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The name’s Davenport. I review games.
And with all the freaks I deal with in this gig, it was pretty swell to meet the rep from Eos Press the other day. Guy was dressed to the nines: top hat, frock coat, gold watch onna chain… the works! ’Bout time I started gettin’ some respect from these game companies, I figured. Granted, the gas mask the guy hung up along with his snazzy top hat on the hat rack seemed a little off… but what the Hell, right? Top hat!
“Good afternoon to you, Mr. Davenport,” he says. (Brit by the accent. Nice touch.) “I am Dr. Henry Heckyll. I’ve been retained to purvey to you a copy of this fine bit of recreational interactive literature, Unhallowed Metropolis.”
A doctor, no less! Quite a step up from nutty spacemen and yodeling cowboys and poo-flingin’ apes and talkin’ Commie cockroaches and all those goddamn zombies. (Not quite as nice as that Willow dame from Eden, but you can’t have everything, right?)
“I’m all ears, Doc!” I says. “So what’s the skinny on this game of yours?”
“Ah, your enthusiasm is so refreshing!” he says. “But, on the subject of refreshment: would you mind terribly if I took a bit of libation to soothe my travel-parched throat before we begin?”
He takes out a nice little hip flask to illustrate. Well, I guessed that knocked him down a peg or two on the classy, but hey, who’m I to complain about a guy needin’ to hit the sauce now and then? “Libate away!”, I says to him.
So he does.
That’s when he turns into a hairy, smelly goon 7’ tall and just about as wide.
“GREETINGS, YOU WORTHLESS %#@*!” he says. “I AM EDWARD SEEK, AND YOU WILL REVIEW UNMET – I LIKES T’CALL IT UNMET, Y’SEE – AND YOU BLOODY WELL WILL SING THE BLOODY PRAISES OF ITS PAGES AND PAGES OF SMOG-SHROUDED NEO-VICTORIAN ALLEYWAYS, ANARCHIST BOMBINGS, LURKING VAMPIRES, RAMPAGING WEREWOLVES, STALKING MADMEN, DEMENTED GENIUSES WITH IMPOSSIBLE TESLAPUNK WEAPONS O’ MASS DESTRUCTION, AND ALL THOSE GLORIOUS GORE-SOAKED SHAMBLING ZOMBIE HORDES, OR I WILL BLOODY WELL @*^% YOUR *^%$#ER UNTIL YOU HAVE TO $*&# WITH A &*%#ING $#$&!~%#*$^+/, SAVVY?”
Me, I just sit there and sigh… not just because of the Doc turnin’ into a big smelly palooka, but also because goddamn zombies were involved after all.
“Y’know,” I says, “Tellin’ a reviewer the grade he oughta give a game ain’t exactly professional.”
“DO I LOOK LIKE A #^%&ING PROFESSIONAL TO YOU?!?”
He sure didn’t. But I figured if I wanted to keep my review copy – and my head – I’d better keep my trap shut about what he did look like. Or smell like, for that matter.
Anyway, now that you ingrates know what I had to put up with yet again to get the job done, here’s the review. Me, I gotta go haul the Doc outta my office. Turns out that hooch of his doesn’t just turn you into a talkin’ ape with an attitude – it also leaves you with one helluva hangover.
Substance
Chapter 1: Unhallowed Ground
The history of Unhallowed Metropolis diverges from our own in 1905, when a Romero-style zombie plague strikes the world. Various nations survive, adapt, and rebuild, including Iceland, Germany, France, and about half of the U.S.; however, the focus of the setting is England, which survived primarily by evacuating urban centers, shelling the crap out of them, and (eventually) moving in to re-take them from the remaining zombies (a.k.a. “animates”). Now fast-forward a full two centuries to the game’s actual era: England has rebuilt its industrial base and has made huge strides in some areas of technology. In particular, massive, crackling Tesla arrays provide wireless electricity to everything from flashlights to lightning guns, and alchemical science allows for vastly extended lifespans... for those who can afford it. Meanwhile, the social stagnation of the extended recovery period combined with nostalgia for the nation’s glorious past have kept Victorian fashions and mores in place, albeit with a few nods to the changed condition of the world.Unfortunately, scientific breakthroughs and nostalgic national pride haven’t put much of a dent in the bleak status quo, for several reasons.
For one thing, all the faults of Victorian England remain in these “Neo-Victorians.” The Dickensian gulf between the rich and poor has grown wider than ever before, and living conditions for the poor have grown even more abysmal. For another, science has created as many problems as it’s solved: among the latter, Frankenstein monsters, Mr. Hyde potions, and even genetically-engineered werewolves.
