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Chapter 1: Unhallowed Ground (76 pages)
In 1905, the dead rose and began to devour the living. Only an estimated 30% of the world's population managed to survive the Plague (as it became known) and the devastation that followed. Britain was in a better position than most countries; being an island, it could contain the walking dead without endless zombie reinforcements showing up from neighbouring countries. The game takes place 200 years after the Plague began. Most of the major cities have been retaken from the dead and are now walled fortresses, packed with humanity. Much of the social structure and conditions from the Industrial Age has been reinstated, complete with filthy air, filthy rich industrialists, an oppressed working class that slaves away in factories and anarchists hoping to make a better world or just bring the whole thing down. Not much is known about the fate of the rest of the world. Iceland, another island country, is also doing well, and the Prussians managed to use their nascent zeppelin technology with great success. France is a mystery; they seem to have dealt with the zombies, but no one is quite sure how. Some think that they've made a pact of some sort, but the details are unknown.
It's not just zombies that creep about menacing humanity. Vampires have also arisen, ghouls that may have once been human have their own dark hungers and the workings of science have brought about artificial life and augmented supersoldiers with a frightening tendency to go berserk. Wildlife and plants in most of the country is becoming twisted and unnatural. If that's not enough, humanity is in some ways its own worst problem. The poor working and living conditions for the majority lead to the occasional undead outbreak in the poorer quarters of London, as something as common as a cholera death can easily give rise to a new zombie outbreak in the city. These same conditions have led to endemic crime in the city and anarchist cells targeting politicians and police. All these stresses have also led to serial killers popping up here and there. Even when surrounded by forces that threaten everyone, people can't work together.
The book opens with two hundred years of history, and it's two hundred years of history that actually makes sense. There are some aspects that you can disagree with the reasons for (Victorian-style society still being in place after two centuries and the level of some technology are two), but the vast majority of it feels real. Much of the history is social, as opposed to endless accounts of zombie attacks. London as presented in the game has a feel of the Victorian London, but with a sensibility of a society that has a zombie plague to deal with. It feel lived in, and avoids many of the unfortunate tropes that city descriptions tend to have: criminals are mostly regular people with no other options instead of gangs with themed clothes or tattoos and characteristic weapons, for example. It's not standard-issue steampunk, with largely modern technology that's run by steam and shiny with brass, but rather how novelists of the time would have seen the future if they could have imagined a zombie apocalypse, which gives it a much fresher feel. The game is centered on London and most of the background deals with the Neo-Victorians, but you could play pretty much anywhere in the world without too much trouble. The countries that have managed to stay on their feet are strong and stable enough that war between them is a possibility, and there have already been skirmishes over limited resources. There is a host of possibilities of games to play here, and the undead hardly need to make an appearance if you don't want to. There's enough information to play aristocrats struggling for power, industrialists vying for wealth, criminals working on the big score... and that's just within the city. Outside of London you can try to retake the few cities still infested with the dead, try to perform a survey of the country, engage in international intrigue and more.
Chapter 2: The Formula (38 pages)
The system for Unhallowed Metropolis is new and fairly straightforward. Roll 2d10, add modifiers and compare to a target number. Kudos to the designers for having the "impossible" difficulty level actually be flat-out impossible, instead of a high number that players will actually achieve from time to time. For most non-combat rolls you're adding a stat or skill to the die roll, but not both. Stats are used for rolls against untrained abilities, like lifting heavy things, while skills are for trained abilities. Because stats and skills as a rule don't both get added, your Coordination skill has no effect on how good you are with a knife, which may be considered a bug or feature depending on what games you've played in the past. There are occasions where stats and skills both count, though. Coordination does get added to the Acrobatics skill, and your Concentration skill can be added to every roll made on your Will stat. I would rather have had a purer approach, personally. Some of the untrained abilities are odd choices; seduction is an innate ability you don't get better at, apparently. Stats and skills go up to 5 (rarely 6), so adding that to 2d10 makes very little a sure thing. This is intentional, and it encourages you to do everything you can to ensure the success of your actions, fight dirty, and use your Corruption (see below).
