Tabletop Game / Red Markets

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Red Markets is a roleplaying game of economic horror set in the post-zombie apocalypse United States. It is the premier release by Hebanon Games and Caleb Stokes.

The Blight caught people off guard when it emerged, not because they hadn't been prepared for it by decades of B-movies, but because they dismissed it as click-baity fake news. As a result, the Federal government, still reeling from the economic troubles of the early 21st century, gave up on salvaging the western states of the USA and just cut them off.

Eventually, some of the survivors in the West, or "The Loss" as it's commonly referred to now, coalesced into Enclaves fortified against the hordes of walking Casualties. These Enclaves survive by scavenging the carcass of the United States and trading their findings over the Ubiq, a network sustained by a series of balloon relays in the stratosphere. This is where the players come in, they are Takers, scavengers for hire taking jobs to recover specific goods, scout out reclamation sites for the Department of Homeland Quarantine and Stewardship, raid DHQS black sites, or just kill Casualties for the bounty on their ID cards.

Just because the world ended doesn't mean there aren't bills to pay.

The Carrion Economy sourcebook gives an overview of the rest of the world and includes rules for interacting with the global economy, or at least what’s left of it.

Tropes:

• A Child Shall Lead Them: The Convert is an aberrant Casualty that is rumored to lead entire herds of zombies in organized attacks on enclaves. They have all been reported to have been young children.
• Adventure-Friendly World: An apocalypse where the internet has survived and there's plenty of people willing to pay good Bounty to secure stuff from before.
• After the End: The Crash has largely settled into something fairly stable. Though Gnat defies this, since according to her, there's nothing "post" apocalyptic about the Loss.
• The Alternet: The Ubiq, a network maintained by stratospheric balloon nodes, inspired by Google's Project Loon. Originally it was developed to counter the death of Net Neutrality but after The Crash, it became the only reliable form of communication.
• Amoral Attorney: The sample Loan Shark in the game, Ted Hancock, was once the representative of a particularly cutthroat student loan agency, who specialized in "difficult cases". Before the Crash, he once convinced a court to seize the money a cancer patient had put aside to get chemotherapy. Afterwards, he once forced a woman to choose whether her or her son would become a Sex Slave. It's mentioned that he sees his job as remaining basically the same - "pay up or die slow".
• Always a Bigger Fish: The Loss is full of badass crews, cult leaders, deadly loan sharks and other movers and shakers. But even the most powerful of those is a scavenging warlord, while the DHQS are an actual fully funded first-world military. Luckily for the Loss they're usually spread too thin to care what anyone there is doing, but if someone's unlucky or stupid enough to draw their attention, it's mentioned that their reclamation squads have wiped out entire enclaves in minutes.
• Apocalypse How: Class 1. The Loss is an anarchic hellscape, but civilization continues to hold on in unaffected areas, even if it's precarious.
• Apologetic Attacker: When infectees are in the Vector stage, the Blight takes over everything but the poor victim’s language center. Cue your friend screaming in apology as they try to eat your face.
• Appeal to Force: Defied. The first step in coming up with a Taker the players have taken a loan from is pinning down why the heavily armed and trained zombie hunters can't just tell them to take a hike when they ask for repayment.
• Appropriated Appellation: The Loss itself. The term originally came from news stories dismissing the abandoned region as "written off as a loss" or "lost territory", which the people stuck there began using as their own name.
• Artificial Limbs: Very high-maintenance but reliable, not uncommon among survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse, especially Immune who escaped the DHQS's marrow farms.
• Beware the Living: Even After the End, it's a capitalist dog-eat-dog world out there and people are willing to kill for it. The game explicitly says that casualties are not the antagonists. They're more like weather. Humans are always the antagonists.
• Blatant Lies: The DHQS has stated it intends to reclaim the Loss in 20 years. Of course, that's what they said last year, and the year before, for the past 5 years.