Furthermore, the zombie plague – known simply as the Plague – never ended. Anyone who dies may rise as a flesh-hungry animate, leading to mandatory cremation under most circumstances. That, in turn, has led to the creation of massive public crematoria whose steady plumes of ash combine with the thick smokes of a renewed Industrial Revolution to render the urban air foul enough to make gas masks a necessity. And zombies aren’t the only undead skulking about, either. Vampires have shown up in the wake of the plague as well, and hauntings have grown both undeniable and rampant.
Most ominously of all, the Blight, a corruption of the land itself, slowly crawls across the world, leaving the ground inhospitable to natural flora and fauna but spawning (among other things) corpse-hungry Ghouls.
The end result is a claustrophobic, polluted, terror-filled world. The Blight and the Plague rule the Wastelands beyond the city walls, while poverty, poisoned air, and assorted monsters and madmen render urban life almost as hazardous. It’s a Romero zombie apocalypse as envisioned by Shelly, Stoker, and Stevenson in a production directed by Tim Burton.
I love the setting. I love the imagery. I could get lost in its smoggy bleakness.
I only have a couple of issues with the setting, really.
One is the fact that the very same faithfulness to Victorian society also seems a hindrance to adventuring. Even if the GM and players come up with a plausible reason for characters of different social strata to work together, chances are the time will come when the group will need to get information from somewhere some members just don’t belong, leaving the others twiddling their thumbs.
The other is the game’s tendency to drop tantalizing hints about certain aspects of the setting without giving direct answers. In particular, the book at several points mentions the existence of creatures other than those explicitly described – creatures dwelling in the Wastelands and in depths of the London Underground and the Thames, for example. Are they other varieties of undead, escaped lab experiments, or creatures spawned by the Blight? If the latter, then the book really ought to explain that such mutations are possible.
Chapter 2: The Formula
This chapter covers the basic mechanics of the game, along with their application in combat.UnMet uses a very simple die mechanic for almost everything: Attribute + 2d10 or Skill + 2d10 vs. either a variable target number starting at 11 or an opponent’s roll of the same sort. Double ones are a critical failure, and double tens are a critical success – not a mechanic I’ve ever liked much, since it doesn’t take character ability levels into account.
And speaking of mechanics I generally don’t like, did you notice that “or” in the last paragraph? This is, indeed, one of those systems that disconnects attributes from skills.
Well… sort of.
Here’s the thing: in my playtest session at GenCon ’07 – run by Nicole Vega herself in full creepy Victorian regalia – this division didn’t bother me, largely due to the elegant interplay between Attributes and Skills. (More on that in a moment.) However, upon reading the rules, I found them wildly inconsistent regarding the Attribute/Skill separation. Many opposed rolls are Attribute + Skill + 2d10 – Grappling, for example. Some Stunts (see below) allow Skill-only rolls to become Attribute + Skill rolls. Most annoying to me, the Acrobatics skill always uses an Attribute + Skill roll. It just seems to me that the system wants very badly to be Attribute + Skill, keeping the two mostly separate out of a desire for simplicity. I’d prefer consistency, myself, making the system Attribute + Skill across the board, bumping up the difficulty levels by 2-3 points and having Stunts that add Attributes to otherwise pure Skill rolls instead double the relevant Attribute before adding it to the Skill.
The Attributes in question are Vitality (a.k.a. strength), Coordination, Wit, Intellect, Will, and Charm, each ranging from 1-5 for normal humans. An additional derived Attribute, Prowess, is the sum of Coordination + Wit. Skills likewise have a 1-5 range.
So what determines whether something is an Attribute roll or a Skill roll? Again, the system seems inconsistent. Generally speaking, Attributes cover general abilities and Skills more specific ones. Surprisingly for a Victorian setting, there are no interaction Skills; instead, all such rolls fall under Charm. And while there are a number of skills that might seem to be related to Coordination but are not – Firearms, Melee Combat, and Drive, for example – climbing is not a Skill, but rather an application of pure Coordination. As a practical matter, this means that if you want your character to be a master of seduction or cat burglary, you’ll have to spend the higher number of points required to improve an Attribute rather than a Skill.
Corruption
You may have noticed that the roll modifiers tend to be pretty small when only Skills or Attributes apply. I noticed the same thing when playing the game – it seemed pretty easy to fail. Which makes the Corruption mechanic all the more insidious. (But in a good way.)