Combat is very brutal; it's pretty easy to get hit and armour isn't spectacularly effective. It'll take the edge off the damage, but it's much better to not get hit in the first place. Once you are hit, an optional roll tells you where and another roll how badly. Wounds are represented by wound levels, from Flesh Wounds to Fatal Wounds. There is a death spiral, but it's not incredibly steep and you only suffer the effects from the single most serious wound. A nice touch is that the second most serious wound level, Incapacitating, gives you a flat, uniform penalty while the fight is going on, but once it's over and the adrenaline wears off you can check to see exactly what happened to you, which is rolled up on a table. It's basically a critical hit chart with possible collapsed lungs and severed fingers, but it doesn't slow down play in the middle of combat unless you want it to. Undead creatures can always be taken down with a Fatal Wound to the head, but if you're not a crack shot you can whittle them away by doing enough Fatal Wounds to their bodies to shatter them beyond use.
Chapter 3: Playing God (80 pages)
This is the character generation chapter. Characters have six stats and many skills. Stats are generally used for unskilled abilities, as given above. For each skill, you get a number of specialties equal to the skill level of that skill that give you an additional bonus on the roll when they apply. Combat skills and a few others give you stunts instead of specialties. Stunts are special abilities, like choosing which body part you hit or having a longer range or better parries with your weapons.
Callings make Unhallowed Metropolis a quasi-class system. Callings are a combination social class, occupation and even race (in the species sense). Taking a calling gives you special abilities related to that calling, but if you don't think your character fits any of the callings given there are rules for making a character without them, hence the quasi-class description. One interesting calling is the Mourner, who sits with bodies while they lie in state for three days and deal with them if they should rise. The Neo-Victorian rich can afford to pay for this service, while the poor get cremated. Multiple callings can't be taken, even though it can make sense. An aristocrat (class) - Mourner (occupation) - dhampire (race) character should be possible, I think, but can't be made, as each calling has specific abilities that are pretty much essential to it. You could fake it by choosing one calling and picking skills that match the others, though your character would be lacking some of the specific abilities of its faked callings. There are some missing callings; why no Deathwatch (the soldiers who are specifically trained to fight undead) calling? Again, you can make one easily enough, but it's an odd absence. Mediums are missing, as is most anything related to spirits, even though they make several appearances in the book. This looks like a conscious choice due to space restrictions, and the next book in the series will include ghosts, psychics and the like. Although telepaths and mediums are mentioned in the book, they are never made out to necessarily be a key part to the setting, so not having rules for them doesn't feel like a burden or like vital parts of the game are being held back for splatbooks.
It's perfectly possible to make a character who is useless in a combat and still interesting and have good screen time in the game, such as a doctor who works on creating new life that is indistinguishable from normal humans or an aristocrat working her way up in society. Your entire campaign can be set up around making the perfect Frankenstein monster, trying to get the money, body parts and equipment needed while avoiding the authorities who frown on this sort of behaviour.
There is a sizeable list of qualities and impediments (advantages and disadvantages). Some of the qualities are combat-focused, while others (like blindness or haemophilia) are most definitely not. You can possess a private anatomy theatre, be believed dead, or be especially unappetizing to the undead, to pick three of the more unusual qualities. Various mental disorders are included as well.
Each character begins with a single point of Corruption in one of three categories (physical, desire or drive), and your Corruption score goes up from there. Corruption is something like hero points in other games, but in Unhallowed Metropolis it's more like antihero points. Each level has detrimental effects, but also allows you a die reroll once per session, so there's always a temptation to increase your Corruption rating, especially since the skills you're adding to the 2d10 roll top out at five. As your Corruption gets higher the hassles become more severe, and eventually it will kill you if it gets too high.
Chapter 4: Tools of the Trade (38 pages)
The equipment chapter starts off with a price list. Some of it is pretty mundane, with bonnets, dress shirts and suspenders, but gets more interesting with combat corsets, combat syringes and the Van Haller Lightning Gun and from there goes into some heavy weirdness with homunculus-grade artificial wombs, Dr. Merrifield's Pandemonious Timidifier and interface jars, which let you keep a brain alive in a jar. Higher-quality interface jars include input and output capacity as well as a means for moving about, so your disembodied brains can get up to shenanigans.
Combat items get some fairly lengthy lists, and its nice that you can buy your armour piecemeal or just buy full suits. Weapons range from the low-tech sword to the terrifying Van Haller Death Ray, which disintegrates you with enough force to make a five-metre radius crater and quite possibly disintegrate those unfortunate enough to be nearby as well. Other weapons include a gas-powered stake gun for taking out vampires and a combat shotgun with an interesting but (admittedly) useless folding scythe blade that is a collector's item. There are also syringe guns, useful for administering alchemical substances from a distance (see chapter 6, below).
