Red Markets Beta: The Brutalists episode 7

rm-vetThe workers of the abattoir need medication to continue their work and it is up to the Brutalists to transport the drugs. Unfortunately, the shipment also contains dangerous narcotics that could wreck havoc with the community. The takers may be mercenaries but the fallout of addicting an allied enclave with these drugs and getting them into debt with a drug cartel is quite dangerous. Those narcotics are worth a lot of bounty though, so someone must pay for them.

Liked it? Get exclusive bonus episodes on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!

21 Comments

  1. Felt Touch Phil for MVNPC

  2. Agreed.

  3. My favorite part of the game was when Aaron almost tried selling drugs to a cop.

  4. Excellent session. Love that the game can still be terrifying without Vector’s charging you down.

    Poor IP breaking down again. Am I understanding correctly that when IP goes to la-la-land (or “crack”, was it?) again, he’ll have to go for “fight” since the others have already been used?

  5. @Levi

    You are indeed correct.

  6. I love how as soon as the party was given a car the response becomes cant stop here, lion country.

  7. @James

    In my campaign they started with a car, and despite the utter lack of lions in Nevada I had a bastard of a time getting them to pull over for Legs. They loved to toot the horn and flip off my encounters in the rearview. ;___;

    ALSO KOWLOONxISABELLA DATE VIGNETTE WHEN

  8. @Jace
    Well it occures to me that if the party has a car then you as the gm must make Leg encounters seem more interesting and potentialy profitable. Advertising if you will. Like the horde of zombies around the guy up a tree is not very inticing. Aparent high cost, no real indication of profit chance. To draw from a previous episode, the tower was the perfect example of making it interesting and hiding the cost until they commited then sunk cost hit.
    On the other hand, fear and loathing quotes.

  9. The budgeting mechanic will do wonders for that, because there’s an excellent chance that someone could get caught short if the job is not terribly profitable. Not having read the playtest rules, is there a cost for refreshing Haul if things go bad?

  10. @Lonnie

    As I understand it, Haul is included in upkeep; if you can’t afford upkeep on your gear, then you can’t refresh it at the end of a session.

  11. Felt Touch Phil is NOTHING beside Burlaptrix dahling

    usual comments re: pacing feels off when players skip a bunch of (all, I think?) their legs, but I imagine when people start seriously hurting for money and sanity it’ll aaall sound better because I’ll be right there with the players going NO YOU NEED TO JUST KEEP GOING. as is most of the legs I’ve heard played have treated the players pretty well, so it sometimes feels like a metagame “we don’t want a six-hour session” decision, as opposed to a real risk/reward decision? or something, v excite for the Kickstarter.

    I still wanna see an aberrant, though! that will be the first page I flip to in the PDF, like a good attention deficit gamer incapable of reading anything from start to finish!

  12. Oh man, that realdoll talk was giving me flashbacks. There was a late-night sex show on CityTV that did an episode on realdolls when they first came out, complete with shots of half-finished realdolls hanging from chains and footage of Ron Jeremy “demonstrating” the product.

  13. Leg skipping feels like a real double edged sword. If your job site is too toxic to provide a retuen on investments, bounty and resorces scavenged on legs can offset the blow.

    I love the brutalists but it is starting to feel like the later stages of a mission based rougelike where each job has some hidden negitive utility that will effect the enclave if not addressed with only the players as a counter balance. Its never enough to just make money when the place you sleep and network to make money turns into a drug exploited slum.

    Also just my own feed back. Making a player pay and role to recover humanity is a poor choice. If your family and dependents are your primary sorce of mental health recovery limiting their effectiveness will increase charater burnout to the point of never hitting retirement. It would end up more cost effective to just hit the shrink and give a middle finger to caring about anyone.

    My advice (and i know this is so late to be ineffective) is to keep Mental Health recovery the same but Will Recovery to roll dependent. You are not going to go crasy because you argued with your sister but it will take the edge off your reflexes if your dwelling on it to hard.

  14. to me, leg skipping is paying to run away from fights. While useful, you miss out on bigger scores.

    my question is this ‘are legs generally random rolls, or are they half of the prepared encounters for the players?’ because I am not sure how to fill time if the party consistently skips all the legs and goes straight for the endgame.

  15. Man, 120 bounty. Good thing it was already flagged as “plot money,” I suppose. That’s “shoot Synthenia, get a milestone and a half in one payoff” money otherwise.

  16. I know the next draft of the rules is close (kickstarter) but I am pretty curious how vehicles shake out. Definitely they’re appealing and should be, but keeping them useful while having players still explore some Legs seems like a balancing act.

    Like crawlkill, I’m eagerly awaiting the first aberrant. When they started down the foul smelling alley I was wondering if there was an aberrant lurking.

    Felt Touch Phil is amazing. Very cool to see Gnat in game, too.

    I also like the “spread thin” aspect of this campaign where the home Enclave benefiting missions may pay a bit less, but doing them also means that you can’t take that lucrative (morally questionable) DHQS job. Definitely emphasizes the idea of opportunity costs.

    The art’s all been top notch so far. GENTRIFICATION.

  17. Tom, I will have a few chosen words with you next time we meet 🙂 as the way you decided to name the corrupt ex-officer from the Machine deeply hurted my feelings.

  18. FYI, this is missing the Red Markets tag.

  19. Author

    I use categories for game systems and genres, tags for players and campaign names. I updated the Beta category to be RM (red markets) beta. I hope this helps.

  20. Question are you going to include the various new campaign under the Campaign Index section?
    And/OR update the Fan Creations with newer fan works?

    Not trying to start anything as I was just thinking it would be cool to see more fanwork making the circles.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *