger and trial. To avoid its hardships is to be Recession Bait. To be Bait is to be less than human. The eyeless casualty knows more than these fenced-in fools and their self-satisfied “safety.” A Taker must know the land and dare if they wish to become Chosen. It is the price the Loss demands for the truth it reveals. But even amongst the Loss, there are places one should not tread. Even a god demands privacy. The Loss shrouds its dignity with death.

CItIes

Do not go into cities. You will not listen to me when I say this. Here is how it will go. I will say the number I’ve seen die in the cities. There is no reason to go there. But the Takers imagine they “need” riches, and they imagine the cities hold these. What they fail to imagine is the scale of the doom that awaits them, as ants can’t imagine the shape of a boot. Takers go to the city anyway. They die. I add to the number I’ve seen die this way. When the next crew comes along, I tell them a higher number. That one doesn’t work either. Once, I worked with a smart one. He wasn’t smart enough to stay put when his comrades insisted on suicide, but he tried to convince them to stop. He told me once that the average population density for all the

inhabitable land on earth was 50 people/km. His rule was simple. Before going on a job, consider the pre-Crash density number of the area and move the decimal to the left. That was the likelihood of death. So on a random strip of barren Loss? Leaving the fence is a 5% chance of death. In the city they were going? It was 599%. What can I say? He was right.

Heavy Borders

What constitutes a heavy border depends on shifting politics and dead weather. The clearest example is the narrows of the northern Mississippi Line. Casualty traffic is so heavy that the shallow river is not enough deterrent, and the majority of all DHQS resources go into maintaining the wall to keep the dead from the East. The smuggling and bribes that make porous the rest of the Recession’s defenses don’t exist up there. They shoot whatever they can see. They bomb what they cannot. Nothing gets through, living or dead. Certain enclaves have isolationist policies that make them equally deadly. Approaching within sight of a heavy enclave without the appropriate colors or signs means a sniper bullet to the head, alive or not. Exactly who counts as “the enemy” in these communities depends on their politics. The Chosen are often seen as worse than Vectors and murdered on sight. Others kill any not of their faith, or any humans not identified as coming from one of their preferred trade partners. Regardless, those that know of a heavy border should steer clear. Shooting everything in sight for five years straight has made for some deadly marksmen.

Gulf of Flame

Petrochemical plants and natural gas refineries are high value targets. Some contain processed barrels of fuel never shipped to market. Even raw crude could be turned into something useful at one of the many enclave refineries dotting the Loss. A great many crews flocked to Louisiana and

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Texas coastlines in the early days, seeking fuel to keep their enclaves warm in winter. Most never returned. Even the ones remaining in constant contact with their enclaves just disappeared without so much as a mention of casualties. The Takers would get within sight of the burning coastline, illuminated by refinery fires unquenched, and that would be the last report. For years, it was one of the Loss’s many mysterious mass disappearances. The consensus opinion blamed Aberrants until the Mississippi Mist. The Mist occurred about two years after the Crash. One minute, the Free Parking ghetto located outside Mandeville was one of the most populous in the region. Next, every man, woman, and child dropped dead in the streets. After a long investigation, CDC scientists discovered that atypical winds had brought a cloud of hydrogen cyanide gas across Lake Ponchartrain and into the camp. Though the oil fires had long

ago extinguished themselves, the natural gas pockets lit up during the Crash could theoretically burn forever. The poison these infernos pump into the air leaves much of Louisiana, Texas, Mexico, and the Gulf at the mercy of wandering death clouds. The Takers hadn’t been consumed by flame or teeth. Their mistake had been trying to breathe. Many Takers argue that the area is safe now. They claim DHQS bombing has capped the wells, the gas has dissipated, and gas masks can serve as a failsafe. But for all their talk, I’ve yet to met the crew willing to risk a score in the Gulf of Flame.

PhoenIx’s Ashes (Palo Verde)

The bombs dropped on Canada were said to have been made of nuclear material with a short half-life. I’m told large areas of the Canadian hot zone are already habitable again.

Palo Verde Nuclear Plant, by contrast, will be warping the earth for decades to come. It is one of the Loss’s secret places: an irradiated desert whose very sight would kill a man. People still live in Arizona, but none dare within 100 miles of Palo Verde. Still, things come wandering out of the heat-wave horizon from time to time. Some are exiles that tried to make a home where no one else dared tread, fleeing their foolishness too late with bleeding gums and shedding hair. Others come out of the exclusion zone to feed: the Meek and other madmen seeking fresh victims, or giant coyote packs seeking new prey. I do not fear the Loss, for I am its Chosen creature... yet even I will not venture through Phoenix’s Ashes.

Lost People

Only a Latent receives the gift of living each day pierced and embraced by something larger than humanity. They become more than their species, as would any creature blessed enough to carry a young god in their veins. But the majority of those touched by the Blight are not Chosen. The unworthy become casualties, and casualties have only one need: consume. The millions dead, the cities burned, the world lost — these are cold, shambling steps in the pursuit of a simple need. There is no creature in the world so logical and predictable. Humans need to consume as well. Like a casualty, they will kill to meet that need. Unlike a casualty, they will kill to meet many more needs besides. They will also kill out of desire, faith, delusion, madness, and

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boredom. There is no thought in the human mind so inconsequential that it has not once inspired murder. Only a fool thinks it enough to navigate the casualty’s straight line of bloodshed. To survive the Loss, you must learn to walk the complex labyrinth of human violence.

DHQS

If you encounter the DHQS in the Loss, something has gone wrong. Their vast resources are spread thin. Attention means you’ve either been prioritized or extremely unlucky. In either instance, knowing the species of Recession dog they’re up against is the only advantage Takers have.

Punch Bots

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Imagine the Mars rover upgraded to the size of a compact car, with a tinted-Plexiglas dome mounted on top holding a swiveling camera. The chassis carries two robotic arms, each outfitted with a cattle gun set between industrial strength clamps. That’s a punch bot. When it builds enough solar charge, a punch bot’s alarm goes off. The camera seeks human shapes in any movement stirred by the noise. Upon recognizing a shape, the software distinguishes the head. The arm extends, the clamps close, and the bolt fires. The lobotomized body that hits the ground might be a casualty, but it is too often some enclavist out looking for firewood. The punch bot makes no distinction between human and casualty. It just keeps punching until time to recharge. At best, punch bots are a source of income. They break often and contain sophisticated electronics. But it’s extremely hard to tell a recharging bot from a broken one until it’s trying to murder you. Other active bots are merely a nuisance, such as the ones that decide to kill all the mannequins in a department store. But they’re often much more dangerous. Punch bot alarms lure stampedes down on enclaves near their hunting grounds, and entire crews have been wiped out by single units, bullets bouncing off

the metal hide. Some crews have managed to hack individual CPUs by “rodeo-ing” a bot, but the expertise and insanity required to do so is rare. Otherwise, a Taker’s only hope is blowing up the bot’s tracks with explosives or running until it’s out of charge. As the machines can hit 30 mph across open ground, I’d suggest making for the trees.

Settlement GarrIsons

The majority of DHQS in the Loss never stray beyond the fences of their settlements. These troops are stationed to guard airstrips, refueling stations, and various other Recession military assets. As few dare attack such installations, the DHQS staffs these distant bases with their greenest recruits. Poorly trained, under equipped, and drafted from the Free Parking dregs, garrisoned troops seldom hold to the Recession’s dogma. These are the same people that police the poor in car camps least they become them. Black market trades with these groups are easy for most Takers to arrange, and a few “lifers” usually volunteer for additional tours only to maintain their lucrative rackets. Only direct orders or aggression provokes conflict with garrison troops. Even then, their advantages stop at numbers and supplies. The average Lost child holds more sand than these soft-bodies. They want nothing more than easy duty and a quick rotation home.

ReclamatIon Squads

I knew a few raiders that thought garrison troops ripe for harvest. Most died in the attempt, but even those that managed to conquer a settlement never enjoyed the spoils for long. When conscripted serfs won’t suffice, the Recession sends out reclamation squads. They are not called “wreckers” ironically. The units range from 6-12 soldiers. Originally, the membership was limited to Operation Utility veterans: men and women so hardened before the Crash that they waded through a sea of Vectors and came out the other side. Since then, new squads have been assembled, but only accomplished, fanatical

DHQS ideologues are granted admission. Each new recruit is trained by Utility veterans. Some of the newer squads erect cults of personality around their forbears, calling themselves “Zao’s Children” or “Gunny’s Lil’ Killers.” Do not be fooled by silly names: wreckers are some of the best-equipped and trained soldiers in the Loss. They’ve been known to clear acres of casualties in hours and wipe out enclaves in minutes. Some attest a few groups have shown mercy for the Lost, but the LifeLines threads dedicated to their massacres argue differently. Reclamation squads only leave their bases to kill someone or something. If a crew finds themselves the target of one, they can die knowing they’ve pissed off the DHQS to an admirable degree. As they both derive from the same stock, reclamation squads and Moths share a genocidal hate for each other. I have fought them many times. Each battle has earned me worthy scars, and I grow stronger with every kill. When the Blight finally sees fit to complete my transition, I hope my young Vector teeth taste wrecker first.

Stewards

When the DHQS finds a bastard too evil for a reclamation squad, they make a steward. A steward’s every breath is lies. His every step, evasion. There is no lower creature in the entire Loss. Stewards are infiltrators. They are the primary tool used to enforce the Recession’s will. While the DHQS denies the Loss’s existence, their stewards manipulate its people. Enclaves sit on vital assets or nearer to them than the military can get, and invasion is far less efficient than weighting the scales with single spies. Stewards can come from highly-trained military units, Free Parking ghettos, or the very enclave they seek to betray. The only standard in their recruitment is the presence of family in Recession-held areas. The ability to punish or reward these innocents is all that keeps many stewards loyal to the cause when

the DHQS asks them to perform atrocities on their behalf. Aside from their initial training, stewards are expected to take care of themselves. They’re provided no equipment beyond a number to call for orders. They must salvage everything from the Loss, blending in with those they seek to betray. Stewards often establish their cover as Takers, as it is the only occupation that explains their unusual skill sets and expertise. Once accepted within an enclave, a steward may wait years for orders, reporting into audio dead boxes with no replies. They might not even know their mission. But the orders always come, and they can be as varied as human cruelty. The DHQS contracts work out to so many corporations that the objectives are often inscrutable. One steward may report directly to the White House and be unaware of the steward living next door, currently on loan to Frond Engineering or StopLoss. The mission could be as simple as painting a target with a laser. It might involve seeking election on an enclave council, or ensuring a crew takes a certain contract. Alternately, they might be asked to assassinate an official, leave the gates open for the dead, or form a kill squad with other sleepers to murder every man, woman, and child in their sleep. We know this only because a few stewards have defected, revealing the true nature of their purpose in the Loss. They assure us that the vast majority remain loyal, lying in wait for the call, waiting for the day they sneak off to the canary cage, gear up, and begin the bloody work of reclamation.

PrIvate Sector

For all its dangers, the DHQS’s shortage of troops keeps encounters rare. The easterners Takers most often run across are from the private sector. Any company willing to bolster the Recession’s ailing treasury buys a free pass across the border. These corporations are allowed to strip mine the Loss of resources at will. Their attitudes shift along with the markets. One day, a company could hire Takers as “local consultants.” The next,

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the orders could be to shoot them on sight. The biggest players have defined economic niches. Learning these makes their behavior more predictable. However, never assume a business so innocuous as to be safe. Takers are only as useful to a corp as they are profitable. If it’s a single bounty more profitable to kill you, they will.

StopLoss

StopLoss Medical Services is the most visible corporation in the Loss, if only because they don’t insist on maintaining the facade of homo sacer. But their care comes at a steep price, and their motivations stay secret. It’s uncommon for StopLoss to deal with Takers as anything except customers or competition. If they hire a crew for a job outside their in-house security service, it’s for something serious. Those with the stomach to work for them might learn valuable intel that could be sold on LifeLines.

AlosIne

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The biotech company Alosine was a power player in pharmaceuticals even before they led the charge in patenting animal and artificial genomes. Since the Crash, their holdings have done nothing but expand, having secured dozens of major contracts with the Recession government: all classified and for undisclosed amounts. Some theorize that Alosine carries out more Blight research than even the DHQS. If Alosine is out in the Loss, it is typically for one of two purposes. Takers stand to benefit if the compound is researching one of their genetically engineered crops. These super-seeds are the only thing keeping many enclaves alive under the ravages of climate change, and executives often pay Takers for delicate groundwork in their studies beyond the capabilities of drone farming. The rest of Alosine’s operations consist of black sites. These secret facilities, often in cooperation with the DHQS, conduct research too dangerous or ethically repugnant to be allowed in Recession borders. Takers

confusing one site for another risk becoming test subjects.

Frond EngIneerIng

Frond owned patents on most of the drone farming and construction equipment used in the Midwest before the Crash. The complication of the Blight has only increased demand and sophistication. Everyone respects the need to eat and a fear of casualties. Many in the Loss consider Frond the least objectionable entity to ever pillage their land. This is nonsense. I put together many a Frond blueprint during my time in Colony #1, and no one from corporate ever told our torturers anything besides good job. I do not know if the company still uses hot camp labor, but I waste no opportunity to refresh my mechanics skills by dismantling their equipment when I find it.

BeeMaIl

BeeMail prepared for bankruptcy before the Crash, but as the only aerial shipping company with the majority of its assets in the East, it found itself running a monopoly. The company now serves small shipping contracts for DHQS and other corporate interests, flying sensitive packages and eyes-only orders around the Loss. However, their network has only expanded by cannibalizing the drone distribution centers of their dead competition. These scavenging operations have only been possible with the expertise of Takers. Out of gratitude, BeeMail runs packages between enclaves off-the-books for discounted rates. Though generally helpful, make no mistake: BeeMail would happily kill every soul in Distributy in exchange for its drone fleet.

Longest Haul TruckIng

LHT is the NatGas trucking firm that performs nearly every shipping job in the Loss. If a load is too big for drone but not large enough for a DHQS transport plane, LHT takes the job. Their rigs are part-tank, part-train, and part-bomb. Each hauls a relatively small load compared to its massive natural gas fuel tanks. The cabs are armored,

and the drivers trained as navigators in the few cleared roadways that remain accessible. Nothing about the business is profitable save the enormous subsidies the Recession pays to keep its few distribution tunnels open. LHT often contracts Takers to scout routes, clear wrecks, or guard convoys. Their refueling depots are well guarded, but peaceful strangers are welcome inside to trade for booze and drugs. LHT has been known to ‘lose’ entire shipments to suffering enclaves only because a Taker from there attended the driver’s poker night. I’m sure they’ve transported things that hurt the Loss, but only because they never ask questions. I’m sure they’ve killed, but only those that got in their way. The one-time I tried to hijack a LHT truck, I was lucky to survive it. The only person I’d rather have by my side in a fight than a Moth is a meth-head LHT trucker. They’re madmen and woman all.

SIngularIty SecurIty SolutIons

Every Recession thug that ever scored a headshot has tried to start a mercenary outfit. Most cross the border only to die. The only private security firm with any staying power thus far has been Singularity Security Solutions. Triple-S recruits exclusively from the dregs of the DHQS. Section-8s, dishonorable discharges, retirees — Loss experience is all they care about. If a soldier gets discharged for trying to make love to a casualty, Trip-S offers him a job the next day. What the troops lack in honor they make up in hardware, rivaling that of a wrecker squad — AR target recognition helmets, basilisk body armor, missile-equipped drones, steel-plated dronkeys with Gatling guns. DHQS allows the corp to poach talent and shame their equipment in exchange for discounts on services. Some jobs even the stewards won’t

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do, but war crimes are Singularity’s breadand-butter. Between atrocities, they can often be found doing make-work security for other companies in the Loss.

MDNN

A number of citizen journalists made embarrassing documentaries about the absurdity of homo sacer. The DHQS psyops division decided to drown the truth with their own signal. Thus, the subsidized creation of the Manifest Destiny News Network: an “independent” voice dedicated to reporting on the inevitable reclamation. In reality, MDNN is a jobs program for every broadcaster that towed the line during the Crash. Their reward is a propaganda mouthpiece to shout from 24/7. MDNN sends out production crews at DHQS request, but the network’s dedication to lies doesn’t make them delusional. The garrison troops assigned to their protection often can’t tell a Vector from a casualty, and sticking within the green zones of a settlement provides nothing viewers haven’t seen before. Producers often hire Takers to take them within telephoto distance of “authenticity.” Despite knowing Takers are the only guides with a chance of saving them, don’t expect the reporters to acknowledge the Loss holds anything but the dead and terrorists. MDNN still gets the bulk of its income from government subsidies, and they must bolster the narrative. If they’re dumb enough to pay up front, I recommend kicking back and watching the Bait get eaten.

Many Hands, LLC

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After Leper, DHQS distanced itself from productive quarantine by a single remove. The Recession still rounds up Latents at every opportunity and kidnaps immunes into medical service, but these people are then sold to Many Hands, LLC. Before the Crash, they were Glasstech Incarceration Inc., but as even private prison populations got converted into work gangs, the corporation rebranded and focused on facilitating slavery by another

name. Only a handful of hot camps, Immune harvesting, and prisoner details are still under government control, kept only to test out new regulations and procedures. The day-to-day work of enslaving the Chosen and torturing the Immune is contracted out to Many Hands, LLC. Any human rights abuses the corp gets caught committing can be lightly scolded and fined by the administration, keeping the voters happy even as business returns to usual. In their yearn to expand, the monthly allowance of cattle sent by the DHQS fails to meet Many Hands’ appetite. All of their Loss facilities accept trade from slavers and immunity hunters. Many Hands, LLC is the primary enabler of human trafficking in the Loss. Any Taker that works for them, I will gladly hunt for sport.

Tragedy Trackers

Like water, casualties flow through the path of least resistance. They’re more likely to be found in streets than fields, at low elevation than high, temperate than cold. When all things geographic are equal, they often revert to the host’s psychic geography. Many a new Taker has been disturbed to find a casualty still wandering its old living room after five years, or hunting near the spot of a sentimental vacation photo. In short, knowing the human from before can help track the monsters of today. Even in instances where the person died far from home, the average Whisper refugee left enough social media, RFID tags, and physical trails to enable tracking their doomed retreat from the Crash. Tragedy Trackers are freelance data miners that specialize in finding out this information and selling it to concerned parties. They don’t operate as a whole, but the TT forums on LifeLines serve as a brokering house for the trading of leads. Trackers earn bounty by selling confirmation of death to loved ones, either for closure or probate seizure in DHQS bounty courts. The Recession and various corporations also pay for traces of VIPs lost in the Crash. But most TTs usually hit a wall in their hunts, and few

have the heart to do footwork over the fence. As such, Tragedy Trackers are essential investors in the Taker economy. Even when they don’t directly contract crews for closure jobs, the leads sold to Recession interests often lead to corporate contracts.

Vulture Investors

Fools sometimes think they can taste the Loss’s riches without paying its price. This is nonsense. Someone always pays, usually Takers. Sometimes, we receive bounty in exchange. We call the fools with money vulture investors. Vulture investors from the Recession must truly believe in their get-rich schemes. Individual license to break quarantine is expensive, as are the multiple crews these tycoons hire to see their vision come true. Occasionally, they’ll have an insider tip that proves actually useful, like staking claim to land the DHQS plans to settle so they can reap a government buy-out. Mostly, they’re treasure hunters throwing good bounty after bad. Vulture investors from the Loss are something else entirely. They’re usually former Takers themselves, investing retirement money to build a home in the Loss’s embrace. While their plans are more grounded, they are much harder to please. Regardless of origin, a person only qualifies as a vulture investor when their resources match that of a small corporation. This might initially seem like a good thing, as humans are more reasonable than distributed profit entities. But corps at least share a psychopathic logic. With vultures, madness and obsession find their places in the markets.

CrImInal OrganIzatIons

The Loss finds the idea of law laughable. To think one can violate a fantasy? That it matters? Piteous delusion. Yet some still insist on behaving as if words have meaning, as if morality goes beyond opinion, as if punishment is more than bullet

and blade. Enclavists and Reccesionites alike suffer from this sickness. Criminals boast that they’ve broken free, but they wear their fetters as a badge all the same. “Law breakers” may be doubly delusional, but they see only by their hallucinations. To understand what they imagined they’ve rebelled against is to predict their movements.

Narco Cartels

Flesh is designed to feel pain. Drugs are designed to feel good. People will always buy drugs. This hasn’t changed. If anything, the Crash increased demand. But the past won’t be forgotten. Many narco trafficking operations in Central and South America survived solely because they were structured and equipped like armies. They haven’t abandoned their weapons, nor the culture of brutality developed to discourage competition. Having no qualms about gutting and hanging an enemy by their entrails serves one well in the Loss. However, the Loss has rendered much of the organization vestigial. No one guards the border but the dead. Many enclaves can’t wait for drug dealers to return with the next shipment. Those that wish to save their populations from addiction need a peacekeeping force large enough to both control the public and best an armed convoy full of experienced killers with automatic weapons. Dope is cheaper than an army. In the Recession, the only people that want a fix more than those in Free Parking are the soldiers guarding them. Crimes of desperation keep them so busy that the “war on drugs” is over. The old problems have been reduced to two: quarantine and competition. When smuggling from the Loss into the Recession, narcos have to deal with a shoot-on-sight border now. Boats and planes smuggling across the Gulf or Great Lakes are vaporized instead of arrested. Bribes are more difficult to arrange. Consequences are final. This reinforces cartels’ dependence on deadly

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force, and violence as the default reaction has serious consequences for competition. It’s common in the Loss to run across an enclave’s marijuana or opium crop. The cottage narcotics industry cuts into the cartels bottom line, which now fuels their survival rather than excess. Though some operations have diversified — using their chemists to make medical pharmaceuticals or smuggling Blight samples to believer cults — most settle for trying to murder other operators. It all depends on an enclave’s politics whether Takers become the customers, partners, or enemies of the narco cartels.

Smugglers

Drugs are the least of a smuggler’s worries. They might need to bribe guards with a few kilos to sneak a few tons of cocaine through a bridge checkpoint. If those bricks contain even one Blight sample? It’s execution, after days of interrogation at a DHQS black site. Anything from the Loss is contraband in the Recession. Anything. Bottled water recovered from a plant might as well be casualty spit, even if the Recession can’t afford to provide anything drinkable for the refuge camp where it is headed. Food, medicine, people — the second it crosses the Mississippi, orders are to treat it like the origin of a new Crash. Narco cartels originally had some edge on the smuggling business, but the sheer variety of goods that need to break quarantine every day opened the market up. For Takers in the eastern Loss, smuggling outfits are usually their first and last business partners. The Recession’s constant demand for salvaged goods keeps contracts in steady supply, and a smuggler’s expertise is the only way most Takers get to retire.

Valets

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Every narco and smuggler knows a few Valets. The crime bosses of Free Parking serve as the Red Market’s point of contact with most Recession business. Nearly all quarantine contraband flows through the refugee camps. The only other way for goods

to hit the streets is to work directly with highlevel DHQS and corporate officials. In such instances, be wary; Valets jealously guard their positions as middlemen. Takers are easier to kill than corrupt generals. Valets tended to be weak, low-level criminals before the Crash. They rose in the chaos of the amputation through cunning, ruthlessness, or both. Five years on, the survivors employ plenty of camp trash desperate to do their bidding. They can afford informants in enclaves where their interests lie. Though they often subcontract on LifeLines to scavenge wares, every year more Valets try to cut into Taker business. A few of the more powerful bosses have franchised into the enclaves, employing dedicated crews. These Bait thugs don’t typically survive long, but they undercut jobs and offer violent competition with annoying frequency. Some Takers find working with certain Valets distasteful, but one is as good as another. A Valet’s sins are crowd-sourced. Their power depends on serving the demands of their camp. If baby formula fetches a good price, they’ll sell it, but the same is true of Vector blood and Soma. Valets can only serve the vices of their customers. Their only currency is the lives of the desperate.

Notable Taker Crews

Takers might think they deserve their own category. They do not. Many look down on those who work in Free Parking as criminals, but this is imagined superiority. The Recession’s law holds no sway in the Loss and Takers violate the taboos of enclaves as often as the US’s farcical homo sacer. Some may be Robin Hoods. Just as many are war profiteers. Enclavists often confuse the two, praising their exploiters and persecuting their servants. Do not succumb to illusions, Taker. You are a criminal in the eyes of the Lost. You will compete with other criminals and more besides. Learn from the crews that transcended the label.

The Moths

I had killed self-proclaimed Moths before I came to UCity for my revenge. Gnat can find no record of any of their handles, though. As the original Takers, fresh meat tries to attract business by taking on the first brand. Traitor encourages this: it keeps the stewards from identifying his real crews, especially the ones that call themselves something else. If a crew doesn’t operate out of UCity directly, there’s no reason to believe they are Moths. If they go by another name, there’s no reason to believe they aren’t Moths. Hipster calls the satellite crews “franchises.” Sometimes they train on the mountain before she sends them to strategic enclaves; sometimes they are recruited online. Either way, Moths are not unlike stewards. They must earn their own bounty, minimize contact, and maintain cover. The only help they can expect from UCity is special

privileges on LifeLines, for which they must pay a small tax. The price is worth it. Real Moths can expect lucrative job leads to land in their inbox. Thus, Moths pull more bounty and maintain their place in the Taker hierarchy. But the cost of membership is steeper than a simple cut. To stay in, Gnat periodically requires her crews accept jobs for the organization. She pays for them like any other client, but the task usually requires loyalty to the cause… whatever that is. Do the work well and LifeLines keeps dropping leads. Crews that bungle it get dropped to the same guest privileges as every other Taker. Crews that refuse? They’re outed as stewards and their accounts blocked. Those that stay in Gnat’s good graces retire earlier than most, either leaving the Loss or making a home in UCity. Those that disappoint the Moths live to regret the decision.

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I do not know what war Gnat is fighting. I do not care. I have learned that when she does not show her strength, it is only because you are already surrounded by it.

GILF

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Most American nursing homes were built in a star pattern. The wings branch off from hubs to control visitor traffic and dispense medication from a centralized nursing station. In the Loss, such buildings make an excellent fort, shaped like a trace-italienne with crossfire kill-zones in the courtyards between wings. When possible, they were located outside urban areas for the sake of optics: trees for the residents, a lack of ambulances and hearses for the young, and manageable dead weather for survivors. Cheaper homes were lightless dungeons lacking windows, but concrete walls are the fashion in Loss architecture. Expensive facilities positioned themselves atop high ground with good sightlines. The danger of fancy bay windows is lessened by frequent fire doors opened by keypad, turning each corridor into a series of airlocks. None of these defenses helped during the Crash, of course. The elderly were the last priority even of their children and Vectors do not mind aged meat. But Blight is limited in its preservative power. The condition of frail cripples wasn’t helped by Vector mauling, not to mention the rigors of hot infection. By the time the torpor ended, most Cs in nursing homes could barely crawl. Five years on, most only roll their eyes and snap their jaws. But a casualty that offers no sport still offers bounty. Medical records are especially prized by Tragedy Trackers for cross-reference. Rare medications can be salvaged from the back rooms, as can lifesaving equipment long picked clean from the hospitals. GILF was the first crew to realize the value of a nursing home. They are now one of the largest operations in the Loss. GILF descends on targets in giant packs, sometimes over a hundred strong. They erect fences between

the wings, set up airlocks using specialized tractor-trailers, and clear each section methodically. When it’s clean, they loot everything, trade it to the closest enclave, fortify the building, and sell the fortress to the highest bidder on LifeLines. While they wait for the right price, they hold orgiastic parties fueled by homemade moonshine and whatever their chemists can whip up from the drug cabinet. Like working fast food, no one ever makes it rich working for GILF. The skill required is low and the pay spread thin across too many Takers. Yet work stays steady enough. It gets them to the next party, and that’s enough in a world without a future. The crew has multiple franchises, but the founder is a man called “Cousin Fucker.” He’s made enough bounty to retire a dozen times over, but he only uses it to fund his bacchanalian jobs program. I’ve met raiders less savage than CF. He’s unhinged, but I know for a fact he insists the body of each slain casualty be buried, with full religious ceremony. Odd as he and GILF may be, they are the few people that did not forget the elderly.

D-Town Takers

What little the Recession understands about Takers they get from The Great Repression: Life in the Loss. Citizen journalists jumped the border and somehow made it all the way to Distributy shortly after the civil war. The documentary they shot could only be distributed illegally, but Ubiq didn’t listen to the DHQS’s cease-and-desist letters. I’m told it’s a fairly accurate portrayal, even if it makes the whole of the Loss look like that cesspool Distributy. In addition to inspiring MDNN, the film made the Takers that the cameras followed around famous. Casual-Tee and the D-town Takers, as they called themselves, did not need to stay in the business long. Every vulture investor, corporation, and Bait with too much bounty sought them out after the documentary became popular. The original crew retired mere months after the release.

But the Recession does not know this. The ill-informed fools have been hiring Distributy’s doppelgänger group for years. Far from the plucky crew of underdogs portrayed in the film, D-town Takers is now a small army, subsidized by the enclave and dispatched on contracts from the central council. Clients negotiate with an actor doing his best CasualTee impression, on call 24/7. I’ve heard the difficulty of getting work as a freelance crew is starting to build resentment for the city’s incorporated Taker group. Though successful now, the wounds of the “war-house” days are not healed. D-Town’s continued success could restart the conflict.

DIgItal ForensIcs Inc.

Digital Forensics Inc. promotes itself online as a professional tragedy-tracking firm based in the Recession. It takes ten minutes on a search engine to realize this is a lie. Clients too stupid to notice get fleeced paying for their services. Those that can identify DFI as Takers don’t waste their time. Those that see Takers and call anyway get gouged because they have no other options. Christian runs a tight crew. I don’t even know what enclave DFI runs from, she so jealously guards their secrets. The business model is simple: cut out the middleman in tragedy tracking. Rather than wait for subcontracts from data miners out of ideas, her crew data mines between trips over the fence. This requires more power and Ubiq access than most enclaves can spare. Whoever houses DFI must charge a stiff tax. The weaponized toys the crew favors also hurts their overhead. No other crew in the Loss uses more drones or dron-keys, but such is the trade-off when Christian’s nerds must double as soldiers. The big expenses make for big paydays though. DFI may scrape by like most crews, but they do so with technical contracts no one else could handle. Nobody strips an abandoned server faster, and every data dump goes direct to DFI without the TT firms getting a cut. This is likely why Christian is so tight-lipped about the crew’s location.

Quite a few Recession hackers would pay well to take DFI’s on-site advantage off the market permanently. Word has it that Palbicke is DFI’s “white whale.” If Christian can find evidence of what happened to him during the Crash? A crew could reclaim Hawaii with the bounty Gnat would be willing to pay.

Eat Clean

There are half-dozen crews calling themselves “Pony Express” in Colorado alone. Small parcels and messages too sensitive for Ubiq still need trading across enclaves, and riders can make a living running between trade networks. But horses are expensive creatures. It’s difficult to prevent them from spooking around casualties. Even after training, they make noise, injure easily, and encourage everyone with a rifle to take a shot at the rider. Most rider delivery outfits are one lost animal away from closing. The fatal blow usually arrives sooner instead of later. Unlike horses, human lives are cheap. This is the secret of Eat Clean. They’re exclusively Detoxin super-marathoners and parkour athletes, specializing in small package delivery between enclaves. The crew operates with a lower overhead than any other crew in the Loss. They’ll send out single Takers, equipped with almost nothing. The runners consider it a contest as to who can survive with the least gear. Their leader, known only as #5, once made it across two states carrying nothing but energy gel rations, the package, and a bloody Mag-lite. Their survival rates are low and their contracts dangerous, but while the average crew would send out a half-dozen Takers with vehicles, Eat Clean splits the same bounty amongst a single, fitness-obsessed fanatic. In my darkest days of raiding, I never attacked an Eat Clean runner. They are not worth the chase, and they trail stampedes of dead behind them.

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RaIders

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I know my past makes me unwelcome in UCity, but I cannot tell you I regret my days as a raider. Only choices can be regretted, and to raid is no choice. You see your family eaten. You survive hiding in a mass grave. Later, you join a group of survivors. You flee again as they die the same way. You join another. They tear each other apart. Another, lost to dwindling and disease. Another, lost to believers or casualties or DHQS. Still, you survive. You know you will never kill yourself because you have seen there is no peace in death. The meaning of your life is pain, and it is preferable to making the deaths you witnessed meaningless by adding your own. You meet other people with vacant eyes. You collect, like hairs in a drain, but you do not speak. You are silent together, but you still have needs. You will die if something is not done. But what to do? Cooperate? Another enclave? Another scheduled gutting? No. Not again. Then the trade caravan comes into view, or the settlement, or the Taker crew. They have things. You do not want; you need. You cannot die or you must die, but you have to know now. Afterwards, some of your number is dead. You did not know their names. The victims, equally faceless. The number is nothing… nothing compared to the failures from before. You have finally escaped the cycle. You live in the last phase now, forever, comforted by death that never leaves and grief that never comes. Slowly, you learn the animal joys again: no victory sweeter than a fight you had to win, no sex better than between sole survivors, no embrace warmer than the fearful respect of your tribe. The enclavists call it “Living Darwin.” You don’t call it anything. You dare not name what you’ve become. Raiding is void. Raiders breathe like the vacuum of space, sucking breath to fill their absence. Sometimes, in that vacant cocoon, something human can heal and regrow.

Maybe that has happened to me. But raiders are not mad. They see the Loss’s truth. And what is death to those who know the truth? Be it a Taker’s, or their own?

Slavers and Immune Hunters

Each will try to claim some rationalization. They only capture Immune that refuse to serve. They only enslave Latents spreading disease. They only grab criminals exiled from enclaves. They only kidnap children that would otherwise starve. They only snatch women that won’t be missed. They only trade in men that sell themselves. It’s for the best. It’s for your safety. It’s for the greater good. All lies. Slavers are raiders without the nobility of nihilism. They serve a god, and it is greed. They corrupt the simple savagery of the Loss. They turn its hunt into a factory farm. They seek to feast forever on single meals, thinning momentary conquests into gruel with human misery. They pervert the life and death purity with a third, unnatural existence, and its every second is worse than an eternity of undead shambling. To be seen by a slaver is to be judged as equal or as cattle. Accept neither at any price. I do not suffer a slaver to live. Those who do are no better than them.

Rebels

Politics have always been about murder. Vote for one candidate to kill an entire class. Vote for another to do it slower. Vote for a third to kill yourself. Those that lose can use guns, money, and power to kill voters, then go on killing besides. The society might change besides who dies, but blood is always the cost. Good politicians offer good exchange rates. Some enclaves still vote, but in the Loss, bullet and blade play kingmaker. Many have dispensed with the pretenses. They dedicate themselves to the only protest that still counts.

VIndIcated

It’s easy the scorn the man from before the Crash. He deserves it. But I do not begrudge

all facets of his life. He lived as best he knew how, and there is no fault in failing to predict the apocalypse. Not everyone gets to be prophet to a dark messiah. Yet there is a certain type that thinks they saw the end coming. These so-called survivalists dare claim their heraldry of the end is some sort of virtue. Before the Crash, they were rich men that thought themselves persecuted. They wasted their lives fearing their government, their neighbors, fate itself. They filled their days with petty preparation for an end that never came. When the Crash finally came, all that grim pragmatism got most of them eaten by an apocalypse too fantastic for their imaginings. Still, some survived by dent of decadent bunkers, king’s estates removed from the world, and militia compounds already turned into premature enclaves. These fools are the first of their type to achieve what their ilk always bet their lives on: vindication. The Vindicated are insufferable. They lord over their enclaves like gods. They

demand loyalty as gratitude, then demand it at gunpoint when the debts are paid. Proven correct once, they rule by the same paranoia that saved them. They hoard and rarely trade. They enslave those races and ideologies they deem inferior. They lash out at anyone they imagine works for the government, or the Moths, or the Jews, or whatever other scapegoat they invent to prop up their little fiefdoms. I somewhat sympathize with the intoxication of the Vindicated. Proving someone wrong can be an addicting feeling. That’s why killing them is such an exquisite joy. There’s nothing quite like watching the realization wash over them. They survived the Crash… only to meet me.

PapIneaus

Each cell has a different name: The Society of Red Leaves, The Revenants, Northern Fallout, Preemptive Revenge. The name “Papineaus” caught on after a group of the same name managed to assassinate the Recession’s first

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interim executive appointed after the Hunter purges. Since then, it’s become generalized to refer to all Canadian insurgents. Papineau cells usually contain someone with military experience, but membership is open. Mothers with children at hockey tournaments in Montreal when the bombs dropped. Husbands that watched wives die of third-degree burns. Orphans raised only by the frozen northern Loss. Ex-Parliament members with inoperable cancers, looking to die quick inside a suicide vest. Their enemy is all the same: the US Recession. All that differs between the cells is how they define that enemy. Some are focused and precise, targeting only members of the Hunter administration still at large or imprisoned. Others regard the entire post-Hunter administration as complicit. They’ll kill DHQS, corporate subcontractors, and anyone else profiting from the first strike. A few regard every single citizen as the enemy and save no qualms for collateral damage. The true zealots won’t be happy until the entire Recession falls in a second Crash. Though most cells prioritize infiltration, large teams operate in the Loss to disrupt DHQS assets and smuggle weapons to their Recession agents. Some Papineaus consider Takers allies; others see only targets. Be sure you know whom you’re dealing with before going into negotiations.

TraItors

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There’s an argument that the Utility vets making up the original Moths count amongst the traitors. But their general’s Taker handle was chosen with some irony. By that definition, Pappa Doc’s Railroad is also a traitor stronghold, as is anywhere where armed services violated orders in order to stay behind and help during the Crash. The broad use of the term is another Recession generalization, used to prop up its flagging civilization. Traitors in the Loss are defined by their continual attacks against the US government. Most have legitimate grievances; they were

either left behind and disavowed by their government, or ordered to commit some atrocity by a man in a comfy eastern armchair. Some have even come back from the safe zones, rebelling against the dismantling of free elections in post-Hunter years. Their intensity varies much like the Papineaus: one end of the spectrum seeks only a special election and enfranchisement for the homo sacer, but hardliners on the other end fight for the total destruction of the USA, a return to the slave-holding Confederacy, or any number of fringe ideologies. With their goals so aligned, it would be easy to imagine the Papineaus and traitors as allies. Cooperation remains scarce. A favorite trick of stewards is to impersonate traitor cells to kill Papineaus and vice versa. As always, their trickery poisons the Lost against each other.

BelIevers

Some would say I am mad for my faith. Perhaps. I’ll not argue it. The Chosen need no validation beyond what they have already received from the Blight. If I have gone insane, who is to say it is not for the best? What use is sanity when so many of its carriers are offal in a casualty’s gut? Perhaps my faith is only insane because it pulled me from the protective nihilism of the raider. Who is to say? I read the Loss as best I can; I dare not guess its ending. Takers believe in the intangible as much as anyone they scorn as “cultist.” They believe in capitalism, the sanctity of the deal, the hope of a better tomorrow. These beliefs break them and save them, same as any theology. They sought something to cling to as reality crumbled beneath their feet, and they reached out for the pillar of human greed. Most Takers would be offended to hear this lifestyle called a choice, yet they would scorn others that grabbed different handholds to save against the collapse of Truth. The Crash kicked down all the old pillars of faith. Jesus, Mohammed, and all the gods refused to save us. Science stammers over its

explanations. History was caught off-guard. The “absent” heavens seemed to answer atheist dismissal by raining down hell. Democracy sold out its citizens and retreated into dystopian fascism. Afterwards, what was left upon which to build a self? Maybe the cowardly enclaves or sheltered Recession still harbor the old beliefs, but anyone that has spent time in deep Loss either invested in a new delusion or killed themselves. Criminals and rebels may have fled to the comforting realities of capitalism and politics, the only gods old enough to weather the Blight’s birth. Others, like myself, found deeper faiths. I recognize my faith in the Chosen may be madness. Religion, like madness, is never diminished by introspection. It’s difficult to define believer sects — even internally, no dogma unifies a faith — but understanding the general trends is important for any Taker. New delusions can be manipulated for profit, but believers will not hesitate to kill blasphemers.

The Meek

Obviously, it’s important to keep believers in perspective. To dismiss them as crazy is wrong, dangerous, and selfish. But I must begin with the group that invented every negative stereotype, as hatred never seems more justified than when considering the Meek. The “theology” of the Meek, if you could call it that, is that the Blight is holy. It came to Earth to save mankind and grant eternal life. The great sin of mankind is that they fought this enlightenment. The Meek themselves resisted the change, but they regret it. In a sick quest for redemption, they seek to “save” as many people as they can before becoming Vectors themselves. They do this by spreading infection to as many as possible. We are only guessing their beliefs based on their actions. Meek cultists have smuggled themselves into enclaves only to jam syringes of hot Blight into their necks, suicide bombings via Vector outbreak. They’ve dropped casualties into the Recession with

helicopters. They regularly erect traps along trade routes, rigging doors with tripwires to open and release floods of trapped casualties. The Meek have barred the gates of Immune harvesting settlements and burned them down with everyone inside. They’ve kidnapped classes of school children and infected them, one-by-one, using Latents strapped to chairs. Then they send the little Vectors back to their enclave. No one knows how people become Meek. They don’t have meetings. They don’t write books. They don’t recruit through anything save murder. But somehow, the Meek always find each other. Most burn out after their first suicidal act of worship, but some have been mass murdering with the Blight for years, refusing to taste the black sinew themselves until the last clean is infected. The Meek are a mockery of faith. They aren’t even human, they’re a memetic virus: a suicidal impulse that demands company. Of all the believers, they are the only group that is completely, hopelessly insane. Killing one does it a favor.

Shepherds

Takers consider becoming a casualty interchangeable with death. To consider anything worse weighs down the job with fear. To think of infection as another form of life is to invite more guilt than most can stand. Yet the truth and what Takers need to rationalize rarely intersects. We know that a Vector’s apologies echo thoughts from their life. The entire business of tragedy tracking depends on a casualty’s tendency to gravitate towards places of significance to the host. It pains one to think about, but something of the soul remains in every casualty. Shepherds do not turn away from this truth. They refuse to slay casualties or Vectors. The source of the pacifism varies greatly. Some sects believe the Blight will one day be cured, and they’ve a responsibility to protect its sufferers. Some refuse violence out of a sense of naturalism, the same way a hunter would refrain from shooting a lion. Christianity

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or other old religions stay hands, as do a sheer inability to put down infected family members. Whatever the source, Shepherds will not fight with the Blight, even when refusal means their certain death. Many believe Shepherds to be in the early stages of turning Meek. Takers have a pragmatic hatred for them, as congregations tend to horde “flocks” of casualties in unexpected places. But I’ve never met a Shepherd with an ounce of malice. They merely do not fool themselves. Decapitating a casualty is murder. Perhaps it is a merciful one, but it is murder all the same.

Chosen

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The Chosen are criticized as Blight worshipers, but how exactly is that worship carried out? What has a Latent done except be bitten or injected? How would the Blight even receive our praise? Every day, Latents live with an alien creature in their veins. It protects them from its wrath even as it murders millions, defying all earthly science in the process. What should they call this thing? An infection? Bad luck? “God” is the only name that fits, but the cleans feel as if that name is synonymous with love. We don’t live in your children’s tales with pantheons of imaginary friends! Our god forces itself inside us. It announces its arrival with agony and black veins. A god does not need to love you, precisely because it is a god. You don’t need to love it back to be in its thrall. Acknowledge the fact that the Latent are better equipped to survive in this world than any other. Recognize that the Blight is greater than humanity by far, and the bodies it spares from its endless hunger are part of a larger plan. Accept the plan is beyond understanding and control. Take comfort in the certainty that Latents shall play a role. See the sinews in your flesh as what they are: badges of terrible purpose. This is all it means to be Chosen. There are denominational squabbles: immune-tolerant, naturals-only, Supressin-evangelical, etc.

These details are paltry in comparison to our single truth. Latency is a divine calling.

TrIage

Being Chosen is about Latents learning to accept the role forced upon them. A portion of the weak, jealous cleans cannot tolerate this truth. They’ve invented cosmology around this hate. Members of Triage won’t admit to being believers, insisting instead they are a movement of concerned citizens. But once they start talking, it’s only a matter of time before they start spewing fantasies more absurd than any religious text. A favorite starting point is the “new studies” that prove the Blight can covertly infect the brains of Latents, turning them into brainwashed sleeper agents. If trying to infiltrate a traditional faith community, they’ll hand out pamphlets about how God warned mankind about Latents with “the mark of Cain.” Eventually, the message becomes action. Triage takes to the streets to protect the citizenry from gangs of Latents playing the “infection game” as ritual initiation into the “Chosen death cult.” They burn down clinics that produce side-effect treatments so that the Latents can’t “boost their infection airborne.” Given enough time, they’ll find a Latent in hiding, don hazmat suits, and lynch the poor fool. As the innocent dies, they’ll film propaganda ads about the danger of latency. They make certain to catch footage of the body turning Vector before slowly chopping off the restrained creature’s limbs, saving the head for last like children torturing butterflies. The old prejudices are as strong as always, but the Crash reduced many who thought themselves progressive to the pure line of hatred that runs through all humanity. These broken things believe they’re “protecting the children,” making the “hard choices,” or whatever other rationalizations speeds them toward the next fix of rage. Triage tends to operate primarily in the Recession, but their poisonous gospel has been known to convert entire enclaves. On at least one occasion, a

group freed the entire population of a Many Hands productive quarantine camp only to execute hundreds of the workers. I wish more Triage ventured into my corner of the Loss. I would happily play the part of that nightmare Latent they’ve concocted to justify their fear.

Black Math

When a Vector kills, it reduces the human population, creating a new Vector in minutes. When a casualty kills, it snuffs out another human life and might create another Vector in days. When a human kills, it might kill one of its own. Even if it slays a casualty, it doesn’t reproduce in the process. Making a new human takes nine months, and it’s more than a decade before it can fight. The math is not on our side. The Black Math realizes this. They recruit from the most hardened and desperate veterans of the Loss: rebels burnt-out after five years of hopeless war, Takers that have lost entire crews, raiders gone vacant-eyed with slaughter. They propose a simple argument. “You are broken,” the Math says. If humanity survives, it will not be with one so thoroughly used and spent. But humanity will not survive. Every person on earth could kill a casualty tomorrow, and we would still be wiped out. The only hope is for some among us — the truly strong — to carry the bulk of the duty themselves. There may be nothing good left inside a broken survivor of the Loss, but holiness is defined solely by the number of monsters you slay. Salvation is in the slaughter and slaughter alone. The Black Math are ascetics that worship a kill/death ratio. Piety is measured in casualties slain. Most mathematicians form Taker crews that exclusively accept extermination contracts. They spend bounty only on the bare essentials; all else goes towards weapons and ammunition. Some go on for years like this, but retirement isn’t an option and the goal isn’t survival. The goal is to die in what the members refer to as “A Significant Subtraction.”

Theology varies. Some Black Math groups shoot Latents as infection risks. Others recruit them as super soldiers. One sect might be suicidally short-lived, but others practice extreme caution in pursuit of a long life spent purging the Blight. The dogma differs, but a mathematician can always be identified by the tattoos. For every casualty slain, a tic mark is inked into flesh. Their leaders wear what’s called “the face full of fives.” They are some of the most feared warriors in all the Loss.

ArchIvIsts

Like Black Math, the Archivists are an eschatology cult. Where they differ is on whether the end can be prevented. Archivists believe extinction is inevitable and the present a brief reprieve between Crashes. Their duty is to preserve as much human culture as possible, as quickly as possible, for whatever comes next.

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The exact shape of this “next” begins denominational rifts. Roughly half of archivists believe that extinction won’t be total, but humanity will be reduced unto a new dark age. They seek to protect the knowledge of today so that it might be rediscovered hundreds of years hence, when the Blight has passed and only primitives remain. This faction is typically referred to as “investors,” contrasting with the “monumentalists,” who believe all mankind is doomed. They construct archives for evolved Blight creatures or aliens, using our knowledge as humanity’s tombstone. Each half is further fractured by what, exactly, deserves preservation. Many investors are content to horde books, but some insist on inscribing knowledge in stone in case the Dark Age lasts longer than hoped. For the monumentalists, stone is the low end of acceptable preservation. Longevity alone determines the quality of their archives, so many cults busy themselves constructing vaults or experimenting with digital file formats that can last for centuries. The Loss generally regards the Archivists well. Their faith may seem a bit precious when survival is on the line, but the limited storage capacity of the Ubiq network means they often possess manuals and lore vital to enclave survival. But in rare instances, the bookish normalcy of an archivist can shatter and destroy the unprepared. The primary tenet of their belief is the doom of mankind. This means that, if given the choice between a human life and a rare comic book, some will not hesitate to kill for the text. They regard themselves and all they meet as already dead; watch out for archivists that act on such belief.

Holy CommunIon

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We don’t understand immunity. Of course people worship it. The Church of Holy Communion derives primarily from Christian faiths and their textual obsessions with blood. Considering the origin, it is no surprise that religious

practice is equally diffuse. The least intimidating denominations merely regard the Immune as God’s chosen people. This privilege can be as innocuous as electing the Immune to deliver Sunday sermon, but things get darker from there. Some Immune manipulate the faithful into serving them as cults of personality. Fundamentalists are worse by far. They regard the Immune as holy, but in the same way man’s dominion over the animals is holy. These backwoods tribes believe that ingesting the flesh of the Immune will save them from the Blight, which is surely the instrument of God’s wrath. Hardline churches snatch travelers from the road. Latents they execute immediately. Everyone else they administer blood testing kits. Any regular cleans are allowed to leave, if they take communion. Those who refuse are executed as apostates. Anyone who tests as Immune is turned into communion. Ritual consumption varies. Some only slit the throat and drain the blood. A few groups practice full-blown cannibalism. Suffice it say that if a shifty-eyed hillbilly comes wandering in from the deep Loss looking to buy advanced bloodtesting kits and flensing knives, it might be best to navigate around the region he calls home.

Detox

Neo-Primitives were a movement before the Crash. Its expression ranged from harmless vegans lording their morality over dinner parties to delusional anti-vaxxers causing outbreaks of extinct diseases. Intentions were equally varied, starting at the necessary work of environmentalists and corrupting until reaching the psychosis of dark enlightenment eco-terrorists, seeking to forcibly drag humanity back into the 16th century so that their prophets might rule. The one thing all these attempts at “authenticity” shared was a platform of privilege. The starving don’t care about GMO crops. Months of non-violent protest is a hobby laborers couldn’t afford. One would think that, as the Crash

eviscerated the privilege supporting it, those of the “more natural than thou” set might adjust their beliefs. But some merely doubledowned on their ideology, sublimating a vague sense of eco-consciousness into a religion. Thus the Detox believers were born, and they were first among the Loss to practice evangelical recruitment. Like most missionary work, enlightenment came along with a threat. The early Detoxins tended to have bountiful home gardens and the preindustrial skills required to run them. Those that converted and joined their enclaves lived. The rest starved. The numbers grew steadily thereafter. Detoxins vary in intensity and focus. Some merely point out the fact (correctly) that the cull in population caused by the Crash might be the only thing that allows humanity to stop the rampant climate change already destroying the earth. These groundfloor believers run rational, sustainable communities and sell good weed. Some more extreme sects believe the Blight was caused by preservatives and will murder members that breech their dietary laws. Entire enclaves have starved after Detoxins burned their GMO crops, dooming themselves in the process. Only super-seeds can provide in the harsh weather changes of the Loss, yet some in Detox would rather humanity perish than ingest anything that isn’t organic. Extremists have executed people for riding horses or owning dogs. The worst of the Detoxins take a return to agrarian economies to mean a return to Dark Age society. These hardliners use the ideology of naturalism to cow their women into illiterate breeding sows, ruling their enclaves like fiefdoms. The majority of Detoxins are harmless hippies, but the average Taker’s clothes and diet are blasphemous enough to a zealot to justify murder.

Crusaders

I cannot relate to study sickness. The mismatch between the reality science teaches and the rebuke of the Blight is distressing

without doubt, but the solution seems simple: don’t look. No cure can be found this way, but no cure was ever possible. Besides, I would no more want to cure the Blight than wish to erase myself. It is part of me and part of humanity as a whole, even for cleans. Like cancer and death, its sorrow gives shape to the mortal condition. And if we could cure it? What would we say to those desiccated corpses, resurrected after five years of wandering cannibalism? What I do understand is an oath, and that is what drives the Crusaders to defy the limits of the human mind. Doctors that authentically lived their Hippocratic Oaths could not be swayed by a lack of funding. They did not listen when the Recession tried to reallocate their focus to other things. They did not abandon their posts during the amputation, and the true healers could not stand to see the people in the Loss suffer without aid.

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These medical professionals have dedicated themselves to fighting the Blight’s extinction by patrolling, researching, and caring for the Lost. The mission assures their madness and death, yet they still collect samples, gather research, and try cures. It is folly to fight a god like the Blight, but it is a brave folly. Noble or not, it would be a mistake to regard all Crusaders as philanthropists. Though they provide most of the healthcare in the Loss, they are rarely on the side of their patients. Practitioners consider themselves in a daily battle against the very extinction of mankind. With those stakes at hand, the life of a single person seems paltry. Even the ones that still respect their patients have been made cynical by witnessing thousands die since the first days in the emergency room. As the slippery contradictions of the Blight weigh on a Crusader’s mind, it is only a matter of time before ethics slip. Crusaders usually pay for samples from Latents and immunes, but they’ve been known to take them by force. There are rumors of secret labs, hidden in the deep Loss, where Crusaders practice human experimentation. Most come to regard the Surpressin trials as the height of medical discovery, and the person bandaging your wounds may not hesitate to throw your life away chasing another such result.

RandIans

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Raiders are often confused as Randians. Both can leave enclaves impoverished and bleeding, but conflating the two is to mistake a reflex for a dance. Raiders steal out of animal instinct, reduced by tragedy to a tribal imperative. Randians have confused a tendency toward greed for cosmic philosophy, as if a fool learned how his stomach works and proceeded to dissolve the world in acid. In fairness, the early days of the Crash punished altruism with death. By the time enclaves re-established order, too many had been rewarded too long by their psychopathy. Continued survival confirmed the worldview of disgraced pre-Crash elites even as they lost their wealth. Others from more humble

origins came to see dispassionate selfishness as what their lives had always been missing. A lack of empathy became more than a survival mechanism. For those it rescued, cold selfishness wasn’t what saved their lives... it was the only way to live. Randians do not identify as “believers.” They are atheists one-and-all, regarding the tenets of both God and man as slave moralities. However, the dogmatic pursuit of total self-interest practiced since the Crash puts the sub-cultures of the preCrash US business community and political establishment to shame. Today’s Randians won’t even speak to another person unless their time is compensated with bounty. They would not douse a fire if it did not threaten them personally, even as a child burned alive. Expecting anything from them resembling “common courtesy,” “good manners,” or “human decency” they regard as theft, fraud, and attempted slavery. Paradoxically, Randians rarely operate alone. They form “mutual cooperatives” out of “rational self-interest” by first binding each other with contracts. Though there is no body of law to enforce these documents, the believers consider a contract intrinsically sacred. The slightest deviation from one can provoke gunfire. As such, Randians make for terrific businessmen and awful neighbors. Their every interaction is priced and demands compensation. No act of civic engagement is too small for their ire, and they’ve been known to conquer entire enclaves rather than pay a tax on sewage removal. These purists, despite their constant lip-service to fair exchange, fully adhere to the laws of might makes right. Many believe the ability to steal from someone represents a flaw in the character of the victim. The theft is, as Randians, their duty to perform. No hypocrisy is too great for the Randians. They’ll condemn Takers as parasitic liberals even as they hire them. They’ll launch attacks against crews because their work takes them near salvage they “contracted” as their own. Some co-ops even keep slaves, justifying it by

having the oppressed sign themselves into indentured servitude. As I said, people confuse Randians for raiders. I raided because it was the life the Loss demanded of me. Only a Randian would call that virtue. They also tend to dress in business casual, even now. I do not know why.

LALAs

Takers call them LALAs: Last Asshole Left Alive. The Loss is not forgiving to isolation, so they become scarcer every year. However, lone survivors can still be found dotting the deep wasteland. To call LALAs believers is a stretch. They are defined by their isolation, and even I admit that the term “crazy” fits well on many that I have met. But rest assured, LALAs are driven by their beliefs, even if those beliefs are only held by a single person gone insane with years of solitude and grief. I met a man that thought the dolls he collected talked to him. One woman had been teaching a kindergarten class of skeletons the same lesson for years. Another thought he could cure the Blight with aromatherapy. He kept basements full of fragrant casualties. Do not pity or dismiss a LALA. Though they may have broken with reality, they did so in such a way that enabled survival. Alone. In harsh conditions. For years. The chance of even the most dedicated hermit avoiding all contact that long is very slim. The chance the LALA killed anyone who came close is disturbingly high. Loneliness is an unnatural condition. Even raiders form tribes. The suffering a LALA endures can sharpen the mind into a razor point, and they aim it at anyone who dares come too close.

Lost ThIngs

Places can be predicted and skirted. People? Reasoned with. Manipulated. But the Loss is a home for things. Humanity only squats here. It is for the casualties and the Vectors: the monsters with which it cut itself onto the earth. Everyone

knows about these creatures, but there are other things besides. Things that cannot be seen, avoided, or escaped.

Extreme Weather

Seasons no longer exist. The earth still rotates around the sun. The hours of daylight stay consistent. Temperature and precipitation still follow loose trends. But the season, as humans conceive of it, no longer exists. It has been wiped out by climate change we brazenly ignored and continue to accelerate. One may think it is summer, but radioactive fallout from a nuke or dust storms from a drought can easily blot out the sun in a day, leaving the ground blanketed in ash and snow. It can be over 100 degrees in January. Late spring can bring ice storms so cruel they snap tree trunks in half. Seasons existed as our primary tool of agricultural survival, and they are something upon which we can no longer rely. Thankfully, humanity has so tampered with crops that they can survive the hellish moonscape we’re building for them. Alosine has strains of corn that grow even after bleach has been injected into the roots. Potatoes that can survive sixty-degree temperature swings. Okra plants that can grow from cracks in the sidewalk. But scientific breakthroughs that help the enclave farmer do nothing to save Takers in the Loss. I’ve seen men frozen to death in June. Women choked to death on dust. Entire crews wiped away by flash floods. Enclaves poisoned by contaminated reservoirs or starved by hordes of locusts. There is a reason we call the migrations of roaming casualties “weather.” Both are equally capricious and deadly. Rest assured, if the Loss does not feel its minions are killing you fast enough, it will handle matters personally. Trust not the seasons, the forecast, or your own eyes. The very sky can conspire to end you.

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Ferals

An animal that ingests casualty flesh dies, poisoned. An animal that ingests human flesh eats for that week. The creatures of the Loss have learned this. The worst and most common ferals are dogs. Most pets starved, got eaten, or swallowed black juice while fighting off casualties during the Crash. The few that survived either have dedicated owners or rejected their domestication entirely. At this point, the survivors have inter-bred so much that mongrels are almost all that remain. Some former pet packs have even joined with wolves, coyotes, and coywolfs. The hybrid packs are formidable hunters, but the Blight’s poisoning of insects and other carrion eaters put them at constant risk of starvation. The knockdown effects of the scavenger die-off, combined with climate change and Crash fallout, makes game scarce. By far, the most prevalent and easy prey in the Loss is man. Feral dogs have only survived this long through cunning, and most have intimate experience with mankind. I’ve seen packs use cute pure-breeds to lure in travelers. The

malingering pup sets an ambush, waiting for someone to come to its aid, before barking to alert dozens of ravenous hounds lying in wait nearby. Packs will harrow and pursue targets for days, herding them towards hostile encampments in the hopes of eating the clean corpses killed by gunfire. The craftiest packs have learned to bite and then throw up to purge themselves of the Blight in order to hamstring casualties in the high grass of their hunting grounds, essentially trapping escape routes out of the kill zone. Dogs are just the most prevalent ferals. Bears have grown bolder with dwindling resources. At least one crew of Moths once got contracted to hunt a man-eating grizzly. As we’ve not heard back from them since, I assume things did not go well. Zoos further complicated matters. LifeLines contains reports of rampaging rhinos, man-eating baboon troops, and stampeding bulls harassing enclaves. The Lions of Chicago have become legendary, and though their existence is in doubt, the death toll cannot be denied, nor the prize on their heads. The Loss is a jungle. Takers are not king.

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Aberrants

Any child knows to aim for the head. Taking casualties is simplicity itself. Be smart, stay lucky, and survive. As for Vectors... throw everything at them: empty magazines, use grenades, break blades off. If they get close, keep mouths shut and eyes covered. You’re probably still dead unless Chosen or Immune, but they can be slain if met with the same suicidal intensity with which they attack. But Aberrants? There is no planning for an Aberrant. There is only the sensation of being hunted, and the wisdom of running away. Killing one grants no reward, save maybe the false confidence of having conquered the Blight’s champion. Such quests are madness. Aberrants are the very maws of the Loss, the jaws that swallow entire enclaves in the night. To continue on when one is near is stupidity. To chase one is suicide. They are real. Fire any in a crew that

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believe otherwise. No doubt some of the stories on LifeLines are lies, legends passed around to scare the Bait. But dare we make the same mistake again, refusing to believe monsters exist? Has the Crash taught us nothing? The Blight has already destroyed reality once. The Aberrants are the weapons with which it will do it again.

Aerosol

I know a Taker named Lady. She’s natural Latent, but as yet doesn’t acknowledge being Chosen. I try to enlighten her; she tries to get me to buy her more drinks. It’s frustrating, but she uses a large pipe in the field, similar enough to a sledge. We trade tips and stories. Lady’s first crew was successful. They had run contracts since the beginning and caught a rhythm. The time came to scavenge a vehicle and increase their range. They found a candidate in an oil change place, banged on the back door to kite the dead, and picked the

lock on the front. Inside, they found a single casualty. It was desiccated, long-gone. One of the first to change. According to Lady, they played it safe. Melee weapons out they surrounded the creature. It had a broken ankle and could barely shamble. The pipe was drawn back, ready to end it, when one of Lady’s crew sneezed. It seemed funny, echoing in the silence, such a silly noise for such a grave deed. Her crew laughed. She laughed too. Then they began to cough. Choke. Collapse. You never forget what a Vector transformation looks like. The bloody tears, the red spilling out the ears…Lady said they all began to turn, right on the spot. By the time she walked towards one to help, the seizures and apologies were starting. She ran and slammed the door behind her. She was barely down the block before they were bashing at the walls, trying to get at her. I believe Lady’s stories. All Latents eventually get roped into cleanup duty, patting down the dead for loose bounty. Many of us have seen the mystery casualties, myself included. The ones with no wounds save rot. The ones that have no site of infection. Most of us assume they were originals, leftovers from the emergence event, or victims of a Meek’s poisoning. But it’s also possible that, for some reason, the rare casualty turns the Blight airborne. They emit a cloud of the hot strain around themselves, infecting any cleans that come close. How could we tell, if they look like the rest? What if all those sudden outbreaks, the ones that destroy entire settlements in hours, were caused by one of these Aerosols wandering too near the gate? What if they’re out there even now, emitting clouds of the poison? What if all casualties are destined to spore invisibly into the air, and the one’s we’ve encountered so far are merely the first of millions?

Ever-Vecs

It is the purpose of hot Blight to bring death. It must kill victims to ready them as hosts for the cold strain. Without Supressin or the

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grace of being Chosen, the clock starts ticking immediately upon exposure. Most die during the chaos of outbreak, quickly transitioning into torpor without a headshot. For the survivors, death comes from hemorrhagic fever, neural damage, accelerated heartbeat, or wracking convulsions. If the body’s strong enough to withstand that, muscle strain and exhaustion is often enough. Hydrophobia causes dehydration. Unless new victims are plentiful, starvation also comes into play. Then there are secondary infections…. Most Vectors have three days. A week, at most. But some Vectors, according to legend, never die. They never bleed out, starve, or lose the basic motor skills. They can climb, turn door handles, and wield simple weapons like a just-turned freshy. In fact, an Ever-Vec seems to get stronger the longer it runs. Experts guess they metabolize energy from protein better than a healthy human body. Every ragged chunk of flesh gets turned into muscle, creating linebacker physiques and inhuman speed.

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Even I would dismiss claims of the EverVecs were it not for the Cursed Settlement. Located in the Ozark mountains, the Cursed Settlement started as a DHQS forward operating base before succumbing to a hot outbreak. Eventually, it was cleared out and turned into an archivist compound... before succumbing to a hot outbreak. Then an enclave. Then a settlement again. Then a Crusader site. All fell, flooding the region with new casualties each time. On Lifelines, there are accounts from multiple survivors across the site’s many revivals. Whether corporate, military, or Lost, all claim to have seen the same Vector leading the infectious charge: huge, fast, wielding a parking meter like a club. At least two crews have gone out hunting him, seeking to reclaim the haunted compound for themselves. None have returned.

EmptIes

Empties are also called blanks, dreamers, pacifists, and downers. There’s hardly a Taker that hasn’t seen one. Few register them.

Many try to explain them away as a quirk of infection. The ones that admit they’re Aberrants lie and tell themselves empties are the only ones. They tell themselves they aren’t bothered. The psychic geography that collects some casualties at places they knew in life goes haywire in an empty. They don’t attack. They don’t bite. They just repeat some action they knew in life. Over and over again. Blindly. I’ve seen an empty behind the wheel of a wrecked car, shifting between drive and park endlessly. I’ve killed entire mobs only to find one sitting in the living room, watching a cold fireplace. They’ll stand at train stations, waiting for rides that never come, reading phones long dead, scrolling with phantom fingers lost to rot. There’s no real danger in an empty. Most get slain in the heat of battle, shot in a panic to kill the rest of an attacking mob. If they survive that, it only makes sense to put them down. They’ve been stationary for years, after all. Chances are good they still have a bounty

on them. But most get left where they were found. Takers won’t admit it in front of Bait, but most can’t stand to end it. When you pull cards all day, the casualties become the enemy. It hurts enough to admit you need them, to hang salvation on such terror. But watching them have memories, acting them out forever… it sets the mind back to every headshot and decapitation, remembering the face beneath. You wonder if you have family out there, repeating the loop, waiting for someone to break the spell. You wonder what you’ll do when your time comes. You wonder if you’re even good enough to resist the hunger, if you even deserve purgatory after all you’ve done. On the job, such thoughts kill faster than gunfire. An empty is an albatross around a crew’s neck. An omen of the fatal mistake sure to come soon.

Mutants

Ferals are a constant problem in the Loss. Many enclaves plan for their nuisance, and

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there are crews that specialize in their removal. Even against experts, though, the odd feral seem too resistant to damage. Hunters land direct hits that do not fell the beast. The exterminators track the oddly dark blood trails of these predators. Sometimes, they fail to return. There is no shortage of other explanations. Perhaps the too-proud hunters lied about their shots. When they come back as Vectors, why believe the culprit is anything but a wandering casualty? If they never return at all, why ascribe the tragedy to something fantastic when the Loss boasts so many common dooms? But, still, LifeLines has tales of horses that eat men. Apes that hang the bones of victims from the trees. Reported sightings abound of carnivorous beasts that

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do not fall, reek of rot, and hunt more for sport than hunger. Maybe too many for simple myth....

GanglIa

Blight sinews break the skin. We see it in the black cankers and “blossoms” poking from a casualty’s rot. The Latent suffer this too. It’s not unlike acne if it had root around your nervous system. Trimming these burrs is an everyday, painful annoyance for the Chosen. For those that believe in the Ganglia, the errant sinews explain the abomination’s origins. The idea is that sinews penetrating cadavers can’t hope to understand the human musculature. The twitchy stumbling of the casualty must result from alien nerve cluster struggling with a foreign body. But the Ganglia

theory holds that, if sinews connect enough of the limited processing centers housed in a C’s brain, the Blights manipulation of dead flesh becomes exponentially more effective and graceful compared to the twitchy stumbling of a casualty. House enough Cs going through torpor in a tight space, their growing sinews break the skin and join up with neighbors in the pile. The Blight doesn’t distinguish between the bodies in the network. It just keeps producing more and more sinew, leaking more and more juice, until a monstrous, rat-king of casualties is formed. We only know about ganglia from the GILF tape showing one of the things rushing down a hospital corridor. Tied together with black, fibrous sinews, the mass seems like it should be immobile, but many heads, hands, and feet apparently make light work. The movement is... disturbing. The group body casts members in front of the nucleus like grappling hooks. They land and drag

themselves forward on all fours, hauling the mass behind them with the cords of tissue prolapsing out of their backsides. Others ram their dead fingernails into the walls and ceilings, supporting the nexus of poisoned dead flesh and inching forward like a swarm of roaches. Ceiling crawlers shatter the lights as it comes, providing only strobe glances at the indiscernible whole. The whole ballet takes place in fractions of seconds, faster and more agile than any Vector. It’s a rolling, swinging, animal sprint that looks wholly wrong. No one in GILF takes credit for the tape, but I’m not sure how anyone there at the filming could be alive to corroborate. Armchair-Takers claim the impossible physics of the ganglia’s movement mean the footage is doctored. I hope they are right. It would be comforting.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. -H.P. Lovecraft 165

Converts

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My tribe and I once scouted an enclave inside a prison. They had reinforced the chain-link with layers of vinyl siding, further buttressed with strong pillars cemented into the ground as support. Rather than attack the hard target, we made camp in the woods a few miles away, hoping to make easier prey of their traders. I alleviated the boredom of the wait by hunting. I came upon a field, pockmarked with fresh craters, dozens of casualties clawed at the earth. A dead man digging his own grave is not uncommon in the Loss. The casualty will see a gopher or fox, then claw after it dumbly. If not provided other stimulus, they can dig themselves up to the neck. But there were plenty of other things to entice them: birds, deer crashing through branches, distracting rustles of wind through leaves. I’d also never seen so many of them dig at once. But as I pondered this, there was an explosion that sent corpses flying. They were digging in a minefield, one set by misguided soldiers during the retreat. The

others looked up, began shambling towards the crater, and then stopped. They seemed to spy something on the ground in unison. They resumed digging. It was strange, certainly, but I thought it funny. I moved on before more arrived. Days later, I scouted the enclave. They’d set off alarms on the far side of the compound that night. It was to draw fence-clingers away from the gates: sure sign a party was leaving. I waited to signal my tribe’s ambush. As the sun rose, the cleared gate pulled open to reveal a sizable convoy. Gas vehicles, armored — the enclavists were rich. I prepared the signal when I heard the explosion. In the night, right outside the gate, something had placed a landmine. From the sound of it, the same type of landmine from the field. The truck passing over it was blown apart. Its engine block dropped and snapped the front axle. The car and its dead passengers were an immovable, burning obstacle... jammed right in the middle of the gate.

That’s when they came. Thousands of them. The largest casualty stampede I’d ever seen. They rose from where they’d been lying under the leaves. They rose from parts of the forest I had walked through the previous day, stirring not a single creature. They descended at their stumbling leisure, in no great rush, confident the panicked enclavists would never clear the gate in time. For the rest of the afternoon, I watched in shock as the enclave fell. I listened to their screams echo through the valley. Near the end, the horde seemed to lose its focus. The casualties again mingled aimlessly with their new, frantic Vector-kin, dumbly trapped by the walls they’d just invaded. Just as night fell, I watched one wander away. It was a little boy, in pajamas soaked with fresh blood, walking in a straight line though it pursued no prey. On its head rested a SWAT helmet, dented with bullet impacts. Eventually, it turned. It looked at me. It saw me. The rolling cataracts of its eyes locked on mine. I was recognized, found unworthy, and abandoned as it moved on. There are other stories on the lines like this. Some of them, for some reason, retain consciousness. They hold a human mind, intelligent but converted entirely to the hunger. No one knows why, but they are always children.

Scarecrows

Scarecrows are another instance of sinews over-reaching the bounds of their victim. People tell stories of entire fields covered with desiccated corpses, each strapped to the ground, drained by thorny black vines that radiate out from an immobile casualty crucified by its own Blight. The root-like growths turn the soil into a minefield, ready to burst forth and ensnare any creature fool enough to pass close. Drone combines have been choked to a stop by the fibrous tendrils. Entire enclaves have had to evacuate as the taint of a scarecrow wormed under their crops and walls. Most deny the existence of scarecrows. They regard refugees fleeing its influence as

con artists seeking handouts. They question why snipers don’t just shoot it in the head, or dig up the roots for burning. As if those who have seen hadn’t tried and seen their Takers pulled down, drained of blood by the thirsty soil. I’ve never encountered a scarecrow, but there are many photos on LifeLines. The same accusations of tampering are thrown at them all, but why concoct such a hoax? To what end? I think people just don’t want to believe the Blight can have such alien, plant-like behavior. They want to think of it as a parasite, infection, animal, or whatever inadequate corollary is that year’s fashion. They want to take comfort in imagined limits to its required conditions and speed of growth. Such fools build their reality on quicksand.

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Stalkers

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The mother still watches over me. I do not know why. She is not Banhammer’s mother; she bore the man from before. She is his stalker, but bound to my new flesh. In his endless stupidity, the man stuck her in an economy apartment so he could get on with his “life.” He forgot about her. For that and many reasons, I’m glad he is dead. I’m grateful that his body houses me and to the Blight that has Chosen me to see its purpose. But I wish the man’s ghosts died with him. She always stays on the horizon. I recognize the pink nightgown through binoculars. Her rotting face bears a resemblance too, recalled in my bones. I’ve doubted this recognition, but I’ve hired erosion artists to decay her visage from old photos. Her casualty is unmistakable. From long study, I suspect it was the bite on her arm. I can just imagine it. One of the Vectors tried to break in through that window herb garden she fussed over for lack of a worthy son. She’d not have gone to the cops or fled upon hearing the breaking glass. A lone fighter — always had been. It was her home. She would have pushed the intruder out herself. Judged by the condition of her corpse, she was successful and remained unravaged. But it got one bite out of her before moving on to easier prey. That was enough. I do not know how she tracks me. I once thought it was our shared Blight, or our shared blood, but there are other stalkers out there. I’ve heard tell of lovers, friends, and former crewmembers that come back, driving Takers to madness. The method doesn’t really matter, for it is unshakable. When I flew to the coast, I thought I was free of her. I went months without her haunting. Then we met halfway upon my return, states away from where I last saw her. I’d caught her in the midst of a cross-country trek to join me. Or rather, she caught me. I’ve hired the best snipers in the Loss to end it. They always miss. She’s wily, ducking corners the moment a shot lines up. When I send them in for closer kills, they don’t return.

She’s there even now, watching my camp from just out of range. I know this without looking. When I wander alone, she gets closer. Once, as I slept in a destroyed copy shop, she passed by the storefront windows. She shuffled by as if on an errand, somewhere to go. But her black eyes locked with mine, never losing sight until she passed the grimy glass. I screamed challenge. I grabbed my sledge and charged. But when I ran outside, she was already gone. Before I could look, I was distracted by a mob of regular casualties, all too eager to eat what Mother refused to finish. She may merely be playing with her food. She may wish torture me, endlessly. Revenge for the man’s many sins. I wish I could get close enough to end both our pain. I wish I could tell her that the man she seeks is as dead as she. I wish I could tell her many things.

MalIgnant

Blight tissue doesn’t come from thin air. It might as well, for all we understand it, but it doesn’t. As the Blight slows decomposition, it metabolizes tissue from the victim to make its sinew. Medical studies have measured casualties in torpor and after, finding a nearly one-to-one maintenance of weight. What if the Blight kept rewriting tissues? What if it didn’t stop after the sinews had wormed through the body? What if it just kept going until the whole body was black ichor? Then it would be malignant. We were headed through the sewers on the outskirts of a city, trying to bypass the urban hordes. Deep in the lightless tunnels, I walked onto a carpet of spongy pitch darkness I’d

mistaken for night overpowering my flashlight. As I moved forward, it turned to hands, eyes, teeth in barely twitching jaws. The moisture from the tunnel turned into chunky NHPD fluid dripping onto my hair and back. Had I not been on point, the crew would have certainly been infected. It didn’t move or attack. Our way was just blocked, choked by corpse kudzu. Yet seeing it was enough to feel assaulted. How did that many casualties get into the sewer? What spread the cancerous overgrowth of Blight sinew between them? Could it spread to me, consuming other Latents? I do not know. I know that we left those tunnels and ate the cost of that contract. I know that’s why I’m alive to tell the tale.

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Shuffled

Absolutes in the Loss don’t come often. One of them is shoot for the head. But every so often, a panicked Taker will hit the lines claiming that headshots don’t work. They report massacres where the mobs couldn’t be stopped, nightmares where the ritual is observed but the beasts keep coming. Eyelessly tracking, trying to stuff the flesh of dead crewmembers down a neck stump. There are also reports by Fencemen claiming they’ve seen entire headless mobs wander past the gates. Casualties with skulls hollowed out by buckshot or with hatchets still buried in their spines. All of them claimed that the groups stayed together and kept tracking their prey, despite have no sense organs left which to do so. There are a million explanations for a failed kill besides Aberrants: dud ammunition, light gunpowder reload in the cartridge, bullet

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bounces off the skull, melee weapon misses the Blight nexus in the brainstem. Common mistakes like these get Takers killed. If someone survives to tell the tale, they’re usually carrying the ghosts of a dead crew on their backs. Making up a new Aberrant might be how some cope. But, if the Shuffled do exist, we’ve already lost our only weapon against the Blight and don’t even know it yet.

PLAYING THE MARKET

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MaterIals Needed

Every player needs the following: • One black and one red ten-sided dice (they don’t have to be black and red so long as the two can be told apart) • Pencil and Eraser • Character Sheet (included) As a group, you need… • A table or surface to play on • Crew Sheet (included) • A copy of the Red Markets rules

The DIce: Black and Red

ProfIt System

The Profit System uses two dice – Black and Red – to determine a wide range of effects. Players use the dice to determine the success or failure of their characters’ actions. Similarly, the Market uses the same dice to generate much of the game world randomly, simulating the capricious and unpredictable forces at work in the setting. When there’s a chance a character might fail an important task, the player makes a dice check to determine what happens next. The Profit System follows the same rule as all business; success means being “in the Black.” A dice check is in the Black if the Black die is higher than the Red, either naturally or after adding modifiers. If the Red is higher or equal to the Black, the combination of uncontrollable, moment-to-moment variables, and the character’s inexperience leads to failure.

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To play Red Markets, each player needs a set of two, ten-sided dice. It’s preferable to have one black and one red because that is how the dice are named in the rules, but any pair of d10s will do, so long as the player can keep them separate from each other. The Black represents the best attempt of the player to succeed at that moment. This number is modified by a combination of skills and charges. The number the Black lands on is abbreviated as B# in the text. A result of 10 on the Black die would be written B10. Since the Black can be modified by choices the player makes, it can go above ten. For instance, that B10 would actually be B10+2 if the player had a skill of +2 that applied to that check. The Red represents the obstacles threatening success. It accounts for all the variables affecting the check at any given moment – windage, lighting, fatigue, mood, etc. – and can vary wildly. The number a Red die lands on is abbreviated as R# in the text. For instance, a roll of 5 on the Red die would be written R5.

Boom and Bust

The terms Boom and Bust are used to describe two extremes on a spectrum of rules variants.

Boom rules are variants that make the game easier and more action-packed. Characters are tougher, more capable, and generally bigger badasses than might be seen in bleaker horror stories. Boom games are about taking big gambles for big rewards; if the characters die, they’ll look good doing it.

Bust rules are variants that make the game more difficult and grim. Characters have more responsibilities, flaws, and weaknesses than the protagonists of more escapist zombie fiction. Bust games are about the weight of the supernatural and the mundane conspiring to crush and grind souls into dust. If a character makes it out of a Bust game whole, it’ll be as ugly as it is impressive. The principles of Boom and Bust aren’t absolutes; groups can use different variants for different aspects of the game. The labels are merely included for reference so readers can find variants that cater to their tastes.

Procedure

The Profit System is all about representing the cost of character’s actions. Dice checks are rarely free and, if a charge doesn’t need to be spent, the check is “one-and-done” (can only be attempted once). Every other check of the dice must be purchased using game resources. Characters that invest in the development of their skills and the care of their gear can add more to the Black, increasing their probability of success. If the Black is higher, success is achieved. If Red is equal or higher, the character fails. What follows is the procedure for making dice checks in the Profit System. Indentations mark where special rules and equipment can affect the process. Always remember: no matter what modifiers are in play, the question of a dice check is always “Is Black higher than Red?” • The Market calls for a skill check • Determine if the skill requires the player to “buy-a-roll.” o Purely mental actions are free (such as Foresight, Sensitivity, or Self Control), but they are one-and-done rolls. If failed, Will must be spent or a Reference must provide a favor if the check is to succeed. Takers can’t just try again, even if there is time. o Purely social actions are free, but they are one-and-done. If failed, Will must be spent, a Reference must be tapped, or a different approach must be used. o Spend a charge to buy-a-roll if using gear (something requiring ammunition, batteries, or other disposable parts). ▪ For charged tools, determine any extra charges the player wants to spend on success. Spend those charges before the dice are rolled. The most common instance of this is increasing the chance of a hit by firing more ammo. Every extra charge adds a +1 to the check, unless otherwise stated (see p. 235)

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o Spend a charge of rations for intense physical actions, such as using a melee weapon or running. Spend additional charges for +1 to the check, representing overexertion supported by a high-calorie diet. • Roll the Black and Red together. o If Black is a natural match to the Red, it’s a critical success on even numbers, a critical failure on odds (see p. 175). Criticals negate the effects of any spent charges, but those charges are still spent and gone. o If results don’t naturally match, add the character’s skill rating and any bonuses from charges to the Black. ▪ If the modified Black is higher, the character succeeds. ▪ If Red is higher or equal, the character fails. Ties always go to the Market. • After the roll… o If the dice check is mental or social and can’t be rerolled, the player can choose to tap References for an automatic success if they have time and resources. o If the character has a Will point, it can be spent to flip Red and Black numbers, negate a critical failure, or upgrade a success to a critical success. o Certain gear allows players to spend charges after a success to gain additional benefits. Both player and Market work to describe the result of the dice check in the game’s narrative and move on. When to Roll The Market only calls for a dice check when three conditions are met. 1. There is a reasonable chance for failure. For example, let’s say an adult character wants to drive a well-maintained car down an empty, straight highway. It’s the middle of the day and the character maintains safe speeds. It’s not reasonable to assume that

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this perfectly capable person would suddenly forget how the steering wheel works and drive into a tree. The Market would not call for a skill check in such an instance. However, if it’s raining, night, and the character is racing to warn the enclave about an impending attack, a dice check is needed because the nasty conditions make failure understandable. 2. Failure has consequences. A character is curious how many breeds of dog exist. They spend a charge on the laptop to buy-a-roll, make a Research check, and fail. What’s to stop them from trying again? They are at their home base; they have access to solar panels to refresh charges. Why can’t they just keep searching? There’s no reason, so the Market shouldn’t call for a skill check in the first place. If, on the other hand, the character is out on a job and trying to figure out why the client needs so many salvaged bicycles, the crew doesn’t have all day to wait around. A failed check would mean the information couldn’t be found fast enough to have a use in negotiations. The consequence is a loss of precious time in a sensitive situation. Even if a Reference is tapped to provide the information as a favor, favors cost. The failure of the Research check would, in this instance, have consequences, so the Market would be right to call for a check. 3. Stories can continue if there is a failure. The only available contract is posted on a bulletin board in the enclave where the characters currently reside. The Market calls for everyone to make an Awareness check. Everyone fails. The characters don’t know about the job and the game grinds to a halt. The Market should have never called for a check because failure means stopping play. If, on the other hand, that contract is one of many available, an Awareness check would make sense; anything can be reasonably overlooked, and the consequence of failure would be less profit. To up the stakes even

more, failing a Mechanics check to hotwire a car and flee the zombie hordes would be another justified check. The character in the car might die, but the story has “gone on” to a tragic conclusion rather than an abrupt anticlimax. SImple Success Leaving aside criticals (see below), when the Black exceeds the Red – either naturally or after skills and charges are added – a simple success has occurred. The player gets to see the character achieve the goal. Success at Cost If a skill check is failed but the player really wants to make it, they can petition to succeed at a cost. This means it’s up to the Market to set a price on what it would take to overcome the Taker’s failure. This is why a lot of rolls in Red Markets are one-and-done rolls; success isn’t a matter of trying again so much as it is about wearing the problem down with extra resources. The most common method of succeeding at a cost is the use of References. A failed Medicine check doesn’t have to mean the patient instantly dies on the surgery table; it could just mean the character has to call in a favor from a fellow doctor and pay it back later. Will is another option: it’s the only Potential that doubles as a resource and can be extremely powerful as a result. Other options are available at the Market’s discretion. Players can ask to succeed at cost even on some more intense, action-oriented rolls. Say, for instance, a Taker really needs to hack a security door so everyone can escape being eaten. If the character fails the check, it’s up to the player to request to succeed at cost, especially if the character is out of Will. So long as Markets can think of a reasonable way for additional resources to solve the problem, they should always try to offer players a choice to succeed in this instance. In this case, it might mean the Taker had to rush the job and leave behind the valuable electronics kit, or maybe the character

our lives from of ve ha e w ce en ri pe The ex ll ourselves about te e w y or st e th n, hi it w for what we t un co ac to r de or in s ourselve truth lies e th lie a us th is , are doing we do. rather outside, in what -Slavoj Zizek selflessly uses their body as a conductor and takes damage from electrical shock. Succeeding at cost is still a consequence of failure; it just allows players some choice in which consequence they want to suffer. If there’s no reason the dice check couldn’t just be performed again normally, the Market shouldn’t have called for the dice check in the first place. FaIlure Sometimes there is no reasonable way for resources to compensate for a lack of skill, or the Taker doesn’t have any References or Will to call upon. In these instances, a higher or equal Red means the check failed and the character suffers the consequences. The fallout varies depending on the context of the skill checked, but death is a possibility. No amount of preparedness, luck, or training can hold out forever against the crushing tide of history. Failure should always be a possibility when a check is called for, either due to sudden misfortune or a slow draining of resources.

CRITICALS

A “natural” double means that the Black and Red land on the same number before any modifiers from skills or spent charges are added. Natural doubles are called “criticals” – these indicate that the check was exceptional in some way. Critical successes are impressive displays of skill; critical failures are disastrous mistakes.

