A wonderful introduction to Red Markets. Perfect for a one-shot on game nights or as a demo at local game stores or conventions.

This brilliant game of economic horror is even more prescient now than when it was released.

But it's not a dour game; it's central mechanics drive powerful role-playing and storytelling by focusing on the essential elements of drama: what do characters want, what is in their way, and what are they willing to do?

The mechanics are simple to pick-up and play, and the "market" system takes much of the work off the GM's shoulders. Highly recommended for both novice and veteran role-players.

I enjoyed reading this as an ebook, and I enjoyed hearing Fae Kell's narration too!

Lover in the Ice is a Caleb Stokes adventure, which means that it has a ton of theme, and building tension. I've listened to actual play of this several times. Its always a wonderful, slow build game.

I used the Quickstart adventure to run the game for the first time on Saturday. I can't speak for the clarity of the rules, since I have just finished reading the entire book. I copied oiut the pre-gen characters from the adventure to the charactersheets provided and let the 4 players choose. One had the foresight to ask, are there any that are important to have? Yes, you pretty much need to have Cosmetologist on the Crew. It was my first time running the game or even playing it and it was the players first time playing the game. I think one of them had heard of it before.

I managed to exhaustively explain the rules, there really aren't that many rules. We used the Bust rule: "+1 or it can't be done", which led to only one person being able to sneak around. We then played through Negotiation and the adventure and were able to complete everything in about 4 hours, but the PCs did nope out of nearly all the legs and avoided - due to strategy- both complications at the job site. One final note for convention play: the game can be very dark and disturbing, so tone that down in play when you don't know the players ahead of time, especially if they are brand new to the game. The Quickstart adventure isn't especially dark, but there is one touchy element that can be easily left out for the sensitive.

As for Red Markets on the whole, I have the following to say: It was so EASY to run! Not having anything to roll or anything was a piece of cake. The casualties being two numbers mass/distance was so liberating! I never had to invent an NPC. I got to role play two NPCs invented by the players and two NPCs invented by the author.

I betatested the system and backed the Kickstarter, and now I get to tell you about my favorite RPG.

You might think that a 500-page book couldn't have a core mechanical system that's simple, fast, easy to learn, and highly flexible. Red Markets is all those things. It combines the best elements of traditional task-resolution skill-based gameplay with innovations from the best of the story game scene. And it puts its mechanic constantly at the service of a tight, focused game theme: everything costs resources. Economics as horror.

Economic horror is a genre that you might not have ever heard of, but you've probably played before. The old school dungeon crawl where you're counting your torches and arrows. The sci fi game where you struggle to fix the oxygen system before you asphyxiate. The childhood game of Monopoly, desperately trying to miss landing on your sister's Boardwalk hotel. Any game where the tension and worry revolves around the questions, "Can I afford this?" "Should I risk this?" "What am I giving up for this?"

Red Markets is about bringing those horrors into the center of the game. The zombie apocalypse setting is there to tap into our strongest mythical story about insecurity and constant danger (and it's brilliantly realized in a distinctive authorial voice, not generic in any way). The world of Red Markets is about the horror of having already lost everything, then discovering that you still have so much left that you can still lose. And the horror of the the everyday, constant need to risk life and limb just to get tomorrow's food on the table.

It's a beautiful game that tells beautiful stories, of tragedy, suffering, endurance, and even sometimes triumph (always hard-earned, never certain). And it depicts the daily, constant struggle that eventually adds up to those stories.

There's much more I could write, about the wonderful modular rules elements you could steal for other games, the possibilities for applying the system to other settings and moods, the fantastic community of players that have already created tons of great additional material for it. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's the best RPG I've ever played. I think if you try it, you'll love it too.

Okay, either I am missing something, or the quickstart very poorly explains everything. First off, it kinda just... starts, I dont expect it to explain what an RPG is, but itd be nice to have it explain 'hey, this is what makes this game different' in a nice, concise way. It finally gets into a reading order on page 10. It should have started with that.

Later still it lists 'game night prep', including the order in which you want to walk people through the explanation. This order makes sense, so why the document itself hasnt followed it is beyond me.

Besides that, the game throws out all sorts of terms it doesnt explain. It uses the term 'the market' for the GM, but nowhere explicitly states this (the very first mention of this is, regarding checks, 'ties go to the market' which I found rather confusing) It uses a whole bunch of statisctical terms as well; theres a creature that has a 'murder modifier', and characters can be 'latent' or 'immune'; by ommission I assume these mean the character is incapable of getting infected.

My final issue with the quickstart is that it looks like the sample characters are not all that useable; when I hear 'sample character' I assume I can just hand it out and play; but in this case the game calls them archetypes? and they seem to be missing some critical stuff, like hit locations. The 'game night prep' section, which for some reason is on page 13 instead of 1 or 2, says you want to print out character sheets, which I assumed referred to the sample characters provided but apparently doesnt. It also mentions having 'quick start printouts: 1 per player plus you', which I assume referes to the entire document? it then also says 'comforts: an extra rules printout or two' but if I do the former wouldnt I already have this?

Ultimately, the game itself still sounds pretty interesting, and I look forward to playing it tonight. It just does a rather poor job of explaining itself, it feels like they have never ran this by anyone that has never played the game before.

For anyone who bounced off of the core Red Markets book, said, "no way am I going to read a 500 page Zombie Heartbreaker," and kept going, stop. This is the remedy. The three minute Ramones song to Red Markets double album magnum opus. Stripped-down to the bare rules, this will get your group playing the game fast. Pregen characters and a nasty scenario that can serve either as a one-shot or act one of a campaign, this is an excellent gateway to the brilliant Red Markets RPG.

