Whoops, I had some bits modded out of the initial post and kind of forgot to replace them with actual information. Here's the basic writeup.
High Concept
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 GM 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 the wrong end of the economy. It’s cut-throat capitalism with its knife on your neck.
The Setting
The game takes place in the near-future, amidst a doomsday-in-progress.
When the tired joke of the zombie apocalypse clawed its way up from the dirt of the subconscious into terrifying reality, the cultural obsession killed as many as it saved. Some knew to aim for the head ... but just as many denied death’s existence until it tore them to pieces. The media, forgetting their own history of click-bait bullshit, screamed “zombies!” and were ignored in turn. When the warnings weren’t wrong, they weren’t believed. “The Romero Effect” dragged the slaughter on for months, until the end seemed certain.
But capitalism loves a good disaster. Our logistics system saved us, and our apocalypse, like everything else, was unevenly distributed.
Five years after the Crash, humanity has survived by leaving itself behind. The world is now divided: infected and clean, living and dead, haves and have-nots, The Recession and The Loss.
Takers live in the Loss, the wrong-side of that divide. They’re trapped in a world where even the apocalypse offers no escape from the everyday grind. It’s a world where combating nightmares becomes another item on the to-do list, where all the luxuries of an old reality taunt you from behind a fence. In the Loss, going to hell and going to work are one and the same. The mundane threats of poverty join ranks with actual monsters, and they all seek to consume you.
This link should be fine, as well, as it leads to the developer's website rather than directly to the kickstarter:
http://hebanon.blogspot.com/
Anyway, there are a lot of things to like about the game. It has zombies, but zombies are really just the weather. It has character-specific interludes where you interact with your dependents in order to find motivation to keep going on. It is also meant as something of a sendup of capitalism, and the horrors of being a cog in the machine.