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“Modified” doubles occur when, for instance, a B2/R4 becomes a B2+2/R4 due to modifiers being added after the dice land. Modified doubles are always failures; ties always go to the Market. CRITICAL Success Critical successes occur on natural, even doubles: 2’s, 4’s, 6’s, 8’s, and 10’s. Critical successes have varying effects depending upon the context of the skill check. Players can pick which effect they want, but the Market gets final say. • Double damage or effectiveness • Switch damage to a hit location of the player’s choice • Bypass armor • Dictate a status effect or other narrative benefit of the test (such as knockback) CRITICAL FAILURE Critical failures occur on natural, odd doubles: 1’s, 3’s, 5’s, 7’s, and 9’s. Critical failures have varying effects depending upon the context of the check. The Market always chooses which occurs. • Double damage or effectiveness against the PC • Bypass armor • Breaks a tool with a malfunction • Brings about an unfortunate status effect or other narrative obstacle • Eliminates the rest of a tool’s charges until it can be refreshed

Market DIce Checks

In the Profit System, dice checks are the sole responsibility of the players. The only time the Market makes a check is to determine aspects of the setting and narrative that are randomized to represent the capricious nature of economic forces. Markets roll to: • Generate new mobs of casualties • See if a PC is infected by the Blight

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• Select a random encounter to occur on a Leg of the journey • Set the mood for an Interlude • Set the supply/demand equilibrium for a certain good or service • Combine a number of elements into a randomly generated contract • Find the damage and hit location of an unpreventable attack (a failed dodge uses the same numbers of the failed skill check to determine damage) • Roll for all damage if using Bust: Random Damage (p. 281) Bust: +1 or It Can't Be Done At base, there is already a 45% chance of any check succeeding, without the use of a skill or any charged equipment. That’s awfully high for a horror game about costs and consequences. If there is a way for a character with no skill whatsoever in the task to succeed, then the Market should just allow them to succeed and move on without the dice. Conversely, if someone with a lifetime of experience could reasonably fail the task, then it is certain someone without experience will fail. For example, no amount of extra gauze and disinfectant is going to help someone perform First Aid if they haven’t the slightest notion of where to even start, but a person with the basics (+1) might be able to put those medical resources to good use, albeit sloppily. Characters should be rewarded consistently for their skills and preparation; a player’s blind luck in dice rolling should be rewarded rarely. It’s much more interesting to force a character without a certain skill to find another tactic than to foist the responsibility of narrative choice onto a player’s ability to flip a coin. But, as it makes planning a character and keeping him/her alive more difficult, +1 or It Can’t Be Done is a Bust rule. Boom: Default Checks Groups that really want a default method can allow checks of untrained skills, but the

Market always has veto power to deem the request too ridiculous. For instance, if players insist their characters can bioengineer a curative retrovirus based off nothing but cando attitude, the Market always has the right to say, “+1 or it can’t be done.” Default rolls work off the nonexistent skill’s associated Potential. The Red isn’t rolled in a default check. In order to succeed, the Black result must be equal or under the Potential. Let’s say Malleus really wants to punch an attacker to death but Malleus’s player hasn’t put anything in his Unarmed skill. The player asks to default. The Market allows it so long as Malleus spends one charge on rations to buy-a-roll. Spending more does nothing to improve the chance of success. Malleus’s has 5 STR (he works out... a lot). That means Malleus has a 50% chance of success: Black 5, 4, 3, 2, or 1 sees him succeed. While this is high probability for someone completely unskilled, Malleus only

started as a 2 STR character. The player spent a lot of bounty (30, to be exact) to grow a character strong enough to pull this off. That much lost capital was undoubtedly to the detriment of the character’s other abilities, retirement plan, and family. Had the investment been put in some other Potential, the character would have a paltry 20% chance of success – much lower than rolling the base Black and Red with a +1. What Malleus may not do is spend extra rations for a bonus chance of success. Correctly applying such force would require discipline beyond the wild haymaker he’s going to throw. No extra charges can be spent on a default: once the check is purchased, the Black must be equal or less than the Potential to be a success. As defaulting gives Takers more (suboptimal) options for dealing with situations, it is a Boom rule.

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Opposed Checks I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and, like the grave, cries, ”Give, give!” -Abigail Adams PRECISION The Profit System is designed with a materialist focus. Objects are very powerful and can often assure success by spending charges before a check. However, sometimes no amount of spray-n-pray or excessive spending can fix a situation. Sometimes, a trained professional is the only option. If the Market calls for a precision check, charged tools that could normally increase the chance of success can’t spend extra charges. A sniper making a headshot a kilometer away can’t spray more rounds downrange for a greater chance for success; one shot has to strike true or none will. The charge is spent for the Shoot check, but no more spends are allowed. DIFFICULT Another name for this check might be “illadvised.” Save this difficulty modifier for tasks so risky that to attempt them is lunacy, even for trained professionals. In order to succeed a difficult check, a character must succeed a precision skill check with a critical success. Will can be spent to upgrade regular successes to criticals, but the precision requirement remains the same. For instance, if Sticky the freerunner wants to jump off the roof, through the hovering military helicopter’s gun-doors, drop the explosives, crash through the window of the office building on the other side of the street, and roll to safety as the aircraft explodes, that’s going to be difficult. Sticky is one of the most Athletic people in the Loss (+4 Athletics), so success is feasible, if unlikely.

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When two or more players at the table are competing against each other in a fight, race, or other contest, they might wish to resort to the dice to see who wins. This rare instance is called an opposed check. Players and the Market determine the skills being used. Both parties make a skill check normally and add their modifiers. If both players fail (higher Red), a stalemate ensues. If one succeeds and the other fails, the successful character wins the contest. If both players are successful, the player with the higher modified Black gains an advantage, though the other’s player action still has some effect.

Market Forces

Players are never competing against the Market. It is not the Market’s job to “fight” the players. It’s the Market’s task to narrate the story, provide interesting choices, and simulate the uncaring, relentless economic forces affecting the characters’ lives to overcome according to their fitness. In fact, the Market cannot be opposed. Nonplayer characters and events determined by the person running the game are called “Market forces.” Market forces always succeed if the players let them. What does that mean? If making a skill check to see if a character is struck by an attack, the Market does not roll any dice. The player under attack makes an Athletics check to dodge. On a success, the attack misses. If the dodge fails, the attack, by definition, hits and the numbers on the failed Athletics check determine the damage (see Combat p. 272). If the character doesn’t even try to get out of the way, the Market rolls to determine the damage done, but there’s no chance of the attack missing. In the Profit System, the outcomes of character actions are determined entirely by their players. Every check is player facing. The Market only rolls to generate large-scale events beyond the characters’ control, such as the number of zombies at a certain location

or the supply/demand equilibrium of goods. If the Market declares an action for one of its forces, it always succeeds unless the character makes a check to stop it. There are no opposed checks against the Market in the Profit System. The players either hold it at bay for that turn, or they don’t.

WIll

Will is explained in more depth on p. 197. In general, Will is the meta-game mechanic in the Profit System. The Will rating is the number of Will points that refresh once per game session. Players spend Will to make the story go a character’s way and negate the capriciousness of the dice. The uses of Will are as follows: • Switch Black and Red numbers (B4/R9 becomes B9/R4) • Upgrade a success to a Critical Success • Buy another narrative benefit to add onto an existing Critical Success • Negate an opponent’s Critical Success • Turn a Critical Failure into a regular failure • In combat, shift the damage onto a piece of gear or different hit location • Jump to the front of initiative order (see p. 275) Will points gain be gained and refreshed in the following ways: • Buy a point of Will in character advancement • Follow a weak spot into trouble • Fulfill a personal obligation to a soft spot • Suffer because of a tough spot • Rest in-between jobs/game sessions

Charges

Nearly all equipment in the Profit System is described in terms of charges: abstract units (typically ten per piece of gear) that measure the equipment’s remaining usefulness. Depending on the gear, charges might

represent fuel, ammunition, batteries, general maintenance, or any other conceivable measure of utility. It doesn’t matter what the narrative specifics the group decides are; charges remain mechanical representations of usefulness. The specifics of charges and how they are used in play are described in more detail later (see “Materialism: Bounty, Gear, and Vehicles” p. 234). For now, here’s a basic rundown of the mechanical impact of charges. The Use of Charges Charges have three uses: 1. Tracking a character’s inventory 2. Buying skill checks that require equipment 3. Providing bonuses to certain checks in addition to the skill rating

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Using most equipment requires spending at least one charge to make a skill check. For instance, no one can make a Drive check without a vehicle and, to make the check, at least one charge off of the vehicle must be spent. The use of the resource buys a dice check. The combination of certain resources and certain skills can benefit from overspending resources; spending above the minimum charge required to buy-a-roll adds a +1 to the Black for each additional spend. Finally, charges on equipment can be “refreshed” by repairing or reinforcing the gear. The number of refreshes a character has access to depends on their ADP Potential: their aptitude for sourcing, purchasing, and hustling for supplies in-between jobs. Types of Gear UtIlIzIng Charges Capped Capped gear requires a charge to use in a skill check, but no extra charges may be spent to add to the check. For instance, using a laptop would require a charge as the battery drains, but spending extra charges is not going to make an attempt to hack someone’s email more successful. Capped charges enable use, but excessive use does nothing to increase effectiveness. Charged Charged gear requires a charge to use in a skill check, and additional charges can be spent to add a bonus to the skill check. For example, if each bullet represents a chance to score a hit, shooting more at the target increases the chance of success. For each charge spent after buying a check, add +1 to the Black. Manpower (Rations) Gear utilizing manpower requires the human operator to fuel the gear’s effect. You never have to reload a machete, for instance, but your arm can get tired. Manpower gear is charged but spends the Taker’s rations rather than any charges on the item itself. Spending

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more rations adds +1 per charge, just like charged gear. But calories are costly in a food scarce environment like the Loss and energy wasted eventually translates into bounty lost. Static Static gear doesn’t require a charge to use. Binoculars are largely unaffected by eyes looking through them. As long as the binoculars aren’t broken, they continue to work as designed. That’s the definition of static gear. Since the Profit System is meant to emphasize the very serious consequences economic costs have on people, static gear is rare. Most equipment in the game is meant to bleed utility until fed again by some form of capital. The player must budget between maintaining the health of a character and the material goods that protect that character’s existence.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man. To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justices and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues. No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And of the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. - Thomas Hobbes

Character CreatIon

Takers are interesting people. They’re bold enough to fight monsters, but careful enough to live through it. They’re strong enough to survive, but too weak to abandon memories of a better time and resign themselves to the Loss. Heroic opportunists. Brutal saviors. Disillusioned dreamers.

At-A-Glance 1. Pick your Taker’s name 2. Write a soft and weak spot 3. Pick a tough spot or roll for it a. Lost +Adapt: +2 skill points at Char. Gen -And Die: Legally dead and must stay in the Loss or forge a new identity (+1 retirement milestone)

b. Bait +Citizen: One less milestone required for retirement -Migrant: Dependents cost upkeep x2, and communication with them must be electronic c. Latent +Once Bitten: Can’t be infected -Twice Hated: Becomes a Vector upon death; remains infectious and persecuted in life d. Immune +Genetic Lottery: Can’t be infected -Meal Ticket: Living body is worth 5 bounty per permanently “harvested” hit box e. Believer +Faith: +2 to all Self-Control checks that confirm faith

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-Doubt: start off cracked in a Humanity threat; Self-Control checks required for violations of faith f. Steward +Undercover: Once per game, may ask organization for help. Market says yes or no. -In Too Deep: May only have other Takers as Dependents; Whole crew must make Self-Control checks if cover is blown; Sponsoring organization may give orders to the Taker g. Hustler +I Know a Guy: Automatically succeeds Networking checks, even without skill points -I Owe a Guy: Once per game, Market can call in a marker of 1d10 bounty h. Fenceman +Headshots: +1 on any attack check against casualties -In My Sleep: Starts cracked on a Humanity threat from nightmarish memories

b. c.

The first Profession X skill trades at one-to-one, but a second trades at 2-to- 1, a third at 3-to-1, etc. Specializations are limited by the Potential AND skill they are under, and each point of specialization costs skill points. Melee: Sword 2 costs four skill points – two for Melee and two for Melee: Sword

6. Ensure no skills exceed their associated Potential. Reallocate excess skill points. 7. List as many Dependents as the Taker’s CHA 8. Buy and upgrade gear with starting 10 bounty. Cost is upkeep only at Char. Gen – cost to purchase gear in game is upkeep x2 9. Campaign only: Come up with your Taker’s retirement plan and milestones 10. Campaign only: As a group, design your enclave and name your crew

i. Scavenger +Salvage, Salvage Everywhere…: Start the game with 20 bounty -…Not a Screw That Fits: Permanently at -1 Refresh j. Roach +Survivor: Damage Humanity to assist any skill check: +1 per point -Sole: Start cracked in all three Humanity threats 4. Assign 1 free Potential to every category: STR, SPD, ADP, INT, CHA, WILL a. Assign 5 more Potential as you see fit b. Potential is capped at 3 during Character Creation 5. Assign 20 skill points a. Skill points trade at a one-to-one ratio at character generation.

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This trade-off captures perfectly economists’ notion of opportunity cost. The real cost of something, the opportunity cost, is the value of the next best opportunity, what you have to give up to do what you want to do. During the apocalypse, the cost of taking something with you is the value of what you have to leave behind. - James Dow

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Taker's Name

Takers rarely use real names. They adopt “handles” more suited to their new lifestyle. Ever since DHQS instituted the bounty system, names have real power. It’s a lot easier to retire from the life if you’ve got an old identity to fall into. Getting forged documents sufficient to fool the ration system is really expensive, not to mention all the lost property that could have been claimed by an old identity. Couple this with the fact that, just by being accused of breaking quarantine, a person can be legally declared dead by the DHQS and have all their salvage entitlement seized, it makes sense to operate under a pseudonym It’d be a lie to say that’s the only purpose new names serve, though. The handle is psychological survival mechanism. Steve might have seen everyone he loves murdered before his eyes, but “Ven” is just a guy that does what’s necessary. That’s why they’re called handles; it’s what Takers use to carry the baggage. Example: Morgan and Mal Morgan thinks about the kind of character she wants to play. She recently finished a novel with a no-nonsense mechanic that solved mysteries using the same diagnostic methods used to troubleshoot technology. Morgan decides to model her protagonist after that. She envisions a squat woman in coveralls, decorated with patches for a dozen bands stitched into the fabric. She’s wearing a toolbelt, pistol, and too much make-up; she likes the way it makes folks out in the Loss gawk. Morgan thinks her character’s name is Patricia, but she doesn’t tell any of the other players that. It’s a secret. She figures Patricia

A belief is not true because it is useful. -Henri Frederic Amiel 184

didn’t like her name much, and she disliked her job before the Crash even more. She figures that her character is happier now that she can work with her hands without convincing some asshole garage owner she knows her way around an engine. But Patricia was never much with words, so Morgan figured her character tried to call herself Malfunction but her crew shortened it down to Mal.

Spots

Spots are descriptive tags that define a Taker’s personality and past. They draw characters into conflict and drama while rewarding their players mechanically. The true personality of a Taker is going to be as nuanced and detailed as the player in control, but spots are contact points by which they interact with the setting. Weak Spots A weak spot is a character flaw that tenaciously defines the character’s personality, despite any awareness they might have of the shortcoming. When others complain about it, people that know the Taker best can only say “That’s just X” or “You know how X is.” It’s a central fault that can only be overcome temporarily. Following a weak spot into trouble means gaining a point of Will, even if it temporarily puts the character over their Potential. Weak spots should therefore be vague in order to remain applicable to a wide variety of situations, including contract negotiations. Some example weak spots might be... • • • • • • • • • •

Vengeful Arrogant Pedantic Pollyanna Cowardly Easily Angered Dismissive Napoleon Complex Head in the Clouds Obsessed with ________________

Soft Spots A soft spot is a deep passion, belief, or sentiment that the character holds in spite of the dangers it presents in the Loss. It’s a virtue, or it would be if the character lived in a place where selfishness wasn’t a necessity to survival. In the sociopathic logic of postapocolyptic capitalism, situations and people can manipulate character behavior by appealing to old sentiments. A soft spot should be vague to remain applicable to a wide variety of situations. Fulfilling a character’s obligation to a soft spot financially, spiritually, or physically means gaining a point of Will, even if it temporarily puts the character over their Potential. Soft spots can also be used by NPCs during contract negotiations. Some examples of soft spots might be... • • • • • • • • • •

Protecting the weak From each according to ability, to each according to need Social justice Freedom Karma is its own reward Waste not, want not Providing solace Can’t we all be friends? Women and children first Puppies deserve protection too!

Tough spots A tough spot is an association with a group of people or background with a sordid reputation (your relationship with the label puts you in a “tough spot”). This should have something to do with the Taker’s past and how they came to survive this long. Mechanically, tough spots break the rules of Red Markets in the favor of the player. Limits can be raised, vulnerabilities removed, bonuses accrued. No Taker survives long without a special edge – the tough spot is that edge. When tough spots are used for the character’s benefit, the Market shapes the narrative and mechanics to fit if the case is clear.

But tough spots are never only benefits; they can easily cause a Taker as much harm as good. Tough spots double as handles the Market can use to jerk the characters around. Everyone has a drawback that triggers as frequently as the benefit. Characters earn a point of Will when the Market uses the drawback of their tough spot to put them in trouble. Weak and soft spots have no bright side. They exist only to be resisted until the player chooses to give in, making the story more interesting and banking some Will for the effort. Tough spots are different because the Taker receives a persistant bonus from the tough spot. Since tough spots engage directly with the lore of Red Markets, there’s an established list to choose from, whereas players are encouraged to write their own weak and soft spots. Lost

The Lost make up the majority of people that survived the Crash. They either missed the orders to evacuate, decided such orders were bullshit, or managed to get to shelter after a military convoy abandoned them. The Lost, as a class, were the first people to realize no help was coming. They were the first to discover LifeLines and organize. Everybody either helped establish an enclave or migrated to the closest one available. + Adapt: The Taker gets +2 skill points at Character Creation In the early days, those that failed to contribute didn’t make it. There were too many things to do, too many casualties to fight, and too many mouths to feed. Anyone surviving the past five years had to learn a whole lot of new skills in a hurry. Some gravitated towards areas of natural aptitude, but for most, their new career depended on whatever the enclave happened to need that day. The rut of poverty resulting from most enclave work is all most Lost have to look forward to, but an unlucky few were conscripted into Taker work.

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- And Die: The Taker is considered legally dead and must stay in the Loss or forge a new identity Those that find a way to live in the Loss must find a way to die there. The government’s homo sacer policy declares anyone caught or assumed left behind is legally dead. Millions of names crowd the DHQS rolls, each one denied the right the vote, the right to fair trial, the right to own property, etc. The sin of survival can never be forgiven least the government admit what it had to do to establish the Recession. Five years after the Crash, most Lost have already cashed-in their own bounty out of desperation, or found the job done for them by some distant relative of the citizen. For original Takers, there’s no escaping to the old world. They either have to make some corner of hell safe enough to retire, or they have to bribe their way into a whole new identity. In the case of the latter, that requires one more retirement milestone than any member of the crew not declared Lost.

BAIT

Bait is the name for someone lucky enough to escape but dumb enough to come back. For most Takers, that’s all the ungrateful bastards are good for: Casualty Bait. The nickname stems solely from resentment. In reality, risking a return to the Blight is an act of total desperation. Life in the Recession can be even worse than the risk posed by the undead. Free Parking ghettos burning tires for heat and stacking humanity in scrapyard favelas. Disease and rats swarming around open latrines gouged into parking lots. Ration riots and DHQS suppression squads beating the desperate masses into submission. StopLoss Immune hunters and Latent chain gangs disappearing people in the middle of the night. Valets pimping out the desperate and dealing poison to the mad. Life on the wrong side of the Recession’s class system is as deadly as any zombie. A few desperate souls see the self-reliance of the Loss as an improvement. Still fewer see Taker

work as an opportunity to gamble their lives on an escape from poverty. +Citizen: One less milestone is required for the Taker to retire. Though the wealth gap in the Recession is far more extreme than the Loss, the remainders of civilization still offer more upwards mobility. Clean clothes, an address, a shower – that’s all it takes to get into a job interview and limping towards middle class (or what’s left of it). Bait find this process easier for having registered in the post-Crash census – they can still use their given names and old records. For most fence-jumpers, the infusion of bounty needed to lift them out of Taker work is smaller than usual. -Migrant: Dependents cost upkeep x2 and communication must be electronic Only family motivates inviting the risk promised by jumping quarantine. Bait have loved ones in need of support like everyone else, but the family remains in the Recession. Getting bounty to them requires converting it into crypt currency and back into the ration dollars accepted in the car camps. All these middlemen and fees double the cost of upkeep for Dependents. To make matters worse, the psychological benefits of keeping a family healthy are reduced by distance. Humanity heals require an Ubiq call to even have a chance, which further eats into resources. Bait can assign other Taker’s as Dependents, but not at character creation. Latent

Latents are people infected by the undead strain of the Blight without ever suffering from its living state. This typically is the result of injecting Supressin K-7864 shortly after infection, but it has been known to occur naturally, owing either to some fault in the Blight’s genetic code or the victim’s partial immunity. Whatever the cause, the victim’s brain remains unaffected by the Blight: the hemoragic rage typical of Vectors

never occurs and the body doesn’t die from the resulting strain. However, Blight sinews wind their way through the subject’s nervous system, just as if the victim were a cadaver in torpor. The process is agonizing, killing many with the pain alone. Those that survive retain their humanity, albeit covered head-to-toe in the black veins typical of latency. They’re infectious, but the retention of living brain tissue short-circuits the parasitic connection of Blight sinews with the brain stem, leaving Latents in control of their mental faculties. +Once Bitten: The Taker can’t be infected Or, rather, can’t be infected again. The damage is done. Any “hot” cells entering the blood stream revert to their undead state in the presence of sinew, and the “cold” bites of casualties merely add to Blight structures already in the body. Aside from the trauma, Latents are unaffected by bites and scratches from the undead. The ability to go hands-on with casualties without special equipment makes Latents sought after employees for Taker crews. -Twice Hated: The Taker remains infectious while alive, becomes a Vector upon death, and suffers from persecution The Blight sinews that puppet the dead flesh of casualties wait, poised to strike the second brain death occurs in a Latent. Once the living brain ceases its interference with the Blight’s signals, the disease takes over in mere moments. For most casualties, the danger is mitigated by the decay and rigor of the body. But with the wiring “preinstalled,” Latents become sprinting Vectors immediately upon death. As if that weren’t enough, all Latents’ bodily fluids carry the Blight. The potential to become an extreme danger upon death, combined with a general sanitation risk, means most enclaves either segregate or outright imprison Latents. Some won’t accept anyone infected within their walls and a few execute the “veiners” on sight. The vital service Latents provide a crew is balanced

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against the constant threat they pose and the prejudice that follows them everywhere they go. It’s possible to add the Latent tough spot in addition to another tough spot, but only during play (see “Infection” p. 305). At character creation, only one tough spot is allowed. Immune

Something in certain people’s bone marrow is capable of shutting down the Blight’s reproductive capabilities and expelling it from the bloodstream. In the five years since the Crash, medical science has yet to figure out how this works, or what factor in the bone marrow is responsible for the effect. Cases of immunity are dotted across all ages, genders, blood types, and races. To this day, the only way to test for immunity is exposing the patient’s blood to the Blight and observing the effect. All that’s understood is that some people can’t be infected, and injecting bone marrow from those people into the recently infected, while not a cure, can revert live Blight into the undead state prematurely, resulting in latency. Immune, or “moony,” is used to refer to those too lucky to become zombies. +Genetic Lottery: The Taker can’t be infected Blight, in all its forms, dies in the bloodstream. Beyond the wounds that would normally cause infection, an Immune has nothing to fear from casualties. This qualifies them for the same up-close tactics typically reserved for the Latent. -Meal Ticket: The Taker’s living body is worth 5 bounty per permanently destroyed hit box. Supressin K-7864 is the single most valuable commodity in the world, and it’s derived solely from the bone marrow of the Immune. Though some production lines farm Immunes for years – subjecting them to endless cycles of harvest and regrowth – many choose short-term profit over

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sustainability and debone the Immune like cattle. Whether into slavery or slaughter, the value of Supressin is so high that each Immune is a walking retirement plan. Thus, the Immune remain desperate to hide their diagnosis from everyone, in the Loss and the Recession, lest they be “medically conscripted” and tortured for the remainder of their lives. It’s possible to add the Immune tough spot in addition to another tough spot, but only during play (see “Infection” p. 305). At character creation, only one tough spot is allowed. BelIever

The Crash wasn’t just any apocalypse: it was the apocalypse we saw coming. When the end came, it came as a monster we’d been imagining for half a century. It was a disaster that everyone secretly thought they could handle until it very publicly slaughtered them. And when the pop-culture iconography failed, it did so alongside the government, science, religion, and every other narrative humanity had ever relied upon. Many escaped the undead only to find themselves wrestling with the death of reality. All in all, the Crash probably broke as many people as it killed. Or, rather, it opened their eyes. It depends on who you ask. Whether people retreated into delusion or revelation, many couldn’t survive with the old ways of seeing. Groups of like-minded seekers coalesced into cults, creeds, schools, and movements of every imaginable stripe. Ravings transformed into ideologies and vice versa. Differences in dogmas grew ever finer and split survivors into more and more fractured worldviews, theologies shifting like lines drawn in a sandstorm. Soon, amidst the few zealot holdouts of pre-Crash belief and the nihilistic majority, the Loss was populated by hundreds of apocalyptic sects, each offering a different answer to the end. The general term for those that use a new faith to survive the post-Crash world is Believers. A list of the major groups can

be found in “Believers” (p. 150). Players are encouraged to pick one of the beliefs described in the setting, or they can design their own with the Market. Either way, selecting this tough spot means the character’s world is defined by the new faith, for good or ill. +Faith: The Taker receives +2 to all SelfControl checks that confirm faith This benefit depends on the defining characteristics of the Taker’s new faith. For instance, since Archivists believe mankind is already doomed and that they must record its final days, the death of a friend would be easier to handle so long as the believer recorded it. A member of the zealous Black Math cult could very well revel at the sight of a casualty horde. Self-Control checks that confirm the Taker’s worldview are easier to succeed. -Doubt: The Taker starts off cracked in a Humanity threat, and Self-Control checks are required for violations of faith One doesn’t invent new gods and commandments without some mental strain. The same madness that provides revelation permanently unbalances the mind. Thus, believers might be asked to make Self-Control checks only a member of the faith would suffer from. An Archivist might have a panic attack as the enclave burns books for heat or overwrites old hard drives. A medical Crusader, driven mad in the quest for cure, might weep as others cheer the burning of a Vector, mourning the loss of a fresh sample. Steward

Some in the Recession – staring across the border on a drone feed or from the high-rise window of a quarintechture office complex – see the Loss as an opportunity. There is much profit to be gained from the partial extinction of humanity. Blueprints and prototypes lay rotting within the bowels of extinct corporations. Infrastructure and territory begs to be reclaimed and ransomed off to the highest bidder.

Held to be a crime when committed by individuals, homicide is called a virtue when committed by the state. -St. Cyprian The treasure is out there, gathering dust and ripe for the picking... were it not for all the desperate squatters calling it home. Rescuing the Loss from the Lost requires subtlety until the true reclamation can begin. Staking claim to opportunities requires agents, capable and skilled enough to secure an enclave’s cooperation, but loyal to their true masters. The DHQS calls these operators Stewards: undercover agents dedicated to manipulating the homo sacer into behaving (or dying) according to the Recession’s whims. But corporations field just as many Stewards of their own as the DHQS, each with their own competing agenda. The tangle of private/public partnerships that resulted from the Crash blurred the last line between democracy and oligarchy, and every faction has its own pawns on the board. A player that picks the Steward tough spot owes allegiance to a major Recession power: typically either the DHQS or a major corporation. Like other Takers, the character risks death over the fence to survive, but their desperation is ultimately no more than method acting. Stewards have loved ones living comfortably in the Recession and, as long as the spy maintains cover and follows orders, the family stays safe. Or the Steward could be a complete loner, recruited for a dangerous mission in infected territory precisely because they don’t have attachments. Either way, a Steward’s duty is to observe, report, and wait for activation. Once the mission is complete, Stewards get to go home to a fat bonus check. Stewards are sleeper agents, meaning they’re mostly left to their own devices. But no matter how many times fellow Takers may save their lives or help them out, Stewards can never be wholly loyal to a crew or enclave.

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The continued safety of their real loved ones depends upon a willingness to betray people to the Recession’s financial interests. When picking this tough spot, the Steward player announces the spot normally, but all characters regard that PC as just another member of the Lost until something in game reveals the truth.

organization will call in its marker one day – the Steward eventually must complete their mission, as determined by the Market. At that point, it’s up to the player whether the character executes the mission or comes clean, dealing with the subsequent fallout of refusing orders.

+Undercover: Once per game, the character may ask their organization for help. The Market says yes or no. If a Steward is in a “mission critical” situation – one that threatens the character’s life or cover – headquarters can be contacted once per job and asked to assist. The Market roleplays the Steward’s handler and ultimately decides what qualifies as mission critical; the Market can say “no” to almost any request. Perhaps the character is too deep in the Loss to receive help, or maybe the death of an entire enclave is deemed an “acceptable loss.” But, ultimately, the Steward wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t a job to do. If the character can make it seem in the organization’s best interests, superior resources can directed to the Steward’s aid: everything ranging from job recommendations to air strikes. Of course, the bigger the favor, the harder it will be to explain such fortuitous gifts.

No one survived the Crash alone. Cooperation and coordination were all that separated the living from the dead. It took the long scarcity of the carrion economy to turn the survivors against each other, each enclave preying on its neighbor’s bounty like casualties on flesh. That is to say, it took most people awhile to get back in the exploitative swing of things. Some never stopped. Characters with the Hustler tough spot had to fight for every scrap even before the Crash, and they were smart enough to know that just because the dead rose, it didn’t stop the almighty dollar. Those with a surplus of charisma and a deficit of shame hustled their way through the dark days, begging and borrowing what others risked death to obtain. Five years on, the ability to survive through charm alone is a useful skill set for any crew. But a lifetime of loans and scams racks up debt – a debt more tireless in its pursuit than any zombie.

-In Too Deep: The character may only have other Takers in the crew as Dependents, and the whole crew must make SelfControl checks if the cover is blown. The sponsoring organization may also make orders from time-to-time, according to the Market’s wishes. Humans are social animals. No matter how detached a steward tries to be, risking death with fellow Takers forms bonds. In the short term, this is a good thing. The horrors of the Loss affect spies same as everyone else, and having a friend or lover in the crew makes things more bearable. But seeing a friend eaten alive is bad for mental health, as is having a lover discover your sole purpose in existence is betrayal. Lastly, the sponsoring

+I Know a Guy: The Taker automatically succeeds Networking checks, even without skill points Hustlers know everyone because everyone has something they want. This means that all Networking checks automatically succeed. A Hustler has no need to “find” new References; there’s always somebody else the Taker knows. There’s no problem sourcing gear or finding out about jobs; the hustler always has the connection. Players should note that this ability doesn’t forgive a Hustler of any responsibilities except rolling the dice. Finding a new Reference may carry no risk of failure, but favors already used still need to be paid back. The Hustler can automatically know the price, contract type, or

Hustler

the competition before starting negotiations, but they don’t know all three (see “One-anddone” p. 173). Once the right NPC is found, all roleplaying requirements and bounty costs remain the same. -I Owe a Guy: The Market can call in a marker of 1d10 bounty (the Taker gains one Will point). The Taker must pay up to the NPC debtor... or else Hustlers craft enormous social circles in order to escape from old enemies and into new acquaintances. Like capitalism, the character’s network must constantly expand to survive because all bridges into the past get burned. Occasionally, outstanding debts and bad faith deals catch up with the Hustler. Once per game, the Market can call in one a marker of 1d10 bounty. The exact reason for the debt is role-played collaboratively by the player or the Market (like any Reference

scene), but the price must be paid by the end of the session... or else. What’s “...or else”? That’s for the Market to decide. Failure to pay could saddle the crew with a -Rep spot, or it could send a hit squad after the Hustler’s family. It depends on what the Hustler did to weasel out of payment in the first place and where the Market wants to take the story. Regardless, the full debt can never be completely repaid. There’s always somebody else the character screwed over. Fenceman

Vectors can climb. Fast. Letting a fresh one over the gate spelled the end of many an enclave. Even the relative stiffness of casualties can’t be trusted to keep them out. They can shamble up slowly accumulated ramps of their decapitated brethren and the sheer weight of their numbers can collapse defenses.

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No, a wall is not enough. Successful enclaves established brigades of Fencemen on the very first night. It could be called the carrion economy’s first occupation. Fencemen can be Fencewomen, of course. Since the name was coined as the cannibal hordes descended, no one can be blamed too harshly if gender equality wasn’t the foremost concern. It’s a simple name for a simple task: guard the fence. Initially, this meant firing and stabbing down into an endless tide of screaming death, relearning siege warfare in what veterans have come to call “the Crash course.” After the torpor, it meant meticulously cleaning the fence of casualties and the occasional excursion outside the wall to remove the Blight-infested remains. Now, most enclaves have thinned the casualties around their borders to negligible levels, and maintaining the border has become a sleepy profession. Most Fencemen now supplement their income with whatever amounts for police work in their enclave; a job inherited due more in part to armament than ability. Experienced Fencemen are uniquely qualified for warfare in the Loss, but as demand wanes, many of the enclave’s best warriors have migrated to Taker work. For some, joining a crew means a return to the intoxicating terror of the early days. For others, it’s a deadly lesson in how much difference a fortification can make. +Headshots: The Taker receives +1 on any attack check against casualties or Vectors Punching tickets, popping pimples, whack a C – Fencemen come up with cutesy names to use around polite company, but the job ultimately amounts to shooting or stabbing people in the head. All day. Every day. In 12-hour shifts. Anyone that’s worked the fence has a hard time hiding it. Their gaze tracks the head of everyone they see, affixed right between the eyes as their hands twitch, involuntarily guiding invisible weapons to a kill shot. After a few years, the muscle memory doesn’t leave. Most people view these

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reflexes as unwelcome reminders of the hell waiting outside; Takers see a recruitment opportunity. -In my Sleep: The Taker starts cracked on one threat from nightmarish memories Underneath the battlement, or on the other side of some chainlink, it’s hard not to feel bad for casualties. They come to the gates in whatever clothes they died in, like refugees seeking shelter. They gnaw their teeth off on the metal, hungry eyes blindly spinning in their sockets, too dumb for pain or solace. Fencemen see the undead, and the elderly undead, and the infant undead. They see former neighbors, friends, spouses shamble past the fence, an endless parade of ghosts. And Fencemen are expected to execute and burn every one of them. All day. Every day. In 12-hour shifts. Eventually, desensitization sets in, but no one working the fence comes away whole. The same twitchy personality that makes Fencemen good Takers makes them equally unreliable. Scavenger

Any idiot can play keep away with the dead for a few minutes. It takes a specialist to do the same for days on end, in strange territory. In the earliest days, there was no need for Takers. Fencemen would distract the casualties while scavengers raided the surrounding ruins. They had few weapons and no promise of payment. The only currency was speed and a keen eye. They found what they needed or starved. And if they got bit? That was one less mouth to feed. As the carrion economy established itself and pickings grew slimmer, Takers came to prominence. Most of the early scavengers found safer work within the fence or specialized, forming businesses around copper wiring or canned goods or whatever else they were best at finding. But a few never lost a taste for the hunt. They kept raiding the Loss, delving deeper, recycling greater value from the wastes than was thought possible. As the rest of their ilk succumbed to wage slavery

or went out of business, true Scavengers became tinkerer-gods, constantly hacking, dismantling, or repairing the next piece of life-saving equipment. But the treasure troves get further away every day. Most Scavengers eventually find themselves joining a crew, if only to watch their backs as they continue picking through the entrails of the old world. +Salvage, salvage everywhere: The Taker starts the game with 20 bounty A Taker with the Scavenger tough spot is better off than most. Either they got lucky with a big find shortly after the Crash, or a keen eye keeps them in better-than-average scrap. Whatever the reason, the Scavenger has 10 more bounty to use at character creation. The additional ten can be spent however the player wishes. It can be banked for retirement, spent on a fancy gadget, or saved for an emergency. But once the surplus is gone, it’s gone for good. Pickings are getting slim in the Loss, and Taker work is the only way to get ahead as the game progresses. -Not a screw that fits: The Taker is permanently at -1 Refresh The same mindset that finds the best stuff damages the ability to prioritize it. Scavengers’ homes still look like a collection of pre-Crash trash and stray cats. One may have recovered a spool of HDMI cables larger than a bull, but he forgot to buy ammo for his gun. Another may have sourced new batteries for her specs, but she didn’t spend that time restocking her rations. The fetishization of objects that saved the character permanently damages the ability to tell the difference between useful and might-eventually-be useful. Thus, a scavenger’s Refresh rate is ADP - 1. Roach

The renewal of economic activity in no way implies stability. Enclaves regularly fall to raiders, sabotage, believer death cults, Blight outbreak, civil war, and common disease. These disasters peculiar to the Loss reward

the perseverance of survivors with a repeat viewing of the apocalypse. Even among those lucky enough to emerge from two holocausts unscathed, very few can continue on. Watching the death of two worlds is enough to shatter the minds of most. Most. Sometimes, after a tragedy so horrific even the jaded people of the Loss refuse to speak of it, someone will emerge from the wreckage ready to start over yet again. They journey to the next enclave over, knocking at the gates like any other dead man. Most enclaves let in these poor souls out of pity. Nearly as many come to regret it. The Lost call these super-survivors “Roaches:” creature destined to inherit the earth. The name is far from a compliment. No one can guess the shameful, sickening things the Roach had to do to survive and the survivor’s wild, haunted eyes discourage anyone from asking. About the only people willing to associate with such cursed souls are Takers. As messed up as a Roach may be, they don’t die easy, and that’s all the average crew can afford to care about. It’s up to the player and Market to decide what exactly happened before the character joined the current crew. It can be part of the setting’s past that comes to play a big role in the future of the campaign, or it could be a personal tragedy that the PC never speaks of. +Survivor: The Taker may damage Humanity to assist any skill check at +1 per point lost. Some ancient, animal instinct won’t let the Roach go down. Past the point where life seems anything but a torturous burden, some ancient reflex keeps a Roach fighting when others would succumb. Roaches literally fuel their survival with Humanity. In a firefight, points in Detachment can be spent like charges from a gun to add to a check. If injured, a Roach burns through sanity to keep going. The fearsome, primordial refusal to die kept the character going through the Crash, helped them survive the fall of an enclave, and keeps the PC moving on even now, living a life that long ago lost hope of recovery.

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-Lone: The Taker’s past experience leaves them cracked in all three threats at the start of the game. A Roach no doubt possessed exceptional mental fortitude at one point, but the Loss’s merciless string of cruelties has filed the person’s mind into a jagged, brittle point aimed only at survival. Yet survival is not the same as living. Though retirement and recovery remains possible, the character perpetually teeters on the edge of a slippery slope. The price of being able to burn through rational thought to survive is having less of it to work with later. PICKING Spots Example Morgan imagines Mal had a lot of resentment at the pre-Crash world. But demure, silent anger isn’t her style; Mal would have externalized that frustration. Morgan picks the weak spot: “Shock and Awe.” Mal earns a point of Will any time she pisses on the sensibilities of a possible ally, especially if she doesn’t like them. NPCs that read her weak spot might antagonize Mal until she embarrasses herself with crass behavior. Mal was told all her life that her obsession with mechanics was too manly. It caused her a lot of pain as she was growing up. The character has a lot of sympathy for people still trapped in oppressive systems, so Morgan gives her the soft spot: “Round Pegs in Square Holes.” Any time Mal can help someone that doesn’t quite fit in, she does so. But her sympathy for the oddballs can also be used in negotiations to lead her by the nose. Morgan figures that a hands-on learner like Mal probably found her niche quick after the Crash. She picks the Scavenger tough spot and decides to bank the extra bounty it provides. The permanent reduction of her Refresh is going to hurt, but Morgan figures it will be strong motivation to keep Mal frugal in the field. The nest egg will come in handy if the crew falls into debt, and the spot best explains the skills Mal has to offer her crew.

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PotentIals

Mechanically, Potentials determine the maximum skill points a character can have in the associated skills. Narratively, Potentials represent the peak of a person’s abilities. For instance, lifting weights a couple times of week would increase the Resistance skill, but not the Strength Potential. Lifting practices muscle memory, endurance, and efficiency in a specific type of exertion. Lifting weights, doing pylometrics, stretching properly, eating a strict diet, and studying the anatomy of bodybuilding would gain a point of Strength Potential. Potential measures the degree to which the character’s lifestyle supports certain expertise, which is why nobody with a pack-a-day smoking habit (Speed 1) holds a marathon record (Athletics 5). Before the Crash, there were people with 0’s in their Potentials that got along just fine. Hell, there might still be a few alive in the Recession. But out in the Loss, those people are dead or worse. The Blight has a selective effect on human survival, Takers especially. Only the peak performers live long enough to enter the game, so put one point in every Potential and assign the other five points from there. At character creation, no Potential can be above a three. Buying Potential after character creation costs bounty (see p. 214) Strength (STR) Strength (STR) measures general physical prowess: muscle mass, memory, weight, and distribution. Strength is used to drive melee weapons through bone and barricade doors against the undead. It’s used to punch competition in bar brawls and wrestle casualties to the ground. STR also determines Haul rating. Takers can carry Haul equal to their STR and still perform the intense physical exercise demanded of the job. The concept is explained more in depth on p. 264, but for now, understand that, rather than an exact measurement of weight, Haul abstracts to

bounty per unit. Whatever the Market price for a unit of supply is, Haul represents how many units the Taker can carry. The Market never tells how much treasure is located at a job site, but the Market does have a responsibility to tell the crew how much each unit of treasure is worth. Haul informs the player how many units their Taker can carry. STR also determines the modifier for when the Market calls for a Health or Infection check. Health checks occur when the character is trying to resist common disease, exposure, or some other more traditional threat. Infection checks occur when the character are exposed to Blight. Either way, STR is added to the Black when the Market calls for these checks. Finally, if the Market is running a Boom game that allows default rolls to STR, the Taker must roll a Black result equal to or under the STR to succeed. Remember that the STR Potential represents raw power: not the ability to apply it effectively. If a Market allows defaulting to STR, it should be reserved to checks where panicked, adrenaline-fueled thrashing has a chance of success. Speed (SPD) Speed (SPD) measures a Taker’s overall quickness over a sustained period of time, abstracting a combination of cardiovascular fitness, reflexes, and grace. SPD is required of skills like Shooting, Athletics, and anything else involving precision movement under time constraints. How far characters can retreat in combat on a successful Athletics check depends on their SPD rating. The distance casualties have to travel before they can attack is measured in Shambles. If the mob of dead Amuu is fighting closes within 1 Shamble, she’s going to want to get away. The player buys-a-roll with a charge of rations, checks Athletics, and succeeds. Now, if Amuu’s SPD is 3, the character is now 4 Shambles away, or, to put it another way, Amuu now has

an additional three turns (turns equalling her SPD) to headshot the monsters before they get close enough to attack. Were the character’s SPD 1, there would be only one more turn of breathing room before the mob struck again. More details on how SPD relates to casualties can be found on p. 296. In combat against living foes, players roll just the Black to determine initiative order, but they can add their SPD to the result. More information on determining initiative can be found in the Combat chapter (p. 275). When Takers become gassed (see p. 280), rations can be refreshed by metabolizing the character’s inner reserves. The maximum number of charges that can be refreshed this way equals the SPD rating. So, if a Taker with a SPD of 2 runs out of rations, two charges can be earned after taking a turn to rest, but never more than two charges worth.

RatIon Use Rations are the charges players use to buy rolls in most STR and SPD skills. Rations are spent in the moment; combat does not need to stop while the characters eat protein bars. Spending rations represents eating a sufficient amount of calories before physical exertion and enough to recover afterwards. If your group wants to roleplay every time the team sits down to eat some beans, go for it. Just know that rations don’t have a mechanical benefit until people start buying physical rolls, so for simplicity’s sake, that’s when rations are used.

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AdaptablIty (ADP) Adaptability (ADP) represents an overall aptitude for situational awareness, quick thinking, and self-discipline. If using a skill to perform an intellectual action on the fly or cope under extreme pressure, that skill is probably attached to Adaptability. ADP determines Refresh. Refresh represents the Taker’s ability to plan ahead, source, and efficiently pack extra supplies inbetween jobs. Refresh is spent in the moment to refill charges on gear. If a gun goes empty, spend a Refresh and slap in a new clip. If the first aid kit runs empty, spend a Refresh and pull a new roll of gauze out of the backpack. If the flashlight dies, Refresh is new batteries. If food runs out, Refresh is a new MRE. Refresh is explained more in-depth in the Materialism chapter (see p. 240) but for now, suffice it to say that ADP determines Refresh as an abstract measure of the character’s preparedness. It’s not that a character out of

Refresh forgot to bring ammo into a zombie wasteland. Of course they need ammo. They need everything. Everyone in the Loss needs everything and there’s not enough to go around. ADP and Refresh represent the ability to source goods in an environment of constant scarcity. Running out of Refresh doesn’t indicate absentmindedness; the character knows what they have and don’t have in their backpack, but staying at home is never an option when enclave rent is due. Refresh... well, refreshes... at the end of every job, no matter how much was or wasn’t spent. The game always starts with Refresh equal to ADP, and it can be spent recharging items from there. INTELLIGENCE (INT) Intelligence (INT) should probably be called “Intelligences.” It measures the total mental capacity of a Taker. It differs from the cognitive functions attached to Adaptability in

that INT-based skills take time. For instance, it’s difficult to Research the price of grain while zombies are trying to break down the door. This doesn’t mean that INT skills can’t be used in high-pressure situations (shit happens), but INT skills take time, even in combat. The guidelines for when to make dice checks (p. 174) are never so important as when considering whether to default on an INT check. If the player wants to know something about the setting, the Market should tell them whenever possible. After all, the characters live there: they are the real experts. If the player wants to know something about the setting the Market doesn’t know either, let the player dictate the truth of the matter. Build the world collaboratively, not against each other. If the player wants to know some bit of financial information for negotiations – something normally revealed by a Networking, Research, or Foresight – this is the only situation where defaulting to INT might be acceptable (and even then only in a Boom game). Failure must have consequences (ignorance is usually cured painfully), but if the information can possibly be known as a piece of random Loss gossip or trivia, allow a default INT check. Failure falls under the one-and-done rule, but players desperate to know everything can succeed-atcost by tapping a Reference. Charm (CHA) Charm (CHA) is the blanket term for social acumen and empathy. Related CHA skills have simple uses in game – such as using Deception to lie to a guard – and more complex uses in the negotiation mechanics (see p. 320). While CHA might not be very useful when surrounded by hungry casualties, it’s essential for making trips out into the Loss financially worthwhile. CHA also determines the number of Dependents and the number of References a Taker can have. For instance, a character with CHA 1 has one Dependent and one

Reference available. Dependents should be integral to the character concept; it’s a loved one for whom the Taker risks life and sanity. References can be assigned midgame and hold any kind of relationship the player wishes. As the relationship is financial, a wide variety of emotional relationships are encouraged (i.e. you do not have to like everyone you work with). A high CHA means that the character can recover quickly from emotional trauma and utilize many favors from their References. However, healthy relationships are based off mutual exchange, and even time spent chatting costs money. The same CHA that heals Humanity damage and fixes failed dice rolls adds more financial burdens to the Taker. WIll (WILL) Will is the only Potential not attached to any skills because it is, by nature, difficult to quantify. It’s the stuff survivor’s guilt is made of, the X factor that lets one person live and the next person die. The impact of Will is as often ascribed to divine providence as it is to stoic determination. It’s a bastardized confluence of unbelievable luck, unbreakable resolve, absurd optimism, and grim realism. Will is the only Potential that can be spent. At the start of a new game session, characters have as many points of Will to spend as their Will score. Spending a point of Will is very powerful and can achieve any of the following effects: • Switch Black and Red numbers (B4/R9 becomes B9/R4) • Upgrade a success to a Critical Success • Buy another narrative benefit to add onto an existing Critical Success • Negate an opponent’s Critical Success • Turn a Critical Failure into a regular failure • In combat, shift the damage onto a piece of gear or different hit location • Jump to the front of initiative order (see p. 275)

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Will points gain be gained and refreshed in the following ways: • Buy a point of Will in character advancement • Follow a weak spot into trouble • Fulfill a personal obligation to a soft spot • Suffer because of a tough spot • Rest in-between jobs/game sessions AssIgnIng PotentIals Example Mal gets one point in every Potential for free. Morgan wants a smart, practical character. Mal has gotten strong handling engine parts and building fortifications over the last five years, so she goes up to STR 2. She’s always been practical and known for her common sense, so she gets ADP 2. Morgan wants Mal to be very useful to her crew and gives her INT 3. Finally, nobody gets through the Crash without determination and luck, so Mal buys another point of WILL. Her final Potentials are STR 2, SPD 1, ADP 2, INT 3, CHA 1, WILL 2.

SkIlls

Characters start with 20 skill points. Potentials are good for describing a character, but they’re minimally active in gameplay. They describe maximum performance, not actual performance. Nearly every dice check players make in Red Markets is modified by skills and it is these specific abilities that define a Taker’s success. In character creation, skill points trade at a one-to-one ratio. The number of points in a skill is the modifier that gets added to Black when rolling for that skill. So, if someone were trying to lift a grate off a manhole cover, they would make a Resistance check. They would NOT make an STR check, because without skill in Resistance, they don’t know how to use that Strength well (lifting with the back, for instance). If a piece of gear would modify the check, charges are spent and the bonus is added to skill. Basically, the benefits of using tools can stack with associated skills,

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but skills never stack with Potentials. Skills may not exceed their associated Potential. Additional skill points are purchased with bounty after character creation (see p. 214)

“But a +1 Is useless!”

Since criticals are always triggered on natural doubles and ties go to the Market, playtesters have argued that having a +1 in a skill is essentially useless. This isn’t entirely true. For example, if the dice for a Shoot check roll B2/ R3 and the Taker spent an extra charge of ammunition beforehand, the check is a success (B2+2/R3) where it would have failed with only the +1 skill or the extra charge separately. More importantly, the Taker had the ability to aim that gun at all. Defaulting to Potentials isn’t allowed in a Bust game. In most situations, characters that don’t have at least a +1 in a skill don’t have enough expertise to even hope for success. If the check is such that even a total layman might pull it off, the Market shouldn’t have the player make skill checks in such low stakes situations. If using Boom defaults, a +1 skill, as opposed to a +1 Potential, increases the probability of success by 35%, allows extra spending on charged gear, and permits the use of Will. Even default checks to a Potential of 4 have worse odds than that. "Full PotentIaL" A skill rating that is equal to its associated Potential is at “full potential.” This means that though a character might possess some of the abilities required to increase a skill, some other aspects of their physiology or education is holding them back from further advancement. For example, a character might want to take their Mechanics to the next level (Mechanics 3) but they need a better understanding of physics before that’s possible (INT 2). They might know enough about archery to improve their accuracy

(Shoot: Bow 2), but they need a deeper familiarity with the way windage affects ballistics in general (Shoot 1) and better hand-eye coordination (SPD 1) in order to apply that knowledge. The narrative description of how Potential caps a skill’s development is up to the player. Just remember that, in real life, you probably haven’t rated your skill set according to any consistent system, and even if you did, performance would still vary widely from day-to-day. The Taker is going to think of their development in terms of specific talents and frustrations. In Red Markets, Potential stops skill development and costs a lot of bounty to improve so as to emphasize a single economic truth: education is as much a commodity as anything else. Increasing human capital requires actual capital. No one learns computer programming by decapitating zombies. SpecIALIZATIONS It’s possible to be a great driver and have no idea how to even start an airplane. Many world-class snipers would be stymied when asked to operate a catapult. Certain situations and tools require expert knowledge. If a player wants to be skilled in one of these areas, it requires a specialization. Specializations are built on the foundation of a skill, just as skills are built off a Potential. Specializations are required for some pieces of unique gear (see p. 239) and cost additional skill points. Let’s say the player wants to use an archaic weapon like a sword. The skill they would buy first would be “Melee.” And because wielding a katana is nothing like batting practice, the player would then have to spend another point in “Melee: Sword.” A pilot would need to spend points in both Drive and Drive: Plane. Specializations can exceed neither the skill rating nor the associated Potential. The only mechanical benefit of specializations is the ability to succeed with equipment and in situations that would otherwise be impossible.

LIst of SkIlls The following list of skills can also be found on the character sheet. Players and Markets are encouraged to collaborate when constructing additional skills and specialization they desire to see in their particular campaign.

What do I really need?

If a skill weren’t useful, it wouldn’t be on the character sheet, but not all skills are created equal. Red Markets has a few skills that are safe bets for maximizing a Taker’s chance for survival. These skills aren’t essential (and I’d argue a story of the asthmatic, neurotic IT professional that survives the zombie hordes is damned interesting) but going over the fence without them is more dangerous and challenging. Athletics is used to dodge attacks and run from danger. Cardio is rule number one. Shoot is important if you aren’t Latent or Immune. Melee combat with casualties when your character is susceptible to infection is extremely dangerous. One bad check and the whole party becomes Vectors. Melee and Unarmed skills aren’t bad to have as well, but keeping distance is a priority in combat. Self-Control is vital for keeping a character effective. Lose your mind and it won’t matter how healthy and well equipped you are. Someone needs Research or the group is going to be at a disadvantage in negotiations. Similarly, a lot of players think of scams that involve Criminality. Someone with a high Scavenging skill can be surprisingly profitable. A group without a CHA skill specialist is going to be hurting for bounty all the time. Alternately, groups that don’t want to specialize too much and/or want to take turns negotiating can utilize the Fixer Rules (see p. 349) STR SkIlls

All dice rolls for STR skills must be bought with a charge of rations. Unless the Market calls for a precision check, all STR skills

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can spend extra rations before the check to “overexert” and increase chances of success. Takers that are gassed cannot use any STR skills until refreshed. Unarmed Hand-to-hand combat, martial arts, and any other knowledge that factors into a brawl – Unarmed is great for knocking out other humans, but it won’t do much against the undead beside push them away. All Unarmed attacks do Stun damage, save for two exceptions. On a critical success, the player can choose to double Stun damage or convert to Kill damage. Certain gear, such as spiked gloves, can also turn Unarmed attacks into Kill damage. Specializations may be useful if the player wants to focus on specific contexts where a generalist might otherwise receive a penalty: grappling, blind-fighting, “peeling” (knocking casualties out of a mob), fighting with a prosthetic limb, etc.

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Melee The same considerations of Unarmed combat are complicated by wielding a blade or bludgeon. The weapon used determines the damage type of a melee attack. Specializations in the Melee skill focus around unusual or archaic weapons: swords, spears, nunchaku, etc. The Melee skill is still used for weapons which can be thrown due to buying the weighted upgrade. Resistance The ability to move heavy weight and resist enormous pressure. Resistance is not used in combat because it emphasizes raw strength rather than strength and speed. Grappling a casualty would be an Unarmed check, but holding on to the thrashing corpse would be Resistance. Use this when barricading doors against a mob or blocking a hallway by tipping a vending machine. There are no specializations in this skill.

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. 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.

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.

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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.

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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

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

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.

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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).

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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.

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.

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

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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.

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:

The BenefIts of Dependents

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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

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).

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.

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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

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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

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

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.

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.

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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.

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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-

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

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.

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. 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

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

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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.

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.

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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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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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

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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

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.

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.

y swallowed nl de ud s as w , s t yriads of inhabitan m s it l of connection al t h it or s w , no na hi d C ha of ho ity in Europe, w the great empire an m t hu ha t of e lamity. He would, s an ca po m l up s a fu ad w e ho dr r s Let us e hi id t , and let us cons g intelligence of e in k iv ua ce hq t re ar y people, he would e on pp up ha an d un e t ct ha fe up by t af of be labours of the world, would r the misfortune fo of he t w l ro rt al or pa s of t s y ha hi t it ly h an wit life, and the v ess very strong an pr m x e hu l, al of lation, enter cu s of s pe s t ne s rs of ou fi ri , e ca an in e m pr ag a im he I perhaps, if he was reflections upon t , ly oo t ho nc ld la merce of Euou e m w m co e y H he an . t nt e on up om m make m e a ter might produc be annihilated in as s s di hu s t hi t d as over, when all ul w co ch hi hy w ch op hi s s ilo ct ph e ff man, w e ne fi nd when all this gs concerning the A in l. on ra as ne re his pleasure, take e g y or an in s m s ld e o or in s w int bu he s t hi and business of he would pursue d, de e ra s t s e pr he had happened. The x t e d nt ly an de ir ci , fa ac rope h ce uc on s n e no to lose his ntiments had be ranquility, as if t as w d an he e f I as . e e nc e ba am these humane se ur s a more real dist ersion, with the v n di io s s ca hi snore with the oc or ill ld w e ou s w po he lf , e m s m he his re hi t ll fa ided he never saw er which could be t ov pr as s , di t ion of that imbu s ct ; ou ru ol t ht iv s ig fr de on t he p t e most le d s an n. of his brethren, row, he would not or s m on oilli t m r d e fortune of his ow re is ng m nd fi hu le ry a lt litt pa of s in hi ru t g to him, than curity over the in t s re e t in s s le most profound se s plainly an object m e e s e ud it t ul m -Adam Smith mense

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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

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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

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...

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.

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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

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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

Loman Crew: Moths Weak Spot: Squeamish Soft Spot: Animal Lover Tough Spot: Lost Dependants Gilly (Spouse) Hunter (Brother) Leanne (Mother)

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 • Melee 1

PotentIals and SkIlls STR 1 • Resistance 1

SPD 3 • Athletics 3

SPD 2 • Shoot 1 • Stealth 1 • Athletics 2

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

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

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Smoke Crew: Moths Weak Spot: Compassion is Weakness Soft Spot: Protect the Next Generation Tough Spot: Latent

Control Crew: Moths Weak Spot: Punish the Old Prejudices Soft Spot: Selfless Service Tough Spot: Scavenger

Dependents Philly (Adopted Daughter)

Dependents Disha (Wife) Ragsdale (Dogs count as Dependents even above Support limit)

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

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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

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.

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.

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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.

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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

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

(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.

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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

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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.

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..

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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,

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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.

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.

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.

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MaterIalIsm: Bounty, Gear, and VehIcles

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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

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.

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.

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

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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

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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

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.

”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. 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

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.

By right means if you can, but by any means make money. -Horace 235

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

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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

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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,

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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. 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.

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

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

SCAVANGING AND CRAFTING

SellIng Gear

Takers started because people needed salvage from over the fence. Though pickings look slim five years after the Crash, crews still pry

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

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

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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 x3 • 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

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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

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

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. 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

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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Grenades: Though unreliable for headshots, grenades tend to mangle casualties beyond the point of mobility anyway. Humans fare even worse.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

 

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.

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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.

Tomahawk: Hatchets are second only to machetes in popularity. The small axe loses points because the temptation to throw it often outweighs a Taker’s ability to do so well. Takers that don’t want to be left in front of a hungry casualty with nothing but their fists buy a backup.

Drugs and Healthcare Blood Testing Unit: BTUs range from the hacked-together, pieces-of-shit used by the military at the Recession checkpoints to newer, sleek StopLoss designs. Regardless of the cosmetics, all models answer the same question: should I shoot my friend now or later?

Warhammer: Most that succumb to “size queen syndrome” when desperately casting about for bludgeons end up dead. But those strong enough to wield the things effectively are hell on casualties.

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First Aid Kit: It won’t do shit against the Blight, but a lot can go wrong in the Loss. Nothing about Taker first aid is meant to keep you healthy. Kits are there to keep you alive, moving, and in agony until you can collapse back at the home.

Prosthetic Arm: The field of prosthetics underwent a renaissance just before the Crash. New, lightweight materials constructed ergonomic designs that could be directly grafted to the pectoral nerves of the patient, feeding signals directly into an onboard computer. Those lucky enough to have access to the technology and doctors with the expertise to install it have modded their prosthetics to fit a Taker lifestyle. Nothing says “handicapable” quite like crushing someone’s skull in your fist.

Prosthetic Leg: As with any other prosthetic, learning to cope with an artificial limb takes time and patience. But with cuttingedge polymers and smart designs, the new prosthetic legs make the skilled as fast as any other Taker. Finding the technology and expertise to install it remains an expensive

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proposition, but most Takers that have lost legs the hard way have learned to never skimp on anything that helps them run away.

Rations: Mechanically, rations buy-a-roll for all acts of physical exertion and represent the caloric requirements of staying alive in the Loss. The charges are spent in the moment to aid tests, and a player need never mention it to the Market unless overspending for additional bonuses. Narratively, rations are always eaten “off-screen,” before or after whatever action scene in which they come into play. No one stops a fight to scarf down on some beans; they spend charges in the moment to represent how they prepared for extreme exertion the night before.

Scent Blocker: Certain organs – the liver, the large intestine, etc – remain oddly untouched by Blight infection. Collecting viscera from slain casualties and squeezing it creates Scent Blocker, or “C-Juice” as it is sometimes called. The noxious substance reeks but does not carry the Blight. Rubbing on scent blocker allows Takers to sneak past mobs of casualties, though sight, sound, and behavior can still give the humans away.

All vile acts are done to satisfy hunger. -Maksim Gorki 253

Soma (Stability Vitamins): Soma is to anti-depressants as power drills are to screwdrivers. The government dumps this tranquilizing poison into Free Parking ghettos to keep the refugees from burning down the cities, but it does ease the pain… if only for a little while. StopLoss Healthcare: On the off-chance they’re nearby and not busy, StopLoss will provide medical care to anyone with the foresight to have purchased their exorbitant medical insurance package. The corporation provides these services to all paying customers, even in the Loss. Smart Takers never confuse life saving for compassion: the only reason the corp offers such a policy is the increased chance it provides to catch Immunes in the field.

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Stim Sauce (Evacuation Amphetamines): Military-issue meth, issued to drivers to keep the caravans moving East during the Crash. The feds claim it’s no longer in production, but there’s enough bootleggers that the truth doesn’t really matter. Many can’t face the thought of the Loss without a little SS in their blood. After awhile, it becomes the only reason to get up in the morning.

Armor and AccessorIes Backpack: There’s no reason to go out if you’re not bringing something back. Even the most desperate Takers carry a backpack.

Supression K-7864: Derived from the bone marrow of the Immune, along with a cocktail of dangerously caustic antiseptics and antibiotics, Supression K-7864 is the only hope for someone infected with the Blight. The shot reverts live strains into their little-understood undead state. Though the infection still perforates every tissue with Blight sinews, the live cells responsible for destroying the brain and turning people into Vectors never activate. This turns the user into Latents, humans completely riddled with the Blight’s sinew, but sill alive and rational. The shot is no promise of survival, however; the process of becoming a Latent is agonizing, and it has been said to kill many through shock alone.

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“Basilisk” Body Armor: Increased fatalities from the US’s never-ending stream of bush wars finally prompted Congress to issue advanced body armor to all military personnel. Basilisk was the evolution of metamaterial prototypes capable of stopping even high-caliber rounds without hindering mobility. Due to budget cuts and logistical fuck-ups, “the future of warfare” only saw a 16% rollout before the Crash. Those lucky enough to scavenge a set off a dead DHQS soldier reap the best the military-industrial complex has to offer.

Carpet Gauntlets/Greaves: The base layer of commercial carpeting – the plastic weave in which the strands are embedded – can’t be pierced by human teeth or nails. Some early Taker realized that this made the floors of most abandoned houses a goldmine of anti-casualty kevlar. Five years later, carpet gauntlets and greaves are standard equipment for a lot of Takers. Feed your left arm to the zombie, scream like hell as it bites down on the carpet, and start bashing skulls before the dumb thing goes for juicer meat.

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Chainmail: If it’s good enough to defend against sharks and swords, it’ll stop casualties. However, chainmail requires constant care to replace missing links and prevent rust. Some Takers are willing to sacrifice safety to save on maintenance.

There is no armour against fate. -James Shirley

Kevlar: Slap one on and pray they aim center mass.

Padded Gloves: It seems like a small thing, but a cut knuckle from a panicked punch has undone many a crew. Keep casualty teeth out of your skin and on the ground where they belong.

Helmet: A bad idea when Latents go Vector; a good idea for every other occasion.

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Riot Shield: Some enclaves only exist today because the Fencemen trained to form a phalanx across the breach. Many Takers have brought them into the field to get some muchneeded distance from the dead.

Tools Bicycle: Taker survival in the short-term is about spending. The long-term is about sustainability.

Binoculars: Whether you’re walking into it, being chased by it, or getting flanked by it, see it before it sees you.

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DDJ’s (Denial Door Jams): Before the Crash, carbon nanotubes were being manufactured en masse by the military industrial complex for a number of uses in various defense contracts. As the chaos cancelled those grand projects, some demolitions expert got the bright idea to wrap all that spare unbreakable wire around a grenade. DDJs were about the only casualty-specific ordinance distributed before the withdrawal over the Mississippi. They were used by “shudder” teams deployed to retrieve vital personnel and fortify infrastructure. After entering a building, teams would pop a DDJ to ensure no more infected joined them from the outside. Tiny harpoons would deploy from the baseplate and embed in the walls and frame, barricading the door and tangling anything that managed to breakthrough. DDJ’s are a favorite of Taker crews specializing in extermination jobs, and many enclaves have started recycling nanotubes from detonated ordinance to manufacture their own units.

Flashlight: Remember the Taker motto: “Prevent a bite with a nightlight; turn it off or heads get blown off”

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Electronics Kit: Basic software on minidrives, circuit boards, soldering irons, voltage meters – sometimes the best Scores require working with equipment too delicate for a simple toolbox. Takers specializing in communications and high-end security systems carefully assemble kits catered to assist with advanced electronics.

Toolkit: It’s the Loss: everything is breaking or already broke. Come prepared.

Pets

Lockpicker’s Kit: If you’re lucky, the door’s locked because the idiots thought they’d be coming back one day. If you’re not, they locked it to keep what they’ve become from getting out. Either way, the noise of forced entry is a bad idea, and smart Takers know they need more to rely on than cancelled credit cards.

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Dog: Animals that try to feed off the flesh of casualties usually get eaten themselves or die from the Blight’s poison. Five years in, “man’s best friend” only survives by feasting off survivors in feral packs or remaining loyal to master. A well-trained pooch can be a lifesaver in the Loss, though. They can attack human rivals or distract casualties without much fear of being caught. Outfitted with equipment, service dogs make great scouts. Perhaps most importantly, dogs are invaluable for morale. Life over the fence might be a harrowing nightmare to the rest of the crew, but Fido is just happy for walkies. But never forget, a dog is more than another piece of equipment to invest in. Many a Taker lived through the genocide of the Crash only to put a gun in their mouth when their dog died.

Falcon: A lot of archaic knowledge became relevant again after the Crash; perhaps none so surprising as falconry. A trained bird can hunt, scout, deliver unhackable mail, and perform a number of vital roles in a crew. A huge investment is required to train these wild animals, in time and emotional attachment.

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Horse: Anything that can plow a field or carry a load without using precious fuel is valuable indeed. The fact that a loyal horse can also get you away from casualties is a nice bonus. Just don’t let the poor thing get hurt. Hearing the screams of a horse being eaten alive will forever turn a Taker’s dreams into nightmares.

Advanced ElectronIcs

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Dron-key: Though not quite breeching Terminator territory, AI advanced far enough

before the Crash that limitedly autonomous robotic units became the norm for most military ground units. Dron-key’s were used to carry equipment, relay communications, scout, and dispose of explosives (by running into them). The recall of US forces brought a glut of dron-keys into the domestic warzone. The Loss has long since learned to hack and mod the equipment for their own needs. They may be dumb as all hell and look like cross between a pommel horse and deformed mule, but they carry your shit and don’t complain.

Drone: The government tried to crack down on civilian drone use immediately after they became available and they started failing just as quickly. Drones are the primary early warning system of most enclaves and Beemail carriers are as close to a postal system as the Loss can get. If they can afford the batteries and maintenance, many Taker crews bring drones out on job to safely scout ahead.

Laptop/Pad: Ubiq’s aloft servers may still be floating up there in the stratosphere, but it don’t mean shit if you can’t access them. While hacked Specs remain the norm for many Takers because they’re hands free, the limited UI leaves something to be desired. Takers that need to hack in a hurry or spend a lot of time online usually set up their account on a more traditional device.

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Ubiq Specs: The first wearable computing device to really take off, Specs finally made good on the promise of augmented reality computing by removing the hassle and stigma. They came in a wide variety of attractive models, ranging from wire frames to sunglasses to horn-rimmed. The interface was designed to be compatible with all needs and proclivities, allowing for voice command, Ubiq On-Sight operation via specialized contact lenses, or wearable thimble inputs. The camera was ultralight and highresolution, recording on microdrives hidden in the earpieces capable of holding nearly 100 gigs without noticeable extra weight. The AR interface sported the best visual recognition software yet made by man, and open-source code made sure the app market could meet every conceivable need. And not only did the calls have the lowest drop ratio of every major provider, but onboard sensors in the frames could be fed into a computer model of the user’s face to project an accurate facial expression to the person on the other end. Specs were well on their way to replacing cell-phones… but then the apocalypse started, “terrorists” took over the servers, and everyone started using them to shoot zombies.

Haul

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Scores earn bounty by attaching a price to each unit of supply (see “Scores” p. 394). These units are called Haul. If Refresh abstracts the ability to source and purchase gear, then Haul abstracts a Taker’s carrying capacity. A Taker can carry Haul equal to STR and still perform the intense physical exercise demanded by the job. Anything more than that and the Taker can’t move, or at least can’t move fast enough to escape a shuffling casualty. For instance, a Taker might be strong enough to carry a flamethrower, a shotgun, spear, kitchen sink, filing cabinet, and baby mule at the same time. But that character is going to have a hell of time rolling into cover from gunfire, pulling themselves out of

a burning train, or jumping over a crowd of zombies. Takers travel light by necessity. If Refresh abstracts the ability to source and purchase gear, then Haul abstracts a Taker’s carrying capacity. Although the Haul rating is derived from STR, it does not represent maximum physical force. It also doesn’t limit how much gear the Taker can own (see “How much can I carry?” p. 237). Haul describes the maximum amount that can be earned through the Taker’s physical labors by capping how many units of supply can be carried. The price of each unit varies, but each Taker’s capacity is limited by their STR. So, let’s say the crew is designing a Score. The Market rolls and each unit of supply costs 7 bounty. But what’s the Score for? Doesn’t matter. If the crew goes after gun parts, a Taker with STR 1 can carry 7 bounty’s worth of gun parts. But if the crew goes after bags of rice? That Taker can still only carry 7 bounty’s worth of rice. Stationary? 7 bounty’s worth of decorative paper. • Figure out the demand, in bounty, of each unit of supply. • Multiply that number by the Taker’s STR. • That’s the maximum amount of bounty the Taker can carry back from the job site. This means that, even if they achieve the maximum bounty per unit, the ability to profit from Scores is always going to be limited by how much the crew can hump on their backs. That is, unless they invest in some transportation.

VehIcle Rules

Moving things from point A to point B has been the primary struggle of economic production since the beginning of history. The Loss certainly doesn’t make distribution easier. Takers can carry their salvage the old fashioned way with Haul, but crews that don’t want their earnings tied to the strength of their backs need a company vehicle.

Salvaged Vehicles If Takers recover a car or truck from the Loss, remember that it has been sitting unused for five years. Getting it working is a miracle, even if the PCs scavenge parts from other vehicles and somehow find tires that have yet to rot. Vehicles looted in route only last until the end of that job. If the Takers want to consistently reduce their Legs, they need to pay for a vehicle that has seen maintenance in the last decade. Transportation not only allows much more to be earned from a Score, it also protects from the dangerous unpredictability of Legs and provides a rolling shelter for the crew. Reliable transport would almost make the job easy... were fuel not the scarcest commodity in the world. VehIcle Effect When vehicles aren’t broken down, they close distances faster than walking, allow vehicular interactions, and carry additional weight. Mechanically, that’s all vehicles can do in Red Markets. But it’s enough; those mechanical benefits are huge. 1. Vehicles are finicky. • Five years after the Crash, most machines running at all are just barely road worthy. The body and parts were likely pieced together from the innumerable pile-ups dotting the freeways, or pulled from a garage after years of neglect. The few vehicles receiving regular use and maintenance throughout the disaster have probably run over multiple casualties, bashed through roadblocks, and weathered multiple gunshots. Unless upgraded, starting any motor in the Loss requires a Mechanics check. 2. Vehicles can skip Legs. • When using transportation, Takers can spend extra vehicle charges to skip any Leg designed to be dealt with on foot. Takers have the option of stopping and

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engaging with the encounter, but their wheels can get them away. This allows Takers to arrive at the job site rested and uninjured, which rarely happens to crews on foot. 3. Vehicles make certain scenes possible. • In the contest between man and machine... there is no contest. If the cultists kidnapping your son have a car and your character does not, they get away. If you have a vehicle too, now it’s a chase. If raiders ram a character fleeing across the desert, that person is really dead. If the character is in a vehicle, it’s just some damage. Vehicles allow PCs to interact with aspects of the environment that would otherwise just run away or run them over. 4. Vehicles increase available Haul • On a Score, each character can carry Haul equalling STR. But in a vehicle? Takers can carry their normal Haul, plus any carrying capacity in the vehicle not occupied by passengers. A three-person crew capable of 2 Haul each can make, at maximum demand, 60 bounty off of a Score. Another three-person crew, driving a semi, could theoretically make 170 bounty off the same job.

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and drilling operations still operate can’t begin to meet the Loss’s demand. Upkeep on vehicles is for replacing parts, which are still in abundance, but finding fuel is a constant struggle. 2. Charges for vehicles must be individually sourced and purchased. • Every charge put into a vehicle costs bounty. This means that it is extremely rare for a crew to have a “full tank” of 10 charges. It also means that the wheels don’t turn if someone can’t source a supply. Purchasing fuel requires a successful Networking check and bounty in hand: no one gives fuel out on credit. 3. The price per charge depends on the vehicle’s fuel demand. • The number recorded as the vehicle’s fuel demand is the cost per charge for that vehicle. In general, the bigger and more specialized the vehicle, the higher the cost. The bounty cost per charge can fluctuate depending on upgrades installed.

VehIcle Charges and Fuel Charges on a vehicle represent fuel. It can be any kind of fuel – gasoline, biodiesel, batteries – but the charges keep the vehicle moving. No charges? No go. This doesn’t differ from the narrative interpretation of charges on all other gear, but vehicle charges operate differently in some significant ways.

4. Charges are spent to start a Leg, and charges are spent to skip a Vehicle Leg. • To get to the next Leg, a vehicle must spend a charge of fuel. For typical Loss encounters, Takers can choose to stop and engage, or they can speed on by to the next Leg. If the Leg is a Vehicle Leg (meaning an encounter specifically designed to stop a vehicle), another charge must be spent to “go around” the obstacle. If the encounter isn’t stationary – such as a motorized group of pirates – escape from the vehicle encounter might not be possible without other skill checks.

1. Upkeep only prevents malfunction. It doesn’t refresh charges. • Energy is expensive in the Loss. If it’s renewable (such as solar and wind power), the wait list to hook up to the generators is wildly long. If it’s fossil fuel, the supply can literally only go down. What few refinery

VehIcle OwnershIp and Upkeep The cost of fueling and repairing a vehicle is too much for most Takers to afford on their own. Therefore, the whole crew shares the burden of maintaining transportation. Vehicles are “company property.” This means...

1. Vehicles may not be purchased at character creation. • The price for working transportation is always upkeep x 2. Takers don’t receive the half-off discount of character creation when buying a car. Furthermore, it’s just a good idea to hold off on investing in a major piece of company equipment until the crew has a better conception of its particular brand. If the crew needs a vehicle for a one-shot, the Market can provide one, but purchase should otherwise remain a major company decision made by all the PCs. 2. Vehicle upkeep and purchase price is deducted from the Score or contract. • Whenever calculating the bounty earned from a contract, automatically deduct the price of any vehicles the group plans to purchase or needs to upkeep. The remainder is split amongst the crew into equal shares. If the car lets you do business, the car gets fed before you. 3. Vehicles don’t factor into negotiation until expenses. • The upkeep price of a vehicle doesn’t enter into contract negotiations until expenses get paid, same as any other type of gear. Unless the client has been totally fleeced, owning a vehicle always cuts into the bottom line. VehIcle Haul Vehicles almost always cost, but they might save capital by decreasing the risk to Takers. Conflict avoided by skipping Legs translates into bounty saved in healing, Humanity, and favors. However, these savings are offset by the gains potentially lost skipping Legs. No risk means no rewards.

Money doesn’t change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the money brings that out, that’s all. -Henry Ford

A vehicle’s increased carrying capacity, however, is an unqualified benefit. More often than not, Takers have to leave valuable goods behind when out on a Score; they can only carry so much and still deal with the dangers of the Loss. A vehicle significantly increases the efficiency of each trip. 1. Passengers take up one Haul. • For every person riding in a vehicle, subtract one off its Haul. • Remaining vehicle Haul adds to a crew’s total Haul. • Imagine a crew buys a Jeep. The vehicle has 7 Haul. Now, a crew of three Takers, each with STR 3, would be able to carry 9 Haul; it wouldn’t make sense to take a Jeep when they could carry more by hand. However, only passengers count against Haul, not passengers and what they are carrying. The vehicle, after accounting for passengers, would still add 4 Haul to their potential gains. This means the crew could salvage 13 Haul’s worth of goods with the Jeep, as opposed to 9 Haul carried by hand. VehIcle Upgrades All vehicles have six possible upgrades. Each upgrade may only be purchased once. Each vehicle is limited to three upgrades. These upgrades also have multiple effects, usually related to how they alter fuel demand or upkeep. Purchasing and installing upgrades is done normally. Each upgrade costs one bounty, but can be lost in malfunction rolls. The available upgrades are... 1. Off-road • Burn a charge to skip an encounter despite obstructions or off-road conditions. • Fuel Demand increases by 1 bounty. 2. Reliable • Vehicle does not require a Mechanics check to start. • Upkeep increases by 2 bounty

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3. Armored • Vehicle counts as cover in combat • No attacks can do damage to the vehicle unless they carry the explosive or armorpiercing upgrade. • Fuel Demand increases by 1 bounty 4. Alternative Fuel • Vehicle uses solar panels, electricity, biodiesel, or other renewable energy for fuel • Fuel Demand decreases by 1 bounty 5. Optimized Load • Vehicle gains +2 Haul • Fuel demand increases by 1 bounty 6. Juiced • Vehicle’s superior horsepower and handling provides a static +2 Drive bonus • Fuel Demand increases by 1 bounty

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VehIcle LIst Make, model, look, paint job, and any other cosmetic accessories are entirely up to the crew. They can ride around in whatever they think would look cool or fitting for the upgrades. Mechanically, these descriptions have no bearing on the game besides making the setting more fun and immersive for the group. Markets should encourage player creativity and emotional investment: it makes the Humanity damage all the worse when the thing blows up later. Here are the vehicle types Red Markets currently supports. Copy the essential stats and upgrades into the space provided on the crew sheet.

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VehIcle Combat and Chases If you need help calculating how much damage is done in a car crash, see “Weird Damage” in the Combat chapter (p. 283). Otherwise, suffice it to say that firing weapons and jumping onto moving cars are really bad ideas in reality, and really fun in make believe. Red Markets has no intention of letting reality ruin our fun. This means that combat amongst vehicles is treated like any other combat: tactics and twitches resort to the character’s skills. If someone wants to jump onboard a moving train, tell them if they are close enough and, if so, call for an Athletics check. There’s no factoring in variable speeds and distance and blah blah blah. Most cars aren’t bulletproof (except for those with the Armored upgrade), so resolve firearm damage as normal. The Market is free to forbid twitches to dodge if a character is strapped in, but the driver could make Drive

checks to avoid attacks instead. If people scrape sides, it’s cinematic and looks cool, but no dice need to be rolled unless the Taker’s vehicle is disabled. As for chases, Drive gets characters closer or further away, depending on the preferences of the person making a check. Drive is also the skill for stopping a pursued vehicle with some artful ramming, and it’s used for performing death-defying stunts. There’s no need to keep track of complex distances, speeds, and variables for physics problems. The Market declares what is happening, the players make their check, and the characters react. That’s it. The only mistake to avoid would be bogging down one of the most tense, climactic scenes of the game (like...say, a car chase) with an excess of rules lawyering and dice checks. Keep it simple; keep it fast.  

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Combat

In many instances, a fight to death with the casualties is the best-case scenario; humans are still the deadliest animals on the planet. Facing down the undead is a unique proposition, which is why casualties and Vectors have their own rules (p. 295). The combat rules in Red Markets seek to emulate the terror, suddenness, and confusion of armed conflict with other human beings, be they soldiers, believers, raiders, or other crews. What follows is a description of the basic combat mechanics, order of operations, damage penalties, and special maneuvers. For rules on running combat as the Market, see “Market Forces” (p. 291)

The Market WIll WIn

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The Market always succeeds if uncontested. This means whatever the Market declares will happen, does happen unless the players

make a check to prevent it. For instance, if a soldier is about to shoot one of the characters, the Market doesn’t have to do anything to see if the soldier succeeds. The player makes an Athletics check to dodge. On a success, the bullet misses its mark. On a failure, the shot lands. Similarly, if a player tries to attack, the Market doesn’t waste time rolling to see if some random thug dodged; the success or failure of the player’s attack check determines the outcome entirely. With a few exceptions (see “Market Dice Checks” p. 176), the Market doesn’t make dice checks in a conflict. The Market never checks for success because the person running the game represents the weight of history: the combined forces of the economy, opposing and assisting the characters. Takers either succeed in overcoming the Market’s Forces for the moment, fail, or they’re too exhausted to even try.

The Economy of ActIons

When combat starts, dice checks get recategorized into four types of actions: tactic, twitch, freebie, and task. The categorizations approximate how much time an action takes and when it occurs in the initiative order. What follows is an explanation of the action types; initiative is explained later in “The Combat Round” (p. 275). TactIc A tactic is a planned action. It may not be planned particularly well, but it is something the Taker intends to do. Example tactics are... • • • • •

Firing a weapon Making a Melee or Unarmed attack Drawing or holstering a weapon Running to cover Reloading a weapon or refreshing charges on other gear • Administering First Aid • Barricading a door

• Full defense (converting a tactic to a twitch) • Full offense (converting the twitch to a second tactic, which occurs at the end of the initiative order) Tactics resolves in initiative order, as explained later. Initiative order has a lot of power to determine tactics: checks the player planned on making might be invalidated or rendered impossible by events taking place earlier in the initiative order. Tactics near the beginning of the order can set the tone of the entire battle. TwItch A twitch isn’t planned. It’s an animal instinct that goes off when prompted, such as the hint of motion out of the corner of an eye causing a spastic dodge. Since a twitch is so fast and prompted by the Market’s forces, it’s use is limited to...

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• Make an Athletics check to dodge attacks • Make an Athletics check to get under cover • Block an incoming Melee or Unarmed attack • Recover from knockback • Quick draw an item by dropping previously held gear • Reload or perform another quick action, as allowed by a specific gear’s upgrade A twitch is entirely defensive. Its power comes from being unbound by the initiative order. After spending a twitch, a player can make a skill check immediately, no matter where their tactic lies in the initiative order. So, although Angel might not act until last in the initiative order, she can spend her twitch to get behind cover so all the Market forces acting before her can’t declare attacks. Each character only gets one twitch per combat round. If Market forces declare an attack and the target player doesn’t have a twitch to spend, the attack hits automatically (see “Market Dice Checks” p. 176). FreebIes Freebies include intellectual and verbal actions that can be carried out while performing tactics and twitches, or whenever the Taker chooses. Characters get one freebie per combat round. Some examples of freebies include... • Foresight checks to get tactical information • Awareness checks to spot something • Shouting, whispering, or CHA skill checks where appropriate • Self-Control tests called for by the Market • Command using Profession: Animal Handling or Profession: Drones The Market isn’t obligated to allow a soliloquy in the middle of knife fight, though barking “Get down!” is fine and wouldn’t require a check. And while it might be possible to see where the raiders are flanking from

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(Awareness), nobody has the time to complete a Where’s Waldo? book in the middle of combat. Task Tasks require a long-time, at least relative to the pace of combat. A single combat round represents a few frenetic seconds of bloodshed and terror. That’s usually not enough time to pick a lock, hot-wire a car, or bandage a wound, but the situation might demand such concentration despite distractions like shrapnel and arterial spray. When performing a task, the Market quotes the number of uninterrupted combat rounds required to attempt a check OR the number of successful checks required to complete the task (never both, unless the whole group likes constantly rolling dice and failing). Sometimes, a task might not require a check at all, but the time it eats up still means a lot in a firefight. The Market stipulates whether the player’s task requires uninterrupted focus or merely cumulative focus. For instance, battlefield surgery can’t be stopped for the doctor to return fire – the Market might say it requires two rounds uninterrupted before the player can make a single Profession: Surgeon check to determine success. On the other hand, somebody chopping down a door with an axe can spare one swing for the casualty that strays too close – in this instance, the Market might require two successful Melee checks before the door breaks, but successes don’t have to occur concurrently.

y. g r o g r cybo a s i ar w n r ay e w d a r Mo a H -Donna

Finally, maybe the task is too simple to warrant using the dice. Cranking a generator might require two rounds spent on the task, but failing to grasp a handle isn’t an interesting or reasonable way to fail, so the Market doesn’t require a check at all. Freebies don’t interrupt tasks, but tactics and twitches do. Thankfully, Takers engaged in tasks can be in cover at the same time, but they have to trust their coworkers to keep them from getting flanked and killed. In short, to perform a task, forgo all other actions except screaming for the crew to help.

The Combat Round

A combat round is defined by the number of actions that can be performed by each PC (one tactic, twitch, and freebie, or one task and one freebie) and the order in which those actions happen, called the initiative order. Other than those two traits, a combat round has no definitive limits. In terms of time, one combat round is usefully vague enough to allow the group more storytelling options. Groups are free to narrate fights in a style befitting the painstaking slow-mo of a John Woo shootout, or they can opt for a sudden, second-long burst of bloodshed ala a Tarantino standoff. For ease of reference, here’s a summary of the combat round: 1. Initiative • The Market rolls one Red die for every Market force involved in the combat. • Players roll one Black die each and add their SPD. • Players declare from highest to lowest numbers, after their SPD is added. The Market uses Red dice from the pool to place Market forces in-between their numbers. This is called the initiative order. (For instance, the players rolled and the Market got a 10, 4, and 1. Bill goes first with 11, Thug A goes next with a 10, Melanie got an 8, DeMarcus 7, Thug B goes at 4. The Market is out of forces, so

the 1 is dropped and the initiative order established). 2. Declare, Spend, and Resolve • The highest initiative player or Market force declares a tactic, buys-a-roll, and resolves the action. • As the round continues, twitches and freebies are demanded by the actions of Market forces or used at the discretion of the player. Both twitches and freebies are unbound in the initiative order. 3. Deal Damage and Assess Penalties • Damage is recorded directly after the tactic that caused it. Damage is always the Black. Hit location is always the Red. The weapon used determines if the damage is Kill or Stun damage. The damage is unmodified by extra spends unless the gear is specifically upgraded. • If using the Bust Rule: Random Damage (p. 281), the Market rolls Black/Red to determine how much damage the PC takes rather than using the results of a failed twitch. • Assess and implement any penalties as a result of health or Humanity loss. 4. Repeat • After everyone has acted, the combat round ends. Twitches unspent by the end of the round are discarded (unless the character is specifically using upgraded gear that allows them to be spent). The initiative order cycles back to the highest player and repeats until the conflict ends. InItIatIve Unlike other dice checks in Red Markets, initiative is not a success or failure check. Rolling initiative means rolling a single d10 upon which the character’s Speed is added. The person with the highest number goes first. But what happens to the Red dice? The Market needs to determine what order their forces act just like the players, so initiative is one of the only times the

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Market rolls dice in combat. Before combat begins, the Market rolls one Red die for every NPC or Market force involved in the combat, minimum the number of players in the combat. For instance, if the Market has two NPCs opposing a three-player crew, the Market still rolls three Red dice. All the Reds are rolled at once and left on the table in a pool. The players roll only their Black and add their SPD. The Market then asks who has the highest number. In decreasing order, the Market records the character names in the order they act. At this point, the Red dice come into play. The Red dice are spent to insert Market forces into the initiative order. Example: It’s an even fight: Gnat, BanHammer, and Monk battle against a rival crew willing to kill to steal their contract. The Market has a pool of three Reds (one for each member of the crew, and enough for all the Market forces). Everybody rolls. Only the players add initiative modifiers to their dice.

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Gnat’s player gets B8+1 for a B9 BanHammer’s player gets B9+3 for a B12 Monk’s player rolls a B4+2 for a B6 The Market rolls 3 Reds (1 for each combatant) for a 10, 10, 7 Looks like BanHammer is going first: nothing the Market has can beat a 12. Then two of the rival crew – Baddie A and B – are going to go at the same time with 10’s. Gnat’s 9 is up next, then the R7, and finally Monk. So the order for the fight is going to be BanHammer, Baddie A, Baddie B, Gnat, Baddie C, and Monk.

Notice that the PCs always have a slight edge on Market forces because they can have initiative scores above a ten using their modifiers. This is because, despite all their struggles, Takers are our heroes, cooler and more capable than your average human being. But as a counterbalance, the Market either outnumbers the players or has more numbers to choose from, representing the endless tide of obstacles facing the PCs. The Market never adds a SPD modifier to forces unless they badass enough to have an advantage (see p. 292). Once the initiative order is established, it’s recycled every combat round until until a player spends a point of Will to jump to the top of the order or one side is killed, disabled, or withdraws. Declare, Spend, Resolve Players declare what they are going to use for their tactic in the order of initiative. Nobody has to declare simultaneously unless they are

What about ties? If initiative scores are exactly the same (whether due to natural or modified dice), the two characters act at the same time. Narratively, this can make for bloody shootouts or comical double knockouts, but such things happen in the chaos of violence. Mechanically, actions on the same initiative merely resolve at the same time and ignore penalties. For example, if a Taker shoots on initiative 5 and a raider shoots on a 4, the raider might never get to act. The damage of the blow might kill or disable the foe before there’s a chance to retaliate. Alternately, if the Taker AND the raider are on initiative 5, the Taker could blow the raider’s brains out and the raider could still get an attack off before death. In this example, the two characters could easily kill each other and not hit the ground until the initiative counts down to 4.