All characters begin play with a single point of Corruption in one of three paths: Physical, Desire, and Drive. As Corruption increases, characters become progressively more monstrous and mad. At six points, the characters become monstrous, mad NPCs, assuming their Corruption hasn’t killed them outright.
Now, here’s the weird part: Corruption also serves as the game’s “Hero Point” mechanic. For every point of Corruption a character possesses, he may re-roll a die once per session. However, the character may get another re-roll beyond that limit by taking an additional point of Corruption. Yes, that does mean that the character will then have more “free” points of Corruption to spend on subsequent re-rolls. In addition, characters may invoke Corruption to get a sudden lucky break – again, gaining another point of Corruption.
As you can see, Corruption is designed to feed on itself. Characters get more re-rolls by becoming more Corrupt, and once they’re more Corrupt, they get more re-rolls. (Which means they’re getting progressively freakier as well, so they’re probably needing more re-rolls just to keep from getting lynched by an angry mob.)
All’s not lost, however. Characters may choose to fight their Corruption. Unfortunately, it’s an arduous process that requires players to seriously roleplay their characters’ struggle to reform, and that only happens a single point of Corruption at a time. “Falling off the wagon” exacts a steep cost, however: if a reform-minded character ever takes an action that would add a point of Corruption, the character jumps right back to his original level of Corruption and then add the additional point.
Now, add in the fact that combat in the game is quite deadly and that Corruption points may be spent to re-roll survival rolls, and you can see why the text plainly states that characters are basically doomed in a manner reminiscent of Call of Cthulhu Investigators. This may or may not be to your players’ liking and probably ought to be made clear going in.
What I don’t get in all of this is why being lucky would make a character Corrupt in terms of the setting. Yes, characters can also gain Corruption behaving – well, corruptly – but that, we’re told, is meant to be an extreme circumstance. I’d much rather have the rules reward corrupt behavior with Corruption as a matter of course, thereby increasing the luck of nasty PCs and providing ample reason for turning to the Dark Side, so to speak. As it is, the Corruption mechanic feels disconnected from the setting and designed to annoy players rather than to present roleplaying challenges.
Combat
As previously mentioned, combat in this game is quite deadly. It’s also quite fast, which I love.
Combatants determine initiative by rolling 2d10 + Prowess. They may then take a number of actions allowed by their Prowess scores. Attacks are 2d10 + [Weapon Skill] against a flat difficulty of the target’s Coordination + 11. If struck, the victim can choose to spend an unused action from the current round or “borrow” one from the following round to make an active defense roll; if this roll beats the original attack roll, the attack didn’t actually hit.
If the attack does land, the attacker rolls 2d10 and adds a damage modifier based on weapon type and (for melee attacks) Vitality. Hit location is determined randomly, the value of any armor protecting that location is subtracted from the damage, and any remaining damage is compared to the Wound Table to establish whether the resulting wound type is Flesh, Serious, Incapacitating, or Fatal. Incapacitating Wounds result in a randomly-determined Complication, which receive multiple pages of gruesome details about such things as brain damage, punctured lungs and pierced eyes; however, these only have a mechanical effect after combat ends and the wounds are examined, the logic being that pure adrenaline keeps the combatant going until then.
Note that the accuracy of the attack has no direct effect on damage. While I’m not thrilled with that, I think that the extra damage to be had from targeting specific body parts makes up for it – especially since, when fighting the undead, characters will be making frequent headshots anyway.
Playtest: That may seem like quite a few steps, but I found that combat flew by in the GenCon ’07 demo game. (Granted, one of the game’s authors was running the game.) We started out playing as members of the Deathwatch – basically the anti-zombie branch of the military – on a search-and-rescue mission into the Wastes. Well, actually, we were playing multiple members of the platoon, Paranoia-fashion, because these were not PC-level characters. Essentially, it was a demonstration of how “Joe Average” fares in the UnMet setting. (Answer? Not very well…) Almost immediately, we ran into a well-armed pack of Ghouls. In the intense firefight that followed, combatants on both sides seemed to drop after two hits at most, and a slight mishap involving my character and a grenade managed to wipe out an entire squad. (Sorry, guys.) After a costly victory, we then took on a small group of zombies, which didn’t take a whole lot of effort – they were part of the expedition we’d been sent to pick up, they were shuffling toward us from a good distance away, and they weren’t responding to our radio transmissions. Horror movie characters might’ve assumed that they were just really tired and had a radio malfunction. We, by contrast, proceeded to light’em up. (Literally, in my case. My current character at the time – my third or fourth, as I recall – was packing a flamethrower.) None of them ever got close to us.
