Season 3 episode 16: Trabajo for Red Markets

Trabajo (Hebanon Games, 2019) is a 32-page ‘portfolio’, part sourcebook and part adventure pack, for the Red Markets post-apocalypse RPG of economic and undead horror, written by Ludonarrative Dissidents’ own Ross Payton. We analysed Red Markets last season and liked it a lot, as you can imagine, and this episode is an opportunity to hear more about how it looks in action, and get Ross’s insights into how he went about constructing this compact, intense supplement.

“This is best read with a big bowl of snack food and a refreshing beverage,
and you’re like, ‘These poor bastards are so screwed!'” – Greg

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SHOW NOTES

These are the notes for this episode, a chance for us to pick up the threads, fill in the blanks, throw up some links, and correct the occasional errors that we didn’t have time to deal with in the episode itself.

This is one of the shorter sets of show-notes we’ve done this season, which isn’t an indication on Trabajo itself or its length, only that we spent most of the episode talking about the supplement itself, not associated works – or not as many associated works as usual.

So: Trabajo (the word means ‘work’ in Spanish) is a 32-page book including the covers. Six pages cover the town itself, there’s a page of NPCs (‘VIPs’), a page of competing local communities and groups, and the rest is three or four ‘contracts’, which we discuss: Oil Be Back; Schoolhouse Sensors; Post-Apocalyptic Pay Day; and the Deer Hunter, who’s more of an NPC/antagonist.

The Red Markets RPG was written and published in 2017 by Caleb Stokes, friend of the podcast, who regularly appears in Ross’s actual-plays in his other podcast, Roleplaying Public Radio (RPPR). Trabajo itself originated as a 13-episode campaign there, and you can still listen to them here.

We took Red Markets apart in the dim, distant days of season 2 episode 3, before we did proper show-notes for each episode, so the best way for you to refresh your memories of it is to listen to the episode after you’ve listened to this one.

Caleb is currently working on a new edition of Red Markets, to be crowdfunded later this year, and he’s made the playtest documents for it available as a pay-what-you-want download.

‘A l’eau, c’est l’heure’ is not the actual motto of the French navy, it’s ‘Honneur, patrie, valeur, discipline’ (‘Honour, homeland, valour, discipline’). Truth is more prosaic than fiction, at least in France.

We praise Trabajo‘s cover quite a bit, and you can see what we’re talking about by clicking on the thumbnail at the top of this page. It’s by Michael Plondaya, who you can also follow on Bluesky.

James likened the Trabajo cover to a piece of Saul Bass art, the great graphic designer who worked on the movie posters for classics from Vertigo to The Shining. Not precisely the same style, but the tonally there’s an overlap of starkness and bleakness there.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist who is notable for repeating himself and his imagery is (Greg thinks) Michael Ramirez of Business Daily. You can see some of his endless renditions of Uncle Sam hugging someone and crying here. We’re not going to show any of the images here because he does not deserve it.

City Book 1 came out from Flying Buffalo in 1982 from a fantastic roster of noted designers, and promptly picked up an Origins Award for showing that it was possible to design a generic fantasy supplement without it being bland and unoriginal. Still full of good ideas and interesting urban encounters, today you can now pick up the volumes – the series stretched to seven books by the end, I haven’t read all of them – for less than $5 each.

“If Red Markets ever gets turned into a prestige TV series” – stranger things have happened and odder RPGs have been optioned for TV series (Puppetland for one), though very few have come to fruition. Vampire: the Masquerade is the only live-action TV I know of (as Kindred: the Embrace, discussed in our episode on Vampire) but of course there have been four (FOUR!) D&D movies, and quite a few RPGs adapted into animated series.

The recent TV series where comedians compete to make each other laugh is Last One Laughing, which alas is on the despicable Amazon Prime. Based on the Japanese series Documental, it has been franchised to several countries. Here’s the trailer for the UK one which was patchy but brilliant in parts.

Taskmaster is Alex Horne’s godlike TV series of giving comedians silly things to do (the second TV series that can chart a direct line of descent from the radio show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, along with Whose Line Is It Anyway, and I’m waiting for the chance to do a proper show-note on ISIHAC, originally created by gods of comedy including John Cleese and the Goodies, now on its 84th series, yes you read that right, and the home of Mornington Crescent, the greatest un-game in history). Like Last One Laughing, Taskmaster now exists in several different territorial versions but the UK original is the best. The recent series 20 was a particular high-point.

Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s remake of The Wages of Fear, flopped when it came out in 1977 but has been reappraised as the director’s masterpiece (or possibly second masterpiece after The Exorcist). It is basically an RPG adventure, with the party constantly one fumble away from disaster. James had recently read a making-of the movie, which is how he knows so many details about it. You can watch the whole thing on Youtube and if you haven’t seen it, you should.

Death Stranding is a 2019 video game by Hideo Kojima, the figure behind the Metal Gear Solid franchise. You play a courier in a post-apocalypse world where vehicles don’t work, everything must be transported by humans, and there are weird monsters with a tendency to create explosions about the size of a medium nuke. A sequel has just come out. Death Stranding is reportedly inspired in part by the bokka, the Japanese mountain-porters who carry 100kg+ loads to remote settlements and cabins. Several other cultures have a similar profession: I’m particularly fond of the Slovakian horský nosič, mostly because it’s called horský nosič.

The Juicero was a part of the tech bubble of worthless products that also brought us Theranos and NFTs. Launched in 2016, it was a wifi-enabled (in fact it wouldn’t work without a wifi connection) juice-maker that retailed for $699 (later $399), despite its only functionality being to squeeze juice out of proprietary sealed packets of fruits and vegetables. Bloomberg later demonstrated that you could squeeze the packs just as effectively with your hands. The device was absurdly over-engineered. Somehow Juicero received over $120m in startup funding from various venture-capital firms. I am increasingly convinced that Devo was right about everything.

“We make a loss on every unit, but we’ll make it up in volume.” The game that James was referring to was Children of the Sun, a dieselpunk system from the short-lived and aptly named Misguided Games. Today it is unavailable, and mostly remembered for the fact that the two-page colour map of the island-setting on the book’s endpapers bore a striking resemblance to a vulva.

Mark Moran is, of course, not Miracleman. That’s Mike Moran.

Payday 2 is a 2013 co-op video game in which a group of players perform a variety of heists, mostly by firing guns.

Fallen Flags was Ross’s 13-episode Red Markets campaign from 2016, set in an early version of Trabajo before the supplement was written. You can listen to it all at the RPPR website.

The deerhunter illustration that we describe in the episode was created by Patsy McDowell. I’m not going to reproduce it here, we have to give you some reason to go and buy the book. It depicts a human figure with a horned deer skull across its face, like the mythic figure Herne the Hunter, only more psycho.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre is another movie about human greed and the moment when a cooperative endeavour goes bad. Made in 1948 from the 1927 novel of the same name, it stars Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston (father of its director John Huston) as gold prospectors in Mexico. Strong recommend for GMs, partly for how it uses adventure to explore character. It is also the source of the often unattributed quote about the lack of any requirement to show anyone any stinking badges.

 

Thank you for listening! The hosts of this episode were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, with audio editing by Ross and show notes by James. We hope you enjoyed it. If anything in this podcast or these notes has spurred your interest then we invite you to come and chat about it on our friendly Discord. 

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