AlternatIve InItIatIve

If players want each round of combat as chaotic as the last, consider these alternative initiative rules. Bust: Individual initiative: The Market pairs off forces with individual PCs. To keep things simple, the Market resolves actions from left-to-right. Each player rolls Black + SPD. The Market, in descending numerical order, then has each player make a Black + SPD/Red check against each opponent. Success moves the character ahead of an opponent, failure after them. So, if Han is fighting two cultists and rolls a success and failure, then Cultist A would act first, then Han, and finally Cultist B. Once resolved, the Market would move to the next player down the list to see what is happening to Han’s teammate during that the same time. This makes combat a simultaneous fit of individual struggles that is, paradoxically, easier for the Market to track. It does, however, greatly increase the power of numbers, as one PC falling will then throw all of the forces attention on another Taker. Boom: The Last Shall Be First: In this variant, the initiative order reshuffles every round. The PC or NPC unfortunate enough to be last gets to use two tactics in a row: one as the last action of the previous round, the second as the first action of the next round. If the first round order is A, B, C, D, the second round is ordered D, A, B, C. Other than cycling the slowest character to the top, nothing else changes: the rest of the order stays the same and everyone’s actions refresh as normal. This alternative minimizes the amount of dice and bookkeeping the Market must deal with while still adding more variation to the tactical picture. The lowest initiative number becomes a desirable spot for players and a high-value target for Market Forces. Bust: Fog of War: By rerolling for initiative at the top of every round, combat remains utterly unpredictable. This variant means players have to constantly pay attention, adapt, and think on their feet. That said, randomly ordering every round can sometimes result in farcical or murderously difficult challenges, depending on where the dice land. Furthermore, rolling for initiative every round slows down gameplay and demands more bookkeeping from the Market.

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working off the exact same initiative number. In such instances, who actually says what they are doing first means little because the actions resolve at the same time regardless (see “What about ties?” p. 277). One of the few benefits of being slow on initiative is the ability to see what others are doing before deciding one’s own tactics. NPC’s do the same, though instead of spending for bonuses or rolling, the declaration either demands characters use their twitch or instantly resolves. Before a player makes a check for a declared tactic, they must spend to buy-a-roll. This could be a charge of rations for a STR or SPD skill, or a charge required to use a piece of gear. If using charged gear to buy-a-roll, the player can also spend additional charges to add +1’s to their check (see “Charges” p. 179); these charges must be spent before the check. When the tactic is declared and the charges spent, the dice are rolled and resolved. Resolution means that the numbers on the dice affect the narrative and alter the character sheet. A missed attack doesn’t require much resolution besides describing how it missed, but a successful attack warrants a description of where and how the blow struck. Resolution is an opportunity for both the Market and players to craft a suspenseful story in which their characters excel or fold under pressure. TwItches and FreebIes

A twitch is compelled by the Market’s forces. NPCs don’t succeed in an attack; Takers fail to dodge. When the Market declares an NPC’s tactic, it automatically succeeds unless the player can do something about it. That’s where twitches come in. A twitch is the knee-jerk reaction that can save or doom a character’s life. Spend the twitch on a successful Athletics check to duck under cover just in time; if the check fails, the character jumps right into the bullet’s path. Because twitches are compelled by Market forces, they can go anywhere in the initiative order. This flexibility is immensely powerful,

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so twitches are limited in number and scope. A character only gets one twitch per combat round, and it can only be used when prompted by Market forces. Furthermore, any twitches not used by the end of the round are wasted. Whether characters succeed or fail their checks, no second twitch is provided. A Taker that dodged an arrow is too distracted to duck a sword strike. Bumbling into automatic gunfire means the second and third bursts hit as well. When a Market force declares a tactic against a PC that has no twitches remaining, the Market checks for hit location and damage, or the player may be asked to determine their own fate. Either way, when the twitch is already spent, any action declared against that PC succeeds. There are special moves characters can use to convert twitches into tactics, burn them for special effects, or earn another twitch, but these combat maneuvers are tied to the initiative order and their effects only take place after that players turn. Like twitches, freebies can go anywhere a player wishes in the initiative order, but each character is limited to one. A character can scream a warning, but there’s not enough time for a lecture. They can assess the scene, but no one is going to sketch a map with casualties closing in. Assess PenaltIes Characters do not take the penalties for injuries until after the initiative order in which they are sustained. Once the initiative ticks down by even one number, the penalties are assessed according to the Hit Location Table (see “Hit Locations and Damage” p. 280) and applied to any following tactics or twitches. Narratively, this brief pause represents the adrenaline rush fading and surprising combatants with the knowledge that they’ve been fighting with a wound for the past few seconds. Most of the time, penalties in combat are going to take the form of Self-Control checks to maintain Humanity (see p. 310). Only one type of check can be made per combat.

on their actions, and the battle continues until one side wins, escapes, or manages to negotiate a peace.

Movement

Red Markets does not require hex spaces, maps, or distance per action ratios to keep track of where characters are in the environment. Groups that are invested in that type of play can easily adapt these rules to fit their brand of fun, but the game is only designed to provide the minimum amount of objective spatial information. Players know enough to make decisions based on where their characters are in relation to others and any objectives, but that’s about it.

Nobody has to worry about taking Humanity hits in the same Threat track after the first check, and this keeps the assessing penalties stage from dragging on endlessly. To return to the example... Penalties Example: BanHammer got hit hard last round. That’s going to mean Trauma damage if he doesn’t make the Self-Control check. BanHammer has Self-Control at 0 (he’s not known for his restraint). He defaults to his ADP of 2, but rolls over. He takes a hit on the Trauma track. Oh no! That’s a crack! BanHammer’s player wants to stay in the fight, so he chooses the...well, the Fight option. BanHammer is now berserk and remains so for the rest of the scene. Repeat Unless the group is using the Alternative Initiative Rules, the order cycles back to the top after the last tactic is resolved. All twitches are discarded, everyone gets refreshes

Usefully Vague How far can a successful Athletics check take you? How many seconds to run to cover? Exactly how many feet long is that spear? The answer for all these questions and more is the same: as long as is narratively convenient. Notice the term “narratively convenient” is NOT the same as personally convenient; the only characters with superpowers in the setting are trying to eat you. When performing an action in which time, distance, and speed is a factor, players can ask the Market to describe the stakes as much as they deem necessary. Trust the Market to quote reasonable distances and plausible times that keep combat exciting. Narrative convenience can swing a player’s way as well. If a player asks if there is a crane in the shipping yard that could smash that Aberrant, the Market should always strive to reward such engagement with the setting. Players dictating set pieces to the Market doesn’t have to work every time – dice checks can still be required, stipulations made, and absurdities dismissed – but badass stunts are the kind of thing everybody wants from protagonists. Stipulating that the player can’t climb into the crane’s control room because his movement rate is one hex too slow is the kind of spoilsport gaming that can kill a cool moment.

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UsIng RatIons When performing physical actions (such as Melee, Unarmed, Resistance or Athletics), charges of rations must be spent to buy-a-roll. Additional rations charges can be spent to add +1 at a one-for-one ratio. For instance, spending one charge to buy an Athletics check adds the character’s skill to Black, but spending two charges adds the character’s skill+1. If a character runs out of rations, they are gassed (see below) and cannot buy-a-roll for physical skills until they refresh charges. A full combat round spent resting restores a number of charges equal to the character’s SPD, but this only works once. For example, a Taker with SPD 3 can rest to gain three free charges of “rations” (in reality, burning fat stores), but a second round of rest does not add three more charges. Until rations are refreshed, the Taker has only three charges to spend on all physical actions before they become gassed again. Charges from rations get spent in the moment, but the narrative understands the charges to represent a healthy caloric intake before and after combat. Nobody is stopping the fight to scarf down canned goods; the charges represent a healthy diet in calm times and the resulting financial burden of preventing starvation. GettIng Gassed, StarvIng, and PushIng On If a character runs out of rations, they are considered “gassed,” meaning totally exhausted, winded, and unable to continue at the pace the conflict demands. They can’t make any physical actions that round aside from slowly trotting or lifting light items, even as a twitch. Once a round has gone by without the character taking any physical actions or being hit, characters regain a number of charges equal to their Speed. If they have rations, getting gassed can be prevented so long as they keep spending charges off that gear. Refreshing is a free action so long as the character has the remaining ADP points to do it.

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If they don’t have the rations to spend, each gassed character’s usable charges stay at the SPD rating until they sleep, eat, and rehydrate. Waiting around for a full refresh isn’t an option; bodies that must perform must be fed and rested. If no rations are waiting for breakfast, characters take 1 Stun damage to every location due to starvation. If the characters don’t get any food the next day or Leg either (whatever comes first), add two more Stun boxes to each location. On day three, take three Stun damage everywhere. Continue until immobilized or fed, and don’t forget the Humanity damage that results from starving. Stun damage keeps progressively increasing until food is found or the character dies. The Stun damage taken must be healed normally. More information on the dangers of starving and how they manifest outside of combat can be found in “Weird Damage” p. 283.

HIt LocatIons and Damage

In Red Markets, the amount of damage inflicted is always determined by the natural Black, and the location is always determined by the natural Red. Spend nine charges blasting away with a gun to turn a B1/R6 into a B1+9/R6 success? Great, but it’s still just one damage done to the left arm. The same dice are used to calculate damage on failed rolls during twitches. If a PC fails an Athletics check with B5+3/R9, five points of damage goes to the torso; the damage doesn’t go up on account of the Taker wisely trying to get away with extra rations charges and skill. Fail a dodge on B9/R9? Ouch. That’s 18 points of damage to the chest (9 damage to hit location 9, multiplied by a critical failure). There are two types of damage: Stun and Kill. Stun damage constitutes bruising, numbness, blunt trauma, muscle fatigue, and other non-bleeding damage. Kill damage constitutes broken bones, punctures, lacerations, poisoning, and serious internal injury. The damage type inflicted

is determined by the weapon used and any upgrades it might have. Indicate Stun damage with a diagonal slash ( / ) in a box. Indicate Kill damage with an ( X ). Every character has 10 hit boxes per location, except for the torso, which has 20. If a hit location is filled up with any combination of Stun and Killing damage, there are consequences. Stun or Kill damage inflicted to a location already filled with Stun damage becomes Kill damage (turn a diagonal into an X). When a location is filled entirely with Killing, the consequences get more severe.

Bust Rule: Random Damage

Using the failure of player rolls to determine damage minimizes dice checks, but it favors Takers with light damage (low Black) to the torso and head (high Red). Conversely, Takers amputate a lot of legs and arms (high Black for damage, low Red for location). Normally, the only time the Market rolls in combat is to determine initiative order and calculate damage when a Taker has no twitch to contest an attack (see “Market Dice Checks” p. 176). For groups that want more dynamic and deadly combat, the Market can check Black/Red for every hit. Random damage rolls don’t slow the game down too much, and they raise the stakes of combat even higher. Think about how often the Market should be rolling before adopting this alternate rule. If the Market rolls every time a Taker is hit and the dice land B10/R10, it’s time to make a new character... even if it was their last day before retirement. If the Market rolls for damage every time the player hits and it lands B1/R5, all emptying the clip accomplished was lightly grazing the enemy’s arm. Market rolls against Takers make the game much more deadly; Market rolls against NPCs makes combat more frustrating. Groups should make sure they know what particular flavor of gameplay they’re inviting in before adopting alternative random damage rules.

Bust Rule: AlternatIve HIt Boxes

Tired of taking and dealing leg damage? Scratch out the numbers listed on the character sheet and fill the following numbers into the “Alt.” Box. Right Leg: 1 Left Leg: 2 Right Arm: 3 Left Arm: 4 Torso: 5-9 Head: 10 Now everyone knows to aim center mass. There’s less chance of leg damage than before, but now 60% of all hits land in a kill location. Being hobbled might not sound so bad when a bullet tears through your character’s heart, so make sure everyone is up to the challenge before altering the hit boxes, especially if using this rule in tandem with the random damage rule. BleedIng Out If an extremity is filled with Kill damage, the sufferer is bleeding out. Every turn they go without healing, they take 1d10 Kill damage per round. The Taker may choose which locations the hit points come from, but the Kill damage must be healed like any other damage. Filling the torso or head as a result of blood loss results in death. A First Aid check can be made to stop the bleeding. See below. HealIng In the FIeld Characters with First Aid or training in Profession: Doctor and the proper gear can heal some damage done in combat. A successful check heals a number of Stun boxes equal to the natural Black of the check (spent charges just indicate a greater chance of success, not better medical skill). Kill boxes are reduced to Stun boxes at the same rate, meaning 2 profit is needed for every Kill

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box completely removed. In narrative terms, this healing is represented in painkillers, coagulants, bandages, and the other trappings of field medicine. First Aid checks are one-and-done per Taker, per location. For instance, a healer couldn’t possibly get someone with a filled torso back to full health while the bullets were flying unless the injuries were light to begin with. However, they could work on the fighter’s torso one round, and then try to repair the fighter’s arm on the next. A skilled friend could check the suture work later and make their own First Aid check on the injured torso, but the previous medic has already done all they can do. The only way to succeed a failed First Aid check is to succeed at cost, either by using a point of Will or, if time allows and technology is available, tapping a Reference to consult on the procedure. Beyond that, healers can’t take any more action on a body part until it is filled with brand new injuries. Additional treatments require the care of a doctor and rest in a safe place.

Death

Filling the torso or head (locations 7-9 or 10) with Kill damage kills a character through cardiac failure, blood loss, brain trauma, or some combination of the three. Some weapons can do this in one hit. This makes for a deadlier game than some players prefer, so there are Boom rules for mitigating such sudden damage.

Bust Rule: Permanent Damage

Serious wounds rarely leave no lasting effects, especially considering the kind of care available in the Loss. If an arm or leg is filled completely with Kill damage, the Market rolls Black/ Red with no modifiers. On a critical success, the Takers can heal all hit boxes in the limb normally. On a success, the Taker permanently loses a hit box from that hit location. Completely color in that box with pen to represent the permanent damage left by the injury. On a failure, the limb permanently loses two hit boxes. On a critical failure, three hit boxes.

Boom Rules

Will to Live: Spending a point of Will can shift damage that would go to the head to the torso. It can also keep an incapacitated player alive for one round longer. Lucky X: Spending a point of Will can shift damage from any hit location to a piece of gear. The equipment and all its upgrades are completely destroyed, but the damage doesn’t affect the Taker. Players and Market’s should take care to keep the lucky intervention of objects cinematic and not goofy. It’s one thing if the frame of some Uniq Specs deflects a low-caliber bullet; it’s quite another if someone argues that a flashlight could deflect all a grenade’s shrapnel.

WeIrd Damage

The Loss contains a variety of dangers beyond direct warfare. Here are some guidelines for inflicting weirder types of damage on the players. CollIsIon Car crashes in Red Markets should only be two things: fast and cinematic. To stay fast, there’s no calculating the speed of vehicles and doing physics equations to figure out damage. Like films, vehicles move at a narrative speed rather than a physical one. The Market narrates how fast the vehicle feels to the PCs. They can use actual readings on the speedometer if everyone feels that is important, but the main goal of the Market during a vehicle scene is to make sure characters know what kind of risk the characters are taking. If a fight between cars is lazily circling a parking lot where the biggest consequence for falling out of the car would be a twisted ankle, the Market should let that be known. If the vechiles are going so fast that one pothole could send the whole thing tumbling through the air, make it known. The Market doesn’t have to tell

players the exact speed, but if something goes wrong, the consequences shouldn’t come to players as a surprise. In terms of calculating damage, don’t bother with it at all if the narrative speed allows for the vehicle’s survival. If the car can still run, focus on narrating the Road Warrior-esque battle the Takers are having with the raider caravan or whatever. If the wreck is bad enough to stop the ride, even temporarily, then the Market calculates damage to the characters based on the estimated vehicle speed when the collision occurred. Fender-bender: all passengers take 1d10 Stun to a single hit location. Whiplash: all passengers take 1d10 Stun to all hit locations Total-out: all passengers take 1d10 Kill to a single hit location Disaster: all passengers take 1d10 Kill to all hit locations Conflagration: all passengers die The Market should make sure that the players know how fast they are driving and have chances to use their Skills to avoid a wreck. Putting the pedal to the floor is a choice – one with risks and rewards – so make sure the PCs know the stakes. FallIng There are two types of falls: leaps and tumbles. Characters leap of their own accord. They know it will likely hurt when they land, but it’s preferable to the zombies, flames, bullets, or whatever else is chasing them. When a character leaps, the damage of falling is taken on the legs only. Roll Black and Red. The player picks the lowest number and inflicts the damage to both limbs. So a B4/R6 would do 4 damage to each leg. Whether the damage was Kill or Stun would depends on the height. But most people that fall from great heights would prefer not to. These are called tumbles. Characters tumble when they lose their

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footing or suffer knockback on a precipice. The damage taken from a tumble occurs to two random hit locations. The damage is rolled separately for each hit location to represent an off-balance landing. A tumbling character might roll B5/R10 and B6/R2. That would be five damage to the head and another six to the right leg as the character bounces off the deck. Stun vs. Kill would again depend on distance. There are three distances a character can fall from... Considerable: both hit locations take 1d10 Stun damage Impressive: both hit locations take 1d10 Kill damage Suicidal: both hit locations take 1d10 Kill and Stun damage. InfectIon The mechanics of Blight infection are explained in-depth in “Blight: Casualties and Vectors” p. 295. PoIson/Drugs Beyond a few drugs specific to the setting, there aren’t many chemicals stated out in Red Markets. Groups are encouraged to make up their own deadly concoctions or research real world chemicals if they want some insidious poisoners in their game. Regardless, poison or drugs come in just two varieties: vascular and neurological. Vascular substances target the torso. Starting at whatever hit location is used to inject the chemical, the drug “crawls” through the bloodstream to reach the torso hit boxes at 1d10 boxes per round. So if someone gets injected in the arm, let’s assume the Market rolls a B6 for the poison. That means the first six boxes of the arm get filled. If the dice land B6 again the next round, the other four hit boxes in arm fill up, and the remaining two moves to the torso as the poison crawls towards the heart. Essentially, a vascular poison does damage like the “Bleeding Out” status effect.

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Using the above example, neurological substances work the same way except the destination is the head. The second round’s damage would bleed over into the head, rather than the torso. What happens to the hit boxes? It depends on what the substance is meant to do. A tranquilizer would fill the head with specialty damage units until the Taker passed out. So, as the Market rolled d10s to move the damage to the head, they would fill hit boxes with check marks to trace the path of the contaminant. Once the Taker passes out, the check marks are erased because the drug’s narrative effect has been achieved. If the drug is a weak poison or paralytic, the 1d10 hit boxes might use stun damage to move to the brain or heart, continuing to fill the vital boxes until the Taker is gassed or unconscious. A deadly poison would keep going until all the Stun damage was upgraded to Kill and the Taker died. These methods of tracking poison and drugs are only really necessary for timesensitive scenes such as combat. If a Taker gets dosed with something outside of direct conflict, Markets are advised to treat the scene narratively or to use Skill checks. SuffocatIon If a Taker can’t breathe – due to being underwater, immersed in a gas, choked in a grapple, etc. – they have a number of rounds equal to their SPD before any negative effects occur. After that, Takers receive 1d10 Stun damage per round to the torso (location 7-9). If the torso is filled up with Stun/Kill damage and the Taker still can’t get air, the excess damage bleeds over into the head (location 10). If the head gets filled up, the Taker falls unconscious and the 1d10 damage per round starts turning the head’s Stun boxes into Kill damage. At this point, the Taker either gets a breath or dies when the head fills up. Once allowed to breath, all Stun damage taken from suffocation is erased automatically. Any Kill damage resulting from suffocation must be healed normally.

Combat Maneuvers and SpecIal Cases

Certain moves in combat provide bonuses, effects, and protections. Most of these maneuvers work by spending tactics and twitches special ways. A list of combat maneuvers is explained below and summarized in the Combat Summary Cheat Sheet (see p. 490)

Block

A Taker might want to make sure damage lands on an armored limb rather than a soft, vital organ. Blocking an attack involves rolling an Unarmed, Melee, or Resistance to avoid an attack instead of Athletics and counts as the use of a twitch. Failure means the attack lands normally. Success means the damage is directed to the gear or hit location used to block. For instance, if Falstaff uses Melee: Sword to block an incoming spear thrust, a success takes one charge of the sword and does no damage to Falstaff. Alternately, if Falstaff is unarmed and just wants to make sure the blow lands on his chainmail armored arm rather than his vulnerable thighs, he can make an Unarmed check to direct the damage to a hit location of his choice. Firearms cannot be blocked and, as most human enemies use them, blocking has limited utility in traditional conflicts. Blocking is more useful when fighting casualties oneon-one; the beasts’ jaws can clamp down on an armored arm or tool while the Taker’s other hand delivers the killing blow.

Cover

The enemy can see you and you can see them. Or neither of you can see each other. Unless somebody is blinded, this is always the case. If you’re behind a shield and pop up to take a shot, the enemy can hit you as you pop up. If you’re behind the shield and it’s actually cover (e.g. bulletproof), you can’t be hit and you can’t attack. Cover requires an Athletics check to get to unless the player started out in cover by

design, such as with an ambush. Once in cover, no attacks can be declared against that player. Similarly, any attacks against NPCs in cover miss. The effects are voided the moment the character in cover makes an attack or moves out of cover. After that, they are fair game for the rest of the round and they must make an Athletics check to duck back down in time (requiring a twitch). If no one declares on the exposed player and the cycle ends with the twitch unused, the player can burn it at the end of the initiative order to duck back into cover for free, without a check. Certain weapons with tags like explosive and armor-piercing can bypass cover and make attacks without exposing the wielder. Otherwise, to attack characters in cover, they must be flanked (see below).

Called Shots

Called shots target specific locations: a head, a grenade, a chain, etc. To make a called shot, a Taker must spend a twitch to take careful aim and a tactic to attack. Additionally, the Taker moves to the end of the initiative order, and the attack check has the precision requirement. A called shot fails if the character is struck while taking aim or is otherwise distracted. On a success, the location is struck regardless of what the Red lands on. Will may be spent to change the results. Either way, the character does not return to their original place in the initiative order.

FIrIng Into Melee

Firing into melee combat requires a Precision check (no extra charges can be spent). If the Shoot check fails, the attack hits an ally. If it’s a called shot that fails, the shot misses both targets unless it’s a critical failure. In general, using a gun to interrupt a wrestling match is a bad idea if either participant is a friend.

Flank

If an enemy is in cover, PCs can make Athletics check to go around the sides and

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Full Defense

Sometimes it’s wise to prioritize staying alive. In this instance, full defense is a good choice. Full defense converts a tactic into a twitch. The original twitch can go off whenever prompted by Market forces, but the second can’t be used until the player declares full defense on their initiative order. From that point on, twitches respond to threats normally and can be used whenever prompted, regardless of initiative. Declaring full defense is much more effective at the top of the round than bottom.

Full Offense

flank the enemy. The number of Athletics checks required is always one; if the distance is longer, the Market should clarify the number of rounds it takes to get around the side of the target and call for a task action. Additional Athletics checks in a lengthy flanking maneuver aren’t to get into position; they are to avoid being hit by other NPCs, burning twitches on dodge opportunities. As such, it’s wise for flanking PCs to start in cover, go on full defense (see below), and use both twitches to stay safe. NPCs attempting to flank can be seen running to better ground, and attacks against them are declared and resolved normally. If an enemy or PC is flanked, they are not in cover to the flanker. The flanker can declare actions against them, or the defender can move and open themselves to declarations from other combatants. Suppressing an enemy in cover and sending someone else to flank is a very effective strategy.

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Full offense converts a twitch into another tactic and moves it to the end of the initiative order. This allows for a second attack in the same round. Full offense must be declared on a player’s initiative and, once the twitch is converted to a tactic, it can’t revert back into a twitch until the initiative cycles again. The second attack moves to the end of the initiative order and resolves normally, factoring in any penalties accrued as a result of the player’s no-holds-barred strategy.

GrapplIng

It’s possible a Taker wants to restrain a target without doing damage. If the opponent is another Taker, make an opposed Unarmed check (see p. 178), and repeat the contest for every round the wrestling lasts. Against Market forces, make an Unarmed check against the target. On a success, the target is grappled. Make an Unarmed check every subsequent round to keep the target restrained. If at any point the check is failed, the target escapes and declares attacks normally. If the Taker is damn fool enough to try and wrestle a casualty or Vector, make an Unarmed check to get in close without being bit. If the first check succeeds, every subsequent check to maintain the hold is made with Resistance, rather than Unarmed; the undead are not deterred by the pain of a joint lock, and they aren’t trying to get away

so much as burrow inside you. If the grappled creature is bleeding, infection is also a possibility.

Knockback

Some weapons cause knockback damage, allowing the attacker to narrate that the target is either knocked prone or into some nearby portion of the environment (spinning blades, for instance). The blow itself does no extra damage, but the target has to waste a tactic to climb up from a prone position. The effects of a knockback can be resisted with a twitch – characters must make a Resistance check to stay stationary/upright.

Ready

Some players are methodical types that like to ensure every check is a success. For those players, there is the ready action. To ready an action, the Taker must abstain from all actions for one round; they may not perform a tactic, twitch, or task, and they must not be struck or otherwise affected by the actions of Market forces. After a character has been ready for a full cycle of the initiative order, they can do one of two things: 1) move to the top of the next initiative order for the next round only 2) roll Black + Skill + Potential for the next check These effects are cumulative, so if a Taker takes two rounds to ready an action, the check can add Potential and moves to the top of the next cycle of initiative order.

ReloadIng and RearmINg

If a tool runs out of charges and is static, it’s just broken. If a tool is charged or capped, it can be refreshed if the player has sufficient ADP. Whether a gun is out of bullets, a crossbow is out of bolts, a laptop is out of batteries, or a first aid kid is out of bandages, it takes a full round of combat to fish spare charges out of a backpack. Refreshing is a one combat round task action; any actions

declared against a Taker refreshing their gear resolve if they aren’t in cover. The only exception to this rule is certain upgrades allowing some weapons to be reloaded with any twitch actions left over in a round. Drawing a new weapon costs a tactic as well, as does stowing any other tool currently held in the hands. Drawing a weapon from a backpack is a task action costing one combat round. Sometimes this may be too long for a Taker that wishes to survive. In such instances, the player can declare a “quick draw.” This prepares a weapon stored on the belt or back using only a twitch action. Nothing stored in a backpack is eligible for a quick draw, and anything held in the hands before a quick draw has to be dropped to the ground. No gear with the cumbersome quality may be quick drawn.

Rush

Takers can burn both a tactic and twitch to rush the enemy. This must be declared on their initiative. The Taker makes an Athletics test. If it succeeds, the Taker uses their twitch as another tactic and performs a Melee or Unarmed attack that resolves at the same time. If the first Athletics test fails, the Market forces get a free attack. The player can choose to eat the damage and finish the attack, or use their twitch to break off the assault and try to dodge.

Spray

If a weapon possesses the spray upgrade, on a successful attack a PC can burn three additional charges for a free attack. The Shoot check must succeed first, but then, upon burning the three charges, the player can choose to deal damage again to the same target or make a separate attack on a nearby target. Against humans, the second attack only lands on a Precision check and uses the damage of that second dice check. Against casualties and Vectors, the second attack hits automatically. NPCs can also spray if they have a capable weapon. It requires a successful hit as

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well, but afterwards it is treated as another declared attack that goes off on the same round. For instance, if a PC burned a tactic for Athletics as part of a Rush, failed and got hit, then had the same NPC spray him, the PC could still use his twitch in an attempt to dodge the second attack.

SuppressIng FIre

If an opponent is in cover and the attacker doesn’t want them to leave, they can lay down suppressing fire. To do this, a PC just spends three rounds off their weapon, knowing it will bounce harmlessly off the cover. However, the NPC remains pinned behind that cover so long as the PC keeps spending rounds and exposing themselves to attack. Anyone laying down suppressing fire is not considered in cover. NPC’s can suppress PC’s too. If the player still insists on leaving cover, they must make a Self-Control check threatening Trauma AND use a successful twitch to dodge if they don’t want to get hit.

Example Combat Round

BanHammer dislikes guns; he prefers to crush enemies with his warhammer. BanHammer’s player asks if any of the enemies are in melee range. The Market responds they are not, but with BanHammer’s superior initiative he could rush to close the distance. BanHammer likes this plan. He spends a charge of rations to buy-a-roll, and an additional three charges of rations for a +3. With BanHammer’s Athletics modifier (+3) and the three spends, that’s a total of +6 to the check. He really wants to get at these guys. BanHammer’s player rolls B7+6/R2, for a total of B13/R2. Turns out he didn’t really need to exert himself that much, but, damnit, he wants blood. The ex-raider goes tearing across the open ground, screaming and whirling his hammer. The Market asks if BanHammer wants to burn his twitch to make an attack immediately (the second part of a rush). Of course he does! He spends

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rations for his Melee attack with his hammer. The weapon is static and the player is trying to conserve energy now, so BanHammer’s only adding his skill. He rolls and adds his Melee (+2). He gets a B8+2/R7 for a total of Black 10. It’s a hit. Normally, BanHammer would have to take a charge off his melee weapon as it smashes into something solid, but the sledge has been upgraded to sturdy and withstands the impact just fine. However, BanHammer’s player wants the knockback effect from the weighted upgrade, so he burns a charge off the hammer anyway. The damage is resolved instantly: Bad Guy A takes a hammer blow to the chest for 8 Stun and 8 Kill damage. The Market gave these forces 20 hit boxes in that location, but the blow still almost incapacitated Bad Guy A instantly. Note that had the Black landed on a critical success, or if Banhammer had been able to make a called shot, Bad Guy A would be dead. But he’s still got four hit points left. He’s knocked back by the blow, but that means he can’t move until he wastes a turn standing up; he can still attack whilst on his back. Bad Guy A obviously wants to shoot BanHammer. BanHammer’s player wants to make his Athletics check to dodge, but the Market reminds him that he already used his twitch to rush. Having rushed blindly ahead in a frenzy, BanHammer is hit with a shot by Bad Guy A’s rifle. The Market rolls B7/ R10. OUCH! With previous injuries, that’ll kill BanHammer outright if he doesn’t have a helmet on. He doesn’t, so BanHammer’s player spends his last point of Will to shift the Kill damage to his chest (see “Will to Live” p. 283). BanHammer takes 7 Kill damage to the torso as a bullet rips between his ribs. Bad Guy B is reasonably more concerned with the madman wielding a cudgel amongst his ranks, and he’s on the same initiative as A, so he’s declaring an attack on BanHammer too. That crazy rush doesn’t seem like such a good idea now. With no chance for a twitch, BanHammer is struck by a pistol round... the Market rolls B2/R1, hitting the right leg (R1) for two damage (B2).

Bad Guy C is the leader of this little group and hates Gnat more than anything else. Ignoring the struggle next to him, he aims to kill that little interloper. Bad Guy C’s declaration of an attack on Gnat demands her twitch. Gnat’s player can choose to ignore the risk and take the hit, saving her twitch for something else. But with an assault rifle bearing down on her, she decides it’s time to move. Gnat uses her twitch for an Athletics check to dodge. She buys-a-roll with one ration charge, decides she really doesn’t want to get hit, and spends four more charges. With her +1 Athletics, that’s a total of +5 to the check. She rolls B6/R6. That’s a crit success! Gnat asks if she can have her extra charges back as a reward for the critical success and the Market says yes. She scrambles out of the way as a swarm of bullets tears up the ground where she just stood. Now it’s Gnat’s turn for tactic. She needs to hack the drone surveillance these goons’ friends are no doubt using to pinpoint the firefight’s location and send reinforcements, and she doesn’t want to get shot in the process. Her player asks if there is any cover around (see “Cover” p. 285), and the Market says there is: an outcropping of rocks she can duck behind lies a dozen yards away. She spends a ration to buy another Athletics check and leaves it at that. She rolls B1+1/R4. Her +1 in Athletics isn’t enough to get her there that round; she’s still stumbling from her desperate bullet dodging, after all. She’ll be eligible for declared attacks next round. Monk sees that BanHammer is hurt and outnumbered. With no one left to shoot at him and no one moving under him in the initiative order, he burns his twitch to take a called shot (see “Called Shots” p. 285) to the uninjured Bad Guy B’s head. All called shots are precision shots, but since he’s firing into melee that would be the case anyway (see “Firing into Melee” p. 285). He spends a round from his pistol to fire, hoping that his +2 in Shoot is enough to get him the profit he needs for a hit, since he cannot spend extra

charges on a precision check. If he hits, the Market force will be killed, regardless of the damage. Called shots to the head kill Market forces instantly (see “Market Forces” p. 291). If he fails, he’ll hit BanHammer (see “Firing Into Melee” p. 285) Monk rolls B7+2/R4; that’s B9/R4 with Monk’s skill added. Success! The pistolwielding thug slumps to the ground with a round between the eyes, dead instantly. With only a single, prone foe left gunning for him, that will help the injured BanHammer survive the next round.

LootIng The Dead

To the victors go the spoils. Players are going to want to ransack the bodies of anyone they kill. That’s fair; making a garage sale of anyone dumb enough to fuck with you is a viable business model in the Loss. Looting casualties is its own challenge (see “Looting the Undead” p. 301). For humans, anything the Market narrated the enemy as having is fair game. So, if the Market said the forces were shooting mortars at them, the mortar tube is still there when artillery team is defeated (provided, of course, it wasn’t damaged). If the plot revolved around retrieving the Maltese Poodle, the enemies have it so long as the Market says so. The same goes for allies. If it was on one your buddies’ character sheet, you can pick it up off his corpse. If the Market doesn’t know what the forces were equipped with either, the choice goes to the players. For every slain human combatant, one Taker can make a Scavenge check. This DOES NOT mean every member of the crew can rummage through the pockets of every single corpse until they find something. Total # of Scavenge checks = number of slain Market forces ≤ number of available Takers. So if a group of five Takers kills one raider, one member of that crew can make one Scavenge check. If two raiders were slain, the crew could make two checks, but the other three members of the crew have to stand

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guard duty. If a crew of five Takers kills ten raiders, they’re still only able to make five Scavenge checks. The one-and-done rules still apply; anything a character is capable of finding is found on the first check and only on the first check. Before rolling to Scavenge, players can say they are looking for one of three things while looting:

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• Any tool under 3 bounty in upkeep. - Success: They find it. - Critical Success: They find it with an upgrade, or they can pass their success on to the next player making a Scavenge check, allowing them to search for gear of any upkeep cost. If the next player succeeds as well, the item is found. • Bounty - Success: Enemies were carrying bounty equal to the natural Black of the Scavenge check.

- Critical Success: Bounty equals the natural Black, times two. • An upgrade to a specific piece of gear they already own. - Success: They find the upgrade they’re looking for or materials to craft it. - Critical Success: They find enough material for two upgrades. Markets should keep in mind that looting the dead takes time. Casualties that hear gunfire and smell blood are sure to cut short any graverobbing. Furthermore, there exists no level of badassary that makes rifling through the pockets of a person you just murdered pleasant. Self-Control checks threatening Detachment and Trauma could be in order, and Stress might damage Humanity if nothing is found and all that sin turns out to be for nothing.  

Market Forces

Most people advertise their strength, and hiding one’s ability while carrying actual weapons is a sophisticated form of deception. Even children can tell whether a fight is a good idea or not: bullies steal the lunch money of the chess club member and not the captain of the wrestling team. All of this is to say that there is no reason for Markets to keep the abilities of their forces secret: it complicates bookkeeping, slows down play, and doesn’t make much sense. While there isn’t much paperwork necessary for the Market to run NPC antagonists, it’s included here because there’s no reason to keep that information away from the players.

Forces on Paper

Running a combat shouldn’t be a chore. What follows are the only statistics Markets should keep track of for human-on-human violence. As always, zombies present their own unique challenges, which can be found in “Blight: Casualties and Vectors” p. 295. Numbers Uh...how many people are fighting? Pretty important thing to know. Weapons There’s no need to know exactly what kind of weapon an enemy is using except for purposes of narrative immersion. Mechanically, it operates off Melee or Shoot. It does Stun, Kill, or Stun + Kill damage. It’s explosive or it isn’t. It can spray or it can’t. Feel free to search through the gear list and equip forces with specific armaments, but doing so isn’t a requirement to run a combat. Remember: don’t give the NPCs anything you don’t want the PCs to loot off their corpses. Charges Market forces don’t use charges because their success or failure is determined by the Taker, not their own rolls. Don’t track them. It’s too much work.

This isn’t to say that antagonists have endless ammo: if it makes sense for them to run out, the Market can just say so. It’s even better to let the players do it. Inflicting scarcity on the NPCs is a great way to utilize critical success. Roll double-evens on Athletics check and the player can say the attacker’s gun is empty. Crit a block and describe the sound a shattering sword makes. Armor NPC armor negates one attack if the damage type could feasibly be stopped and it only applies for hit locations where it makes sense to wear it. Don’t track charges for armor and don’t let it endlessly absorb attacks to the point of player frustration. Markets should also describe where armor is worn for any player that asks so that Takers can incorporate that into their strategy. NPC wearing a helmet gets hit in the head? They’re okay. Same guy gets hit in the head again? Helmet breaks and the NPC takes damage. Other EquIpment Market forces carry whatever the Market wants, but if it isn’t established in the narrative, don’t worry about it. The exact specifics of what’s in each opponent’s pockets can be determined by the players using the Scavenge mechanics (see “Looting the Dead’ p. 289). HIt Boxes Aside from the number of opponents, the main way the Market can adjust the difficulty and length of combat is through hit boxes. There are three presets: Part-time: These forces only have a general pool of hit boxes. Damage to any location eats away at the pool (unless there is armor on that location). Once the pool is filled with any mix of Stun/Kill damage, the NPC is incapacitated and/or dead. Hit locations can still be used to determine the narrative resolution of attacks. For instance, a part-time Market force is still

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hobbled by a shot to the leg, even though the damage goes to a general pool. Ten hit boxes is a good baseline for parttime forces. Armor makes them slightly tougher, as does increasing the pool. Part-time forces are sufficient – and preferable – for the majority of conflicts in Red Markets. Full-time: These forces have 10 hit boxes in each location (almost like a Taker, but with 10 less in the torso). For instance, an NPC that takes 7 Kill damage to the left arm would be recorded by the Market as “7 l. arm” on a piece of scratch paper. If the next attack hits for 3 Kill damage to the right leg, it’s recorded as “3 r. leg” and the NPC keeps fighting. Once any location (not just the torso or head) fills with Kill/Stun damage, the NPC is incapacitated and/or killed. Full-time forces increase the difficulty of combat by lengthening the amount of time and precision required to down an enemy. Armor increases this time even more. If even more challenge is needed, upgrade to... Management: The Market will need a hit box man, as found on the Character Sheet p. 485, for each NPC at the management level. These Market forces utilize all the same damage rules as the PCs. Management makes combat quite lengthy and difficult, as well as maximizing the amount of paperwork the Market must track. Management-level enemies should be reserved for serious antagonists. If even more tools are required for manipulating the challenge, Markets can add levels of Advantage (see next).

Advantage

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On occasion, the Market may wish to up the challenge with a particularly dangerous foe. Singularly skilled opponents gain the upper hand in multiple ways, using special rules called advantage. The point of throwing extra challenging forces at players is to make the characters’ struggles more desperate, terrifying,

and heroic. Therefore, the Market never completely ambushes the group with highthreat enemies; once battle begins, the skill and prowess of the opponent becomes immediately apparent and the Market tells the players what modifiers they need to overcome. Since advantage is supposed to effect the group’s tactical decisions, the details of each level are listed below for the benefit of players and Market alike. TraIned Advantage Most Takers didn’t professionally risk their lives before the Crash; the same can’t be said of some of the military and rebel groups they might encounter. The trained advantage represents the benefit of an extended education in survival and combat. The trained advantage is a modifier that rates the program the forces went through. A 1-point advantage would work for an experienced SWAT officer, whereas a DHQS super-spy might wield 3-points or higher. The number is the modifier applied to dice rolls declared against that NPC. To be clear, the trained advantage modifies players’ rolls targeted against AND prompted by the NPC. Market forces never roll for anything, even if forces have advantage. The modifier could be subtracted from the Black or added to the Red: choose only one. Add or subtract depending on whatever your group finds easier to calculate. Critical success and failure resolves normally. So, if a crew was fool enough to take on a trained team of DHQS stewards with a 2-point trained advantage, a B8/R6 attack wouldn’t hit; the advantage would negate the success by subtracting from Black (mod B8-2/R6) or adding to Red (mod B8/R6+2). Regardless, the adjustment to the success/ failure rate is the same, and ties still go to the Market. Similarly, an B8/R6 attempt to dodge attacks from the Stewards would fail, but damage would be calculated according to the dice as normal. A natural B6/R6 would still be critical success, regardless of any trained advantage.

Advice for trained advantage: People with professional combat skills are valuable commodities not easily risked and, when they are actually deployed, aren’t fool enough to get into a fight where the outcome is in question. As such, Markets should throw trained forces at the players rarely. To overcome such forces, bring overwhelming logistics to bear. Try to elicit help from NPC allies, then focus on charged gear and tactics to overwhelm the opposition with big spends. GIfted Advantage Some people are peak performers: naturalborn savants in certain areas. Sometimes those innate skills happen to be in the area of violence. And, sometimes, gifted killers are out to get Takers. The gifted advantage represents the 1% killers that might draw a bead on the PCs. The gifted advantage should be reserved for singular foes; legends of the Loss whose exploits are as much the subject of rumor as fear. The nearly preternatural skill of such an enemy is long foreshadowed, and the realization that conflict is incoming should provoke Self-Control tests. After all, the crew is facing down the gunslinger Tenpenny Blood, the Denim Ghost, the Vector Twins, or whatever other larger-than-unlife characters were developed over many contracts. Mechanically, all rolls against gifted characters are precision rolls. Charges may only be spent to make a check. There’s no bonus for material advantage; everything becomes a contest of raw skill and luck. If Ribbit is boxing against Tooth-cracker, the best MMA fighter Distributy’s mafia has to offer, a B8+1/R10 isn’t going to save her face – no matter how many ration charges she spends. Ribbit’s Athletics skill is either fast enough or not. Her level of exertion means nothing against the skill of the terrible Toothcracker. In any fight, the bruiser of Distributy predictably breaks another jaw, or someone bests him with raw skill and becomes the new champion. There’s no such thing as “wanting it more” and spending big against a gifted foe.

Advice for gifted advantage: Market’s should never spring gifted enemies on their players without warning, doubly so if the force is both gifted and trained. The entire point of the endeavor is to emphasize the risk facing such a skilled opponent entails. When the importance of materialism in Red Markets gets internalized by the players, the gifted’s ability to negate the power of their charges is intimidating. Knowingly facing such an opponent makes for a powerful character moment. The very nature of gifted enemies limits their numbers, so crews would be wise to gang up when possible. Otherwise, the one edge PCs have is their investments in skills and Potentials, especially Will. DetermInatIon Advantage The will to survive against enormous odds is what defines Takers. But they’re not the only ones in the Loss with internal reserves, and that same determination can turn towards hate. When an NPC loathes the PCs enough to plot schemes, vow oaths, and single-mindedly pursue their destruction, the Market gives that adversary a determination advantage. Determination is the most dangerous of the advantages because it allows the Market to spend points of Will to flip any check for or against the PCs. The player may roll a natural B10/R1 to dodge... but the Market has Mr. U spend one of his points of Will to flip the dice. Now it’s B1/R10. As they are immensely dangerous as enemies, Market forces with determination advantage are reserved for climaxes of job lines and campaigns. The power of Will points is such that it shouldn’t be used by anyone save the story’s primary antagonists. Advice for determined advantage: Since it has the power to snatch victory from the very hands of players, it’s a sign of good intentions if the Market states how many Will points an antagonist has at the outset of combat. It’s also good to only declare Will spends in line with the determined NPC’s personality. For

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instance, Mr. U is more likely to spend Will on the character he blames for his financial ruin, but a more disciplined NPC might reserve Will for the most tactically opportune moments. Both of these guidelines keep the gamemaster’s tense climax from descending into accusations of favoritism. Players facing a determined foe have no doubt been gearing up for the inevitable showdown for some time, but so has the antagonist. Determined foes rarely fight alone and defeating one is all about spending character resources carefully. A player can spend a point of Will to upgrade attacks to unflippable criticals or re-flip dice altered by the opponent, but that means getting through the rest of the job without blowing such a powerful resource on some lesser challenge. Other Advantages Giving a Market forces more than one type of advantage makes them extremely deadly. If

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someone is badass enough to have multiple advantages, the prowess should be advertised far in advance. When PCs choose to go up against bad odds for love, family, or other character motivations, getting slain can still add to the narrative. Getting dismembered by an omni-competent wasteland ninja out of nowhere is just confusing. Other types of advantage exist in Red Markets, but they’re individualized to Aberrants. Since Aberrants remain a topic of speculation to some and abject terror to a few, these advantages are supposed to come as a surprise to players. If you work in a zombie apocalypse for a living and something about one of the undead looks weird – aside from the whole walking corpse thing – you should run. Not knowing what mechanical bonuses the monster has reinforces this narrative truth.

BlIght: CasualtIes and Vectors

Infected, undead, biters, walkers – the media had a hundred damn names for them before the Blight made them real. What’s one more? Takers ironically refer to zombies as casualties, the censored nomenclature used late in the Crash by the governmentcontrolled media (see p. 55). Most shorten the term to “C’s” (pronounced sees). Casualties are the “traditional” undead: slow-moving, poorly coordinated, cannibalistic corpses. This chapter tells players everything about the mechanics of how they work in the game. It also deals with Vectors – the fast, hemorrhagic stage of early infection – and rules for their use. Aberrants – victims of the Blight that seem to violate the disease’s own principles – are not included here. Aberrants might not even exist in some verions of the Red Markets

setting. If they do, the Market is under no obligation to use the examples provided in the book, nor do those pre-made monsters need to behave as suggested mechanically. As such, the mechanics of Aberrants are included in the d10 Aberrants table in “Running the Market” (p. 454) to avoid spoiling the horrific surprise for players. For information on rumored Aberrants that might be known incharacter, check out the Aberrants section in “Lost Things” (p. 160)

Dead Weather

Casualties are not the antagonists of Red Markets. They’re too dumb to be villainous. They’re so uncoordinated that they end up following the path of least resistance. Most stumble and trip in harsh terrain until they get turned around and wander out of it. They pool around pavement and low elevations like water. If they move with any purpose,

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it’s either towards food or some innocuous location misfired from their dead memories. Stay away from lowlands and landmarks, stay quiet, keep moving, maintain line of sight – most people can get across the Loss just fine. But since the aimless wanderings of casualties are funneled by geography, and their infection likely happened in a major population center, the things are never alone. For every one you see, dozens are creeping closer. They easily corner and devour the unwary. One bite can make a Vector and those sprinting disease carriers can destroy an enclave in minutes. Despite the omnipresent threat, it’s hard to hate them. Sure, casualties want to eat anything they see, but it’s a compulsion. There’s no light in their eyes, no animosity. Every single one was once somebody’s wife, husband, brother, sister, mother, father, best friend, friendly face, etc. Each casualty is a painful reminder of a dead reality and a rebuke to promises of the future. Takers like to tell themselves casualties are monsters when they aim the gun, but they never truly convince themselves they aren’t shooting human beings in the face. I repeat: Casualties are not the antagonists of Red Markets. There is nothing intentional about their actions, and they’re entirely too easy to thwart or pity. Other Takers, believers, corporations, and military groups serve as antagonists in a Red Markets game. It’s best to think of casualties like the weather. People can plan for, defend against, and try to predict the weather. Often, this preparedness saves lives. But sometimes, it doesn’t matter. The Loss consumes whom it pleases. It can creep through vulnerabilities people didn’t know they had, or it can come with the insurmountable force of a flood. The dead weather works the same. Plan for it. Avoid it. Fight it. Just don’t expect to stop it.

Casualty Placement

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Markets have the power to place as many casualties as they want, wherever they want, whenever they want.

This means that, yes, the Market could parachute a thousand zombies inside the enclave while the team is out on a job, killing everyone, wiping out savings, and destroying everything the characters ever loved. The Market represents the cruel, capricious uncaring weight of history, and that’s a thing that could happen. If your Market actually does something like that, consider playing Red Markets with someone else... dude sounds like a real asshole. The reason Markets have the power to put zombies wherever they please is because the placement of casualties can tell a powerful story about the job site. If, for instance, all the undead in an abandoned megachurch are found locked up in the daycare, that suggests a far more horrific end than if a roll of the dice places all the casualties safely outside the building. The Market has carte blanche in placing casualties in order to craft better stories. Aside from crafting a more interesting narrative, the Market should place casualties randomly whenever possible. One of the few rolls the Market makes is to generate undead, and it goes a long way towards establishing the unpredictable and dangerous nature of the Loss. Like everything else in Red Markets, generating random zombie mobs is done through the Black and Red.

Casualty Stats

Casualties come in two sizes: mobs and stampedes. Both types use the same stats, but we’ll deal with mobs first. Groups of casualties are generated with two numbers: • Mass: determined by Black; this is the number of individual casualties in the mob. • Shamble: determined by the Red, this abstraction of distance measures the number of combat turns before the casualties reach the nearest player. Shamble can be altered by the movement of PCs.

So, if the Market needs to know how many casualties are in a grocery store, roll the dice. B6/R3 means there are six undead (mass) roughly 3 combat turns (shamble) away from the group. The casualties will attack at the end of the third round. How are these stats tracked? Well, the Market should use whatever makes the job easiest, but the dice themselves make a good counter. As opposed to scratch paper, using the Black and Red help both the Market and players keep track of how close the casualties are to striking. In the above example, the Market could use the B6/R3 dice as they lay. If the Takers kill a zombie, the Market moves the Black to show a result of five rather than six (mass reduced by one). After the whole crew has acted, the Red goes down to two, representing the mob coming closer. After another round, the Shamble moves down to one and the casualties can attack anyone close to them at the end of the round. If the characters run away, the Red is raised to represent the distance gained.

additional rations spent. On a success, the character manages to avoid being dragged to the ground. On a failure, the mob piles onto the victim.

CasualtIes In Combat

For instance, if Prole is engaged with a mob and needs to escape, just making an Athletics check for his twitch action won’t cut it. A success only means he dodged the clawing hands and snapping jaws for that round, not that he’s out of reach. To escape, he needs a successful twitch and tactic. He can go on full defense. To minimize dice-rolling, rather than making two Athletics checks in a row, the Market can say one successful check gets him a number of Shambles away equal to his SPD. The other option is to kill a casualty, use its body to trip up the remainder of the mob, and use a twitch action to escape. Unlike full defense against casualties, this does require two separate checks: a successful attack and Athletics check to move SPD in Shambles away. If the attack fails, the twitch has to be spent dodging attacks rather than flat-out running. If the tactic (attack) succeeds but the twitch (dodge) fails, Prole takes damage from

The undead are slow. They always go last in any initiative order. If Shamble reaches one and mass remains, the mob attacks the character they just reached. Players may use twitch to make an Athletics check and avoid the grappling horde. If the check fails, damage is done just like in regular combat. A Black die’s worth of Kill damage is done to the Red hit location. If the player has no actions left, the Market rolls the dice and damage is calculated the same. If the mass is above one, the Market has a choice. They can add +1 to the damage for every additional zombie, or they can ask the player to make a test against knockback (see p. 287). When dealing additional damage, add it to the same hit location as the zombies focus in on the precious blood. If the Market chooses knockback, the player makes a Resistance check, adding any bonuses from

Frenzy

Casualties that get within one Shamble of a player smell blood and enter “frenzy.” This means the promise of food has the zombies aroused and moving faster than usual. To move out of melee range, a Taker must either… a) go full defense, spending both tactic and twitch to get some distance. The Market can make this two rolls or one task, according to taste. b) reduce the mob by one, trip up the zombies on their own dead, and use a twitch to get away c) have a comrade reduce the mob by one, stagger the casualties on their own dead, and use either a tactic or twitch to get away d) reduce the mass to zero before the end of the round.

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the mob. Attacking and then running is riskier than focusing entirely on escape. Conversely, one of Prole’s crew could slow the beasts down with a successful attack and provide the Taker two chances to escape with Athletics. However, a comrade that comes to assist with a melee weapon exposes themself to the same frenzy, and mobs with more than one mass can easily split attacks. Coming to assist a harried Taker usually means firing a projectile weapon into a melee fight, which brings its own risks (see p. 285). Finally, if all the casualties are decapitated, there’s no problem when Shambles get within range. By using a tactic or going full offense, a Taker within the range of frenzy has one last chance to eliminate the mob before it digs in. This is the riskiest option, as it leaves the Taker little recourse if the attack fails. It’s hard to escape casualties once they are in frenzy. Plan accordingly.

DamagIng CasualtIes

Casualties don’t take damage traditionally: anything that isn’t a headshot has little effect. However, since casualties can’t do much besides walk straight towards their target at a slow pace, it is much easier to score a headshot than it is on a human target. Called

Latents and Immune to the Front The tough spots of “Latent” and “Immune” make for good melee fighters because they don’t have to worry about infection every injury. Takers are one of the few groups that seek these people out for reasons other than persecution and exploitation. They serve a vital function in most successful crews. If someone that isn’t Latent or Immune is going hand-to-hand with casualties, something has gone wrong. They better hope to have some Will left to spend, armor in the right places, or some luck with the dice.

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shots aren’t necessary. Furthermore, decay of muscle and bone tissue means any Kill damage to the head is enough to put the zombie down for good. To reduce the mass of a mob by one, a player needs a successful attack. That’s it. Just one successful attack kills a casualty... but it only kills one. Easy headshots don’t mean much when dozens of monsters are attacking at once. As Takers say, every kill is easy until the one that bites you. To take down the mass of a mob by more than one, players need weapons with special upgrades and qualities: explosive, spray, etc. Instead of increasing damage, weapons capable of hitting multiple locations at once or upgrades that allow charges to be spent after the check can be used for additional kills against mobs.

Loud Weapons And AttractIng CasualtIes

Casualties are silent. They don’t aspirate audibly and can’t talk. They only make noise when they stumble into things or clack their jaws together in anticipation of a meal. As a result, the Loss is an eerily silent place and loud noises mean only one thing: fresh meat. For every loud weapon used in a scene, the Market can roll to generate a new mob joining the scene, attracted by the noise. The noise only attracts new casualties for every loud weapon used; not every time that loud weapon is used. After the first shot, the second one doesn’t cause another reinforcement mob to show up. The dinner bell has already been rung. The Market decides when to add the reinforcements. Using loud weapons against new mobs counts as a separate use, so the Market gets to roll again. See where this is going? Good Takers fight and run, or they just plain run. Heroic last stands are for those dumb enough to stand their ground. The only exception to the loud weapon rules attracting additional mobs is quarantined locations. Takers that secure all entrances

and exits before breaking out the big guns can methodically exterminate every casualty in that area. They just have to worry about being locked inside with the ravenous undead and finding a way to escape the horde slowly surrounding the building, trying to get at those delicious gunshots.

Casualty SpecIfIc Maneuvers

A few combat maneuvers are specific to casualties only: peeling, luring, and chumming. All of these maneuvers count as a tactic.

PeelINg

Peeling is used to reduce the size of mob headed towards someone else. If the player declares they are peeling for their action,

they need to move closer to the mob than the person currently setting the shamble. So, for instance, if Prole has a mob closing in at 4 shambles, Kapital would have to move to at least 3 shambles in order to peel. Once closer to the zombies, the Taker needs to use a freebie to get the attention of the undead. The Market can either roll randomly to determine how many casualties “peel” off from the mob, or it can be decided merely by dividing the mob in two. All peeling does is create two mobs out of one; it might make the monsters more manageable, or it might just provide them a second victim. The benefit to such a distraction is a reduced mass for the mob heading towards another player.

LurIng

“Luring” kites zombies behind a Taker, leading them to a specific location. To lure, make a successful check with a CHA skill (player’s choice). Failure means the mob is too distracted by its current prey. Unless a Taker gets close enough to the mob to become the closest target (peeling), the mob continues after the original victim. A success is loud and boisterous enough to draw the attention of the entire mob and Shamble is reset. However, casualties do not respond to subtly: anything loud enough to get their attention is treated like the use of a loud weapon. Thus, Takers can’t just play “keep away” with mobs endlessly without being overrun, but they can keep amassing followers up until they get cut off from every direction. Once a mob is successfully attracted, the Taker can keep luring them at the cost of one ration per round (you have to stay close). The Market might say difficult terrain or obstacles cost more or call for an Athletics check. Luring in a vehicle can potentially go on as long as there is open road and fuel. Herding large numbers of casualties away from certain areas is a common contract for Takers, and enclaves have been destroyed by rivals luring a massive horde to the city’s gates.

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ChummIng

Chumming involves temporarily directing casualties to an area by providing them a free meal. But the Blight only wants live victims. If a crew wants to ensure the zombies go into the containment area or stick around for the explosion, sacrifices must be made. Animals work; casualties eat anything living, including the carrion eaters that attempt to feed off them. Humans work even better, especially if they’re competition. There’s no skill check required for chumming besides whatever the Taker had to do to get a fresh victim offered to the dead. Once a sacrifice is secured, the victim need only be closer than the Takers for the tactic to work. The casualties always go for the easy kill. The only difficulty in chumming is the psychological damage of watching it happen, which prompts level-2 Self-Control checks against Detachment or worse, depending on who is on the wrong end of the mob.

Example Casualty Encounter

Teapot is on guard duty while his partner, Killy, picks the lock on a door to the abandoned school’s nursing station. The Market thinks this scene needs a bit more tension. The dice are rolled and land B7/R2. The Market is nice and gives Teapot an Awareness check. It’s a success. Teapot hears footsteps coming from inside what he thought to be an empty classroom right before the door burst open. Teapot now has to deal with 7 mass worth of walking corpses before they close reach him in two combat rounds (or 2 Shamble). The Market calls for Teapot to make a Self-Control check (you never really get used to being attacked by zombies). The dice land B3+1/R1. A professional keeps himself together, despite the unfortunate turn of events. Teapot heard them coming and has an assault rifle ready. Killy can’t do anything while she’s picking the lock. The casualties, as always, act last. Teapot makes his tactic

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an attack against the 7M/2S mob. He has a total +2 to his check (+2 Shoot). Firearms are charged weapons, so he buys-a-roll and spends an additional charge to make the total +3. Teapot rolls B4+3/R6. A B7/R6 is good enough for a success, and successes are good enough for headshot against the slowmoving casualties. Then the Market asks him if he wants to use his spray upgrade, which grants additional damage at the cost of 3 charges spent after the check. Teapot thinks about it and chooses to spray. He has spent two charges so far, meaning he’ll need three more charges to get the effect. He marks his charges and burns his twitch to take down an extra mass with a spray. Now, Teapot’s weapon is down 5 charges, but the mob lost 2 mass instead of 1. In terms of narrative, either the Market or Teapot’s player could describe a clean hit, followed by a reckless burst that pops another head and chews uselessly through the remaining corpses’ torsos. Killy is busy trying to pick a lock on a security door, but reasoning that Teapot’s death means the task of lockpicking is going to get too difficult, she spends her twitch to put her lockpicks away and her tactic readying her gun. The next round starts with the mob down to 5 zombies, one turn away (5M/1S). Teapot is confident now and declares full offense. He spends a charge to buy-a-roll and gets B5+2/ R9 for Shoot. Close but not quite. He asks the Market if he can spend his remaining charges to score a success. The Market says no because he didn’t declare before rolling, and spray only works after successful aim. He’ll be within reach of the mob at the end of this round. Luckily, Killy sees her comrade’s distress and opens up with an automatic rifle of her own. She buys-a-roll and gets B2/R2. Critical success! She didn’t even need her +3 Shoot. The Market describes a single bullet threading between the eyeballs of two, perfectly aligned skulls. She request to spray

and end the combat. It’s a badass check, but her request to spray is denied. The mob is in melee range and extra rounds might hit Teapot; all Shoot checks require precision when firing into melee. Still, the mob is down to 3 mass and Teapot has a better chance than he did before. Since he declared he was going full offense, Teapot uses his twitch to attack as well (second attacks move to the end of the initiative order, but humans do everything faster than casualties). He buys-a-roll and gets B10+2/R3. Sweet. He spends his last three charges to spray again. Two more casualties go down in a guillotine of bullets, but then the rifle clicks empty (Teapot’s player was keeping track of charges; one spent on the failure and four spent on the success with a spray ate the rest of his magazine. He’ll have to use a point of ADP to refresh). One Shamble is within striking range for Melee and Unarmed attacks. The last remaining member of the mob goes into frenzy and reaches for Teapot. Since the character has no more actions left, the Market assumes a hit and rolls for damage: B1/R4. The Market describes the casualty tripping over the pile of dead and landing first in Teapot’s left thigh, biting through the pants and breaking skin. It’s only one Kill damage to the leg, but it might be enough. The Market calls for a Self-Control check against the Trauma threat; Teapot is not Immune and could be infected. He’s got a +1 Self-Control. The dice land B3+1/R9. Suck! That’s 2 Humanity damage to Trauma, but thankfully just shy of a Regret. Teapot decides this has to end. He uses his twitch to quick draw, dropping the empty rifle and unsheathing his machete. He can’t dodge anymore, but he won’t have to if he kills the last casualty before its next attack. Teapot spends a charge of rations to buy a Melee attack as his tactic. He gets B1+1/R2. Whiff. Killy sees her opportunity and buys another shot. She scores B10+3/R4. The creature’s head explodes with its teeth inches away from Teapot’s groin.

The Market asks if the crew has a blood testing kit they want to use. They do not. So the Market rolls in secret and is about to add Teapot’s STR... but the dice land B7/R7. Turns out the lucky bastard is naturally Latent and didn’t know it! The Market smiles – just to fuck with ‘em – and play continues. They’ll need to have packed a blood test if they want the results. Meanwhile, the Takers just made a lot of noise. Neither rifle had a silencer, so the Market starts coming up with new mass and Shamble ratings for the two loud weapons used. Let’s hope Teapot’s gratitude protects Killy from the 3 mass/7 Shamble mob about to break through the barricade at their back and the 4 mass/4 Shamble coming through a window from outside. She better get that door open soon.... But then the Market describes Teapot’s screams as a wave of black veins begin crawling up his neck. The players cuss, aware of what’s happened. Even on a success, Teapot’s Humanity would be damaged enough by the agony of turning Latent to take a Trauma Regret. The character drops to the ground, crippled by pain as the Market begins rolling to tally up Kill damage inflicted by the sinew. Now Killy needs to figure out what do. She can drag her seizing, infectious partner down the hall and try to pick the lock before the casualties pouring inside eat them. Or she can try to ignore the sounds of Teapot being eaten and get back to work.

LootIng The Undead

Casualties never carry anything of worth beyond a bounty or two. To make matters worse, not everyone fled the Crash carrying a wallet, and fewer still have managed to keep it in their grimy pockets in five years of wandering the Loss. For jackpots — like a deceased father carrying all his family’s important documents — crews have to hack through dozens of “blanks” that aren’t worth

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the bullet that put them down. Looting casualties is therefore a little different than as laid out in the Combat chapter (see “Looting the Dead” p. 289). Here’s how things differ. • Casualties only carry bounty; nothing else. If the Takers succeed their Scavenging check, the natural Black is how much bounty was located amongst all the zombies in the mob, limited by the mass of the mob. • Casualties are looted as mobs; not as individuals. So if the crew put down a mob of 10 and a mob of 1, they could make two Scavenging checks (using two PCs). They couldn’t make 11 Scavenging checks, or two Scavenging checks each 11 times. • Critically failing a Scavenge check on the undead means one of two things: one of them is still alive, or one of them had something sharp — and infectious — in its pockets.

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Stampedes

As far as the narrative is concerned, encountering a stampede is not an enemy so much as a natural disaster. Stampedes are huge masses of casualties heading towards a single food source. Stampedes carry numbers that would be suicide to oppose. Most groups are content to call the number of undead in a stampede “too many” and plan from there. Stampede Mass (Black): Mass is measured by a factor of 10. That means that a B3/R2 stampede has mass of thirty casualties. Unless the players have fully automatic weapons firing explosive rounds, the only real option is to run. One successful attack by a stampede follows almost exactly the same rules for mobs: add +1 for every additional casualty (in the previous example, this would be 1d10 +29 Kill damage) or make a knockback test. In the case of the latter, knockback from a stampede can’t be resisted.

Stampede Shamble (Red): Stampedes stumble and claw against each other in such away that they achieve a momentum greater than their typical shuffle. All stampedes reduce 2 shambles per turn instead of 1. There are also so many casualties that the term “wave” might be more appropriate. If a Taker misses a chance to dodge a mob, they can still wrestle free in the next round. This is not the case with stampedes. After the first missed Athletics check, the horde encircles the victim and escape becomes impossible unless the poor soul can reach a ladder, stairs, or door. If the players encounter a stampede of Vectors... something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. The PCs should be too worried about getting the hell away to care about the horde’s statistics.

Vectors

Vectors are freshly infected humans hijacked by the Blight’s hot strain, but not yet killed by it. The contagion controls their minds by ramping up all sorts of violent hormonal responses and excising certain sections with quickly forming viral sinews. The infected person hemorrhages from every orifice as the contagion begins seeding the body with its parasitic nervous system. The process is agonizing, but by the time it starts, the victim has already become a frothing killing machine. For more on Vectors in the setting, check out “The History of the Crash” (p. 32). For a more condensed description of how the hot strain works, read this chapter’s entry on “Infection” (p. 305). Thankfully, there aren’t many Vectors left five years after the Crash. Currently, most derive from a Latent dying or a new infection. But one “freshy” can create a thousand inside of an hour. They’re stronger, faster, and more durable than any human, and the Blight is more infectious than ever in its live state. Vectors are one of the most serious threats a Taker can ever face.

Vectors At-a-Glance

The main rules for Vectors are... • Murder Modifier: Equals the Vector’s inlife SPD; affects their undead movement and strength in addition to equaling their Advantage (Red bonus) in checks against PCs and on skill checks declared against the Vector. • Fast: Vectors can move their Murder modifier in shambles per round . • Strong: All successful Vector attacks add the murder modifier to damage, in addition to dealing knockback. • Psychological Warfare: Fresh Vectors (those turned within the last few hours) scream “apologies” that cause Self-Control checks in all who hear them. • Hard to Kill: Vectors are harder to damage than casualties. - Turning Vector heals/ignores all previous wounds. - If the Vector started as a random NPC, headshots kill it instantly (via called shots or lucky hits). Otherwise, the Vector’s total hit points have to be depleted as if it were a management-level Market force. - If the Vector started as a PC, the Vector has the same hit locations. All boxes in the torso or head have to be filled to kill the creature. The Vector cannot bleed out. - Killing a Vector with anything but a headshot sends it into torpor. It will rise again as a casualty in a few days. - Latents that “go Vector” can only be killed with headshots. • Hot Strain: Vectors are more infectious than casualties. - Victims of a casualty bite turn in a matter of hours or days. Vector bites cause transformation in a matter of turns equal to the Red of the failed infection check.

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Fast

The brain imposes limits on human strength via the central nervous system. Anatomically, humans can wield savage power only slightly less than that of wild apes, but developmental priority is given to our cerebral growth, which means our structurally similar musculature is much more prone to strain and tear. Certain extreme situations and drugs can generate enough adrenaline to bypass the limits that pain places on human strength, but by and large, one of humanity’s greatest evolutionary adaptations is the way our nervous system can stop exertion before it reaches dangerous levels. The Blight doesn’t care. The first thing the infection dismantles is the central nervous system’s protections against muscle stress. The early stages of Vector creation are almost miraculous – the lame walk, the mute scream, the feeble flex – but they do so through an agony they can’t escape. When Vectors sprint at a victim, they are snapping the tendons in their glutes and quadriceps to do so. When they bite, cracked teeth and unhinged jaws do nothing to stop the feeding frenzy. Vectors don’t have superpowers; they’re just humans without the brakes. In the game, this means that Vectors are faster, stronger, and more resilient than seems possible. Vectors have a “murder modifier” equal to their in-life SPD. For Market Forces that were never completely stated out, the Market can default to whatever SPD is appropriate. When rolling against a Vector, add the murder modifier to the Red every time, or deduct it from the player’s skill modifier and spends. This is equivalent to the “trained” advantage mentioned in the combat chapter (see p. 292). Vectors move a number of Shambles per round equal to their murder modifier. A Vector’s sprint is slowed by one Shamble for every hit it takes that round, but only for that round. Blows don’t affect the murder modifier in the long term, but a shotgun blast to the leg can still make the thing stumble. They can

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also climb walls, dodge obstructions, sprint up stairs, and work door handles. The murder modifier places Vectors in the initiative order. For instance, if a Latent with a SPD 3 turns, the resulting Vector starts with an initiative of 1d10+3 (an initiative check + the murder modifier). The character’s initial place in the order doesn’t matter; it’s recalculated after the person transforms.

Strong

If within one Shamble of a Vector, failed Athletics checks cause Kill damage like any other casualty, but the damage is increased by the murder modifier. Additionally, all Vector attacks have knockback. They plow into victims like linebackers. Damage goes to the same hit location as the Red, and infection checks follow. For instance, imagine Scapegoat is fighting a Vector with a murder modifier of +2. Scapegoat attacks with his +2 Shoot, but that skill bonus is negated by the murder modifier. The dice land B1+0/R9 for a miss. Next, the Taker spends his twitch and uses Athletics to dodge, but his +3 bonus gets whittled to a +1 by the murder modifier. Scapegoat rolls and gets B4+1/R6. Instead of the usual 4 Kill damage to the chest, he takes 6 Kill damage (+2 from the murder modifier). There’s also a knockback effect, and Scapegoat has no actions to spend on a Resistance check. He’ll start the next round pinned by the frothing cannibal, and that’s before he even knows if he’s infected or not.

PsychologIcal Warfare

Though the terrifying transformation of infection seems instantaneous enough, it is not. The brain of the victim does not die all at once. Eventually, the sinews worming through their frontal lobe destroy any reason left in the brains, but this doesn’t happen fast enough. Those recently turned scream in panic and terror while eating their loved ones, lucid and able to watch. The language centers break early, but not so fast that a few pleas for mercy

don’t break through the cannibal screams. These are called “apologies.” Vector apologies are terrifying for everyone. It’s a constant reminder of the fate awaiting everyone who survived the Crash. When a character hears a Vector apologize, it calls for a Self-Control check against either Detachment (if witnessed from a safe distance) or Trauma (if threatened by the Vector), regardless of mental fortitude. The Market may call for more severe checks if the Vector was once a friend or lover. The sorrow and guilt of having to kill a family member can make anyone hallucinate guilty rebukes inside an unintelligible scream. The Market can roleplay these cries directly or they can describe the screams of the damned and ask the player what their character hears in the cries. Characters that have been Vectors for a few hours but have yet to die don’t shout apologies; they are entirely lost to the Blight.

Hard to KIll

If a Vector started as a Market force with a simple pool of hit boxes, turning effectively “heals” all wounds. Since Vectors are still technically alive, all hit boxes in the torso or head must be filled up before the creature goes down. This means aiming center mass can still be effective, at least in the short term. However, a Vector felled by body shots is just a casualty waiting for the torpor to end. Destroying the brain is the only way to keep a zombie down for good. Called shots and headshots bypass any hit pools and provide instant kills, as is tradition of the genre. Just remember that the murder modifier is going to be making that precision check all the more difficult. If a PC is the Vector, things get that much worse. The player passes his newly doomed character to the Market. The Market plays the character as a Vector, healing all hit boxes and factoring in any worn armor. Slaying the former friend requires filling all hit boxes in either the torso or head with killing damage. Called shots no longer work as instant kills. Worse still, bleed out doesn’t contribute to the

damage. Latents going Vector are even worse – turned Latents are technically casualties without the limitations of rigor and rot; only a headshot takes them down. To survive Takers must adopt the same panicked fear and rage fueling the monster. Spend big, spend quickly, and leave nothing in reserve, or join the blood-vomiting hordes.

Hot StraIn

Finally, if all goes wrong and a Vector infects somebody, things get much worse. Failing an infection check against the hot strain means the Blight is already in the midst of exponential replication. There is no unpredictable phase between infection and symptoms; there may not be time to use a blood test, even if the crew has one in reserve. The victim turns into a Vector in a number of rounds equal to the Red on the infection check. This means that, if bitten by a Vector, there may not be time to use a blood test, even if the crew has one in reserve. Hard choices have to be made to stop a hot outbreak.

InfectIon

If a character isn’t already Latent or Immune, they must make a check against infection whenever they receive Kill damage from a casualty, Vector, or Aberrant. This is one of the few times the Market rolls dice in secret. The Market makes a check, adding the character’s STR to the Black. If the character was wise enough to bring a blood testing kit, the player can make a check instead, and WILL can be used to shift results. But no matter who rolls the dice, the modifiers and results stay the same. On an infection check: • If the Red is higher than Black + STR, the character is infected. • If Black + STR is higher than Red, the character is uninfected. • If it’s a critical failure, the character is naturally Latent. • If it’s a critical success, the character is Immune.

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Speed of InfectIon

Though multiple types of zombies exist in Red Markets, the characters will likely only witness people turning into Vectors. The lifecycle of the Blight is explained more in-depth in the “History of the Crash” p. 55. But for now, the takeaway is that a freshly infected person can only turn into Vector, not a casualty. Though incurable cannibalistic monsters, Vectors are still technically alive. Stopping the heart of a Vector kills it, but only if the blow fills every hit box in the torso. Vectors can also die from exposure, starvation, and dehydration, but only when those circumstances would also kill the most hormonally-flooded human imaginable, such as a psychotic in the midst of PCP binge. The death of a Vector, without a destruction of the brain stem, is impermanent. Shooting a victim full of holes only accelerates torpor: the period in which the Blight, now distributed throughout the body, begins forming the sinews that allow it to preserve and puppet a corpse’s musculature. The dead body of a former Vector eventually rises as a slowmoving casualty. Though these creatures now make up the majority of the Loss’s inhabitants, each was once a Vector. Abberants...well, no one knows where Abberants come from. This means that it’s never a matter of what an infected PC turns into eventually: the remaining crew will have to dispatch their former friend or be killed long before another stage of infection can develop.

Bust: God’s BlIght

In this variant, a Taker’s health has no effect on the Blight. The disease is totally inscrutable, and luck is the only determiner of who survives. Check Black/Red, but add nothing. Critical failures still mean latency and critical success still mean immunity, but the results of exposure are based only on blind chance.

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While the end result is not in question, the speed at which they occur depends on which creature did the infecting. The rates of transmission are detailed in order of their commonality. 'Cold' BItes: CasualtIes and Latents If the infection is from a casualty bite, transformation into a Vector happens at a dramatically appropriate time, according to the Market’s whims. The Blight takes time to resurrect into its living state after transferring into a living host, and the wildly differing time period between becoming infected and turning symptomatic remains a major obstacle to understanding the disease. Markets could roll a die and decide that the victim turns in that number of minutes, hours, or days. Or they could just wait until the worst possible moment and spring it on the players. The unpredictability of the time it takes a casualty to make a Vector – and the uncertainty as to whether or not the character is infected at all – should do a lot of damage to the entire crew’s Humanity. Since Latents are infected by the “undead” version of the Blight as well, accidentally or intentionally becoming infected by one works the same as a casualty bite. 'Hot' BItes: Vector and Aberrant If the infection is caused by a Vector or Aberrant, the change occurs in a number of combat turns equal to the Red of the infection check. Blight is already in the active state when transferred from these more deadly creatures, and the rapid transformation of their victims is what made the Crash so deadly. This doesn’t mean that the wait time between infection and symptoms is any less damaging to Humanity; the anxiety just doesn’t last as long. Latents: 'Take a Shot or Take the ShOT' Taking Supressin K-7864 before the Blight resurrects into the hot strain makes the character Latent. Even if they were not actually infected by initial contact with the

undead, injecting K-7864 results in the condition anyway. Latents may also occur naturally, due to some unpredictable flaw in Blight’s genetic code that occasionally prevents its typical resurrection into the hot strain. Whether a character uses drugs or becomes Latent naturally, the effects of latency occur immediately, even faster than Vector infection. The cold strain – which constantly reengineers human flesh into the parasitic nerve tissue and musculature referred to as Blight sinew – assumes that the body of a Latent is merely a cadaver that has yet to be converted. The process of torpor begins immediately, but rather than causing a long-dead corpse to seize and slowly reanimate, the victim is alive and aware, their mind undamaged. As a Latent’s flesh is rent asunder from the inside and rearranged into invasive, alien tissue, they can feel the entire thing.

A character becoming Latent must immediately make a level-4 Self-Control check against the Trauma threat. If the Humanity damage doesn’t result in a Regret, the Taker can still manage to move, despite the agony. If they do suffer a Regret, the character is incapacitated by the sensation of razor wire crawling underneath the skin. The Market should also treat the event as if a loud weapon was fired – the screams don’t stop. The sight of black veins coursing throughout the afflicted’s extremities causes Self-Control checks in all present. Finally, the Market rolls 1d10 Kill damage for every hit location on the Latent and inflicts the damage to each limb separately. It’s entirely possible for Latents to bleed out or die as they are riddled by Blight sinew. In fact, it’s a common occurrence. Medically trained Takers nearby can administer aid, mediating damage and sedating the patient. But, of course, any exposure to the Latent risks secondary infection, so assisting is not without its risks. If Latents die, they technically become a casualty as the viral sinew “wakes up.” However, since the transformation occurs immediately after brain death, the body has no rigor mortis or decomposition to slow it down. Effectively, treat such foes as Vectors in terms of strength and ability. Immune and UnInfected Characters only learn if they are naturally Immune one of four ways: • Use an upgraded blood test at the sight of infection, directly after exposure • Undergo extensive and sophisticated lab testing • Suffer an exposure to the Blight so severe that immunity is the only explanation for survival • Take Supression K-7864 to no effect Thousands of Immunes aren’t aware of their own gifts because, to test for the condition, both Blight cells and Immune blood

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must be in contact at the exact moment of analysis. An absence of reaction is the only reliable indicator of the condition discovered by science. Standard blood tests produce false positives for immunity too easily, as many escape infection for entirely mundane reasons. Older casualties tend to dry out, losing the majority of the black preservative ooze that leaks from the Blight’s sinews. Some bites just don’t exchange enough fluids to infect a person. Or wounds may not have come from a casualty at all, but close encounters can drive anyone with broken skin to paranoia. In fact, the Blight’s head games killed far more Immunes than the zombies did during the initial outbreak. The Crash was the single most terrifying event in human history, and almost everyone got to witness the Blight dismantling someone they loved. Exposure to undead fluids has a powerful placebo effect, and a panicked mind can manufacture many of the symptoms indicating pre-Vector transformation. The only way to know for certain is to wait for the change, but people usually start putting guns-to-temples long before then. Regardless of whether a character is Immune, uninfected, or waiting to turn, the Market should describe the same set of bodily changes to keep the entire group paranoid.

DescrIbINg Symptoms

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Narratively, what happens when someone begins to turn? Well, if the character is Latent, Markets should read “Latents” on p. 306 for a description of events. If the crew has a blood test, administer it and make the infection check. For everyone else, use the following description to narrate a character’s symptoms. Make sure every PC that was exposed experiences these symptoms – regardless of whether they’re actually infected or not. Five years after the Crash, everyone is aware of the horror awaiting the

bitten, and fear is enough to mimic infection psychosomatically up to a certain point. Early InfectIon: Placebo Effects and Real SIgns Those infected by casualties show few outwardly visible signs. The Blight’s resurrection from the undead, “cold” cells into the hemorrhagic, “hot” strain of Vectors is slow, invisible, and little understood. Symptoms only manifest once the fully resurrected cells begin attacking the brain, killing and coopting neural tissue in preparation for housing a central ganglia of viral sinews in the brainstem. Once this process begins, the infected person has minutes before transformation. At most. Internally, the viral replication of hot Blight starts in the frontal cortex and replicates at a rate utterly unprecedented in the scientific record. Meanwhile, more sophisticated, specialized cells similar to prions differentiate and hijack the endocrine system, flooding the victim with a variety of stress hormones. A certain percentage of the new Blight cells produced by metabolizing the brain tissue of the victim redouble the attack on the mind, but the majority become “seeder” cells and disperse among the tissues via the circulatory system. These heretofore-unclassifiable microorganisms serve no function until the victim’s death, at which point they activate and begin converting dead tissue into Blight sinew. Externally, sweats and tremors characterize the early stages. There have been reports of high-grade fevers developing as well, but such claims could be apocryphal. Common wisdom holds that strange urges, hallucinations, and a tendency to slur or stutter speech precedes the first violent outbursts by a few moments, but the degree to which these symptoms can be explained by the extreme stress of the situation cannot be known. Suicidal ideation correlates strongly with infection, though selftermination is arguably the sanest reaction. TransformatIon: TurnIng Takers Into Monsters At this point, any infected PCs lose control of their characters if they’ve yet to inject Supressin K-7864.

For characters infected directly by the hot strain (through Vector or Aberrant exposure), the symptoms begin here after the randomly rolled number of rounds passes. Either way, placebo effect is no longer a possibility once the transformation reaches this stage. As damage to the brain increases exponentially, effects become more pronounced. Victims may scream or clutch at themselves, though a sudden onset of catatonia has also been observed. Spasms and seizures set in seconds later. The disease begins secreting a new form of extreme anticoagulant into the bloodstream – currently theorized as a means of embedding seeder cells deeper into host tissue – and this development leads to hemorrhagic symptoms. The victim vomits, defecates, urinates, perspires, and/or cries blood.

Around the time bleeding begins, owing to widespread damage, hormonal imbalance, or some yet-to-be understood from of parasitic behavioral modification, hosts lose all control and begin attacking the nearest living creature. Cannibalistic urges may not yet be present at this phase, but the overwhelming, psychotic aggression of Vectors means that biting remains common. Language centers still survive, which leads to the disturbing “apologies” as the condemned attack. Thankfully, the Blight’s severe neural abrasion continues until only the victim’s autonomic functions remains, so this period of nightmarish awareness ends after brain death.

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HumanIty

The last few decades of mental health research reveal that biology and chemistry bear more responsibility for mental illness than we ever thought possible. RPGs depict fantastic worlds and part of that escapism is the comforting notion that mental illness can be prevented by behavior, just like washing hands lowers chances of the flu. In reality, much madness is in the blood and it will take those of us it so chooses. But, if any part of insanity is communicable – a malady of nurture as well as nature –, then there could be no better home for the infection than poverty. Socioeconomic status is correlated with mental illness, especially anxiety and depression. The question of whether insanity causes poverty or vice versa is a false dichotomy: why have it one way when we could be getting screwed from both

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directions? Mental illness deprives people of support services, relationships, and relief even as it increases the likelihood of emotional trauma from every source. This isn’t to say that this game seeks to simulate reality on any level. Red Markets is a horror game, and in horror fiction, the world breaks characters’ minds as well as bodies. But while Takers may “go insane,” it’s got nothing to do with their genes and everything to do with the Loss. The supernatural terror of the undead gets added to the scraping dread of capitalism. Characters are as likely to snap under the pressures of crushing debt as they are to lose it while fighting monsters. The sleepless horror of living on the edge can wear down any human. Letting go of some of that vulnerable Humanity is sometimes the only way to survive. Hardening oneself against the constant assault of the Loss can work for a little while, but everyone breaks eventually – great

mountains of strength worn into sand by the constant, rhythmic waves of madness. The business of Takers is not about staying healthy; that’s never going to happen. It’s about getting out before the point of no return.

The Threats to HumanIty

Humans are defined by what they do beyond the work of survival. But life in the Loss doesn’t leave much time for anything beyond the bottom line. Drowning pain in drugs, cutting ties with risky relationships, expecting betrayal at every turn – these are all essential survival mechanisms in the Carrion Economy. But past a certain point, the act of staying alive becomes all consuming, and the Taker no better than an animal. Out on the edge, these personality shifts don’t have a name. Few enclaves have doctors trained to diagnose and treat them and, even

if they did, no survivor of the Crash is healthy enough to stand in judgement of someone else’s crazy. Collectively, a Taker’s mental health is referred to as their Humanity. It rates the Taker’s remaining ability to stay a person, or imitate the person they used to be. Mechanically, a Taker’s mental health is tracked along three threats to Humanity: Detachment, Trauma, and Stress. Threats measure the common ways the Loss can scrape away at a Taker’s well being. When something in the game threatens Humanity, the Market calls for a Self-Control check against a certain threat. If the check succeeds, the character holds it together. If it fails, the PC takes damage in that threat. There’s more on the type of Self-Control checks the Market can call for on p. 312. For now, let’s talk specifically about the three threats and what they represent.

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Detachment

Detachment threatens the ability to connect meaningfully with other humans and, eventually, to one’s own self-concept. Everybody lost somebody in the Crash, and people have been betraying and backstabbing each other ever since in fearful, misguided attempts to save what’s left. It can be hard for experienced Takers to find relationships worth the risk anymore. When new friends are nothing more than future appointments with pain, why make the effort? Many don’t even find themselves worthy of love after the things they’ve had to do to survive. Real-world ailments related to the Detachment threat are depression, blunted affect, and antisocial behavior.

Trauma

Trauma occurs when characters suffer from a violent act or the fear of violence to come. The threat damages the ability to overcome fear and maintain perspective in survival situations. The Blight encouraged acts of violence unheard of in human history. Survivors of these events have suffered physical and emotional pain for which the preCrash world left them completely unprepared. Takers that survive life-threatening injuries and agony must often volunteer to repeat the experience, but such wounds take their toll even after the flesh heals. Collect enough scars and healthy caution gives way to paranoia, phobia, and delusion. Real-world ailments related to the Trauma threat are post-traumatic stress disorder and various phobias.

Stress

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Stress harms a character’s ability to stay cool and resist panic in the face of prolonged struggles. Stress is affected by nearly everything, including the other two threats, but the Stress threat is primarily about the grind. The bad luck of seeing a loved one get ill (Detachment) or suffering a major injury (Trauma) can cause Stress in extreme cases, but the Stress threat is most dangerous

when a character finds the pantry bare. It attacks when a spouse in the Recession stops returning emails. It strikes as the price for supplies rises and the time between paydays stretches. Stress measures the everyday bullshit of trying to get by and get out of this nightmare; it’s the many straws that break a back. Real-world ailments related to the Stress threat are panic attacks, obsessive behaviors, and other symptoms of anxiety disorders.

Other terms

Regrets refer to moments when a character loses control from taking too much Humanity damage in a single Threat. Regrets are so named because there’s no taking them back. Once a character suffers a Regret, their Humanity can never heal below that point again. Characters suffer regrets for every five points of Humanity lost in a single track – once all the boxes in a track fill up, the regret occurs and all boxes to the left of the regret are permanently filled for that threat. There are three levels of Regret: cracks, crumbles, and breaks. Each level has three choices as to how the player wants to roleplay that Regret. There’s more on taking Regrets later in the chapter (p. 313).

Self-Control Checks

The Market calls for Self-Control checks when something particularly disturbing, shocking, or horrific happens in the game. In addition to calling for a Self-Control check, the Market names the threat. In general, threats correspond to the following events. • Detachment: witnessing or inflicting pain upon teammates, loved ones, and other humans. • Trauma: experiencing personal injury or illness; fear of the same • Stress: suffering financial and professional setbacks; anxiety over persistent problems; fear of the same

Finally, Markets can increase the difficulty of the check depending upon the severity of the event. There are four levels of difficulty. For simplicity’s sake, they are referred to by the amount of Humanity damage that might be done. If the Market needs even more severe levels of Self-Control checks, the general rule is that a successful check can’t mitigate more than two points of Humanity damage at any time: it pays to be mentally tough, but Takers are still only human. Level-1 Checks: Success does no damage, but failure costs one Humanity in the threat. Here are some examples of appropriate difficulty on each threat: • Detachment: watch helplessly as some horrible crime is inflicted on your fellow man • Trauma: see a deadly threat coming for you, such as near-miss gunfire or casualties on the march; suffer physical pain • Stress: be forced to borrow money from your crew to meet upkeep or fail to meet financial goals like projected earnings (see “Upkeep: Paying the Bills” p. 223) Level-2 Checks: Success does no damage, but failure costs two Humanity in the threat. • Detachment: lose faith in a teammate (certain Regrets suffered by other players can be interpreted as betrayal, such as a personal addiction putting everyone in danger); watch a Dependent suffer for your failures • Trauma: get seriously injured; get (possibly) infected by the Blight • Stress: make no profit from a job; lose a vital piece of equipment; withdraw from the retirement plan to make upkeep Level-3 Checks: Success does one damage to a threat; failure costs three Humanity in the threat. Things are so bad that no one, even the hardest among the group, is going to ever be the same.

• Detachment: watch a Dependent or teammate die as a result of your failures; kill in cold blood • Trauma: fight an Aberrant, stampede, massive Vector outbreak, or other supernatural event pulled straight from a nightmare • Stress: Lose all your gear in the middle of a mission; find yourself unable to pay back a loan shark Level-4 Checks: Success still does two damage to the threat; failure destroys four Humanity in the threat. At this point, only the hardest and most privileged Takers can avoid succumbing to a Regret. • Detachment: kill someone you know in cold blood; allow dozens to die through inaction • Trauma: get caught in an enclave or settlement wide outbreak; lose control of your own body • Stress: sever a Dependent as a result of your inability to fulfill responsibilities; lose everything in a bad investment. Unless the Market says otherwise, assume all Self-Control checks are at the “Level-1” difficulty. The Market has no obligation to say how much Humanity damage is riding on a check until after the check is made.

Regrets

When a Taker suffers five or more Humanity damage in a single threat, they take a Regret. On the character sheet, this means a Regret occurs the second the bar is filled, NOT when it goes over. Regrets are moments where the facade of toughness breaks down and characters reveal just how much the Loss has worn them down. A Regret is a loss of control that puts the Taker, their teammates, and the success of the contract in danger. The player, on the other hand, still has some options when it comes to roleplaying the Regret, which we will go into momentarily.

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Threats Break

Crumble

Stress Trauma

Crack

Detachment

ALTFirst

things first – here are the rules regarding Regrets: 10

1. Characters start with 15 Humanity in 7-9is triggered after A Regret each threat.ALT ALTevery every box beneath that Regret is ALT 5 6 filled. The only way to start out with less Humanity is to assume a tough spot that reduces the starting amount in character generation (see p. 185) ALT ALT 2. The player 1-2 always chooses the 3-4Regret from the available options at that level. The Market has no say in what the player chooses. 3. The same Regret can’t be taken twice. For instance, at the crack level, the player might choose “freeze” when they hit that Regret in Detachment. If the character later cracks along the Stress threat, they Rations can’t pick “freeze” again. 1 Upkeep Charges 00000 00000 4. Humanity cannot be healed past Rations spenttaken. to Buy-a-Roll Effect of thecan lastbeRegret A the level on skills that require exertion. character that’s suffered a crack in the Additional spends add +1 Trauma threat is never going to forget that Qualities Charged moment;Essential neither areAddictive their teammates. ter Advancement: No matter how helpful Dependents tial = 10 Bounty may be or how much bounty is spent in skill level (1B = 1 Skill, 2B = 2 Skill, etc) recovery, the character never again has more than 10 Humanity in the Trauma threat. Threats other than Trauma may be healed normally, but additional Trauma still counts as the “furthest” damage taken for purposes of healing columns using Dependents. 5. Regrets consume excess Humanity damage when they are reached. For instance, if a Taker takes three Humanity damage in the Stress threat, but only has one point left in Stress before hitting a Regret, the additional two damage

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disappears. The character can take more damage in that threat later, but any excess Humanity loss is soaked up until the Regret is fully played out. 6. Characters that take a Regret at the break-level are removed from the game. The player still gets a choice in how their player goes out, but the character is so emotionally shattered that they become an NPC.

Regret Levels

There are three levels of Regret, each referring to facade of normalcy Takers have to cling to get through the day: cracks, crumbles, and breaks. Cracks refer to momentary lapses of control. These perfectly understandable reactions to extreme hardship are no less dangerous for being sympathetic. Cracks are short, in-the-moment behaviors that put the Taker and crew at greater risk. A Taker can recover as soon as the next scene, but the crew must forever have to wonder if they can rely on that person in the next crisis. Crumbles refer to persistent, debilitating personality flaws that develop from prolonged exposure to the Loss. Crumble Regrets aren’t immediate, but they are constant. Markets call for Self-Control checks against past crumbles once per game. On a failure, the player must choose to take additional Humanity damage or indulge in unfortunate behavior that very moment. This consistently puts contracts and crew at risk. Other Takers watching friends crumble know it is just a matter of time before the person snaps completely. Breaks remove characters from the game. The Taker just can’t handle it anymore and is removed from play. How this occurs is up to the player. Regardless, the characters Dependents, crew, and enclave are going to be seriously damaged in the process. Nothing degrades people faster in the Loss than watching their loved ones break under the pressure.

Crack Characters crack in one of three ways: fight, flight, or freeze. These Regrets take place the instant they are received. Fight means just that: the character fights with irrational, suicidal fervor. The character goes berserk and attacks a single enemy until one party is dead. Characters undergoing a fight response stop at nothing to destroy the target. If their arms are bound, they use teeth. If the crew is trying to be stealthy, they charge screaming from the shadows. If the enemy is already dead, they keep beating the corpse into paste as the building burns down around them. Physically dragging the sufferer from the scene is the only thing that stops the rage. When a character picks fight as a

Regret, treat all weapons as if they have the loud quality (on account of all the screaming). Witnessing an enraged teammate dismember the body of a fellow human can also threaten Trauma in teammates, alarming the crew with sheer savagery. Flight is the total opposite. The character does everything they can to get away. They ignore cries of help from allies, drop precious loot, and flee towards certain doom so long as it means getting away from the original object of terror. When flight is chosen, the character may come out of their panic in the next scene with no idea where they are or how they got there. If it takes place in combat, other Takers have to make Self-Control checks threatening Detachment: their supposed teammate just abandoned them in a time of great need. Freeze means the Taker can take no actions at all for the remainder of the scene. The shock of the event has shut down their ability to process the environment around them. In negotiations, they shut up and stare blankly in wall-eyed catatonia. They wander through the middle of a firefight looking confused and listless. They gibber nonsense, recounting grocery lists as the undead beat down the door. Unless the rest of the crew takes control and leads the helpless Taker to safety, the Regret could get the shell-shocked character killed. This can threaten Stress for teammates; the last thing a Taker needs on a job is to babysit the helpless. Crumble When characters begin to crumble, the damage to their Humanity becomes permanent and consistent. This doesn’t happen instantly. When a character starts to crumble, the player lets the Market know so it can become part of the scene, but the character doesn’t lose control. However, in every game, for as long as that character remains alive and unretired, they continue to crumble. The Market calls for one Self-Control check related to the character’s specific Regret once per session. This occurs at a time of the Market’s choosing. If the check fails, the

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character must either take Humanity damage in the threat or indulge in the Regret again. Players can choose one of three ways to represent persistent psychological damage: disassociation, delusion, or dependency. Disassociation occurs when relationships no longer seem worth the effort or pain they require. The Taker has lost too many people and seen too many hopes dashed. In every interaction, all the character can think about is how it’s only a matter of time before this person becomes another ghost. The disassociation Regret affects relationships. If a character fails Self-Control with a Dependent or Reference, they can no longer maintain the illusion of normalcy. Emotional affect flattens, tact is lost, and the entire interaction turns sour. Mechanically, this deprives the Taker of favors and the healing power of Dependents. A successful CHA skill check is required to even get the person on good terms again. How the player chooses to roleplay this scene is up to them, but note that even a successful Self-Control check just means the facade is successful. The Taker forever feels distant from the rest of mankind as a maladaptive coping mechanism. Delusion means a recurring hallucination that the Taker must struggle to remember is false and impossible. The exact nature of the hallucination is up to the player, though the Market and other players can make suggestions. Perhaps the Taker imagines seeing her dead husband walking in the wasteland, unharmed and beckoning her to follow. Maybe a character believes he can hear God whisper between the reports of gunfire. Remember, it is a comforting fantasy that’s a desperate escape from a too-harsh reality; the hallucination doesn’t come from a chemical imbalance or genetic disorder. As such, the Self-Control check gives Takers a chance to see the hallucination for a lie. But success only gives the character a chance to hide seeing and hearing things that aren’t there; it doesn’t stop the hallucination. When the Self-Control check is failed, the Taker believes in the hallucination and it becomes

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a delusion. The player can do nothing for the remainder of the scene save treat the delusion as absolute truth. This can lead the character into danger or cause Self-Control checks amongst the crew when they see their friend slipping towards madness. Dependency forces the Taker to rely on some external item to get through the agony of existence. More often than not, this takes the form of drugs or alcohol, but players can pick other addictive behaviors such as nymphomania or compulsive gambling (adjust according to your group’s comfort level). It is the thought of the next fix that gets the Taker to wake up in the morning. They secure the next contract to feed the habit. They maintain ties with Dependents only to ensure no one interferes with feeding the need. The next fix is everything. Sometimes, things in the field just get too stressful and a Taker has to dip into an emergency stash. When characters suffer dependency, they must pay double their break point in upkeep for the remainder of the game. The new costs come from enabling the addiction. If there isn’t enough bounty to go around, it requires a Self-Control check to spend on things other than the addictive behavior. If the check is failed, the Taker buys more drugs, booze, poker chips, etc., even if their Dependents are starving as a result. Assuming the Taker can meet the added cost, they remain functioning addicts. However, the Market still gets to check the addiction once per game session. If the check fails, the Taker must feed the addiction and damn the consequences (i.e. drunken parkour over casualty-filled streets) or take additional Humanity damage. Break When characters break, they exit the game. There is nothing left to lose; there is no one left to rescue. All that remains to be seen is how much damage the shattered mind does on its way out. Like crumbling, characters do not break immediately. Unlike the last crumbling, the player shouldn’t tell the Market anything

has happened until after the game is over. It’s a big deal when a character breaks, and it’s going to be a major focus in the next session. As always, the player gets to choose the specific Regret, but try to work with the Market to make a memorable exit. In addition to the player needing a new character, a break does a lot of damage to the group as a whole. It’s meant to make characters paranoid about their teammates in the future, wondering whether or not it might be wiser to cut an ailing friend loose rather than deal with the fallout. While no one can get ‘fired’ in Red Markets, being wary of the crew’s emotional state should be a recurring conflict that appears in the roleplaying. Breaking a character is as much about the burden carried by survivors as it is about removing a Taker from the game. Players can choose one of three ways to break a character’s psyche: self-destruction, betrayal, and convalescence. The same rules for Regrets are in effect: if this is the second character that’s gone mad for the same player, they must pick a different Regret the second time around. Self-Destruction means suicide. Be careful when selecting this Regret; don’t ruin anyone’s fun by dragging in real world hurt. However, even if someone has been unfortunate enough to lose a real loved one to suicide, this Regret can still be saved by zombie tropes. Wading into the crowd of undead and taking down as many as possible is fairly common in the

While crises do shake people out of their complacency, forcing them to question the fundamentals of their lives, the most spontaneous first reaction is panic, which leads to a “return to the basics”: the basic premises of the ruling ideology, far from being put into doubt, are even more violently reasserted. -Slavoj Zizek

literature and there’s no reason the character can’t do the same. Grittier, more realistic depictions of suicide are on the table for groups comfortable with that level of intensity in the game. Regardless of whether the character goes out with a bang or quietly with a note, self-destruction forces everyone in the crew to make high-level Self-Control checks threatening Detachment. Seeing someone you love and trust succumb to hopelessness risks dragging the whole crew down. And what to do about those abandoned Dependents? Betrayal opts for physical and financial damage over psychological pain. The character loses their cool and can’t wait one second longer – they have to get out of the Loss now, even if it means no one else gets to come along. The character betrays the enclave to an enemy for a big payday, or they steal bounty from the crew and run. Players shouldn’t pick the betrayal option unless they are okay with the Market playing their character. The Taker is now an NPC and likely a major villain in the campaign. Markets can let the original player keep controlling the character if they feel it can be done objectively and within the story, but ultimately, the former friend has become a selfish bastard out of desperation. The unshakable rule for the betrayal Regret is that a crew must always have ample chance to get revenge and reclaim their lost bounty. The dice may not support the crew’s payback, but nobody gets to disappear suddenly with everyone’s hard-earned loot, never to return. While the animosity of betrayal certainly lessens psychological blows, having a trusted colleague make off with a big payday or try to have you killed is bound to threaten Stress and/or Detachment. Convalescence might, at first, seem to be the best option. The character’s mind breaks and is no longer fit for going out on the job, but no one dies. Hell, the same player can even control the character, just like before. Except it’s not just like before. The character is broken – completely and totally – catatonic, delusional, paranoid, hysterical, or everything at once. When a character convalesces, they

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won’t be getting better. Those that don’t get years of serious psychiatric treatment can’t hope to recover and that’s not going to happen out in the Loss. No enclave employer is willing to deal with the wild mood swings. Instead, the family has to cope with screaming night terrors, bed-wetting, and slow decay of a loved one eaten alive by mental illness. It’s up to the remainder of the crew to take care of their ailing friend. This means paying any outstanding debts to References and shouldering the cost of the player’s Break Point for the remainder of the campaign. Seeing the old friend is also a burden in its own right. Lucidity is rare and it’s heart wrenching to watch it slip away every time. More psychopathically profit-oriented outfits might decide to put the character out of their misery, but anyone opting for the Of Mice and Men option can expect a far more brutal hit to Humanity than the daily disappointment of bearing witness to a friend’s fall.

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RegaInIng HumanIty

Besides Dependents (see below), the only way to recover Humanity is by spending bounty to relax and recover between jobs. But time spent on recreation, healing, and recovering is not spent working towards survival. The opportunity cost of staying sane eats up capital, and the price of healing invisible wounds stacks up fast. To heal one Humanity damage in a single threat, spend one bounty. There is no spend limit, except Takers may not heal past the last Regret they suffered in that Threat.

Dependents

Dependents, or loved ones a Taker must support financially, are a vital part of any Red Markets character. As such, they’re explained more in-depth in Character Creation (see p. 205). However, Dependents do play an important mechanical role in maintaining Humanity.

In the interest of making rules easy to find, some of the more salient rules regarding Dependents are repeated here. The Power of ConnectIon For every fully supported Dependent available (not Needy, Strained, or Broken), the Taker heals one column’s worth of Humanity damage after completing a vignette. The term column is meant literally. A Taker suffering from 2 Detachment, 3 Trauma, and 3 Stress could reduce the damage to 2 Detachment, 2 Trauma, and 2 Stress. Detachment wouldn’t go down because it wasn’t aligned with the threat that had taken the most Humanity damage. In this example, another Dependent could heal the Taker down to 1 Humanity damage across all three threats. Players can use Dependents to heal once per session (Score or contract). In advanced play, the effects of Dependents can be gained twice in per session or not at all, depending on how the Taker uses Work/Life Balance (p. 434). To heal, players can request a vignette between their character and an available Dependent of their choice. This can happen either at the end of the current contract or the beginning of the next session. The player, the Market, and any other players stepping into to roleplay a Dependent can negotiate any kind of scene they wish. 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 should be noted here that, for Takers suffering from the disassociation Regret, SelfControl checks are required to receive the healing benefit of Dependents. The Cost of FrIendshIp If a Dependent doesn’t receive at least one bounty in a session, the relationship with the Taker begins to degrade. In advanced play, skipping a vignette with Dependents causes all costs associated with Dependents to double, according to the Work/Life Balance (p. 434).

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 SelfControl test 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 a more severe Self-Control check threatening 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 Taker picks the threat they’ve suffered the most Humanity damage in and rounds up to the nearest 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.

Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.. .There are perhaps three of these means: powerful diversions of interest, which lead us to care little of our misery; substitute gratifications, which lessen it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Something of this kind is indispensable. -Sigmund Freud

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NegotIatIon

Playtesters have argued that negotiations in Red Markets constitute another game entirely. The skills and other mechanical trappings of the system get expanded to encompass new meanings. The themes of horror and violence are suddenly reprioritized in favor of political intrigue and psychological manipulation. Whereas many traditional RPGs encourage using grids and miniatures to track the minutia of combat, this game only breaks out the visual aides to keep track of price-fixing. There are four reasons the negotiation mechanics in Red Markets take up their own chapter. Most importantly, it’s because they are optional. Groups that don’t find the social combat of negotiation interesting can set the price for a contract via Market Fiat (p. 379) or design a Score (p. 394). Those that want to jump straight to the action are encouraged to do so.

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But negotiations warrant specialized rules because Red Markets is a game about economic horror. One of the central tenets of modern economics theory is that humans are not rational actors. This irrationality is the central tenet of economic horror. In the real world, goods and services that promise high quality despite sizable risk, grueling labor, and constant demand aren’t always rewarded accordingly (Don’t believe me? Work on a fishing boat or in an inner-city high school for a few years). Conversely, some people can turn so little effort into so much profit that the public deems them thieves. Navigating the disconnect between these two extremes and roleplaying what it does to human relationships is what Red Markets was designed to do. Furthermore, negotiations are really about rhetoric, which is a unique skill set in the world of RPGs. Actual skill with a gun or melee weapon isn’t rewarded in most games. Hell, considering the medium’s reliance on emulating other entertainment media, practical experience might actually hinder an action scene. That’s why the character sheet exists: to mediate between the expertise of the player and the character. However, the veneer of mechanics grows very thin in scenes where two characters are talking. To tell a lie as a character, the player has to come up with something at least vaguely plausible before a Deception check is made. After all, the Market wouldn’t ask players to make a Drive check when they aren’t in a vehicle, or a Shoot check when they don’t have weapons. All RPGs reward players for good roleplaying and the ability to communicate well, either explicitly or implicitly. Red Markets chooses the former, and negotiation makes the rewards financial. Lastly, the negotiation mechanic demands the same thing from PCs as every functioning economy demands of its workers: specialization. The ability to maintain a network of contacts, trade favors, engender goodwill, and manage contracts is enormously important to a crew’s survival. However, the skill set required for negotiating a fair (or

unfair) price demands time and effort... time and effort not spent on the expertise needed to navigate the Loss or the ferocity required to survive it. Having to keep the underpowered sales rep alive makes encounters more dynamic and interesting, allows for a wider range of character concepts, and works to ensure every PC gets time in the spotlight. The Loss is always trying to kill Takers; a good negotiator might get you paid for the trouble.

The BIg Idea BehInd NegotIatIon

In a negotiation scene, the dice are going to generate the random forces of the economy outside most people’s control, such as the starting price of certain goods and services. The Market always roleplays the client, the person with a job that needs doing. The client is always trying to find the cheapest crew available that can still succeed at the task and will use everything at their disposal to get the price down as low as humanly possible.

”That’s my final offer!” No. It’s really not. Stonewalling will not work. PCs must haggle to survive. Most RPGs assume a fixed price model similar to the postindustrial Western economies in which the games were written, even when the game is trying to convey a setting where bargaining would be the norm (see: the overwhelming majority of human history). There are many reasons for this: it’s hard to conceive of economic models outside one’s own experience; haggling makes some people very uncomfortable; it’s difficult to meaningfully bargain when one isn’t experiencing a genuine need; it interferes with the hitting-zombies-with-swords part; etc. Red Markets includes haggling because haggling is a game. Sociologists and game theorists have been studying the intricate mechanics of price negotiation for decades, and practicing in a low-stakes situation (e.g. zombie make-believe) can be fun once the risk of real-world financial ruin is off the table. Furthermore, the rhetorical structure of haggling is largely invisible, which means roleplaying a negotiation makes for sophisticated character moments. It would be a mistake to think of negotiations as a repetition of numbers until someone gives up due to boredom. Entire social constructs exist exclusively around bargaining. Consider current Western norms, for example. Most Americans would consider a person paying sticker price for a house a fool: bargaining is expected as prices rise in US culture. However, the same bargaining principles one brings to the car lot would seem insane in the grocery line. All that has changed is the starting price. So when can I haggle for goods? Is $101 the haggling starting point? $102? Southeast Asia also frowns on negotiating the price of something like vegetables, but only because throwing the price of food into question is seen as poor taste, inconsiderate of the unfortunates who can’t afford such necessities. Everything else - be it T-shirts, cab rides, or lawn mowing services - remains up for negotiation. Paying sticker price in some African countries is viewed as an atrocious, classist insult. It flaunts one’s own wealth as beyond frugality and could be seen as akin to lighting cigars with thousand dollar bills. And all these customs only scratch the surface of national and ethnic differences. Consider the weirdness of negotiating prices in various subcultures. Due to concerns about law enforcement, complex protocols and body language are used to fix prices for drugs and sex work, layered contracts hashed out without a single piece of paper where the cost is never stated but always understood. To bring the example closer to home.. ever tried to explain a crowdsourced RPG to someone that hasn’t heard of Kickstarter? What’s crowdsourcing if not a negotiation between producer and consumer? So, yeah, Takers have to negotiate every time they pick up a job. Don’t worry; the only real-world requirement is a willingness to roleplay. The mechanics take care of everything else. As for the specific sociological practices of negotiating contracts for excursions into a zombie wasteland? That’s up for the players to decide. Whatever you come up with, it can’t be weirder than some of the ways people do it in the real world.

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After all, no one saves enough surplus bounty to hire Takers by being generous. They care about their bottom line. Amongst the players, one character (usually the one with the best CHA skills) takes on the role of negotiator. This character is the contact person for the whole crew, and it is their job to convince the client to pay more. In negotiation, each of the negotiator’s CHA skills gains a special ability specifically geared towards pushing the price higher, but the negotiator needs to cater their roleplaying to the skill they want to use in order to use those abilities. For example, a player that wants to use the Intimidation skill needs to say something intimidating in-character before they make a check. The Market, playing as the client, is tasked with doing the same. What is everyone else doing? Well, no one is keen to let their kids starve just because the negotiator screwed up. Takers that survive do so by doing everything they can to support their negotiator before and during the actual conversation with a client. While the negotiator is in the room proving how suave they can be, everyone else has scenes demonstrating just how much better Takers know the Loss than anyone else. They can manipulate clients before they ever show up to the table. The variety of actions other players can take in-between rounds in the client/negotiator conversation are called Scams, and they either provide a mechanical bonus for the negotiator’s next skill check or increase the price of the contract. The basic structure of a negotiation scene has the client and the negotiating Taker sharing a brief verbal exchange, followed by a dice check that determines the conversation’s effect on the price. The narrative then flashes back or cuts away to show what the rest of the team has done to help. The cycle repeats until the negotiator can no longer push the price and the contract’s compensation is agreed upon. By the end, the complex social maneuvering of the whole crew decides exactly how much risking their lives is worth that week.

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NegotIatIon At-A-Glance

0. Non-negotiables • One-on-one: Only one Taker per round may speak to the client. • Clients are Competent: Clients never make a skill check but always succeed. Takers can only defend against or outperform a client’s success. • References Only in Scams: Negotiators may not use References while speaking to a client. • Simultaneous Resolution: Nothing moves on the Sway Tracker until both parties have spoken and the round ends. Dice on the Sway Tracker then move at the same time. • Heads Up: Dice on the Sway Tracker cannot intersect (i.e. they can not be on the same space on the Sway Tracker) and must “push” each other with Sway until negotiations end. • Payment on Delivery: Nobody brings bounty to the meet up. 1. Prep Work • Before negotiations, every Taker gets one prep action. The skill used depends on the method used to get the information and the context of how the player describes the scene. • Successful checks entitle the Taker to the answer for one of the following questions: - What contracts are available to us? - What will a specific contract likely require? - What is the starting value (equilibrium price) of a specific contract? - The Market rolls Black + Red to generate this price and consults the Supply/Demand chart. This check always occurs during the Prep Work phase, but Takers need to successfully discover it in order to find out the price before negotiations begin. - What competition is vying for a specific contract? • Failed checks can succeed by tapping References.

2. Leadership Opens • The Taker serving as the crew’s negotiator meets the client and makes a Leadership check. The result determines the number of rounds negotiations will last.

3. Negotiation Round Negotiator/client verbal sparing, taking place “in the moment.” • Winner of the Leadership check determines who speaks first. • Taker decides what skill to use, roleplays according to the choice, and makes a check. The Market decides what skill the client uses and roleplays a pitch, succeeding automatically. • Negotiation-specific uses for CHA skills can be found on the Sway Tracker. • Dice resolve on the Sway Tracker simultaneously: moving, pushing, or sticking according to the amount of Sway. • Negotiation pauses as other members of the crew perform Scams. • Repeat until rounds end or the Taker successful exits the negotiation. 4. Scams Scams are actions roleplayed between negotiation rounds, taking place before or concurrent to the negotiator/client conversation. • Scams are only available between negotiation rounds. A three-round negotiation would only have two Scams: between the first and second rounds, and between the second and third.

• Each Taker may perform only one Scam. - MBA Rules: a Taker might be afforded one, two, or no Scams, depending on Work/Life balance. • The skills used in a Scam and the number of checks required depends on the context of the scene decided between the scammer and the Market. • Regardless of the skill used, each Scam can only fulfill one of five purposes: - Partners in Crime: The scammer is in the room with the negotiator. He or she can “step in” and perform a CHA skill check instead of the negotiator. - Negotiator Support: A scammer’s actions provide the negotiator a one time +2 bonus to one of the negotiator’s skills. - Discourage Competition: The scammer sabotages competitors and prevents an undercut (see #8). - Price Manipulation: The scammer’s actions add bounty to the equilibrium price equal to the natural Black of the check. - Intelligence Gathering: The scammer learned one of the client’s Spots, providing more leverage for the negotiator. 5. Repeat 3-4 • Step 3 and 4 continue until all rounds are used up or the negotiator checks Intimidation to leave early. 6. Leadership Closes • After the dice resolve for the last round, the Taker rolls a Leadership check. The result is the same whether the dice are heads up or not. - Success: Black moves right to align with the Red for a higher price. - Failure: Red moves left to align with Black for a lower price.

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7. Last Chance to Back Out • Takers don’t have to accept the contract. They can move on to a different client, but they start at the lowest rung of the Sway Tracker and receive no additional prep work, Scams, or Will. 8. Undercut • If the competition wasn’t sabotaged, they threaten to do the job for one rung cheaper than the PC crew. Any Taker present can make a final CHA skill check against the client to prevent this. - Success: clients believe they’re paying for quality and keep the higher price. - Failure: the Takers have to meet the lower price or chase a different contract.

Prep Work (Before NegotIatIon)

No economy is a perfect information system. Even when the actors take the time to research options, that time isn’t spent researching other, potentially more lucrative options. Just because characters have a choice between jobs, doesn’t mean the choice will be easy or well informed. The amount of information players can learn before actually bidding on a contract is limited, and that limited information must be spread amongst all available jobs. This phase of negotiation is called “prep work.” Every Taker can make one check to learn information about available contracts before committing to one of them. Each success answers one essential question about the job (see below).

What Can Prep Work Do?

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There are four questions that can be asked as a result of successful prep work. One question finds a potential contract; the other three provide details about contracts the Takers already know about. The number of questions that can be asked equals the numbers of players at the table and, even then, only if everyone succeeds. There’s no time for more

MBA and Prep

The advanced rules provide a wider variety of options for the economy of actions using the Work/Life principal (see p. 434). However, these rules do not affect prep work. Contracts have to be found, and even if the crew is doing Scores, the prep work is eaten up by the research that would be required of the characters to even learn the opportunity exists. One can’t forgo prep work to get extra scams or vignettes. investigation while still allowing Takers to prepare to negotiate for one contract well (see “Scams” p. 339). If players want to know more than their questions allow before bidding on a contract, it’s up to the Market whether or not to provide it. The default answer is “deal with it”. A job gone horribly wrong is an interesting story; a bunch of people squirming with indecision and follow-up inquries is decidedly less interesting. Besides, the leisure time required for endless interrogation makes little sense in the setting. Nobody is paying Takers to be safe or well informed. They take the job or they don’t. The Carrion Economy has no time for anything else. What contracts are avaIlable? Succeeding on a check for prep work and asking this question reveals one of the contracts the Market has prepared for the session. Knowledge of the job includes the clients name or alias, whatever they are willing to reveal about the affiliation, and a basic description of the task. If players ask this question and all the contracts have already been revealed, they can ask one of the other questions instead. Example: Sigma burns a charge off her laptop and makes a Research check. It succeeds. She tells the Market she’s looking online for any jobs currently bidding in her enclave. The Market says BeeMail (affiliation) has subcontracted Cutthroat (client) to find them a hit squad to take out the pirates shooting down their drones (task).

Freelance Contracts vs. Job Lines If the players want to learn anything about a freelance contract (a contract offered by a one-off client or during a one-shot), they must do prep work. But in campaign play, recurring clients are one of the easiest ways for the Market to compose a broad, sweeping story. This repeat business is called a job line, and one of the ways Market’s can incentivize going after job lines is by making prep work easier. Once a crew successfully completes the first job on a job line, the client makes sure they are the first to know when another job becomes available. Takers never again have to make a check to find work from that particular client. As the relationship continues and the crew becomes the client’s preferred provider of service, more questions can be answered up front until the Takers know everything they can about a contract before it starts. Less required prep work, combined with immunity from competition, makes selecting contracts on a job line that much easier. However, clients often prefer working with the same people because they already know which buttons to push, so negotiations with these friends gets increasingly difficult. For more on job lines, see p. 420. Sin-ergy is looking for a job as well. After some thought, his player decides to lie to the mayor of the enclave, claiming the deputy mayor recommended him for a job but he was told to ask the mayor about it in person. He succeeds on a Deception check. The mayor falls for it. She reveals that DronePunk (client), leader of the Hawks raiding group (affiliation), wants someone to escort their inventory of drone parts back to the enclave’s market (task). Six makes her Networking check as well, but the Market has no more contracts prepared for this session. He says she can use her skill in Networking to ask a different prep question about the two jobs already on the table.

What wIll a specIfIc contract lIkely requIre? Takers ask this question to get a more specific picture of what the job likely requires. Since clients need to keep as much classified as possible before negotiations start in order to prevent their opportunities from being stolen,

Why Prep At All? Since every adventure is built around a contract, some might ask why make a Prep Work check at all? Why not present the players with all their options, or have the Market simply declare the contract the players pursue? Well, those are certainly options, but making checks creates more interesting player dynamics. If a one job would benefit an individual Taker’s finances or situation more than the group, the fact that the whole crew doesn’t have the same information becomes an interesting source of conflict. For instance, if I.P. really wants to meet with the Moths because they’re essential to his retirement plan, he can choose to lie to his crew about the better paying work he discovered in his Networking check. Players see the lie of omission, but the characters don’t.. unless they make that Sensitivity check. This resentment and petty conflict makes for a more interesting group dynamic when the crew has to cooperate to survive. Conversely, choosing to sacrifice self-interest for the sake of the crew is an equally character-defining choice. Others might ask what happens if everyone fails their checks? It’s certainly possible, but that’s what References are for. Buy a favor, roleplay the tip, and get on with it. If no one is willing to ask for help, the players can design a Score for just such an occasion (p. 394). They might even hash one out beforehand, so the Market can have it ready to go for a rainy day. Finally, if no other options are available, the players are always guaranteed a game. At least one contract is always available, regardless of prep work, but it doesn’t make itself known until late. Getting a lead on a contract by default always means the competition have already bid on it. The PCs must undercut their prices to earn anything from the job.

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this information is normally based of rumor and conjecture. What the characters find out may end up being inaccurate or invalidated by the contract’s complication. The only rule the Market need follow is that a success entitles a character to some actionable intelligence; whatever rumor they end up overhearing, it has to contain some information that might be relevant to making a decision. Example: Six uses her Networking success to look up rumors about the BeeMail contract. Rumors on the LifeLines indicate that hiring a local middleman to organize retaliation against groups assaulting BeeMail drones is a standard tactic for the corporation. They like using guys like Cutthroat as cat’s paws in case officials in the Recession start looking into their illegal drone smuggling over the border. Meanwhile, they make sure the crews hired to do the job advertise that BeeMail put out the hit. Anyone working for them will likely have to keep things completely deniable on the Recession’s end while making damn sure everyone in the Loss knows damn well not to mess with the yellow drones.

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Now that Six knows the job will involve some brutality, the group can make a better decision on which job would be best to take. If everyone in the group has taken a lot of Humanity damage, slaughtering a bunch of desperate pirates for a corporation might not be worth the risk to their souls. But... BeeMail’s need for discretion could be leveraged for a bigger payday... What Is the equIlIbrIum prIce of a specIfIc contract?

The Market rolls Black + Red to generate the equilibrium price for each contract; the sum of the dice is the base price for the contract. It’s where negotiations start; the lowest possible price for the goods and services themselves, without accounting for risk or worker compensation. It’s the price the job would be offered at if there were international corporations of Takers that could provide economies of scale. The combination of Red and Black also determines where the contract lands on the Supply/Demand chart (p. 363). The chart describes how the local economy values the

goods and services needed, and this gives the Takers ideas on how to best manipulate the price during Scams. If no one asks about the equalibrium using their prep work, the price isn’t rolled until negotiation begins. Example: Audit hasn’t done any prep work yet. He checks his Profession: Accountant skill. It fails, but he taps a Reference and quickly roleplays a scene with his friend Deduct. Together, the pair figures out that a hit job for a major corporation would score B1/R1 on equilibrium price. No way! Nobody wants to do it, and there’s not enough demand to make it profitable. The negotiator would have a really hard job making that contract worthwhile. The crew decides to work for the drone pirates instead. What competItIon Is bIddIng for a specIfIc contract?

Crews that want to ensure nobody comes in and undercuts their bid need a warning as to whom else is sniffing around the contract. Finding out who is else is likely to bid for the job requires a prep work action. Otherwise, crews are left to deal with undercuts after the fact (see p. 343). Example: The crew has decided to pursue the drone pirate job, but they’re out of characters capable of doing prep. This means none of their Scams can go towards eliminating the competition. They’ll have to deal with the FUGOTMINE crew trying to snake their contract at the last minute.

WhIch SkIlls to Use?

It depends. How does your character learn about the world? Social characters can check Persuasion down at the local bazaar to convince an acquaintance to give up a hot tip. Quiet types might use Awareness to notice the new blood in the enclave. Brainiacs might use Foresight to predict GMO corporations usually shop in the Loss around harvest time. The more hands-on type might beat information out of Crafty Carl, who seems to know everything going on in the enclave. The skills characters

use to do prep work depend on the skill they are best at and the type of scene the player wants to roleplay. Anyone stumped for an idea should consider Networking. In Red Markets, finding a job requires navigating a variety of Ubiq forums, listservs, and internet rumors to find work in the area. Rather than roleplay every fruitless lead, investigating available work can be abstracted using the Networking skill.

The Sway Tracker ExplaIned

Rather than try to keep the math from a dozen bids and counter-offers fixed in one’s mind while attempting to roleplay, Red Markets employs the Sway Tracker to track the status of a negotiation visually. The tracker’s only purpose is to reduce the complex rhetorical strategy of a negotiation down into a simple, visual goal: push the opposition as far into a corner as possible. The Taker and the client each put a die representing their current standing on the tracker. The goal of the Black (the Taker) is to push the Red (the client) as far right as possible, increasing the price. The goal of the Red is to push the Black as far to the left as possible, discounting the price. The way the representative dice move and push each other is through Sway, which measures the social leverage employed in the characters’ roleplaying as moves along the tracker. The Sway Tracker also includes formulas for calculating final prices and a cheat sheet of rules reminding players of all the rhetorical tactics of which their CHA skills are capable. The formulas are explained more in depth here, whereas strategy for the negotiator’s skills can be found in “Sway Skills” on p. 333.

Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. -John F. Kennedy

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Crew Name Enclave Client Start

As A Favor

Buyer’s Market

Contract is offered at the Demand price only AND client earns a - Rep spot to use in future negotiations

Contract is offered at the Demand price only (Black result on a equilibrium roll)

Provider Undercut Start

Provider Default Start

Black Die

Black Die

At Value

Contract is offered at the value of Supply+Demand (Black + Red)

Labor

Hazard Pay

100% Mark-Up

Client agrees to add the crew’s break point to the price (Black + Red + break point)

Add one Bounty per Taker per Leg to Hazard Pay. (Ex: a crew of four on a three-Leg run earns 4 x 3 more)

Double the cost of the job before Labor

Red Die Expenses The equipment upkeep of every participating Taker is added into the price (no one pays upkeep this session)

decided are flashbacks to the crew’s careful Weak Spot: A character flaw or secret canown be leveraged planning. to provide +1 Sway The negotiation mechanics havethat their Soft Spot: An area of sentiment or great passion that can be exploited for +1 Sway Spots: these character traits exist for NPC vocabulary. Here are some of the more Tough Spot: For NPC clients, this takes the form of a specific need the client has for the contract. clients as well as Takers. “Playing a spot” It important can be exploited terms:for +1 Sway refers to exploiting these traits to provide +1 Playing Spots Sway normal rolls. Client (Red): the person purchasing a For Takers: For to Clients: Working a client’s weak, soft, or tough spot into the Sensitivity: Clients can sacrifice a turn to learn one spot Starting Position: This is where the dice good orbehind service from the provider. roleplaying a skill automatically adds Clients +1 Sway toare a roll. from the Taker in negotiations This bonus remains even if the check fails, On so success means Gift Spot: Once perclient negotiation, a client may “sweeten the and provider start. representing the NPCs controlled by the Market. the Sway +2 Sway, but a failed play on a spot is still worth +1 Sway. pot” with a piece of gear, earning an irresistible +1 Sway Starting position affected turning down Spots must be the learned in scams or using Sensitivity + by Rep a Spots: - Rep Spot: If the is crew has done by something unprofessional, Tracker, client is always represented If the crew has earned a + Rep Spot for a notable deed, the incompetent, or dishonest in the past, the client can use it jobs, competition, and Leadership checks. Red die. negotiator can work it into the roleplay for a bonus +1 Sway. once for an irresistible +1 Sway Sway: The measure of how far a client Contract: the subject of the negotiation. Negotiation Charm Skills or provider can move in a single round of The contract is the agreed payment for A means Swayundercutting of +1 would move one completing a service and/or providing a Networking: Roll a check to find a contract or find info about negotiation. it. Total failure to “As a Favor.” space; a Sway of +2 would move two spaces. good. Payment is provided upon delivery and Persuasion: Success moves +1 Sway, or defends against opponent’s Sway if heads up. Can be used with spots. The dice can’t intersect until negotiation ends, doesn’t include any bounty discovered enroute can be used to end negotiations early with a threat to “walk out.” Work in a spot to move and end Intimidation: Intimidation negotiations in the same turn. so Sway also measures how hard each party to the job site. Read an opponent’s weak, soft, or tough spot, but a turn to do so. wastes +1 a turn and provides issacrifice pushing. A Sway of Failure +1 against would Sensitivity: The client and provider, as Heads Up: no information. cancel out, while Sway ofcan +2defend against +1 the representedLie byabout a Black and Red die, to can’t the crew’s abilities move +1 Sway. Can be used with spots.aDeception against Deception: client’s spot play with “poker face” would push one space on the tracker. share a space on the tracker until the very end To Begin: Black + Leadership / 2 (rounded up, to a max of five rounds) equals the number of turns. Failure means Leadership: Rounds: The number of exchanges that of negotiations. such, any unopposed roundsAs are rolledwhile secretly. To End: Success has Black meet Red at the higher price, and failure brings Red down to Black at the lower price. take place before negotiations have to agree Sway results in a movement of the dice, Determining Price on a price. A round consists of one attempt when the dice rest across from each other to gain Sway by the client and one attempt by they are said to be “Heads Up.” At this point, To Start: Player makes a Leadership check (see above) the provider. Rounds are usually separated by movement requires overpowering the other Heads Up: Red and Black cannot be parallel while in negotiation. Each die resolves at the same time (moving Scams. party’s Sway. simultaneously once both parties have spoken). It takes 1 Sway to advance unopposed, but in head up, dice only advance by pushing (negating an opponent’s Sway and having some left over) Provider (Black): the person seeking to get paid forOnproviding a goodplayer or service. Fixing Price: the last round, makes aThe Leadership Where check. On Do aI success, Put theBlack DIce?moves right and parallel with the Red (higher price). On a failure, Red moves left until parallel with Black. Parallel dice indicate the providers are the PCs. On the Sway Tracker, The center path on the Tracker is where the agreed upon price. the provider is always represented by a Black price is set. When negotiations end, the two Undercutting: Competition will try to undercut agreed upon prices, unless eliminated or left out because die. dice finally rest on the same space and come the PCs are “preferred providers” of a job line. Resisting an undercut requires a successful CHA check or a every Taker in athe crew notgoes involved Scams: dedicated scame. Failure means price down one space; critical meansUntil two spaces. PCs dice undercutting to “meet” infailure the center. then, the competition always succeed (there must be a game), but they start on “As a Favor” on the tracker. in negotiation can perform one action move on separate tracks and in opposed between rounds of conversation, called directions. scams. Scams can provide the negotiator The Black represents the Taker doing a variety of bonuses (see p. 339). It is negotiations. It moves along the bottom space understood that scams take place before or of the tracker, starting at the “Buyer’s Market” during the conversation between client and step. It might start underneath the “As A provider, and the scenes in which they are Favor” step if one of the following happened. Clients Have... Nomenclature

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• Everyone in the crew failed prep work and they bid on the contract late. • The crew already passed up a contract after negotiation and they’re trying to undercut competition. • The negotiator critically failed the opening Leadership check.

Like “As a Favor,” “Buyer’s Market” indicates the negotiator failed to convey the crew’s limited availability and unique skill set. But at least working for half the price is a oneoff failure, without complicating social issues that follow the crew’s brand.

If the Leadership critically succeeds, the Black can start on “At Value.” The Red represents the client. It moves along the spaces above the tracker. The client always starts at the “Expenses” step.

“Contract is offered that value of Supply + Demand (Black + Red)”

As a Favor

“The contract is offered at the Demand price only (Black result only on the equilibrium check) and the client earns a Rep Spot to use against the crew in future negotiations.” The price of the contract is only the Black result on the equilibrium check. Whereas B9/ R6 would normally mean 15 Bounty, doing it “As a Favor” means it’s only worth 9 Bounty. Frankly, the client doesn’t care how much supply is available. They’re in no hurry, feel no pressure, and remain confident they can find a dozen other people willing to do the work. In order to keep the client from waiting for a more favorable price, the crew must bid the job below its acknowledged market value. To make matters worse, they also have to make a major concession in the form of a rep spot as they beg for work. Agreeing to do a contract “As a Favor” is a total failure of business acumen and common sense. It only occurs when the client has completely outclassed the provider’s negotiator. The Takers will be lucky to be able to pay enclave rent by the end of the session. Feeding their families and recouping costs? Yeah right. “As a favor” equates to begging; the crew has to use the promise of future favors to convince the client to take a chance on them.

Buyer's Market

“The contract is offered at the Demand price only.”

At Value

Agreeing to do a contract “At Value” is still an enormous hardship for most Takers. The Market determines the equilibrium for a good or service with a dice check on the Supply/ Demand chart (see p. 363). Takers may have manipulated the equilibrium with Scams before the price was agreed upon, but the compensation still doesn’t account for labor, expenses, risk, or anything else. It’s the value of the good and/or service as if it fell from the sky. Unless the crew is minimally equipped and staffed, it’s almost certain the Takers will be losing bounty on the job. Takers that didn’t do the prep work (p. 324) only learn the equilibrium of a good/service when they reach the “At Value” price point.

Labor

“Client agrees to add the crew’s break point to the price (Black+Red+crew’s break point)” Clients that agree to pay for “Labor,” begrudgingly recognize that being a Taker is an act of desperation, fueled more by responsibility than greed. Compensating labor means that the break point – the minimum amount of bounty required to keep a Taker and related Dependents alive – gets factored into the price for each member of the crew. So, for a three-person crew with break points of three, three, and four bounty, 10 bounty would be added to the total price. “Labor” adds sizably to the overall price, but it still does nothing to save against large expenditures of time or supplies. But while all lower price points are certainly exploitation, the labor price point is, at least, arguably fair.

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Hazard Pay

“Add on bounty per Taker per Leg to the price (Ex. A crew of four on a three-Leg run earns 12 bounty)” Takers that convince the client to give “Hazard Pay” have forced an acknowledgement of the danger they face. This price recognizes that every second in the Loss increases cost and risk, so the distance to the job site is taken into account. One bounty per Taker, per leg, is added to the price. “Hazard Pay” on a 3-leg job means that a 3-person crew makes 9 bounty more on the contract. It’s harder to miss out on profit when the client agrees to compensate for unforeseen hazards.

100% Mark-up

“Double the cost of the job before Labor” Takers aren’t universally regarded as heroes for a reason – they gouge the hell out of clients when the opportunity arises. Whether or not the crew is really worth the cost is irrelevant. Once clients are convinced they’re over a barrel, the truth no longer matters. When a crew gets the client to agree to a 100% mark-up, the price before labor is doubled. The Market takes the equilibrium for the contract, multiplies it by two, then adds in labor and hazard pay. Continuing the examples discussed so far, let’s say a job’s equilibrium is 15 bounty total. Add in the crew’s break point (10b) and hazard pay (9b). The price is 34b before the mark-up. After the mark-up, the equilibrium is added again. The new price is 34b + 15b = 49b.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are rearranging their prejudices. -William James 330

Unless the crew spends extravagantly or dies, it’s hard not to profit from a mark-up job. The crew can expect serious consequences, however, if they end up not being worth such an exorbitant price.

Expenses

“The equipment upkeep of every participating Taker is added into the price (no one pays upkeep this session).” Convincing the client to pay expenses means the big payday. The client recognizes that resources expended in pursuit of another person’s needs deserve to be reimbursed. At this point, the combined equipment cost of every Taker participating in the contract gets added to the price. Securing expenses effectively negates an crew’s entire overhead, aside from seriously unfortunate incidental costs. This is a dream scenario for most realworld business ventures; Taker’s should be downright thrilled when their equipment costs get reimbursed. Calculating “Expenses” is easy: nobody pays upkeep this session. If the gear is already owned, survives the contract, and can be refreshed, it automatically refreshes. Those that desire to keep their books more fastidiously can just add in the crew’s equipment cost from the Crew Sheet (p. 488).

LeadershIp Opens (StartIng NegotIatIons)

Every CHA skill has a special function in negotiations, and Leadership is foremost among them, measuring the Taker’s overall presence. How commanding is their voice? How imposing the stature? How confident the expression? Leadership determines all these aspects and the checks affect both the beginning and close of negotiation. It’s the intangible combination of variables that forgives interruptions, demands attention, and draws eyes. Since so much of human interaction is determined by these non-verbal cues, Leadership frames the whole process,

opening (see the next section) and closing negotiations (see “Leadership Closes (After Negotiations)” (p.343)).

FIrst ImpressIons

In Red Markets, a Leadership check represents the oh-so-important first impression. Succeed on a Leadership check, and the negotiation lasts longer, giving the Takers more time to push the price up. Failure means the client can sense the upper hand and use it to earn discounts. The number of rounds a negotiation lasts is always equal to the Black + Leadership, divided by two and rounded up.

On a success, negotiations last the number of rounds equal to the Black+Leadership divided by 2, and the players know it. They can plan any Scams and play spots accordingly. On a failure, the Market rolls one Black die in secret, never telling the players how many rounds they have to work with. A critical success puts the players at the next highest stage on the Sway tracker: something about the negotiator just screams “competent.” Conversely, a critical failure drops Taker’s down on the Sway track (but never below “As A Favor”).

Success also determines who talks first – the winner of the check chooses who speaks first. While simultaneous resolution (p. 332) negates most bonuses from initiative, order can inform roleplaying and might be crucial to an Intimidation check to end talks early.

The Task of the NegotIator (DurIng Rounds)

Successful negotiation is a group effort, but one player still has to take on the responsibility of strategically catering the roleplaying to secure the best possible dice checks. The negotiator has to deal with the client face-to-face, and the blame for a bum deal usually only falls on the one in the room. Players that prioritize CHA skills to build the best negotiators possible represent a core truth of economics: interpersonal skills always have value. History has shown that, no matter how dire survival circumstances may get, there are always some that manage to survive through wits alone. The “soft skills” required to deal with people may not decapitate a zombie or stitch a wound, but the boardroom secures the bounty necessary for such feats. Being the negotiator doesn’t mean you can’t have any action movie moments in the Loss, but it does means those moments are a poor allocation of resources. Negotiators have people for that; who is going to get the big

Why Leadership? Neuroscience and sociology suggests that, more often than not, people judge each other in seconds and spend the rest of the interaction compiling a narrative that justifies their snap decisions. When you walk into a job interview, the boss likely knows whether you got the job the moment you walk through the door. The discussion only exists for as long as it takes for the boss to explain his own irrational choice. Some people know how to manipulate the instantaneous prejudices of others. In negotiations, Leadership measures that ability.

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payday if you go down? Haggling over a card table in a disused storage unit may not be quite as grand as the conference rooms and car dealerships where the negotiator honed the necessary skills, but the stakes have never been higher.

Non-NegotIables

Certain aspects of the negotiation mechanics are essential if the game is to work properly. Payment on DelIvery Nobody dumb enough to bring the money to the meeting lasted five years in the Loss. The PCs never have the option of just sticking up the client and making a run for it. Additionally, no one is dumb enough to pay in advance either, so no one can grab a contract and stop returning calls. As for the clients refusing to pay once the job is done... that’s always a possibility. But then again, that’s one of the many reasons Takers tend to carry all those weapons. One on One No one negotiates terms individually with every single worker in a company. To that end, there should never be a situation where five PCs shout over each other while debating with a single employer. Negotiations are personal affairs. The crew elects somebody to represent their interests, and that person goes in. The representative makes all the skill checks and calls the shots as to strategies. If other players want to help, they can pull a Scam (see p. 339). Though some Scams put other PCs in the room, only one person can make the skill check that round. Nobody can fail a check, then tag in someone else to try again – that violates the “one-and-done” rule.

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ClIents are Competent Like in combat, the Market never rolls for the rhetorical attacks of the client. If the client wants to move one Sway, the client automatically can. If the client wants to make a Sensitivity check to learn one of the PC’s spots, it automatically succeeds. When a

No man is wholly free. He is a slave to wealth, or to fortune, or the laws, or the people restrain him from acting according to his will alone. -Euripides client plays that spot, they automatically get +1 Sway, unless the provider is successful at Deception. Assume that the client earned enough bounty to hire a crew by being good in business; they will dominate the negotiation unless the Takers pull Scams and leverage spots. Heads Up The Black and the Red can never intersect on the tracker until the very end of the negotiation. If the final Leadership test fails, clients push prices down to meet providers. If the Leadership check succeeds, providers move the price up to meet the client. Otherwise, the dice can only ever be unopposed (open spaces on either side) or heads up. When dice are heads up, they lock horns and push each other according to who has the most Sway. No References Takers cannot succeed-at-cost by tapping a Reference during negotiations. Failing to impress the client is bad enough, but pausing the conversation to phone a friend is only going to make things worse. References can be used to repair failed checks in Scams, but Will is the only mediator for failure in the negotiation itself. SImultaneous ResolutIon There is no mechanical bonus for going first. Dice representing the provider and client do not move until both have had their say that round. Players should keep this simultaneous resolution in mind when planning strategy; it affects the way dice become heads up and push Sway.

Sway SkIlls

Sway refers to a character’s combined influence: political, financial, rhetorical, etc. Make a successful check on a CHA skill to gain one Sway. Make a successful check that exploits a spot? That’s two Sway. The only problem is that Sway cancels Sway. Clients and providers that are heads up and wielding the same Sway stay deadlocked. The only way to make progress is to play spots for leverage at the right time. All CHA skills have some function in the fight for Sway in negotiations, in addition to their normal functions (see “List of Skills” p. 203). These special uses are detailed here. PersuasIon Persuading a neighbor to turn down the music is one thing; convincing him to fund a suicide mission is quite another. Persuasion is the primary means of moving across the Sway tracker. A success on a Persuasion check

moves +1 Sway, and a success is necessary to defend against an opponent’s Sway when dice are heads up (unable to move without sharing a space). Leveraging a weak, soft, or tough spot – or using a +Rep spot – requires the player to work that information into their pitch. If the Market deems the information properly incorporated, playing the spot is worth +1 Sway even if the Persuasion check fails. If the negotiator is successful and the spot is used? That makes a success worth +2 Sway. Knowing when to bank on simple success for a +1 and when to gamble on a spot for a +2 is the key to good negotiation. Persuasion can also be used to prevent an undercut by competition, so long as the negotiator advocates paying a premium price for premium quality. On a success, the client views the competition as “bargain bin” and sticks with the quality providers. A failure means the crew has to meet the competition’s

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Where Roleplaying and Dice Meet What rhetorical appeal counts for what skill? It can be difficult to tell sometimes. Let’s assume a Taker asks the client, “Can you really sleep at night, knowing those things are piling up against the gate?” Is it a Sensitivity check, meant to gauge the client’s grit? Is it a Persuasion check, a strictly rhetorical question meant as a pathetic appeal? Or is it Intimidation, meant to scare the client at the prospect of losing this crew of Takers? In edge cases such as the example above, Market’s are encouraged to ask players their intention out-ofcharacter and let them make whatever skill check they planned their roleplaying around. However, the Market gets final say on what mechanical skills the roleplaying qualifies for. Takers can’t “convince” a client they really will cut his tongue out if he doesn’t hire them, no matter how many more points they might have in Persuasion. That’s an Intimidation, plain and simple. Players are always allowed to “rewind” the story and roleplay a different appeal if the Market vetos their play. price in order to keep the contract. In summary, during negotiation Persuasion can do the following: • On a success, move the Black +1 Sway up by pitching your crew’s abilities. Example: “We’re still alive; that’s the greatest recommendation a crew can have. We can get this job done, and we’ll be here when you need us again.” • Incorporate a spot into roleplay for a +1 Sway bonus, regardless of success or failure. Example: (for the soft spot: Animal Lover) “Have you met Fido? He’s really our manager. We’d be lost out there without our boy, wouldn’t we Fido? WOULDN’T WE?!” • On a success, convince a client to stay away from competition. Example: “Look, if you want to trust a bunch of cultists with your money, that’s your business. But my crew doesn’t have an ideology; as long as your bounty spends, we get the job done without distractions.” SensItIvIty Good negotiation is about reading the opponent, but since the mark is competent,

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no information is offered willingly. Still, particularly observant negotiators can spend a full round on a digression, asking a question or talking just to gauge the opponent’s reaction. If the Taker’s Sensitivity check is successful, they learn one of the client’s spots and can exploit it in the next round. The problem is that playing mind games wastes time that could be spent pushing the price and isn’t guaranteed to succeed. That’s why learning a prospective client’s spots so often ends up being one or more of the crew’s Scams. In summary, Sensitivity can do the following in negotiations: • Sacrifice a turn to make a check. On a success, learn one of the client’s spots. Example: “Seems a little odd, keeping such an average job so hush-hush. What’s really going on here?” DeceptIon The client needs a combat specialist with experience in military-grade computer encryption and paratrooper certification. The most badass occupation anyone in your crew had before the Crash was “Temp.” So, it’s time to lie on your resume. Deception is used to make promises the negotiator has no intention of keeping or bullshitting about the team’s abilities. More

often than not, Deception checks only arise when the crew is trying to exploit a contract’s tough spot without the required expertise to do so. The Market calls for the Deception check to see if the client buys it. Deception designed to exploit a client’s spot works the same way as with Persuasion. The player must have learned the spot through an action and it must be present in the character’s pitch. But, if those requirements are met, the bonus +1 Sway always happens. A more common use of the Deception skill is to resist a client’s use of a spot. If the NPC learns the negotiator’s weak, soft, or tough spot by sacrificing a turn to Sensitivity, they can play it automatically for +2 Sway. The only hope the negotiator has is maintaining a poker face, hiding the emotional impact of the barb, and forcing the opponent onto another tactic. A successful Deception check reduces the Sway of clients playing a spot down to the +1 Sway of a normal success. Finally, Deception can be used to prevent competition from undercutting an agreedupon price. Get the client to believe a lie about the other crew’s reputation and tie the job down. If this strategy is overused, however, the Market may give out -Rep spots for slandering fellow Takers. In summary, Deception can do the following in negotiations: • On a success, lie about a crew’s abilities for +1 Sway. Example: “Oh yeah. We’ve got a couple of anti-material rifles actually. Those tanks won’t be a problem.” • Incorporate a spot into roleplay for a +1 Sway bonus, regardless of success or failure. Example: (for the soft spot: The Faithful Must Stick Together) “I, too, drink deep the holy blood of the Immune, brother! You need not worry about me selling the details of your little human farm to, say... relatives thirsty for revenge.”

• On a success, negate the bonus Sway of a client exploiting one of the Taker’s spots. Example: “Well, I’m glad you did the research on my church, but all that God stuff is really just good for networking. I don’t let it affect my work, you know.” • On a success, lie to scare the client away from competition. Example: “Okay... but don’t let them lure you into a dark alley. I think they recently sold the last of the organs leftover from their previous ‘client.’”

Bust Rule: No HIdIng the Truth

For added difficulty, a GM can disallow the use of Deception to resist client’s playing spots on characters. Clients are competent, after all, and their shots always land. The only way to weather the abuse is to bring more social ammo to the table. For even more challenge, the Market might say particularly brutal verbal jousts provoke Self-Control checks. IntImIdatIon The eye contact, intimacy, and trust of goodnatured haggling run counter to the prisonyard mentality that rules much of the Loss. Survivors carry a lot of baggage, and many aren’t keen to have a stranger rifling through it in an attempt to squeeze a few more bounty out of a deal. Clients that push too many emotional buttons might find themselves reminded their employees are experienced killers. For the cost of one turn, Takers make an Intimidation check to scare NPCs away from any further Sensitivity attempts or from playing spots. On a success, the negotiator’s dead stare or whispered threat is enough to dissuade the client. On a failure, they “doth protest too much” and reveal a spot in the process. Players can end a negotiation early by threatening to walk out with Intimidation. Empty threats to leave the room are great for negotiations that go well early but face the

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challenge of additional rounds without the resources to accrue more Sway. Intimidation cuts the conversation off early, allowing Takers to quit while ahead on a success. Finally, Intimidation is another skill available to prevent competition from undercutting the final price. Roleplay a threat to rivals and make an Intimidation check. On a success, the other crew withdraws their bid. In summary, Intimidation can do the following in negotiations: • Sacrifice a turn to make a check. On a success, the client can’t learn any more spots. Example: “Stick to business. You try to get in my head again? I’ll paint yours across the wall.” • On a success, force an early end to negotiations. Instead of simultaneous resolution, negotiations end the moment the Taker succeeds. The process moves directly on to “Leadership Closes” (p. 343) and price fixing. On a failure, the client doesn’t buy the threat. Example: “I don’t have time to prattle all day with you. You want to risk your bounty with some Bait-ass crew, be my guest. I got shit to do.” • On a success, scare a competitor into removing their undercut for the contract. Example: “You can snake my job and lose a lot of bounty paying your medical bills, or you could keep walking and save us both the trouble.”

Bust Rule: Peasants Don’t Scare Me To add challenge, Markets can disallow Intimidation checks to prevent further Sensitivity reads by the client. No one gets enough bounty to hire out Takers by being shit at reading people. In this Bust variant, sacrificing a turn means the client learns a spot. Always.

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LeadershIp Leadership’s use in negotiations is dealt with more in depth in “Leadership Opens” section (see p. 330) PlayIng Spots Adam Smith may have believed in rational choice, but no logic survives contact with a human. Even the most deadened sociopaths have buttons to push, and negotiation rewards emotional manipulation above all else. Playing spots is all about leveraging an opponent for maximum profit. Once the dice go heads up on the Sway tracker, the only way to break the deadlock without giving in is to get the other party to start thinking irrationally. Spots are the most powerful weapons either side can use in a negotiation and absolutely essential to success. You don’t have to play spots to negotiate – just to win. Spots At-A-Glance All spots must be learned, either through Scams or through Sensitivity, before they can be played. Spots for Takers to use against Clients: • Weak Spot: Work a mention or exploitation of the client’s personal flaws into the roleplaying for a bonus +1 Sway. • Soft Spot: Work a mention or exploitation of the client’s virtues into the roleplaying for a bonus +1 Sway. • Tough Spot: Work a mention or exploitation of the contract’s requirements into the roleplaying for a bonus +1 Sway. • +Rep Spots: If the crew has earned a +Rep Spot for a notable deed, work it into the roleplay for a bonus +1 Sway and erase the +Rep Spot from the crew sheet. Spots for Clients to use against Takers • Sensitivity: Clients can sacrifice a turn to learn one spot of the provider in negotiations. They never start off knowing spots unless they’ve already worked with

crew in a job line, but they always succeed on Sensitivity checks. • Character Spots: The spots listed on the negotiator’s character sheet, once learned, can be incorporated into the Market’s roleplay for a bonus +1 Sway. Takers may be able to resist the bonus with a successful Deception check. • Gift Spot: Once per negotiation, a client may “sweeten the pot” with a piece of gear, earning a bonus +1 Sway. No skill can resist this Sway bonus. • -Rep Spot: If the crew has done something unprofessional, incompetent, or dishonest in the past, the client can use it once for a bonus +1 Sway. No skill can resist this Sway bonus. RoleplayIng Challenge Playing a spot is, above all, a roleplaying challenge. The entire negotiation mechanic already requires some careful acting if the negotiator is to utilize the best skill for a given check. Saying “I’ll kill you if you don’t give me the job” isn’t exactly persuasive, and the difference between Persuasion and Intimidation skills might be a +3. The negotiating player that can’t cater their

character’s speech to the dice is putting the fate of everyone in the hands of blind luck. Since spots are so powerful, incorporating one increases the roleplaying challenge even more. Now, instead of merely catering their speech to maximize the impact of skills, the negotiator has to work the spot into the pitch as well. So if a group has a skilled improvisor amongst their ranks, maximize the crew’s profits by having the thespian play a highCHA negotiator. The challenge then becomes keeping the golden goose character alive when it comes time to fight. GIft Spots A gift spot is an intrusion of the barter system on negotiations. Everyone likes presents; when they might keep you from being eaten alive, it’s really hard to be ungrateful. A client can offer the crew a piece of gear for free and get an automatic +1 Sway for “sweetening the pot.” The gear doesn’t have to be useful, and it’s up to the crew to decide who keeps the profits or pays the upkeep, but the gift always works. The client cannot use a gift spot more than once in a negotiation, but the gesture can’t be denied without committing a social faux pas that cuts off negotiations altogether.

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Markets should take care to make sure the gift warrants the extra Sway, though. Bribing the Takers with an extra Haul of rations is condescending rather than ingratiating. Rep Spots In long-term play, the Market offers Rep spots for particularly noteworthy actions. When the Takers are documented or witnessed doing something heroic or impressive, the crew gains a +Rep spot. During negotiations, they can play a +Rep spot for an automatic +1 Sway, regardless of the associated skill check’s result. The same rule applies for public disgrace and failure. In the event the Takers get caught being unprofessional, the crew’s reputation gets damaged. Clients can burn a -Rep spot for an automatic +2 Sway. No skill check can prevent this maneuver.

Bust Rule: The Loss Never Forgets

In this variant, reputation never goes away. It can be used in every negotiation, by both the client and the Takers. The only way to get rid of a -Rep spot is for the crew to burn a +Rep spot to cancel it out. If the crew chooses to level out its karmic accounts, erase both the + and -Rep spots from the crew sheet. LImIted Usage Whether used by the client or by the Taker, each spot can only be used once per negotiation, and sometimes only once per campaign. All characters have weak, soft, and tough spots, but wailing on them over and over creates bad blood and breaks contracts. Each one may only be played once per negotiation, and only after it has been learned. The only way to replay a spot would be if the same negotiator and client met again as part of job line, but even then, the client’s tough spot would shift to reflect the new contract. Similarly, gift spots are irresistible, but the client can’t endlessly bury a crew in presents.

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The first gift is hard to argue with, but the cost of fencing extra crap would make any contract not worth it. Clients only get one gift spot per session. Both + and -Rep spots are “burned” once they are used. The Loss has a short memory, and using the crew’s brand for or against them has a limited shelf life. Once the spot is used, it can’t be used again in any other negotiations during that campaign. However, there are some Bust rules that make Rep spots reusable. Always Powerful; SometImes Enough Spots always count for +1 Sway, regardless of whether the associated skill succeeds or fails. Leverage remains leverage even when inexpertly applied. Example: So, let’s say Whitman wants to employ the Tough Spot: Time is of the Essence. He’s heads up with the client and needs the extra push. The character says, “The Philosopher Kings aren’t only professional; we’re available. We have no other obligations at this time, and we can start work immediately.” Whitman’s player rolls B6+2/R8. Damn! Ties go to the Market. The reminder of the ticking clock is good for +1 Sway, but his delivery seems paper-thin. It won’t be enough to push the client, but using the spot at least keeps the dice where they are for this round.

Bust Rule: All or NothIng

For an increased challenge, the spot means nothing if the associated check fails. That means playing a spot can result in either 0 or 2 Sway: nothing inbetween. The spot is gone after the check is made, even if the skill failed. DefendIng AgaInst ManIpulatIon One non-negotiable is that clients are competent. So long as a turn’s not being sacrificed to learn a spot, the client always has at least +1 Sway available to them. The same goes for playing spots against the PC. The client’s success is assumed, unless the

player makes a successful Deception check. Deception is the only way to cut the +2 Sway from a spot down to the regular +1 Sway. Like an Athletics check used to dodge an attack, it’s best to think of Deception as a twitch action compelled by someone attacking a character’s spots. The skill check doesn’t even have to represent any actual speech; it could be something as simple as a poker face. If the Deception check succeeds, the client’s Sway drops down to +1 again, allowing the provider to push the price by playing a spot of their own. ObtaInIng Spots For the cost of a turn, negotiators can check Sensitivity to learn a client’s spot in the moment. But turns are precious and time spent reading the audience isn’t spent working it. It’s best to know what makes clients tick before ever even meeting them, and that’s where Scams come in...

Scams (Inbetween Rounds)

Clients seemingly hold all the cards in a negotiation. They have the bounty to pay, a desperate workforce, and all the time in the world. But successful crews don’t leave anything to chance when it comes to a payday and, as far as the Loss goes, they’re the experts. The whole crew cooperates to fleece the client as much as possible. PCs not directly negotiating with the client engage in Scams that boost the price, sabotage the competition, and support their negotiator’s plays. Players that don’t want to play a CHAheavy character but still want to contribute to negotiations should read the following and familiarize themselves with Scams.

Scams At-A-Glance

Scams are actions roleplayed between negotiation rounds, taking place before or concurrent with the negotiator/client conversation.

• Scams are only available between negotiation rounds. A three-round negotiation would only have two Scams: between rounds one and two, and between rounds two and three. • Each Taker may only perform one Scam. - MBA Rules: A Taker might be afforded one, two, or no Scams, depending on Work/Life balance. • The skills used in a Scam and the number of checks required depends on the context of the scene decided on between the scammer and the Market. • Each Scam can only fulfill one of five possible purposes: - Partners in Crime: The scammer is in the room with the negotiator. They can “step in” and perform a CHA skill check instead of the negotiator. - Negotiator Support: A scammer’s actions provide the negotiator a one time +2 bonus to one of the negotiator’s skills. - Discourage Competition: The scammer sabotages competitors and prevents an undercut. - Price Manipulation: The scammer’s actions add bounty to the equilibrium price equal to the natural Black of their check. - Intelligence Gathering: The scammer learned one of the client’s Spots, providing more leverage for the negotiator.

NonlInear TIme

Planning in RPGs can be laborious, hindering the progression of the story. Also, even if a group cooperates well enough to agree on a scheme quickly, once that scheme is executed, everyone at the table is still stuck watching the provider and client talk. Scams are designed to prevent both problems and keep the game engaging for everyone. To this end, Scams operate off of nonlinear time. What does that mean? In the middle of conversation, if it turns out the negotiator really needs to know the client’s weak spot,

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one of the other crew members can use a Scam to say they figured it out already and relayed the intel before the negotiation even started. How did the crew know they’d need that information? Because they’ve been surviving in the Loss for five years, that’s how. Alternately, if the negotiator needs a distraction that very second in order to assist a Deception check, a coworker can spend their Scam to trigger a diversion as the negotiation is going. It doesn’t matter if the Scam happened before or during negotiations, so long as the skill check succeeds, the scheme succeeds. At the table, Scams always take place between rounds of a negotiation: after both provider and client have determined their Sway but before the next round starts. While the scam can determine whether the character is acting before or during the conversation, the player always describes that action between one round and the next.

“Nonlinawha?” Anyone who has ever seen a heist movie or read a novel knows how nonlinear, time-hopping story structures work. What at first seems like an insurmountable obstacle ends up having been conquered at a previous point in the narrative.. a point left out by the author until such a time as a flashback could relieve that artificial suspense. For instance, it looks like the Ocean’s gang is going to be caught.. until we find out they’re disguised as the SWAT team. Voldermort has certainly won.. until we learn about the secret histories that both Dumbledore and Snape have been hiding for six books. It’s a cheap writing technique, but it’s less of a copout in games: those flashbacks still need to be played out in the moment and the dice don’t always cooperate. If the scheme failed, but the negotiator had to go ahead regardless, it still makes for satisfying drama rather than stopping the negotiation dead. A failed Scam can only ever deny a bonus. It’s never a matter of life or death..

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LImIted Resources

Scams are limited to the number of the players outside of negotiations. In a 3-person crew, two Scams would be available: one for each player outside the conversation. The negotiator cannot scam because their work action is used actually talking to the client (see “Work/Life Balance” p. 434). Scams are also limited to one or two skill checks apiece – also keep in mind that References can be tapped to succeed at cost during Scams. It’s not possible to interrupt a tense negotiation to phone a friend, but Scams operate off nonlinear time. Between planning the Scam, executing it, and roleplaying any networking used to compensate for failure, a complex Scam could eat up ten minutes of time at the table. The goal is to keep any single player from dominating the spotlight entirely, so players aren’t encouraged to go off on never-ending, one-man side quests. MBA Rules and Work/LIfe Balance In its basic form, Red Markets assumes the Work/Life Balance of every character. Takers get one vignette with their family (life), and they get one action to help the crew (work) either through scamming or negotiating. The MBA Rules make available a variety of other actions that PCs might want to engage in, but the opportunity cost of the Work/ Life Balance still exists. This means some characters might get two scams by sacrificing time with family, or no scams by focusing on their loved ones. For more detailed rules on this advanced style of play, see p. 424.

The Targets of Scams

Like “Prep Work” (p. 324), players can propose the use of any skill in a Scam so long as it might reasonably get the job done. But, regardless of its design, Scams can only serve one of five mechanical functions. IntellIgence GatherIng Any time a negotiator wants to figure out the opponent’s spot, it requires sacrificing an entire turn for an uncertain Sensitivity check.

Considering the power of playing spots, the risky fishing expedition may very well be worth it, but it requires perfect timing. Successful Takers know their clients before they even meet them. A great way to use a Scam is to figure out a client’s spot before they ever walk into the room. Lots of ADP, INT, and CHA skills can get the crew insider information, provided they have the leisurely time limit of a scam. Example Intel Gathering Scams: • Hack into a client’s internet history using Profession: Hacker, learning about the boss’s embarrassing addiction to some very questionable genres of pornography. • Pick an assistant’s pocket with Criminality to learn the client’s tough spot. • Tail the client with Sneak, and then use Sensitivity to read one of their spots. • Contact an old squadmate back in the Recession with Networking. Maybe she has dirt on this Steward you have to deal with. PrIce ManIpulatIon Price manipulation Scams seek to alter the equilibrium price of the contract. The Market determines the initial equilibrium by rolling on the Supply/Demand chart (see p. 363). The Black and Red determine the quadrant on the chart and what kind of scams Takers can perform to alter the fundamental price of what they are selling. On the final dice check determining the success or failure of the scam, success adds a number of bounty equal to the natural result of the Black. Critical success maxes the added bounty out at 11. Failure doesn’t alter the equilibrium at all. Example Price Manipulation Scams: • Puncture holes in the jugs storing the water reserve, decreasing supply to increase demand. • Secure a hiding spot for the salvaged generators off-site, creating an artificial scarcity to keep demand constant

• Preach about the coming apocalypse to the fearful refugees, driving up demand for guns. • Spread internet propaganda about the dangers of the job site, decreasing the competition of other Takers to increase your crew’s payment. Partners In CrIme Good cop/bad cop, straight man/cut-up... there are a variety of rhetorical strategies that require more than one person. Players can forgo their opportunity to scam if they want to be in the room with the negotiator. The non-negotiable of “One-on-one” (see p. 322) still applies – no one can shout down the client as a PC hive-mind choir – but being the room allows the other Taker to “tag into” negotiations. There can still only be one person speaking to the client for any given round and the person speaking is still allowed only one CHA-related check. So no one can fail a Persuasion check and then immediately have their partner make another Persuasion check, and neither Taker can use References once engaged in the negotiation. Though both parties are unable to scam, they can alternate using their skills and play to each Taker’s strengths. For example, if the convincingly earnest negotiator finds herself in need of some bullshit, the duplicitous bastard can step in for a Deception check. Two middling negotiators can add up to a great one, with the right cooperation. Remember: neither party is guaranteed success, and both are cut off from the powerful support positions played by those outside the negotiation. NegotIator Support Supporting the negotiator’s rolls means somehow being present for the negotiator in the room, either physically or through reputation. While intel gathering makes certain rolls possible (such as playing spots), supporting the negotiator provides a one-time +2 bonus.

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Example Negotiator Support Scams: • Using Profession: Computer Science to skim the wireless traffic from the client’s fitness watch, monitoring the heartrate for signs of lying, and feeding data to the negotiator (+2 to Sensitivity) • Using Profession: Herbalist to ease a mother’s gout, thus securing her son’s – the client – gratitude (+2 to Persuasion) • Using Criminality to plant oneself in a “random” crowd and Deception to act surprised when the provider proves she can read minds (+2 to Deception) • Using Networking to convince a Reference to soften the client up with stories of this terrifyingly badass crew of Takers in the area (+2 to Intimidation) DIscourage CompetItIon One or more Takers can use their Scam to discourage competition, thus preventing the undercut at the end of a negotiation. After all, if all the other crews in the enclave are too busy being on fire to take on new clients, that’s a powerful bargaining chip. Eliminating

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all possible competition in the vicinity even provides the +Rep spot “Only Game in Town.” However, enclaves and settlements have their own laws, and outright murdering other people within the borders tends to be illegal. Less deadly sabotage – dosing all their rations with laxative, for instance – still risks repercussions from the authorities and the sabatoged crew. Groups antagonizing the competition regularly or overtly can expect -Rep spots and ambush out in the Loss. Ruthlessness only works in the short term, and even then only if the group is smart enough to hide it. Markets should make sure that their players understand that gunning down their rivals can never be done with total impunity. At the minimum, successful sociopathy still costs ammo and Humanity. Shady business practices can help or hurt the bottom line in equal measure. Example Discourage Competition Scams: • Using Leadership to stir up public fervor, insisting that the other crew are “the only ones who can be trusted” to take on a

certain enclave contract... distracting them from the more lucrative job. • Using Criminality to break in to the rival crew’s HQ. With all their weapons disassembled and hidden about the enclave, it’s going to be hard to go over the fence. • Using Intimidation to convince the crew to find another client... or else. • Using Unarmed to start a bar fight with the rival negotiator. It’s hard to use a silver tongue with your jaw wired shut.

LeadershIp Closes (After NegotIatIons)

What tips the scales in haggling? Most of the time, even experts can’t point to the straw that breaks a negotiator’s resolve. As with the beginning of Negotiations (see “Leadership Opens” p. 330), the Leadership skill measures all the variables in the Taker’s personality that can affect the price. It takes one final dice check to agree on a price. Then players deal with the competition and decide whether it’s time to suit up. Leadership closes negotiations by determining who ultimately compromises on the price. The dice representing the two parties can’t lock horns forever: someone is going to have to come down or go up to agree on a price. Was the client impressed enough to pay more than planned, or do the Takers make a concession for fear of going hungry? It’s a test of personality to see who breaks first. The negotiator rolls a Leadership check. On a success, the provider’s die (Black) moves up to meet the client’s die (Red), ensuring a higher price. On a failure, the client’s die (Red) goes down to meet the provider’s die (Black), and the Takers give up a final concession. In short, success means the Takers get more bounty, failure means they get less.

UndercuttIng

A successful Networking check gets the players first shot at a job, but competition can

What If the dIce don’t meet?

If negotiations have been disastrous and the dice aren’t even close to a compromise, there are two ways to fix the price. Boom Rule: the Taker makes a Leadership check all the same. Success moves the price up, failure brings it down... even if the dice are three boxes apart. This means that an uncertain, rocky conversation can end up working out based off the Taker’s sheer force of personality. Bust Rule: the price always goes down. If the dice aren’t head’s up, the client only goes down to meet the Taker. If they wanted more bounty, they should have pushed harder for it. attempt to undercut the final price to steal the contract. Competition always tries to steal jobs after the price has been set, providing one last challenge for the negotiator. Resisting the undercut requires someone in the crew to somehow convince the competition to back down or the client to pay for quality. If either of those tactics fails, the crew has to meet the competition’s price to keep the job. If the check critically fails, the crew has to go one step lower than the undercut on the Sway tracker to keep their contract. Once an attempt to undercut the PCs has been made, the NPCs won’t make another – undercutting is a one-and-done move. Failing the Prep Work (p. 324) checks required to find a job means the Takers are the ones that must undercut their competition in order to get access to negotiations. This starts the negotiations at the lowest possible price on the Sway Tracker. It’s possible to undercut in order “to get a foot in the door” only to end up negotiating a higher price, but doing so requires more skill from the negotiator. Though undercutting is limited and can’t reduce prices infinitely, it’s still a dangerous maneuver available to competitors. The

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primary appeal of using scams to eliminate competition is preventing this stressful and potentially damaging check. This is also one of the benefits of chasing job lines early: groups that are the preferred providers for a client don’t have to worry about competitors undercutting them.

BackIng Out

PCs aren’t obligated to take a job they don’t feel pay enough. When negotiations fail, they can move on to another job the Market has created, or one can be randomly generated (see p. 358). However, everyone should be forewarned that all economies move in cycles and waiting too long for the perfect job could mean passing it by. In the Carrion Economy, a number of factors give the markets their seasons. The weather plays a part. War against the dead is easier in winter, but it costs more in gear and supplies. The summer means a lower overhead, but more danger from casualties and other factions. Clients from the Recession only hire out contracts as they can afford to, which keeps most of the apocalyptic wasteland marching to the same “1st and 15th” monthly beat as the old world. So Takers don’t have to take the first thing that comes along, but they can’t afford to waste time either. There is a finite amount of work in every cycle, and starvation keeps a much more demanding schedule. The opportunity lost by turning down a job is represented by the starting positions on the Sway tracker. If a group turns down a job because they’re dissatisfied with how negotiations worked out, the competition gets that job. The next job they pursue starts them in the “As a Favor” section of the tracker. Furthermore, while players get another Scam in a Boom game, a Bust game leaves the group with whatever is left over after the first negotiation. In either case, resources and Will spent on failed haggling don’t come back.

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Example NegotIatIon

Basic Premise Wyeth, Ghede, and Fern run the Voodun outfit. We’ll refer to each as the combined entity that is a PC rather than cluttering the text with separate player/character names. Voodun just got off the ground, so they haven’t had a chance to open any job lines yet. They only have freelance jobs available. Voodun is negotiating with another Taker that goes by the handle of Splenda. Splenda has been hired to contract some protection for a group of wealthy Recession businessmen that want to go on “safari” out in the Loss. But while they want some simulated danger hunting casualties, they need experienced Takers to prevent that danger from becoming real. Prep Work Voodun just got off the ground, so they haven’t had a chance to open any job lines yet. They only have freelance jobs available. Wyeth goes first, spending a charge of his Ubiq Specs to make a Networking check. He succeeds and asks “What contracts are available?” He learns of a security detail job being offered by a Taker in the area named Splenda. Fern uses Networking as well and also succeeds. She could ask a follow-up question, but she decides she wants more options. She asks for another contract. Fern hears rumors that a group of rebels are willing to pay big for water purification tablets. After some discussion, it’s decided that it’s better to sign up for the security job; the group is pretty well-armed, but they don’t have any vehicles to carry salvaged goods and would be leaving bounty behind for every box of tablets left behind. If negotiations don’t go well with Splenda, Voodun can still try to negotiation for the rebel’s job at a penalty. Ghede decides to use Intimidation on local snitch called Crab. The check fails, but Ghede decides he really wants more information and taps Crab as a Reference: if he can’t scare him into talking, he can bribe him. He asks, “What will the security job likely require?”

The Market thinks about Ghee’s request. The answer would give away one of the client’s spots, specifically the Tough Spot: Absolute Discretion Required. Breaking quarantine is widely illegal, and powerful men won’t risk their positions for a little fun without guarantees. Since learning spots is reserved for Scams, the Market leaves that information out, but he does reveal where the group plans to hunt. Turns out Crab has heard about the proposed casualty hunt: the obvious choice is Ivory Plains, a gated community with a sealed off and finite population of undead. The group now knows the job is going to be five Legs away. Such a journey is risky, but it can make for a hell of a payday if the price point is right. Leadership Opens Wyeth is elected as the negotiator for Voodun. The Market gets out the Sway Tracker. She places a Black on “Buyer’s Market” to represent Wyeth’s lowly class. The Red goes on “Expenses,” representing the client’s comparably limitless resources After roleplaying introductions with Splenda, the Market asks Wyeth for a Leadership check. The results are B6+1/R7, a failure even with Wyeth’s skill in Leadership. Normally, this would mean that the Market would roll in secret for the number of rounds and the group wouldn’t know how many were available. Wyeth hates that idea, but he can’t use References in a negotiation. After some consideration, he spends a Will to swap the dice. Hopefully he won’t need that point later... Now that the “natural” results are B7+1/ R6, the group knows the negotiation is going to last 4 rounds (B8 divided by 2). Since Wyeth won the Leadership check, the Market asks if he wants to pitch first or respond to the client’s demands. The order can have an effect on the tracker, depending on whether the strategy is a hard initial push or a lategame burst. Wyeth, as a role-player, decides he is more comfortable going second. It gives him more information to make decisions.

Negotiation: Round 1 The Market, assuming the role of Splenda, opens with a simple Persuasion move: “We are looking for guides to accompany an already well-stocked and heavily-armed expedition. Really, your people would only be tagging along to provide some peace of mind. This contract is practically charity, so I won’t be tolerating the usual cons. I suggest you take what is offered and be grateful.” Clients are always competent and the dice aren’t heads up yet, so the Red die will move down the tracker at the end of the round. Since he’s got four rounds to work with, Wyeth figures that it’s time for the long con. He is going to burn his turn for a Sensitivity check. This could be roleplayed by simply describing the Taker’s penetrating stare, but Wyeth figures he’ll try and probe behind what Splenda’s masters told him to say. He asks, “Do you really think there is such a thing as charity? Out here?”

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Wyeth makes a Sensitivity check and gets B5/R5. Critical failure! Splenda’s demeanor remains icy and totally unimpressed. It’s so bad that the Market calls for a Self-Control check against Stress. Luckily, Wyeth makes it with B4+1/R2; he’s not quite ready to despair his chances yet.

Ghede’s Scam Things are not going well in there for Wyeth, but Ghede would have planned for such an eventuality. The Voodun representative is going to need leverage, so his scam seeks to gather intel. After some out-of-character discussion, Ghede figures corporate executives would leave some sort of electronic paper trail. Ghede doesn’t have any skills capable of sniffing out such clues, and the player fails to default off of INT. However, that doesn’t preclude calling in a favor. Ghede contacts QA, a hacker he knows at a different enclave and roleplays the request with the Market. QA goes on Ghede’s character sheet as being owed a bounty (Needy), and the NPC reports that he’s sniffed Splenda’s wireless signal and found a number of communications with Phoenix Armaments, a major weapons manufacturer in the Recession. Breaking quarantine is wildly illegal and powerful men won’t risk their positions for a little fun without guarantees. The group therefore knows the Tough Spot “Absolute Discretion Required” and can play that spot against the client. Negotiation: Round 2 The Market figures that Splenda would want to push hard, sensing weakness in the Taker’s

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failed attempt to read him. Splenda plays the -Rep spot: Sneaky Bastards, leftover from Voodun’s brutal betrayal of their competition last session: “I’m glad you asked that question. It reminds me: my bosses won’t like working with a bunch of sociopathic thugs. If you want this job, I have to neglect to mention some of your previous indiscretions. And if I’m going to do you that favor, you’re going to have to work for bottom dollar so I get my bonus.” This is a maneuver that Wyeth can’t defend against; the crew did backstab people to get previous jobs and it is on record. No amount of Deception can change that. The client’s die will move 2 Sway on the tracker, but at least the crew doesn’t have to worry about the past coming back to bite them anymore. The Market erases -Rep Spot: Sneaky Bastards from the crew sheet. Well, crap. Wyeth has a spot to play, but he doesn’t want to waste it until the dice are heads up. Since the dice resolve simultaneously, it would be a waste to use it now. He figures he’s better off with a Persuasion check: “The same problem your boss has with my people is the same reason you need us. There’s no place for scruples once you hop the fence. You want ethics? Find a philosopher. You want to stay alive? Hire Voodun.” Wyeth rolls and gets B4+3/R6. His +3 Persuasion makes that a success. The Black moves up.

Since they didn’t bother to research the current equilibrium for security jobs during prep, the Market only now rolls on the supply/ demand chart. He gets a B4/R10. That means the job is worth 14 bounty and the economy

is flooded: there are too many other security contractors competing, keeping prices down. Fern’s Scam Fern hasn’t contributed a scam yet. She wants to scare off some of the other Taker crews, decreasing supply to increase demand. Wyeth begs her not to; he needs more spots to play if this is going to work out. This kind of table talk between rounds is allowed and encouraged. It reminds everyone at the table that the crew is made up of experts that would have predicted as many possibilities as they could before meeting the client. Fern considers how she might get the inside scoop on the client. She figures that Voodun would’ve guessed a big player like Splenda would be across the table one day. Of course she’s already figured out an angle on him! Fern’s player asks the Market if she could have used Criminality to disguise herself as an average enclavist, then plied the freelancer with drinks until he let his guard down. The Market thinks that sounds plausible. Splenda works with so many Takers it’s hard to keep them straight, especially when he’s being bought drinks. Fern makes the Criminality check and gets B5+3/R9. That’s a failure. But wait! This is a scam. Fern can tap a Reference. She calls up Shifty Eddy, the most renowned pickpocket in the Loss. She pays a favor to have him lift Splenda’s backpack while the guy is busy rebuking the advances of some random barfly. Eddy finds a dozen faded photographs in the man’s wallet before returning it. Turns out Splenda has the Weak Spot: Family Man.

Nobody can turn down free military hardware in an apocalyptic wasteland. The Gift spot is worth an easy 2 Sway. The only way to resist the push is to come back with just as much leverage.

Wyeth needs to push hard, so he plays the tough spot he learned with Ghede’s scam: Absolute Discretion Required. Even if he fails the check, Wyeth will still put up 1 Sway of resistance, and they might negate Splenda’s maneuver entirely. Wyeth wants to use his Persuasion skill because it’s his best; he’s got to work in the spot to get the bonus without being so overtly threatening as to call for a different skill. After some thought, Wyeth says, “That’s very gracious of you, though those folks at Phoenix Armaments probably have guns to spare. If we don’t get this contract, I’ll have to tell all my fellow ‘sociopathic thugs’ exactly who they’re helping to break quarantine.” Wyeth rolls B8/R8. Critical success! He gets +1 for the success, +1 for the spot, and another +1 for the critical. That’s 3 Sway versus the client’s 2 Sway. Splenda’s maneuver has backfired and pushed him back one.

Negotiation: Round 3 Splenda smells blood. He can get these amateurs working for a song. The Market plays a Gift spot: “Look, I know there’s a potential for danger out there. But these guys are willing to share. If you take the job, we’ll throw in a fully upgraded assault rifle: silencer, hollowpoint ammo, the works.”