• Blessed with Suck: Congratulations! You're Immune! You can't be infected, you don't have ugly black veins and you don't have to quarantine yourself, and your bone marrow can produce a cure for the Blight. That means that you are the most valuable trade good in the Loss, and if anyone you can't trust completely learns about it, you'll be sold and scraped to buy someone a retirement plan.
• Boom, Headshot!: The usual way to dispose of a casualty. It isn't even considered a called shot; every Taker knows how to put one in the head of someone shambling mindlessly toward you. Sometimes, an Aberrant isn't vulnerable to headshots, which is one of the most terrifying things you can see in the Loss.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: In-universe example. Nearly every problem in-universe can be solved by spending money, you can use it to skip legs^note  Mini-encounters during your character's journey, get information, even get higher rolls ^note  in-universe it represents you either spending more ammo for a spray-and-pray approach or eating more food in a day which allows greater physical exertion , it’s even used as the method of leveling up the PC’s, however, as both living and achieving your goals requires that money, you need to assess the benefits vs the costs.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: People may say that the taker “Cousin Fucker” is savage and unhinged, but him and his group(GILF) are some of the only people who try to honor the deceased elders, putting down the zombies and even giving them proper burials.
• Code Name: Enforced, All takers are known by their handles while in the profession, this helps prevent people from tracking them down once they retire or stealing their identities.
• Cozy Catastrophe: While the Americas, Africa, most of continental Europe and Asia fell to the Blight, some countries like Britain, the Nordic countries, Saudi Arabia (now the world superpower) and Australia escaped largely intact.
• Crazy Sane: Discussed but ultimately defied. Banhammer notes that its very possible he is in fact just insane rather than a Vessel of the Blight but, if so, he's seen far too many sane people end up devoured. However, Gnat describes Banhammer as the worst case for a taker, and the actual sanity rules rules have trauma and delusion as straightforward negatives.
• Crazy Survivalist: The Vindicated are the survivalists who bunkered up before the Crash. They tend to be insufferable assholes now that they've been proven right, and their skills and useful goods make them common warlords.
• Cult: Several new fanatical faiths have arisen in the wake of the Crash, known collectively as "Believers", notable examples include:
  • Black Math: Dedicated to evening the score by killing as many Vectors and Casualties as possible before they join the ranks of the dead. Nothing else matters but adding more tallies to those they tattoo on their skin. The problem comes from those who believe Latents count toward the tally, or from those who'll sacrifice an innocent to subtract a mob of casualties.
  • The Chosen: A group of Latents and some Immune who believe they've been divinely chosen as those who will inherit the Loss, given how they can't be infected by the Blight.
  • Crusaders: Most of the Mad Doctors and Mad Scientists on the wrong side of the fence to join DHQS ended up joining their possibly hopeless quest to find a cure for the Blight, no matter how many Casualties and Immunes they have to dissect. Fortunately, they're willing to offer their medical services, but it costs an arm and a leg, sometimes literally. Made even worse by the fact that they didn't all start as lunatics- it's outright stated that since the Blight literally defies physics, the medical professionals who worked hardest to try and understand it just ended up losing their minds instead.
  • Detoxins: Their theology is some mixture of veganism, neo-primitivism, and organic non-GMO farming. Most are just New-Age Retro Hippie types, but then there's the green zealots and Animal Wrongs Group types who'll kill you for owning a dog.
  • Holy Communion: They believe the Immune are holy, so they eat them.
  • The Meek: An Apocalypse Cult that believes the Blight is God's wrath upon mankind, and thus they should actively spread it, to the point of infiltrating Enclaves with syringes of Blight to inject themselves with.
• Cursed with Awesome: Being a Latent means that everyone treats you like crap, you have to stick to the quarantine section of town and you'll go hot the moment your brain dies, but you're too vital to Taker crews for most enclaves to write off entirely, and you're immune to re-infection without being a meal ticket for some asshole who wants to farm your bones.
