In June 2022 we presented the Red Markets Quick Deal featuring Red Markets, the RPG of economic horror from Hebanon Games. During an unevenly distributed zombie apocalypse, the world is divided: infected and clean, living and dead, haves and have-nots. The mercenary entrepreneurs called “Takers” live on the wrong side of that divide — the Loss, where even the apocalypse offers no escape from the everyday grind. If actual monsters don’t consume you, debt will, and the cycle of poverty is harder to escape than hordes of undead.
Funded in a May 2016 Kickstarter campaign, Red Markets evokes a harrowing hand-to-mouth existence marked by hardscrabble work, nightmare prospects, corrupt and insipid leaders, factional chaos, widespread shortages and logistical breakdowns, soul-destroying frustration, despair at the collapse of a great society, heartfelt sorrow for friends and family enduring calamity, a constant sense of impending doom, desperate clawing panicky escapes, and zombies. This May 2018 Reddit r/rpg thread — Red Markets was the subreddit’s Game of the Month — showers praise on the game’s immersive quality. “It makes it so easy for the players to get invested in their characters. I’ve been playing RPGs for many, many years now, and I’ve never seen a player get so worked up OOC [out-of-character] over what their characters were dealing with IC [in-character]. It’s just so good.”
The Red Markets Profit System mechanic uses two 10-sided dice of different colors called Red and Black. In a test, you roll both dice, (using luck or gambling resources to modify the result) and check which die rolled higher. Landing “in the Black” means success; “in the Red” is failure. Optionally, the same 2d10 roll can also generate hit locations and damage, local supply-demand curves, even entire encounters. There’s a lot of crunch, if you want it. Your game’s pace, structure, and challenges depend on the sub-systems your group chooses. (Eric Bright at Play Every Role created a handy Red Markets web app to handle the rules.)
You start campaign play by generating your own enclave, determining its location, history, economy, politics, etc. If you lack a gamemaster, your group can generate a Score, a GM-less scenario that determines a job’s elements while still allowing plenty of surprises during play. And negotiating payment for a Score involves social combat that depends as much on nuanced roleplaying as lucky dice.
A cutthroat game in many ways, Red Markets can be about just killing zombies, or about complex sociopolitical intrigue, corporate sabotage, family drama, currency exchange schemes — and killing zombies. Players can control the biggest badasses in the Loss, or they can play a high-turnover roster of doomed fools in a meat grinder. Like any well-run business, your crew must develop soft skills (manipulating clients) and hard skills (decapitating zombies). Your profits feed a family of dependent nonplayer characters. The quality of your gear determines your survival, but every piece of gear costs to purchase and to maintain. You’ll try to do the most with the least, because debt is as deadly as any monster.
This Quick Deal provided everything you need to tell stories of disaster capitalism and grim knife-edge survival on the wrong end of the economy. There were five titles in our Market Collection (retail value $45) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Red Markets core rulebook (plus the free Quickstart Guide), the conspicuous-consumption equipment guide Veblen Goods, and three portfolios describing survivor enclaves: Le Corbusier, Trabajo, and Elevation.