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Out of Scams Both of the characters outside of negotiation have performed their scams. They’re all out of resources and have to hope Wyeth can get a big push using the remaining spot they learned. Negotiation: Round 4 Splenda is running out of options. He’s all out of easy leverage to play, and he hasn’t taken the time to get a read on Wyeth’s personality. The Market opts for Intimidation: “Breaking the confidentiality of this conversation will ensure you never work again. I will blacklist Voodun with every group I represent.” It’s a transparent strategy, but it’s still good for 1 Sway. Wyeth started slow, but it’s time to finish strong. He sticks with his best skill, Persuasion, and plays the Weak Spot: Family Man: “Lose the holier-than-thou attitude, Splenda. I know you’d do anything to provide for your family, and you can’t fault us for doing the same. Giving us a fair price won’t steal food from the mouths of your kids. We’re right for this, and you’re too good a person to send those citizen assholes out to die with some punk crew.” Wyeth gets a B8+3/R9. The success and the spot add up for 2 Sway. Since the dice are heads up, it’s a 1 Sway push after Splenda’s resistance is factored in.

Leadership Closes Wyeth has to make his Leadership check to see who compromises. It’s not his best skill (+1), and he ends up with B5+1/R10. He was afraid that might happen, which is why he

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was saving his last point of Will! He flips it to B10+1/R5. The Black moves up to meet the Red at “100% Mark Up”

Voodun earns the equilibrium price (14 bounty), plus their combined break points for Labor (6+3+4= 13 bounty), plus one bounty per Taker per leg (3 Takers X 5 legs = 15 bounty), plus another 14 bounty from 100% Mark Up (equilibrium x 2). When it’s all added together, the contract is worth 56 bounty split three ways – not to mention a free, fully upgraded assault rifle. Undercutting Right as Voodun is about to leave, Splenda messages them on Ubiq. Dr. Epicurus and his band of merry amateurs have offered to do the job for only “Hazard Pay,” a full 21 bounty less than the agreed upon price. Splenda demands Voodun meet their price or he’s going with the other crew. Ghede is now regretting his decision to be nice; not having to deal with this shit is the main benefit of eliminating one’s rivals. Fern says she’s got this and gets on the Ubiq specs to say, “Well, we’re sorry it didn’t work out. You’re sure your clients are cool participating in all that weird sex stuff though?” “What?” Splenda asks. “Epicurus practices a denomination of Detoxinism that practices ‘community love.’ You didn’t hear about that? He never sent you an invite to one of the orgies?” This, of course, is complete bullshit. Fern knows nothing of the rival crew or their religion, but she wants to get paid. The Market says this is a Deception check: Fern rolls B8+2/R3.

Splenda sighs, “Nevermind. Forget what I said. Good luck out there.” He hangs up. The crew has secured a reasonable price, stymied their competition, and avoided murdering anyone in the process. Everything’s looking up for Voodun! Now all they have to do is stay alive....

Alternate Rule: FIxers

Perhaps no one wants to take point in negotiations. Or maybe your group is comprised of enthusiastic roleplayers who all want a turn with the talking stick. Either way, the Fixer rules allow groups to succeed in negotiations without having to commit a character’s skills to one focus. But as is the case with subcontractors, outsourcing the work raises overhead. What follows are the rules for using a fixers in campaign play.

HIve MInd

A fixer’s purpose is to enable any player at the table to take a turn as the negotiator, without reprioritizing all their skills. Naturally, making sure the fixer has a backstory that can support a variety of different actors is going to ease this mechanic’s implementation in the narrative. The fixer could actually be a team of fixers working for a single PR firm, subcontracted by the crew to secure the best prices. He could have a lot of personal issues taking place in the enclave or back in the Recession, explaining he wild shifts in demeanor from week-to-week. The group could merely agree on a few spots that describe the fixer’s personality, or develop a list of talking points to keep the personality grounded. Regardless, the only wrong choice would be a fixer that can only be successfully roleplayed by one person. If the negotiator has a thick Irish brogue, that’s all well and fine for the one player that can manage the accent, but what about everyone else? The goal of the mechanic is to democratize the role of head negotiator. Don’t write fellow players out of the part.

Some example archetypes for fixers: • Raider’s Advocate LLC: a boutique PR firm comprised of out-of-work lawyers struggling to survive in a Recession ghetto. The team hires out their nearly obsolete expertise over Ubiq to supplement their meager new incomes as subsistence farmers. • Mullet: a legendary Taker from the early days of LifeLines. She retired to Leper after a disastrous contract wiped out her whole crew and left her Latent. She gets by selling her shrewd bargaining skills, but the horrors she’s witnessed have left her entirely unfit for field work. • Mr. Johnson: Cold, dispassionate, callous – Johnson is the only man with the gall to attend meetings in the apocalypse in khakis and a pink polo. He’s been around for years, lending his inexplicable professionalism to the highest bidder, negotiating some of the greatest Taker paydays in history from behind his mirrored aviator sunglasses. No one knows how he’s survived this long, not to mention how he’s stayed so clean doing it.

Shared Burdens

Whether a fixer loves, loathes, or remains indifferent to the crew that employs them is up to the group to decide. But regardless of personal opinion, fixers never work for free. Groups that want to outsource their contracts need to pay for the privilege. Fixers charge a retainer per session, whether they are used that session or not. The cost is equal to the number of players in bounty. If that amount isn’t paid per session, the fixer finds other work and the Takers have to figure things our on their own.

Investment In Human Resources

Fixers wouldn’t be working if they weren’t competent. A fixer starts with a three in CHA and +1 in every CHA skill. Beyond that, fixers have no other stats except Will (which also starts at 1). They exist solely as social surrogates for the player inhabiting the

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role for that session, so CHA, Will, and the associated skills are all that’s necessary. Improving the fixer’s negotiation prowess requires bounty, just as if they were a regular PC. The only difference between normal character advancement and fixer advancement is that the bounty has to be paid by everyone profiting off the professional negotiator’s skills. Upping a fixer’s skills still takes a number of bounty equal to the desired bonus, but this amount is multiplied by the number of PCs in the crew. So, raising Deception from +2 to +3 doesn’t cost 3 bounty; for a group of five players, it would cost 15 bounty. Every player needs to pay the same amount to increase a fixer’s skills set. The burden of the subcontract is carried by all. Skills are still limited by Potentials, but raising a fixer’s CHA costs 10 bounty per point, to be paid by every member of the crew. So, to return to the previous example, raising Deception up to +4 would be impossible without first raising Potential. Our hypothetical group of five players would have to share the burden of 50 bounty first, then pay the 15 required to up the Deception skill.

I have to pay HOW much? For those that judge the costs of retaining and developing a fixer too high, consider the ways in which having a dedicated negotiator frees characters up to invest in other skills. CHA skills remain as useful as ever during the job proper, and avoiding the need to specialize lets at least one more player dedicate more resources to combat and survival skills. Cutting the cost of fixers would make any other option too foolish to consider and that contradicts the entire point of fixers: to provide more options. LImIted Scams

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Scams are still limited whether using a fixer or not. After all, someone is still going to have to play that fixer during the negotiations.

Groups are still only allowed a number Scams equal to the number of PCs minus one, as the number of rounds allow. The PC of the player adopting the role of the fixer has to sit out. Shot-calling the negotiation is enough spotlight time already. Players that don’t want to play a CHAheavy character but still want to contribute to negotiations should familiarize themselves with Scams.

RUNNING THE MARKET

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Shades of Red

“Playing the Market” (p. 171) teaches the game’s rules, discusses this book’s intentions, and defines economic horror. It is recommended that anyone looking to run their first game of Red Markets read that section first. The task of the Market is very different than that of the players. Huge sections of the setting are created, interpreted, and implemented by the person running the game. Essentially, once a session of Red Markets begins, the game leaves the book and becomes a collaboration between everyone at the table. The Market’s responsibility is to facilitate that collaboration. “Running the Market” contains tools for navigating the Loss with your game group: customization options for the game, the structural breakdown of a typical session, rules for creating new settings, and tables for randomly generated setting content.

Market vs. GM

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Many readers have likely served as game masters (GMs) in other tabletop games. This section speaks more to some preconceptions those readers might have than it does those brand-new to role-playing. If this is your first RPG, you can skip ahead to Boom vs. Bust (see p. 353). Expect experienced players to dismiss the name “Market” as another sad attempt to appropriate an old concept with an unnecessary new title. It’s up to the individual reader to decide whether this “GM-by-anyname” criticism is apt, but some might find running Red Markets so different as to warrant the new name. The degree of separation between Markets and GMs depends less on this book than a person’s previous experience. Certain RPGs share a play style very similar to Red Markets, whereas others couldn’t be more different. Running the Market is a bastardized fusion of more recent “story game” aesthetics and old-school mechanics. Big sections of the

narrative, such as the nature of a campaign setting and the cast of NPCs, are determined as much by the players as the Market. PCs choose what Contracts they want to pursue rather than being forced into the adventure the GM happened to write that week. Vignettes inside the enclave are closer to improvisational acting than the role-playing required of many traditional RPGs. Spots and Will serve as disassociated mechanics that give PCs power to control their own fate through force of personality. Finally, much of the procedural information other games obsess about, such as how much damage different weapons inflict or how much a character can carry, are glossed over for the sake of convenience. Yet Red Markets also has some distinctly old-school tendencies. The Market has a ton of control over where jobs take place and what is to be found there. NPC clients are designed and played by the Market, their personalities shaping the narrative of whole sessions. The goal of many Contracts boils down to the classic “kill monsters and take their stuff” story that founded tabletop RPGs. Most importantly, Markets are responsible for creating job lines: multi-faceted jobs that take place over many sessions, crafting campaigns larger in scope than the episodic limitations of one-off jobs. But the path to the job site, the structure of the Contract, and the price of the Takers’ services can all be randomly generated. These predesigned encounters and tables are meant to add another element of chance to the game beyond the success and failure of player actions. Certain jobs can be cakewalks, providing massive payouts for little risk. Conversely, fate can be cruel and present horrific obstacles every step of the way, eating into profits and destroying lives. The Loss is capricious and unpredictable even to the Market. Like old-school RPGs and roguelike videogames, random encounters make every adventure dangerous; the players can’t necessarily rely on their GM’s kindness to get them out of dangerous situations, and

unpredictable dangers test players’ skill. The power of the dice has the added bonus of relieving the Market of a lot of responsibility between sessions. Most jobs can be written up in about 1,000 words, fewer still if playing in an established campaign setting. The dice and this book take care of the rest. In general, traditional GMs wield an enormous amount of power over the narrative while in many story games, power is shared equally amongst the whole group. Red Markets tries to walk the middle path — the Market as a guiding hand: interpreting randomly generated content, implementing player contributions, and steering both sources towards a satisfying narrative.

Boom vs. Bust

Depending on the Market’s impression of the Loss’s economy, games usually fall into one of two broad categories: Boom and Bust. Groups can go hard to one side of the spectrum or the other, or negotiate a centrist approach by picking and choosing from the alternative rules sets. Regardless, it’s useful for Markets to think about how they want to characterize the setting before running the first job.

Boom

A Boom game is high-octane, action-heavy, and fast-paced. High-tech gear and rich clients make for sleek, flashy jobs more akin to action

movies than cable dramas or horror films. Consequences are for poor people, so we won’t have to worry about them for long. Get in. Get out. Get paid. Fuck the rest. That’s a Boom game. When we use the term “Boom,” we mean for the PCs and not the setting. Here’s why: In economics, the broken window fallacy refers to the idea that, on the surface, destruction seems like an excellent way to stimulate growth. Break a window, exchange capital with the glassmaker and carpenter, who respectively exchange goods and services resetting the window. The new window advertises each worker’s quality to the rest of the community, thus increasing the demand for that specific glassmaker and carpenter. The businesses and their employees suddenly have more disposable income, which in turn gets spent in the community and starts a virtuous cycle of increasing returns. The broken window theory fallacy fails to account for opportunity cost and globalization. The time spent repairing windows is not spent making new glass for new buildings. Value that could have been added has been merely replaced, causing financial stagnation. Furthermore, nothing about the global economy demands the glassmaker and carpenter’s surplus stay in the community. The excess can be spent in other markets, thus costing the community additional wealth on top of the damages. In the broken window situation, the contractors probably aren’t performing as well as they could be and the economy as a whole definitely suffers. The Crash set up the biggest broken window economy in history. While this means that the world at large is in trouble, one thing remains in the PCs favor: perhaps their best skills weren’t in demand before the casualties came. Shooting people in the head, thievery, smuggling — all these vital economic skill sets suffered from a lot of risk before society collapsed. Now, the risk of criminal activity is purely physical and free from concerns like prison.

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In a Boom game, Takers are the outliers, profiteers capable of turning the tragedy of the Carrion Economy into opportunity. Every disaster leaves a select few better off and playing Boom means the Market wants it to be the PCs. The Loss won’t be around forever: the surviving nations of the Recession could fall or, worse yet, exterminate the undead and re-establish rule of law. Like the California gold rush and sub-prime mortgages, there’s a short window in which fortunes can be made. Boom groups exploit the terrors of the Loss as much as possible, looking to win big and cash out. What does this mean for a game? Playing Boom means giving the characters big rewards and even bigger risks. The potential for profit wouldn’t be so high if the danger wasn’t real. The questions PCs face in a Boom aren’t “will I have enough?” so much as “will I be alive to enjoy it?” Boom groups are rarely at risk of starving or losing a loved one to the grind of poverty. Far more concerning is what kind of expensive gear they’ll need to get through the insanity of the next job. Retirement plans become ever more important because it’s only a matter of time before some disaster strikes. Every Contract is all about getting more bounty, more quickly, and damning the consequences. Gear eats up bounty fast, and profit-obsessed decision-making deprives characters of Humanity quickly. Market’s that want to run a Boom game should do the following: 1. Use some or all of the Boom rules. Check the index for a full list. 2. Expect a shorter campaign. Due to the danger and the big payments, characters die and retire often. 3. Hand out frequent +Rep spots. Remember that the PCs are elite and singularly capable. 4. Create noob clients. Big paydays mean the people offering the Contracts have deep pockets and shallow sense. They waste the final round in a negotiation on Sensitivity

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5.

6.

7.

8.

checks because they don’t know the rules of the game. They fall for simple Scams. They rarely offer job lines or get to know the PCs’ spots well enough to call them on their bullshit. Focus on combat and horror. Nobody would be making this much money if it weren’t insane to hop over the fence. Randomized legs in a journey should be replaced with more grueling and draining encounters. Complications at job sites should be huge, challenging, and mindshatteringly terrifying. High rewards only come with high risk, and PCs speculate with their lives. Accentuate the negative perception of Takers. The term intentionally suggests the occupation is linked with theft and exploitation. Groups playing Boom must frequently compromise their Humanity for bigger profits and a faster escape. This can lead to resentment of Dependents even when relationships are healthy. Present plentiful opportunities. Everybody wants to get rich quick, but only people like the PCs know how. There’s no shortage of paying jobs at any given point, and the Takers’ skills are in great demand. If they design Scores, it’s only because the players want to contribute more to the setting. Relish escapism. The characters are cool, crafty, and skilled enough to escape the Loss and they’re going to look damn good while doing it. PCs are hood-rich in the enclave, and they’re going to have fullblown, “fuck-you” money once they retire.

Bust

A Bust game is all about the grind. It’s a poverty simulator with zombies thrown in. Staying solvent means lowering overhead and securing meager profits through the use of minimal resources. Hacking down one debt sees two more spring up in its place. There’s still action and scares, but the consequences of both are never far behind. The unyielding demands of the Loss chips away at people,

transforming PCs and their Dependents slowly and creating tragic character arcs. At best, survival is a balancing act, but it more often means triage and sacrifice. A Bust game acknowledges the statistical truth of the broken window fallacy described previously: when disaster strikes, it’s disastrous for most people. Nobody is going to come out ahead from the Crash. The greatest possible hope is escape, and players in a Bust game need as much luck as skill to stay alive. A Taker’s heroism comes from their stubborn insistence on chasing the dream, doggedly pursuing a slim hope of a better life that may be no more than a delusion. Players in a Bust game want any Cinderella stories to be really earned, and they’re just as happy when a character meets predictably tragic ends. Markets that want to run a Bust game should do the following: 1. Use some or all of the Bust rules. Check the index for a full list. 2. Use the MBA rules. They provide more opportunity for profit, yes, but that comes along with increased risk and greater anxiety over picking the best investments for time and bounty. 3. Expect a longer campaign. Not every job results in profit. Characters can die off suddenly, but they can just as easily bleed out over several sessions, slowly losing health, Humanity, and any hope of financial salvation. Similarly, while big windfalls are possible, progress towards retirement tends to be hard-fought and incremental. 4. Being cursed by -Rep spots is a constant danger. People in the Loss like to gossip and hate parting with their bounty. Any indication that the crew might fail to deliver is taken seriously and always exploited to drive prices down. 5. Create experienced clients. The unforgiving nature of the carrion economy means only the most cunning and ruthless rise to the level of job creator. Clients know how to work a negotiation. They

6.

7.

8.

9.

require complex Scams to fool. They offer job lines and repeat business because it allows them to remember a Taker’s spots and exploit them for bigger discounts. Focus on randomness and stress. Sometimes the Loss rewards a Taker beyond all expectation; other times it stacks the odds against them like an angry god. The dice always decide. The anxiety such uncertainty creates in players manifests ten-fold in their characters. The alternating dreams and nightmares of what lies over the fence eats away at a Taker and affects even the quietest moments with family. Accentuate the positive perception of Takers. Part of the term comes from “undertakers,” an occupation dedicated to providing solace in the face of death. The difference between the PCs and the rest of the enclave isn’t need; they have the courage to face the creatures that threaten to destroy everything and get the job done. Present scarcity at every opportunity. There should never be enough to go around, either in bounty or in clients offering to pay it. Scores become more than a chance for the players to exercise their creativity the setting: they are essential to survival. Teams must constantly hustle to survive, and player creativity translates directly into character rewards essential for supplementing the meager opportunities on the ground. Relish challenge. Anybody that escapes the overwhelming odds offered by such a capricious and uncaring world is nothing short of a hero. The success of the few who survive is made that much more enticing by the many that fell along the way to death, infection, madness, and despair. A character’s suffering sweetens a possible victory and heightens the probable tragedy. Bust-style groups care most about giving their characters big, satisfying character arcs rather than happy endings, and they’re willing to climb a steeper difficulty curve to get it.

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SIgns of a Healthy Market

There’s no wrong way to run the game so long as the group creates some kind of pleasurable experience. But the game was designed with a certain experience in mind for both the players and their Market. Here are few indicators for the Market to check that the rules are working as intended.

Fast PreparatIon

Red Markets seeks to streamline a lot of the front-end work required to design an RPG scenario and automate the rest of it. Each Contract creates a story using seven modular components that, written together, don’t need more than 1000 words. These elements remain in control of the Market, but there are also tools in this chapter for randomly generating Contracts, either for improvisational play or as writing prompts. This allows Markets to write multiple scenarios in the same amount of time it takes to prepare a single game session for many other RPG systems. Players are given

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a choice of what adventure to take at the beginning of every session, and preparing for the next week can be as easy as writing a single Contract to replace the completed one. Certain sections of Contracts can be entirely randomized every session. The equilibrium price point is as easy as rolling two dice and consulting a table. Generating casualties to fight doesn’t even require a table. Finally, the Loss Encounters section (see p. 446) can generate specific procedural scenes for PCs to move through as they head to a job site, or it can craft general prompts for Markets to improvise on and dramatic cues to encourage role-playing. Extended play takes even more work off the Market’s responsibilities. Building an enclave is a collaborative effort, as are vignettes with Dependents at the beginning of every campaign session. Once an enclave is statted out, another component of the standard Contract template is taken care of for the remainder of the campaign. Finally, elements like Scores, retirement plans, and Mr. JOLS stay collaborative.

In short, healthy Markets choose to put a lot of preparation work into building a session of Red Markets only because that’s their preferred style of play. The game’s engine is working well when players get equally satisfying experiences through collaboration with the book and each other.

contInuous Engagement

Red Markets is meant for the table, but it also seeks to utilize the RPG’s potential for closet drama. Many people read RPG texts for pure enjoyment due to a lack of a gaming group or time to play. Even outside a game, there is much pleasure to be had merely thinking about playing the game. Planning what gear to buy or developing subplots for one’s character has whiled away many a boring hour. The gear list is posted for free online, available for players to browse even if they don’t have a copy of the main text. Furthermore, the No Budget; No Buy variant (see p. 228) rewards players that tinker with their character sheet before the next session of the campaign starts. If you didn’t budget for it, you can’t buy it...at least not without causing a lot of anxiety. These systems encourage players to do their homework, minimal though it may be. Though about materialism, Red Markets wants to sacrifice the minimum amount of playtime possible to imagined materials, so players are rewarded for coming to each session with a plan about how to best equip their characters. More important than the logistics of the crew are the personalities that make it up. Every session of campaign play begins with a series of vignettes dealing with the Taker’s life in the enclave. Players do best imagining guiding questions for the vignettes, new wrinkles to add to Dependents they may be playing, and scene ideas for their characters. Without these vignettes, characters take expensive hits to Humanity. Equally powerful is the exploitation of spots. Knowing ways to play an NPC client or complicate the life of a PC for some extra

Will are both vital to a character’s survival. Planning out dramatic scenes beforehand is further incentivized by the Interlude mechanic (see p. 446) which exchanges the unpredictable dangers of a Loss encounter for the unpredictable emotional toll of human interaction. Fleshing out a Taker dramatically can mechanically assist the physical survival of the whole group. Finally, player-designed Scores (see p. 394) require the group to exert a lot of creative effort building up the setting. Because of this, Scores can be some of the most lucrative jobs possible, free as they are from the compromises of negotiation. Thinking about the enclave, the surrounding area, and the Loss as a whole inbetween game sessions creates financial rewards for the characters, in addition to the satisfaction any player feels when contributing to the narrative. Red Markets wants to reward players that think about their characters in their offhours. It wants to reward them explicitly, using as many incentives as possible. If people arrive to game night prepared, suggesting lots of Scores and scenes, the game is working as intended.

Fast Play

By minimizing preparation for the GM and rewarding player engagement, the final result should be a game that steadily progresses forward. The one-and-done rule, Scam system, and player-facing checks in combat reduce chances for player dithering and mathematical distractions. Dramatically, scenes that lose focus can be steered towards clear mechanical goals such as regaining Humanity or fulfilling an Interlude prompt. Whether the unit is Legs, charges, Shamble, or Haul, the game’s measurements are defined by their narrative economy rather than their physical quantities, and each term’s effect on the characters is clear. An optimal game should start quickly, provide frequent creative opportunities for the players, and progress quickly towards the Contract’s goal.

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Job Creator

The stories of lives are shaped by the material circumstances that surround them. The Market generates those circumstances. The demands of the Carrion Economy remain constant, so the components of each adventure written for Red Markets have been standardized. This section defines the elements of a game session and provides tools for generating their content. For the sake of clarity, let’s nail down a few terms essential for any Market’s vocabulary.

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Client: any NPC character offering to pay a crew of Takers to perform a task. Clients are unique as NPCs because they are statted out with spots. Contract: a game session in which the characters have agreed to perform a task for a client in exchange for a negotiated price. In economic terms, Contracts fall into the services category. Even where goods or assets

are involved, Takers are compensated for retrieval rather than the items themselves. In game terms, Contracts are plot hooks devised by the Market and presented for players to choose from. Equilibrium: Roll Black and Red. Separately, the numbers describe the price of a good or service in the Red Markets world on a Supply/Demand chart. Add the numbers together. That’s the starting price when negotiating a Contract for services, or the price per unit when planning a Score. Job: the general term for a play session. Regardless of goods or services, the players get together on game night to put their characters through a job. Job Line: a string of jobs offered by a single client. Together, they develop an episodic story that forms a major plot thread in extended play and affects the setting. See “Long-term Investments” (p. 406) for an explanation of job lines.

Market Forces: any NPC violently opposing the PCs whose actions are dictated by the Market. Score: a game session largely planned by the players in which the Takers fight to secure some asset or goods to trade with a buyer. In economic terms, Scores focus on goods. The price of the Score is determined by supply/ demand equilibrium, liquidity, and the PCs ability to manipulate the economy. In game terms, Scores are planned collaboratively and skip the negotiation requirement in favor of offloading goods to a wholesaler.

The Golden Rule

Risk = Reward. A more expensive job should have more cagey Clients, more bloodthirsty competition, more travel time, more casualties, and more unpredictable complications. Takers that return from the Loss uninjured should be hurting in their wallets and toxic to their Dependents. Those that come back broken, bleeding, and sobbing should be rich. There can be exceptions: crews can get lucky or get screwed. But, generally, big money should mean big problems. When in doubt, assess what the Takers are doing. If it provides a reward, ensure they are risking something to earn it. If the characters are already risking something, how can the Market quantify a reward for their actions, either financially or emotionally? If neither is true, offer something the Takers want, but lock it behind a risky situation. No matter what part of a job you’re in, keep the risk = reward rule in mind and the game stays on track.

Workplace EssentIals

In a game of economic horror, the workplace essentials cover the moments players need if their characters are going to be challenged and defined by the setting. Since the essentials are so important to the gameplay experience, they are defined here in the order in which they typically occur during

a play session. This standardization eases preparation, streamlines pre-generated scenarios, and establishes a procedure for when groups decide to design jobs collaboratively. But don’t mistake workplace essentials for a full-blown prescription. Markets are encouraged to fill in each section as creatively as they wish. If you have to treat it like dogma, think of the essentials like jazz changes; the standard chords change in a set order and time, but there’s still a lot of room for improvisation. What’s presented here should be considered the most useful tools for making a compelling one-shot job, components that fit well into any session of Red Markets. Markets with a grasp of the essentials can move on to “Contracts” (see p. 379) for some inspiration. For information on player-designed jobs, check out “Scores” (see p. 394). For campaign play, check out “Long-term Investments” (see p. 406). Finally, experienced Markets looking to add additional complexity to their games should check out the “MBA Rules” (see p. 424).

EssentIals At-a-Glance

Think of the essentials as a list of questions. You write enough answers to come up with a job’s premise and then the whole group plays through to discover the rest. 1. Goods and/or Services How are the Takers going to be paid? If they are securing goods to sell — either to a wholesaler or through their own business — that’s a Score (see p. 394). Scores are collaboratively designed scenarios made by the group and the Market. The group is paid in the equilibrium price per unit. If the Takers are performing a service for a client, that’s a Contract (see p. 379). Even if goods are involved (such as retrieving something for the client), anything involving services counts as a Contract. Takers bid for Contracts and get paid according to the best price they can negotiate with the client.

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1A. Equilibrium Roll 2d10 and add the numbers together for equilibrium prices. The result is the starting price in negotiations for Contracts and the bounty-per-unit price for Scores. The Market consults the Supply/Demand chart to explain the economic situation that resulted in the equilibrium.

7. Complications Something goes wrong. In the Loss, something always goes wrong. If disaster weren’t inevitable, everybody would be a Taker. So what unpredictable obstacle arises, how can the crew overcome it, and how does that make them cooler, tougher, or smarter than the average survivor?

2. Economy Describe the enclave, settlement, or community in the Recession where the job is offered. How is the population governed? How do their laws and customs affect trade? What other operations in the area compete or cooperate with them?

Goods/ServIces

3. Client Clients are NPCs that offer Contracts (see “Negotiations” p. 359). What do they need done, and why can’t they do it themselves? Clients are statted out with weak, soft, and tough spots to be exploited in negotiation. They might also carry a gift spot to sweeten deals. 4. Competition Who else is in town looking for work? What’s the crew’s name and specialty? Are they local or passing through? Friendly, professional, or hostile? The bigger the job, the fiercer the competition. The only exception is job lines, which are initially offered as no-competition bids. 5. Travel Time How many legs of travel does it take to reach the job site? The number of legs determines the number of encounters the Market designs or rolls on an encounters table. 6. The Site Where does the job take place? Why hasn’t the place been looted yet? What task needs to be completed there? How does the place make the job more interesting and difficult? What happened at the job site during the Crash, and what has happened in the years since?

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A Market’s first task when writing up a job is to define what earns the Takers’ compensation. Are they selling a good, or performing a service? Contracts: Adventure Is a ServIce If the Market presents a plot hook and the PCs accept, it falls into the services category. All services in Red Markets are classified as Contracts, even when they intersect with goods. As a general rule, if the Market had a big role in shaping a job, it automatically becomes a Contract. Only player-designed jobs focus on goods, and those are called Scores. The reason the Market deals exclusively in service jobs is because, by the very nature of presenting a plot hook in character, they are joining the traditionally service-based economy of most RPG plot hooks. Quest, task, and hero’s journey archetypes fit the model inherently: go DO this thing for me. Think about it. It’s rare for a group of Dungeons and Dragons adventurers to dive into a crypt just to see what they can loot. More often than not, they are sent at the behest of guild masters, princesses, or mysterious old men lurking in taverns. These sword-and-sorcery types perform a service for the community by clearing out the local monster infestations, and they are compensated with salvage rights to whatever they find along the way. The service is the point; the goods are a perk. That’s a Contract. To use a more contemporary example, many cyberpunk RPGs might seem like a goods-based economy because the PCs are selling stolen data and items. But the typical

structure of such games has the group tasked to steal something by a fixer at the beginning of each adventure. The group can’t sell any goods because they retain no ownership of any goods and produce nothing. Economically, the fixer is the one stealing something, but he’s subcontracting the theft to a third party. That’s a service, and it’s the service that defines those games’ characters. So, as a Market, express the job in terms of what they need to DO in order to get paid. The task might be no more than picking something up and hauling it back, but the task is what receives payment. For jobs based around goods, let the players plan a Score. Scores: Be Your Own Boss Cooking homemade pies, running your own clothing line, blacksmithing — productive, goods-based small businesses form the beating heart of most economies. They would also be dull as hell to play through. The Loss’s production and manufacturing operations might be dramatically interesting, but they lack the frightening action that makes a game of economic horror. Nobody wants to play through the day-to-day drudgery of customer service or assembly lines. Thankfully, the carrion economy allows players the same opportunity for creative expression small business owners experience without bringing all that tedious work to the game table. Whereas some goods in Red Markets are produced, most are recovered. If Takers can secure salvaged goods that meet a community demand, they stand to make profit without an NPC client playing middleman. When players want to sell goods directly to customers, they need to design a Score. Unlike Contracts, it’s not for the Market to tell them what the community needs and wants. The PCs must be sharp enough to spot opportunity, bold enough to meet it, and creative enough to survive. Those groups that want to be their own boss should design Scores instead of bidding for Contracts.

Contracts are all about doing. Scores are all about having. Markets should make sure players express exactly what they want to sell, where they are going to get it, and to whom they are going to sell it. Example Goods/ServIces WrIte-up Megan wants to design a new job for her group. Since Megan is designing it, she knows she’s making a Contract: the players have to DO something in order to get paid by an NPC client. If they don’t like the price, they can bid for one of the other Contracts Megan designed for that session or create a Score of their own. After some thought, Megan decides that slingshots would be in pretty high demand in the Loss. They can accelerate projectiles fast enough to crack skulls and ammo is as plentiful as gravel. Salvaged wood or metal of any type could make tongs and handles, so they’d be easy to mass-produce. As a means of clearing casualties off the fences, they’d allow enclavists to keep their distance and turn the horrifying task into a game of marksmanship. The problem, she decides, would be finding enough high-quality rubber to make the slings. But that’s what Takers are for! Here’s what she writes to prep for the game session: “Menace, the Loss’s foremost manufacturer of high-end slingshots, is having supply problems. His rubber has gone cracked and dry, slowing production to a halt. Menace knew this day would come — through extensive research, he’s discovered a manufacturer of baby toys that once existed in the area: First Joys Inc. Before the Crash, the company was the biggest producer of pre-K accessories in the United States, capable of producing thousands of pacifiers, teething rings, and bottle nipples per minute. First Joys Inc. likely had enough rubber on site to supply his business until the T-minus Never, but there’s no way Menace is going to risk getting himself killed hauling it back to the enclave. He’s looking for Takers to solve his problems before his business goes bust.”

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EquIlIbrIum Every good and service has an equilibrium: the price people are willing to pay. In the real world, equilibrium is determined by a “Supply/Demand Curve.” Demand determines the price. Increase supply and demand drops. Increase demand and supply decreases. This is the most fundamental principle in economics.

but the carrion economy is a post-rational economy. Price is determined randomly, but the supply/demand curve creates a narrative situation PCs must manipulate to alter that price. In Red Markets, economics charts serve as plot hooks rather than complex mathematical predictions. To determine an equilibrium price, the Market should do the following. 1. Roll the Black and Red. 2. Black equals Demand. Red equals Supply. 3. Add the two numbers together. This is the equilibrium price (in bounty) for the good/ service. It’s either the starting price for negotiations (Contract) or the bounty-perhaul of a good (Scores). 4. If the characters made a successful Research check to learn the equilibrium, tell them. If not, write a note in case the crew bids for that job. 5. Consult the supply/demand chart. The intersection of Black and Red determines the narrative situation required to manipulate the equilibrium price.

In its infancy, most economists assumed human beings were rational actors that always pursued their best interests. However, history and a litany of other economists teach us that rationality fails to model a lot of markets. The sub-discipline of Behavioral Economics deals with the irrational and surprising ways in which humans actually behave in markets. Branding, marketing, governmental regulation, and cultural bias conspire to move prices away from supply/ demand equilibrium. It would be more accurate to say that prices hinge upon perceived supply and demand. Artificial scarcity and inflated demand mean high supply/high demand goods are possible. So what does this mean for Red Markets? It means Markets don’t have to mess with any forecasting or complex math. Mathematically, supply/demand should limit each other,

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of procedure. d ho t e m ar ul g in s a Economists have utions of them, it t s in of ds in k o w There are only t ions of feudalism ut it t s in he T . al ur artificial and nat bourgeoisie he t of e s ho t , itutions are artificial inst y resemble he t , s hi t n I . ns io ut are natural instit lish two kinds ab t s e e is w e lik ho the theologians, w is not theirs ch hi w n io t la re of religion. Every their own is an le hi w n, e m of n is an inventio od. emanation from G -Karl Marx

The chart summarizes each condition, but what do those numbers really mean? How does the Market turn two random numbers into a setting and story? How do Takers exploit those conditions for greater profit? SubsIdIary Subsidiary goods aren’t kept in supply because there is so little demand. Subsidiary services have few or no providers because of narrow profit margins. A lot of things became superfluous in the wake of the Crash; subsidiary markets exist for commodities hovering just above the line of totally useless. The key to working a job in the subsidiary range is increasing demand... or at least anticipating it. For Markets: The most important thing to provide when a good or service lies in the subsidiary range is an explanation. Why is this job valued so low? Often, the reasons are obvious: vintage comic book collections, for instance, don’t have a lot of use in the apocalypse beyond kindling. Other explanations might require more creativity. What if a Score to secure drinking water rolls a B1/R1 equilibrium? How can the enclave offer such low prices when such a vital resource is about to run dry? Well, maybe the rainy season is coming and the public anticipates a surplus. Or perhaps

price gouging for goods as essential as water is frowned upon by the collectivist culture of the survivors. The enclave’s government could have even fixed the price of water with legislation. Whatever the explanation, some reasoning as to why value remains low gives the players an idea on how to manipulate the situation. Since it requires a lot of work to inflate demand for subsidiary commodities, Markets should consider compensating groups taking low equilibrium jobs by eliminating the competition. After all, who would want to risk trouble for so little pay off? For Takers: Scams to raise equilibrium out of subsidiary range are simple: increase demand by anticipating an increase in demand. This is called speculation. If the consumers can be convinced that, at some point in the future, the good or service will be valued far higher than it is now, they will pay in an attempt to get a deal. Use greed and a fear of missing out to get people to buy something they don’t need. The speculators increase demand by buying cheap, decreasing supply, and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, for instance, comic books aren’t worth much to the Loss, but citizens in the Recession will pay big for recovered masterpieces once the reclamation starts. Persuasion, Profession: Advertisement, Deception, Criminality — any number of skills

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could be used to create an artificial demand for otherwise useless items. Alternately, Takers can anticipate scarcity for goods with a high use value. If you hack into the enclave’s e-copy of the Farmer’s Almanac and change the predictions to drought, the price of water might skyrocket a week before record-setting rains. flooded Flooded goods and services were in high demand before everyone tried to get rich quick. Now, the economy carries too much surplus for profits to remain high. Pricing remains highly competitive, dropping constantly as businesses try to snag jaded customers. Dealing with flooded commodities requires dealing in large quantities, driving out competition, or moving into a new enclave suffering from deflated supply. For Markets: Flooded goods and services make for a golden opportunity to define the character of an enclave. Surplus goods are typically the first to be exported. The price of seafood in a fishing village is next to nothing, but the same fish would be worth a lot in the deserts of Utah. Similarly, mastered skill sets become the services for which a community is known. The mechanics at the garage don’t make much working on each other’s cars, but the one desperate amateur that comes for help can fund operations for months. Be it fishing villages or garages, places are defined by their surpluses and specializations. So, in the instance of the flooded equilibrium, what does this surplus say about the enclave the PCs are working in? Did the community come into a recent windfall, or have they always been known for this specific excess? Answering these questions for the players is essential not only for Scams, but as a way of immersing the group in the setting. For Takers: Increasing the profitability of flooded economies can be as easy as finding another buyer. Export excess and beat the enclave’s low prices. For services, use Ubiq to contract with enclaves lacking groups with the proper expertise.

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Flooding the market even more can work as well, at least in the short term. Scores that secure massive quantities of goods can be dumped on the enclave all at once in hopes economies of scale make the narrow margins worthwhile. However, flooding an already flooded commodity runs the risk of causing a crash and pissing off the many competitors in the field. Since repercussions are likely in such instances, it might be better to sabotage competition outright, thus decreasing supply and increasing demand. Though difficult to pull off, a Scam that creates artificial scarcity is the most sustainable. Keeping stockpiles of goods hidden can artificially inflate equilibrium, but schemes like these require a lot of trust and cooperation amongst competitors. Scarce The platonic ideal of economic opportunity is scarcity. Hard-to-obtain goods and services can be sold for a significant mark up until demand is met. Exploiting scarce markets requires speed and liquidity. Every second spent meeting demand drives prices down and risks a flooded market. It’s often better to off-load wholesale rather than selling slowly and sacrificing the equilibrium. For services, limited time offers work well to maintain a healthy margin, but expect competition the second stories of success spread. In situations where scarcity is common — such as the need for timber in a desert — really smart Takers do their best to establish stable monopolies. For Markets: Much like the flooded category builds setting through surplus, enclaves are also defined by what they need. No one is a master of every skill, and no single community can support all the needs of all its people. Scarcity defines an enclave’s imports, critiques its leaders, and implies the surrounding geography. What does the community need, and why can’t they provide it themselves? An enclave in need of energy might be located in a colder climate where the cost of heating the enclave is a constant drain on resources. A well-defended ammunition

factory might be so specialized it possesses no means of growing its own food. Whatever the scarcity, it says something about the enclave that suffers from it, and the PCs become that much better defined through their unique ability to provide for that need. For Takers: With low-supply/high-demand goods and services, the negative impact of competitors can’t be overstated. Lost customers take a significant chunk of profit with them. Any Scams Takers can undertake to steal the other guy’s base have the potential for major gains. Just don’t expect success to last long. Nobody in the Loss can afford to ignore opportunity, and the get-rich-quick schemers fill any vacuum quickly. For every competitor eliminated, expect two more to take its place. Monopolies fix the problem of competition, but the resentment of driving others out of business magnifies ten-fold when Takers exert the kind of force necessary to drive everyone out of the game. The risk to safety may not be worth the amazing gains of a sole provider position. The most profitable Scam in the shortterm is provoking the enclave into a scare. Anticipating an even greater scarcity to come for a high-demand good or service can provoke a glut of spending. However, this is always followed by a much longer period of hoarding and economic depression — hard times a crew could be blamed for if their manipulations become common knowledge. Takers should think long and hard before inciting a scare; such scorched-earth economic maneuvers won’t win them many friends. VolatIle A volatile equilibrium lives the impossible dream: a high-demand price with deep reserves of supply. For some reason, the situation has momentarily escaped economic law. People are buying, and no matter how much they consume, prices remain the high. Takers that can exploit volatile goods or services are well on their way to escaping

the Loss, but everything becomes a matter of timing. The market must eventually correct itself, adding competition and reducing prices rationally. In the worst case, the bubble doesn’t so much deflate as it explodes, causing a crash large enough to destroy entire enclaves. Getting rich quick means getting out before it’s too late. For Markets: There are only two situations that explain volatility in an enclave: monopoly and speculation. Neither is sustainable long term, but both make for fantastic story conflicts. In the case of monopoly, the only way to keep prices high without scarcity is to control the entirety of the supply. This means that, before the PC Takers arrived, somebody has already sewn up all goods and services within that area. There’s no way someone else hasn’t already tried to get at those sweet profits, which means that the cartel has some means of enforcing their claim. Any group of Takers trying to horn in on volatile profits has just asked the Market to create a new antagonist for them.

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Though it may seem safer, the thugs and threats of a monopoly are actually preferable to wild speculation. If everyone in the enclave is getting in on the action, it means massive scarcities or increases in demand have been predicted. In such instances, there’s no outcome that doesn’t end in economic disaster. Does the predicted scarcity happen? Now everyone is hoarding their goods, leading to a recession. Does the predicted scarcity never arrive? The exact same situation occurs, only now because there isn’t enough demand. And what if increased demand doesn’t meet expectations? The real-estate crisis, the tech bubble, beanie baby collection — history is littered with micro-economies destroyed by such speculation. Markets that roll high equilibrium need to answer a few questions: what caused this economic anomaly, how bad is going to get when the market corrects itself, and will the PCs be able to escape the blowback? For Takers: Working in volatile goods and services means deciding where to take the hit. Do you want the pain now or later? If the answer is the latter, run Scams that utilize the resentment the populace likely feels towards their economic captors. For instance, let’s say the local enclave is run by a cartel that controls all the available drinking water. Everybody hates the Water Barons, so they’ll be happy to keep their mouths shut if your group starts selling jugs for a discount on the edge of town. But no matter how secretive the populace might be, word is going to get out once profits start to drop. Expect retaliation. In fact, retaliation is so certain as to suggest a pre-emptive strike. Why wait for the Water Barons to counter-attack when the Takers could kill them and take over the racket? As before, blood will spill... it’s just a matter of who strikes first. If there’s no monopoly to break up, speed is the key. Run Scams to reinforce the prediction of coming scarcity or demand. Whip speculators into a fervor and try to cash out before the inevitable crash.

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Confused Players Maybe your group wants to manipulate equilibrium but is stumped for ideas. Rather than let them languish in confusion, Markets can ask for Foresight checks. After all, the characters have had five years to learn the ropes; their understanding of enclave economics is going to be superior to the players’. Success provides some strategic information on how to manipulate the price using a Scam. Example EquIlIbrIum Megan can wait to set the equilibrium for her job until right before negotiations start, but she doesn’t like to improv much and would prefer some time to think about how to describe the situation to her players. Megan decides to determine the equilibrium early and record it in her notes. Megan rolls B10/R5. That means negotiations with Menace start with 15 bounty on the At Value box of the Sway tracker (see p. 487). On the supply/demand chart, that puts retrieval jobs at the cusp between Scarce and Volatile. Megan figures that means retrieval of raw materials was once a rare and dearly priced service, but now the word is out. Other Taker outfits want in on the huge profits retrieval crews have been raking in. The retrieval economy is tipping towards speculation and a possible crash. If Megan’s players want to Scam the equilibrium price higher, they’ll need to scare off the amateur Takers looking to horn in on their business. Or they could slander them, marketing their own crew’s experience. What Megan actually ends up writing in her notes is “B10/R5. 15 bounty At Cost. Barely Scarce. Discourage competition to raise.” Economy If there is a god cruel enough to rule the Loss, his name is capitalism. But though the apocalypse has allowed for forgotten heights of exploitation, it has also reintroduced

diversity. There are numerous flavors of capitalism adopted by different communities, and each can have a major effect on how jobs are bid and prices set. Furthermore, the isolation and autonomy of certain enclaves allow for experimental economies completely divorced from the capitalist model. Takers face a whole new set of challenges when dealing with these alien systems. The mechanics of Red Markets are based solely on a desperate form of disaster capitalism, so the effect of different economies on the game remains purely narrative. But this doesn’t mean describing the material philosophy of an enclave should go ignored. Defining the economic landscape is one of the best tools a Market has to get players invested in the setting. What follows are brief definitions of macroeconomic types an enclave’s economy can be based on.

Economy in Extended Play Markets running extended campaigns only have to answer the economy question once. Fleshing out an enclave covers all the necessary material and more. Since campaigns are based around the Takers’ home enclave, the economy only changes if PCs take the show on the road or migrate. MIxed Chances are you are living in a mixed economy. Mixed economies are fundamentally capitalistic, but they rein in the chaos of a completely free market with anti-capitalist regulations. Whether a government lies on the less or more side of the regulatory spectrum defines the majority of all existing political entities. Though Americans typically refer to modern China as a communist country, in truth they utilize a mixed economy just like the USA. China’s “communism” is a differing

regulatory system that favors the government over the individual, but citizens still choose their employment, set their own prices for the majority of goods, and compete amongst each other in markets where the state hasn’t established a legal monopoly. When China compels economic inputs from the populace, it is with the force of law and serves as a defining characteristic of their communism. So, for instance, if the state desires to flood your town to build a dam, it can legally compel the “sale” of the land through censure and use of force. The United States, in contrast, has a much more lax regulatory system, but people still pay income tax, insider trading is still illegal, and toxic waste dumps can’t be built next to preschools. These regulations limit capitalist enterprise and, therefore, aren’t capitalistic. When the United States wants to compel economic inputs from the populace, the law is not always on the side of the state and protections exist that favor the individual. However, as history has shown, just because compelling the private citizen isn’t as easy as it is in China, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen all the time in the US. If Uncle Sam wants to flood your town to build a dam, it can bankrupt you with decades of court cases, rezone your home until it’s an unlivable hellhole, buy your debt just to “renegotiate” your collection terms, or claim eminent domain to purchase the land for pennies on the acre. Pure capitalism, or laissez-faire capitalism, is as rare as totally controlled systems, largely because both economies tend to destroy themselves once they reach a certain scale. Most long-term, functioning economies are mixed. Whether these mixed economies should lean further towards free markets or planned economies is the origin of almost all political doctrine. LaIssez-faIre Laissez-faire, or “let it be,” is the argument that economic forces should be free of all governmental interference and only governed

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by Market forces. Taken to its extreme, this takes the form of anarchocapitalism: economic systems ruled solely by individual self-interest and assuming what Smith called “spontaneous order.” A more generous term used to describe these economies is “market economies.” Some would say that modern-day Somalia and the historical Wild West are examples of anarchocapitalism in action, but both are straw man arguments. Nothing about the chaos in Somalia is intentional. It’s a failed state, not a hands-off state ethos. Similarly, the Wild West’s lawlessness came from it being an unincorporated territory. The “wildness” came from a failure of policy enforcement rather than a policy of noninterference. As manifest destiny progressed, the regulatory powers of the United States were implemented with violent and terrifying force, especially if you happened to be Native American. The ethics of laissez-faire capitalism have been under critique since the term was coined, and the degree to which a state can exist at all while still claiming a laissez-faire economy is a source of constant debate in libertarian circles. For the purposes of Red Markets, laissez-faire refers to the ideological extreme, if only because it makes for more dramatic games. If the Takers are dealing with well-meaning libertarians, describe their enclave as a mixed economy with an independent bent. But if the Takers are dealing with lawless, might-makes-right postapocalyptic gangsters, call it laissez-faire. The dangers of such economies are obvious, but profit comes easy for those ruthless enough to seize it. Controlled A controlled economy monopolizes all forms of production and capital for the state. The government dictates even the most basic aspects of labor. Feudalism enforced these rules through rigid caste systems and ironclad codes of inheritance. Communist disasters such as Mao’s Cultural Revolution

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and present-day North Korea use absurd vocational reassignment to kill all economic specialization, retarding growth by forcing trained doctors to harvest crops and similar nonsense. This is not to say that all communism or socialism is monstrous. No mixed economy system provides for all its citizens equally. In every capitalist system, there exist exploited, disenfranchised, and oppressed populations, and more humane regulation is essential for justice. Furthermore, the degree to which it is even possible to “control” an economy is a matter of contention, as even the most totalitarian of regimes develops extensive, anarchocapitalist black markets. Like laissez-faire, the exact moment when government regulation tips into too much regulation is a matter of political debate beyond the scope of this game. If Takers are dealing with perfectly rational cultural Marxists, describe the economy as mixed with a socialist bent. But if Takers are dealing with dictators or corporate-controlled dystopias, use controlled economy in the pejorative sense. It’s more interesting to play against an entirely antagonistic economy, and the potential to profit off its inevitable black market rewards players for the added risk. Other For extreme deviations from mixed economy capitalism without negative connotations, refer to those systems with their own names. Markets hurting for idea can find examples of experimental economies detailed in “Contract Generator” (see p. 379). Whether using an economy from the book or designing one’s own, Markets should remember that the mechanics of Red Markets are steeped in capitalist ideology. As such, dealing with experimental enclaves should add a step of translation to the narrative. For instance, if the town of Pelt only has a barter system, the players face the additional challenge of turning their fees into a list of easy-to-fence goods. Conversely, a town of Odoists completely divorced

from the idea of possession requires an extra set of negotiations before they’ll even agree to compensate the Takers at all, not to mention how much. Unless they want to move there and retire, Takers working inside experimental systems can only expect more obstacles standing in the way of their bounty. Nothing frees them from the ruthless demands of the carrion economy. The nightmare of a Taker is living through the world’s end and watching capitalism carry on without it. If they somehow escape the cycle of scarcity, the game can still be good... it just can’t be Red Markets. If the players want to start the revolution and build the worker’s utopia, good for them! But the charge system isn’t going to make much sense after that, nor Buy-a-Roll, nor any other mechanic for a game about economic horror. Make the triumph of the proletariat a retirement goal; this game is for the grinding struggle against poverty necessary to get there.

Example Economy WrIte-up Megan is running a one-shot, so she’ll need a short description of the enclave she wants to locate her Contracts in. She decides that since Menace needs industrial quantities of rubber, his slingshot operation is probably fairly large. Specialized manufacturing implies deep specialization, so that means this enclave has to have some system in place to feed itself while some people spend all day making improvised weaponry. After some thought, she writes up the following. “Menace operates out of ‘Home.’ Once a national distribution center for a major hardware store, survivors have painted over the remainder of the defunct company’s name and turned the warehouse complex into a thriving industrial enclave. Using the wealth of tools and materials on-site, Home specialized in manufacturing, machinery, and construction services. The lumberyards (their content long since burned or used

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in fortifications) have been converted into farmland to support the populace. However, the acreage inside the fence is barely enough to sustain the population and requires constant care. Home is a mixed economy whose major regulation is a variable labor tax on all full-time residents. Anyone wanting to stay in the enclave must devote 60 hours a week to the care of its agriculture, fortifications, and cleanliness. Other means of economic production are encouraged by the option to buy off portions of the labor tax with bounty. Enterprises that attract enough trade to Home reward their owners by buying off time tending the fields. Though good for the enclave’s bottom line, the ability to buy off all responsibility for menial labor has led to a stark class divide. The only thing that keeps Home’s serfs-byanother-name from revolution is the mayor’s even-handed enforcement of policy: the second someone comes short on their bounty payments, they find themselves back digging dirt and taking out trash.” It should be noted that for any other Contracts Megan offers to the characters while they are at Home, she won’t have to rewrite the economy section. The macroeconomic situation won’t be changing on account of one job, and this description will remain accurate until the players move or something affects the enclave as a whole. ClIent(s) Contracts need clients offering to compensate the Takers for their services. These NPCs are more than a collection of hit points and weapons. Each client has enough disposable income to escape the Loss but, for some reason, does not. Perhaps they’re citizens and exploiting homo sacer as cheap labor. Maybe, like the Takers, responsibilities to their loved ones anchor them in hell. Or they could be ideologues, too proud or comfortable in their new lives to suffer the indignities of the cowardly Recession. Whatever the reason, clients possess outsized personalities with more power to shape the Loss than any

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weapon or army. They’re movers and shakers destined to come out on top of any deal, unless Takers figure out how to turn their egos against them. Markets can dedicate however much effort they want into describing a client, but all that’s really needed to get the game rolling are the spots. NPC spots differ slightly from PC spots because their uses are limited to negotiations, but each descriptor covers roughly the same information. • Weak Spot: a pervasive character flaw or blind spot that can be used to provoke a reaction. • Soft Spot: a point of sympathy or positive bias that can be exploited to manipulate behavior. • Tough Spot: instead of an explanation for the character’s survival (unlike PCs), a client’s tough spot represents a certain demand for the Contract under bid. What makes this job something the client can’t do personally? Why do they need specialists instead of regular employees? Finally, clients get one more spot that no PC has: the Gift. • Gift: particularly wealthy clients can afford to give away pieces of useful equipment to their contractors as a means of gaining extra Sway in negotiations. Example ClIent WrIte-up Megan writes the following description of Menace. “Menace grew up in a rural area with a gunnut for a father. He hated the damn things: loud, smelly, and dangerous. This disappointed the old man and his redneck friends to no end. The only thing Menace ever found to alleviate the mark on his character was other forms of marksmanship. Leave the shotguns and rifles to everybody else; if you wanted someone to teach you how to bow-hunt or throw a tomahawk, you went to Menace.

A hobby became a survival skill during the Crash — suddenly weapons that didn’t need a reload seemed like a great business decision. The man’s hobby of absent-mindedly whittling slingshots turned into one of the more profitable businesses in all of Home.” Megan knows she doesn’t need to write that much, but she like to get into the heads of her characters. Now she has to think up some spots the PCs can use to push her client around in negotiations. She figures that, though successful, the slingshot mogul can’t afford to hand out gifts, so she skips that one. That leaves her with the following: “Weak Spot: Hit Your Mark” The discipline required to master archaic tools of marksmanship has left its mark on Menace. He has nothing but scorn for quitters and sloppy execution. If the Takers can make themselves seem like keen, precise professionals, he’ll be more likely to give them a good price. Alternately, they could paint the competition as spray-and-pray amateurs to achieve the same effect. “Soft Spot: Odd Ducks” Menace was a country kid that hated guns. He also prefers rap music to country. This didn’t stop him from wearing wranglers, attending rodeos, and fitting in other ways, but he’ll always have a soft spot in his heart for people that don’t quite fit the mold. Show Menace you’re a round peg in a square hole and he’ll be sympathetic. “Tough Spot: Farming is Beneath Me” Menace didn’t work so hard building his slingshot business just to have it go belly up and leave him a lowly field hand. Despite his humble beginnings, success in the Loss has left the man snobbish and soft. The rubber shortage has him backed into a corner, and playing on Menace’s desperation to maintain his station is good for extra Sway in negotiations.

Skipping Clients Groups planning Scores don’t need clients; they need wholesalers. Hopefully, these wholesalers are interesting NPCs (hopefully, all NPCs are interesting), but they don’t negotiate. Profitable Scores are all about dealing in bulk, reaping the equilibrium price as much as possible. So, when a group plans a Score, they don’t need to stat out a client’s spot. Similarly, if the client has appeared before in campaign play, their spots don’t change much. One of the benefits of working a job line is knowing how to push the client’s buttons. The only things that change are the client’s tough and gift spot, depending on the specific requirements of the Contract. Like the economy element, extended play relieves the Market prepping a ton of a new material every session, meaning the group gets more jobs to choose from with the same amount GM work. CompetItIon Aside from simulating a free market, NPC competition exists as a way to define the PC crew’s ethos. Are they untrustworthy profiteers, sabotaging others frequently, or out-and-out warlords that eliminate financial threats with a gun? Do they keep things professional, trusting their reputation to beat out the bargains offered by other desperate crews? Do they see all Takers as allies alienated only by circumstance, a guild of master craftsmen that fakes animosity to play the rubes in the crowd? How a group reacts to their competition does a lot to shape the enclave’s perception of Takers as well as generate + and -Rep spots. The amount of competition also gives the Market a tool for communicating a job’s difficulty; a Contract with multiple competing crews must pay big and, therefore, be quite dangerous. NPC competitors also give Negotiators an easy prompt for persuasive appeals — slandering the other guys is the world’s oldest form of advertisement. In addition, rival Takers with their own vivid

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personality can inspire negotiation tactics in those otherwise stumped. Finally, it’s important to provide competition to spread the work of negotiating prices around the group. While Scams offer everyone an opportunity to shine in the pricing of Contracts, intimidating, sabotaging, or eliminating competitors occupies characters that may prefer action to words in nonetheless vital business roles.

Competition in Extended Play As long as the PCs don’t murder everyone to prevent an undercut, competing NPCs can become recurring characters in any campaign, serving as professional acquaintances, frenemies, consistent annoyances, sworn enemies, or all of the above. Like the economy element, one write up for competition can serve for a whole campaign, and established NPCs can later be combined with new competition on particularly attractive Contracts. Furthermore, job lines offered by recurring clients don’t suffer from competition. The trade-off for the client knowing the Taker’s spots already is luring them in with a no-contest bid. This balances the negotiation mechanics to keep repeat business profitable and further relieves the Market of writing responsibilities. Bust Rule: Competitive Market To make the game more difficult, the Market can roll a 1d10 of any color. On an even number, a Contract only has one competitor. On an odd number, the Contract has two different crews trying to get the job. If the Takers don’t do something to sabotage competition in their Scams, they might get undercut twice as the surplus of providers creates a bidding war. Alternately, the Market can say that only one rival crew is undercutting the price; the other one is trying to sabotage the PCs just like them. Add a complication and a few more die rolls to one Taker’s Scam as rival crew tries to discourage the PCs from taking the job.

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Boom Rule: Labor Shortage To make securing high-paying Contracts even easier, the Market can roll a 1d10 of any color. On an even number, the competition finds their own work and doesn’t pursue the PC’s chosen Contract at all. There’s more than enough work to go around, and players that do their Prep Work know they can focus Scams entirely on the client. On an odd number, the competition tries to undercut the job normally. Example CompetItIon WrIte-up Megan’s players are pretty new to Red Markets, so she doesn’t want to throw a ton of hostile competition at them yet. She decides that she’ll only have one other group competing for Contracts this session. She’ll make sure they’re professional and not a fringe group likely to respond with violence if they lose a job. Finally, since she’s hoping her players will like the game enough to request a full campaign, she plans to communicate some aspect of the Dakotas setting she has in mind. After giving it some thought, Megan writes her competition element: “Counting Casualties (CC’d, to their friends) is visiting Home looking for work. Operating out of Red Cloud, an enclave that arose from the local Lakota reservation, CC’d is run by a young woman named Wasuya. She’s renowned on LifeLines as one of the funniest Takers on the forums, and she’s been running a crew since the Crash came down. CC’d is perhaps the most likable crew in the whole Loss, if not the most profitable. They’re what’s referred to as a “non-profit outfit:” subsidized Takers that return 100% of their profits to the home enclave. The residents of Red Cloud have no desire to escape to the Recession or be converted into a Settlement — most had quite enough of the US government even before the Crash — and the proceeds of each Contract gets dedicated to improving the enclave’s infrastructure. Since they’re playing such a long game, Wasuya consistently puts the welfare of her crew above the demands of the job, walking

away from profitable Contracts on more than one occasion to protect her team. When they do complete a job, it’s always pleasant and professional, but their “nice guy” brand hurts the crew’s chances with nervous clients, losing them as many Contracts as it gains.” Since CC’d is looking for any work Home has to offer, they’ll serve as the competition for every other Contract on offer this session. Travel TIme Job sites rarely share the same location as the Takers. If they did, why hire anyone? Traveling to the necessary site is one of the greatest dangers Takers face. The Loss is brutal and unpredictable, plagued by wandering Casualties, severe weather, and unhinged survivors. But it’s also stuffed

with bounty just waiting to be salvaged, and commutes can sometimes pay more than the jobs they serve. No amount of preparation can predict whether a crew is destined to feast on the carrion economy or be consumed by it. So as not to require detailed maps and calculations of average land speeds, distance in Red Markets is calculated in Legs. Legs measure units of story rather than distance. Every Leg constitutes one encounter or Interlude scene, and it costs each Taker one charge of rations to continue the journey. Markets can dictate each Leg represents an hour of walking, the distance travelled between breakfast and lunch, or an entire day’s hike. Whatever distance is convenient for the story the Market is trying to tell, that’s measured in Legs. Markets remain entitled to create new Legs for any Score or Contract they run. See the “Loss Encounters” chapter for dramatic and procedural leg prompts as well as a d100 table of pre-generated encounters. Example Travel TIme WrIte-up Megan likes using the tables, and none of her players are familiar enough with the book to be bored by its encounters. She makes a short note that the job site is three legs away. During play, she’ll roll the Black and Red, read that entry from the encounter table, and run her players through the situation; no other preparation required. The SIte The site is where the Takers go to get the job done. The site is the core of any Contract or Score. The names of job sites get screamed as often during celebratory toasts as during night terrors. It’s the place where Takers triumph, profit, go mad, lose hope, and/or die. In Red Markets, the consumerist society we live in is the dungeon. The items people take for granted every day are treasures. The enemies are made up of scared people competing for the resources, fanatics gone mad from suffering, dystopian corporate and governmental agencies, and zombies. Three-

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out-of-four times, antagonistic settings can be adapted directly from the news. Markets can invest as little or as much effort as they choose into world-building the job site. One GM might invent a new state, fictional country, and alternate timeline for their setting, rebuilding the “History of the Crash” section from the ground up. An equally good game could be run from plot hooks as written in “History of the Crash” and “The Loss.” But even that much effort isn’t required. Designing a job for Red Markets is as easy as turning your hometown into a zombie playground. Nursing homes, mega-churches, university recreation centers — all provide complex challenges to the players, rewarding their planning and preparation while still hiding dangers around every corner. And none requires the Market to get out a ruler and grid paper. Preparations are as simple as printing off some blueprints from the internet. Of course, Markets should prepare for a game in whatever way makes them feel most comfortable, but the workplace essentials are about minimizing GM work so it’s possible to present players with an economy’s worth of adventures from which to choose. What follows are directions for the least laborintensive way to construct a job site and an example in action. DesIgnIng Job SItes 1. Think of a place that would house the good or service the Takers need (see “Goods/Services” p. 360). 2. Search the internet for appropriate buildings, structures, or neighborhoods. A. An impressive amount of blueprints and floor plans are available for free with a simple image search. B. Services such as Google Earth make entire real world neighborhoods available as maps for players to use in play. Groups that use tablets and other electronics at the table can keep constant track of where their players are at the job site, or printouts can be used.

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C. For jobs where an exact map of the location is unnecessary, look up evocative photos to set the mood by searching terms like “ruin porn” and “urban exploring.” 3. Once a location has been found, create Taker copies and Market copies. For printouts, these are literally copies. If using electronics, Markets should annotate their copy on a personal device and have the default URL version be the Taker copy. 4. Markets should think about the following questions. Keep in mind, the answers likely intersect with or decide the job’s complication (see “Complications” p. 376). A. What happened to this place during the Crash and pull back to the Recession? How can the history be “written on the walls” of this space so it is available to the players? B. What here, besides the main element of the job, is of value to my players? Where is this value located? Mark this information on the Market copy. If the players would be able to discover it, indicate important locations on the Taker copy as well. C. Why hasn’t this location been stripped of its value before now? Was the opportunity concealed before this job? Overlooked? Is it protected by some danger only the players were brave enough to face, or have others tried before and failed? D. How does the map differ from the landscape? How would the archived information available on Ubiq about this place differ from the reality of it after five years in the Loss? In what ways could these unpredictable changes challenge and surprise players? Mark the surprises on the Market copy, and leave the players to discover them the hard way. E. During the game, reward paranoid and prepared PCs with Taker copies. Allow and reward rational plans that exploit the terrain. But there are things

professional Takers can know (the Taker copy) and things no one could predict (the Market copy). Example SIte WrIte-up Megan likes architecture. She wants her rubber factory to be the famed modernist Brynmawr Rubber Factory. Though the building was really located in Wales, there’s no rule saying she can’t transplant the building to her setting in the Dakotas. She decides to rechristen the complex the First Joys Manufacturing Division and starts doing research. Megan already thought of the type of place her goods would be located at when she made the Contract. An infant toy manufacturer would have to have extensive injection-molded rubber and plastic equipment. At one time, the real world Brynmawr Rubber Factory was one of the largest rubber manufacturers in the world. Megan is in luck. As a major architectural milestone, there are numerous blueprints, floor plans, AND photos of the Brynmawr Factory available online. After identifying some basic maps to provide her players, she finds that a number of urban explorers have trespassed on the factory ground since its shutdown in the 80’s. The pictures of the dilapidated interior and abandoned machinery are unsettling and totally appropriate for an apocalypse. Megan prints a few of these photos to help establish a mood, noting where they were taken on the floor plan when possible. Megan’s group likes to keep it low-tech at the table, lest the dreaded phones make an appearance and steal everyone’s attention. She prints off a copy of the floor plan for every player and a couple of pages of photos to set the mood. If PCs make a Research check, she’ll give out the floor plan. If someone makes a Foresight check, she’ll let them know that the rubber is most likely located in Factory C. Beyond that, the rest of the notes go on the Market copy.

Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseas es. -Hippocrates It’s time to answer some vital questions about First Joys. Most complications that can occur during a job intersect with the job site, so Megan decides to figure out both elements at once. Here’s what she writes up: “First Joys Manufacturing Division was abandoned before the Crash and left untouched during the worst of the outbreak. As the government retreated and it became apparent people would be left on their own, a group of former employees gathered up survivors from surrounding towns, sourced supplies, and headed to the factory. The plan was to use the existing fencing and fortress-like modernist architecture to form an enclave ironically name Bounce. The plan worked initially. Scavenged food and medicine was rationed as the people worked to establish agriculture, and the industrial equipment left behind was being refurbished to provide some trade with the other enclaves popping up around the Loss. Everything was going fine until Bounce was infiltrated by a cult of The Meek a few months after the Recession. The believers worshipped the Blight as a divine salvation, viewing themselves as unworthy of the ascension and forced to ‘spread the gospel’ as penance. Members of the Meek intentionally infected the main housing center of Bounce, poisoning a stew with casualty flesh. No one survived the resulting tide of Vectors. Now, the once hopeful decorations and half-finished construction of the would-be enclave are only dusty ruins strewn across the factory floor, casualties of long-dead victims shambling aimlessly among the dead alleyways. On the plus side, there are numerous nonperishable goods available for salvage among the remains of Bounce, such as vehicles, tools, and ammunition. However, reaching the rubber supply and anything else of value requires descending into the undead-choked street of a dead shantytown. To make matters

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worse, a few of the Meek survived the initial sabotage, staying behind to tend the flock. These madmen haunt the catwalks above the factory floor, hanging perverse totems made of scavenged children’s toys and throwing kidnapped travelers into the hungry mobs below.”

ComplIcatIons

There’s no single word in English for the paradoxically shocking, yet somehow reliable, sense of disappointment a crappy day at work can generate. We have to make do with Same Shit; Different Day. It’s a feeling everybody who has ever worked for pay can relate to, and in Red Markets, it’ll kill you. Things WILL go wrong. That’s the complication element. The complication is solely the purview of the Market. Even in player-designed Scores, the Market has to come up with the complication and spring it on the group. A good complication seems simultaneously obvious and impossible to predict, touching on every element of the job previously established without being obvious. It could be a secret the client was trying to hide, an unpredictable antagonist inhabiting the job site, or an act of god. Whatever complication the Market writes, the goal is to make the surviving PCs feel powerful and tough for overcoming it. Any fool with more balls than brains can make a buck in the Loss; overcoming unforeseen complications is what separates the amateurs from the real Takers.

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Example ComplIcatIon WrIte-up Obviously, the complication has to revolve around the believers and their victims in the forgotten enclave Bounce. Megan decides the Meek’s unique brand of ritualized serial murder probably doesn’t attract a lot of converts. It also suggests a pretty unhealthy lifestyle. She decides that only a few of the original saboteurs remain, but they’ve survived because of exceptional cunning and savagery.

truth t c a r t s b a n a h c ay cat We shall some d have our ll a h s e w n e h t by the tail, and rtality. o m im ur o d n a n religio Adams -Henry Brooks “The only living souls left at the plant sane enough to communicate coherently are Ma and Pa; this sickly older couple leads a group of three more Meek cultists left over from the initial fall of Bounce. If the Takers head directly into the warren of decaying tents and shanties to retrieve the rubber, they’ll raise all the ladders to the catwalks, call their fellow believers from their hiding place, and fire a sniper rifle from above. However, if the Takers head to the catwalks first, Ma and Pa introduce themselves civilly. They impersonate Shepherds instead of Meek, hoping to gain the characters’ trust by highlighting the reverence for casualties both faiths share. A Sensitivity check reveals something is off about the twitchy older couple. Takers that see the trap coming can interrogate the pair of psychos with CHA skills. If forced to talk and promised something in return (escape, the survival of their “babies,” etc.), they reveal that a service tunnel beneath the complex opens near some crates containing bars of raw rubber.”

Completed Job WrIte-up

What follows is everything Megan needs written down to run her job. The whole thing comes out to about 1000 words, plus a couple maps printed directly off the internet. If Megan wanted to create more jobs and give her players a list of options, the additional write-ups could recycle the economy and competition sections, requiring even less work to prepare. Everything else — be it casualty placements or encounters in the Loss — can be generated by the dice.

Contract: Don't Bounce Back Goods/ServIces Menace, the Loss’s foremost manufacturer of high-end slingshots, is having supply problems. His rubber has gone cracked and dry, slowing production to a halt. Menace knew this day would come — through extensive research, he’s discovered a manufacturer of baby toys that once existed in the area: First Joys Inc. Before the Crash, the company was the biggest producer of pre-K accessories in the United States, capable of producing thousands of pacifiers, teething rings, and bottle nipples per minute. First Joys Inc. likely had enough rubber on site to supply his business until the T-minus Never, but there’s no way Menace is going to risk getting himself killed hauling it back to the enclave. He’s looking for Takers to solve his problems before his business goes bust. EquIlIbrIum R5/B10. 15 bounty At Cost. Barely Scarce. Discourage competition to raise. Economy Menace operates out of ‘Home.’ Once a national distribution center for a major home hardware store, survivors have painted over the remainder of the defunct company’s name and turned the warehouse complex into a thriving industrial enclave. Using the wealth of tools and materials on-site, Home specialized in manufacturing, machinery, and construction services. The lumberyards (their content long since burned or used in fortifications) have been converted into farmland to support the populace. However, the acreage inside the fence is barely enough to sustain the population and requires constant care. Home is a mixed economy that’s major regulation is a variable labor tax on all full-time residents. Anyone wanting to stay in the enclave must devote 60 hours a week to the care of its agriculture, fortifications, and cleanliness. Other means of economic production are encouraged by the option to buy off portions of the labor tax with bounty. Enterprises that attract enough trade to Home reward their owners by buying off time tending the fields. Though good for the enclave’s bottom line, the ability to buy off all responsibility for menial labor has led to a stark class divide. The only thing that keeps Home’s serfs-by-another-name from revolution is the mayor’s even-handed enforcement of policy: the second someone comes short on their bounty payments, they find themselves back digging dirt and taking out trash. ClIent Menace grew up in a rural area with a gun-nut for a father. He hated the damn things: loud, smelly, and dangerous. This disappointed the old man and his redneck friends to no end. The only thing Menace ever found to alleviate the mark on his character was other forms of marksmanship. Leave the shotguns and rifles to everybody else; if you wanted someone to teach you how to bow hunt or throw a tomahawk, you went to Menace. A hobby became a survival skill during the Crash — suddenly weapons that didn’t need a reload seemed like a great business decision. The man’s hobby of absentmindedly whittling slingshots turned into one of the more profitable businesses in all of Home. Weak spot: Hit Your Mark Soft spot: Odd Ducks Tough spot: Farming is Beneath Me CompetItIon Counting Casualties (CC’d, to their friends) is visiting Home looking for work. Operating out of Red Cloud, an enclave that arose from the local Lakota reservation, CC’d is run by a young woman named Wasuya. She’s renowned on LifeLines as one of the funniest Takers on the forums, and she’s been running a crew since the Crash came down. CC’d is perhaps the most likable crew in the whole Loss, if not the most profitable. They’re what’s referred to as a “non-profit outfit:” subsidized Takers that

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return 100% of their profits to the home enclave. The residents of Red Cloud have no desire to escape to the Recession or be converted into a Settlement — most had quite enough of the US government even before the Crash — and the proceeds of each Contract gets dedicated to improving the enclave’s infrastructure. Since they’re playing such a long game, Wasuya consistently puts the welfare of her crew above the demands of the job, walking away from profitable Contracts on more than one occasion to protect her team. When they do complete a job, it’s always pleasant and professional, but their “nice guy” brand hurts the crew’s chances with nervous clients, losing them as many Contracts as it gains. Travel TIme 3 Legs (to be rolled on the encounters table) The SIte (Taker and Market copies of the Brynmawr Rubber Factory included) First Joys Manufacturing Division was abandoned before the Crash and left untouched during the worst of the outbreak. As the government retreated and it became apparent people would be left on their own, a group of former employees gathered up survivors from surrounding towns, sourced supplies, and headed to the factory. The plan was to use the existing fencing and fortresslike modernist architecture to form an enclave ironically name Bounce. The plan worked initially. Scavenged food and medicine was rationed as the people worked to establish agriculture, and the industrial equipment left behind was being refurbished to provide some trade with the other enclaves popping up around the Loss. Everything was going fine until Bounce was infiltrated by a cult of The Meek a few months after the Recession. The believers worshipped the Blight as a divine salvation, viewing themselves as unworthy of the ascension and forced to ‘spread the gospel’ as penance. Members of the Meek intentionally infected the main housing center of Bounce, poisoning a stew with Casualty flesh. No one survived the resulting tide of Vectors. Now, the once hopeful decorations and half-finished construction of the would-be enclave are only dusty ruins strewn across the factory floor, casualties of long-dead victims shambling aimlessly among the dead alleyways. On the plus side, there are numerous non-perishable goods available for salvage among the remains of Bounce, such as vehicles, tools, and ammunition. However, reaching the rubber supply and anything else of value requires descending into the undead-choked street of a dead shantytown. To make matters worse, a few of the Meek survived the initial sabotage, staying behind to tend the flock. These madmen haunt the catwalks above the factory floor, hanging perverse totems made of scavenged children’s toys and throwing kidnapped travelers into the hungry mobs below. ComplIcatIons The only living souls left at the plant sane enough to communicate coherently are Ma and Pa; this sickly older couple leads a grounp of three more Meek cultists left over from the initial fall of Bounce. If the Takers head directly into the warren of decaying tents and shanties to retrieve the rubber, they’ll raise all the ladders to the catwalks, call their fellow believers from their hiding place, and fire a sniper rifle from above. However, if the Takers head to the catwalks first, Ma and Pa introduce themselves civilly. They impersonate Shepherds instead of Meek, hoping to gain the characters’ trust by highlighting the reverence for casualties both faiths share. A Sensitivity check reveals something is off about the twitchy older couple. Takers that see the trap coming can interrogate the pair of psychos with CHA skills. If forced to talk and promised something in return (escape, the survival of their “babies,” etc.), they reveal that a service tunnel beneath the complex opens near some crates containing bars of raw rubber.

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CreatIng Contracts

A play session of Red Markets is referred to generally as a job. All jobs contain some traces of the previously mentions “Workplace Essentials” (p. 359). From there, jobs come in two varieties: Contracts and Scores. Contracts have two characteristics: 1. Contracts are services performed for clients. Even where goods are involved, Takers are being paid a fee for delivering, securing, destroying, or otherwise performing a service. 2. The Market designs Contracts. The players choose which Contracts they want to bid on. This section explains a few concerns special to Contracts and provides a tool for randomly generating them.

Market FIat

The right of game masters to design the games they want to play is referred to as Market Fiat. Red Markets contains a lot of tools to help randomize and democratize content generation; Markets are encouraged to use these tools, but they are not required.

In a contest between a story someone wants to tell and what it says in the book, the individual story always wins. So, for instance, if the Market has a very clear idea for a series of Legs to throw at the players, the d100 table should be ignored in favor of a personal write-up. If the setting material doesn’t allow for the story of east coast Takers the Market was excited about, rework the setting so it works. If the equilibrium price doesn’t match what the Market feels would be fair, change the price to fit the context. The book is meant to assist the construction of jobs when faced with a blank slate. It shouldn’t be used to override elements a designer wants to include in the job.

Contract Generator

Sometimes, Markets can be stumped as to what to offer next, especially if they’re putting multiple Contracts up for bid every game session. Use the following d10 tables to spark some inspiration and make jobs in a hurry. This section also serves as a good list of options for players stumped designing their own Scores.

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Goods Table The goods and services tables can be used separately or together. If a goods description is too vague to spark an idea, roll on the services table to narrow down the possibilities.

The story of the job site depends on the goods found there and the services the space demands. As such, there’s no randomization table for job sites. Markets should come up with the job’s “Where?” after answering the “What?” “Why now?” and “How much?” questions of goods and services.

1 Food and Water

MREs, protein powder, canned goods, sports drinks. How has the material gone so long without being salvaged or spoiled? How is it transported, especially heavy liquids?

2 Shelter 3 Raw MaterIALS 4 WEapons

Clothing, tents, shipping containers. Do the Takers need to transport the materials back or secure them until the client arrives? Engine parts, sheet metal, lumber, rubber, plastics. What does the client need the material for and how might that inform the complication? Guns, ammo, accessories, explosives, melee weapons, specialized equipment. What kept this in-demand good out of the Market until now? Whatever protected or obscured the stash defines the job site.

5 energy

Wood, diesel, aviation gas, solar panels, batteries, uranium. Most enclaves and settlements ensure their energy needs are met first. What has caused a shortage or an increase in demand?

6 medICINE

Antibiotics, recreational narcotics, bandages, surgical tubing. Supplies are easy to scavenge but drugs have a short shelf life. Five years after the Crash, what about this newfound supply is likely to cause the Takers trouble?

7 SPECULATIVE 8 VEHICLES 9 DATA 10 HUMAN RESOURCES

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Goods, Services, and Job Sites

Items of a collectable nature, intangible appeal, or of personal value to the client. Films undistributed before the Crash, rare toys, classical artwork, historical artifacts. What kind of client would risk dealing with intangibles in this day and age? Or is the buyer already lined up? Cars, trucks, motorcycles, RVs, drones, combines, tractors. Have these assets gone overlooked so long, or have others tried to salvage them before and failed for some reason? Evidence, search algorithms, census rolls, deeds. The Carrion Economy is still partially an information economy. Why does the client need this information recovered? Is the client using secrets to gain the upper hand on a rival, or seeking to protect themselves from incriminating truths? Organ trafficking, corporate headhunting, kidnapping, closure jobs, rescues, indentured servant escort. Human resources are inextricably tangled up with services and moral compromise. What kind hard choices are this client’s appetites going to force on the Takers?

ServIces Table There are times when someone can’t afford to pay with materials goods and would rather offer manpower or hours as payment.

1 SCOUT 2 dECOY 3 SALVAGE 4 eSCORT 5 eXTERMINATE 6 CLOSURE 7 SABOTAGE 8 SMUGGLE 9 INFILTRATE 10 ELIMINATE

In instances such as this, the services table should be rolled on to give an idea of what the client has to offer the Takers.

Establish a trade route between locations, map a red zone in the Loss, or find goods within a likely search area. What has kept the job site from being scouted until now? How does the uncertain nature of the locale mask a complication?

Lure Casualties away from a vulnerable location or draw them near a certain target. Perhaps the term is meant literally and the crew has to distract some authority while another group performs a dangerous task. Do the Takers serve as both bait and trap, or must they cooperate with another crew? Recover goods not being utilized or reclaim assets left abandoned. The story of how the opportunity became available is likely the story of the job site and the complication. Transfer something or someone safely into the client’s possession. If it’s a person, are they willing to go? What dangers specific to this instance necessitate an armed escort? Kill the casualties, feral animals, or other creatures infesting a valuable property. What drew the nuisances there in the first place, and why does the client need the problem wiped out right now? Using knowledge of the victim’s previous life and fate during the Crash, track down and put a single casualty out of its misery. Clients only hire crews for expensive and uncertain closure jobs due to extreme emotions, but that emotion need not be love. Why must this specific monster die, and what does that say about the client? Perhaps it is carrying the key to something the client needs?

Destroy a functioning piece of infrastructure or stockpile of goods. Is this for the client’s business or pleasure? Do the owners of the assets know what’s coming? Get someone or something across a protected border, into or out of the Recession, a settlement, a locked-down enclave, or hostile nation. What needs to be transported? Why can’t it travel normally? Is the border lockdown justified precaution or totalitarian paranoia, and how does that affect the ethics of the Taker’s actions? Gain intel by spying on some secretive or exclusive group. What secrets is the group trying to protect? What opportunities do the Takers have that the client can’t utilize personally? Kill a person or group of people for the client. Why does the client want the target dead? Why involve a third party? Does the target deserve it, or is the pay too good to even ask?

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Economy Table The imports, exports, and geography informing the economy of an enclave or settlement depend on the Market’s vision for the setting. The three major classifications of economies can be found in Workplace

1 FEUDAL

2 cOLLECTIVIST

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Essentials on p. 359. This randomizer prompts Contract designers with dramatically interesting mixed economies good for challenging player assumptions and creating political intrigue.

The enclave is owned. Every square inch of it. The soil, the air, the fence, the sun — access to everything is taxed. A single owner or group of “lords” has generously patronized enough powerful “knights” (read: criminal enforcers) to stake their claim, but the majority of the population remain serfs. Nearly the entire labor output of the community goes to serve the wealth of the ruling classes, though they may invest in copious propaganda endeavors to make the system seem more egalitarian, up to and including deifying those in power. Production is used primarily to dissuade the constant threat of eviction, and all other needs become secondary. Whether the claim of ownership is legitimate or not is a moot point; might makes right in any feudal system. But control isn’t absolute. Feudal systems are plagued by disputes over inheritance, social upheaval, and institutional hindrances to innovation. The only people with enough surplus to hire Takers will be the ruling class, but their grip on power is tenuous and prone to paranoia. Do the Takers exploit the fear of revolution to raise their prices, knowing that the people will suffer? Cooperation is key in collectivist enclaves. Though individual property rights still exist (i.e. my tent, my table, my chair), the means of production and major infrastructure are owned by the entire community. The responsibility for maintaining these assets falls to “everyone,” and “rent” is collected in the form of labor. Additional capital can be gained through business endeavors owned privately, but the government ensures that each resident’s contributions to vital industries such as defense, agriculture, and manufacturing are first fulfilled. Collectivism is a double-edged sword. In small communities, the sense of fairness and joint purpose leads to a better quality of life. Cooperation bleeds into every facet of the culture, building robust social support structures. However, the system grows increasingly susceptible to abuse as it grows. Increased demands for subsistence goods puts a cap on labor specialization and stifles innovation. The reliance on social shaming and cultural enforcement creates a privileged class of bullies. Any hypocrisy is thrown into sharp relief, and preventing the system’s breakdown requires increasingly harsh methods of oppression. Are the Takers working for a genuinely collectivist group acting in the community’s best interests, or are the clients gangsters armored in the guise of egalitarianism?

3 THEOCRACY

4 MINIMUM INCOME

Theocracies are essentially collectivist economies that prioritize intangible spirituality over practical goods and services. Members of a monastery, for instance, still have an economy; they must trade goods and labor of various values amongst each other and outsiders to survive. However, it’s doubtful that an economist would regard the construction of a cathedral or the carving of an icon in the group’s rational self-interest, especially without the possibility of tourism or other monetizing options unavailable in the Loss. As the primary “export” of a monastery is worship and sufficient structures already exist to support it, things like charity and religious art waste capital. They might serve a larger macroeconomic purpose, but a closed system dedicated primarily to spirituality is destined for economic stagnation. In a true theocracy, social capital is the only currency. The ability to project one’s adherence to the doctrines of the faith is the only means of personal advancement. As such, what little surplus capital a primarily theocratic group has is managed by the most faithful. Takers will likely be hired if the job expands the ranks of the community or deals with some imminent threat they aren’t capable of handling. But theocracy is even more vulnerable to corruption than collectivism. As soon as someone gains enough social capital to shape the religious narrative to selfish ends, such systems can devolve into a tenacious feudalism. Finally, the flavor of a theocracy is obviously informed by the faith that dictates its political structure. What oddities of public policy are peculiar to this specific sect of believers? Due either to a large surplus of wealth or a dedicated volunteer class of public servants, certain enclaves legitimately promise their residents life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Minimum income is a social welfare program that assures everyone enough healthcare, food, and shelter to live. That’s it. Minimum income covers no discretionary spending whatsoever. Meals may be disgusting, housing cramped, and medical care barely sufficient, but no one gets to waste away, even if they’ve never worked a day in their life. People that want a better quality of life work for it, creating wealth for the community. All labor above the minimum income assumes the property rights of a laissez-faire market economy. The only controlled aspects are access to the essentials and whatever institutions that maintain that supply. Citizens with assured minimum income enjoy a lot of labor specialization and superior psychological health. Freedom from the fear of eviction and starvation allow for a lot of innovation as people pursue their passions within the safety net. The downside to such a system is sustainability. Those that maintain whatever labor and production sustains the minimum income may one day demand more compensation or cease their duties altogether. Initial surpluses can dwindle, challenging the noble impulses of the populace with the harsh reality of scarcity. Finally, even effective minimum income enclaves have serious immigration issues. They must employ total secrecy to keep word of their charity from leaking to desperate refugees they can’t support. Failing that, a downright draconian immigration policy must be in place, threatening serious violence to anyone violating the border and carefully vetting any new citizens for necessary skill sets. That Takers have been contacted at all means the enclave is desperate, or the crew is made up of residents seeking to gain disposable income by risking their lives.

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5 bARTER

6 TRIBAL

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Barter economies do not accept any of the currencies utilized in the Loss or the Recession. This could be from lack of access, lack of confidence, a holdover from the post-apocalyptic thinking common immediately after the Crash, or a cultural manifestation of P.A.S.S. Regardless, this economy trades only in the direct exchange of goods and services, with no currency to mediate rates. Such systems are remarkably inefficient, volatile, and prone to abuse, though the fixation on use value (i.e. worth is determined solely by personal utility) is enough to perpetuate barter indefinitely. Long-term distrust of currency, the political systems that control it, and the people that accept it remains likely in this economy. Self-reliance is highly valued in such cultures, and the occasional necessity of outside contractors is resented. The challenge of dealing with a barter economy is that, once a Contract price has been agreed upon, the players must express that price with a list of goods from the gear list or in units of Haul for a single good. Essentially, this makes the payout of a Contract the physical take of a Score. Any goods not used and incorporated into a character’s upkeep must be transported to another enclave not operating under a barter economy and sold. Fencing a large amount of gear requires Networking and other CHA checks. However, a series of successful checks can provide more profit as the negotiator gets the fence to accept a higher mark-up.

Enclaves without strong executive leadership descend into tribal economies. Family usually delineates between tribes, but groups with strongly held religious or political beliefs can fracture just as easily. The demands of the Loss and limited geography of most enclaves force the factions to interact, but trade is scarce and plagued by intense skepticism. The political landscape demands each group seek wealth as much as they sabotage the advancement of their rivals. Tribal economies are zero sum gains, tending towards agrarian systems with roughly equal land shares or a series of interconnected monopolies. If one group does manage to gain enough power, their reforms adopt a more efficient model by dissolving the opposing groups through economic incentive, coercive violence, or cultural assimilation. Working inside a tribal economy is like navigating a minefield. Any Takers hired from without instantly become targets for every other tribe in the enclave. If the Takers are part of a tribe, they can expect “loyalty to the family” as a constant excuse for inadequate pay. Working for a second tribe will be viewed as betrayal, even for outsiders. What led to this primitive tribal economy? How are the lines drawn? Are relationships between factions confined to quiet resentment, or do the Takers need to view other possible clients as potentially deadly competitors?

Every economic system, whether Capitalist or Socialist, degenerates into a system of privilege and exploitation unless it is policed by a social morality, which can only reside in a minority of citizens. Every church becomes a vested interest without its heretics. Freedom is always in danger, and the majority of mankind will always acquiesce in its loss, unless a minority is willing to challenge the privileges of its few and the apathy of the masses. -R.H.S. Crossman

7 aNARCHOCAPITALIST

8 PIRATE

Humans naturally tend towards structure and order, so the design of bureaucratic systems is often an enclave’s first priority after they’ve assured the means for survival. To exist at all, the majority of residents inside truly anarchocapitalist enclaves share an ideological resistance to any and all control structures, no matter how seemingly well-intentioned they may be. Considering the deadly betrayals perpetrated by most governments during the Crash, there is no shortage of these survivors. Takers working for anarchocapitalists must learn to navigate the “spontaneous order” of their systems. A truly laissez-faire enclave might risk starvation, invasion, and death without developing any cooperative plans to address the issues, trusting instead in the rational self-interest of their neighbors and the guiding hand of the market. Security and police organizations, if they exist at all, are privatized, just like every other facet of vital infrastructure. But despite all this uncertainty (or perhaps because of it), anarchocapitalists have some of the healthiest economies in the Loss. Takers can expect no end of opportunities, but only if they can bypass the bevy of cultural problems attached to such wealth. The distrust of government, though sometimes an unspoken assumption amongst the populace, often solidifies into an oppressive ideological structure akin to a theocracy. The lack of social safety net means death from disease and deportation are much more common; fear of the same causes increased stress in the lower classes, leading to outbursts of violence or outright revolution. Most importantly, the privatization of every vital service makes the enclave’s survival fragile. When developing an anarchocapitalist enclave, the Market must ask what aspects of the society are stronger for competition and freedom from regulation, and what aspects are neglected or unstable as a result. Pirate economies either have no means of production or lack the skill to operate them. Nothing is produced in a pirate economy. Every good required to sustain life, along with all comforts and amenities, must be stolen or salvaged from other communities. This leads to drastic and deadly boom/ bust cycles dependent upon the availability of “prey.” Pirate economies differ from anarchocapitalism in that, if someone were to utilize the lack of regulation to develop a successful business, that person would then either be robbed, killed, or regularly extorted by their neighbors. The lack of governmental structure is replaced by a totalitarian government elected solely by might-makes-right. As such, one of the risks anarchocapitalist economies face is descending into a pirate system, which is the failure state of laissez-faire. Takers need a very good reason to work with pirate economies. In addition to the problematic morality, pirates are as keen to steal the labor of others, as they are their goods. Hiring Takers means that the pirates can’t coerce cooperation through the threat of violence. It does not, however, mean they will actually pay when the job is done, and violence is the culturally engrained method of dispute resolution. These groups depend entirely on the wealth of salvage left over from the Crash; they are essentially giant Taker crews in and of themselves. Why do they need the help of another group? And if salvage in the area dries up, will the enclave disband and immigrate to more stable economies, or will they resort to violence and theft like other groups before them?

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9 EXPLOITATIVE

10 oDOISM

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The stability of exploitative economies relies on the labor of an enforced underclass. In short, exploitative economies need slaves. Due to social progress before the Crash, slave-based economies remain rare, but a few have succeeded in the Loss. Exploitative systems resemble feudalism, but rather than chaining the oppressed labor pool with pure ideology, the ruling class utilizes violence and bondage, Rather than pilfer goods from external sources, exploitative economies steal labor through force in order to stimulate production. The exploitative economy builds an entire hierarchy atop an enslaved base. A small middle class develops that the masters hire to perform the day-to-day brutality that sustains them. Though it greatly reduces overhead, slave economies are extremely inefficient. The labor pool has little incentive to maintain quality or speed, requiring many more people than it would take to perform the same job in a decent enclave. As such, slaves outnumber their masters by large margin, thus requiring increasingly monstrous tactics to keep the masses under control. The rationalizations slavers use to justify their loathsome practices are sickening and can cause moral injury to Takers by mere proximity. The stigma of working with slavers far outweighs the short-term profit. In fact, the only way to profit long-term from work in exploitative economies is to destroy them. If Takers can’t undermine such regimes through their work, being complicit to their existence is sin enough.

A few groups trapped in the Loss experimented with a radical redefinition of social and economic models. Deriving their name from Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, Odoists take collectivism to the extreme by denying all personal property rights. Odoists share everything, eschewing every traditions that might imply ownership. Though no state structure exists to enforce law, marriage and monogamy remain taboo in Odoism. Children are raised in communal homes by volunteers from the entire community, never knowing their birth parents. Personal pronouns are stricken from the language: “my hand” becomes “the hand.” The psychological dismantling of every existing human social norm wouldn’t have been possible without the nightmarish tragedy and forced cooperation of the Crash. Many Odoists have suffered in ways most people can’t even imagine, and this makes their demeanor disconcerting to outsiders. Dealing with Odoists is challenging. Their unwavering anarchocollectivism runs counter to the entire Carrion Economy. If Odoists request Takers, something has gone wrong. Yet, regardless of the severity of the situation, Odoists won’t “hire” a crew to do anything, meaning Takers have limited options for getting paid. They can claim goods as necessary for the Contract, then abscond with the assets to sell elsewhere. Alternately, Odoists can pay in the form of +Rep spots to be used elsewhere in the Loss. Finally, most Odoists recall capitalism before the Crash. These clients might risk censure and banishment by their peers and pay Bounty, if Takers can keep the transaction hidden.

ClIent Table The backstory of clients should fit the goods/ services they need and the economy they function within. Markets are encouraged to make up spots in tune with that description, but it can sometimes be interesting to roll

1 DIDN'T ASK FOR PRIVILEGE

2 ANIMAL LOVER

3 THE FAITHFUL MUST STICK TOGETHER

randomly for spots and write a personality to fit the traits. Remember, the specific demands of the job make up a client’s tough spot. Write one implied by the goods/services and how they fit into the economy.

The client is sensitive to the fact that, merely by having enough The client is very concerned income to hire labor, she exists about working with “real” Takers. 1 in a higher class. The client The exact definition of what real recognizes that a lot of luck went AUTHENTICITY entails reveals a whole list of into ascending the economic IS personal prejudices and privilege. ladder and remains concerned EVERYTHING Painting one’s outfit as authentic about being mistaken for a or others as posers is a good way greedy oligarch. Pointing out the to manipulate this client. privileged position can shame the client into concessions. This client goes goofy at mere Sometimes a bad boss makes mention of puppies, kittens, and employees suffer because an even other adorable creatures. To this worse boss sends shit rolling person, the death of all those downhill. In these instances, household pets is the saddest satisfying the middle manager’s 2 thing about the Crash. Ironically, to crawl from under elevating the humane treatment AMBITIOUS desire the boot is the only way to get of animals despite the enormous concessions. This client has to pressures of the Loss is one of take orders from someone higher the only ways the client maintains up in the enclave or business. a connection to humanity. Show Convince them hiring the crew this client the negotiator is a advances their personal position fellow animal lover to build to earn Sway. instant rapport. The client practices some faith, either one of the new believer movements or an established religion. As a result, this person innately trusts fellow members more than the average person. If the negotiator happens to be one of the faithful, all the better, but the price tag bumps up all the same for those that can passably impersonate one or shame the client’s subtle prejudice.

3 SMARTEST PERSON IN THE ROOM

The sensation of being outwitted and underprepared seems totally alien to this client. The meritocracy of survival has deprived them of social graces normally used to compensate in such instances, and the client has grown unaccustomed to humility. Crews should try show off their own intelligence or, better yet, get the client thinking more favorable terms are actually his idea.

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4 ThINK OF THE CHILDREN

No one suffered more in the Crash and resulting madness than children. While the necessities of physical and financial survival have hardened the client to the suffering of fellow adults, the melancholy pull of innocence lost never ceases. This client is hardwired to put the needs of the young first. Takers that show pictures of their own children or can somehow promise increased child welfare if they are hired get a boost in Sway.

Fears of conformity are typically healthy, but some conflate a healthy sense of self-reliance until they worship the new for its own sake. This client has 5 been rewarded so many times STRONGER for leaving the beaten path SWIMMERS that she no longer considers any procedure or prescription OUTSIDE trustworthy. The client would THE MAINSTREAM much rather take a chance on the weirdest, most iconoclastic group of Takers in the Loss than an “average” crew with impeccable reputation. Highlight a crew’s weirdness — or just flat-out lie — to utilize this social blind spot.

6 LOVES A GOOD WAR STORY

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Though keen to point out the horror of the Crash in mixed company, some people secretly regard the Blight as the best thing that ever happened to them. Perhaps a life sentence to inconsequence and predictability was lifted by the zombie terror. Maybe they found reserves they didn’t know they had, virtues that now serve as the foundation of a new personality. The client could be one of the few whose life was actually worse before the Crash. Regardless, this client’s favorite topic of conversation is the horror that led to the carrion economy. Hook the boss with a daring tale of survival, and then make her pay more to hear the end.

4 VINDICTIVE

5 fEAR OF mISSING OUT (fOMO)

6 THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD

“It’s just business” doesn’t mean much to this client. Personal slights, both real and imagined, strongly motivate financial decisions. Find someone that offended this person, paint hiring the Takers as a blow against the rival, and reap the profits. Or, offend the touchy bastard, and then feign disinterest in a dangerous job. He’ll irrationally pay more to get you over the fence just so he can pray you get bit. FOMO manifests in lots of ways. Sometimes it’s being overly concerned about the latest cultural trends. It can also show up as the old “keeping up with the Jones’s” fallacy, exacerbated by the advent of social networking. When staying in the black means staying alive, it can take the form of bargain hunter’s disease, convincing people to buy things they don’t need under the illusion of a limited-time offer. This client has a bad case of FOMO; exploit it. Due to indoctrination by a pundit, childhood teachings, or a tendency towards sophism, this client has divided humanity into two camps, “Those who X, and those who Y.” Those with firm handshakes, and those without them. Those that can hold a gaze like a man, and those that can’t. Butchers and meat. Alphas and betas. The aphorism has been repeated so often that the person is blind to the inherent value statement and doesn’t register identifying with one side as prejudice. Of course, such tidy little generalizations never predict behavior, but they’re certainly useful for separating fools from their money.

7 SUCKER FOR A GOOD REFERENCE

Lying on job applications is as old as jobs, and it’s not too hard to find others to join in the fiction. Still, employers exist that continue to worship at the altar of a good reference, yet can’t be bothered to do the extensive research required to vet such unreliable sources. This client has a reputation for going with the crew with the most buzz. Use a +Rep spot for three Sway instead of two, or bribe a Reference to snowball the rube into coughing up a big payday.

8 THE RULES WILL SAVE US

The client does not like surprises. At all. Survival for many came in the form of memorized procedures followed exactly, and this client worships routine as savior and provider. Crews that can project the most robotic response to the task get the job. Overwhelm the client with tons of Taker rules, guidelines, and contingency plans. Putting the deadly and unpredictable into tidy boxes comforts the client and loosens the wallet.

9 Just wants to make frIENDS

Those with enough bounty to outsource work can live an isolated existence. Poverty and need abound; everyone wants what they have and resents them for having it. Basic human kindness, if it can be passed off as genuine affection and not manipulation, lowers this client’s defenses and opens up more options.

7 POOR IS ANOTHER WORD FOR UNMOTIVATED

8 LOATHES AN AMATEUR

9 DON'T GET HIGH ON YOUR OWN SUPPLY

Bootstraps! This person retreated from class guilt into the comfortable lie that everyone, everywhere, deserves everything that happens to them. The only person that can suffer from bad luck is the client; everyone else just doesn’t want to work hard, or they don’t maintain a positive attitude, or they want to mooch off others, etc. Conversely, everything good that happens to the client comes from their own carefully planned actions. Narcissism predicates this delusion. Smart negotiators pretend to be a mirror version of these clients and get paid for letting the self-absorbed bastards talk to themselves.

Whether they’ve been burned in the past or merely fear it happening in the future, this client hates nothing more than someone still learning a trade: the living embodiment of the Catch-22 “can’t get a job without experience; can’t get experience without a job.” This person wishes the Crash happened earlier so he could hire Takers with more than five years in the field. Highlight a crew’s longevity or paint the competition as noobs to get this client on your side. Salesmen don’t speak to each other in the same way as customers. It’s foolish to bullshit a bullshitter, and this client considers himself a bullshitter. The person offering the Contract recognizes that all advertisement is based in deception, but mistakes the value of a business by its volume of deception. Show the client that the entire Taker persona is just an act, a show for the punters, and they’ll be convinced an obvious Scam is actually a bargain.

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10 PREFERS A DEVIL SHE KNOWS

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Everyone is lying to everyone else, all the time. The truth is so rare as to be nonexistent, and it’s hard to fault anyone for abandoning it. This cynical client would much rather work with sneaky bastards she can predict than a perfect angel. A few well-placed and poorly crafted lies make the client feel like they’re too smart to be fooled. By being caught once trying to deceive, negotiators paradoxically get away with successive lies much more easily.

10 SKEPTICAL TO A FAULT

Nothing rewards paranoia like the total breakdown of society. This client has been rewarded so many times for pessimism and excessive planning that the slightest kernel of doubt can grind things to a halt. One way for crews to exploit this is to leave nothing to chance, presenting themselves as a sure thing. However, it’s far easier to paint the competition as untrustworthy and reap the benefits of being the lesser of two evils.

CompetItIon Table Competition doesn’t want the Takers to get the job done so they can steal the client, fulfill a personal goal, or pursue a vendetta. This faction tries to undercut negotiations. If they

1 LONER

2 nOOBS

3 FENCEMEN

4 RAIDERS

5 VALETS

succeed, the PCs have to drive their prices down, intimidate the rivals into fleeing, or eliminate them. Even if the Takers get the job, the competition might arrange for an “accident” out in the Loss.

Though rare, a few Takers operate solo out of concern for their profit margin or an antisocial attitude. Those that survive long enough to make a name for themselves are indisputably capable and more than likely a little unhinged. What has drawn this lone operator to this job? What reputation does this person have? Will it help or hinder a bid? How can facing the Loss alone warp a personality? Starving enclavists and bored citizens sometimes enter the game late. The competition for this job is a group of inexperienced Takers that have yet to establish turf or reputation. Why risk this line of work? Are they well-equipped adrenaline junkies with too much bounty and not enough brains? Exploited populations risking death for the chance at a better life? Desperate refugees with nothing left to lose? Whatever the reason, Noobs always come to the table with something to prove and undercut any price to get their foot in the door. Do the Takers convince them to leave it to professionals or pick up the pieces after the Loss punishes their hubris?

Besides Takers, Fencemen have more experience with casualties than anyone else. The thankless task of killing and removing the dead from the borders, not to mention the tendency to double as a group’s law enforcement, puts them in the good graces of the community. Experience might be enough to get a Contract, but clearing the undead from fortifications is quite different than wrestling with them on their own turf. Furthermore, goodwill can be manufactured and exploited. Are these Fencemen really up to the task or merely overconfident? What motivates them to leave their post for speculation out in the Loss? The heyday of post-apocalyptic piracy fades with every year post-Crash, but a few tribal bands still “live Darwin” and subsist by consuming the spoils of others’ labor. In their dotage, some of these groups have devolved into little more than protection rackets, demanding no bid Contracts that they can sloppily complete for pay. Raiders aren’t used to not getting their way. If the Takers steal a Contract from them, will the raiders take violent action against competitors or the client? If it’s the latter, does the crew even care so long as they get paid? The crime lords of the Free Parking ghettos often sponsor their own Taker crews and send them over the Recession border, skimming profits and making smuggling connections to feed their desperate customer base back home. These groups are usually made of some combination of fanatically loyal lieutenants and unfortunates trying to pay off debts for family members coerced by the crime boss. What valet runs this crew? Will this person be impressed or enraged when the PCs dare to steal a Contract? Can the disparity in the crewmembers’ motivations be used against them?

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6 CARTELS

7 TAKERS

8 BELIEVERS

9 REBELS

10 DHQS

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The monstrous brutality of narco-traffickers suited them particularly well to life post-Crash, and demand for their product in the remaining states has never been higher. Along their lengthy supply routes through the Loss, cartel enforcers occasionally accept Taker work to boost their margins or fulfill their bloodlust. Cartels rarely need the work, but their obsession with maintaining everyone’s respect and fear make them prone to extremes. How does the cartel’s reputation affect negotiation with the client? How can the Takers counteract their threats? Will the cartel laugh off losing a Contract or take it as a personal insult? Rival crews often look for work in the territory claimed by a local group. Sometimes, they are nomads that only do business on the run, or crews in need of supplemental Contracts en route to a distant job. Cases of hostile takeover are more rare, but they do occur; nobody on LifeLines gets a protected monopoly except the Moths. Competition among Takers is complicated by professional appreciation. What about this opposed crew’s brand makes them seem right for the job? How does camaraderie make fighting over the scraps that much worse? Resorting to violence or dirty tricks to get a Contract likely incurs a -Rep spot, but is that worth it to prevent the rival crew from escalating the situation first? Fanatics still need to eat. Some do Taker work to fund their operations or proselytize a certain method for living in the Loss. For example, Black Math is going to handle an extermination job very differently than the Shepherds or Archivists. What about this Contract attracted these people, or are they acting out of desperation? Faith often turns the professional into the personal at unpredictable times; do the believers regard the PCs as friendly rivals or view any competition as a blasphemous assault on the faith? The betrayal of the Recession won’t be forgotten. The Crash drafted many trained warriors into the desperate ranks of an army whose only mission is revenge. Stranded foreign spies, stateless military diaspora, treasonous units that refused to abandon their posts, and vindicated survivalist nutbags, among others, continue a war against the government pre-dating the casualties — all these groups need to fund their continued political operations somehow. The extremism of most rebel groups is deemed acceptable considering their training and equipment. How can the Takers make themselves appear more professional than the professionals, or do they merely undercut them? Will the rebels understand the necessities of the market, or do they view competition as counter-revolutionaries in need of elimination?

The absolute worst thing a Taker can hear is that the Feds have an interest in their business. DHQS maintains numerous intel assets in the Loss, and they occasionally find it cheaper to bid for Contracts that might infringe on their interests than to exterminate everyone that stumbles onto a black site. But as a method of counterintelligence, they’ll often hire out their death squads for meaningless tasks to keep the Loss guessing about the agency’s real priorities. The government mercs are infinitely more qualified and willing to work for almost nothing; Takers competing with a DHQS black squad have to rely entirely on a shared hatred of the Feds to get a job. Even if they succeed, is the bid a DHQS bluff or an actual attempt to discourage interference in their affairs? If it’s the latter, Stewards have no qualms about ordering an entire crew murdered. As far as the government is concerned, they’re dead already.

ComplIcatIon Table Complications define themselves from the job’s other elements. The Market’s creativity is required here more than anywhere else to develop a twist fitting the job’s

other circumstances. These generalized complication “families” suggest a variety of disasters to keep the Market from falling into a rut.

1 detour

Some unforeseen obstacle blocks entrance to the job site. The crew must add Legs to the journey to bypass the obstacle, find a different job site, expend resources to eliminate the obstruction, or risk serious danger to gain entry.

2 weather

Climate change causes an anomalous and extreme weather event at the site. Flooding, tornados, extreme heat, gigantic hail, locusts — the natural disaster complicates everything about the job. Planning becomes more difficult, execution more dangerous, and extraction more uncertain. If goods are involved, the event negatively affects them, and the Takers must take even more risk to secure their payday.

3 INCOMPLETE BRIEF

In order to protect their pride, reputation, or safety, the client has intentionally left out some vital information about the job. An especially dangerous task could have been made to sound routine. Morally disgusting motivations could be obscured in hopes that once the PCs learn the truth, they’ll be too invested to turn back. The client has manipulated the crew in such a way that more danger, resources, or Humanity must be expended to get the job done than was promised.

4 CAT'S PAW

This is similar to an incomplete brief, but even the client doesn’t know the true nature of the job. Some jobs are lures to bring unwary crews into an ambush. Contracts are really performed at the behest of third parties that don’t make their true intention known until the crew is out in the Loss and away from witnesses. Anything requiring such complex machinations is, at best, extremely distasteful and, at worst, an out-and-out betrayal. Takers must not only figure out how to survive; they have to figure out a way to turn their misfortune into profit. (Note: as is always the case, Markets should allow the Takers an opportunity to meet their agreed upon price or greater. The group might not be able to capitalize on the opportunity, but the chance for a successful job should always be available.)

5 Bad Intel

Some aspect of the job meant to reduce risk and entice providers into accepting the Contract achieves the complete opposite effect. The “nearempty” mall is crawling with casualties. The fleet of trucks has no tires. The safe is locked after all. Whatever the case, the Takers have to adapt to the new logistical demands if they want to get paid.

6 HOT ZONE

A migrating stampede of casualties moves through the area. Whatever prey brought them here has long since died or escaped, leaving the site absolutely infested with undead. The primary challenge is chumming and luring the horde to strategic locations so others can traverse the crowd without getting eaten. But once those with the short straw have drawn the attention of the hungry mobs, how will they escape?

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7 SQUATTERS

8 OUTBREAK

9 EMINENT DOMAIN

10 ABERRANT

Scores

The site is occupied by some human presence. It could be an undiscovered enclave, a believer stronghold, a faction taking temporary shelter, or some group trying to steal the job. Regardless, the presence of others complicates the job, requiring Takers to negotiate compromise, sneak into the site unnoticed, or eliminate the interlopers. A nearby community, crew, faction, or other group has succumbed to a fresh infection. Vectors haunt the area, screaming apologies and puking blood. The job site holds clues as to what happened to these poor souls. Can the Takers find out what went wrong and complete the job without succumbing to the sprinting cannibals? What else is located around the site? Do the Takers shoulder the responsibility of clearing out these dangerous monsters before they climb the walls of the nearest enclave? StopLoss, DHQS, or one of the many other corporate/governmental interests setting up illegal operations in the Loss has invested in the job site. They may have laid claim to the Takers’ interest or have other goals, but the access to the site is somehow restricted. Well-funded groups might have installed surveillance equipment or automated defenses to keep the site safe. Mercenaries could be garrisoned to guard the perimeter. Perhaps the site is scheduled for a bombing run to make room for incoming human resources, or maybe the cleanse has already occurred, leaving the remains on fire or poisoned by chemical weapons.

The worst-case scenario is the one you can’t prepare for. Aberrants violate the already shaky physical laws governing the Blight’s epidemiology, creating singular nightmares that threaten a Taker’s understanding of reality and continued survival. The site is haunted by one or more of these abominations. Does LifeLines have any information on how to escape these monsters? If they do, how does the group separate fact and fiction, truth from trolls, while fighting for their lives? If it’s never been seen before, do they risk life and limb documenting and learning about the anomaly or call the job off altogether?

What’s the point of self-employment if you can’t be your own boss? Part of Red Markets’ plan for breaking the GM monopsony is a system that allows players to write their own games. The Market still plays a vital part, but players take the active role in the scenario’s design. Alternately, characters can contribute to the process, forcing their players to engage with the setting through the hungry eyes of entrepreneurs. In addition to defining exactly what a Score entails, this section provides procedures for developing Scores both in and out of character.

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What Is a Score?

A Score is an opportunity Takers make when they get tired of waiting around for the knock. As is the case with most DIY businesses, the only way to scratch a profit out of nothing is to skimp on labor: namely, your own. That’s what Takers do when they chase a Score; Scores don’t account for services rendered. Takers waive compensation for the danger they face in exchange for full ownership of the goods they salvage. Scores are based solely on goods. The more valuable goods the Takers secure, the more profit they stand to make. Since it’s all about what the group can Haul out of the Loss, Scores are

creative responsibility is divided amongst everyone at the table. Here’s everything required for a Score at a glance. 1. Goods and Equilibrium What are the Takers going to sell? How much is each unit worth? While the “service” part of the job still makes up the bulk of the adventure, Takers have no responsibility to please a client or work a certain way. They are gambling their lives and labor on securing the goods. No goods; no profit. 2. Economy If the Takers aren’t running out of their own campaign’s enclave, which type of economy serves as a market for the good, what characterizes the community, and how might the Takers manipulate the price of their goods inside this system?

potentially the most profitable jobs in the game, but the requirement of distribution (i.e. carrying all the shit back) means that reward stacks more heavily with risk than ever before. Most importantly, Scores say something about the characters and the world they live in. Value correlates with need, and the biggest paydays are going to sustain and alter the enclave Takers work in. Furthermore, when Scores are written by PCs, they say something about the characters’ personalities. After all, if somebody else knew about unclaimed treasure hiding out in the Loss, why wouldn’t they hire a crew to go get it for them? The subject of Scores relates inherently to something unique about a character’s skill set or backstory; it’s a job only they can do.

Scores At-a-Glance

Scores share many similarities with Contracts. The primary difference is the way

3. Wholesaler Wholesalers replace clients in Scores. Who is going to buy the goods off the Takers for use in their own business? What kind of personality enables someone to run such a successful enterprise in the Loss? 4. The Site Why hasn’t someone gone after this Score before? Is it secret? Already claimed? Protected? Inaccessible? What is going to make the Takers earn their money? 5. Market Responsibilities Experienced Takers know something is always going to go wrong, but nobody knows what. The Market still decides elements like travel time and complications, surprising the players with them once the game starts. This is why Scores are most often devised at the end of game session, to give the Market more time to prepare. Goods and EquIlIbrIum The definition of services stays fluid in a Score. Whatever needs to be done to wrest the goods from the chaos of the Loss, that’s what the Takers have to do. For free.

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The goods in question are to be determined by the players as they design the Score. If the group is struggling to come up with ideas, the Market should prompt them with the following questions: • What is something of unique value only someone like your character would recognize and know how to find? • What does this specific enclave need on a regular basis? • For the people of this enclave, what desire has gone unfulfilled for too long? • What does the geography in this area necessitate to survive? • What are the most successful business ventures around here, and what supply do they need to keep doing business? Once goods are decided upon, the Market rolls 2d10 and adds the results together. The sum is the equilibrium price of the good, and the interaction of the two numbers describes the economic situation on the Supply/ Demand Chart (see p. 363). The major difference is that while Contract equilibrium describes a single service, Score equilibrium is price per unit. How much constitutes a unit? That’s up to the Market. If the Score calls for salvaging vehicles, the unit should obviously be one vehicle. If the Score is parts for the vehicles, it would be best expressed in terms of Haul. Nothing should be expressed in units smaller than a Haul for a few reasons. Firstly, Markets that say every diamond is worth 18 bounty just ended their own campaign. A pocket full of loot lets a character instantly retire. Secondly, the game needs the Golden Rule (Risk = Reward) in order to tell a compelling story. Thus, goods should be expressed in terms no smaller than Haul because that abstract unit of measure is limited on the character sheet. This is not to say that characters shouldn’t be rewarded for cleverness. Smart planning and good rolls still mean huge paydays, but the fact remains that Haul is a finite resource

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eaten up by the loot. Loading down with goods greatly increases risk, so the rewards enjoyed by those that survive is justified. Economy In truth, it’s unlikely groups are going to have to characterize the economy at all when devising a Score. Red Markets groups typically don’t start planning Scores until playing in a campaign, at which point they’ve already exhaustively detailed the economy during Enclave Generation (see p. 406). But if the group has travelled or wants to plan their Score as a one-shot, they need to establish a basic description for the economy the goods will be sold in. The description need be no longer than those found in a Contract, but information about the economy can’t be left blank — while there is no negotiation in Scores, characters can still conduct Scams to manipulate prices. Having some information about the enclave’s economy can help when it comes time for players to drive the price per unit up. Wholesaler To escape the complications of supply/ demand represented in the Small Business rules (see p. 425), Takers need to foist that responsibility off onto someone that runs a full-time retail business. This means selling to a wholesaler. Wholesalers exist within economies of scale. They can move product fast enough to make narrow profit margins add up quickly. But since margins are so narrow and they control so much market share, wholesalers remain notoriously inflexible about price. They will buy goods at the equilibrium price. Haggling messes with their mark-up and they won’t put up with it. Mechanically, wholesalers prevent players from developing NPCs they can push around. The wholesaler’s personality can’t be exploited to screw with the price in negotiation because there is no negotiation. But this isn’t to say that groups can’t have fun writing their own colorful NPCs. Someone bold and capable enough to grow

a retail business in the Loss is bound to be an interesting character. How did they get started? What’s the business called? How do they advertise their brand to enclavists and settlers? What’s distribution look like? What’s their personality like? The SIte Before players start developing a job site, it’s important everyone understand one hard and fast rule: nothing about the site can be pleasant. Whatever the good and wherever it may be found, one immutable fact remains: if it were easy to get, someone would have done the Score already. Beyond that, there are no requirements. Some Markets research a real-world location and pull floor plans before the game starts; some just wing it. Either is okay. If the group is stumped for ideas, the Market should ask the following: • What kind of place would have the good you are looking for? • Why, besides ignorance, hasn’t anyone found this stash before? What has prevented people from stumbling onto the treasure trove? • What complicates removing the goods from the site? • What other enclaves, factions, and threats are known to be in the area? • Who else might be considering this Score? What, if anything, is stopping them from going after it? Market ResponsIbIlItIes Complications are the primary responsibility of a Market when designing a Score. The Loss just sucks: always and forever. No matter how favorable the conditions may look, something is going to go wrong. Every. Fucking. Time. Just like Contracts, Markets need to surprise their Takers with a reliable disaster, preferably as soon as it seems like they might get away with it. Markets need not concern themselves with competition. Unlike Contracts, Scores are closely held trade secrets. Takers with

a lead on some hot salvage won’t share the information with anyone except their wholesaler. This saves the Market some work, but competition would make for an excellent complication. It’s pretty common for shady crews to trail their rivals, lay an ambush, and rob them of whatever they have.... Another Market responsibility is travel time. If the Takers lived on top of the Score, somebody would have claimed it already. It’s going to take some walking to get to the site, and the nightmare waiting over the fence is the Market’s job. Market Fiat can be used to create each Leg’s encounter from scratch, or the GM can consult the d100 Loss Encounters Table (see p. 457). All that matters is that the PCs don’t know what’s coming. Besides the complication and travel time, all that’s left is taking notes and elaborating on the players’ suggestions. Draw or research floor plans for the site they described. Write a backstory for the wholesaler implied by his personality. Or just wing it. Players tend to be heavily invested in any scenario they designed themselves. Markets that want to do a lot of preparation should design Scores at the end of a session, giving themselves the time between games to work. But those comfortable with improvisation can launch straight into playing the Score once players finish writing it.

DesIgnIng Scores

So how does the group cooperate to design a Score? There are a lot of possible methods. Which one is right for your group depends on your preference for role-playing and group dynamic. What follows is a description of each method, a prescription for the type of game it best fits, and an example of the method in action. In-Character Opposed (StrategIc ThInkIng) Strategic Thinking is best for groups with a narrative focus. If you want the Score to be a role-playing challenge, but still want to ensure the elements remain grounded and realistic

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for the setting, this is the method for you. No one aspect of the job gets overloaded with content, and there is plenty of room for the Market to engineer surprises for the group.

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Basic Setup: Takers are always looking to get ahead. Every moment not spent trying to stay alive gets devoted to figuring out the next big Score. These people want escape, and everything they have goes towards figuring out how. When clients become scarce, there’s no shortage of suggestions about where the crew should start hustling. Step 1: Everyone rolls Black + Research. Reroll ties until a winner emerges. Step 2: Speaking in character, the Taker with the highest roll proposes some rumored stash of goods ripe for a Score. Step 3: Going around the table clockwise, every other Taker proposes a different stash of goods they think would make for a better payday. After all, everyone in the crew is

constantly thinking of ways to get ahead. Players may choose to pass if their Taker would share another person’s plan. Anyone passing their turn abstains from Step 4. Step 4: Once everyone has proposed for that element, all the players roll Black + Foresight. Reroll ties until a winner emerges. Step 5: The Taker with the highest roll has the best sounding plan. That’s what will be there, unless... Step 6: The Market rolls a Red and hides the result. If the Red is higher than the player’s modified Black, then something about the prediction is off. Exactly what is up to the Market. For example, if the Taker thought they were going to steal a pallet of baby formula, they’ll be disappointed to learn the powder is contained in a giant vat and hasn’t yet been packaged. Are they going to stick the stuff in their pockets? Step 7: Repeat the previous steps until every element is decided, but acknowledge

that all previous elements are now fixed. For instance, if the group established it was looting baby formula, no one would be suggesting a wholesaler for car parts. However, every Taker in the crew would “know a guy” that could fence baby formula. The winner of the Foresight roll wins. Perk to the Market: In making sure the predictions for failed Foresight checks are slightly off, you probably already developed a good complication for the job. Congratulations! You’re halfway done!

Default Rolls and Scores There is no defaulting in Red Market according to the “Plus One or it can’t be done” rule (see p. 176). However, designing Scores in-character only utilizes a few skills. If a character wasn’t trained in those few skills, the player couldn’t participate in the process. As such, designing Scores is one of the few times a +0 roll is allowed. The character still only has a 45% chance of success, but they aren’t cut off from participating. Example In-Character Opposed It’s a two-player game. The characters roll Research checks. Philly is up first. Philly: “My contact in the Detoxins tipped me off to a bunch of GMO crops being developed at this Alosine research lab. Apparently, they’re operating out of the Loss to protect their genetic patents. Those crazy hippie cultists want to burn the place to the ground, but I figure those super seeds would fetch a great price.” The other player has a different idea, and he says as much in the voice of his character. 8ch: “Plants? Look man, if you ain’t got your plants this late in the game, you already dead. Nothing more scarce out here than ammo. I got a line on this factory, see? Place probably has pallets of the stuff.” With the propositions made, both players

roll Black d10s and add their Foresight skill. Philly has the better plan, so GMO seeds are established as the Goods for the Score. Now the Market rolls a Red d10 in secret and ends up beating Philly’s roll. After some thinking, she figures that GMO crops are there, but they’re only designed to produce seeds when a proprietary fertilizer is used. The Takers have to get both the seeds and the fertilizer in order to get paid. In-Character CollaboratIve (Rumor MIll) Rumor Mill is best for groups that want to make sure everyone has a chance to contribute. This method produces varied elements with a lot of content. There isn’t as much surprise built into the elements as Strategic Thinking, but the combination of differing suggestions still makes for unpredictable moments. Basic Setup: A lot of conjecture makes its way onto the LifeLines. For every hot lead, there are a dozen commenters piling on the bandwagon carrying nothing but bullshit. Separating the fact from fiction can mean life or death. Step 1: Everyone rolls Black + Foresight. Reroll ties until a winner emerges. Step 2: Speaking in character, the Taker with the highest roll proposes some stash of goods they think would be ripe for a Score. Step 3: Whatever the first Taker proposed is now fixed: the Score is definitely about going to get that specific good. Now, going around the table clockwise, the next Taker proposes something else they heard about the goods. In improv terms, this is called “Yes, and....” Players aren’t trying to contradict each other so much as add wrinkles to the existing plot. For instance, if the first Taker proposed stealing crude oil, the next Taker may have heard it’s more than crude oil; an on-site refinery is producing gasoline. Step 4: When every Taker has shared a rumor overheard about the job element in question, every player except the one who went first (that element of the job is now

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immutable) rolls a normal Sensitivity check. If the roll is a success, there’s some truth to the rumor. On a failure, the Taker has been duped by one of the many hoaxes plaguing Ubiq. Secret Sensitivity Option: Instead of rolling out in the open, the Market makes the Sensitivity checks for the players in secret. The players won’t know the difference between truth and conjecture until they complete the job. Step 5: Go clockwise around the table, starting from the person that won the original Foresight check. The person to their right gets to propose the next element of the job. That person’s contribution is immutable. Step 6: Everyone else now gets to add a rumor on top of the proposed element, rolling Sensitivity to check its veracity. Repeat steps 5 and 6 until the Score is finished. Perk to the Market: Nobody gets left out. The stacking rumors also provide a ton of material to work with for each element of the job. Example In-Character CollaboratIve Grizz, Hellion, and Sherlock are trying to figure out the best person to fence a large number of survival manuals. Sherlock’s player started the last round’s Rumor Mill (he won the Foresight check), and Grizz’s player sits on his right. It’s his turn now. Grizz: “No question. We take the books to Worm. He’s the only bastard crazy enough to start a bookstore in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. I hear he taught half the nearby enclaves how to set up their irrigation. He’s got the customer base and reach we need to get a good price.” Since it’s Grizz’s turn, the group is definitely using Worm as a wholesaler. Anything the other Takers say just goes to further define the NPCs personality and business practice. Hellion: “Ugh. I know you’re right, but that guy is such a dweeb! I hear his voice is so nasal you can hear him breathing from a block away. That commercial of his sounded like he’d just sucked down a balloon full of helium!”

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Sherlock: “I, too, find the man rather loathsome. You all know I always keep an eye out for literary diversions at a good price, but I’m told by many trusted associates that Worm’s establishment is only to be contacted if I want to be harangued into buying a Japanese comic book full of robots fighting scandalously dressed school girls. But alas, even the socially tone deaf are sometimes unavoidable in the world of business.” Sherlock and Hellion’s players make Sensitivity checks. Both end up making it. The Market sighs; it looks like he’ll have to brush up on his funny voices and manga. The Market glares hatefully at the players, waiting for revenge until they get to the Site. Out-of-Character Consensus (Oh! That's Cool!) This method isn’t so much a method as an unspoken agreement. You’re all adults here. Everyone realizes it’s just a game. Nobody is going to get their feelings hurt, so you don’t need some elaborate procedure to police interactions while you design a Score. Let’s get it over with. The “Oh! That’s Cool!” method is only listed in case your group needs permission to throw out the rules when something universally interesting is proposed. This is that “throw out the rules” rule. Basic Premise: Out of character, everyone talks about what kind of Score they want to play. They decide on elements one-by-one until the Score is done. Step 1: The first person with an idea says it. Step 2: Other people in the group propose contrary ideas (à la Strategic Thinking), add something to a previous proposal (à la Rumor Mill), or abstain. Step 3: The Market counts to three. On three, everyone points to the person with the idea they like best. Players can’t vote for themselves, and the Market breaks any ties. The person with the most votes decides the element, along with any additions made by players that didn’t want to compete because they liked the idea. Perk for the Market: Keeping it casual.

Example Consensus Lindsey, Melissa, and Clementine have decided they want their characters to steal educational curriculum packets and sell them to a homeschool guru operating out of their enclave. But they’re currently stumped as to what interesting and challenging site would contain their loot. After some thinking, Clementine asks, “Maybe the curriculums could be located at a big convention center? And nobody looted them because there was this, like, huge education conference going on when the Crash happened, so the place is crawling with casualties and in the middle of the city, which is also crawling with casualties. So there’s like double zombies and a big search area.” Lindsey perks up, “Could we model the convention center after the one in Indianapolis?”

“I don’t see why not...” the Market replies. “Oh my god!” Melissa jumps up from her chair: “We could use the map from last year’s Gen Con! That would be so cool!” She sprints into her bedroom, looking for her old convention catalogue. The Market asks if that’s okay with everyone else, but they’ve already joined Melissa in frantically searching the house. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke. RandomIze and Extrapolate Finally, groups stumped for ideas can always consult the Contract Generator for prompts. The elements are equally useful for Scores and might spark creativity regardless of the method being used.

Mr. JOLS: A SpecIal Case

The concept of “Chasing Mr. JOLS” and its mythic stature amongst Takers has been

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discussed earlier in the book (see p. 217). In general, Mr. JOLS is a Score like any other; the only difference is that the Market makes things harder to represent the struggle of rising from rags to riches. This section specifically gives the Market advice on how to build meaningful (and/or bloody) exits for retiring characters. Plot Pay There is no equilibrium price for a Mr. JOLS. It pays enough... however much enough is. For the one player retiring, Mr. JOLS pays enough to launch them into a life a luxury. The retiree doesn’t just escape the Loss; they become rich is such a way that would only be possible in a partial apocalypse. Since retiring players come up with the plan — likely plotting it over the course of years — they get the bulk of the pay, but no one can catch Mr. JOLS alone. Any player that helps gets their costs paid, plus 10 bounty. It doesn’t matter how much health, Humanity, or ammo the non-retiring players expend helping their friend get rich; that cost is reimbursed, plus a 10 bounty profit. This, in addition to the free reference provided by a retired PC, encourages Takers to help out, even though they aren’t the ones about to get rich. If the group is utilizing the tontine rules, Mr. JOLS is enough to make everyone rich. Just remember that everyone has to reach their final retirement milestones before the final Score can be planned. It’s one thing to get yourself killed in a fit of ambition, quite another to watch a friend get eaten alive for it.

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IC Mandatory Chasing Mr. JOLS is all about character. Even the choice to go after it signifies a major story moment. Remember, Takers can retire the instant they hit their final milestone, but they only have enough to go back to their regular lives. Escape is possible, but only back into the lower middle-class drudgery that probably defined their existence before the Crash. After all that blood and terror, a life of swing shifts and 40-hour weeks may definitely be better, but it won’t ever feel fair.

Choosing to risk it all chasing Mr. JOLS means succumbing to years of temptation. It simultaneously speaks of greed, recklessness, naivety, idealism, entitlement, and grim determination. It’s a selfish move that sets up loved ones for life. It’s alternately foolish and heroic, and where it lands depends on the same thing everything depends on: the bottom line. Since it’s such a defining moment in a character’s life, Mr. JOLS needs to be planned in-character. The in-character collaborative (Rumor Mill) or in-character opposed (Strategic Thinking) methods need to be used. Which one? Let the Market decide. It’s also possible to do both, switching back and forth between methods for different elements. For instance, it makes for good heist narrative when a crew goes after a single good (Strategic Thinking) at a site that is varied and unpredictable (Rumor Mill). RetIrement Party But why does everything have to be done in-character? Because there shouldn’t be any competition for deciding the elements of a retirement Score. After all, it’s a secret hope the character has been harboring for literally the entire campaign; we shouldn’t trust it to a dice roll. So the in-character methods of designing Scores are used. The only change is that, in the case of a singular retirement plan, it’s always treated as if the retiree won the skill check that establishes initiative: Foresight for Rumor Mill or Research for Strategic Thinking. First proposal privilege doesn’t travel clockwise as it does normally. The exiting character defines the basics of every element, and the other players contribute by augmenting the element with rumors. In the event of a tontine, use the procedures as written. Since everyone is retiring off this one job, everyone has an equal chance to define it. Secret SensItIvIty The other modification of Rumor Mill for Mr. JOLS is that the Secret Sensitivity Option (see

p. 400) is required. This job is supposed to be tough. One of the ways to increase challenge is to keep the players guessing about what is actually going to happen up until the last moment. Markets should take notes on each rumor, check each character’s Sensitivity in a roll behind the book, and develop the job based on the results. The SIte: It Goes Wrong, or I Make It Go Wrong It’s suggested that even if every other aspect of the site is decided upon by Strategic Thinking, Market’s should use the Rumor Mill method to decide the Site. The object of a Mr. JOLS is a nexus of legend within the Loss. There are many, many reasons people know that the Site is a no-go zone. Some of those reasons may be true, or the reality could end up being much worse. Markets facilitating the design of a Mr. JOLS need to pay extra special attention during discussion of the Site. Recall that every proposal for the site needs to hurt or hinder Takers, and Markets have veto power over any softball proposals that don’t pass muster. Once the site has been defined by the retiree and all the rumors proposed, roll secret Sensitivity like normal... ...But for every false rumor, add another complication. The number of complications at a job site always equals the number of players. Either one of the proposed obstacles ends up being true, or the Market throws an unpredictable disaster at the Takers in place of the false lead. Two failed Sensitivity checks means two complications that blindside the crew. The only way to get fewer complications than players is for someone to critically succeed one of the Foresight checks. In that instance, the rumors they heard were accurate, but they’ve since been resolved by some happy accident of fate. However, there is no way for the Taker to know this until they arrive. There are many good reasons no one chased this Score until now: either the Takers can guess them, or they find out the hard way.

The Dream VIgnette If it’s time for Mr. JOLS, it’s nearing the end of a campaign... or at least nearing the end for one character. One of the segments of Red Markets specific to extended play is vignettes (see “Long-term Investments” p. 406). If the Market is utilizing vignettes to flesh out and characterize the setting, a new type gets added before a Mr. JOLS session begins. This segment is called “The Dream” and, whereas players choose one of the three types to role-play at the start of a job, role-playing “The Dream” is mandatory for all retiring characters before any other scenes are acted out. What is “The Dream?” It’s exactly what it sounds like: it’s the fulfillment of all the Taker’s frustrated desires. In this scene, retiring players are going to describe their Taker’s perfect day after they retire. In effect, the story is flash forwarding past the Mr. JOLS job and to the happy ending. Using all the funds from their former life as a Taker, how is the PC living now? Are they retired in the Recession? What’s their new identity, or did they get their old name back? How do they fill their days if they no longer have to work? How are their Dependents doing? Is the Loss a distant memory, or has the scarcity of the Loss left scars on their personalities? How does their new community react to their presence? Is the Taker respected on account of wealth, deemed suspicious as an outsider, or unconcerned with the opinion of a bunch of spoiled citizens? If the retirement plan is outside the Recession, where? Is it just the Taker and Dependents, or have others flocked to the haven purchased by Mr. JOLS? What does everyone do to sustain this new, separate peace? Is the Taker a client now, hiring out crews to support their new home, or have they left the life completely behind? How do they deal with the threats of the Loss, and what walls, real estate, or protection keeps them above the fray?

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Regardless, let the player narrate a perfect day after the nest egg is secure and the nightmare left behind. But the dream isn’t just a monologue. It’s not even real. It’s the dream that’s driven the Taker through all the horrors of the previous jobs and, now that salvation is in reach, the anxiety of being so close has turned it into a nightmare. The Market is responsible for reminding the Taker that it’s not over yet. They turn the dream into a nightmare at the last moment, narrating the character’s abrupt, sweatdrenched awakening into another day trapped in the Loss. When and how this nightmare manifests is at the behest of the Market and should touch on the story of that character. The Dream sets the mood for Mr. JOLS and lays out the stakes. At the end of the session, either the player’s vision of what happens to the character comes true, or the Market’s tragedy does.

The Loss Doesn't Let Go Contrary to what it might seem, the point of Chasing Mr. JOLS is not to kill all the characters. The point is to show that the Loss — with all its death, poverty, and despair — does not merely let people go. Those who manage to escape are forever marked. In the best cases, the scar is an act of heroism: a former Taker’s memory of an insurmountable obstacle somehow overcome and the knowledge that nothing a quiet life in the Recession has to offer can hope to surpass that sublime moment of triumph. Or perhaps it’s the faces of those left behind — the ones not strong enough to climb out — and the bitter certainty that you could have helped more. More often, the wounds run much deeper: friends killed, infected, and crippled; minds torn asunder by madness; fortunes of fool’s gold bought with blood.

Example Dream Vignette Kowloon’s life as an architectural student got cut short by the Crash, but he put his studies to good use defending his home enclave. After his retirement, he intends to be recognized for his quarintechture designs and leave the dark years of Taking behind. Kowloon’s player: “.. and after going out to the bar for a couple of drinks with my friends, I go up to my highrise apartment overlooking the Mississippi and stare out the panoramic window across the border. I have a nightcap of pure grain alcohol standing there every night - anything else tastes like a rip-off, watered-down and dusty like everything that didn’t come from Bessie’s still. Drinking to forget has never worked, but I keep trying a little harder every year. I think about-” The Market: “A hand slaps against the window. Rotting. It leaves a bloody handprint as it slides down the glass. Then another.” Kowloon’s player: “What? We’re thirty stories up.. ” The Market: “No. You’re not. It’s ground floor. And on the wrong side of the river. You see that tower you dreamed of living in one day looming on the horizon until more of them come, blocking the view. There’s dozens of them now, hundreds. All your defenses, all your funnels and deterrents, they did nothing. The horde is here. Your sister is among them, as is your crew. Everyone you ever cared about, but they’re not screaming apologies. You are. You failed them. That’s your last thought as the glass breaks and they come pouring in and over you.. until you wake up. Covered in a cold sweat in your cot underneath the concrete rafters of the parking garage. The same way you’ve woken up every day for the past five years, but maybe this is the last time.”

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Regardless, the extra complications assure the scope remains suitably epic, and the consequences hauntingly permanent. Anyone who escapes the carrion economy richer than they started owes the Loss a great debt. They’ve become perfect capitalists, reborn into a blood-soaked luxury, crawling into the light over a mountain of corpses, awakened to the beautiful, rational cruelty that defines the world. Such transformations do not come cheap, and the Loss always takes its due....

na c it ir p s le b o n A generous and ell in w d o t d e t c e p x not be e are o h w n e m f o s the breast read. b y il a d ir e h t r struggling fo assus n r a c li a H f o s iu s -Diony 405

specialization increase the chances of survival. The enclaves that are still around five years after the Crash have developed into diverse economies operating under their own autonomous political systems. While a one-shot of Red Markets can take place at any location or travel nomadically between a variety of locations, campaigns focus on the fate of a single enclave and its people. Takers don’t just live there; they are part of the community and a major part of the economy. Campaigns typically start and end at the enclave, and the jobs Takers do have lasting effects on their home.

Procedure

Long-Term Investments

So the group tried out a Contract or two — maybe they already designed a Score — and now they want to see if they can hustle hard enough to retire from the Loss permanently. What now? How do we string these stories of day-to-day survival into a larger narrative? This section details everything the Market and the players need to run a campaign of Red Markets.

Enclave GeneratIon

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Enclaves are town-to-city sized communities where survivors have banded together for protection against the undead. Though initially defined solely by whatever natural fortification provided protection against Casualties during the Crash, each enclave slowly evolves beyond its arbitrary geographical founding. Trade and skill

Enclave Generation should be performed using the Out-of-Character Consensus procedure from “Designing Scores” (p. 400). In-character methods are great for scores, but the economic horror of Red Markets is based in materialism: the logistics of the place come first. Campaigns, therefore, work better if the players know where their Takers will live and work before they develop character concepts. A solid character concept can easily be altered to fit almost any setting, but building setting around character concepts can sap the story of conflict and make for contradictions the Market can’t explain in the economy. Markets should ask the following questions of the players and take notes on their proposed answers. Vote to decide on contradictory ideas (i.e. it can’t be located in a jungle and in a desert), but encourage players to augment each other’s ideas by using “yes, and…” whenever possible. Strive to include as much as possible so long as it doesn’t directly negate some already established fact about the setting. It should be noted that the Market is not solely a facilitator of enclave generation. Markets should actively participate in the process with their own ideas. After all, the Market has to write a lot of Contracts and Scores based out of this enclave. Make sure it’s a setting everyone is comfortable playing in.

Name

Ummm…what’s the name? You probably want to leave this one until last, and that’s okay. It’s only included first here because it’s at the top of the enclave sheet.

LocatIon

Where, geographically, is the enclave located? You can set the enclave in a familiar area, inside a state or city everyone is interested in, or leave exact geography vague. Whatever you choose, try to limit yourselves to descriptions of the landscape around the enclave. Other questions deal with the enclave’s interior features, but the community’s surroundings are going to play a big role. Remember, geography determines economy. • Do the enclave have access to water? How? Is there a river or lake? Is there a manmade waterway nearby? • What’s the landscape like? Hills and rocks? Flat plains? Forests? Mountains? Urban? • Is there arable soil outside the enclave, or do crops need to be grown inside the fence? Is agriculture feasible at all? • What was the population density like here before the Crash? Higher density means more survivors to feed, or more casualties to eat them. Lower density means less danger, but more scarcity when it comes to scavenging. • What’s the climate like here? Cold? Dry? Hot? Rainy? Are changes seasonal, or has climate change made fluctuations unpredictable?

Defenses

It wouldn’t be an enclave if it couldn’t keep the casualties out, especially back when they were sprinting, climbing Vectors. • Were the defenses natural, like an island, a mountain, or a peninsula? Repurposed from some other building, such as a prison, a train yard, or a military base? Hastily constructed during the Crash, like an arrangement of shipping containers, a moat, or a rag-tag flotilla of ships?

• How have the defenses been added to or altered since the Crash? • Does anyone keep watch on the walls? Or are the defenses strong enough that they take care of themselves? • Is there some sort of enclave police force or militia? If so, how does one join up? • How do people bypass the defenses? If it’s a gate, how do they distract, herd, or kill the casualties waiting outside? A system of airlocks and checkpoints? If it’s a secret entrance, how is it kept secret?

HIstory

A lot of people holed up and survived the Crash…before dying of starvation, disease, and infighting in the years that followed. The enclaves that have made it this far did so by evolving. • What was the first group of people to see this place as a chance for survival? Did they secure it by being smart, ruthless, or just first? • Did other groups come later, or has everyone been here since the Crash? Were these additional populations recruited to meet the needs of the enclave’s founders, or were they desperate refugees that managed to insert themselves? • What past conflicts, between interior groups and outside threats, came to define how the enclave operates today?

Top Exports

No man is an island, and neither is his enclave. Total self-reliance is a myth; the enclaves that survive trade with each other. Determining what an enclave can afford to sell off is a great way to help the Market generate ideas for jobs. • What surpluses does your enclave have to trade? • What goods can be produced or salvaged from the geography? • What forms of industry can be undertaken without undermining the defenses?

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• What skills and expertise can the population sell for what they need?

Top Imports

The same things that define a surplus imply a deficit. The enclave can’t be all things to all people. Listing the necessary imports is an even better way to help Markets generate ideas for jobs. • What does the enclave need to keep operating? • What do people need that the local geography can’t provide? • What forms of industry are made impossible by the necessary limitations of the defenses? • What skills and expertise are lacking in the population?

CompetItIon

Zombie movies existed in the world of Red Markets before the zombies actually came. Things got really bad, but a surprising amount of people knew how to survive. These groups condensed into enclaves in the following years, but most areas in the Loss can’t support a full-blown metropolis. The smaller groups compete with each other for resources and bounty. When talking about competition for the enclave as a whole, we aren’t talking about competing Taker groups (though they may come from other enclaves). Competing Taker crews will come and go in any campaign, but local enclave competition remains a consistent concern. These competing enclaves use the same transportation routes and natural resources. They scavenge in the same ruins, but hold different beliefs and ideologies. Getting some ideas for competing enclaves down on paper should spark ideas for job lines and other serialized storylines. • Where have other groups settled in the area? When thinking about this question, remember your enclave’s top imports and exports. Do these other communities feed your needs, or worsen shortages?

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• What kind of structures and groups could provide for your enclave? What kinds of structures and groups would need your enclave to survive? • How are these other communities different from yours in size, belief, economy, or political structure? • What if some of the competition isn’t from an enclave at all? Does the DHQS have any settlements nearby? Has a corporate interest set up shop in the area for some research or salvage operation? • What do citizens deployed in the Loss need from those left behind? What riches from the Recession can they provide the people of the enclave?

SocIal Structure

Social structure is perhaps the most important part of enclave generation. Economy implies inequality. Inequality creates conflict, and conflict is the heart of your campaign. Look at the answers to the previous questions on the list. How have these answers stratified the culture, and how does that hierarchy perpetuate itself? If the questions below aren’t enough to spark ideas, take a look at the economy section of the Contract Generator (p. 379). • How does your enclave govern itself? Is it a general democracy, or some sort of representational compromise? • Is it monarchy, socialist ideology, or total anarchy? • Is there an executive or court system? • Does anyone have veto power? • Does religion play a role in the enclave’s political struggles? Is it a traditional faith, or one of the believer cults resulting from after the Crash? • Has the enclave always done things this way, or is the current system the result of some past struggle?

NeIghborhoods

Humans like cliques. Break them into tiny cliques and they immediately start making tinier cliques. Bounty will be the biggest

separator, but that doesn’t mean race, religion, politics, gender, language, and every other petty consideration won’t be turned into dividing lines as well. • What are the major demographic zones of your enclave? • Is there a rich neighborhood and a ‘bad part of town’? Are living arrangements determined by occupation, political identification, or other signifiers of class? • How does the enclave quarantine Latents? Are their sections comparable or little more than ghettos? • Are Immunes allowed to walk free, or must they hide their diagnosis least they be sold into medical slavery? • Do different sects of believers live in cloistered groups, do they mingle with the population, or do they have to hide from some dominant ideology?

VIPs

At this point, there are a lot different places for characters to interact with and alter the story. But who represents those places? Now it’s time to provide the campaign with a cast of NPCs the Takers can talk with. This is also a great way to generate clients for future Contracts the Market can offer. • Who are the movers and shakers in the enclave? Did they get power through first come; first serve? Or have they elevated themselves through sheer force of will? • How do their positions reflect their agendas? What’s their endgame? Are they Lost for Life, or do they have a retirement plan too? Is this enclave their retirement plan? If so, what did they do to earn it? • How do the VIPs exert control over the enclave? Do they wield economic power, the threat of violence, or some other persuasive force?

FInIshIng Up

Once the enclave is created, finish off the session with character creation. Now that

players have all the information, they can decide where their characters fit into the different factions in the enclave. Markets should then take time between game nights to elaborate on the enclave generation notes as much as necessary. Give the documents to the players so they have a reference document. Write a few Contracts or design a Score. The next session starts with the Takers starting work and meeting their neighbors.

Example Enclave

1. Enclave Name Troutfitt – so named for the letters on the sign that survived military shelling (TROU. ..TFITT...) 2. Location Troutfitt is located in the former national headquarters of Trout Outfitters in Feldspur, MO. 3. Defenses The national headquarters of Trout Outfitters is a massive complex of interconnected buildings. Rather than large show windows typical of retail stores, the company constructed the five-story tall walls of the shopping complex to depict baroque, concrete-and-plastic murals dedicated to scenes of wildlife and rural pastorals. What windows are located in the place are huge, cathedral-sized vertical slits that rest at least seven feet above the sidewalks outside. Though located in a dense urban area, the surplus of the weaponry inside and the quarantinable corridor system (traffic was regularly rerouted within the complex as new, gaudy tourist attractions were built) meant that the building survived the Crash. Slowly, survivors recaptured and reinforced every inch of the Troutfitt compound, turning the location into an impenetrable fortress against the undead. 4. History The gun room (more like “gun gymnasiums”) formed the beachhead for

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the initial militia groups, military, law enforcement, and desperate refugees that made up Troutfitt. Rather than succumb to infighting as more and more desperate survivors poured in, a work exchange policy quickly calmed inter-factional conflict. New groups were required to take back one of the many sub-buildings in the Troutfitt complex: if they agreed to risk their lives to secure the compound, that section of compound would be theirs to keep and the gun room would supply the attempt. This had the knock down effect of creating a meritocracy of power. Those able to survive against the undead were rewarded with their own tiny fiefdoms. Those that failed, died. Though initially holding out for government rescue, even after news of the Recession began to circulate, Troutfitt skewed heavily towards Rebel politics after the bombing of Feldspur. Deemed too close to the Mississippi line and too populated to ignore, the early DHQS firebombed much of the city in a

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misguided effort to reduce casualties. The plan failed, of course, but it did manage to destroy untold amounts of valuable salvage in the area. Troutfitt lost a few buildings in the bombing and many lives. Reclamation has become an unpopular subject with the residents of Troutfitt ever since, and the DHQS will have a hard time retaking Feldspur if the T-Minus Never comes. 5. Top Exports Weapons: It was a full-blown armory before the Crash. After local survivalists pooled their resources and got the machining equipment running, there was no greater surplus of arms and ammunition in the whole Loss. Survival Equipment: the camping showfloors and warehouses were full to bursting when the Crash came down. Vehicles: gargantuan indoor show-floor of ATVs, boats, bikes, and jeeps make Troutfitt one of the leading providers of transportation in the area.

Water: the city of Feldspur gifted the massive complex its own pumping substation and filtration equipment for the purposes of its onsite fisheries and fountains. It’s been repurposed with rainwater collectors to become a self-sustaining water system. Fish: once maintained as mere decoration, the complex of interconnected aquariums has become a commercial fishery. 6. Top Imports Food: Troutfitt’s fishing can’t feed its whole population, and the structure is made of excessive amounts of concrete. It is difficult to grow food in the lightless fortress. Fuel: even with solar and wind retrofits, it’s nearly impossible to supply power to the massive complex. Many sections of Troutfitt are lightless, frigid dungeons in need of combustible fuel like wood, coal, and petrochemicals. Medicine: Troutfitt’s population is one of the densest in the Loss. The local hospitals were priority targets in the DHQS bombing; Troutfitt needs all the expertise and medicine it can get. Electronics: sophisticated electronics capable of computing and Ubiq access were all claimed within the first few months of the enclave. The bloated population has a huge demand for connectivity devices. 7. Competition FOB Liberty: One of the DHQS’s first settlements was set-up outside Feldspur on the flat, high-visibility plains of the Ozarks plateau. The city-sized armed camp requires trade to keep its civilian population happy, but the proximity to the Recession means that such trade must be secretive lest the wrong officer decides to enforce the “everyone is infected” policy. John’s River Assembly (aka Dracula’s Castle): The mega-church survivors now make up the single largest congregation of the Church of the Holy Blood in the Loss. They’re actually fairly reasonable and fair traders. Just don’t let them know if you have any Immunes

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. -Edward Gibbon in your party... In fact, they pay such a high price for their “communion” that Immunes are in more danger in the region than anywhere else besides Scrape. The Underground: The 2.4 million square feet beneath the city makes up a massive city of traders in its own right. However, multiple outbreaks have left blocks of the tunnels sealed and uninhabitable. The shifting and constant war against the undead as the populace tries to retake the complex makes trading with the underground unpredictable, dangerous, and profitable. 8. Social Structure Troutfitt can’t really be said to have a “government.” Those that are actually in charge would bristle, if not attack, if slapped with the label of bureaucrat. The whole system runs off a shifting alliance of anarcho-capitalist interests and quite a bit of spontaneous collectivism. This system — either due to disruptions in trading or spats of selfishness — often breaks down, leading to frequent famines, blackouts, economic recessions, and minor riots. Ironically, these failures of civic organization continually contribute to the anti-governmental attitudes that cause them. 9. Neighborhoods There are dozens of unique cliques within Troutfitt, but some of the most influential are: The Fountainhead: the fountains served as the main entrance of the complex and its primary thoroughfare. It also has access to the pump station and provides water to the majority of the complex. Fountainhead is, aptly enough, run by an “agreement” of Randian merchants eager to profit off every

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financial interaction in the city. The Armory: The gunroom is the primary haunt of the rebel and militia groups that first saw Trout Outfitters as their salvation in the Crash. Their weapons and history in the community make them serious power players in Troutfitt, but fractious ideologies amongst the initial survivors neuter their potential for control. The Forge: The machine shop and reload stations in the subterranean maintenance tunnels produce new weapons and ammunition for the enclave. Though obviously allied with the Armory, demands on power, space, and raw materials have seen an influx by members of other groups. This makes the Forge one of the more egalitarian and professional of the groups in Troutfitt. The Closet: While the materials in Trout Outfitters’ clothing section are ideal for the harsh conditions of the Loss, many of the patterns (woodland camo) and aesthetics (pink woodland camo) were liabilities in an urban survival situation. The advanced textiles knowledge necessary to repurpose Kevlar weave and water-resistant polymer fabrics was not something anyone in the enclave possessed — until Martha came around. The aging trans socialite leveraged her skills into control of the old department store: she keeps the textile operation earning in exchange for controlling her own bohemian utopia. The Flotilla: While the outdoor pontoons and speedboats remain accessible and fenced off, the interior showroom doorway opens up onto an indefensible urban street. Unable to sell the fleet of freshwater craft locked inside the showroom, “the flotilla” is the largest residential area in Troutfitt. Large, gothic windows provide a lot of natural light, and the boats have been retrofitted into a four-story favela. The Welfare State: Ernest’s Fishing Hole was a giant, open-seating buffet before the Crash, located on the fifth floor of the complex with an overview of the city. As the other factions reclaimed fallen sections of

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the buildings, they found that the former restaurant was already occupied and picked clean. A small band of desperate survivors, led by a local college rock climbing team, had scaled the walls of Troutfitt and occupied the restaurant from the top down. The survivors were grateful for the militants of the gunroom ending their zombie-barricaded isolation, but they were not about to give up their place at the top. Resentment has only grown in the following years for violating the unspoken “kill to earn your place” policy of Troutfitt. “The Welfare State” has been ghettoized ever since, its residents forced to hustle among the other factions to survive despite their prime real estate within the compound. The Dark Alleys: Many sections of Troutfitt are cut off from natural light but too unproductive to justify the power it would take keep them in working order. These lightless shopping concourses are referred to collectively as “the Dark Alleys,” as in “wouldn’t want to meet X in a dark alley one day.” Many desperate survivors have gained access to Troutfitt only to find themselves shuffled off into the alleys, where predation and banditry to rival the Loss itself are the only hope for survival. 10. VIPs Bill Baxter: Conservative talk radio host that serves as the face of the Armory. Bug Eyes: Reticent, aging gunsmith given diplomatic privileges for the workers of the Forge. Kyle: stoner and college dropout responsible for The Welfare State occupation during the Crash. Martha: aging trans socialite operating the enclave’s valuable textile trade. (R)Ann: middle-aged businesswoman most often seen exploiting the tolls at Fountainhead. Elah: freerunner and possible Valet that’s considered one of the only trustworthy personalities living and navigating the Dark Alleys.

Structure of a CampaIgn

We’ve discussed the Workplace Essentials that make up nearly every job and the difference between Contracts and Scores (see p. 359). We’ve also talked about how to create an enclave collaboratively (see p. 406). These elements remain constants in extended play. But what differs, besides length? What makes a campaign of Red Markets different from a one-shot are the options the Market has for scenes that operate like connective tissue. But these options are just that: optional. The story remains solely in the hands of those playing at the table; this section merely seeks to expand the toolbox the Market has to tell it. Keep in mind that the order of these scenes — and even their very inclusion — isn’t prescribed. Since campaigns follow character arcs episodically over time, most of the mechanics specific to extended play focus on roleplaying prompts and procedures for defining dramatic scenes. Groups that are more action-oriented might want to skip past the roleplaying stuff, or even use Market Fiat to set a price, skip negotiations, and get straight to taking casualties. And that’s fine. As the structure of a campaign is discussed, always keep in mind that these sections are modular. Use them all, rearrange the order, add scenes of personal design, and skip the ones you don’t enjoy. Any answer that gets the group playing and having fun is the right answer.

Structure At-a-Glance

The elements that occur in a session of Red Markets and their suggested order are listed below. Each scene has been coded with the type of play it’s designed to facilitate, and interchangeable scenes have been indented to show what they trade with. Remember: these are suggestions. Markets are encouraged to rearrange and alter the list to fit their tastes.

Italics are for rare or one-time events. • E: Essential • C: Contract-specific • S: Score-specific • L: Long-term • +: And/Or (scene can be included in addition to the scene of the above type, used to replace it, or put in any combination) • - : Or (scene can be included instead of the scene of the above type) • Enclave Generation (L) • Character Creation (E) • News (L) • Vignettes (L) + MBA Options (L) + Buying Supply + Hiring + Troubleshooting + Gouging Consumers + Securing Loans + Investments and Speculation • Upkeep (E) • Finding a Job (E) - Designing a Score (S) - Prep Work (C) - Job Line (C + L) • Fixing a Price (E) - Negotiation (C) - Finding a Wholesaler (S) - Market Fiat (E) • Embarking (E) • Travel Time (E) + Market Fiat (E) + D10 Encounter Themes (E) + D100 Encounter Table (E) + Interludes (L) • The Site (E) • The Complication (E) • Return (L) + Legs (E) • Book-keeping (L) • Mr. JOLS (L) - Individual Retirements (L) - Tontine (L)

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Enclave and Character CreatIon

Both have already been covered previously, but most people committing to a campaign of Red Markets will enjoy the game more if they’re playing in their own setting with their own characters. It’s not recommended that groups dive straight into a full campaign without at least trying out a one-shot Contract or Score, possibly with some pregen characters. One of the main pleasures of campaign play is the shared ownership of the narrative; make sure everyone wants to invest in that story before the group starts down that path. It’s suggested that those ready for campaign play design an enclave first (see p. 406), then move on to character creation (see p. 181). Players find it much easer to flesh out a Taker’s personality and how they fit into the different factions in the enclave once the materialist circumstances of the home enclave are defined. Markets should then take time between game nights to elaborate on the enclave generation notes as much as necessary. Write a few Contracts or design a Score. The next session starts with the Takers starting work and meeting their neighbors.

News

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In long-term play, the Market may need some time to establish broad, sweeping changes in the setting. While each enclave’s economy is comprised of a variety of races, ethnicities, beliefs, and motivations, some events do affect everyone equally, and a news scene is where the Market presents those changes to the players. Starting the campaign session off with news is a powerful method for conveying the consequences of player action. If, for instance, one of the Takers refused to turn in an Immune musician for the bounty his slavery would earn, the next session starts off with a short scene where a number of enclave families gather around for an impromptu music festival. The tunes loosen everyone up and the whole enclave ends up having a pretty good time. The Market

gives the PCs some space to role-play this rare instance of leisure time, offering a free Humanity heal as a consequence of that Taker’s altruism. As another example, maybe the Takers pulled a big Contract securing weapons for some local raiders. The next session might start with a group of refugees desperately knocking on the enclave’s door. Their community was sacked by the newly emboldened raiders. They’ll die without refuge, but that’s a lot more mouths to feed with winter on the way. The Market presents the news, then sees what the Takers contribute to the debate about whether the enclave should allow entry. Self-Control checks are called for to measure how the PCs handle the consequences of their actions. Or the news could be a consequence of inaction. If every crew in the enclave refused for weeks to deal with the escaped zoo lions hunting local travelers, the session could start with bloody screams as one jumps the fence and starts slaughtering enclavists. This “news” scene would be about combat and

fleeing, but it’s a necessity affecting everyone regardless of economic class, so it would fit as a news opener. Regardless of tone, updating the players on what’s changed in the setting as a result of the character’s actions is the purpose of starting a campaign session off with the news.

VIgnettes

Vignettes define why Takers put themselves under such risk. The vague explanation of “financial need” in a one-shot grows thinner and more fragile the longer a character is exposed to the true horrors waiting outside the enclave. What’s needed is firm motivation to establish why these characters would regularly expose themselves to the torture of “adventure.” Like most of us in the real world, the real concern isn’t money, but the people we’ll lose if the bills aren’t paid. In Red Markets, Takers fight for their Dependents, eating the sin of the Loss so their loved ones don’t have to, fighting its nightmares so they might afford to one day flee from them. Vignettes are scenes where PCs interact with Dependents to establish the stakes risked in a campaign. As such, it’s recommended that every session of a Red Markets campaign start with vignettes. DetermIne Work/LIfe Balance If the group isn’t using the MBA rules (see p. 424), skip to the next section. If the group is using the advanced play rules, PCs first need to figure out if they can afford enough time to have a scene with Dependents. Calculate the Work/Life Balance each crewmember needs to strike in order to troubleshoot, gouge, invest, hire, borrow, Scam, and/or negotiate for the group’s finances that session. If time recovering with the family isn’t going to work out, sacrifice the vignette scene and resulting Humanity heals for an extra work scene now. That way, everyone can still take turns performing scenes going around the table because everyone knows what scenes they need to call.

One VIgnette per Taker Since CHA is used to determine how many Dependents a PC can support, does that mean a Taker with CHA 3 has to have three separate role-playing scenes before we even start picking a job? No. Remember, vignettes aren’t even required. If the group prefers the challenge of negotiation and combat to role-playing, Markets can skip vignettes altogether and make Dependents purely mechanical. Heal however many columns worth of Humanity equals the number of supported Dependents, and move on. But if the group does want to do some role-playing and establish the stakes of their crew’s struggle, only one scene per Taker is required to receive the full mechanical benefit of all Dependents. One Taker might have up to five family members to support, but there is only one vignette per Taker per session. It’s understood that the other relationships were less eventful and took place “off-camera.” The amount of Humanity healed from financially supported Dependents doesn’t change so long as a single vignette takes place. So Takers are limited to one scene with Dependents per session. This doesn’t mean that Vignettes can only be one-on-one. Perhaps one scene calls for a family dinner, with every other player at the table assuming the role of one Taker’s relatives. This would still count as a single vignette. If two PCs were lovers in the setting, a player might call for a vignette where the couple had a post-coitus conversation. In this instance, the player that called the scene has used the one vignette she’s allowed. The other player could choose for the pillow talk to serve as his vignette (thus healing all the Humanity allowed), or he could call for a different scene with a different Dependent. Market as DIrector Besides playing NPCs, the Market’s main responsibility during vignettes is to cut the scene. Each vignette in Red Markets has a very clear dramatic purpose. When that

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purpose has been fulfilled, the Market stops the vignette and moves on to the next player. Try not to cut people off, but improvisation can become ponderous if allowed to go on too long. There’s also a bunch of game left to run and other characters that need spotlight time, so Markets should keep vignettes brief whenever possible. Who plays Whom? The Market has the responsibility to play other NPCs in a vignette, no matter the theme. It’s up to other players at the table to play Dependents. It’s up to the PC having the scene to assign who they want to play Dependents. Make sure everyone knows what they’re getting into before parts are assigned, though. The goal of assigning other players to play Dependents is to surprise the character who is the focus of the vignette, not to surprise the person taking on the Dependent’s role. The vignette player should announce what theme they’re planning to pursue (see the next sections) and the gist of the scene before assigning parts, or at least hash out a general idea with the other roleplayer before speaking in character. The easiest way to assign parts is to ask for volunteers the first time the Dependent makes an appearance and have that player take over the role whenever it comes up again. Or, people can trade roles between sessions and chock it up to fluid personalities resulting from living under the pressures of the Loss. It might be easiest to make a table rule that says the player to the left of the person having a vignette always plays the Dependent. The only hard and fast rule for assigning parts in a vignette is that no one should have to play a scene with a Dependent if they are uncomfortable. If no one can be found that wants to do that part, the Market can take over or the gist of the scene can be rewritten. Example: Half-off’s player is up for a vignette. He says he wants to do a cope scene with his ex-wife, going over the fight they had the previous session. The person that usually plays Half’s ex-wife is absent for

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this session. He does a fantastic job and no one is comfortable taking over that part. The Market asks Half’s player if there is some other scene he’d maybe like to try. After some consideration, it’s agreed that Half could reconnect with his son, Wes. The player that covers Wes is present for this session and game for anything. The two go about setting the scene. But what kind of scene should they play? The two could say and do literally anything. In order to make sure the scene has a point, they need to pick a theme for the vignette. Cope The most obvious goal of a Taker’s interaction with a Dependent is to cope. The Loss is a terrible place; any scars it fails to leave on the flesh it writes on the soul. The snippets of normality a Taker can grab with family and friends are usually the only things keeping them going. Mechanically, there are three roles in a vignette designed to cope. The player calling the vignette plays the Taker Another player or players assume the role(s) of the Dependent(s) The Market controls any other NPCs present in the scene... and the waking nightmares that haunt all Takers. Essentially, the two players can to have a pleasant, conflict-free interaction, but the Market injects conflict and drama into the scene by playing the PTSD-like reminders of the terrors the Taker will face again. It’s up to the player calling the vignette to determine whether they resist the errant fears or let them sour the interaction. Either way, the Taker gets to heal Humanity, but the Dependent has a harder job to do if the job is coming home with the Taker. Example: For the sake of convenience, we’ll refer to both player and character by the character’s name. The sections in quotes are spoken in character.

Setup: The players decide that, after the loss of a teammate in the last session, Half-off needs to cope this vignette. Half-Off: Alright, I figure I spent my bounty supporting Wes to buy him a cake for his birthday. It takes quite a bit of work to bake an honest-to-god cake out here, so I’m going to surprise his whole class. I walk in unannounced to the schoolhouse and say “Happy Birthday, Wes!” Wes: “Dad! You’re home!” Half-Off: “You bet I am buddy! And I brought a present.” I reveal the cake from behind my back. Market: The kids, even the older ones, stare dumbfounded. None of them can remember the last time they tasted anything as sweet as icing. Even the teacher, Mrs. Beavers, looks at the cake hungrily. She eventually sputters and says, “My! That’s so generous of you, Mr...um...Wes’s Dad. What do we say class?” Wes: The whole class says thank you. Wes whispers to his friends that his dad can beat their dads in a fight cuz he’s a badass Taker that fights monsters for a living. Market: Mrs. Beavers continues, “But I didn’t know you were coming. We don’t have any plates or silverware. I was going to have the kids take recess soon, so I suppose they could wash up in the stream, but... it’s such a beautiful cake. It would be a shame just to tear into it...” Half-Off: “Well, it’s Wes’s birthday. Do you want to eat it now or later?” Wes: Hmmm. I look around torn. On the one hand, I really want that cake. On the other hand, I really don’t want to share it with anyone... Half-Off: I recognize that face and give Wes my best I’m-just-disappointed Dad stare. Wes: “Okay...I guess we can eat it now. Happy Birthday to me!” Market: The kids open the box and start grabbing handfuls of cake. Mrs. Beavers tries to get them to take one handful at a time, but she can’t resist taking some icing for herself. The kids are already on a sugar rush and Wes

has a huge smile on his face. Half-Off: Awww yeah. Half’s the best dad ever. Market: But they just keep tearing away at it. Greedy handfuls shoveling into icing coated moths, teeth gone blue and black with the frosting... Half-Off: Oh, damnit... Market: They’re tearing into it just like those things tore into Drift. And then you’re back there, seeing him get turned inside out by their filthy hands as the jeep speeds away. You can hear his screams again. Half-Off: Whelp, that’s enough party for Half. I excuse myself before I throw up. Wes: “But I want you to stay for recess and meet my friends!” Half-Off: I make up a lame excuse about having to get back to work, kiss him goodbye, and get the hell out of there. End: Half-Off heals Humanity; he did, after all, make his son happy and steal a few moments of normal fatherhood. But the Market used the NPCs and memories of the Loss to insert some dramatic tension into the scene. Support The burdens of love aren’t a one-way street. In a support vignette, the Taker has to be there to solve a problem for a Dependent. The issue could be emotional, financial, or physical, but the Taker is needed to resolve the issue. The three roles in a support vignette are... The player calling the vignette plays the Taker. Another player or players assume the role(s) of the Dependent(s) in need of help. The Market controls any NPCs involved with the Dependent’s problem. Support vignettes exemplify the rationale behind having other players at the table play Dependents. Family and friends can now surprise the main PC with their needs; needs that hint at an inner life the Taker is missing out on when on the job. Some players

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might find support vignettes easier to roleplay because the conflict experience by the Dependent provides an immediate, tangible dramatic goal for the character to pursue. This may or may not involve skill checks, but unless playing with the Bust Rule: Uncertain Vignettes, Takers heal Humanity just for the attempt. Example: For simplicity’s sake, let’s stick with Half-Off and his son Wes. Let’s imagine what would happen if he chose to do a support vignette instead. In this instance, it’s up to Wes’s player what the character needs, and Half has to fulfill that need. This may or may not involve skill checks, but unless playing with the Bust Rule: Uncertain Vignettes, Half heals Humanity just for the attempt. Wes needs to fit in with the rest of his classmates. Mrs. Beavers now includes marksmanship in her class lessons. Arming children with firearms is something the elementary teacher would have balked at

in the past, but now she can’t imagine a complete education that doesn’t involve shooting practice. The class joins the Fencemen clearing casualties off the chainlink with the class .22. The problem is that Wes is still too small to handle the rifle well. His hit percentage isn’t high enough to get regular practice time because the enclave only grants the school so many bullets per week. All the kids make fun of him for his bad shooting, and the teasing is getting downright cruel, going so far as to imagine how Wes’s mother would be torn apart in an outbreak. School has become torture for the boy. So Half has a problem to solve. It’s up to him how he approaches it. He could spend bounty or scavenge to find Wes a personal .22 that he can handle, or he could donate more ammo to the class on the condition his son get to practice more. He could use a CHA skill to scold the bullies into leaving his son alone, convince his ex-wife to homeschool the boy, or dissuade Mrs. Beavers from the barbaric combat training for children. Regardless, the Market has to play any NPCs that come into play in Half’s solution. Engage Rather than resolving a dramatic conflict, the goal of an engage vignette is to engage the community. The scene can be nothing more than a pleasant conversation because an otherwise dull interaction can be used to flesh out the enclave. Scenes of comic relief or emotional fulfillment are welcome in Red Markets (they make the lows seem that much worse). In this scene, neither the Taker nor Dependents have any need, but they must interact with their neighbors and environment. The three roles in a support vignette are... The player calling the vignette plays the Taker Another player or players assume the role(s) of the Dependent(s) The Market controls any NPCs… and reserves the right to complicate the interaction with them.

Example: It’s been a rough few sessions on Half-Off. The Taker needs some baggage-free downtime. The Market reminds everyone that they can engage. In exchange for helping define the enclave more, the Market will hold back on flashbacks and Dependent requests. After some thought, Half says that he wants to go see Wes’s soccer game. There are enough kids in the enclave to field two half-strength squads. They play on the concrete floor of an abandoned warehouse. Normally, so much free space would be used for farming, but the roof collapsed years ago and the concrete is too thick to remove. The kids play on a field outlined with chalk with the enclave’s one precious soccer ball. Wes scores a goal. The father and son role-play their celebration. All-in-all, it’s a perfect case for Half-Off healing Humanity. But the Market is dissatisfied with the scene. Suddenly, Half’s is asked to assign the rest of his Dependents roles at the table: his ex-wife and her new husband, Chad, have shown up to watch the game too. Half’s still better off for having come, but the scene just got more dramatically interesting. Best of all, everyone at the table now knows about an abandoned factory floor turned soccer field upon which they can stage their own vignettes.

Bust Rule: UncertaIn VIgnettes

We can’t control other people, and we can only sometimes control our reactions to them. Retaining Humanity becomes more challenging when the rules acknowledge this. In this Bust variant, vignettes become high-stakes gambles. Takers still only get one vignette, but now the dice determine the type. It’s now possible for the scene to go so badly that the Taker loses all free columns of Humanity healing; receiving the benefits of Dependents now depends on financial support and skill checks. To use uncertain vignettes, the Market rolls Black and Red. Check the result on the table and follow the instructions.

RESULTS

VIGNETTE

CrITICAL FAILURE

Support: Humanity recovery depends on skill checks required to meet Dependent’s needs, but it can only be healed after the job. This is because the Dependent needs something that can only be found outside the fence (medicine, personal keepsakes, etc.) The Taker needs to bring the item back in order to keep the family happy and healthy.

FAILURE

Support: Humanity recovery depends on skill checks required to meet the Dependent’s needs.

SUCCESS

CRITICAL SUCCESS

Cope: Humanity recovery depends on succeeding a Self-Control check when the flashback hits. Engage: No checks are required for Humanity healing, and the Dependent has a gift for the Taker (Market retains veto power: your sister didn’t get you a cannon for your birthday).

MIlestone The last type of vignette only occurs when a Taker fulfills a retirement milestone. Notably, fulfilling a retirement milestone heals no Humanity. In fact, paying that much money at once to set up a retirement plan provokes a Self-Control: Stress check. The Market might dictate mechanical benefits or penalties depending on the exact retirement plan. For instance, in the standard plan (see p. 216), it would be fair to say that Dependents no longer count against break point once they’re smuggled to a safe house in the Recession. But it would be equally fair to say that they no longer heal Humanity for the remainder of the campaign, as contacting them would only put them at risk. Markets should cater the results to the Boom/Bust

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leanings of the game, but losing out on a vignette and taking a Stress hit is often challenge enough. As for role-playing, the retirement milestone defines the dramatic situation. Perhaps the Taker is negotiating with a document forger over Ubiq, or hiring a competing Taker crew to exterminate anything at the site of her future enclave. Remember, the Taker has been working for this goal for the entire campaign; assume that grunt work of setting up the plan has already been done. The Taker needs not role-play anything but the final preparations for that step. Keep things brief and focused on the character’s goals. MBA OptIons There are a number of other vignette-style scenes available to groups diving into the MBA rules (see p. 424). The specifics of those mechanics can be found in that chapter. For now, suffice it say that all MBA scenes are played after the vignettes standard in campaign play.

Upkeep

Upkeep is dealt with on p. 223. It’s important to note any changes in sustenance and maintenance upkeep early in a game session. It allows players more information with which to select a job, and it can affect the price in Contract negotiations. It’s a good idea to get any changes to the book-keeping done and recorded on the crew sheet early, especially if utilizing the NBNB Rule.

FIndIng a Job

Finding a job is a workplace essential in both one-shots and campaign. This is where those scenes fit best. DesIgnIng a Score If the Market isn’t comfortable with improv, it’s still suggested that designing Scores be done at the end of the previous session instead. This gives ample time to plan intriguing complications.

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Those comfortable thinking on the fly and utilizing the book’s random generators can design a Score in the moment. Since the session has already started, the in-character methods are suggested, as they keep everyone engaged with the narrative even as they step outside the setting a bit to engage in some group game design. Prep Work If negotiating a Contract, the prep work phase preceding negotiations would go here (see p. 324). Job LInes Job lines allow a campaign to grow beyond its episodic job-of-the-week structure. Each line, offered by recurring NPCs, enclaves, and settlements, represents a major opportunity for players to shape the setting and steer local politics by doing their normal jobs. Creating a job line is simple. The Market thinks of a major change they would like to see in the campaign setting, splits the work required to enact that change into jobs, and offers Contracts to the PCs using a notable NPC or group of NPC clients. Assuming the first job is completed to everyone’s satisfaction, the client offers the next job in the line to the Takers first; the crew is their trusted provider, and competition isn’t entertained unless absolutely necessary. For example, consider grimecloth: the cheap, patchwork textile made from clothing salvaged off zombies and sterilized. If the grimecloth industry wants to expand their operations with a casualty slaughterhouse near the PCs’ area, there’s a lot of work to be done. Locations need to be scouted, perimeters secured, laborers escorted, casualties lured — all these tasks require the assistance of Takers, and the grimecloth folks are willing to pay extra for reliable operators. Completion of a job line means more than another payday. Such a big operation in the area is going to bring a lot of trade to the local enclaves, but it could bring just as much hardship. The grimecloth industry’s

dependence on casualties for production is going to flood the area with undead, and their success could lure vital workers away from other enclaves that depend on them. By progressing along a job line or choosing to cease doing business, the players should always being making moral choices and determining the fate of the setting around them. Completing a line means the Takers want to see a change in their community... Or that they can’t resist the temptation of extra profit. One of the mechanical benefits of a job line is that the client might be someone that the Taker already knows. Knowing a client’s spots before haggling frees Scams up to push a price even higher. Of course, the client remembers the Takers’ spots too, and their previous dealings mean they’ll be more likely to bring persuasive gifts and do homework on the crew’s reputation. In this regard, job lines offer increasing challenge to experienced Red Markets players. Negotiations become more tactical and highstakes than ever before as difficulty increases the chance for reward. There can be multiple job lines going at any one time, and they can be at cross-purposes. If both the DHQS and the Moths want to secure a political foothold in the region, they both want to use the most accomplished Takers available. If that happens to be the PC crew and they’ve worked for both factions before, they can have job lines open up on both sides of the conflict. However, clients are bound to recognize being played at some point. Eventually, one side will realize it’s more profitable to eliminate their opponent’s tool rather than keep borrowing it. At that point, the side the PCs helped more becomes a very important factor in shaping the setting as market forces shift their allegiances to the crew and their entire enclave. Job lines are the main reason the person running the game retains the right of Market fiat. It’s difficult to craft lasting, highstakes stories by randomizing everything. By using tools for random one-shots and designing lines, Markets can offer the group

variety without sacrificing the satisfaction of a lengthy, interconnected narrative. And, ultimately, crafting a job line isn’t so different. Just remember, job lines... • Exist to facilitate a momentous change in the campaign’s setting. • Require the PCs to execute, prevent, or alter the change. • Offer every Contract after the first successful one with no competition. • Remember spots between negotiations, both for the Takers and the client. • Can interact and oppose the goals of other job lines.

FIxIng a PrIce

Once a job is found, the next step is fixing a price for it. For Contracts and job lines, negotiations would come next (see p. 320). For a Score, someone might need to have scene with a wholesaler (see p. 394). Finally, those itching to get straight to the action could skip the whole thing and name a price with Market Fiat (see p. 379).

EmbarkIng

Not so much a scene as a reminder to be sure to give PCs a chance to stock up on anything they might need before they leave for the job. With the negotiations done, this is the best opportunity they have to make an informed decision on what gear to pack.

Travel TIme

Travel time is made up of legs. These narrative encounters provide much of a job’s challenge, factor into price fixing, and characterize the omnipresent danger of the Loss. Examples of legs and prompts for writing your own can be found in the tables at the end of the book. But there are a few concerns for legs in extended play a Market might consider. There, and Maybe Back AgaIn Takers only get paid for the journey to a job site, never the journey back. Clients don’t

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to exit the area. If the enclave is secured on an island, there might be a ferry ride at the start of every job. If nothing bears repeating a leg encounter besides geography, Markets are encouraged to skip these scenes and not register them as legs. On the other hand, if the leg has a particularly dangerous obstacle, variable cast of NPCs, or a particularly interesting NPC guards that particular crossroads, Markets might make a campaign leg that serves as a rite of passage for every job. However, the only reason to have a campaign leg is to look forward to how it will change in the next session. If the same interaction happens every week on the same stretch of boring road, just skip that scene. Remember: legs are a narrative measurement, not a physical one. The only reason to repeat a campaign leg that doesn’t change is to build scheduled downtime into every job. In this instance, an interlude would be a good idea. care about your problems, and getting home alive is strictly your problem. Furthermore, it makes narrative sense to only do legs on the way to a job site; considering the danger, a crew would most likely retrace its steps rather than risk new disasters. Lastly, skipping the legs on the way home keeps the game from ending on an anti-climax. Legs are the rising action of the plot while complications at the job site make for dynamic, exciting conclusions. Turning legs into a denouement can extend the game past its welcome. Still, if something exciting or challenging happens after a job is complete, make it a leg and surprise the players with it. But unless the event is specifically climactic or tied to events at the job site, try to keep travel time scenes strictly on the way to the job site.

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CampaIgn Legs It might make sense to have certain legs repeat across different jobs. If the survivors are located in a mountainous basin, there might be legs specific to the pass they choose

Interludes and LImIts Interludes are moments where the players trade character exploration in exchange for a break from physical danger (see p. 446). Interludes are conversation amongst the crew during a quiet stretch of road, sparked by roleplaying prompts or proposed by the players. The scene gets Takers some alone time amongst their peers and relieves them from the uncertain danger of the world outside the enclave. However, Takers are limited to one interlude per job. This doesn’t mean they’re only allowed one scene of role-playing — talk in-character as much as you like — but an interlude can only replace one leg encounter. So, if the crew reminiscences about a movie they all loved, that interlude replaces the raider ambush the Market had planned. If they proceed to recite the entire movie from memory, then the players are just making the game longer. That aberrant is still waiting for them over the horizon.

The SIte and ComplIcatIon

Nothing changes about sites and complications during extended play. Markets should keep in mind that complications are a good place to reinforce job lines. It’s excellent narrative placement for a recurring antagonist to rear its head.

Return

The return journey back from a job is the easiest section to cut. Still, if the Market has a delayed complication or climactic leg to throw in, now is the time.

Book-keepIng

Complete what little accounting is required by the game at the end of a session. It’s easy for players to say they’re going to get their numbers recorded, forget about it, and come back to the next session with a character sheet in complete disarray. It’s much better to calculate incidentals, make purchases, pay debts, and assess penalties while the session is still fresh in everyone’s mind. In the same amount of time it takes to clear up snacks and gather coats, the group can ensure everyone arrives at the next game ready to play. There are a few concerns regarding bookkeeping specific to the Market. Learn to Delegate You are not your players’ accountant. You are not the IRS. Concerns about cheating are a communication and expectation issue, not an additional responsibility for the person running the game. If something is brazen, call it out, but otherwise let players keep their own books. Best-case scenario: keeping track of every item in every player’s inventory takes away valuable processing power that could be spent writing better jobs. Worst-case scenario: getting nosey in a character’s books is seen as a breech of trust at the table. The only numbers a Market needs to record go on the Crew Sheet.

The Crew Sheet The Crew Sheet is a character sheet for the Market. It’s the vital statistics of a campaign. If using the MBA rules, the Crew Sheet is a vital tool for everyone to use at the table to keep track of their various investments and business ventures. Even in more basic play, the sheet remains very useful to Markets. Having things like the Break Point prerecorded make price fixing much faster. A catalog of previous jobs, Scores, and job lines improves role-playing as both NPCs and players have a written record for callbacks. Finally, a well-maintained Crew Sheet is vital for Markets seeking to fine-tune their campaigns. If the players have been getting shafted a lot lately, it might be time to throw them a bone during the next job’s leg. If they’ve been rolling in bounty, it’s probably time to engineer a brutal setback. The Crew Sheet is the tool Markets use to engineer the story arcs they want to see in the next session, so keep it up to date.  

rivate p m o r f l a e t s o Those wh ves in li ir e h t d n e p s individuals who e s o h t ; s in a h c stocks and e go r u s a e r t c li b u p e steal from th le. p r u p d n a ld o g dressed in -Cato the Elder

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MBA Rules

The core activity of Red Markets is risking death for profit in the Loss. However, realworld economics promotes a much more diverse labor pool. Perhaps the group wants to explore business opportunities other than the Taker model, or maybe a group’s ethics require supplemental income to make up for Contracts declined. It could be that the players are experienced enough with the Profit System to know that diversifying portfolios will get them out faster. But always remember the game is about being a Taker, not a business-owner. Focusing too heavily on other forms of capital can detract from the experience if the Market doesn’t carefully consider which activities fit into the group’s expectations of the narrative. MBA rules are for players that have already mastered the basic structure of Red Markets and want to dive deeper into the game.

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WorkIng a Double

Experienced campaign players eventually come up with the idea of doing two or more Contracts at once, or designing a Score that just so happens to be on the way to a client’s job site. This is especially likely in campaigns that utilize a lot of real-world locations and mapping software. When the group sees that Job A and Job B are right next to each other, it’s natural to ask, “why not do both?” The Market should encourage this type of thinking. After all, maximizing efficiency is the cornerstone of economic success. But the group needs to understand that there are no labor laws in the Loss, and when you are your own boss, you have to play the exploited worker before you get to be the fat cat.

The Danger of SplIt ShIfts

If players want to work two jobs at once, they may do so. The only requirement is that the

rules must reflect the economic situation: namely, the reward only doubles if the available resources are halved. What does this mean? When working two jobs at once: 1. Both have to be negotiated using the same number of Scams that would be used for a single job. This means that a group of four would only have three Scams to split across negotiating two jobs (one Scam is lost for the negotiator, and the three remaining players can’t Scam both clients at once). 2. All the normal refresh and replenishment that occurs between jobs is delayed. Haul doesn’t refresh until the end of both Contracts and/or Scores. Will doesn’t refill unless spots are played. First Aid in the field is the only healing available, and Dependents only heal Humanity once at the beginning of the session. 3. There’s always at least one Leg tacked on to the travel time that won’t be compensated by either client, unless the jobs are located at the exact same site. It’s up to the Market to decide exactly how far the two job sites are apart, but clients are never going to pay for their employees to go moonlighting. 4. Failing to perform some aspect of a Contract due to moonlighting earns an automatic -Rep spot “Checks the Ass Can’t Cash.” 5. Upkeep remains the same no matter how many Contracts a crew is working at one time. About the only thing that doesn’t get harder working a double is upkeep — that’s the entire point of doing two jobs at once. Even working a double where both jobs are unqualified successes, Takers are going to stumble back to the enclave physically and mentally drained. Hopefully, it ends up being worth it, but that’s everybody’s gamble, isn’t it?

Small BusInesses

Risk is factored into any successful business model. Many PCs might decide the risk of going over the fence isn’t worth the reward. Why not try some occupation besides Taking? After all, there would be no clients hiring Takers if other endeavors in the Loss weren’t seeing at least some success. What’s wrong with traditional retail? It may take longer to reach retirement, but the chances of living to see that day go way up. The problem with founding non-Taker small businesses in Red Markets is the role-playing challenge they present to players. Working a 9-to-5 certainly constitutes economic horror (hell, it inspires it), but keeping a character’s life interesting when the only antagonist is the grind of daily labor can be difficult. These struggles compound exponentially with the ensemble cast represented by a gaming group. An RPG designed for characters that do nothing besides run a hot-dog cart in the Loss could just as easily be designed to simulate running a hot-dog cart in real-life. There’s definitely horror to be found in the do-or-die mentality of mundane capitalism, but it’s much harder to wring the catharsis of horror fiction from the same source. Still, small businesses — both real and fictional — encourage innovation and help define entire communities. Markets should avoid vetoing a player’s entrepreneurial schemes outright; the trick is to allow creative economic solutions without letting the game descend into banalities. Risk can be minimized, but never eliminated.

Gold alone does passion move! Gold monopolizes love! A curse on her and on the man Who this traffic first began. -Abraham Cowley 425

When Takers want to start a small business besides Taking, refer to the following rules and record the results on the Crew sheet (see p. 488). Just make sure everyone understands that a lot of small businesses fail... which was true even before the zombies came.

Small BusInesses At-a-Glance 1. Score Supply: a. Run a Score to supply the business. The number of units recovered determines the Supply. The Market rolls Black to determine value per unit. b. Convince a wholesaler, using Persuasion and a +Rep spot, to provide initial assets at cost. The Market rolls Black to determine the price per unit. Takers may buy however many units that are offered (the Red die) and they can afford; investing up front always calls for a Self-Control: Stress check. c. The Takers start with a supply, gifted to them through a Pro Bono job or found during a particularly lucky (crit. success) Leg. 2. Market rolls on the Troubleshooting table and interprets what happens. a. At least one Taker must sacrifice a work vignette (see “Work/Life balance” p. 434) to deal with Troubleshooting.

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3. Gouge Customers (roll equilibrium) a. The Black is the bounty per unit. Mark up is determined by... −− Takers: Doing sales personally requires a Work Vignette scene. The modified Black # on a successful Persuasion check by whomever is working the business determines mark-up. Mark-up is added to equilibrium to make the final price per unit. −− Employees: Hired Help must be interviewed in a Work Vignette scene. The modified Black # on a successful Sensitivity check made by the business owner indicates the

quality of the employee mark-up. As long as the employee is paid, this is the standard mark-up. Mark-up is added to equilibrium to make the final price per unit. 4. Determine liquidity, or number of units that can be sold per session. a. Liquidity is determined by the Supply/ Demand chart. The price (Black + mark up) offered sets the Demand. Supply (normally the Red) is determined by the number of units left to sell. b. Supply/Demand and Liquidity −− Flooded = 0-1 units per session (Market rolls; if Black beats Red, one sale was made) −− Subsidiary = 1 units per session −− Scarce = 2 units per session −− Volatile = 3 units per session 5. Takers’ calculate Work/Life Balance 1. Takers working Sales costs one work vignette. 2. Interviewing and hiring potential employees costs one work vignette. 3. Maintaining employees costs bounty every session, and mark-up remains constant. 4. Manipulating equilibrium requires a work vignette, just as a Scam that would affect equilibrium in negotiations. 5. Troubleshooting costs a work vignette.

Score Supply

Businesses need a steady source of supply in order to operate. Manufacturers need raw materials. Distributors need transportation. Retailers need goods. Everyone needs labor. But five years into the Loss, any reliable source of supply has already been snatched up and commoditized. The lucky few with their hands on the economic reins make up the wholesalers and clients that employ Takers in the first place. Players that want a steady, constant revenue stream despite the chaos of the Loss should realize that such sophisticated operations require experience

to run and a hefty initial investment. In short, those that want a “sure thing” should make joining the wasteland’s business elite the focus of their retirement plans. By their very nature, any other endeavors remain fleeting. Stealing and salvaging supply from the Loss is the quickest way to start a small business. Most Takers need to run a Score before founding a business. The only difference between a mission to establish a small business and a regular Score is that, once the goods are acquired, Takers use them to start their own endeavor rather than offloading the package onto a wholesaler. Essentially, this means running a Score without hope of profit, with the intention of ensuring a more reliable revenue stream in later games. Scores to secure supply don’t have to be planned beforehand. If the group manages a huge windfall of goods or accidentally captures a means of production during an unrelated Score, they can certainly hold back and sell only enough to keep the wholesaler from getting suspicious. However, once the Takers go into business for themselves, the wholesaler is going to be pissed. Skimming off the top of a Score to start your own business earns a -Rep spot “Schemer,” and that NPC becomes a direct competitor. AlternatIve Supply: BuyIng Wholesale Perhaps the Takers think the mortal danger of a Score isn’t worth it without immediate payment. They might want to buy their initial supply by securing a wholesale price from another distributor, then marking up their own prices to secure a profit. Not a bad plan — it’s certainly how things were done before the Crash. But here’s the thing: wholesalers don’t stay in business if they give their goods away. Getting someone to provide start-up supply at cost is a huge favor to ask, typically reserved for friends and family. For groups that want to skip the physical effort required to secure supply, use the following rules:

Step One: Find a Wholesaler: The group needs to find a wholesaler that specializes in what they need (trucks, protein powder, livestock... whatever). More details on creating wholesaler NPCs can be found in the section on Scores (see p. 396). Step Two: Generate the Wholesale Price The asset’s equilibrium needs to be generated. Roll Black/Red. The Black is the amount Takers have to pay per unit. The Red is the maximum number of units the wholesaler can sell to them. The number isn’t added together when initially investing in a business because it A) represents a wholesale price and B) the number of units Takers buy determines their initial supply. What’s a unit? It depends on whether the PC business offers goods, services, or some combination of the two, as well as the bulk such businesses typically deal in. It could be price per trip for a trucking service, or the price per truck to start a trucking business. Equilibrium price could be 10 repairs at a garage, or price per 100 rat kebobs sold. Narratively, the group can describe whatever fits. The point of a unit price is that it establishes how much supply Takers can afford to buy initially; later, equilibrium and units factor into Liquidity (see p. 434). Keep in mind: the price might be higher or lower in the community where the wholesaler operates than it is at the Takers’ home enclave. If the price is too steep, they need to find another entrepreneurial opportunity (buy low; sell high). Furthermore, if the Takers move the goods to another marketplace, the Red die sticks at the number of units they bought, while Black fluctuates with where they go in the setting. Step Three: Ingratiate Yourself Getting the wholesaler to agree to sell the goods at cost requires three things: A. A successful Persuasion check, to be role-played between a PC and the Market (playing a wholesaler, of course).

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B. Burning a +Rep spot. Nobody is going to consider such a massive discount unless trust has already been established between the Crew and wholesaler. If you don’t have one, earn one. C. Taking a -Rep spot “You Owe Me.” This spot is specific to the wholesaler, but it can be used at any time. If the PCs are negotiating with another Client that knows the wholesaler, the Market can say the debt got sold off and it can be used for additional Sway in negotiations. If the wholesaler wants a small job done pro bono, the -Rep spot can call in that favor.

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Step Four: Doing the Deal Once the wholesaler agrees to sell at a discount, the Takers need to make the initial investment. This surplus is going to have to come from their professional development budget, retirement plans, or a loan. Any funds that don’t come from Pro. Dev. Budgets

provoke a level-2 Self-Control: Stress check, regardless of whether or not the group is pooling resources. Small businesses were gambles in the best of times and it is not the best of times. Anxiety remains part of the price to play. Once the check is made, the Crew can buy as many units of supply as they can afford. Step Five: Distribution Depending on where their wholesaler was located, the Takers must now either transport their units of starting supply back home (a dangerous adventure, all by itself) or start the next phase, “Gouging Consumers” (see p. 432). AlternatIve Supply: GIftIng Supply Leaving a golden opportunity just lying in the middle of road is one of the ways the Market can interpret a critical success when randomly generating Legs. The crew can

hide it and smuggle the goods back into the enclave after they finish whatever Contract/ Score was originally being worked. A supply of goods big enough to start a business could also serve as a powerful Gift spot in negotiations with an NPC client. Either way, gifting Takers with enough free supply to start a small business is a risky proposition for those that seek to control player behavior. There’s no reason the crew can’t offload the stock to a wholesaler and treat their luck as a one-off lump sum. In fact, that’s probably the safest thing to do. Markets should therefore gift supply to provoke interesting character choices; it is not a tool for forcing players into trying the MBA rules. If Takers have no obligations to use their jackpot any specific way, it makes for a better narrative: future success results from virtue rather than luck and future failures are

mistakes rather than fate. The anxiety over how to keep a surplus from turning into folly is a great opportunity for meaningful role-play.

TroubleshootIng

Murphy’s is the only law the rules the Loss. Even the most mundane concerns are plagued by extraordinary problems — somebody has to be there to run things. Since it doesn’t exist unless it’s played out at the table, working a shift at the store needs a scene with at least one of the Takers. Before any vignettes regarding a small business play out, the Market rolls 1d10 on the troubleshooting table. The result determines what has changed in the enclave’s economy since the last session. Most problems that arise can be solved, but doing so demands resources from the PCs (see “Work/Life Balance” p. 434).

An Example of Gifting Supply As the crew crests a hill, they find an overturned caravan. The carts are upside down, and the horses pulling them have been gutted and gnawed upon. Likewise, all the guards and merchants are dead, their mutilated bodies long ago looted by some other passing crew. The mob or creature responsible for this massacre has long since left the area. All that remains are the coffins the caravan was hauling, unopened and undisturbed. If the Takers open the coffins, they find that the coffins don’t contain dead bodies, but rather “Real Dolls.” These elaborate silicone mannequins served as luxury items for a certain demographic before the Crash, and now the crew has (the Market rolls B10/R7) seven of them valued at 10 bounty a piece. So what to do? Getting these heavy bastards back to the enclave is going to be a pain, and hiding them so they can be recovered after the Contract they are currently on might be just as hard. If they do get them back, there are certainly enough lonely men left in the Loss to make some serious money off these things, but is that how the Crew wants to brand itself? The folks who kill casualties when they aren’t pimping robots? Alternately, the Crash created a new demand for faux funerals: burial services for loved ones still wandering as casualties or otherwise assumed dead. If the crew could heat and reshape the latex faces into the likeness of a dead loved one, the crew could provide a valuable psychological service for families at the enclave.. for a bloated price that now includes all these free coffins. But, in this instance, now there’s the problem of finding and hiring someone capable of turning a doll meant to look like a double-D porn-star into some approximation of Grandma. Maybe it’s all too unsavory and the crew leaves them lying in the road, or perhaps they offer that creeper Felt-Touch Phil a discount and sign everything over to his wholesaling operation. There’s no choice players can make that doesn’t reveal something about their characters, which is the best justification for gifting supply.

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TROUBLE

1 Act of God

2 Wages Stagnate

3 Wages RISE

4 BUSINESS AS USUAL

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DESCRIPTION Something completely outside the Takers’ control threatens the supply, employee(s), equilibrium, or another essential aspect of the business. Lightning hits the shed. The company or its employees are falsely accused of a crime. A shift in politics or inter-enclave relations crashes the price. Whatever the Market describes, the risk is always the permanent shutdown of the business. To prevent this, Takers must risk their own physical, mental, or financial health in addition to the usual cost in Work/Life Balance. For example, they could risk entering a burning building to save the supply. They could stake their reputation and defend an employee in court. They could address the entire enclave to calm the financial panic. The more Takers that work to save the business, the less severe the consequences for failed rolls. However, the cost in work/life balance remains constant. When is it better just to accept your losses? Though bad in the long run, slight economic downturn can be a boon to small operations. As employment opportunities dwindle, employers can lower wages safe in the knowledge that few better opportunities exist. If the crew employs anyone to run the business, a Taker can make a Deception check. On a success, the wages per session lower by 2 bounty as the Taker feigns “poor me” and encourages belt-tightening. On a failure, employees understand they’re being screwed, but the Taker can still lower wages 1 bounty by being a dick about it. This latter tactic doesn’t require an additional roll to work, but shafting workers always provokes a Self-Control: Detachment check. Of course, a crew can choose to waste this opportunity to reduce costs. In that case, check Self-Control: Stress. Markets might also doll out some + or -Rep spots for exceptionally generous or miserly role-playing. Though good in the long run, an economic boom at the enclave can hurt costs in the short term. Lots of new ventures mean lots of employment opportunities. Takers have to compete to retain valuable employees. If the crew employs anyone, they ask for a raise. Resisting this request requires a Deception check. On a success, the workers believe that the Taker is struggling and only asks for a 1 bounty raise. On a failure, the workers recognize the Taker’s greed and demand a 2 bounty raise. Without a Deception check, the workers automatically ask for 2 bounty because they sense a pushover. Role-play accordingly. Refusing to give out any kind of raise results in the employees quitting. The Market can give out + an -Rep spots accordingly for generous bonuses and exceptionally nasty resignations. Liquidity is stable. Price is fixed. Mark-up is working. Employees are happy. Everything is going according to plan. For crew’s with employees, just pay wages as normal and apply the typical mark-up. If a Taker wants to work a shift, calculate work/life balance normally. Subtract units of supply, add bounty, and move on with the game. Nothing goes wrong. The minimum effort keeps things going.

The number of units goes down without any sales. The Market rolls a 1d10:

5 SHRINKAGE

1-3: Lose one unit 4-6: Lose two units 7-9: Lose three units 10: Lose four units It’s up to the Market why this happens and who is responsible. Perishable stocks can spoil. Goods can be stolen by employees or burglars, and assets can be sabotaged. The Market should always provide an opportunity to recover at least some of the lost supply, but doing so always costs in work/life balance or additional risk. The invisible hand of the Market raises the value of what the small business offers. Roll 1d10:

6 DEMAND RISES

1-3: Add one bounty to demand (Black) 4-6: Add two bounty to demand (Black) 7-9: Add three bounty to demand (Black) 10: Add four bounty to demand (Black) Mark-up is still determined by the skills of the Taker or employee in charge, but increased demand means it’s that much easier to profit. Liquidity is based off the new price. There doesn’t need to be an established reason for the shift in demand. Economies are often too complex to explain fully. Markets are free to come up with narrative reasons, though. Capricious fate devalues the business’s bread and butter.

7 DEMAND FALLS

1-3: Subtract one bounty from demand (Black) 4-6: Subtract two bounty from demand (Black) 7-9: Subtract three bounty from demand (Black) 10: Subtract four bounty from demand (Black) Mark-up is still determined by the skills of the Taker or employee in charge, but decreased demand means it’s that much harder to profit. Liquidity is based off the new price. There doesn’t need to be an established reason for the shift in demand. Economies are often too complex to explain fully. Markets are free to come up with narrative reasons, though.

Images of agency are increasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser. -Arjun Appadurai 431

8 LIQUIDITY INCREASES

9 LIQUIDITY dECREASES

10 WINDFALL

Gouge Consumers

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Though equilibrium remains stable, liquidity increases. It’s up to the Market why this occurs. Perhaps the population came into some disposable income, or maybe the weather is just nice. The change occurs regardless of the narrative around it or what Supply/Demand chart would normally describe. Whatever the economic condition, increase liquidity by one for this session only. Though equilibrium remains stable, liquidity decreases. It’s up to the Market to explain, but it’s more than likely that the enclave is either entering an economic depression or the populace begins to realize it has a surplus of whatever the business offers. The change occurs regardless of the narrative around it or what Supply/Demand chart would normally describe. Decrease liquidity by one. If the business is already flooded, no sales can be made this session. Someone is trying to offload a surplus of exactly what the business sells. It could be the result of an inheritance, or a going-out-of-business sale. Whatever the reason, everything must go. The Market rolls Red. The result is the number of new units of supply available. The price per unit equals the latest demand price (the Black die). There is no mark-up. The NPC needs to offload the material fast, offering it at cost. Do the Takers pull money from retirement in order to replenish their supply at a discount? Borrow it? Do they let the opportunity pass? They can worry about budgets or wonder about what may have been; either way calls for a Self-Control: Stress check. And keep in mind, more units means that the Supply/Demand situation has changed as well.

Whereas the Black and Red are usually added together in Scores and Contracts, only the Black counts towards equilibrium price in a small business. This is because no stable business operating on a daily basis inside an enclave can withstand the sort of scarcity and risk Taker jobs undergo. (It also keeps Red Markets from descending into a game entirely about bean counting and keeps things scarce enough to encourage the regular cycle of desperate adventure). But profit must be made, even by narrow margins. The goods or services must be priced high enough to compensate for the capital it took to secure them. How much of a price mark-up the players can get away with depends on the social skills of the person running the business. The added mark-up is the modified Black # on a successful CHA check, made by the PC running the shop. Taking time to run the shop

is a Scam and costs in terms of work/life balance (see p. 434). Example: Securocrat, a Taker from the Oxford Crew, has given up time with his family to run the group’s rat kabob food truck between jobs. If he fails a Persuasion check, the most he can sell the kabobs for is their starting price, which is currently B3/ R2, making for a price of 3 bounty per unit (apparently, rodent foodstuffs are a subsidiary good). If he makes a Persuasion check, Securocrat hawks his wares and makes raton-a-stick seem more delicious than it has any right to be. Securocrat’s player role-plays the best pitch for rat cuisine he can think of and rolls the dice. They land B5+1/R1. That means he’ll be able to sell each unit for three times the initial price, at 9 bounty a piece! Apparently, Securocrat is the only Michelin-star gourmet rat peddler in the Loss. Jumping up demand that high changes the

businesses liquidity (see “Liquidity” p. 434), jumping rat from subsidiary to scarce on the Supply/Demand chart. With only two units of rat left to sell (R2), the crew will run out this session. HIrIng Help What’s the point of being the boss if you have to work all the time? A Taker’s potential is not realized cooking, cleaning, or waiting behind a counter. Skills can be put to better use over the fence, securing big profits from wealthy clients or hunting lost treasures. Why not give some of the many impoverished enclavists some much-needed employment? Because good help is hard to find. Finding qualified, reliable people in need of work requires a Research check for every applicant. Failure means no one wants the work or that a Reference is going to have to help find someone. After that, the person in charge of the crew’s HR has to interview the applicant. This requires a Sensitivity check and some role-playing. Failing the check means the employee is a loafer, but the Taker won’t learn this until the business underperforms by selling units without mark-up. Success determines how good the employee is a selling the product. Unlike gouging customers personally, the mark-up earned by a hardworking employee depends on the manager’s ability to identify that employee. The modified Black # on a successful Sensitivity check made by the business owner indicates the quality of the employee mark-up. This rate remains constant as long as the person is employed. It’s suggested that the Market and the PC role-play the interview process after the roll. That way, the NPC’s personality can be determined by the numbers on the Sensitivity roll. If it’s B10 +3/R5, the Market can say the lady shows up in a pressed pantsuit despite it being the apocalypse. Conversely, on a B1+1/ R10, the Market gets to play a transient on a meth-binge that accidentally stumbled into a job interview. On a B5/R5, the Taker only gets

the learn pantsuit lady is a meth addict when she’s found smoking rocks in the storage room. Finally, pay needs to be negotiated. Unlike more serious Contract negotiation, this can be determined by a single Persuasion check. The price to pay the employee equals the unmodified Red on a success. On a failure, the cost to pay is Red PLUS the Taker’s Persuasion skill. Cost is to be split as evenly as possible amongst the Crew. Employees are assumed to remain loyal and hardworking until supply runs out or the troubleshooting table (see p. 430) says otherwise. Employees can be narrated as a single worker or the foreman of a group of hired help. Regardless of the workforce, the price negotiated for wages stays the same. No business large enough to subdivide wages over dozens of workers can be maintained while still working as a Taker.

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LIquIdIty

Liquidity is the rate at which an asset can be sold without drastically altering the asset’s price. In Red Markets, liquidity is measured in the number of units that can be sold per game session at the current price, including markup. A game session is defined as one Contract or Score, regardless how much actual time it takes to finish. Liquidity is determined by where the price falls on the Supply/Demand chart. Liquidity (increases clockwise around the Supply/Demand chart) Flooded = 0-1 unit per session (Market rolls; if Black beats Red, one sale was made) Subsidiary = 1 unit per session Scarce = 2 units per session Volatile = 3 units per session The combination of liquidity, equilibrium price, and mark-up are responsible for turning hard-won supply into bounty. However, liquidity can be affected by the Troubleshooting roll and the mark-up. Example: The Troubleshooting roll is anticlimactic. It’s just another day in the Loss. Sanguine works her shift at the crew’s bike shop: “Ace in the Spokes.” She gives up valuable time with her Dependents to do so because she doesn’t want to lose a Scam in future negotiations (see “Work/Life Balance”). Instead, the player uses her Life vignette to describe the sales pitch Sanguine gives out in the streets about the benefits of an 8-gear shifter. Sanguine rolls B7+1/R3 for her Persuasion test. It’s good advertisement and she’s getting onlookers interested. The demand rolled was B5, and the crew has a supply of 7 units of bikes. That puts the bike business on the line between Flooded and Volatile. Sanguine’s charms have caused a rush on bikes though; everyone wants to get those road bikes before they’re stuck slogging up a hill on a gearless. The marketplace is now Volatile, and Sanguine’s Persuasion

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check means each unit is selling for 13 bounty. The liquidity in volatile marketplaces is three, which means Sanguine just moved 39 bounty in product! However, with three units gone, the bike shop’s supply has dropped to four, and the price drops back down to its equilibrium of five once Sanguine stops hustling. Next session, it remains to be seen whether they’ll be able to bump bikes up to scarce or if conditions depress into subsidiary goods.

Work/LIfe Balance

Red Markets expresses the time between jobs in terms of work/life balance. This means that each Taker gets one short scene detailing a typical professional activity and one scene to establish a typical home life. In the core game, work is always whatever Scam the Taker pulls before or during negotiations. If negotiations don’t last that long, or if the crew is doing a Score, the work scene is ignored entirely: after all, real Taker work is done over the fence. The Taker’s domestic life is always represented by a vignette with a Dependent (see “Vignettes” p. 415). On rare occasions, the life scene has to be dedicated to fulfilling a retirement milestone, but that’s as varied as vignettes get in basic play. MBA rules don’t change the work/life balance so much as give players the tools to screw it up. When running a small business, the options for the work scene go far beyond Scams. 1. A Taker gouging customers and working the business Working retail, cooking food, running invoices — none of these help recover from the last job or prepare for the new one. If a Taker wants to work at the business and use Persuasion to secure a mark-up, that replaces the work time typically dedicated to Scams or engaging in negotiation. For a business to be successful without driving any Takers nuts, the Crew needs to cover shifts in turns or hire help.

2. Interviewing and hiring employees Whoever has to hire an employee to run the business while the Takers are over the fence has a lot of work to do. Curating a pool of potential hires, ensuring their qualifications, and negotiating salary takes time — time that can’t be spent researching a client’s spots or intimidating competition. Contracting someone outside the Crew to run the business in its owners’ stead is discussed in “Hiring Help” (see p. 433). 3. Manipulating the Supply/Demand equilibrium of goods and its effects on liquidity Working to alter Supply/Demand takes up time that could be spent on Scams focused on a future client. Messing with the equilibrium of a small business’s goods or services means that character cannot do the same for any other Contracts in consideration that week. With small businesses, the price manipulation has the trickle-down effect of altering Liquidity. 4. Troubleshooting Anyone that has ever tried to run a business knows that something is always going wrong. The troubleshooting table simulates this state of perpetual collapse (p. 430). Takers always have the option to let the market shift happen, but taking action to correct course always costs Work/Life balance. The PCs working to counteract a roll on the troubleshooting table must either sacrifice that session’s Scam or their life vignette with Dependents. There’s never enough time to heal from the last job, prepare for the next, and keep the business afloat. 5. Pursue an Investment If a Taker is working to research and vet a possible investment opportunity, that time can’t be used to play with one’s kids or pursue more immediate financial gain. Role-playing scenes with possible business partners takes up the work vignette. For rules on how do to this, see “Investments and Speculation” (p. 436).

6. Insider Trading Similarly, putting a “finger on the scale” when speculating in financial futures takes time. Anyone engaging in insider trading spends a work vignette to do so. Again, see “Investments and Speculation” for more information. 7. Fulfilling a Milestone Once characters have enough to fulfill a milestone in their retirement plans, they need to role-play a scene in which that aspect of their Dependent’s future is actually secured. This takes time. 8. Selling Gear It takes time to find the right buyer for the excess equipment the Taker wants to sell. In order to off-load unwanted gear in the MBA rules, a Taker needs to use a Work action to do so. Life vignettes, or scenes with Dependents, remain mostly unchanged in MBA rules. However, the one exception is that Takers have the option to convert “life” scenes into “work” scenes. This makes it possible to both run a side business and Scam for negotiations, or to take two work vignettes dedicated to the business. However, losing the balance means that the Taker has spent every available moment since the last job hustling, neglecting all other family responsibilities in the pursuit of bounty. Skipping vignettes with Dependents has the following consequences. 1. Exchanging life for work cannot be reversed; work vignettes cannot be converted into life vignettes. If you agree to work, you’re working. Nobody is going to give up their precious time with loved ones because you personally miscalculated. For instance, let’s say a Taker converts a life vignette into work so that she can troubleshoot the business and Scam the next Contract negotiation. But the Leadership check to start negotiations fails and talks don’t go on long enough for her Scam to have effect.

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This doesn’t mean the Taker now has time to go to her daughter’s piano recital; it means she spent the time trying to find leverage on a client and either failed or had her work squandered by the negotiator. 2. Skipping a vignette with Dependents forfeits all Humanity healing that all Dependents provide. Though vignette scenes are typically with one Dependent at a time, those scenes are representative of the Takers entire domestic life in the nebulous time between jobs. Skipping the scene means forfeiting all the restorative benefits Dependents have on Humanity. 3. Dependents don’t get Needy any faster, but the Taker’s next scene must be in the support theme and make mention of the extra work in the previous session. Many a marriage and childhood has been ruined by working too many hours. Skipping time with loved ones makes them even more reliant on the Taker’s presence, not less. Next the Taker has a scene with a loved one, roleplay the Dependent as in need and, perhaps, resentful of the neglect.

Investments and SpeculatIon

Don’t think of it as Wall Street. Think of it as micro-investment and small business loans: the kind of financial speculation the World Health Organization uses to draw people out of generational poverty. The amount of bounty a person needs to get a business off the ground in the Loss is minuscule compared to the capital that moves around the Recession’s remaining financial markets. A successful Taker crew can easily make its breaking point, engage in some professional development, and still have enough left to buy shares in a new venture. For a few people, the idea of smuggling themselves across the border only to become a pauper in the Recession holds no appeal. Some like the Loss just fine; their only

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complaint is that they don’t own it yet. Loss speculators bet their lives in the hopes of owning huge swaths of the country when the T-minus Never rolls around. If the world’s governments want their land back when the last casualty turns to dust, they’re going to have to negotiate with the robber barons that saw opportunity in the chaos and survived long enough to seize it. The blessing and the curse of investing in the carrion economy is a total lack of regulation. Recession trading amongst the surviving nation states still battle against all forms of oversight. But in the Loss? A tiny seed fund can grow unrestricted profits but the risks are equally boundless.

BuIldIng an OpportunIty

Investments can be proposed by the Market or by the Taker. If the Market thinks a player would enjoy role-playing through a certain opportunity, an NPC comes by looking for investors. Player-designed investments should be treated with equal enthusiasm, so long as nothing proposed drastically alters what the Market has planned for the campaign. So what opportunities are available in the Loss? A Taker could invest in another crew’s small business. Providing the upfront bounty needed to buy initial supply can earn an easy revenue stream that requires little or no work. However, it’s just as easy for Takers to piss bounty away on a doomed concept, or get scammed out of their savings by the Loss’s many con artists. Enclaves seek investors to improve infrastructure. In most locations, this looks similar to a war bond system. Let’s say orbital satellites suggest a front of dead weather headed towards the enclave. The enclave leadership needs funds fast if they’re going to upgrade defenses in time, faster than their taxes allow. The solution? Get loans from private citizens, and pay the interest with taxes collected after the renovations. Of course, these lucrative deals require the next administration to honor the promises

of the old. And those that object might find themselves out in the cold, left to wonder if austerity was really worth it as they get eaten alive. Crowd funding remains viable in the Loss. Do-it-yourself attitudes and collectivist movements are the only way anyone survived in the first place. It makes sense the same ethos would be fiscally popular. Imagine a group of actors that travel the Loss, putting on plays for enclaves and providing some much needed analog entertainment. How would such people feed themselves, not to mention hire Taker crews to escort them between jobs? To risk such a “frivolous” endeavor despite the grim pragmatism of the Loss, they’d need to secure costs up front. Takers providing an initial investment could dictate terms, requiring a percentage of the door from each performance they enable.

“Becoming a backer” ties these investors to the fate of the group, floating their fortunes on a full house or sinking them with empty seats. Shorting other investments is common practice in the Loss. Takers, as the economic wildcards in their enclaves, have the power to cause drastic economic swings. And they talk to each other. If one crew reports that the vitamin salvage trade is about to hit its expiration date, another crew can “short” vitamin stocks (or invest in “scurvy futures.” Whatever.) They could sign a contract to buy an incoming crop of bananas, hoping the enclave leaders have to purchase it to keep the population healthy. Of course, this plan presumes the news of a vitamin shortage isn’t bullshit and that people won’t just seize the supply by force. Hell, if the nutritional deficit is even a little late in arriving, the crew could find itself broke with nothing to show for it but a pile of rotting fruit. No matter how the Market and players narrate the investment, remember: there is no such thing as a sure thing.

IndIvIdual or Broker?

The first thing a group has to decide before investing is whether they’re acting individually or under a broker. Individual investment is exactly what it sounds like: each Taker antes up an initial investment, and the return depends on how much each pays up front. The risk of the initial investment is still determined by the roll of a single Red (see “Assessing Risk” p. 438), but each PC gets their rate of return calculated separately. The plus side of going in alone is players manage their own comfort-level and risk. The downside is that the Market has a lot more bookkeeping to do, especially if Takers pass on one opportunity and invest in something different than their colleagues. Keeping track of the risk, liquidity, returns, and narrative for different investments across the entire group can be a pain. Markets should feel free to veto any individual investing that gets in the way of the core activity of being a Taker. The Market

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is there to make sure everyone at the table is having fun and experiencing a good story, including the Market. If individual portfolios are too much to track, Market’s can demand a broker system. Under a broker, the whole crew goes in together. Each Taker needs to put in an equal investment, and each gets an equal share of the returns. While less realistic, the broker method keeps bookkeeping simple enough for the Market to focus on telling a compelling story.

d10 roll. The result is the number of sessions until the investment pays off. For shorter campaigns, the Market can choose to divide any result by two and round down. Liquidity is recorded on the Crew Sheet. It is the Market’s responsibility to track of the number of sessions until the investment shows a return. Mechanically, the investment is effectively over. The Taker checked Self-Control: Stress and paid the money. The risk has been determined. Now it’s just a matter of waiting.

AssessIng RIsk

Insider Trading is an action taken to make sure the investment is successful. Between jobs, smart investors do everything they can to make sure their gamble pays off. What the Takers have to do depends on the narrative of the investment. For instance, getting everyone to shop with a new vender of 3D printed firearms might require some online advertising, or the Taker could attract more casualties to the fence to increase demand. They could also film themselves using one of the guns out in the Loss as a testimonial, or launch a propaganda campaign against the competing gunsmith. There are only a few rules to govern Insider Trading:

Markets start off investments by introducing the Takers to their possible business partners. Every potential investor present must make a Sensitivity check. If no one succeeds, a Red die is rolled in secret and the result recorded as “risk” on the Crew Sheet (see p. 488). The NPC’s description of the opportunity can be whatever the Market wishes. On a success, at least one of the investors sees through the sales pitch to the truth of thing. The Market rolls one Red in the open: this is the investment’s risk. The risk is recorded on the Crew Sheet. When it comes time to calculate the investment’s return (if any), the risk is the number the Black has to beat. When Takers see through the bullshit, the Market should try to role-play the NPC’s pitch according the risk result. On a one, it sounds like a sure thing. The NPC is confident, smart, and prepared. On a ten, the Market should be shifty, uncertain, and eager to promise things that sound too good to be true. This is the Taker’s last chance to get off the boat. If they don’t like how it sounds, they can walk away free and clear. But if they don’t walk, it’s time to pay. Regardless of the investments size, all speculation requires a Self-Control: Stress check. It’s never pleasant to hand over bounty with no promise of reward.

LIquIdIty

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Instead of being determined by the Supply/ Demand chart, Liquidity in investments is a

InsIder TradIng

1. If the player can’t come up with an idea to help the investment out, they need to make a Foresight check to get an idea from the Market. Financial speculation isn’t easy; if the player isn’t creative enough to do it, better hope the character’s skills can pick up the slack. 2. You can’t do the same Insider Trading twice. In order to improve the chances for an endeavor to succeed, investors need to hit multiple fronts. 3. Insider Trading always involves at least one skill check. More, if the Market deems it necessary. The risks associated with failure depend on the plan (i.e. screwing up an advertisement is less severe than screwing up casualty chumming), but failure is always a possibility.

4. Insider Trading costs on the work/life balance, regardless of success or failure. The time used improving the chances of a future gamble can’t be used to ensure the success of a current negotiation. Nor can it be spend with friends and family. There’s always an opportunity cost. 5. Success adds +1 to the investment tracker on the Crew Sheet. Each successful instance of insider trading stacks to provide a bonus to the Black (Return) check that occurs once liquidity hits zero (see below).

Rates of Return

Once liquidity counts down to zero, it’s time for the investment to pay out. The Black is rolled and the result is recorded under “Return” on the Crew Sheet. The return is compared to the risk, just as if a regular dice check had been made, with both Black and Red rolled simultaneously instead of weeks apart. Instead of adding any skills to the Black, add the number of successful Insider Trading actions the Takers completed between the initial investment and the payout. Look at the results of “Return + Insider Trading/Risk” as if it were a normal check of “Black + Charges/Red” The results are as follows. • Critical Success (natural even doubles) = The investment doubled! Even better, each charge of Insider Trading adds 10% of the initial investment to the jackpot. • Success (Return beats Risk, before or after Insider Trading) = 50% profit! Take half of the initial investment, add it to the result, and give it to the Taker(s). For example, an initial investment of 40 bounty would return 60 bounty (40/2 + 20. 20 + 40 = 60). Furthermore, add one bounty per Insider Trading charge spent to the return. • Fail (Risk beats Return, after Insider Trading) = 50% losses. Things didn’t turn out as planned. An investment of 40 bounty only comes back as 20 bounty. The

business is still open though, and every Insider Trading charge spent adds one bounty to the return. It just wasn’t enough to turn a profit. Call for Self-Control: Stress checks. • Critical Failure (natural odd doubles) = All gone. Nothing is left. The business went completely bust, or the owner skipped town with all the profits. Whatever the narrative reason, the investors loss everything. Call for level-4 Self-Control: Stress checks.

Gambling by Another Name Before rolling for Return and narrating the result, it’s important that both the Market and the Takers understand that once the Black hits the table, the results are final. Criticals are criticals. Results are results. Will cannot be spent on an investment roll because the investor only provided money, not skill and determination. No success can be upgraded. No failure mitigated. The dice dictate what happened to the bounty, and the Market’s interpretation of events becomes canon. Those that don’t anticipate liking the results shouldn’t gamble in the carrion economy.

Pro Bono

“...what’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?” —The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Huck Finn almost had a point, except the wages aren’t the same: it’s more profitable to do wrong. By far. There’s a lot of injustice in the Loss. Those that fight the dead for a living see more of it and are better equipped to fight it than most. But downtrodden and exploited masses don’t tend to have a lot of disposable income. Some client might occasionally drop a Contract for

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a noble cause, but, more often than not, moral compromise is required. Like Huck, perhaps the players are unable to ignore human cruelty, or maybe their characters’ Humanity can’t handle doing it one more time. These crews might be tempted to eat the cost of a job just so they can stomach looking themselves in the mirror. That’s good... literally. But that’s all it is. A sense of self-worth doesn’t put food on the table or bullets in the chamber. A clean conscious is a luxury not many Takers can afford. For those willing to subsist on heroism alone, here are the guidelines for taking work pro bono.

Scruples are a ChoIce

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Markets should avoid forcing Takers to work for free at all costs. Upkeep doesn’t go away. Dependents still need to be supported. The anxiety of watching retirement plans stagnate and gear break doesn’t dwindle. Taking a job for no pay is an enormous burden to throw at the PCs. So make it a choice. Nobility comes from a willing acknowledgement of the sacrifices one is making for others. Let the players know how hard free work will be on their characters and Dependents. Let them know the dangers. If they say no, make Self-Control: Detachment checks and move on. If they say yes, move forward knowing full well that even making Sustenance cost is going to be a struggle. Either way, the choice informs the structure of the rest of the campaign; the player’s just experienced a turning point in their relationship with each other and the community. For example, let’s say the nearby enclave of Nova Lucre has succumbed to an outbreak. The last transmissions reported Vectors inside the walls, and nobody has heard from anyone in days... that is, nobody except the schoolteacher. Nova Lucre’s one-room schoolhouse was housed in a disused grain silo. The walls and the door held when the outbreak started, leaving everyone inside to scream helplessly into Ubiq, waiting for

rescue or slow dehydration. Whichever comes first. The wrong way to present this pro bono job to players would be to say Nova Lucre had an alliance with their enclave and that the crew must go or be evicted. This turns the PCs into hostages and the Market into a bully. The right way would be to have the enclave’s leadership ask for volunteers. Meanwhile, the typical collection of Contracts and Scores stays on offer (business can’t stop for every little disaster, after all). Sure, the crew could try to save some kids by risking their lives for no reward, but they can make the “responsible” choice as well, absolving themselves of Nova Lucre by repeating the sacred mantra: not my problem. If they don’t go, it’s Self-Control: Detachment checks all around. As they count their bounty from some other job, they get to think about those kids slowly dying in a metal tube. A new group of ghosts joins the horde following them about the Loss. If they say yes and succeed? They’re heroes. Other enclaves have opportunists, necessary evils that exploit as they protect. But this crew? They’re champions. And if they go and die? Well, that’s the Loss for you. They’re as likely to be remembered as fools or martyrs. And the carrion economy steamrolls onwards....

Human CapItal

Pro Bono jobs shouldn’t be without reward, but, unlike Contracts and Scores, Markets hold no obligation to let characters know what those rewards may be beforehand. Taking on a job for free need not end a campaign as the characters begin financially bleeding out the moment the session is over. It just needs to feel as if that’s possible. Firstly, Takers can always hustle for their bounty. Scavenging the environment and pulling cards from casualties en route is a great way to alleviate the costs of a pro bono job. The Market can also present opportunities at the job site. For instance, defending this

No traditional credit exists out in the Loss. No one is about to underwrite a home loan or credit card to a legally dead person in a zombie wasteland. A big part of Taker work involves recovering documents necessary for the Recession to maintain the structure of debt slavery that ran the world before the Crash, and the desperate governments of the world aren’t about to risk that system by accepting literally apocalyptic levels of liability. This isn’t to say that loans aren’t possible in Red Markets. Usury is the oldest profession in the world after prostitution, and it’s twice as unsavory. There are plenty of people willing to loan bounty out in the Loss, but they don’t stay in business long unless they get paid back... by any means necessary.

Loans At-a-Glance

tiny enclave from a horde of raiders might have seemed dumb initially, but capturing that truck-mounted mini-gun they’re wielding could make all the effort worth it. Lastly, never ignore the human capital of performing a good deed. Takers willing to risk their lives selflessly are rewarded with +Rep spots as the story becomes legend amongst the Lost. Someone they rescue could turn out to be a useful Reference (over their CHA Potential) or a future client. A reputation for honesty is a rare commodity that could end up paying big in the long term.

Loans

Sometimes Takers need bounty fast. A piece of gear might be essential for the next Contract, or a Dependent could come down with a serious illness. If there’s nothing in the bank or retirement plan, where’s the bounty come from?

1. Find a loan shark: someone that survives primarily off lending bounty and collecting interest 2. Know the conditions: −− The shark is not afraid of you. Why? −− You will pay them back, in full and on time. How do they assure this? −− Everyone knows what happens to those who don’t pay. Who was made an example, and how did you learn about it? 3. Check a CHA skill to set interest: −− Critical Success: interest free (10b loan/10b payment) −− Success: 10% interest (10b loan/11b payment) −− Failure: 50% interest (10b loan/15b payment) −− Critical Failure: 100% interest (10b loan/20b payment) 4. At the end of the session, pay up... 5. ...Or else

FInd a Shark

Everyone in the Loss is hustling to survive. Wealthy clients with enough bounty to hire out Contracts do so to maintain their status amongst an enclave or gain the upper hand

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back in the Recession. Even the lowliest Dependent, completely devoid of marketable skills, is in a constant struggle to get ahead. Profit or die. This means that if someone can be screwed over, they will be screwed over. Maybe you can lend a family member a few bounty and expect to see it back, but anyone that makes a habit of generosity is soon going to need charity themselves. In the contest between kind-hearted banker and starving child, few feel bad about screwing over the former for the latter. This tragedy of the commons means there’s not much lending in the Loss; people hoard their bounty and exchange it for concrete goods. Promises of repayment might mean something under the rule of law, but what is an enclavist to do if someone reneges on a loan? Kill them? For the loan sharks, the answer is yes. Five years after the Crash, there is only one way to survive in the loan business: Everyone pays. On time. With interest. Or else. For a shark to ensure that rate of return, they have to be more unforgiving and deadly than the poverty of the Loss. And that makes for a monstrous person indeed. So that’s first question a Market should ask Takers asking for money: who in the enclave is unscrupulous enough to do this for a living? How do they approach the grim realities of their business? Are they depressingly pragmatic regarding breaking kneecaps? Or do they seem to enjoy feeding family members to the casualties over the fence? Example: The Market wants the enclave to be as defined by the players as possible, so she asks who would be the loan shark in this part of the Loss. After some debate (the “Out-of-character Consensus” model p. 400), the group decides on Ted Hancock, former manager of a privatized student loan fund before the Crash. When Ted convinced Leroy’s Boys, the cartel of local Stim Sauce dealers, they were leaving money on the table, he was brought into the syndicate to manage their new money lending enterprise.

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Factoring Loans into Enclave Generation Acknowledging that characters might need to take out a loan early in a campaign creates a big opportunity in enclave generation. Every society has elements of the criminal, the underground, and the taboo. The extreme measures required of Loss loan sharks undoubtedly makes them part of that element. Talking with your players about how the enclave combats, condones, or encourages the loan operation is a great way to define the community everyone is about to play in. Perhaps the unsavory loan practice is built into the foundation of the enclave, dating back to the history of its development. Or maybe the shark also holds a monopoly on the community’s defenses and is given carte blanche? At the very least, it can be fun to have a roguish, “mob boss” character to fill out the VIP roster and offer future Contracts. The CondItIons

These aren’t Contract conditions; these are unspoken realities of the Loss that every character would know. Talking about them at the table prevents the player from feeling tricked if things don’t go the character’s way. More importantly, they help define the group’s vision of Red Markets more clearly. Before giving out loans to a Taker, Markets should communicate the following conditions to the group. Then, collaboratively answer the attached questions and the build the shark’s business model into the setting. 1. The shark is not afraid of you. Why? Takers fight monsters for a living. They do what no one else in the Loss is willing to risk. Any dispute not handled in negotiations usually resorts to gunfire. In short, Takers are scary people. But not to the shark. Why? Well, it could be because no one lends in the Loss without a muscle of their own. Maybe they have the

Takers outmanned and outgunned. Or maybe they’re used to being the one who is feared, on account of their tendency to torture the family members of those who don’t pay up. Maybe they run the whole enclave and they can just keep the gate shut if the Takers piss them off. Whatever reason the group comes up with, the shark is not afraid of the Takers, and they have no reason to be. There’s no bullying their way out of the loan. Example: Ted Hancock surgically removed his empathy even before the zombies came. Back in the old days, his company exclusively used him for the “tough cases,” though Ted could never understand why they were considered so tough. He once sued a woman for defaulting payment on a two-decades old Art History degree. She’d lost her secretary job when she got diagnosed with cancer, and Ted got his first promotion when he convinced the court to seize the money she’d set aside to pay for chemo. He slept fine that night; if she didn’t want to pay, she shouldn’t have gone to college. Really, he sees his current job as no different. Sure, now he works with meth dealers instead of business majors, but that just means there’s less paperwork. Either way, you pay Ted or you die slow. 2. You will pay them back, in full and on time. How do they assure this? Loan sharks don’t directly profit off savagery and intimidation. They want to be paid back, and they want the return business of reliable customers. As such, communication is key; the shark makes certain that everyone knows exactly how much they owe and when it is due. Who delivers these terms to customers? Does the shark do so personally, or is there a designated representative? Is there a hierarchy of employees, with some dedicated to administering loans while others collect payments? Do they send representatives along on Taker jobs to garnish wages and protect investments? Are customers allowed a certain number of warnings before

entering default? Are there penalties — either financial or physical — for late payments? If someone gets behind, can they “work off” debt by performing tasks the shark can’t otherwise accomplish themselves? Interest rates are negotiable, but certain parts of the shark’s business model will remain constant. Establish these business practices before getting into the details of this specific loan. Example: Ted wears a polo shirt tucked into khakis even now. He maintains an office in a disused storage container and still has customers fill out extensive contracts. He’s happy to answer any questions one might have, and he’s even managed to put some of the consequences into safe, legal language: “Hancock LLC reserves the right to seize of one or more of the lendee’s bodily extremities for use by Hancock LLC in local advertising. Hancock LLC cannot be held responsible for any medical treatment or consequences resulting from seizure of assets forfeited as a result of delinquent payment.” Once the agreement is done, Ted likely won’t see the customer again. Leroy and his brothers handle all the collections. They decide when to arbitrarily hike the interest rate and whether late charges are to be paid in bounty or pounds of flesh. 3. Everyone knows what happens to those who don’t pay. Who was made an example, and how did you learn about it? When someone refuses to pay up, the shark has to turn a loss into an opportunity. The only way to do that is to increase future rates of return by motivating customers to get their payments in on time. In the past, this was done through the court system and the garnishment of regular wages. In the Loss, methods have to be more direct and bloody. Everyone in the enclave knows what the shark is capable of if not paid. On dark nights, most imagine they can still hear the screams. What do Takers down on their luck have to look forward to? Example: Marta took out a loan from the Leroy brothers to start her new sewing

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business, despite pleading from her neighbors to just keep begging in the street. When she defaulted, the Leroy brothers couldn’t decide what to do: they were starting a brothel across town and needed “workers,” but they had publicly promised to feed whomever crossed them to the Casualties over the fence. Marta had a son. Which one should they turn into food, and which one should become a slave? In their indecision, the drunken Leroy brothers dragged a screaming Marta and her boy through the streets. They knocked on Ted’s door and asked him what to do. He wasn’t pleased to see them (he was with customers), but he quickly informed them that they he had no right to make a choice. Hancock LLC was only entitled to remuneration; it was the responsibility of the customer to choose where it came from. So, in front of the entire enclave, Ted made Marta choose. Since then, no one has been able to forget what she finally said... or when their payments are due.

Set Interest

Sharks are reasonable monsters. After the group has built their villain, the Market roleplays the shark and sits down with the Taker to negotiate terms. This isn’t a full negotiation à la the Negotiation Rules: sharks, by their very nature, have some inflexible business practices. However, interest rates can be set higher or lower, depending on how confident the shark is that the Taker will pay on time and become a repeat customer. The Taker picks a CHA skill, role-plays a pitch, and rolls the check. The interest rate is set according to the result: −− Critical Success: interest free (10b loan/10b payment) −− Success: 10% interest (10b loan/11b payment) −− Failure: 50% interest (10b loan/15b payment) −− Critical Failure: 100% interest (10b loan/20b payment)

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Payment can be set whenever the shark wishes, but most sharks want payment once the Taker gets back from their next job. Takers don’t have the best life expectancy, and even the good ones have a volatile income. Better to get the money sooner than later, in a lump sum rather than installments. After the interest is set and the repayment arranged, the shark hands over the bounty. Now it’s up to the Taker to repay it.

Loans as Story Opportunities Markets should keep in mind that the purpose of loan conditions is not to create a monster the PCs cannot defeat. The goal of Red Markets’ loan mechanics is the creation of a worthwhile antagonist. That antagonist can be defeated at the end, but it will cost characters dearly and establish more of the world in the process. If Takers could secure loans from pushover NPCs and murder them to avoid having to pay it back, it would break the economy of the game and the heroic nature of the PCs’ struggle. However, by going in debt to a powerful shark, the mechanics trade some temporary currency for a long-term investment in the narrative. One more fight scene is nothing for the average player to gamble, but the life of a Dependent they’ve come to enjoy creates stakes at the table and in the fiction. Sharks test the characters. How much are they willing to let slide for the sake of family? Where is their breaking point? The players might just want to buy a piece of gear they can’t afford, but the Market wants answers to these questions in return.

Pay Up...Or Else

If the Taker gets a loan, does a job, and pays it back, that’s the end of it. Sharks don’t stay in business by murdering people; they murder people to make sure enough people pay them to stay in business. Sharks are happy for repeat customers and perfectly courteous as long as the agreement is fulfilled. However, if payment is short, or late, or missing altogether, things are going to get ugly really quick. And it’s up to the Takers how to respond. Does the whole crew get involved or leave the debtor to their fate? Does the shark go after the Taker, or their coworkers, or their Dependents? Do they leave out the physical coercion altogether and demand payment in gear or free Contract work?

At minimum, failing to pay a shark makes for a nasty vignette, but the consequences are better dealt with as a Pro Bono job or new Contract. The Market has a lot of options of where to take the story so long as someone ends up paying the price.

the expectation Since usurers sell nothing other than sell days and of money, that is to say, time, they clarity, and the nights. But the day is the time of ore, not just night the time of repose. It is, theref eternal rest. for them to receive eternal light and -Tabula Exemplorum

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Loss Encounters

Loss encounters are about the uncertainty of the Loss. The fear of uncertainty is a very real force in the world, enough to collapse entire economies. Evidence of actual risk isn’t even necessary; currencies have folded overnight over nothing but rumors. It’s a fear the Market should be bringing to both the players and characters. A group of players could have the most predictable Market ever running a group-designed Score, but with randomized Legs off the Loss Encounters tables, no one can be certain everyone’s going to make it through alive. Rather than force Markets to internalize the basic tone of the game’s narrative and how it can be used to improvise exciting scenes for players, this section provides ready-made examples and writing prompt tables. Most Markets start designing their own Legs after

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a couple of games, but the tools are always here, ready to help speed up the process of writing an encounter.

D10 Interludes

Before we get to the agonizing uncertainty of randomized Legs, let’s talk about the one reliable method players have to escape them: interludes. Interludes are scenes that tell us more about the relationship of Takers within a crew. Think of them like vignettes between people that may have more casual relationships than those shared by Dependents. Groups that want to have Takers share each other as intimate loved ones are encouraged to do so — those dramas can happen during Legs just as well as within an enclave — but one’s relationship to coworkers typically runs a much wider gambit of affection than their relationship to family and friends. Quite

frankly, the carrion economy doesn’t give a damn whether Takers like each other. Crews are assembled from those available with the mix of fortitude and skill required for the job. Personal hatreds, passionate love, and everything in-between can never be more than a distraction while working. The demands of the Loss can punish anything more than that with a death sentence. Interludes also reinforce the sheer emptiness of the Loss. Legs only represent narratively interesting things that happen between an enclave and job site. Without a vehicle, most of a crew’s time is spent silently trekking across a barren wasteland, nervously scanning the horizons and silently listening for the sounds of shuffling feet. Red Markets skips narrating these scenes because they aren’t interesting, but most of the time spent at real-world jobs isn’t interesting either. Takers spend their downtime at work no

differently than the rest of us: when things get slow, they shoot the shit with the person next to them. Mechanically, interludes allow players to trade their characters’ suffering for the one thing Red Markets finds more interesting: character development. If the last Leg was brutal and the thought of another one is too much to bear, PC’s can skip it by role-playing out the conversation their characters have about that event. Or about a different event. Or about something completely unrelated. The scene can last as long as the Market allows and be about any subject the PCs wish to talk about. There are only a few actual rules governing how to use interludes: 1. Interludes can only be used to skip a single Leg. If the Takers are working a Contract that pays for three Legs, they can reduce

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it down to two Legs and an interlude. There’s nothing to stop the group from role-playing more interlude scenes, but they don’t reduce the number of Legs by more than one. 2. Interludes only occur if at least two players are willing to role-play the scene. Every interlude needs one person to start the scene and at least one person to react to that character’s words. More may participate, but no one is allowed to monologue all the way to site.

Black Result

3. If no one has an idea how to start the interlude, roll on the interlude table and think of what the character would say. The table is there to help prompt the players to improvise a scene fitting for each character’s personality. Groups are encouraged to improvise on their own topics. That’s it. Interludes are pure role-playing. Use them to get to know the characters. When things get dire later in the job that much more is going to be on the line.

Red Result

1

Agonize over...

1

...the history of the Crash

2

Express confusion about...

2

...a moment of personal epiphany

3

Seek absolution for...

3

...becoming a Taker

4

Challenge someone’s opinion of...

4

...someone or something at the Enclave

5

Sow doubt about...

5

....a retirement plan or Mr. JOLS

6

Ask a question about...

6

...an aspect of pre-Crash life

7

Mock or make light of...

7

...a member of the Crew

8

Express appreciation for...

8

...a client or job, past or present

9

Find solace in...

9

...an aspect of the Carrion Economy

10

Try to impress with your knowledge of...

10

...some aspect of the Blight

. . . al t or m im is n io it t rs e up s t die, bu Religions are born and may hology t y m ut ho it w e lif e ak t n Only the fortunate ca -Ariel and Will Durant 448

Bust Rule: Asshole Coworkers

Some Markets might not like the idea of chatting your way across the Loss. To make matters more challenging, “Asshole Coworkers” trades the uncertain physical danger and psychological trauma of an encounter for the uncertain psychological trauma of talking to your coworkers. In this variant, everyone rolls for prompts to improvise the scene. The person that starts the scene begins a conversation according to their prompt, but then anyone responding rolls for their character’s reaction. If that reaction is unfitting — or even cruel — too bad. The Loss screwed with the heads of everyone in the crew, and everyone’s baggage constantly makes interaction a social minefield. The Takers may be able to keep things together around the enclave, but over the fence? Surrounded by people that have seen them at their best and worst? Raw nerves can make some interactions downright abusive, and the Market can call for Self-Control: Detachment checks. If the response is kind and caring? Humanity might be healed. It all depends on what the other players roll for reactions. When rolling for reactions, one responder can roll Black and role-play straight across the row. A really skilled improviser might roll Black and Red, and then try to role-play a response that works in both adjectives. Or two people might involve themselves in the conversation, the Market divvying up Black and Red results.

black Result Red Result 1 Uncomfortable 1 Disquieted

black Result (Cont.) Red Result (Cont.) 6 Wise 6 Advising

2

Helpful

2

Encouraging

7

Concerned

7

Curious

3

Sympathetic

3

Friendly

8

Shocked

8

Offended

4

Annoyed

4

Critical

9

Amused

9

Joking

5

Skeptical

5

Suspicious

10

Apathetic

10

Dismissive

So how does this play out? Let’s say Refurb rolls B3/R6: “seek absolution for...an aspect of preCrash life.” Refurb’s player thinks for a moment before launching into a heartfelt rumination on how he never gave enough to charity before the nightmare began. On his walk to his tech support job, he would dismiss the homeless as weak and deserving of their plight. Now, with his sister in constant need of medication and struggling to make ends meet, he hates the man he used to be. Creed’s player rolls for how to react to her coworker pouring his heart out, and Market decides how the resulting scene might reflect on Refurb’s Humanity damage. A B3 would see her be a kind and supportive friend, maybe healing some Humanity as Refurb feels better about nagging personal doubts. However, a B9 could provoke a Self-Control check as Creed regards her partner’s white guilt in the wake of a zombie apocalypse ridiculous. If Creed’s player rolled B2/R8, she might role-play a bit of tough love that points out Refurb’s current privilege and urges him to keep striving for empathy. The Market could call for a Self-Control check that heals on a success or does Humanity damage on a failure, thus suggesting Refurb’s reaction to the unsolicited scolding. The “Asshole Coworkers” rule certainly makes the game more challenging for role-players and gambles more on interludes, but it does so by sacrificing control of a character’s reactions. If the players aren’t comfortable resting so much of their characters’ personalities on the dice, Markets should skip this rule.

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Four Encounter Themes

The map is not the territory. Every bit of data Takers have regarding the route to their next job is plagued by expired intel, disinformation, and shit luck. For these reasons, Red Markets doesn’t measure distance in units of length. Legs are units of narrative distance that convey the slog through the Loss. They’re factored into pricing during negotiations because they tax and challenge Takers before they even get to the hard stuff at the Site.

Result

Larger Theme

The Legs in Red Markets all follow basic themes, each based off one of the four resolutions possible in Profit. All Markets should try writing a few Legs of their own and inserting them into the mix, if only to keep sneaky players reading ahead from getting too comfortable. Once you get the gist of the little episodic struggles Legs create, it’s hard not to think of more of them as you “zombify” your surroundings. To get started as a writing prompt, Markets can roll Black and Red, then try to design a scene based off the essential questions listed under each theme.

This is a lose-lose scenario. It’s unavoidable. There are two essential questions in this type of scene.

CrITICAL FAILURE

Either/or? Do the Takers want to risk health or Humanity? Do they lose equipment or time? Do they sacrifice a friend or a client? Something is getting hit; where do they take the damage? How much? How much will this hurt? Or will it kill? How much is this setback going to cost? How hard is this moment going to bite the crew in the ass later in the campaign? The encounter can explore one or both of those questions. What it can’t do is offer a chance for profit. There’s nothing good about what’s happening here. The Loss is a cruel, capricious landscape ruled by callous chance. Sometimes all you can do is survive; this is one of those times. This is a bad situation that Takers can avoid or overcome. What remains to be seen is...

FAILURE

Is it enough? Is the scout’s Awareness check enough to spot the ambush before the crew walks into it? Is one Taker’s Self-Control complete enough to stifle a shout? Is Persuasion enough to talk down the bandits? Is the crew strong enough to push the dead car until it rolls safely away down the mountain, or smart enough to get it running? If the answer is yes, the crew can avoid or mitigate what would otherwise be a disaster for a lesser crew. If the answer is no, they deal with a situation that is draining and possibly deadly. However, if they take a hit, there is some possibility profit may result.

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There’s a chance for profit, if the Takers choose to accept some risk. What remains to be seen is...

SUCCESS

Was it worth it? When they went inside the post office with the sagging roof to salvage those documents, was it worth it? When they tried to get close enough to hack that armed drone, was it worth it? When they responded to those cries for help, was it worth it? If the crew takes on the risk, they open themselves to a financial, material, reputation-based, or emotional reward. But the opportunity doesn’t assure success. It also doesn’t protect characters from the consequences of the risk. That’s for the players and the dice to decide. Avoiding the risk, however, voids the opportunity as well. Furthermore, if the answer to the failure theme (is it enough?) was “no,” it’s easy for a Taker to walk into a disaster thinking they’re chasing profit that isn’t there. It’s winning the jackpot. A windfall. A free lunch. The Takers don’t even have to work for it. The only questions are...

CRITICAL SUCCESS

How? How did this opportunity land so fortuitously in the Taker’s path? Whom did the treasure originally belong, and how was it lost to them? How has it gone unsalvaged this long? Once the how is answered, it might also be prudent to ask... Why? Why has something so obviously valuable been left here? Was it intentional? To what end, and when will it come to fruition? If it wasn’t deemed valuable at all, who wouldn’t find it valuable? Freedom from the scarcity that rules the Loss suggests motives ruled by the Blight, radical belief, or something even worse. Regardless of the answers, nothing happens to the Takers on this Leg unless one of them miraculously screws up somehow. It’s a gift from heaven, but Markets should use such opportunities to think about what such a boon says about the setting and sets up for Legs to come.

D10 Encounter Prompts

Need more? The following table was used to write the entire d100 table at the back of this book. The essential questions remain the same, but now each is paired with a common point of interaction between the Market’s designs and the players’ choices. Roll the Black alone. Even numbers are the more forgiving state of an encounter (asking “Is it worth it?”), and odd is the failure-state of the same (asking “Is it enough?”). On a 2-3, the theme revolves around the natural world run amok after the Crash, unhindered

by the trappings of civilization and driven to the extreme by climate change. 4-5 is the Blight and its various complications, 6-7 interactions with other humans, and 8-9 landscape features that are man-made or resulted from the Crash. The 1 and 10 results on the d10 table are reserved for outside context problems or Legs that involve multiple elements from the four pairs. In this smaller version of the table, these are also the critical failure/success states because they make for the most interesting challenges.

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Just because a Leg doesn’t easily classify into nature, Blight, interaction, or remnant doesn’t mean it’s a bad encounter. The truth is actually the exact opposite: the more elements of the setting that interact with each other, the more real and immersive that setting seems.

Result 1 crITICAL MISFORTUNE

2 FORTUNATE NATURE 3 UNFORTUNATE NATURE 4 FORTUNATE BLIGHT 5 UNFORTUNATE BLIGHT

6 FORTUNATE INTERACTION

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Take a roll on the table below and see if it’s enough to spark the imagination. If not, continue on to “d100 Loss Encounters” (see p. 457).

subJect and Theme Multiple elements of the setting conspire to make a lose-lose situation. The crew runs into a hostile faction while suffering an extreme weather event. A number of casualties are made worse by the remnant of some Crash fortification. An aberrant shows up. Whatever the case, the crew can mitigate damage, but they can’t avoid the situation altogether. There’s also nothing to be gained from the encounter, or if there is, it’s not nearly enough to make up for the cost. Some turn of the weather or natural world benefits the Takers. It could ease their passage, hinder their enemies, or provide goods. However, no major benefits are available to Takers without some form of risk. The Takers can choose to push it for the added benefits, but they can move on unhindered as well. Some aspect of the weather or natural world threatens the crew. It could be an unpredictable shift in conditions due to climate change, a landscape shift caused by previous events, or a feral threat. Crews with exceptional skill might be able to avoid the encounter, but chances are resources will be lost due to the misfortune. It’s possible to make some bounty, but it’s doubtful that it fully covers what was lost. Casualties are isolated, hindered, easily avoided, or already dead. There is no such thing as a safe casualty encounter, but the Takers can choose to face these undead to pull cards or get at whatever treasures they may be guarding. However, it might be the better long-term choice to leave them rest. It’s being able to make the choice that makes the encounter fortunate. Casualties are in groups, unrestrained, hidden, or in great number. If Takers don’t engage the undead, it’s because they skillfully escaped a situation in which the C’s had the upper hand, likely using valuable resources in the process. If they power through the beasts, there’s some chance for bounty, but it only takes one bite to kill an entire crew. The crew encounters humans that are friendly or in a situation in which the Takers have the initiative. It could be people willing to trade, offer solace, or provide information. If the persons need help, the Takers can choose not to give it. It may hurt Humanity, but it might also save flesh; the choice is luxury. If the humans are hostile, it’s still a fortunate interaction if Takers have a chance (based on the dice or the situation) to get the drop on them. There’s no bounty in avoidance, but it might be the key to survival.

7 UNFORTUNATE INTERACTION

8 FORTUNATE REMNANT

9 UNFORTUNATE REMNANT

10 CRITICAL FORTUNE

The crew encounters humans that are hostile to them and seeking to gain the upper hand. It could be a financial or even emotional hostility, but unfortunate interactions in the Loss tend towards violence. But the dangerous part about humans is their cunning. While it might be a raider group just leading a charge, those with bad intentions do their best to make an ambush seem like a fortunate interaction. It’s possible for the crew to spot and accommodate to a trap before it’s too late, but it’s hard to stop someone willing to risk their life to end yours from doing damage. The Crash and the Loss leaves behind a lot of waste and treasure. To the desperate, waste might be treasure, but the dangers in retrieving it can turn treasure into waste. Unexploded munitions, salvageable equipment, spare parts, food — Takers lucky enough to find such things need to throw caution to the wind and grab them before someone else does. Of course, the reason the value remains available might be because others tried for it and died. Accepting the risk is the only way to know for sure. This leftover is in the crew’s way or actively seeking to harm them. Most of mankind’s effect on the world during the Crash was overwhelmingly negative. Radiation, land mines, preserved pockets of infected — these nightmares were spewed all over the countryside within the first month. That’s to say nothing of the new cruelties and deadly experiments cooked up by members of the Lost in subsequent years. Some bounty might be recovered from the obstacle, but it’s questionable as to whether it will be worth the pain. Multiple elements in the setting have cancelled each other out, leaving only the value with some or all of the risk removed. Feral animals destroyed the casualties but left the bounty. A believer group made a remnant safe, but abandoned the most valuable salvage for ideology. Whatever the narrative, a critical fortune encounter should cause players a sigh of relief.

Economists t hink about w hat people ou ght to do. P watch what sychologists they actually do. -Daniel Kahn eman

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D10 Aberrants and MechanIcs

Aberrants may not even exist. It’s up to each individual Market to determine how much evidence for their existence is real and how much is internet bullshit. And even if they are real in your group’s version of the setting, the Market is free to change the way their mechanics work or make up brand-new types. Still, if you want to confirm the Aberrant rumors found in “The Loss,” here’s ten of them available for random placement and complete with rules for use.

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1. Aerosol A casualty, usually found amongst large mobs or stampedes, that emits an aerosol form of the Blight as a cloud of invisible spores. Humans that come within range of the cloud before it dissipates risk inhaling the Blight. In game terms, anyone within mid-range of an aerosol must make an infection check unless they are Immune, Latent, or wearing a breathing apparatus. Those that are infected change as if bitten by a Vector,

meaning the transformation occurs within a matter of turns. Identifying an aerosol requires specialized equipment, a successful Awareness check up close, or a successful Foresight check if analyzing the area with footage or other data sets. 2. Converts Infected children that die during a certain stage of neruroplasticity sometimes retain a certain level of intelligence, even after death. But the consciousness steering this cognition is purely predatory. Mobs around a convert may be strategically placed, blocking off exits or flanking enemies tactically. Casualties can also resist the temptation to attack so long as the convert is in the area. Lastly, a convert can direct mobs to do the most rudimentary labor, such as pushing objects or digging by hand. All casualties lose these increased capacities when the convert is killed. Converts can operate rudimentary tools themselves. Jobs involving keys, shovels, rope,

chain, and other simple machines are not beyond them, and they often work mechanical elements into their hunting grounds. Anything with moving parts – such as guns or computers – tends to be beyond the reduced motor skills of the undead, but a convert can understand how such things work. Beside their intelligence, converts have no special abilities. 3. Empties Empties are casualties that have no predatory instinct. They do nothing besides repeat a single task – usually something from the victim’s life – endlessly. They don’t respond to humans, other casualties, or any other stimulus. Seeing an empty implies unsettling, uncomfortable thoughts about the nature of a mind infected by Blight. Empties don’t to anything, so they don’t need special stats. However, the severity of the Self-Control check suffered by discovering an empty depends on the context of the action being performed. An inexplicable or darkly comic action would just be level-1 check, but a whole group performing the same action would risk level-2. An empty that mimics or mocks something dear to the PC could provoke a level-3 check or higher. 4. Ever-Vecs Sometimes, a Vector doesn’t die. It just keeps running, feeding, growing stronger. It builds new muscle tissue and Blight sinews from the protein it has metabolized until it’s stronger and faster than human anatomy would allow. Treat an ever-vec as a Vector with a murder modifier of 5 or higher. Aside from making the monster exceptionally fast and strong, the Market could also use the modifier to increase the creature’s hit points. 5. Ganglia Blight sinews often break the skin during torpor. It’s theorized that when a number of casualties transform in close proximity, their different nervous systems intertwine and can’t distinguish one body from the next. Somehow,

the Blight copes with this and pilots all bodies in the network as one. The result is a mob of unbelievably fast, coordinated corpses strung together by a web of taut, dripping Blight sinews. Ganglia’s are basically cooperating mobs. They have mass equalling the number of casualties caught in the web. They don’t have Shamble; the hive consciousness developed by the Blight makes them far faster than even Vectors. The only way to kill ganglia is to separate all its nodes by decapitating individual casualties, or by separating the web of sinews that connects the mass. Headshots require called shots (they ain’t slow and stumbling no more), and severing the sinews requires explosive or immolating weaponry. A ganglia’s effectiveness isn’t stopped by damage. A ganglia comprised of six casualties can still move without any penalty so long as one still has a single head. Being attacked by ganglia does damage like being attacked by any mob, except the Market need not choose between additional damage and knockback. If the knockback isn’t resisted, the victim is entangled in the web of sinews and takes damage every round they remain there. Infection checks occur normally. 6. Malignant For some reason, the Blight sometimes doesn’t stop metabolizing a cadaver’s tissue once the parasitic nervous system is made. Sometimes, it keeps going until the entire body is turned into a sprawling, pusating mass of black awfuleness. Pockets of malignant Blight don’t move or attack. Exposure to the flesh causes infection checks, but this aberrant primarily serves as an area denial weapon. Moving on or near it makes every step precarious and causes frequent attacks on Humanity. 7. Mutants The Blight can’t hop the species barrier. Until it does. No one knows how or why. Mutants are statted out like feral animals, meaning they have initiative and run faster

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than any human. Depending on the species, the Market might make them resistant to damage, increase the damage of attacks, or provide the creature additional tactics or twitches. The exact specifics of how the monster’s stats are buffed depends on the species that mutated. Regardless, successful attacks cause infection on humans and animals. 8. Scarecrows A lot of theorists propose that the Blight is a form of fungus. They’re wrong, of course; everyone is always wrong. But Scarecrows make a strong case for the plant life argument. Their sinews lock up inside the cadaver’s body, calcifying as they drive themselves out of the flesh and into the soil. It leaves the casualty immobile, stuck to the ground in a crucified pose. Meanwhile, the sinews grow into the ground – spreading like some cancerous weed. Each scarecrow has a “kill zone” determined by the Market. Within that radius, the scarecrow can attack anyone standing on the earth with its roots, once per turn and at the end of the initiative order. Takers have a chance to dodge. If struck, the attack always lands on both legs of the victim, and that person is considered grappled. Kill damage continues for every round until the character is dead or escapes. Infection checks for damage are made normally. Standing on stone or equally dense material prevents a scarecrow’s attack, as does elevating oneself beyond the tendrils’ reach. Any casualties operating within the kill zone share awareness with the scarecrow and can hunt prey anywhere within the sphere of influence, with or without line of sight. Decapitating a scarecrow stops all special abilities within its kill zone. 9. Shuffled Headshots don’t work. THE HEADSHOTS DON’T WORK. Shuffled casualties almost always travel in groups. They don’t differ in any way from

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regular casualties save from the fact that they are unharmed by headshots. Some other hit location, besides the head, holds the nexus controlling the Blight sinew. Finding where this nexus is located requires trial and error. Additionally, the loss of the only certainty a Taker had on the battlefield provokes SelfControl checks, and striking an unfamiliar target requires called shots. The shuffled in the same mob tend to harbor their new hearts in the same location. 10. Stalkers Survivor’s guilt has tricked the mind of many in the Loss into imagined hauntings by loved ones. They see the casualty of the person they let down perpetually advancing over the horizon, waiting for them to fall behind or make a mistake so they can claim revenge beyond the grave. Most learn to dismiss the hallucinations as just that… which makes it all the more tragic when, in rare instance, it turns out the stalker is real. Stalkers hold no special abilities besides tracking individual humans with supernatural precision. There is no way to elude the attention of a stalker besides killing it, but this is harder than it sounds. They are somehow aware of firearms and traps, maintaining distance if the intended victim has any protection. Skittish as they may be, stalkers are never too far away, shilloueted perpetually on the horizon, in view of their intended prey. A stalker’s primary danger is psychological, especially towards the individual of their fixation. Stalkers approach the objects of their fixation only when victims are at their most alone and vulnerable.

that a man is a is ow kn to re ca I at th l Al r me; he can’t fo gh ou en is at th ing human be be any worse. --Samuel Clemens

D100 Loss Encounters

To roll on the d100 table, read the Black as in the ten’s place and the Red in the one’s: a roll of B4/R2 is now a 42. B10/R1 is now 01, while B10/R10 is 100.

Markets should never feel constrained by the d100 list; the only purpose of the list is to speed up game preparation. If an entry has already been played out or wouldn’t fit into your campaign, just walk up or down the list until you find one that works.

black/red DescrIPTION A cow trots past as Takers are about to round a corner. The animal is bleeding from a dozen wounds, slicked with sweat, and mad with exhaustion. As their eyes follow a trail of blood up the road/across the field/etc. (wherever the game is set), the crew sees a line of hundreds of Vectors spreading back over the horizon, loping after the poor creature. Apparently, a distant enclave fell to an outbreak a short while ago. The hungry victims chased after the last of their livestock until the stampede of Vectors arrived here. Those that recover from the terrible sight (Level 3-4 checks) can use appropriate skills to realize there are only two options. The crew can quickly find and secure some shelter against the Vectors until they pass or enter torpor. This option adds days to the journey, eat through rations, and flays the minds of the crew as they listen to the apologies outside. Then they’ll just have to deal with a glut of new casualties along the route to the job. The second option is to find/use a vehicle to drive around. The fuel cost can be mitigated if they drive through the horde, but better hope none of the sprinting monsters manage to grab on. If neither happens in time, the fastest Vectors arrive in one and twos, but if the crew isn’t gone by the time the main group catches up, it’s over. A small herd of (herbivorous animals appropriate to the local area) is visible in the middle distance, grazing peacefully. On a successful Shoot check, Takers can pause to hunt and gain one refresh for their rations from butchering the results. Casualties are attracted to loud weapons, as usual. Climate change can bring about extreme drought, and though the area the Takers service may be spared for now, they aren’t free from the byproducts. Any reasonable skill can detect the dust storm coming: Awareness, Foresight, Profession: X, Research (“I programmed a weather alert into my user settings!”) But a warning won’t mean much. The storm is approaching fast. Takers need to find a shelter, clear it of any casualties, and seal things up immediately. Those caught outside take one Stun to the chest for every round spent in the storm. Worse, the buffeting noise and swirling patterns are keeping the casualties roused. Failed Awareness checks inside the storm navigate PCs towards zombies biting at the winds instead of towards help and shelter. Two mobs of casualties flank either side of the Taker’s intended route. Depending on the shambles, the crew could try and run through the two groups, then outpace and evade them once they converge. They could spend rations and find a different path to the job. Finally, the Takers can attempt to kill the creatures and pull cards. The latter is a regular casualty combat, but remember that noise always attracts more.

457

Takers come across a casualty buried up to the chest in the dirt. The corpse was so badly damaged by other zombies during infection that it barely revived. Its hands are tied behinds its back and buried; the thing can’t move but to snap at passersby. Everyone makes a Self-Control check upon the realization that burying victims and waiting for casualties to fall on them is an execution method used by the Meek. The strap of a messenger bag is visible across one shoulder, hinting that the victim might be carrying something. Success on a Foresight check realizes that the Meek execute themselves using the same method, often booby-trapping the area around the body with mines. A Mechanics or appropriate Profession check can disarm the trap, allowing the crew to retrieve the empty messenger bag. Otherwise, going near the zombie triggers the explosion of a buried DDJ (no Athletics to dodge). The device does Kill damage to all hit locations, causes knockback, and entangles the victim by impaling them with carbon-fiber wires. Then a car alarm rigged to a nearby telephone pole goes off. The buried casualty is killed by the device’s explosion, meaning the Taker has to make an infection check against flying gore. Even if the victims survive uninfected, the crew must deal with incoming mobs as those caught in the explosion rip the wires from their flesh. A single locomotive and boxcar rests on train tracks in a valley or large, flat plain. From a safe distance, the Takers can see it’s the home of a nomadic group of traders out making their rounds in the Loss. The group is besieged on all sides by a stampede, but the height of the cars makes dispatching the creatures safe work. The enclavists slowly kill the creatures with spears, preparing to move the train down the line after they pull cards. Then a whistle sounds in the distance. The smoke of an automated drone train burns down the tracks, headed to restock some DHQS settlement down the line. The Takers can hear the squeal of the larger train’s brakes from miles off, but it’s hopelessly overburdened and heavy. Even if the besieged locomotive throws itself into reverse, the collision is inevitable. The Lost won’t get the horde dispatched in time to ditch. Everyone aboard is doomed to be eaten or pulverized in a massive derailment. The Takers can help. Check Awareness or Foresight to see the switch box between the two locomotives. The crew can try to race there in time and figure how to switch the tracks, or they can lure the stampede to one side so the enclavists can ditch off. Or they can wait, check Self-Control for watching the disaster, and get a ton of salvage from the obliterated casualties and surviving cargo. A DHQS Punch Bot has suffered a failure of its targeting system. One Taker can make an Awareness check. On a success, a repetitive thump against wood can be heard (the bot is trying to execute a tree with its cattle gun). On a critical success, the Taker can identify the sound for exactly what it is. If the crew investigates, the punch bot turns on its alarms to attract more casualties and attacks, confusing the humans for infected. Faulty target acquisition means the Punch Bot can’t do called shots, but the cattle gun manipulators do Stun + Kill damage, and the claws grapple that Taker’s body part. Treat the Punch-Bot as a Management force (re-skin legs as “treads” and head as “cameras”) with double armor to all hit locations, requiring two successful attacks before hit boxes being to fill. The Punch Bot can be hacked if someone can ride it long enough to access the maintenance panel on back. The electronics within the machine are worth bounty, as is the trail of exterminated casualties in its wake.

458

A decrepit grocery store sags under the weight of water damage. Though otherwise looted, Takers that make an Awareness check can see the remains of a wailing wall inside, miraculously undamaged. A cardboard sales cutout has been pinned with notes, photos, and maps from the Crash that would be worth 2d10 Bounty to a tragedy tracker. Foresight, Awareness, or appropriate Profession skills can warn that the floor is likely in as bad a shape as the roof. Retrieving the documents would mean risking falling into the lightless, flooded basement, not to mention waking any casualties wandering above or below. Do they risk it? A cliff or hill blocks the route. Scaling it requires dangerous Athletics checks or additional Legs as the crew takes the long way around. There is a roadway/ railway tunnel that passes through the obstruction, but it’s obviously been trapped. Throughout the tunnel, it appears as if a giant spider has webbed the entire length of the passage. Those with sufficient Scavenging or Awareness recognize the tunnel was trapped with rigged DDJs. The carbon-fiber filaments have threaded through casualties wandering through the tunnel over the years, leaving them trapped and suspended. If the crew picks their way through the web, they might be able to recover unexploded DDJ’s and pickpocket bounty from the impaled zombies. But none of the C’s are completely immobile, and the Takers could set off a DDJ themselves. Walking through a suburb, the Takers come across an untouched house. The surrounding homes have obviously been looted and exposed to the elements, while the one in front of them is so pristine it still has intact windows. Spray painted across the door, faded and weathered, is “Vectors basement.” If the Takers risk venturing inside, the three Vectors in the basement have long since entered and exited torpor. A successful Foresight roll tells the Takers that shooting the Casualties from the top of the basement stairs is the safest plan. In the house Takers find two sets of winter clothing, 4 Bounty, and 2 Haul worth of clothing and kitchen gear. A successful Scavenge check finds an unbroken bottle of whiskey. Takers come across a bridge spanning a major river or canyon. Bypassing the crossing would take two additional Legs across extremely rough terrain, costing two rations each instead of one to traverse. The military checkpoint at the edge is long-abandoned but still intact. Over the wall, the bridge is still jammed with derelict cars and the casualties trapped inside them. It would be possible to jump off the military barricade and hop across the vehicles’ rooftops before the zombies roused themselves. However, once the Takers start this process and agitate the dead, a deafening boom shakes the bridges foundations as a car explodes behind them. It appears the army mined the cars while the casualties were caught in torpor. As they stir for the first time in years at the sight of new prey, the mines are going off. Takers can sprint across the bridge, using Foresight to determine whether the lane they are in might contain a bomb. They can freeze, waiting to be eaten by the casualties or dying as mines cause the bridge to collapse. Or they can ditch off the side, praying they can survive the fall or shimmy all the way to the end on the struts.

