Red Markets RPG

February 9, 2025 7:19 AM

"Red Markets is a game with zombies, but it is not a game about zombies. It is a game about paying your bills. Feeding your family. Affording your rent. Keeping your car running, your laptop charged, your gun oiled. Paying the doctor to bandage your scrapes and paying a therapist to salve your damaged psyche. And most importantly, it is a game about your life savings: both in the literal and fiscal sense."

RPG.net:

Red Markets is fascinated with post-human capitalism, with economies broken by apocalypse and stitched together out of threads of nightmare or fantasy. Red Markets embodies Stokes fascination with the complex social and tribal worlds that people create and with the internal mechanics and psychologies of markets. ...

As Stokes puts it: "Red Markets is basically a poverty simulator that uses zombies to keep its theme from getting too real."

The 2nd Edition Beta Test is available for pay-what-you-want at DriveThruRPG.

posted by Lemkin (4 comments total)

Interesting concept - basically, what we have now, except instead of zombies we have MAGA, and they run the government and you can't treat them like zombies.
posted by jzb at 8:37 AM on February 9 [5 favorites]

Oh man, so glad you posted this, I’ve never been able to get a session together but I’ve been a fan of Stokes/RM for years.

Caleb has been doing a lot of Delta Green work recently, including running playtest scenarios for the Dead Channels podcast, as well as being the primary author of the Gods’ Teeth campaign.
posted by FallibleHuman at 9:04 AM on February 9 [3 favorites]

Oh man, I didn't realize the beta for 2e was out! One of the players in my group is an economist and I've long thought Red Markets would be the game for him, but with being out of print and 2e coming Soon™, I was hesitant to take the plunge. Thanks for this post!
posted by the tartare yolk at 11:34 AM on February 9 [2 favorites]

Caleb is great. The Ludonarrative Dissidents (of whom I am one) did an episode about the first edition of Red Markets last year, taking it apart to see how it works and putting it back together to see how people play it. LND co-host Ross Payton contributed to the original game, has written supplements for it, and has done several Actual Plays on his own podcast Roleplaying Public Radio, and a series of design workshops tracing the development of the game and its second edition.
posted by Hogshead at 2:11 PM on February 9 [5 favorites]