Red Markets is a great system, and I want to run it. For the game I want to run, though, I'm interested in something different than the zombie apocalypse premise of the core book, and the prospect of hacking the system has me feeling kind of daunted.
My background is in economic history. Economic history is, with the exception of a few bright spots concentrated in the recent past, a story of economic horror. I want to make my players viscerally aware that the human condition for most of human existence was of being a bad harvest or two away from starvation. In particular, I want to run a game that's based on my own research area. A game where the players are peasants on the Polish-Soviet frontier during the Great Depression. For a perfect shitshow of reasons, things are bleak. Grain prices-- and with them, your income-- are down by half or more from the heady heights of 1928. With the world economy in meltdown, the flow of credit to your backwater has dried up, and old creditors demand repayment all the more urgently. The government, in its struggle to protect the gold standard at all hazards, redoubles his impositions while shuttering even basic public services. The large landowner, with debts of his own to repay, ratchets up your rents. The prices of industrial goods, controlled by the producers' cartels with the government's encouragement, stubbornly refuse to decline. To salve your desperation, what is there? Brigandage and political violence against a government that does not hesitate to discriminate against you because you speak the wrong language, practice the wrong religion-- the line between the two is thin. And the most lucrative prize: braving the border guard and NKVD to cross the frontier into a Ukraine in the paroxysms of Stalin's collectivisation, selling what little you have for more than you could get at home to those with even less to lose than you do-- or the party apparat, who have the means to eat well in the midst of starvation. You are the dispossessed of the Kresy, the border marches, the wild East. You do what you must to survive, taking from those who can be made to give. You are Takers. And the newspapers, when looked at from ninety years' distance by some cosseted young bookworm, will bear us out: 'We were there. We did these things'.
Sounds like a setting you want to play in? I'm hyped. At the same time, paring away the meat of the Profit system from the zombie apocalypse skeleton it's currently attached to is a challenge, and I'd appreciate any advice you could give me on how to do it.
