Ex terrorem, lucrabamur - Out of Terror, We Profit
Red Markets is an upcoming RPG that I'm super-stoked about and would love to try and get a game going for on here in that world.
The game is set five years into the Crash, the apocalyptic event that killed half the human species and divided the continental United States. An unknown infection referred to as The Blight appears seemingly at random worldwide, with no clear point of origin, turning humans into incredibly infectious monsters and shambling corpses. The Crash goes.. poorly. It's not a total wash, the governments of the world resorting to military invention to fight the spreading Blight. But there are only so many bullets, so many trained fighters. The cold, cruel mathematics of logistics prompt the US government to make a dreadful decision. They withdraw to the east coast, taking vital manpower and resources with them and blow the bridges. This splits the country into the Recession (east of the Mississippi river, where the U.S government has rooted out infection and rules with martial law) and the Loss (west of the Mississippi, given up and everyone left behind declared legally dead).
As one of the legally-dead living left behind in the Loss, you probably belong in an enclave, a survivor colony. You've spent the last five years scavenging food, medicine and other supplies, sitting on pre-Crash stockpiles and subsistence farming for staple crops. But five years is a long time and scavenging isn't a forever solution. Canned food is coming to the end of its life; even the nastiest MRE packets are beginning to turn. Most medicines that haven't been taken are simply expired. Even gasoline goes bad after so long. And people aren't making more, or at least the Loss isn't. But the Recession is. This is where the Carrion Economy comes in. It's an illicit black market trade between Loss enclaves and Recession people to carry out services in exchange for goods both sides want, backed by a form of cryptocurrency called Bounty. An example might be someone whose family was infected during the Crash hiring some Loss-based folks to go out and put their Zombie Grandma out of their misery; they pay in bounty and then that currency goes towards, say, buying medicine the Loss enclave needs. A big part of the Carrion Economy is the trade in legal documentation; the Recession government is gearing up for a big reclamation push in the next 15-20 years and they want to sort out things like inheritance, land ownership, who owns what and what can the State seize, which is causing a big bubble in the Carrion Economy.
So, it's the end of the world but capitalism is still chugging along just fine. And it's time for you to go out, pay your bills, try to strike it rich - and not get bit.
Thoughts?