• Deadly Euphemism:
  • The DHQS are an expert at this, and where a lot of the slang in the Loss comes from. "There are high-casualty events" (There's zombies everywhere). "This area is written off as a loss" (we abandoned everyone there to be killed by zombies"). "We authorize reclamation squads" (we send heavily armed gunmen to shoot everyone).
  • Black Math have boiled the war with the Blight down to maths - every attack is either an addition (more humans get infected than casualties are killed) or a subtraction (the other way round). Their ultimate goal is to die in a "Significant Subtraction"
• Death Seeker: Members of the Black Math cult. For them, survival and retirement isn't the goal. Their goal is to die 'making a Significant Subtraction' in the difference between the number of Casualties and living. If they can add to the tally before that happens, so much the better.
• Divided States of America: During the Crash the federal government decided to write off everything west of the Mississippi river as a Loss, leading to the current divide between the Loss and Recession.
• Doomed Protagonist: A character who doesn't have a retirement plan is "lost for life." They're going to stay as Takers until their luck finally runs out; either they die on the job or crack under the pressure (which usually amounts to the same thing). Banhammer, one of the narrators, embraces this; he's already committed to living his life in the Loss. Same thing with the Black Math, who don't want to survive or make it out - they want to keep subtracting until the day they die.
• The Dreaded:
  • The DHQS are the bogeymen of the Loss. When a reclamation squad comes out, they come out to kill, and a single squad can leave an enclave in ashes. And then there are the stewards; DHQS sleeper agents who are planted in the Loss until the time comes for them to do their job.
  • Aberrants are pure horror. Casualties normally work in a predictable way, and everyone knows that you shoot for the head, but an Aberrant breaks all the rules, which is scarier than anything else; Banhammer's segment on Aberrants finishes with someone else quoting H. P. Lovecraft. The mechanics enforce this; it doesn't matter how hard you are, encountering an Aberrant will leave you shaken at best.
• Elite Mooks: Trained opponents are opponents with formal training, giving them an advantage when you try to make rolls against them. Fighting trained opponents is a sign that you're messing with someone's vital interests, and you'll only succeed if you're cautious, prepared, and willing to burn some resources.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Bounty can be spent on either Equipment Upgrades or skill training.
• Evil, Inc.: Due to the theme of the game many of these have popped up since the crash including but not limited to Singularity Security Solutions, Many Hands LLC and Alosine who operate Mercenary, Slavery ^note  Technically the slaves are actually prisoners who are “repaying their debt to society”, though this doesn’t stop them from straight-up buying slaves to fill out their numbers and Human Experimentation respectively.
  The Rulebook: Some jobs even the stewards won’t do, but war crimes are Singularity’s bread-and-butter.
• Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems: The reason why a Player Character is going to risk life and limb is that even with a Zombie Apocalypse going on there are still bills to pay.
• Fallen States of America: Life in the Recession isn't great, a good chunk of the population lives in tent cities erected in vacant parking lots, the economy has reverted to an agrarian state, and public education is history. Though for most people it's still better than life in the Casualty-infested Loss.
• Fantastic Racism: Many people are downright hostile to Latents. ^note  People that are infected and show signs of infection but won’t zombie out unless killed While somewhat justified in that they are highly infectious and turn into fast-moving vectors if killed, It doesn’t excuse people executing them on-site or treating them like filth. Players aren't immune to this either- the rules even heavily suggest that Latent Takers shouldn't wear any form of head protection, just in case.
• Fantastic Underclass: Most Enclaves force Latents to live in isolated camps by the fence, which they're usually guarding. It's somewhat justified as they can set off a localized Zombie Apocalypse when they die.
• Forbidden Zone: The Palo Verde exclusion zone, 100 miles around a melted-down nuclear reactor. "Phoenix's Ashes" is one of the most dangerous places in the Loss, perhaps the most dangerous, and even the nigh-fearless Banhammer won't go there.
• Game Master: Called "The Market" here, as befitting the game's themes of economic horror.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Advised both against and for in the section on enemies with advantage.
