Thoughts on Unhallowed Metropolis

[Stone Dog]

hose of you who don't know already... I give you the intro!

Unhallowed Metropolis™
An Introduction to the Unhallowed Metropolis™ Role-Playing Game
Unhallowed Metropolis™, the gas-mask chic role-playing game of Neo-Victorian horror.​

It has been two hundred years since first the outbreak of the Plague, when without warning the dead rose to feed on the flesh of the living. No nation was spared. Everywhere, the animates, or zombies as they came to be known by the common man, prowled the streets, killing and spreading the infection as they passed. For each victim claimed, a fresh animate rose to join the ranks of the risen. As panic and mass hysteria gripped the public, the cities were abandoned. Countless millions perished in the chaos that followed. Overnight, humanity found itself on the brink of annihilation.

Seventy percent of the world’s population succumbed to the Plague, secondary epidemics, or the mass starvation that followed.

The year was 1905; it was the dawn of a new dark age.

In the following decades, the survivors to learned to fight back and to retake what they had lost. Recalling the golden age that had come before, the Neo-Victorians set out to rebuild their shattered nation. Despite the heavy cost in human life, they reclaimed their cities one by one until only the sepulchres, or plague cities, remained under death’s dominion. Though the survivors have successfully constructed a new world on the bones of the old, their world remains rife with undreamt of terrors.

London 2105. The capitol of the Neo-Victorian Empire is a vast, densely crowded city surrounded by fortifications fifty-feet high. The dead walk the Wastelands beyond the walls, and spontaneous outbreaks of the Plague ravage the population within. It is only through constant vigilance and massed firepower that order is maintained.

Plague carts make daily rounds through the slums of metropolis to collect the remains of those who died the night before. Once the carts are loaded, grim plaguemen deliver their cargos to one of the dozens of public crematoria throughout the city.

Thick clouds of smoke billowing from countless factories co-mingle in darkened skies with the cremains of the incinerated dead. The dingy, haunted streets below are dimly lit by pale, crackling electrical light fuelled by energy broadcast from the city’s Tesla array. It is here that monsters are born to prey upon their fellow man. Lunatics maddened by desperation, fear, and overcrowding compete with vampires, animates, and ghouls for prime hunting grounds among the city’s slums and rookeries.

Residual psychic energy released from the deaths of countless millions during the Plague Years has worn thin the boundaries between life and death. All manner of spectral apparition gaze unseen upon the corporeal world; observed, in turn, only by mediums, those living souls born with the capability to communicate with the discarnate dead.

Driven by the public’s insatiable hunger for immortality, Neo-Victorian physicians search tirelessly for the Elixir Vitae. The fabled alchemical solution promises not only life eternal, but also the panacea for the world’s ills, the ultimate cure for the Plague. For many men of science, the search for the Elixir becomes a single-minded obsession that frees them from the confines of morality and ethical considerations. Though great advances have been made, most often such experiments produce Anathema, the misbegotten children of science.

Beneath the haunted streets, resurrection men and body snatchers hock their grisly wares at bloodstained meat markets. Their clients are degenerate ghouls and amateur anatomists who practice the outlawed science of reanimation.

Despite such horrors, there are those with the strength to fight the gathering darkness. From the heavily armed soldiers of the Deathwatch who guard the fortified perimeters of the metropolis to the detectives of New Scotland Yard who fight to hold back the rising tide of inhumanity in the streets, there are those who are called to defend the world from its monsters. There are also the Undertakers, the fearsome bounty hunters who stalk the undead abominations that prey upon those who walk the fog-choked streets, and the silent and lethal Mourners, who maintain a solemn vigil over the dead, ensuring rest eternal.

Above it all, the aristocracy gazes down from their monolithic manors with casual indifference upon the overcrowded streets below. Insulated behind walls of privilege, the Quality live in a world unmarred by the desperation that infests the lower classes. These barons of industry and scions of the noble families truly command the Neo-Victorian world.

Launched at GenCon in August 2007, Unhallowed Metropolis™ was written and created by Jason Soles and Nicole Vega. Deeply steeped in Victorian history and science, Unhallowed Metropolis was inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Nikola Tesla. The game features an incredibly detailed setting, a fast-paced and visceral combat system, an in-depth anatomical study of variety of supernatural horrors, and rules for the creation of alchemical solutions, reanimation of the dead, and the engineering of life itself! Eos Press is a Seattle-based game company founded in 2003 by Hsin Chen and Aron Anderson. In addition to its work on such leading-edge products as Weapons of the Gods, Eos has also partnered with other companies & designers to produce popular games like Creatures and Cultists!, Delta Green, Godlike and Lesser Shades of Evil. For more information about Eos Press, contact business manager Brad Elliott at info@eos-press.com.

"This is a great new addition to Eos's family of products," said Brad Elliott, business manager for Eos Press. "Our company is committed to excellence in game and setting design, and Unhallowed Metropolis™ will be an example of both."

Jason Soles is an accomplished writer and artist. In addition to being co-founder of Catalyst Studios, he is also an independent film maker. His gaming credits include work for Privateer Press, Wizards of the Coast, and WizKids.

Nicole Vega is a talented newcomer to the game industry.

UNHALLOWED METROPOLIS™
Hardcover B&W RPG Core Book, 392 pp.
Debut Date: August 2007
Release Date: October 2007
Retail Price: $39.95
Stock #: EOS 1300
ISBN: 0-9710642-9-6

Personally I've been waiting for this game to come out for well over a year and I'm glad to say that I'm finally going to see it given form! Not as glad as the designers I imagine, but still.

The question poses itself though... I have a month and a bit to gather ideas and then the book will be in my hands maddened by Drive Corruption and I'll have to pour through it in a frenzy.

What to do until then? Gather inspirational materials and muse about the beginning!

First of all, I need to get together a list of things to start reading. I already have Perdido Street Station, which while having very different tones has an atmosphere that I really must emulate somehow. New Crobuzon has that bleak strangeness of an alternate London that I want to tap into. The same thing applies to Neverwhere. If I strip out the faerie tale theme of that book, London Below(?) would make a good inspiration for the tangled streets of a black marketplace where anything could be sold among the grime and castoff leavings of the city. one scene in particular involving stumbling upon a corpse propped up comes to mind. Cool Air and Pickman's Model from Lovecraft lore might have to crop up in my reading sometime too.

Netflix is my friend! Blade Runner for the rain and filth and the hunting of things that are not men. From Hell for tainted investigations and the secrets the Aristocracy keep. Island of Dr Moreau is a must for obvious reasons and by some extension I could do far worse than to consider the original comic of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the novels it derives from.

And what to do with it all? All I know right now is that I want to start in media res with a retrieval assignment gone terribly wrong outside the walls of London in the Wastelands. An undertaker, a criminal and a doctor at least, maybe more depending on the group I can get for it. We'll start out in some nearby township. Not far, but not close enough. Waiting for evacuation a tense game of cat and mouse between the animates and the living, trying to survive for a mere... say hour of actual play before they get picked up somehow.

Then comes what I'm really looking forward to. The dramatic reveal and description of London. Whatever they were going to fetch is slightly dangerous or suspicious to carry around, but their contact wasn't at the meeting point. Really he was just detained, but the players don't need to know that right away.

A lot of what happens in London will depend on the way the book pans out, but I really want to get something a little more fleshed out before October comes.


What about other people? What are you hoping to draw from and plan for with this game?