459

Due to climate change, the weather turns uncharacteristically cold. If snow is possible for the place and time of year, it snows. It might snow in places it hasn’t ever snowed before, or perhaps there’s an ash cloud from some distant disaster. If Takers can’t scavenge some winter clothing from the wastes, they take 1d10/2 Stun to every hit location every Leg of travel. If they sleep between Legs, they must choose between a Self-Control: Trauma check for the fear of announcing their position with a fire, or two Stress damage for a long night of biting cold. However, the casualties are a little slowed by the freezing weather. Shambles reduce to one every two rounds for the remainder of the Legs unless the zombies are close enough to frenzy. A wildfire is coming. Takers will detect the oncoming danger in time on a successful Awareness check (smoke), Profession: Animal Handling (the wild animals are fleeing away from the fire), or other reasonable Profession: X skill. Takers need to find non-flammable shelter, a waterway, a way around, or try breaking through to already burnt areas immediately. Those caught in the fire take one Kill to the chest and legs for every round spent in the fire. Once out of the fire, take 1d10 Stun to the chest for smoke inhalation. Takers can refresh their rations with the animals caught in the fire. A small town or neighborhood, consisting of no more than a few houses and a gas station, appears to be populated entirely by mannequins. The plastic statues seem weather-beaten and sun-bleached, but it’s clear that each was carefully dressed. Faded color photographs have been cheaply printed from dead social media profiles and stapled on each figure’s face. Check Awareness or Foresight to realize that casualties are frozen amongst the mix of stock-still figures, blinded by the image stapled to their dead faces and held in place by manacles chaining them to posts in the ground. Call for Self-Control checks. Successful Scavenging discovers the curator’s hideout in a cellar. She long ago committed suicide. Some goods are salvageable, but finding the stopping point of the woman’s descent into madness calls for another Self-Control check. A garbage truck lies in the middle of the path, with a mob of casualties in torpor around it. Takers can see a dead man in the driver’s seat, something clutched in his hand. If the takers make any noise, they awaken the mob, but even if they don’t, the Ubiq specs in the man’s hands activate. It plays an audio file loud enough to awaken the mob and draw another near it. Unless the takers spend an action to destroy the Ubiq specs, they hear the message, even over the sound of fighting. “Truck’s almost out of gas. No way I can bring the prisoner back to the enclave. Don’t worry though. I’ll put him to good use. He’s in the hopper; when the zeds climb in, I’ll hit the crush button. This is for you Sara!” Takers that hear the entire message must make a level-2 Self-Control: Trauma check. The specs are heavily damaged and only worth 1 bounty. There is nothing else salvageable.

460

Takers come across a young Latent boy walking amidst four dron-key’s, each loaded down with gear and armed with shotguns and rifles on swivel mounts. The machines assume firing stances and target the crew once they are in sight, but they don’t open fire. Scratchy voices shout a warning through speakers that any who wish to approach should to do so unarmed. Any Profession skill related to drones or advanced electronics can recognize that the units are being remotely piloted via satellite uplink. If the PCs approach peacefully, the boy offers to trade refresh at one bounty apiece: he has both rations and ammo for one type of weapon the crew carries. He might be able to sell intel about the upcoming job site, dependent on Market fiat and pricing. The boy apparently believes the drones to be his actual family rather than piloted machines. He’s personalized each with decorations, crayon drawings, and nametags. Sensitivity or Foresight reveals that the Latent child is used as the hands for the robo-crew, changing their batteries and reloading weapons from dead drops left around the Loss. He’s never met the pilots in person and doesn’t know they exist. The dron-keys don’t like it if Takers bring this up, but the voices appear to love the child even if their reasons for excluding him can’t be understood. They break off engagement rather than deal with criticism, but they only fire if the child is threatened. Otherwise, trade is uneventful and the robotic pack moves on its way. A precinct of ex-cops rolls up on the crew, flashing sirens silently so as to avoid attracting the undead. There are roughly as many officers as Takers, but they’re kitted out in fully militarized police gear, complete with automatic weapons and armor. They tactically deploy, point weapons at the crew, and demand they put their hands behind their heads. If the Takers don’t acquiesce, a gunfight starts immediately. If they do, the “Chief” charges them with illegal weaponry and violating curfew according to some outdated martial law edict passed down during the Crash. They are there to confiscate everything and let the crew off with a “warning.” Successful Sensitivity realizes that the believers are split. Half the crew are good cops, gripping to delusions of maintaining their profession to keep from going mad after the Crash. The others have gone full raider and use the badge to dupe the other half and their stupider victims. Use Persuasion to question the legal justification for the arrest and sow dissent. Intimidation can speak directly to the raiders and assure them the payday isn’t worth a bullet. Finally, use Deception on the true believers to convince them the crew is “undercover.” In a wooded area, a camouflage sheet and large collection of brush has blown away from where it concealed a dirt road off the main highway. If Takers pursue the route, they find an abandoned barn concealed deep in the forest. A cart outside has been painted to read “Premium Snake Juice!” Opening the barn door leads to an outpouring of snakes — all of which are poisonous. Check Self-Control to stay calm. Those that stay still or run away are not bitten; only taking a regret leads to attack. Inside, the amateur herpetologist apparently got bit while milking one of his stock, knocked over two enormous shelves full of terrariums, and promptly died. The building is now covered in pissed-off, hungry, poisonous snakes... but the man’s workbench holds a fully-automatic, silenced assault rifle, two refresh worth of ammo, a packet of rations, and mason jars filled with some liquid. An appropriate First Aid, medical Profession, or Foresight check recognizes the jars as venom, which can be sold to doctors at 1d10 bounty per jar for the production of antivenom.

461

The Takers come across a large number of vehicles abandoned in the middle of nowhere, in an area being aggressively reclaimed by nature. There is no obvious accident to have caused a pile-up, no barricades, no indication of why a large number of people would abandon their vehicles en masse, especially this far from the Recession border. Grass, bushes, and other vegetation have grown over the sides of the roadway as well as up and around the vehicles themselves. Takers find it easier to walk down the road on top of the vehicles, rather than thread their way through the rows of cars. A successful Research check will get the story while an Awareness check alerts the Takers to the danger before they start walking down the road. During the Crash, the military sent a helicopter to pull a VIP out by air — the traffic jam starts where the helicopter was hovering over the road. As folks surged out of their cars to try and climb on the helicopter, soldiers opened fire, killing a large number of civilians. Most posters on the Ubiq forums discount the military’s claims they were firing on Vectors, but for once the nascent DHQS wasn’t lying. There are two mobs of Casualties in and amongst the vehicles that will attack the Takers if they climb up on the vehicles. Takers hear a trumpet being played in the distance. The tune isn’t recognizable or skilled. If the Takers follow the sound, it leads into a wooded area. As they exit the tree line, they find the musician up a lonely tree placed in the middle of meadow. The image would be a surreal pastoral were it not for all the casualties clamoring to try and eat the man in the branches. As the Takers arrive, the man stops blowing his horn. The undead see the easier meat and go for the Takers on the ground. This appears to have been the plan: risk attracting more casualties for the chance at attracting the bait to distract them. Takers can now check Awareness: casualties are pouring out of the woods on all sides. There’s one mob in each cardinal direction, including the ones around the tree. Running away between the lines of undead requires an Athletics test, or the crew can try to fight through a mob. As the Takers rile up the undead prey instinct, the man ditches out the other side of the tree and makes a run for it. PCs that kill all the casualties gain scavenging rights equal to the number of mobs killed. If they catch or kill the man, he’s an unarmed runner called “#5” from the Eat Clean crew. He was a courier for two doses of Supressin before he got stuck.

462

The city the crew needs to cross through is a no-go zone. The blockaded streets apparently did nothing to keep the Crash out, but it has tightly corralled the dead into impassable throngs populating every street. There’s no hope but to go around, adding two Legs to the journey. If a Taker makes the Awareness check, they spot relatively new graffiti on the exterior road signs and walls. Each advertises “Charon’s Shortcut” and points in the same direction. If the Takers follow, they find Charon high atop a makeshift battlement build inside a sewer culvert. The man is an obvious LALA, but he claims to be able to navigate through the city’s aquifer and sewer tunnels for the price of 2 bounty per passenger (“One for each eye,” he jokes.) He has no weapons, but he seems to have been in business for some time. If the Takers pay up, Charon drops a ladder. Once on top of Charon’s wall, they see he has flooded the tunnels. He takes them aboard a raft made of old pallets and pulls a taut wire strung down the length of the waterways. The only light comes from exposed manhole covers where casualties occasionally drop into the inky blackness. Takers hear the screams of others that threatened Charon into giving them passage. Charon abandons those that do not pay in the lightless tunnels, diving overboard, and escaping through safe underwater passages only he knows. The thieves wander hopeless, either starving in the labyrinth or pulled under by the groping hands of the submerged dead just beneath the surface. Hearing the desperate cries of the lost in the tunnels provokes a Self-Control check, but not so bad as the one if the crew threatened Charon and he abandons them. Aside from the new nightmares, those that pay get to the other side safely.

It’s a beautiful day. The Takers come upon a herd of semi-wild horses roaming the Loss, too fast to be molested by casualties and freed from their farms. A Taker with the appropriate skills can attempt to mount and break one as a personal horse. Otherwise, Takers can pause, have an interlude, and heal one Humanity as they watch them graze. Unseasonable rains have created a flash flood. A successful Awareness, Foresight, Profession: X, or Research check will alert the Takers in time to get out of the creek they’re wading through. Takers caught in the surging water take 1d10/2 Stun to the legs as they are swept downstream a ways. Once the Taker struggle out of the water, they notice the casualties, which were attracted to the sound and also swept downstream, piling up at a bend in the creek. Make a Self-Control: Trauma check for having been in the water with them and gain 1d10 Bounty on a successful Scavenge check. A dog with saddlebags comes trotting up to the Takers and sits down a few yards ahead of them, tail wagging happily. Tied to the dog’s saddlebags is a note asking whoever finds ‘Bruno’ to please send any spare rations, and ask for Q Cell out of the nearest enclave - they’ll make good on your help. If the Takers do not add any rations to Bruno’s saddlebags, he will follow the Takers for 2 legs, whining the whole way, before trotting off. No Profession: Animal Handling checks will be able to convince him to stay. If the Takers do add charges of rations to the saddlebags (one will do), Bruno will lick that person’s hand and then trot off the way he came. Any Takers following Bruno come upon a vehicle. Succeeding an Awareness check means the Takers notice that Bruno has stopped and is growling at the vehicle — Bruno’s Taker handler has died and is now a Vector, but trapped inside the vehicle. A Foresight check reveals that the Takers could, with a sufficiently powerful weapon, simply shoot the Vector through the closed windows of the vehicle, although this will track a mob of Casualties. If the Takers do not engage the Vector and simply walk off, Bruno stays by the vehicle. If they successfully kill the Vector, they find 1d10 Bounty, a journal with Q Cell’s brainstorming plan’s for a Score, and Bruno follows the Taker who put the rations in his saddlebag. Bruno is trained, has the Friendly upgrade, and comes with the harness gear. There are several vehicles in the middle of the road ahead. They look like they’ve seen maintenance and new parts within the last few weeks, not sitting out here for five years — this is a Crusader caravan just sitting in the middle of the road. An Awareness check alerts the Takers to the Vector (who is several hours past the apologies stage) lurching out from the far vehicle while they still have time to run away. If the Takers kill the Vector, the rest of the caravan has entered the torpor stage and can easily be decapitated with a machete (there’s one in the back of the experimentation ambulance). Make a Self-Control: Trauma check upon entering that vehicle. Blood and viscera are splattered everywhere — a team was experimenting on/observing a Latent dying and didn’t kill them fast enough to prevent the Blight’s awakening. The Vector the Takers killed outside was one of the Latent’s victims. The caravan has 1d10 in Bounty, a machete, and 3 Haul of medical supplies.

463

The sound of fighting reaches the Takers from around the bend. As the Takers approach, the last person with a gun defending a small caravan goes down under a mob of Casualties. There are two preteen children and one adult enclavist on the other side of the mob from the Takers. The children are looking around for somewhere to run while the adult is picking up a melee weapon they clearly have no idea how to fight with. The mob of Casualties is busy tearing apart the corpse under them — the Takers could just walk away. If they kill the mob or otherwise help the enclavists escape, the survivors thank them and tell the Takers to contact ‘Delta’. A successful Research test will tell them that Delta is a Taker based out of an enclave several pre-Crash states away, with a good reputation on the Ubiq forums. These are Delta’s Dependents, who were being escorted to the Recession when the coyotes escorting them ran into a mob too big to handle. There is 1d10 bounty on the bodies of the coyotes. The enclavists ask the Takers to escort them to the nearest enclave, promising payment. If the Takers refuse, the enclavists ask to tag along to the jobsite reasoning that is still safer than trying to walk through the Loss on their own, even if they do have enough rations to make it. If the Takers get the enclavists to safety, Delta will pay them 15 bounty and give them a +Rep spot “Takes care of our own.” On an Awareness check, the Takers notice the campfire before stumbling across it. Sitting at the campfire is a lone, older woman putting a pot in the coals. There are signs of her having recently butchered a large animal. If the Takers approach, she will greet them warmly and offer to share a meal and a drink. A successful Awareness check let’s the Takers notice that she drinks from a different jug or that she adds something to the food she passes it to the Takers. Alternatively, a successful First Aid or appropriate Profession check tells the Takers that the meat roasting in the fire is human. These alternate checks can be made from stealth if the Takers do not approach the campfire. If the Takers eat with the woman, the poison does 1d10 Stun damage to the head per round. Once all of the Takers pass out, the woman signals her Sawney Bean-like clan from their hiding places. The Takers are returned to their junkyard enclave, trussed up upside down, and prepared for slaughter. It turns out the clan is a sect of the Church of Holy Communion. They perform a ritual where they blood test victims for immunity before slashing the throats of victims. This “fine meat” goes to church elders. Latents are chained up to the junkyard fence outside, allowed to be eaten, and used to deter other casualties once they turn. Waking up before the ritual begins is the last chance for the crew to escape. If the clan is killed, they have nothing but melee weapons and bows, but they’re carrying 1d10 bounty. Someone’s last stand against the undead has sterilized the surrounding landscape. The Takers see a makeshift outpost surrounded by hundreds of casualty corpses, each shot in the head. Years ago, someone with an arsenal of weapons took out as many C’s as they could before dying under the horde. Any casualties that survived the attack have long since wandered away. However, the blighted corpses have killed off the local flora and fauna. Not even grass or mold grows in the area. It is utterly silent as not even insects are present. Seeing the effect of the Blight on the landscape is a level-1 Trauma threat. Crossing the area is a level-2 Stress threat. Bypassing it takes an additional two rations. There is nothing salvageable in the outpost and attempting to dig through the pile of corpses is a level-1 Stress threat.

464

Across the expanse of an enormous empty parking lot, the Takers spy a strange obelisk over four stories tall erected in a corporate park connecting three drab office buildings. Obvious range markings chalked into the asphalt reveal the structure to be a sniper’s nest. The tower is made of filing cabinets, hundreds of them stacked, welded, and riveted together. It’s supported by wires bolted into the concrete of the surrounding buildings, and a tiny hut made of plywood is perched at the top. Rope bridges lead between the hut and the roofs of the three office buildings, but there’s no easy way to the top: every other piece of office furniture was stacked in the entryways of the buildings from the inside. It would take days to clear the barricades and go up the stairs. It appears possible to climb up the handles of the filing cabinets; all the units on the ground have been filled with concrete to add weight and stability. Takers that try to climb find the drawers labeled with letters corresponding to prime numbers (B, C, E, G, K, M, Q, S, W) are trapped. Some merely slide out when the handles are gripped. Others slide out but drop a payload of cinderblocks or caltrops. Some have grenades or sawed-off shotguns rigged with tripwires. Markets should roll for each of the four stories; success means no trap, failure means trap. Takers can use Athletics to leap to safety if a trap is triggered. Foresight can provide insight as to the pattern, but only after at least two are triggered. At the top, the LALA that built the tower is long dead of some mundane disease, and the crops in his rooftop gardens gone to seed. A rifle can be found on the corpse, along with a hard drive containing 2d10 bounty worth of pre-Fall media. Takers encounter a Circus inside a newly secured college gymnasium or rec center. Circuses are high-end illegal gambling events where people fight casualties for sport, sponsored by degenerate elites for rebroadcast in the Recession. The building is well guarded by Recession mercenaries under the employ of wealthy sports fans attending the games in person via private helicopters. The rest of the crowd is made up of local factions, believers, and other crews. Anyone can compete in the games, but the only game is blood sport. No ranged weaponry is allowed, and the fighting takes place in a massive pool complex drained to make a pit. Casualties have their restraints cut and are sent down the old waterslides into the arena. Takers can bet on their crewmembers, but the odds change depending on how difficult the encounter is made. Fighting with an edged weapon is standard, but using a blunt weapon ups the odds by one (2 to 1). Odds increase again for every mob added, and again if the Taker fights in the octopus’s garden (a kids’ area with a lot of slides, where casualties, weapons, or traps can be thrown down the tubes at random by fans). Anyone bit during a fight must take a blood test before being allowed to exit. Anyone infected gets shot by the guards. Latents and the uninfected are ignored. The Immune are taken into custody by slavers co-sponsoring the event. As the Takers are walking down the road, a light spring rain begins. Takers can continue walking through the shower or turn off to the big box store in the distance. Approaching the store, they spot rain barrels on the roof. If they try to get out of the rain in the store, they have to kill a small mob of Casualties wandering through the store in singles and pairs. If the building is secured, Takers can scavenge 2 Haul of electronic parts and one refresh of water rations from the rain barrels.

465

While passing through a suburban neighborhood, the Takers hear loud music blaring in the distance. If the Takers don’t want any part of it, they need to add a Leg to get away from the music. If they go forward, they see signs that the area is being “card farmed.” Pre-Crash tract housing with garages shared a similar floor plan: a recessed double-car garage leads up a short flight of steps into a narrow laundry room before entering the house. In neighborhoods where residents had enough time to board up windows to prevent looting, some Takers turn these areas into card farms. They break in, reinforce existing fortifications, open the garage door about one foot, and start blaring music. They pull back to the laundry room, remove the steps, and push the washer/dryer in the doorway. This funnels C’s through two checkpoints and puts their heads right in striking distance for the elevated farmers. As the Takers reach a house absolutely surrounded by casualties, it appears this man bit off more than he could chew. To save them, Takers must chum the horde away from the house, destroy the malfunctioning stereo system blaring on the roof, and get inside to help a pair of men trying to hold the garage zombies from advance. If they succeed, the smaller of the two men runs away. The larger of the two — who is obvious suffering from some sort of mental handicap — has been bitten multiple times. The smaller man messages the Takers on Ubiq: “I can’t do it. He’s my brother.” The reward for making the hard choice is Scavenging checks for bounty on the piles of C’s in the garage. A flash flood of heavily contaminated water catches the entire group off guard. A successful Awareness check gives a character one round to find high ground and warn others, but by the time the water is visible, it’s up to the ankles and rising fast. Perhaps a sewage treatment plant’s reservoir has burst open or a group of raiders has diverted a river in order to wash away a horde of casualties. Regardless, the water causes 1d10 stun to the chest if a character is immersed in it. Submerged characters that fail a Self-Control check take 1d10 Kill as they swallow a significant amount. Vehicles may be washed away or damaged. The flood may also carry hazardous debris or casualties. The water subsides relatively quickly, but other threats may remain. At a minimum, survivors take Trauma damage as they imagine what diseases could be lurking in the filth covering them. The Takers come across a single corpse at the base of something tall (a building, bridge, mountain pass, etc.), which fairly obviously landed headfirst. If the Takers roll the corpse over or make a Scavenging check, they find an old-fashioned media player/recorder clutched in the corpse’s hand, underneath the body. Picking it up starts the last recorded file playing and triggers a level-2 Detachment threat as a frightened, pain-laced voice comes on: “My name is Jimmy Alden, I’m from Macon, Georgia, I was out here visiting family when everything went to shit. ... If you’re listening, please let my family know I’m dead... and that I love them... Oh God, it hurts... I finished off those crazy fuckers trying to get in the car with the kids, but I think some got in my mouth and I’m out of bullets...” If the Taker’s haven’t turned off the recording by this point, they make a Self-Control check as they listen to Jimmy turn into a Vector, followed by the sound of the Vector going over the edge of the tall structure and hitting the ground. The recording is worth 1d10 to an archivist or crusader group, while the electronics by themselves can fetch 1d10/2.

466

Cars and trucks have been circled around a group of casualties, effectively corralling them. Large signs reading “PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE SICK” are hung up around the vehicles. The mob is contained within the corral as long as the vehicles are not moved or tampered with. If the characters leave the scene, nothing else happens. If the characters try to scavenge materials from the vehicle, then they risk being attacked. A failed skill roll means a casualty can grab them with a single attack. If the attack succeeds, the character is pulled into the corral. If the characters kill the casualties, they find no bounty on their bodies. After a few minutes, a sniper will open fire on them. A maddened, LALA Latent created the corral, believing that Supressin can reverse the Blight in a long-dead casualty. She has been scavenging in order to save up enough bounty to buy Supressin for everyone in the corral. She cannot be reasoned with and will fight to the death if the Takers kill the casualties in the corral. Remember she will turn into a Vector when she dies. She only has a standard rifle and the noise will attract other casualties in the area. A group of immune hunters, prisoners in tow, are taking a rest at an abandoned school playground. A sniper with a heavy rifle takes over-watch on the camp from the roof of the building. The group is obviously shifty and ready to shoot, but they’ll trade if approached carefully. The Immunes are tied to the jungle gym. They’re gagged and badly beaten. It’s a level-3 Detachment threat to see them and do nothing. When speaking to the leader of the slavers, he’ll demand all crewmembers present take a blood test before they go on their way, but Intimidate can convince him no payday is worth a bullet. If the Takers provoke the full-blown gunfight required to save the Immunes, they can scavenge from the slavers and earn the +Rep Spot “Law in these Parts.” Just remember that the rescued will need some sort of provisions if they’re going to make it to safety. The crew sees a huge military convoy approaching in the distance. The equipment is outdated and barely holding together, indicated the group is made up of traitors. It’s up to the Market whether the troops are former American soldiers, Canadian diaspora, or part of another national military. Regardless, the crew heads East towards the border. They have drone cover, so it’s very hard for Takers to hide from them. Still, they aren’t hostile. The leader (who demands to be called Captain Hannibal) even comes to speak with them. He promises they won’t have to be Takers for very much longer because he’s going to “give the world back to humanity’s real survivors.” Check Sensitivity to realize the commander has come unhinged. Best-case scenario, all the troops are doomed for slaughter. Worst-case? They breach the border and cause a second crash. There’s nothing the Takers can do to stop the massive force save rat out fellow Lost to the DHQS. Call for SelfControl: Stress checks. On the plus side, the doomed soldiers are willing to trade and will even gift some rations; they won’t need them where they’re going.

467

On a highway or other larger roadway, the Takers come to a small waterway. The bridge across has collapsed of neglect and exposure. Numerous cars were on the bridge when it collapsed and now join the rubble blocking the water, creating an impromptu dam on one side of the bridge and shallow mire on the other side. The banks of the waterway are not steep. If they are in a vehicle, a successful Awareness, Driving, or appropriate Profession skill will tell them it is safer to ford across the dry waterbed further down, where less water has escaped the dam and the bed is drier. If they choose to ford at the collapsed bridge, a failed Drive check means they get stuck in the mud and must make a successful Resistance check to get their vehicle out. If on foot, a successful Athletics check means they can wade across the water or hike through the mud without any further penalties; a failed check requires spending an extra ration, as it is tiring. Hiking further down the waterway to the drier section takes time (spend a ration but no checks). If the players cross at the bridge, they find optimized Ubiq specs and 1d10 in the glove boxes of abandoned cars washed past the dam. Characters that fail an Awareness check stumble across numerous potholes/ sinkholes in the ground. Resulting from an experimental scatter bomb used in the Crash, the tiny pits are now hidden by grass. Every PC must make the check and any failure causes 1d10 stun to the leg — it is possible to twist an ankle badly. The ground is too unstable to drive a vehicle across — any attempt automatically damages it. Casualties are nearby, hidden in the grass in torpor. Loud noises awaken them. Check Self-Control to prevent a shout if injured. The crew follows train tracks for a bit to avoid the main roads. They find a passenger train, long derailed in the Crash. The double-decker dining car operating as the caboose remains on the tracks at the top of a hill, but bloody handprints and shifting shadows in the windows suggest the inside is filled with casualties. Scavenging checks reveal the inside likely contains valuable goods with a long shelf life: instant coffee, over-the-counter painkillers, etc. Foresight can come up with a plan that eases engagement with the creatures. The car is still on the tracks and at the top of a hill. If someone has the Mechanics or Profession skills necessary to detach the car, the crew can send it down the hill, pull the manual emergency break, and send the zombies flying. They’ll all be knocked prone and much easier to kill. The car contains 2 Haul of salvable goods, plus a mob’s worth of bounty. Takers encounter a family travelling across the Loss in a horse-drawn wagon. The man attends to their armored horse and his wife rides shotgun (literally). In the back, a Latent girl dangles her feet off the tailgate, playing with dolls. If asked about why they’re risking a crossing, they tell a story about how their little girl got bit playing next to the fence. They sold everything to buy Supressin and save her, but their enclave didn’t allow Latents. They’re out looking for a new home. About ten minutes after the Takers part ways, the chopping of helicopter blades can be heard. Check Foresight or Research to remember that DHQS trains new recruits in old-school choppers: the ones you can hear coming. Rumor has it that newbies have to prove they believe in homo sacer on their first outing by opening up on some Lost (the Market rolls in secret: even it’s true; odds mean not today). Do the Takers rush back to save the family or get under cover themselves? Do they try to draw the gunner’s attention? Can they save the horse and cart too, or will the family be stranded in the Loss with nothing? Either way, Self-Control checks are needed. If the helicopter guns down everyone in the wagon, two vials of Supressin can be found in their meager belongings: the parents were going to join their daughter in quarantine.

468

It is unusually windy, causing one of the Ubiq Aloft servers to crash. Check Awareness to spot it as it crashes or the PCs may just stumble upon it at the Market’s discretion. Regardless, it contains salvageable electronics, if the characters can reach it — it’s either stuck in a tree, atop a building, or someplace equally challenging. The noise of its crash has alerted casualties in the area. If Takers salvage the materials, the most valuable parts are the hardest to move. The server might be extremely heavy, or the carbon nanofiber balloon might still be partially inflated, capable of pulling Takers a dozen feet off the ground with a strong gust of wind. The terrain ahead is extremely treacherous and slow to walk through. A recent storm has knocked down many trees or the rubble from a bombed neighborhood chokes the path. Bypassing it would take an extra Leg. Navigating through is faster but hidden danger lies within the debris. Noxious hazardous chemicals create clouds that can choke unwary Takers, and casualties pinned under debris can still reach and bite. The Takers come across the crashed vehicle of another Taker crew. There is a Casualty in torpor strapped into the driver’s seat as well as one or two other corpses in the vehicle, either also Casualties in torpor or dead by self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head (mix and match at the Market’s discretion). There are 3 Haul of goods in the trunk (roll for price point), 1d10 bounty on the dead Takers, and one charge of gas in the vehicle. The Takers are passing underneath a large series of interstate overpass exchanges, or through a canyon, or amongst a series of tall buildings. The web of makeshift bridging and flags makes it apparent that some sort of massive enclave set up shop there, using the elevation as defense. The construction looks to spread at least 500 yards in every direction. Takers see a bell in the path with a weather worn sign reading ‘ring for entry’. Check Foresight to realize this might not be a good idea, and Stealth to continue on unnoticed. Passing underneath silently still causes everyone a Self-Control: Stress check (new enclaves mean new jobs), but it’s far preferable to getting the inhabitants attention. Once they make noise, Casualties begin raining from the sky. The enclave fell long ago, and the resulting zombies plummet to their deaths in search of new victims. Takers must check Athletics to run through the rain of Blight cadavers. Those that fail catch corpse shrapnel. Treat this like a Kill damage explosive that requires an infection check. Critical failures are direct hits, inflicting Stun + Kill to every hit location, as well as risking infection. If the Takers can get undercover, they can wait for the rain to stop and salvage bounty from the stains on the ground.

469

A horn sounds in the distance. Over the horizon, a massive semi-truck pulls into view. The NatGas vehicle is part of the infamous Titan Trucking fleet and pulling two trailers behind its massive fuel tank. If any of the Takers have Ubiq, they get pinged by the username “Flapjack and Baz.” If they answer, they’re greeted by a dash cam view of a wild-eyed trucker and his squinting, chain-smoking partner riding shotgun. The pair is working a job for the DHQS, hauling supplies to a settlement somewhere out West. The satellite feed and government handlers are warning them they’re about to drive through a stampede. They’re trying to divert to a different route, but that’ll cost them the on-time bonus. “Fuck that,” summarizes Baz. They’ll plow through the bastards. Flap promises to drive the Takers the rest of the way to their destination for free if they hop aboard the trailers and repel any casualties that latch on. If the crew agrees, he’s as good as his word to any that survive. If they don’t answer the call or decline, the truck plows forward anyway, come hell or high water. There is a small shack by the side of the road, along with a wooden sawhorse painted bright yellow directly in front of the bridge/pass/(choke point appropriate to the setting) the Takers were planning to cross. Awareness or Foresight check to notice the two snipers positioned to cover the tollbooth. The tollbooth operator demands 2 bounty per person, 1 per pet (except horses, they’re counted as vehicles), and 4 bounty per vehicle (including horses). A successful Persuasion, Leadership, or Intimidation check will bargain them down to 1 bounty per person and 1 per vehicle or 3 bounty for the whole group (Market’s discretion). The Takers come across a military last stand from the Crash. A choke point was created using the local terrain and sealed off (the soldiers triggered an avalanche, blew bridges, etc.) but erosion has opened it back up, allowing the Takers through. The Takers can continue on their original route or take the shorter, newly opened route. If they do go through, they need to make level-2 Self-Control: Detachment check — there are dozens of skeletal corpses dressed in weather-damaged military gear, slumped against remains of the choke point. Anyone with medical or law enforcement Professions recognize that some wounds were self-inflicted; a major gunfight broke out near the triage station, no doubt a fight about putting down the infected. Takers call these “Wait and See” massacres. 1d10/2 uncharged assault rifles and 1d10/2 uncharged pistols are still salvageable.

470

Takers reach the bottom of a long-incline with a long abandoned military checkpoint on top. If it’s in an urban area, the road leading up the long hill is lined with boarded up townhouses tightly spaced together. If it’s a rural area, the checkpoint is at the top of a cleared highway overpass lined by concrete medians. The Takers are walking up it to avoid the zombies wandering underneath. Unbeknownst to the crew, casualties trapped in an armored personnel carrier see the humans approaching, lunge towards them, and strike the brake lever. The tank is now rolling downhill, careening off the sides of the road and gaining speed. Those that succeed can use Foresight to predict where the APCs path will take it and step out of the way. Those that fail need to use Athletics to dodge (taking 1d10 Stun to a random location) or ditch off the side of the road. If in the townhouses, they jump through a townhouse window to find a mob inside. If on the overpass, they take falling damage and find a mob waiting underneath the overpass. Once the APCs gets beyond the Takers, it crashes for good. Refreshes of ammo and two rifles with the automatic upgrade can be found inside.

Takers see a broken down convoy of Crusader vehicles by the side of the road. They’re armed and guarding their stuff, but not hostile otherwise. It’s uncertain whether this group has succumb to temptation to use unethical experimentation in their desperate struggle against the Blight, but, if they haven’t, their resolve is definitely weakening. None of them look like they’ve slept in days, and weeping can be heard in the back of one of the ambulances. The leader (when not muttering to himself) offers trade for anyone that can help fix their vehicles. They’ll also pay bounty for samples of interesting cases of infection. Latents can earn a bounty for spit, hair, or sweat; 2 for blood; 3 for semen or sexual fluids; and 4 for bone marrow. The prices for Immunes are doubled, but the Market rolls in secret to see whether this group kidnaps ‘munies or not. Anyone injured receives free medical care, but the Crusaders bedside matter is less than comforting (check Self-Control). When approaching a suburban area, the Takers smell acrid smoke and see a small pillar of black wafting upwards. Small fires are common in the Loss and there’s nothing to tell them this is any different. As they walk through the streets though, the smell of smoke is getting worse. Those that roll Awareness can hear a voice in the distance, along with faint crackling sounds. If the Takers turn back, they find the houses on the road they just came in on engulfed in flames. In fact, blazes seem to be popping up all over town, and shadowy shapes can be seen walking amongst the flames. Eventually, the Takers round a corner and find the source of the shouted numbers: a Black Math cultist atop a painter’s scaffold stands before a burning church, using a flamethrower against the hundreds of casualties locked within. The stampede pouring out the door is scattering, covered in burning napalm and unable to track prey. The whole city is on fire as they spread in every direction. The Takers have to get out of the burning city before they get trapped and suffocate. If the Takers escape and venture into the ashes later, they find a working but empty flamethrower on the cultist, his burned flesh caught in a rictus smile. The weather forecast is getting very bad. If inland, the forecast calls for tornado super-cells. If near a coast, a tropical storm is about to make landfall. Due to climate change, these storms are expected to be cataclysmically large and long. The Takers can choose to find shelter now, spend two extra rations, and lose one Stress waiting out the storm. However, Foresight suggests that the smart move might be to push as deep into the front as possible before it hits. Thunder and lightning brings casualties from all over, but those caught in a storm aren’t smart enough to take shelter. If the Takers can push deep and hole up in the eye of the storm, debris and flooding will take care of any casualties that would appear for the remainder of the journey. Essentially, the Market would remove the appearance of casualties until reaching the site, even if loud weapons were used. If the Takers don’t race the weather, mobs of casualties move back in before they get close to the storm’s epicenter.

471

Takers get caught in a torrential downpour. Roads flood and paths turn into bogs. The flooding isn’t dangerous (yet), but it’s hard to move. Keeping livestock or vehicles moving requires checks to keep from foundering in the mud. Anything costing rations costs double as the crew grows heavy with damp. Everyone must make Self-Control: Stress checks as the onslaught continues. Eventually, the crew reaches a rickety looking railway trestle bridge with a flash flood raging beneath it. They can push through and try to get out from under the front, or find shelter and lose two rations a piece as they wait for the storm to pass. If they cross, pick one Taker at random. They must roll Athletics to keep from falling as a rotten plank breaks. If the Taker fails, they don’t drown, but getting to dry land requires ditching all their gear. After the storm, there is plenty of fresh water about and the crew can refresh up to five charges of rations. A passenger jet lies crashed in a field, nose buried into the earth. The fuselage snapped in half; one wing and the rear of the plane burned down to the framework, and the grass in the area is still poisoned by jet fuel. The front half of the plane is accessible if a Taker wants to climb up a dozen or so feet in the air. Inside, those not decapitated in the Crash have turned, but most remain strapped to their seats. The stench of jet fuel still hangs in the air; the use of firearms is not recommended. Getting to the front of the plane requires running through a gauntlet of rotting hands and nails. If someone manages it, the black box is worth 2d10 bounty to tragedy trackers, and the jet fuel remaining in the starboard wing, though not healthy for actual engines, is still highly flammable. Takers that make it to the buried cockpit can hit the manual release and dump the contents outside. Market picks an aberrant from the list or makes one up. It shows up out of nowhere and begins assaulting the PCs mentally and/or physically. There is no explanation as to where the thing came from or how it came to cross the Takers’ path at that exact moment. Sometimes, shit just happens. A loud boom distracts Takers from their journey. An Awareness check notices smoke in the distance. Takers that investigate need to spend an additional ration to make the journey, but they find a downed StopLoss helicopter in a field. Only a doctor has survived, but he’s busy trying to stabilize one of the militarized orderlies in critical condition. The doctor promises that help is coming, but he can already see the mobs slowly stumbling towards the wreckage. He promises the Takers a reward if they help him survive the incoming mobs until rescue arrives. They can shoot him or abandon the vultures, stealing their First Aid kit for the cost of a SelfControl: Detachment check. If they fight off the dead, a helicopter loaded down with heavily armed orderlies arrives. The care provider waves the troops off just as they are about to insist on a blood test for immunity. He instead provides the Takers with a first aid kit, a dose of Soma, and a StopLoss medic alert bracelet loaded with a prepaid care plan (no upgrades).

472

A large group of young men approach. Their gear looks amateurish, but there are a lot of them. They seem to be making quite a bit of noise intentionally so they can attract casualties, and they relish their destruction: picking off limbs with axes and kicking the things to death. If they see Takers, they run up and urge them to freeze. The leader explains the group comes from a newly established enclave (they won’t say where, and it’s up to the Market if this is lie). Their former home was destroyed in an outbreak caused by “Latent traitors,” and the trauma has taught them all the necessity of the Triage movement. If the crew has any Latents in its midst, they demand the crew leave them behind for justice. The hate group can be convinced this one “isn’t worth it,” but not that their views are wrong. They greatly outnumber the Takers, but they’re cowards at heart. Crippling or killing the best of their number causes the rest to scatter and flee. Off the beaten path, the Takers come across a Briar Rabbit fortification: a large number of DDJs set off down a hallway/between two walls (manmade or rock formations)/ etc., typically set up such that a safe path through exists for humans. If the Takers make three out of the following checks, they can chart the path through: Athletics, Awareness, Criminality, Foresight, Mechanics, Research, or an appropriate Profession: X. An Athletics check is required to successfully navigate the path without taking damage — 1d10 to both legs on a failed check as the Taker stumbles into the wires. Past the patch, Takers find a two family enclave — Self-Control check upon seeing the bodies, recently dead from starvation. At the sound of people, a toddler, no more than a year old, wanders out of a building, obviously in need of food and water. Level-2 Self-Control: Detachment check to leave the child behind, Level 2 Self-Control: Stress check to rescue the child. There are 6 bounty and 2 Haul of goods in the enclave. Takers spot a small dog waiting for them in the road (pug, Jack Russell, Chihuahua, etc.). The animal barks at the crew if they don’t follow it down a side road, attracting mobs of casualties. If the Takers make the detour, they arrive at a small suburban neighborhood. Awareness checks notice the drag marks through the grass and relatively fresh bloodstains. Other animal companions (dogs, horses, falcons, etc.) grow visibly upset. The small dog runs off. Suddenly, a dozen, much-larger canines emerge from between the houses. The pack has learned that casualties are poisonous and living meat is required to survive. Athletics is required to get away and climb something too high for the dogs to reach. Immobile casualties lurk in the long grass of the lawns, legs crippled by the canines, but each is capable of attacking if stepped on. A dog bite does Kill damage and grapples unless the Taker makes a Resistance check. Killing a few of the beasts causes the ferals to retreat. Nearby houses haven’t been looted, so surviving Takers may make Scavenging checks. Takers find a beautiful garden hidden a ways off their route. It’s very well maintained, and much of the produce is ripe for the harvest. There’s no one around, though a Profession: X or Research check can tell that someone must come out every few days; the methods for keeping pests away from the crops are as green as possible and require a lot of labor. Takers can take the crops for a free refresh of rations. There’s also a seed vault in the shed, with 3 hauls worth of materials that can be easily sold. But the crew was photographed coming up the trail to the garden. If anything is stolen, the crew is now hunted by a commune of Detoxins calling themselves “Incorruptibles.” The group believes the Blight was caused by GMO crops and food preservatives; they regard the violation of their foodstuffs to be blasphemy and an affront to the group’s survival. If the Takers take nothing, the crew gains the +Rep spot “Cruelty-free” as the Incorruptibles bump their posts on Ubiq.

473

A small museum stands remarkably intact, albeit locked up. The stench of death is in the air. Characters can find the corpses of several raiders or scavengers near the museum. It looks like they were trying to get in when someone inside the building shot them. If the characters attempt to contact the occupant no one answers. Breaking in without making noise (and alerting nearby casualties) requires a Criminality check. Inside, they will find a single dead person, the former curator of the museum. A First Aid check reveals the curator bled out from a gunshot wound but was not infected with the Blight. A Scavenging check of the museum reveals no useful loot aside from a rifle with one bullet left and 2 charges of rations — the curator used or spent everything else in the museum in order to protect its contents. The museum was dedicated to something pointless, like quack medical instruments, popsicle stick sculptures, or salt-and-pepper shakers. The realization that the curator devoted his life to protecting useless trash is a level-2 Detachment threat. If the characters linger too long, other scavengers or raiders appear, looking for revenge. If the Takers know any Archivists, giving the location of the intact museum to them provides the +Rep Spot “Respects the Dead.” A recent thunderstorm has knocked trees or power line poles into the road. Takers can make a Mechanics check to safely clear the road or Athletics checks to scramble over safely. If they go around, spend an extra ration or charge on a vehicle for the extra leg. If they go through, the ground is muddy and a bit treacherous. In addition, a mob of Casualties was caught in the storm and washed onto the road. Half of the mob is already permanently dead from bashing their heads into trees and other landscape features, while the other half have to struggle to their feet. Normal rules of scavenging apply. It is a baking hot day. The temperature just keeps rising and there’s no wind. A First Aid, Foresight, or Research check warns the Takers that they need to find shelter and get out of the sun before they suffer from heat exhaustion. If they are in a vehicle, it will overheat and require a Mechanics check to get started again if they do not wait out the worst heat in shelter. If the Takers continue through the heat, everyone makes a Health check. On a critical success, the Taker consumes an extra ration to deal with the heat. On a success, one extra ration plus 1d10/2 Stun to the head. On a failure, the Taker is suffering from heat exhaustion: extra ration, 1d10 Stun to the head, and 1d10/2 Stun to the torso. On a critical failure, the Taker is suffering from heat stroke: two extra rations, 1d10/2 Killing to the head, and 1d10 Stun to the torso. At the end of the day, the Takers stumble across the body of a messenger Taker, killed by heat stroke, and can take the messenger’s bicycle.

474

A convoy of stopped vehicles, all with intact windows, lies ahead filled two mobs of casualties, all still wearing seat belts and currently in torpor. Careful Takers could clear out the entire convoy, looting both mobs and their vehicles for two haul worth of goods. However, each vehicle is locked, requiring Criminality checks to open a door silently. If the convoy mob wakes up, they will create enough noise to lure in another nearby mob. As the work goes on, anyone with Profession: Medicine or Alertness realizes that, for everyone in the cars to be infected with the doors locked, literally everyone in the convoy had to be hiding a bite. When the bodies are checked though, no infection wounds are visible. The news provokes a level-3 threat against Stress for all who realize it. (The Market knows the cars were hiding from mobs when an Aerosol aberrant came by, but the Takers have no way of knowing this.)

Anyone with Ubiq specs or a laptop is pinged by a Taker in the area. She explains that a casualty bit her, the blood test was positive, and it’s only a matter of time before she turns. She ran out of bullets and has no way to kill herself. She begs for help before the batteries die. If the Takers go to her location, they find she is stranded on top of a small building surrounded by a mob. Killing her with a longrange weapon is a level-3 Detachment threat, plus it may attract the attention of the mob. If the Takers fight their way through to her, they can find out what her last request is, which may heal two humanity if fulfilled. She begs for death so killing her then is only level-1 Detachment threat. If the characters do not follow up on her location, then she will become a Vector and attack the group before they finish the leg. Takers find themselves suddenly surrounded by dogs of every size and breed. The animals keep their distance, but more and more join their ranks, keeping pace with the crew at a respectful distance. They don’t look feral; in fact, these are some of the healthiest dogs they’ve seen since the Crash. If they remain calm, the crew eventually comes upon a dumpy old woman cooking stew on a camp stove. She looks up, greets the newcomers, and returns to her cooking. Successful Research (or simple conversation) reveals this to be the legendary Alpha, a Taker rumored to keep herself safe with a circling pack of dogs trained to lure casualties away from their master. If asked, Alpha confirms her identity and reveals the Takers are only seeing about half the pack now, as the other fifty or so are out on duty. She occasionally stops eating to scroll through camera feeds of various pooches on the perimeter. If the Takers stop and burn their rations for the day, the dogs stop circling and come into play, healing one Humanity for each PC. Alpha will gift a crew that’s good with animals a newborn puppy. Though helpless now, the dog will grow into an animal capable of service in two jobs, with both the Friendly and Hardy upgrades already purchased. Needles to say, anyone attempting to harm Alpha or her pack will be ordered eaten by the horde of attack animals surrounding them, but the interaction is otherwise quite pleasant.

Takers who make a Foresight check note how good the area ahead would be for an ambush; an Awareness check spots the crew of teenage Raiders set-up ahead. Going around the ambush requires an extra Leg’s worth of rations. The crew has two more members than the Taker’s party and none of them are over the age of 15. A successful Intimidation check will convince them too many of them will die if they fight the Takers. Persuasion or Deception will convince them that the Takers aren’t carrying enough for the fight to be worth it. If a fight breaks out and the Takers survive, they can Scavenge the crew’s weapons and 1d10/2 of Bounty, but will gain the -Rep spot “Child Killer,” regardless of who fired first. PCs that make an Awareness or Research check spot Taker sign, a form of graffiti used in the craft to communicate with other crews. The signs advertise a respite at Sunset Glens. If Takers go, they find a gated community with no community, merely a single model home inside a wrought iron fence. A sign on the gate reads, “Shady Pines Enclave Coming in...” dated two years ago. The gate is easy to climb, but to enter the house the crew has to crank a generator for an electronic security system. They must state their names into a camera to “sign-in” before the door opens. Inside, they find bicycle run generators, a functioning hot water heater, and a table with a “Take a Weapon, Leave a Weapon” policy. Stated rules require the crew to clean the house and replace water in the cistern from the well before they leave the respite. If the crew stays the night, the amenities heal one Humanity. If they abuse the respite policies, they still heal Humanity, but the crew gains the -Rep Spot “Scrub Crew.”

475

Characters that make an Awareness check see a zip line on top of a nearby building leading several blocks ahead. A Foresight check determines that if someone took the trouble to put up a zip line, there was a good reason for it. A follow-up Awareness check spots craters littering the ground ahead. Profession: Demolitions or Foresight reveals that the military must have mined the area and it is extremely likely that unexploded ordnance is still around. Bypassing the area entirely adds two extra legs to the journey. Characters trying to go through the minefield must make an Awareness check or suffer 1d10 Kill and Stun to every hit location (mines are very dangerous). A critical failure triggers multiple mines that endanger other Takers and alert nearby casualties. Characters that wish to use the zip line can easily get to the top of the building but using the zip line is a level-2 Trauma threat and requires a Resistance check to hold on. Failure results in a drop that inflicts 1d10 kill to both legs and may detonate a mine. Mechanics can be used to rig up a device to safely hold onto the zip line without risk of falling off. Characters with a pro-go camera can record the zip line run and sell the footage for 1 bounty. A structure with external stairs, such as a fire watchtower, has numerous casualty corpses scattered around it. The stairs have large gaps, where someone deliberately removed multiple rungs. It is possible to jump the gaps with a single Athletics check. Failure inflicts 1d10 kill to both legs. Characters that reach the top of the structure see a strange device powered by a solar panel. Several skills, like Research or Profession: Electronics can reveal that the device is a jury-rigged noisemaker, set to play pirate ska fusion metal in order to lure casualties up the stairs. The casualties fall through the gaps and break their skulls or legs. 1d10 bounty can be scavenged from the corpses around the structure but 1d10/5 casualties are still active there, just crawling around with broken legs. The device can be disarmed and looted with a successful Mechanics check but failure indicates the character does not disarm it. At a random time later on, it will activate and alert anyone near the character carrying it. The device is worth 3 bounty and weighs 1 haul. Zoos didn’t fair well in the Crash, but some animals got loose and adapted quickly to their freedom. In this instance, the Takers have made the mistake of wandering into the territory of the wrong beast. Pick one: Lion: always has initiative/ two attacks per round/ blows do Kill+Stun or Kill and knockback/ 20 hit boxes Bear: attacks do Kill+Stun and knockback or grapple/ 30 hit boxes Rhino: attacks do Kill + Stun and knockback/ 40 hit boxes/ armored against all but firearms Elephant: 100 hit boxes/ counts as being hit by a vehicle Predators know not to eat casualties (they claw their heads from their shoulders easily enough) but that they need to hunt live prey. They only break off attack if sufficiently wounded. Herbivores are protecting territory and only stop once Takers flee the area. If the PCs kill the majestic beasts, Foresight or Research reminds them that superstitious folk medicine has grown in popularity since the Crash. Many of the animal’s parts can be sold for a high profit. The Takers wake up to a solid frost (if it’s the summer, call it an ‘unseasonable frost’). Their footing may be treacherous, but if the Takers elect to press on before the frost melts they will find 2 mobs of Casualties along their route, unable to shamble after them. If engaged at melee range, the Casualties can still attack, but treat each Casualty as a mob of one (they are too spread out to gang up on the Takers). Normal scavenging from Casualties applies. Make an Athletics check to avoid twisting an ankle (1d10/5 Stun to one leg) in the slippery footing.

476

Takers who make an Awareness check realize that the ground beneath their feet is hotter than usual or there are plants and insects in the area which typically only thrive in warmer climates. A successful Foresight or Profession: Computer Science check means they have alerts programmed into their Ubiq specs (if the Takers have Ubiq specs) — these alerts go off due to the high levels of carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide in the area. Spend one extra ration to go around the area. Takers who fail these checks take 1d10 Kill to the chest as they breath in the fumes, before realizing they need to get out of the area. On their way out, they come across the body of a Taker who asphyxiated from the fumes. Most of their gear has been damaged by the sulfur dioxide, but the Takers can scavenge one axe with the Sturdy upgrade from the body. Take 1d10/2 Stun to the chest for the time required to examine and pull gear off the body. A successful Research check later let’s the Takers put together the clues: they were walking over a coal seam fire. Posting the location of the fire to the Ubiq forums gains the crew the +Rep spot “Helpful.” This check can be made whether or not the crew took damage from the fumes. A dron-key is leading a mob of casualties across the path of the Takers. Characters can easily remain silent and wait for it to pass or they can attack the mob themselves. If they kill the mob, the dron-key stops. Characters with Ubiq specs or a laptop will realize it is sending an encrypted message to someone over Ubiq. If the characters wait for a few minutes (perhaps by looting the corpses of the mob) and leave the dron-key alone, the dron-key’s owner reestablishes contact with it and speaks to the characters. She is grateful that the characters have spared the dron-key and tells them that she is at a nearby enclave and used the dron-key to kite the undead away. If they make sure the dron-key returns safely, she will pay them 2 bounty and provide a +Rep Spot “Upstanding Ex-citizens.” Characters with a Profession: Computers skill (or equivalent) and a laptop can hack the dronkey’s security system and claim it for their own. In this case, the owner eventually discovers the theft and identifies the characters by using the cameras on the dronkey. The characters gain a -Rep Spot “Thieving Takers” in this case. Extreme weather and erosion caused a landslide some time ago, half-burying a large mob of casualties. The result is a treacherous hill that conceals dozens of undead, many of which can still get up and attack unwary travelers. All characters can make an Awareness check. If successful, they spot several corpses in the ground, half-buried. Bypassing the hill takes an extra two legs. Walking down the hill requires an Athletics check in order to avoid the undead and avoid slipping on the unstable terrain.

477

The Takers pass by a farm, a house and barn visible from the road with no signs of fortification. A teenage girl comes running up to the Takers, begging them to “please come help, something’s wrong with Daddy.” If they walk away, make a Self-Control: Detachment check. Walking towards the house, making a Sensitivity or Persuasion check reveals that the girl is a Shepherd, as is her father. Inside the house, on the second floor, in the master bedroom, is Daddy, strapped to a bed with several leather belts. Once the first Taker walks into the doorway, the belts snap as the Vector lurches out of the bed. He is so tangled in the bed and belts that he is limited to one Shamble for two rounds, although the murder modifier is otherwise unchanged. The girl screams at the Takers that they can lure him into the barn “with the others” and then runs back down the hallway. She will show back up on round three with Scent Blocker and throw it on the Takers, if they haven’t killed the Vector by then. If the Takers run away, they must make a Self-Control: Detachment check as Daddy will almost certainly kill the girl. If the Takers manage to kill the Vector, the girl will begin wailing in grief — make a Sensitivity, Persuasion, or Leadership check to calm her down before the 3 mobs of Casualties in the barn break out. If they succeed at calming the girl, she will show them two Haul worth of goods (in addition to the supplies she takes for herself [the Takers will not have to spend any rations on taking care of the girl]) and accompany them to the nearest enclave. If the Casualties do break out and the Takers survive, they can Scavenge three mobs worth of Bounty but the girl runs off. Takers come across an eerily silent stretch of road. If it’s in a rural area, there is little to be seen besides a gas station and adjacent feed store riddled with bullet holes. If it’s an urban area, the two buildings across the street from each other can be of any type, but the pavement between is littered with the corpses of casualties. Those with Ubiq get pinged simultaneously. One has a message addressed to “those on the road,” while the other is a cheap public bandwidth, reserved for advertisements pre-Crash. The addressed message is from the last surviving member a Black Math cult in one building. He warns the crew that his sect has been fighting a cult of Meek for days. He’s the only survivor and out of ammo, but he’s fought them to standoff. The other message is the Meek, screaming, “Reinforcements come brothers! Come to help us destroy the defilers and transcend!” The Meek are armed with two riflemen and two kamikazes. The latter are armed with vials of Vector blood. They’ll try to get as close to the crew as possible, take cover, then inject themselves while the rest of the cult lays down covering fire. The hope is to infect the whole crew and start a fresh outbreak in the area. There’s only one, unarmed Black Mather left, but he’ll try to help if he’s convinced he can take at least one of the Meek with him. If the Takers survive the fight, it yields almost nothing of value. The cults had been besieging each other for days. The rations are gone, the ammo spent, and the weapons damaged in explosions.

478

An overturned semi-truck and trailer has been partially scavenged but valuable machine parts from the truck’s engine are clearly visible on the ground. It looks like whomever was scavenging it left in a hurry and never returned. A Scavenging check reveals that the survivor has been gone for some time as the exposed parts show signs of weathering — they are still usable though. A Mechanics check is required to identify the valuable parts. The trailer is still closed. A cursory check shows it will not open from the outside. A Mechanics or Awareness check reveals it has been welded shut from the inside. If the characters can somehow find a way in the trailer, they find a single casualty hidden in crates of machine parts. The parts were bent and damaged when the truck flipped over, so finding useful ones would take days of sorting. A successful Scavenge check finds 1d10 bounty of small parts with a few minutes of searching. Of course, if the characters linger too long in the open, casualties or raiders may notice and attack them.

On the road ahead there are several Army sized large trucks in a circle. Make an Awareness check to notice the four mobs of Casualties coming out of the truck corral for the Takers before they are three shambles away. If the Takers succeed the check, the Casualties are six shambles away. If the Takers kill the mobs, they can scavenge from the trucks. The Casualties are Army soldiers and therefore assumed dead after going MIA. Their gear has been exposed to the weather too long to be worth scavenging. The convoy was carrying samples of the Blight, still in their test tubes, to a research base somewhere in the Loss — the orders in the lead truck do not specify where that base is. A successful Research or Networking check can sell the samples for ten bounty to the Crusaders or the Meek. The convoy contains two haul worth of medical equipment. An abandoned National Guard outpost with a pre-fabricated watchtower is spotted. Characters can easily bypass it but if they investigate it, they will find that scavengers have picked it clean. Even the casualty corpses have been dragged away and burned. All that is left are the sandbag fortifications, heavy metal barricades, command post, and watch tower. It is easily defensible. Characters with binoculars who climb the watchtower can make an Awareness check to get a clue about what the next leg of the trip will contain. A Scavenge check reveals a mortar hidden in the dirt. It has no shells, but it can still fire. Each Taker in the crew rolls a Black die and adds their SPD. The Taker with the lowest roll begins sliding down the edge of the sinkhole that opens up under their feet. Make an Athletics check to arrest the slide without injury. If the Taker fails their check, they slide into the dry underground cistern the sinkhole has just opened up and take 1d10/2 in Stun to both legs. There are 2-3 Casualties in the immediate area the Taker slides into, all of which have Bounty on them. Two more mobs of Casualties are attracted by the loud noise of the Taker hitting bottom; both mobs are minimum five shambles away. Getting back out of the cistern requires two Athletics checks. The Takers spot a DHQS farm up ahead and the fruit has just ripened. But the forecast is calling for a killing frost overnight. If that’s accurate, most of the food out here will go to waste since the drones aren’t out and harvesting. Even if they were, they couldn’t get everything in time. Athletics check to get up and over the fence without injury (1d10/2 Stun to one leg or arm on a failed check). Takers gain one refresh of rations and regain one Humanity if they harvest some fruit. The fruit would spoil before they could get it back to their enclave, so Takers may not harvest any as Haul.

479

A locust plague has sprung up in the area. The creatures swarm over every surface, blacking out the sun. Waiting for the feeding frenzy to die down costs two extra rations and does one Stress damage as the swarm settles down. Walking through the creatures is possible, but the constant buzz and prickling legs represent a level-2 threat to Stress. Casualties are drawn to the noise. Ask the crew to designate a leader to navigate the swarm or have everyone check Awareness separately. On a failure, the Taker walks right into a lone casualty lost in the swarm. On a success, they just manage to avoid them as they snap their teeth at the air, lurching silhouettes moving in the swarm. Realizing the dead are amongst the cloud causes a level-2 Trauma threat. Those with successful Foresight checks that brave the plague realize the protein in a locust can’t be ignored back at the enclave. Any synthetic fabric can be used to trap and bag the insects, and every Haul of dead locusts is worth 1d10/2 bounty back home. A pickup truck is stuck in the middle of a shallow pond. There are boxes and bags in the bed of the truck, clearly visible. However, a mob of casualties is standing near the truck. The thick mud floor of the pond slows them down, so characters can easily outrun them or shoot them down with ranged weapons. If they do not lure them away from the truck, several casualties bleed on the boxes when they are shot, ruining any salvage in the truck. A Foresight check allows the characters a chance to realize this before they attack. There is 1d10/2 bounty in the truck’s bed if the characters make a successful Scavenging check. Around the bend, the Takers come on a dead trade caravan between enclaves. The mob of casualties that wiped it out look up from where they are chowing down on one of the bodies and start lumbering after the Takers. Make an Awareness check to realize that the body the casualties are abandoning will get up as a Vector in four rounds. If the Takers survive, there is four haul of goods in the caravan and 1d10/2 Bounty from the caravan members. Alternatively, if the Takers call either the origin or destination enclave to let them know what happened to the caravan and where they could come pick it up, they will receive a four bounty finder’s fee and a +Rep spot “Honest.” Takers find a raccoon digging up a half-buried bag by the side of the road. If they shoo the creature away, they find a bag with a full complement of grenades and a refresh of rations. The bag hasn’t been there long, and Foresight suggests the explosives were meant for a fallback position. Diverting down the path reveals a weapons deal between the Chosen and the Meek. The Latent group has a Vector restrained with dogcatcher snares. Those not holding the fresh infected have guns drawn on the other group. Just seeing what the Meek have done to themselves requires is level-2 Detachment threat: teeth filed to points, eyes gouged out, running sores cut into flesh. They’re aesthetically molding their bodies in preparation for transformation. They’re mostly armed with melee weapons, but the negotiator is covered in plastic explosives and has nails taped all over his bodies. Though wary, both groups are dealing with each other. The leader of the Chosen takes out an IV bag, syringe, and pump. She injects it into the Vector and starts draining it. The lead Meek licks what remains of his lips and throws a bag of 4d10 bounty on the ground between the two groups. Imagining what the Meek plan to do with that much hot Blight requires a level-4 Detachment check if the Takers choose to walk away. Planning to stop an arms deal between a group of armed infected and a group that envies them requires a level-3 Trauma check. If they win, the crew can scavenge anything left over that’s not on fire or covered in infected blood.

480

Takers see a campfire in the distance. If they approach, they find a group of sitting around it on the steps of a public library, huddled against the chill. Research or Foresight checks reveal them to be members of the Bonhoeffers, a well-known hardline Archivists group. The Bonhoeffers offer a place by the fire and what food they have. They pleasantly ask where the Takers are going and discuss their faith. After some time, it’s apparent the archivists fuel the fire with distressing items: wooden bats that could be melee weapons, good clothes, functioning backpacks, etc. Watching them keep the bonfire lit causes a level-2 Stress check. If asked, they claim only that the items are of no worth, and those that disagree can camp elsewhere. The Market should ask everyone to roll Black and add their ADP. The character with the lowest number has to go pee. When the PC walks around the side of the building to relieve themselves, they find the naked bodies of the family the Bonhoeffers executed before the crew arrived. If anyone bothers to ask why they killed the men, women, and children, they respond that it was because they were burning books for heat. But books are of worth; not people. Check Self-Control and start combat as appropriate.

A recent rainfall has washed away some brush concealing a path off the main road. Along the path are the eroded remains of several primitive booby traps. At the end of the path, the Takers find a heavy metal door closing off an airlock that, due to a lack of electricity, is unlocked — the Takers can open the door with no resistance. Inside is the hoard of a prepper who, judging by the dust all over the place, never made it out to their bunker. The food has long gone bad, but the Takers find an arsenal of guns and ammunition, a small library of survival manuals, a mechanic’s toolkit, and an electronics toolkit. Approaching a river, the Takers find it wider than expected and the bridge marked on their maps now starts and ends partially in the water. A successful Foresight or Research check tells the Takers that during the Crash a retreating military blew the local dam to create a barrier to slow down the casualty stampede coming after them. The crew should head down river, where it thins out and slows down a bit. If the Takers try to wade through the river to the bridge, a single mob of casualties that have washed up against the bridge claw their way up onto the bridge. An Awareness check notices them while they are still in the water and unable to attack. If the casualties make it up onto the bridge and the Takers kill them, the normal Scavenging rules apply. Otherwise, the bodies and any bounty on them are washed away. Takers encounter a DHQS drone swarm. The small aircraft are launched in batches from missile batteries and fly in pre-programmed formations, gathering intelligence for the government. A hundred of them dot the sky. The units are within range for two turns (three for anyone who made an Awareness check) and one can be shot down for every successful Precision Shoot check. A crashed drone provides 1d10 bounty worth of sophisticated electronics. After those three turns, the drones ascend beyond the effective range of weaponry. Those that make a Scavenging, Mechanics, or Profession: Drones check while salvaging parts realize this drone is outfitted to carry small packets of ordinance. Whether they realize it or not, a squadron of six drones has split from the flock and returns to drop payload on the meddlers. The bombs are inaccurate (Market rolls 6 dice; evens miss and odds hit) and Takers that know of the threat can make Athletics checks to dodge under cover, but each does explosive Kill + Stun damage. Even misses can set buildings on fire and attract Casualties.

481

The Takers are passing by an abandoned gas station when music begins playing over the outdoor speakers. An Awareness or Foresight check tells the Takers that the music is motion activated and how far to move to get out of the sensor’s range. If they make the check, only two Casualties come out of the station and the Takers are far enough away to simply walk off. If they do not make the check, 2d10 Casualties come out of and from behind the station. If the Takers kill all the Casualties, they can make a Scavenging check — the speakers are still powered by two solar cells on top of the gas station, which are worth 5 bounty each and take one haul each. The path is strewn with debris — some powerful weather went through the area the other day (depending on the area, suggest using a tornado, hail storm, or thunderstorm) making the road ahead treacherous. The Takers can go around without penalty or spending any resources. If they continue down the path, they make an Athletics check to avoid spraining an ankle (1d10/2 to one leg on a failure), find 2d10 Bounty from Casualties decapitated by flying debris, and encounter 1d10/2 Casualties. A light drizzle starts up. On a successful Awareness check, the Takers notice that something smells a little... off. On a successful Foresight check, they checked the weather forecast for the day. On a successful Profession: Computer Programming, the Takers get an alert on their Ubiq specs. They have started to walk/drive through acidic rain. If they succeed a check, the Takers can get undercover or go around the storm before the rain does too much damage. Otherwise, lose one upgrade on every piece of gear exposed to the rain. If a piece of gear does not have any upgrades, it requires an extra bounty or a successful Mechanics check to fix during upkeep. If caught out in the rain, on a successful Scavenge check the Takers find a spear with the Sturdy and Crossbar upgrade abandoned by the side of the road. In the distance, the Takers can hear several bursts of gunfire, then silence. If they investigate, they find the remains of a raider group being devoured by a mob of casualties. The raiders have scavengable gear but their gunfire will surely draw more undead soon. If the party can clear out a mob in 1d10 rounds, they can scavenge up to 2d10 worth of bounty from the dead raiders with a successful Scavenge check before another mob appears. The Takers see a fortified house that appears to be abandoned. If they investigate, they see a dead man who clearly shot himself near a pile of supplies, including rations and bullets. Tripwires are lined on each door and window of the house. An Awareness check is required to notice them and the market may decide to allow such checks if the players specifically ask for it. If a tripwire is triggered, small explosive charges blow holes in the ceiling, releasing a mob’s worth of casualties in torpor on the characters. They begin to stir and will attack in one round. The entire house is a trap rigged by Meek cultists trying to infect humans. The rations are poisoned with Blight and the bullets are duds.

482

The Takers spot a vehicle in the road up ahead. Three men are standing around with weapons out, but not pointed at the Takers, while a fourth is changing a tire. All three guards continue their bickering as the Takers approach. On a successful Networking check the Takers realize from the bickering that this is a group of Takers out of the nearest Randian enclave. They are willing to trade but will try to sell all of their goods at upkeep x3 Bounty. A successful Sensitivity check will inform the Takers that none of the Randians are mechanics, including the guy trying to change the tire. With sufficient spouting of the Objectivist philosophy and a Persuasion, Deception, or Leadership check, the Takers can charge the Randians two times the number of charges they spend on a Mechanics check (limit 4) plus three bounty for labor in fixing their tire for them. A failed Mechanics check will result in a -Rep Spot “Over selling.” A drone copter descends into view, flashing a strobe light at the Takers. A voice announces over the speaker “We will be coming into view shortly. Do not shoot. We seek to parley.” A few minutes later, a DHQS squad pulls into view. They carry some of the finest gear the Takers have ever seen (silenced automatic rifles, carbon-fiber collapsible hand axes, basilisk’s skin armor, etc.). Each is flanked by a next-gen dronkey, one of which carries a mini-gun on its back. Each of the three is a management level Market force with the determined advantage. The Stewards wait and get prepared to shoot. The Takers need to send forward a representative, and the rep can pick which one they want to speak to. Every successful Sensitivity check gets a read on a squad member. There’s Twitchy, who obviously thinks everyone is out to kill them and the Takers are no different. There’s Vet, who sees the crew as a tactical variable to be dismissed... for now. Then there’s Patron, who seems deeply uncomfortable holding guns on former countrymen. No matter who they parley with, the stewards just want to pass by unmolested: they don’t have time to hide as the Takers go by, and no one wants a gunfight. If Takers are skeptical of their motives, the Stewards assure them they have no designs on their enclave (they don’t let them know how they know about the enclave). Twitchy promises not to kill them if they let them pass. Vet promises to delete their faces from his drone’s camera, and he can be persuaded into changing the status of Lost characters to “Unaccounted For.” Patron dumps 2d10 bounty in the road as a toll for passing. Regardless of how it goes, dealing with the DHQS is a level-2 Detachment threat. For hours, Takers have been seeing signs for “Skeeter’s Treasure” painted all over the place. If they choose to follow them, they come to an actual drive-thru theater, apparently allowed to survive as a local historical site. In a rural area, the screen is set up on the rocky cliff face of a hill half-blasted away to make room for the parking lot. If in an urban area, the screen hangs from a long-abandoned factory as part of urban renewal. Either way, in huge red paint, the screen reads “YOU WIN. COME AND GET IT.” In the middle of the message, a body hangs from the neck from one of the giant screen’s struts. Those with binoculars can see 5d10 bounty stapled all over the canvas of the screen. Across the dirt parking lot, craters and body parts dot the ground. Apparently, Skeeter mined the ground leading towards his treasure screen in every direction. It takes Awareness, Foresight, Self-Control, and time to navigate the minefield. Mechanics or some sort of military Profession is required to disarm mines. Those that go around and try to rappel down from the wall the screen is mounted on find that the largest explosives were reserved for wise guys. Even if those that set them off survive, the high elevation causes a landslide that destroys all the bounty. If the Takers make it to the screen intact, they can take the bounty. Upon closer inspection, it appears the hanged man had his hands handcuffed to his belt; it turns out this is Skeeter’s sick joke rather than his suicide note.

483

The path is blocked by a river straining its bank, swollen by distant rains. The bridges were blown up in yet another failed retreat during the Crash. But it seems the army installed the prototype of what has come to be called a “troutline” before they left. The device is a net composed of thin, carbon-fiber netting and strung to the bottom of the river. The whole thing is suspended on a thick metal cable strung between sturdy trees on either bank. Across the wire, wheels and a counter weight move a miniature Punch-Bot to and fro across the river. The idea was to catch any casualties crossing the river on foot in the net, dicing them on the thin metal wires or having the Punch-Bot fire the cattle gun into their brains if they climbed high enough to trigger the sensors. Takers can cross if they use the guide wire as a handrail and walk across the top of the net (check Athletics). However, mid-way through the crossing, a derelict boat comes into view, teeming with casualties from an outbreak on board. Meanwhile, the bot activates as casualties on the net trigger its sensors. Check Athletics to balance on the net as the passing Punch-Bot makes holding onto the guide wire impossible. For those at the back of the line, check Athletics to move faster and get beyond where the boat full of undead will strike the wires. Finally, check Resistance to hold on as the boat strikes the net. Falling into the water risks drowning, confrontation with submerged casualties trapped in the net, or, at minimum, the loss of important gear. The Takers come upon a massacred horse-drawn caravan. The only visible bodies have been so thoroughly consumed as to be rendered inanimate. The carpet armor was torn from the horses and the animals stripped down to the bone. No sign of the casualties (or aberrants) responsible for the deaths remains. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. Humans wouldn’t leave the cargo completely intact. What the caravan was hauling is up to the Market, but it’s valuable. If using the MBA rules, the wagons hold 1d10 + 5 units of supply — enough to start a small business. If the Takers want to offload everything to a wholesaler, there’s enough for 1d100 bounty. But how do they get it back to the enclave?

484

RED MARKETS

Taker Crew Weak Spot

1 Severed Strained Needy

Dependants

Soft Spot Tough Spot

References

Potential Skills Haul

Refresh

INT

CHA

) )

Threats Detachment Stress Trauma

Break

ADP

) )

Crumble

SPD

)

Crack

Unarmed ( Melee ( ( Resistance Shoot ( ( Stealth Athletics Awareness Self-Control Scavenging Drive Criminality Foresight Research Mechanics First Aid Profession ( ( Networking Persuasion Sensitivity Deception Intimidation Leadership

STR

ALT

10 ALT

ALT

7-9

5

) )

6

ALT

1-2

3-4

ALT

ALT

WIL Backpack Upkeep Effect

Rations 1

Charges

Static

Taker can carry STR in Haul and personal gear

Qualities

Essential Static

Upkeep Effect

1

Charges

00000 00000

Rations can be spent to Buy-a-Roll on skills that require exertion. Additional spends add +1

Qualities

Essential Addictive Charged

Character Advancement: 1 Potential = 10 Bounty Skill Points = Bounty equal to new skill level (1B = 1 Skill, 2B = 2 Skill, etc)

485

Taker:

Charges Upkeep

2

00000 00000

Effect

Upkeep

Qualities

Qualities

Upgrades

Upgrades

Charges Upkeep

Upkeep

Qualities

Qualities

Upgrades

Upgrades

Charges Upkeep

Upkeep

Qualities

Qualities

Upgrades

Upgrades

Charges Upkeep

00000 00000

Effect

Qualities

Charges

00000 00000

Charges

00000 00000

Effect

00000 00000

Effect

00000 00000

Effect

00000 00000

Effect

Charges

Effect

Purchasing Price = Upkeep x2

Failing to meet Upkeep causes a malfunction Crit Success: No refresh but still functions Success: No refresh and -1 upgrade Fail: No refresh,-1 upgrade,and must be repaired Crit Fail: Item lost

Upgrades

Upkeep Maintenance

Survival Equipment

Incidentals

Health

Sustenence

Break Point

Retirement Milestone

486

Bounty Bank

Rent Purchase Humanity Projectced Earnings

Dependants Pro. Dev. Favors Savings

RED MARKETS

NEGOTIATION SHEET

Crew Name Enclave Client Start

As A Favor

Buyer’s Market

Contract is offered at the Demand price only AND client earns a - Rep spot to use in future negotiations

Contract is offered at the Demand price only (Black result on a equilibrium roll)

Provider Undercut Start

Provider Default Start

Black Die

Black Die

Labor

Hazard Pay

100% Mark-Up

Client agrees to add the crew’s break point to the price (Black + Red + break point)

Add one Bounty per Taker per Leg to Hazard Pay. (Ex: a crew of four on a three-Leg run earns 4 x 3 more)

Double the cost of the job before Labor

At Value

Contract is offered at the value of Supply+Demand (Black + Red)

Red Die Expenses The equipment upkeep of every participating Taker is added into the price (no one pays upkeep this session)

Clients Have... Weak Spot: A character flaw or secret that can be leveraged to provide +1 Sway Soft Spot: An area of sentiment or great passion that can be exploited for +1 Sway Tough Spot: For NPC clients, this takes the form of a specific need the client has for the contract. It can be exploited for +1 Sway

Playing Spots For Takers:

Working a client’s weak, soft, or tough spot into the roleplaying behind a skill automatically adds +1 Sway to a roll. This bonus remains even if the check fails, so success means +2 Sway, but a failed play on a spot is still worth +1 Sway. Spots must be learned in scams or using Sensitivity + Rep Spots: If the crew has earned a + Rep Spot for a notable deed, the negotiator can work it into the roleplay for a bonus +1 Sway.

For Clients:

Sensitivity: Clients can sacrifice a turn to learn one spot from the Taker in negotiations Gift Spot: Once per negotiation, a client may “sweeten the pot” with a piece of gear, earning an irresistible +1 Sway - Rep Spot: If the crew has done something unprofessional, incompetent, or dishonest in the past, the client can use it once for an irresistible +1 Sway

Negotiation Charm Skills Networking:

Roll a check to find a contract or find info about it. Total failure means undercutting to “As a Favor.”

Persuasion:

Success moves +1 Sway, or defends against opponent’s Sway if heads up. Can be used with spots.

Intimidation:

Intimidation can be used to end negotiations early with a threat to “walk out.” Work in a spot to move and end negotiations in the same turn.

Sensitivity:

Read an opponent’s weak, soft, or tough spot, but sacrifice a turn to do so. Failure wastes a turn and provides no information.

Deception:

Lie about the crew’s abilities to move +1 Sway. Can be used with spots. Deception can defend against the client’s spot play with “poker face”

Leadership:

To Begin: Black + Leadership / 2 (rounded up, to a max of five rounds) equals the number of turns. Failure means rounds are rolled secretly. To End: Success has Black meet Red at the higher price, and failure brings Red down to Black at the lower price.

Determining Price To Start: Player makes a Leadership check (see above) Heads Up: Red and Black cannot be parallel while in negotiation. Each die resolves at the same time (moving simultaneously once both parties have spoken). It takes 1 Sway to advance unopposed, but in head up, dice only advance by pushing (negating an opponent’s Sway and having some left over) Fixing Price: On the last round, player makes a Leadership check. On a success, Black moves right and parallel with the Red (higher price). On a failure, Red moves left until parallel with Black. Parallel dice indicate the agreed upon price. Undercutting: Competition will try to undercut agreed upon prices, unless eliminated or left out because the PCs are “preferred providers” of a job line. Resisting an undercut requires a successful CHA check or a dedicated scame. Failure means the price goes down one space; critical failure means two spaces. PCs undercutting competition always succeed (there must be a game), but they start on “As a Favor” on the tracker.

487

RED MARKETS

CREW TRACKER

Crew Name Enclave PORTFOLIO Contract

Job Line

Price

Earned

TAKERS

REPUTATION Breakpoint

Name

Totals

GENERAL NOTES:

488

Bounty per Taker

Equip.

Earnings (projected)

Spot

+/-

RED MARKETS

CREW SHEET:MBA RULES

Crew Name Enclave Small Business Name: Corresponding Value Employee/ Remaining Gouge/ Liquidity Troubleshooter Liquidity Score/Contract# per Unit Mark-up Taker Working Supply

Total Earned

Investments and Speculation: Investment

Liquidity

(-1 every session)

Inside Trading (+1 per action)

Risk

Rate of Return

GENERAL NOTES:

489

COMBAT SUMMARY CHEAT SHEET ActIon Economy Every character starts a combat round with one tactic, one twitch, and one freebie. Lengthy actions, or tasks, take up an entire turn or more and sacrifice tactic and twitch. tactICS Tactics resolve with Initiative. Tactics include: • Firing a weapon • Making a Melee or Unarmed attack • Drawing or holstering a weapon • Running to cover • Reloading a weapon or refreshing charges on other tools • Administering first aid • Barricading a door • Full Defense (converting an Tactic to a Twitch) • Full Offense (converting the Twitch to a second Tactic, which moves to the end of the initiative order) TWITCHES Twitches go off when prompted by Market forces. Twitches are limited and are almost always either… • Roll Athletics checks to dodge attacks • Roll Athletics checks to get under cover • Block an incoming Melee or Unarmed attack • Recover from knockback • Quick draw an item by dropping previously held gear • Reload or perform another quick action, as allowed by a specific gear’s upgrade FREEBIES Freebies include intellectual and verbal actions that can be carried out while performing tactics, twitches, or tasks. Characters get one multitask per combat cycle. • Foresight rolls to get tactical information • Awareness rolls to spot something • Shouting or whispering, or CHA skill checks where appropriate • Making a Self-Control test All freebies are under the one-and-done rule. If the freebie required a roll, the Taker either made it or did not.

ORDER OF COMBAT

490

1. Players roll Black and add their SPD. 2. Players declare from most to least. The Market spends Red dice to place Market Forces in-between their numbers. This is the initiative order. 3. The highest initiative player declares a tactic, spends to make a roll, and resolves the action. a. Black is damage. Red is hit location. The difference between Kill and Stun damage is determined by the gear used. The damage is unmodified by extra spends unless the gear is specifically upgraded (or use the “Bust Rule: Random Damage” p. 281). b. Twitches are demanded by the actions of Market forces and may go wherever the player wishes. Twitches unspent at the end of the round are discarded. 4. Assess damage and any penalties. 5. Once ever player and Market force has had a turn, return to step 3 and repeat (or use “Bust Rule: Random Damage” p. 281).

SpecIal Maneuvers Block: Make a Melee check to direct an attack to a specific piece of gear. Make an Unarmed check to direct damage to a specific hi location. Firearms cannot be blocked. Cover: Characters in cover cannot be attacked as long as they are in cover. Characters are out of cover if they attack. Twitches can be used to return to cover. A tactic or twitch must be used to move to cover if the character doesn’t start out there. Called Shot: Player declares a called shot on their tactic and moves to the end of the initiative order. If the Taker’s twitch remains unspent, the Taker can make a precision check to hit the target of their choice. On a success, the player can dictate the narrative of the success, up to and including the death of the target. FIrIng Into Melee: All rolls are precisions rolls, and failure hits an unintended target. Flank: To hit an enemy in cover, they must be flanked. This requires either an Athletics or Sneak test to move into position. If the Sneak test fails, the Forces get to declare a free attack. If the Athletics test fails, the forces get to declare a free attack. Dodges can be attempted normally if the Taker has a twitch left. If an enemy moves to flank and isn’t stopped, Takers they moved against are no longer considered in cover. Full Defense: Convert your tactic into a twitch. One twitch can go off whenever prompted by Market forces, but the second can’t be used until the player declares full defense on their initiative. From that point on, twitches respond to threats normally. Full Offense: Turn your twitch into a second attack. You must declare this on your initiative and it can’t be taken back. The second attack moves to the end of the initiative order. GrapplIng: Make an Unarmed check against the target. On a success, the target is grappled. Make a Unarmed check every subsequent round to keep the target restrained. If the target is a Casualty, make a Resistance check instead. Knockback: Certain weapons have knockback, which lays a target out prone. It costs a tactic to get up from the prone position. Ready: Abstaining from all actions for one round (no tactic, twitch, or task) allows the Taker to do one of two things: 1) move to the top of the next initiative order or 2) roll Black + Skill + Potential for the next check. ReloadIng: Refreshing charges costs a tactic if it is an item worn on the belt; refreshing gear is a task action if it is stored in the backpack. Rush: Takers can burn both a tactic and twitch to rush the enemy. This must be declared on their initiative. The Taker makes an Athletics test. If it succeeds, the Taker can use their twitch as another tactic and perform a Melee or Unarmed attack. If the first Athletics test fails, the Market forces get a free attack. The player can choose to eat the damage and finish the attack, or use their twitch to break off the assault and try to dodge. Spray: If a weapon possesses the ability to spray, on a success a PC can choose to burn their twitch and keep firing. The Shoot check must be successful first, but upon burning the twitch and spending 3 charges, the player can choose to deal damage again to the same target or make a separate hit on a different target nearby. SuppressIng FIre: A Taker spending 3 charges on a ranged weapon and burns one tactic to suppress an enemy in cover. That means the enemy cannot move or attack that round. Takers that are suppressed must make a Self-Control: Trauma check to move from cover, and the enemy gets to declare a free attack against them.

491

A

Aberrants 38, 160, 454 • Aerosol 160, 454 • Ever-vecs 16, 454 • Empties 162, 455 • Mutants 163, 455 • Ganglia 164, 455 • Converts 166, 454 • Scarecrows 167, 456 • Stalkers 168, 456 • Malignant 169, 455 • Shuffled 170, 456 Action Economy 273, 490 • Tactic 273 • Twitch 273 • Freebie 274 • Task 274 Advanced Electronics 262 Armor and Accessories 255 Assessing Risk 438 At-A-Glance • Character Creation 181 • Vectors 303 • Negotiation 322 • Spots 336 • Scams 339 • Workplace Essentials 359 • Scores 395 • Campaign Structure 413 • Small Businesses 426 • Loans 441

B

Backing Out 344 Believers 150 • The Meek 151 • Shepherds 151 • Chosen 152 • Triage 152 • Black Math 153

492

• Archivists 153 • Holy Communion 154 • Detox 154 • Crusaders 155 • Randians 156 • LALAs 157 Blight 32, 295 • Explanations 39 Boom 172, 353 • Default Checks 176 • Basic Refresh 241 • The Last Shall Be First 277 • Will to Live 283 • Lucky X 283 • What if the Dice Don’t Meet? 343 • Labor Shortage 372 Bounty 108, 211, 233 Bust 172, 354 • +1 Or It Can’t Be Done 176 • Accuracy Counts 201 • Interest 211 • No Budget; No Buy 228 • High-Stakes Refresh 242 • Individual Initiative 277 • Fog of War 277 • Random Damage 281 • Alternative Hit Boxes 281 • Permanent Damage 282 • God’s Blight 306 • No Hiding the Truth 335 • Peasants Don’t Scare Me 336 • The Loss Never Forgets 338 • All or Nothing 338 • What if the Dice Don’t Meet? 343 • Competitive Market 372 • Uncertain Vignettes 419 • Asshole Coworkers 449 Buy-A-Roll 7, 173

C

Campaign Structure 413 Casualties 37, 296 Character Advancement 214 Character Creation 181 Charges 7, 173, 179, 234 Chumming 300 Collision 283 Combat 272 Combat Maneuvers 285, 490 • Block 285 • Called Shots 285 • Cover 285 • Firing Into Melee 285 • Flank 285 • Full Defense 286 • Full Offense 286 • Grappling 286 • Knockback 287 • Ready 287 • Reloading and Rearming 287 • Rush 287 • Spray 287 • Suppressing Fire 288 Combat Round 275, 490 Contracts 325, 358, 360, 379 Crafting 242 Crash 32 Criminal Organizations 143 • Narco Cartels 143 • Smugglers 144 • Valets 144 Criticals 175

D

D100 Loss Encounters 457 DHQS 88, 138 Damaging Casualties 298 Default 176 Determination Advantage 293

Difficult 178 Drugs and Healthcare 251

E

Enclaves 113, 120 • Ubiq City 28, 121 • Leper 122 • Distributy 123 • Mont Liner 124 • The Consolidated 124 • MyWay 126 • The Rock 127 • Light City 128 • Achieve 130 • Papa Doc’s Railroad 131 • Troutfitt 409 Encounter Prompts 451 Encounter Themes 450 Equilibrium 362 Exclusion Zones 135

F

Falling 283 Fixers 349 Freebie 274

G

Gear 232 Gear, Designing New 244 Gear List 245 Gear Packages 213 Gift Spots 337 Gifted 293 Gouge Consumers 432

H

Haul 194, 237, 264 Heads Up 328, 332

493

Healing • …in the field 281 • ...between jobs 227 Hit Locations and Damage 280, 282 Homo Sacer Policy 79 Hot Strain 305 Humanity 310

I

Immunes 34, 95, 307 In-Character Collaborative 399 In-Character Opposed 397 Infection 34, 306 Initiative 275 Insider Trading 438 Interludes 446 Investments and Speculation 436

J

Job Creator 358 Job Lines 325, 420

L

Latents 34, 102, 187, 306 Leadership 205 • Opens 330 • Closes 343 LifeLines 112 Liquidity 434, 438 Loans 441 Looting the Dead 289 Looting the Undead 301 Loud Weapons 298 Luring 299

M

Market Forces 178, 291 Mass 296 Mr. JOLS 217, 401

494

N

Non-Negotiables 332 Notable Taker Crews 144 • The Moths 145 • GILF 146 • D-Town Takers 146 • Digital Forensics Inc. 147 • Eat Clean 147

O

One-and-Done 173 Operation Utility 62 Opposed Checks 178 Out of Character Consensus 400

P

Peeling 299 Penalties 278, 282 Pets 260 Poison/Drugs 284 Potentials 194 • Strength (STR) 194 • Speed (SPD) 195 • Adaptability (ADP) 196 • Intelligence (INT) 196 • Charm (CHA) 197 • Will 197 Precision 178 Premade Takers 220 Prep Work 324 Private Sector 139 • StopLoss 140 • Alosine 140 • Frond Engineering 140 • Beemail 140 • Longest Haul Trucking 140 • Singularity Security Solutions 141 • MDNN 142 • Many Hands LLC 142

• Tragedy Trackers 142 • Vulture Investors 143 Pro Bono 439 Procedure 173

R

Rates of Return 439 Rations 180, 195, 253 Rebels 148 • Vindicated 148 • Papineaus 149 • Traitors 150 References 210 Refresh 196, 236, 240 Regrets 313 • Cracks 315 • Crumbles 315 • Breaks 316 • Fight 315 • Flight 315 • Freeze 315 • Disassociation 316 • Dependency 316 • Delusion 316 • Self-Destruction 317 • Betrayal 317 • Convalescence 317 Rep Spots 338 Retirement Plans 214 Romero Effect, The 48

S

Scavenging and Crafting 242 Scams 339 • Intelligence Gathering 340 • Price Manipulation 341 • Partners In Crime 341 • Negotiator Support 341 • Discourage Competition 342 Scores 361, 394, 395

Self-Control Checks 312 Selling Gear 242 Settlements 132 Shamble 296 Skills 198 Small Businesses 425 Soft Spots 185 Specializations 199 Stampedes 302 Stratostructure 28 Stun vs. Kill 280, 282 Success at Cost 175 Suffocation 284 Supply/Demand 362 • Subsidiary 363 • Flooded 364 • Scarce 364 • Volatiles 365 Supressin 97, 255 Sway 327 Sway Skills 333 Sway Tracker 327, 487

T

Tactic 273 Takers 110, 114 Tontines 218 Tools 258 Torpor 37 Torpor Lockdown 59 Tough Spots 185 • Lost 185 • Bait 186 • Latent 187 • Immune 188 • Believer 188 • Steward 189 • Hustler 190 • Fencemean 191 • Scavenger 192 • Roach 193

495

Trained 292 Troubleshooting 429 Twitch 273

U

Ubiq 23 Undercutting 343 Uniform Retirement Plan 216 Upkeep 223 • Sustenance 223, 224, 229 • Maintenance 223, 224, 229 • Incidentals 224, 226, 230

V

Vectors 35, 303 Vehicles 265 Vignettes 415 • Cope 416 • Support 417 • Engage 418 • Milestone 419 • Dream 403 • MBA Options 434

W

Weak Spots 184 Weapons 245 When to Roll 174 Will 179, 197 Work/Life Balance 434 Working a Double 424 Workplace Essentials 359 • Goods/Services 360 • Equilibrium 362 • Economy 366 • Client 370 • Competition 371 • Travel Time 373 • Site 373 • Complications 376

496

497