  • The book advises that if you're using an enemy with advantage, you should telegraph it ahead of time, particularly if they have multiple advantages. Players should know that they're dealing with someone's vital interest if they're facing trained opposition, should know that they've seriously pissed someone off if a gifted adversary is coming after them, and determination advantage is pretty much reserved for the Final Boss.
  • On the other hand, an Aberrant is supposed to be a complete unknown. They're a sign that the rules have completely broken down, they don't need to be foreshadowed at all, and if you meet one, the smart course of action is to run like hell.
• The Gift: Some adversaries have the "gifted" advantage. These are natural-born masters of violence and the 1% among the player crew's enemies, a threat so powerful that you can be driven insane just by knowing they're after you. Mechanically, this means that there's no burning resources to do better against them; you've got to either have skill or will to come out on top.
• Harder Than Hard: The Bust rules are designed to add an extra measure of fuck-you to players' lives and make it less likely that they'll ever see retirement. "No Budget, No Buy" is probably the harshest, trapping PCs in Perpetual Poverty by psychologically preventing them from using a windfall intelligently.
• Hopeless War: It's made clear several times that no matter what happens, everyone is screwed: there are too many Casualties in the Loss for anyone to ever eradicate them all, and the Blight spreads so easily that their numbers are always increasing. Even if somehow all the Casualties are killed and the government is able to reestablish control of the the Loss, the economic, physical and social devastation of the quarantine are irreparable, and the government would not survive the sudden loss of control. The economic situation is also perilous at best, teetering on the brink of apocalypse at any given time. At a more personal scale, Takers are trying desperately to get enough Bounty to escape the Loss and into the relative safety of the Recession, but not only is that goal almost unreachable to begin with, most Takers don't actually settle well into the Recession anyway.
• Hospitality for Heroes: Takers can gain rep spots for doing good/awesome deeds, these can be bought up during Negotiation to get more money from the jobs, after all it’s gonna be pretty bad PR to extort some of the few good people in the loss. This trope is also inverted if your characters gain negative rep spots which can be used against you, they can also only be used once after which they fall into What Have You Done for Me Lately?.
• Living Is More than Surviving: This is a major part of the Humanity mechanic. Neglecting one's mental or emotional health can be just as deadly as any Casualty.
• The Immune: A small percentage of people are immune to the Blight, something in their bone marrow neutralizes it and then their body flushes it out. Latents, on the other hand, are infected but the Blight turned to its "cold" state after infecting them, so they have the Blight in them but they remain in control of their body until they die and get up as a Vector. Latency sometimes happens spontaneously, but usually, it's the result of Suppressin, a drug produced from the marrow of the Immune.
• Impromptu Fortress: most enclaves in the zombie-infested Loss are pre-Collapse buildings hastily converted into improvised fortresses. Notable examples include a mall with a wall made of wrecked cars, a fitness club powered by zombies on treadmills, a hunting and sports superstore controlled by feuding groups of anarcho-capitalists, and an entire Taker group that specializes in converting retirement homes into new enclaves.
• It Can Think: Converts, if they actually exist, are zombie children who have retained intelligence and can control the zombies around them. Suddenly, the once-mindless horde is using tactics, waiting in ambush and using complex traps - the fluff has them laying landmines.
• It's Personal:
  • This is mechanically established by a "determined" adversary. This is an opponent with the same Will to survive as the PCs, who's dedicating that will to taking them down...and is able to use the Luck Manipulation Mechanic against them. This is supposed to be limited to major antagonists; a gifted and determined enemy is by definition Final Boss material.
  • This is also one of the rumored Aberrants, the Stalker - a casualty that somehow remembers one person from their life, and constantly pursues them to the exclusion of all other prey. Banhammer's is his mother, if you trust his story.
• Katana Superiority: Zig-Zagged in-universe. Swords are usually laughed at due to the fact that during the Crash, most people who believed in Rule of Cool grabbed their swords and went out to fight zombies. Unfortunately, realism bites back as many died due to lacking any actual skill or experience. However, if you actually specialize in the sword, it's one of the best Melee weapons in the game, and anyone using it this late into the apocalypse are usually master swordsmen.