Some technology hasn't increased much, like transportation (there aren't many places to go to). There are however two fields in which the Neo-Victorians have made great strides, those being electricity and medicine. The city contains a network of Tesla towers that power electrical ("galvanic") devices like radios and flashlights without the need for wires (oh happy day!). It also powers the galvanic weaponry used in the setting, recharging it over time while you're in the city. If you're out of the city, you can recharge pretty much any of the tools and weapons by means of an integral hand crank. Medicine allows lifespans to be extended to centuries and reattaching limbs is much easier than it is today. Medicine is covered more in chapter 6, below.
Chapter 5: The Anatomy of Horror (48 pages)
Zombies (five different varieties), vampires (two varieties), dhampires (sort of half-vampires, usually created by humans who managed to fight off the vampiric infection) and ghouls (possibly the descendants of people who tried to live in the Wastelands) are covered here in a lot of detail. Physiology, mentality (such as it is in the case of zombies), combat strategies and more are covered here. It does a very good job of making them feel like creatures with their own lives (er, sort of), and not just boring victims for your characters to destroy. Getting infected makes for a waiting game as you wait to see if your character succumbs. There is a little you can do to help the victim, but not much.
Chapter 6: Miracles of Science (78 pages)
Medicine is one aspect in which the Neo-Victorians have made great advances, and this chapter covers that field. Whatever brought about the Plague has made alchemy viable, and there's a large variety of drugs, herbs and alchemical solutions that range from simple chloroform to the horrible Ravager, which quickly and painfully twists and mutates the character's body to incapacitate him. Anti-aging treatment can keep you alive for three hundred years or so, if you've got the money. If your character is into more ambitious activities, there is always creating life, either anathema (human-looking) or homunculi, which don't pass for human. There are rules for playing as an anathema, if you'd like. Just hope that no one finds out the truth about your origins; anathema have no rights and are usually destroyed on discovery. If artificial life isn't your thing, you can try to raise the dead, either by injecting them with alchemical solutions or by stitching together parts of corpses with machinery and using galvanics to animate them. In the earlier post-Plague world alchemists came up with a serum that would let injected humans basically "hulk out" in an attempt to make zombie-fighting supersoldiers, but the changes ended up being permanent, and now they roam in the wastes, essentially immortal, indestructible, and very, very dangerous. Think you can make a better version of the serum? Go ahead. There are also the aforementioned brains in jars. There are rules for all this, so your mad scientist can really go nuts in several ways. This chapter also covers other, more mundane aspects of medicine and mental health in the Neo-Victorian age.
Chapter 7: Smoke & Mirrors (21 pages)
The final chapter is mostly GM advice, and much of it is ho-hum. The sections on running the game and plot seeds are nothing special, though ideas for antagonists are good. Scandals in Neo-Victorian society finish off the meat of the chapter, and while the advice is good some rules would have been helpful; with the various social skills, qualities and impediments, it should have been possible to have come up with some. The book ends with recommended reading, films, a glossary, bibliography and finally a character sheet.
Notes
There are a few problems with the game, from the lack of an index (really, how many times do publishers have to hear the cries of inchoate rage about this before an index is mandatory?) to the lack of a map of London, but the atmosphere of the game makes up for it. I haven't quite set up a game yet, so I'm not sure how the system works out in practice. Reading over it gives a feel of a simple and generally solid but slightly clunky system, but the more I think about it the more the clunks work out. If it's not to your liking, it should be easy enough to convert to another system.
One of the things that makes Unhallowed Metropolis so appealing is that the setting feels so lived in and appropriate to its time. The authors have put a lot of work into making a plausible future, and the detail goes to the level of the platforms of the political parties, if you care to make use of it. There are even legal decisions about the rich who voluntarily embraced vampirism to live forever. The qualities, impediments and skills allow you to make a wide variety of characters for a wide variety of activities. There are also little things that make it feel like the authors have really thought through what caused the Plague and how it's otherwise changed things, which is a nice feeling to have.
Stylistically, the writing is evocative of the time without being as long-winded as the literature of the time often is. There were a couple of times in the last half of the book where I had the feeling that things were being repeated, but all in all the writing adds to the feel. This is the first time I recall seeing photos in a gaming book that didn't look amateurish, which is quite an accomplishment. The drawn art is a mixed bag. Much of it I didn't like too much, but it's only after reading the book that I noticed this; while reading they added to the atmosphere.
In summary, Unhallowed Metropolis is definitely worth a look. It's an interesting, gritty, well thought-out, evocative world to play in.
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