This game is an achievement. Not only is it a fresh take on the zombie apocalypse, but it gives a player-facing system that allows your group a chance to explore a multitude of horrors: the science-mocking blight and the creatures it has unleashed, the cruelties of the desperate cultures of the Loss, the dystopian government of the Recession, and the extremely relatable mundane terror of an empty wallet. Fantastic production values, superb art, and creators that put a chunk of their souls on the page.

This game is yet another take on the zombie apocalypse. But the designers have added a new wrinkle and integrated it well into gameplay. Fans of the genre will enjoy spotting which elements the game has cherry-picked (the basic premise bears a strong resemblance to George Romero's fourth zombie film 'Land of the Dead'). But writer Caleb Stokes places an emphasis on how free market capitalism would function in a nightmare world (the game's introduction states that it intended as a poverty simulator). The premise is that the characters are scavengers (dubbed 'takers') looting bounty from the ruins of society following a zombie apocalypse (called 'the blight'). What is left of the United States is roughly divided into the Loss (a wasteland full of zombies) and the Recession (what is left of the d government and civilization). The setting is extensively detailed but renders the game heavy on exposition. The first 110 pages of the 487-page book read like an illustrated zombie novel, but are entertaining. The core mechanics use a red and black dice for each roll. If a character rolls a higher number on the black dice, he wins -- if the red is higher, the market wins and the player fails. Rolls can be boosted by spending charges on equipment or will power. Skills also add bonuses to the black. Players also certain disadvantages to their characters -- weak spots (personality flaws) and soft spots (virtues that can be a nuisance). There are set types that a character can play, and each has an intrinsic tough spot -- essentially a fixed pair of characteristics (one an advantage and the other a disadvantage). An example is the hustler. This weasel has a list of connections that he can sometimes call on without needing a skill check. The bad news is that he is often in debt. All I could think of was Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt. Just reading the character creation rules gave me ideas -- a hustler whose soft spot is preserving any books that he finds (they do represent knowledge and culture) and whose weak spot is stocking up on beer or spirits as a creature comfort. This guy would be well-connected but a potential drag during a scavenging run. The game differentiates between a grittier, more realistic style of gaming and a more cinematic approach with roiled options to accommodate them. These are coined 'boom' or 'bust'. The presentation is brisk and simple. Literary quotes meant to illustrate certain themes are scattered throughout the book as hand-written sticky notes. The zombie portion of the book contains some interesting ideas -- there are latent carriers of the zombie virus that are harvested for potential vaccines, for example. But anyone who has seen a Romero film, 28 Days Later or Resident Evil will be on too-familiar ground here. There is a glut in zombie RPGs and the political metaphors in Red Market are not particularly subtle. But on the balance this is is a well-constructed diversion.

See our full ratings for this game at GeeksAGogo.com!

No other game I've played captures the stress of managing limited resources as well as this one does, which is all the more impressive given that despite the volume's size, the rules aren't even a little more complicated than they need to be. A lot of the tension comes from the balance between acquiring resources used for character advancement and saving for retirement against the ticking clock that is inevitably depleting sanity which is great for campaign play but I wouldn't recommend playing this as a one shot since it would drastically undermine the stakes that make this game so engaging.

Just finished reading this mammoth of a book and must say I am completely satisfied with my purchase. Well written and quite interesting. I’ve been a fan of RPPR for a couple of years now, but mostly for the CoC and Delta Green scenarios. Now, I’m working my way thru the Red Market episodes because this book has reawakened my love for the post-apocalypse genre. Not only is the fluff interesting (and there is quite a bit of it), the game mechanics are unique and work well. The "social combat" of negotiation is pretty interesting and there is some pretty good Market (think DM/GM) advice given. I'd like to seem more of this game, tho I feel it is a pretty complete product. On the fence? Listen to Red Markets: Brutalists on RPPR. Very entertaining and it’s neat to see how some of the rules evolve during the play testing.

This is an incredible game that sets out to bring some really new things to gaming, and nails every one of them. In most traditional games, like D&D, your gear is a huge part of your character and you grab all you can get. In Red Markets, your gear keeps you alive but it can break, or be used up and need replaced (think grenades), or create new risks (noisy toolboxes, blood tests that report the immune to some really scary people). Even your regular workaday zombie-headshotting gun requires maintenance and ammo. Pay the costs, everything keeps working but it's a little less for retirement. Don't pay, maybe you don't make it to retirement.

Another of Red Markets' innovations is that adventuring sucks. No sane person wants to risk their life for loot if they can avoid it, and every character's goal in the game is to have enough money to never go adventuring again - the sooner, the better. There are more cinematic play modes, but the game also has rules I can't recommend enough for driving home how difficult, dirty, dangerous, and stressful it is to live job to job risking your life, all to stop doing that exact thing. It may not sound attractive, but the feeling of accomplishment in overcoming everything a postapocalyptic wasteland can throw at you is really something.

Ran this in Cthulhu Dark. Mad, wonderful fun and even as things go crazy the biblical narrative supports a darker tone of apocalyptic chaos. The 'monster' at the heart of the affair is perhaps,one of my favourite conceptual horrors.

i ran this in Cthulhu Dark and it was a great fit with that systems focus on poor, vulnerable people taking on otherworldy threats in an already harsh world. Offers the chance to pull out some cod mafia accents as well as you play Chicago in the 1930s, always a plus to use some decently silly voices and names. Great investigative structure that ultimately leads to dark places, and clues that build a macabre atmosphere throughout play. Again, non standard mythos and all the better for it.