• Kill Tally: Members of the Black Math cult tattoo tally marks on themselves every time they kill a zombie. Their leaders have what's known as "the face full of fives".
• Kill the Creditor: Defied in the section on Loan Sharks. It's a game rule that the loan shark is not afraid of you and has the power to collect from you if you don't pay, because any other source of loans would have long since gone out of business.
• King in the Mountain: While presumably not actually true, this myth how the UK got through the Crash - by having someone declare himself the Reincarnation of King Arthur returned at the time of dire need, become absolute monarch, massacre the Tories and reclaim Wales with a sword. Hipster has no idea what the hell's going on there and fully expects it to collapse any day now, but she can't deny it's among the most fun approaches to the post-Crash word.
• Legally Dead: Everyone left in the Loss when the Recession closed its borders is this. This is why retirement is so difficult, its not just bribing a border guard, the Taker needs purchase brand new identities for their dependents and themselves. A small fortune of bounty all together.
• Loan Shark: The only source of banking in the Loss. The game mentions that the majority of sharks in the Loss are killed either directly by people shooting them when they asked for their money back or indirectly by people bleeding them dry. This, unfortunately, means that anyone who makes a loan to the PCs must be someone's who's absolutely got the power to force them to pay it back.
• Loners Are Freaks: Played deadly straight. In the Loss, the term for a hermit is LALA (Last Asshole Left Alive). Almost by definition, these are even more warped than the usual nutcases, and they're usually deadly dangerous.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The Blight doesn't follow conventional laws of physics and resists all attempts as scientific analysis. Some people hold out hope this is just a limitation on our current scientific tools. Others aren't so sure.
• Meaningful Name: The term "Red Market" has multiple meanings IRL. Some use it to refer to the (often illegal) trade in human organs, while to some anarchist thinkers a “red market” is a market operating without government oversight where contracts and transactions are secured by threat of violence. The closest thing to the game's meaning is a market that's only legal because banning it would require the government to acknowledge its existence.
• The Mob Boss Is Scarier: The Loan Sharks are scarier in this instance. Any Loan Shark that survived this far into the Loss just has the firepower or political power to be the monster in any potential Mugging the Monster scenarios.
• Moving-Away Ending: The most common "retirement plan" option is for the player character to bribe their way across the border wall to start a new life in the Recession.
• Mundane Luxury: "Carrion Economy" discusses how while all settlements have, by necessity, enough to survive, very few have much more than that, and most things that we consider mundane are rare and expensive luxuries. As Hunter puts it, if you can find a reliable source of food, you'll be well paid. If you can find a varied source of food, people will write ballads about you.
• Mundanger: Gnat discusses how, for all the ambiguously supernatural monsters rampaging through the street, the primary cause of death during the crash wasn't the zombies. It was the cutting off of food, water and medication. You can shoot a casualty, you can't shoot a lack of insulin or all the food you have going rotten.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: You don't call them zombies, they're either "Vectors" or "Casualties".
• Nuclear Option: While the Hunter Administration settled for blowing bridges when amputating the western states, they nuked Canadian cities near the Recession. Making Canadians the biggest source of terrorism in the post-Crash world.
• One Last Job: A game mechanic in the long-term campaign called "Mr. JOLS" (Just One Last Score). Before a Taker retires they have the option to go on one final job that could buy them a real position of power or luxury, but which will very likely kill them.
