excited
spross, knows more about than I do.Now, however, there's a new rpg in town: Unhallowed Metropolis.
UnMet, as it's called for short is the Neo-Victorian roleplaying game of gas mask chic. Published by Eos Press, with the official website here at The New Dark Age, the game looks like it's going to be brilliant. I haven't got my copy of the game yet, but here's something that a friend of mine, who got his pre-ordered copy, wrote up for me...
"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 the metropolis to collect the remains of those who died the night before. Once the carts are loaded, plaguemen deliver their cargo 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 fueled 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."
~ Unhallowed Metropolis page 3, written by Jason Soles and Nicole Vega, published by EOS Press, 2007.
Doesn't it just sound *delicious*? :)