• Our Zombies Are Different: They're caused by an "organism" (for lack of a better word) called Blight which takes the form of black tendrils creeping along the victim's skin. Upon first infection the Blight throws the victim into an unstoppable rage to spread it to as many victims as possible, before the "Vector" finally dies from either the internal hemorrhaging caused by the Blight or a hail of bullets. However, it doesn't stop there, the Blight then threads its way through the corpse forming a new nervous system controlled by a nexus in the victim's brain, rising after a couple days as a "Casualty". The rules also feature several 'special' Casualties, known as Aberrants. Just seeing an Aberrant is enough to cause Sanity Slippage, because it means the Blight could still get worse.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Blight, in an otherwise mundane and grounded modern world, is something deeply alien and unnatural. By all accounts it just appeared everywhere in the world at once, years of searching have found no trace of where it came from, and scientific analysis comes up with inconsistent nonsense. Even the staunchly atheistic Gnat is forced to admit that the supernatural theories are currently just as plausible as the more scientific ones.
• Removed Achilles' Heel: The Shuffled are a rumored type of casualty that don't need a head to live, making the only reliable method of destroying them useless. Banhammer does note that there's plenty of more plausible explanations for how a casualty might survive a headshot - bad ammo, insufficient penetration, bad angle - so they probably don't actually exist. Or so everyone desperately hopes, at least.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: The problem that literally everyone in the Loss has to deal with. When the government pulled back to the Recession, they declared everyone in the Loss administratively dead for a variety of reasons, including politics and economic necessity. This makes it very difficult for anyone in the Loss to get into the Recession because, if they have any documents proving their identity, that identity is invariably unable to enter because dead people don't cross borders. For Takers that are trying to get into the Recession, this means getting enough Bounty to bribe, cajole and blackmail people into making them administratively alive, in addition to getting additional documentation to meet the draconian requirements of DQHS to cross the barriers. Ironically, the Bounty that they're collecting is intended to prove other people are dead.
• Role-Playing Endgame: Player characters are trying to save up for a "retirement plan" that usually means bribing their way across the border wall from the zombie-infested Loss to the zombie-free but totalitarian Recession, though there's other possibilities suggested like establishing their own Enclave in the Loss.
• Rule of Scary: Lampshaded. The fact that the blight makes no scientific sense in bought up and one of the reasons the Crusaders ^note  A group that studies the blight suffers so much from Sanity Slippage.
• Sanity Meter: Called Humanity and divided into three tracks:
  • Detachment measures your connection to your fellow human beings; Detachment is threatened when you watch a loved one get their leg amputated.
  • Trauma concerns threats to your own body; Trauma is threatened when your own leg is amputated.
  • Stress covers everything else, but given the focus of the game mostly concerns itself with financial hardship; Stress is threatened when you have to clear out your savings account to care for someone with an amputated leg.
• Scavenger World:
  • Most Taker jobs involve salvaging something that the survivors couldn't bring with them at the time.
  • The prospect of "Bounty" is also this: due to the sheer number of casualties in the Loss, as well as the disruption to record keeping and vital statistics, no one knows who owns what in the Loss, and records in the Recession as only slightly better. The government pays money for driver's licenses and other documents because they're trying to determine what they can seize from the deceased without having to worry about next of kin. The economy of the US is thus based on figuring out who owns the things and places that you're scavenging. It's also noted that this isn't a good foundation for an economy, and only works because of the totalitarian government in control of everything, and even then it requires that the government not acknowledge reality to make it work^note In order for the government to pay people for recovering documents from the Loss, the government has to refuse to acknowledge that they're not in control of the Loss, as well as ignoring that the person that is delivering the documentation to them is themselves administratively dead, as the government declared everyone in the Loss as deceased in order to be able to seize their assets.
• Science Cannot Comprehend Phlebotinum: The Blight is "black shit". No matter how closely humans look or what tools we use, that's all there is - just featureless, homogeneous blackness, even at the atomic level. We don't know what elements its made of, we don't even know for sure its made of atoms. It's dense as a black hole while somehow being lighter than normal flesh, it's reactions to chemicals or energy are completely unpredictable and there's no indication of how its animating a body. Scientists who study the Blight either quit or Go Mad from the Revelation,
• Shrouded in Myth: The Aberrants, variations on the blight, include such things as smart zombies, animal zombies, zombies who track down their loved ones, zombies who can infect from a distance and zombies immune to headshots. Now, that's all rumours and no-one's ever found any hard proof of an Aberrant, so it could be that none of those things actually exist. They might well just be normal zombies mythologised by scared, unstable people jumping at shadows. Or...they might not be.
• Shoot the Dog: Discussed. Gnat talks about how it's possible that The Extremist Was Right, and that the Hunter Administration's brutal and ruthless behaviour really was necessary to stop the death of everyone in the USA. Certainly, she can't think of a better plan herself. However, as one of the people who was considered acceptable sacrifices, she reserves the right to hate them for what they did anyway.
  The Recession can have its math, but the Loss gets to keep its hate.
• Stupid Evil: Discussed in "Carrion Economy", where Hipster notes how they rescued a slave who was being forced to clean toilets. The slave turned out to be an extremely skilled engineer, who helped improve Ubiq City's greenhouses to allow for wine and easier antiseptics. Hipster's amazed at how the slavers found skills that most in the Loss would give an arm for and literally threw it in the toilet, and says that's the main way the global economy works now. Everyone's so busy killing and exploiting each other than every useful thing they're fighting over is on fire.
  In general, Connoisseur’s story mirrors the global economy’s general approach. Do everything you can to secure instances of remarkable talent, expertise, and endless potential. Do this enough times to save the world a dozen times over. Now, chain it to a stake in the ground and waste that potential on the most short-term, useless shit you can imagine. That’s the Carrion Economy.
• Technically Living Zombie: Vectors are people who have fairly recently fallen under the sway of the Blight, and despite being rabid, psychotic killers intent on spreading the disease, they’re still very much alive. Although when their bodies finally give out either through the Blight’s toll on them or a survivor defending themselves and they’re not disposed of through headshot, they’ll turn full-zombie (Or Casualty) and reanimate within a few days of their death.
• That Man Is Dead: Banhammer considers the person he was before he became a Latent to be dead, and him to be a new entity emerged at that point. This seems a fairly common stance among the Chosen in general.
• They Would Cut You Up: The DHQS and Crusaders both have a history of horribly unethical experiments on Immune, Latents, and Casualties. And the DHQS still harvests bone marrow from the Immune to produce Suppressin K-7864, named for the number of attempts it took to get the formula right^note each letter covered 9,999 people, meaning that they intentionally infected 107,864 people before figuring out how to keep them from turning Vector.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot: Travel time is calculated in Legs.
• True Companions: Generally averted. While you can have other PCs as Dependents (close friends), doing so means that it's that much harder on their Humanity when one dies. More successful Taker groups keep a certain degree of emotional distance from their teammates for this reason.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: The history leading up to the Crash relates several recent events such as the education bubble and the war on terror. Though there's enough of a gap for improvements in medicine, prosthetics, carbon nanotubes, and the Ubiq.
• Uninhibited Muscle Power: The Blight doesn't care about muscle damage so Vectors tend to be very strong and fast, until they drop dead and resurrect as a shambling Casualty.
• United Africa: After the Crash, the African Union combined its surviving members into a de-facto single state that is currently reclaiming the continent and is rising up to become a dominant power in the new carrion economy. Hipster lampshades this, lamenting that she comes off as an asshole American when discussing how the entire continent has united, and does note that some African nations (South Africa, most notably) retain their independence.
• Weird Currency: Thanks to the hyperinflation of the U.S. dollar, restrictions on the "ration dollar" distributed to Recession residents, and the DHQS placing a bounty on pre-Crash legal documents, the "gold standard" on both sides of the fence has become driver's licenses or "Bounty".
• Zombie Gait: Averted by newly infected Vectors, who are instead fast, but once they die and rise as a Casualty they tend to be a lot slower. To the point where headshots are no more difficult than a regular attack.
• Zombie Infectee: In the early days of the Crash, before Immunity and Latency or even the fact that not every bite carries enough Blight to cause infection were common knowledge, any bite warranted a bullet to the head. Now many Latents are treated like time bombs one heart attack away from starting a Vector outbreak.