Then, as reality show hosts like to say, the game changed. We assumed the roles of the Undertakers protecting the survivors of the expedition. These were PC-level characters, and we just had time to exert our newfound prowess by wiping out another group of zombies without breaking a sweat before the Thropes showed up. I’ll be describing those in just a bit. For now, just know that they’re pretty much the most unstoppable critters in the rulebook.
Yes, we took them down, due in no small part to a demolitions expert detonating a whole belt-load of grenades. Barring that, I’m not sure exactly how long the fight would have lasted. Thropes regenerate at a really disheartening rate, and my character bobbled a grenade yet again – yeah, I was really rolling crap that day – but managed to take only a nasty wound. The main point is that while our characters felt like badasses, they felt like badasses who were fighting for their lives. Combat was fast, combat was intense, and everyone felt as though he could die at any moment… all of which is exactly how I wanted combat to feel in this setting.
Chapter 3: Playing God
The title makes this sound like the GM advice chapter, but nope – it’s the character creation chapter.
UnMet comes very, very close to using a class-based character creation system. Players first select a Calling, which determines the starting character’s automatic skills, optional skills, Features (special Calling-based abilities), automatic Qualities, and assets.
Most features are the equivalent of Stunts (see below), tweaking attribute or skill use to allow for a re-roll, add a skill to an attribute roll, substitute one skill for another, or remove penalties. Some of these are automatic to all members of a Calling, while others are chosen as the character adds levels to a certain skill (again, like Stunts). A few, mostly in the case of the Dhampir, are simply intrinsic abilities, such as the Dhampir’s immunity to London’s polluted air and ability to get an attribute boost from blood-drinking.
The Callings:
- Aristocrat
- Criminal
- Dhampir
- Doctor
- Mourner
- Undertaker
Aristocrat, Criminal, and Doctor are all pretty much what you’d expect, aside from the fact that the Doctor can go the “Dr. Frankenstein” route. The Dhampir is the half-living spawn of a human and a vampire – a graceful, wildly passionate being with a blinding hatred of the undead in general and vampires in particular. They needn’t drink blood but get a nice power-boost if they do. (I suppose they fill both the “angsty vampire” and “angsty dark elf” niche as far as PC races are concerned.) Mourners serve the wealthy who wish to bury rather than cremate their dead by watching motionlessly over the deceased for days at a time and skillfully decapitating it with a huge kukri-like blade called an Exculpus if it turns animate. (Essentially, they’re a sort of Neo-Victorian ninja.) And the armed-and-armored-to-the-teeth Undertakers work as government-licensed anti-monster bounty hunters.
This seems like an awfully restrictive list to me. The combat-oriented characters – Dhampir, Mourner, and Undertaker – all come from very particular backgrounds. The Aristocrat and Criminal Callings are much more flexible, as is the Doctor at first blush; however, the Doctor’s special abilities lie exclusively in (unsurprisingly) medicine, so while he’s the go-to Calling for scientific sorts in general, only Doctors of the medical variety get the Calling-based goodies. Worse still, Doctor is the only calling with absolutely no starting combat skills – as in, they aren’t even optional. This means that unless the Doctor creates for himself an undead bodyguard or the like, he will be thoroughly useless in a fight, albeit quite handy after one – sort of like the old-school D&D cleric that every group needed for the healing abilities but that nobody ever wanted to play.
Now, the chapter does include an option for custom character creation, albeit a fairly anemic one. Such characters rely exclusively on skills and Qualities rather than Features by default, although they can trade in a starting skill for access to a Calling’s Feature with GM approval.
After selecting a Calling, players spend 25 points on attributes and 25 points on skills. Attributes begin at a score of 1, skills at a score of 0; in both cases, the cost of each level is equal to the score of the level itself. So, to purchase an attribute at 3, I’d first have to purchase it at 2, for a total of 5 points spent. To get at skill at the same level, I’d have to buy it at 1 first, for a total of 1+2+3=6 points. Unspent attribute and skill points contribute to Custom Points (see below).
One of my favorite aspects of the system is the concept of Stunts: cool extra abilities that the player can select for the character at every level of certain skills. For example, a character skilled at firearms might pick up the ability to quick-draw at one level of skill, the ability to aim as a free action at the next level, and the ability to dual-wield his pistols at the next. Essentially, this emulates the Feats of d20-based games but bases them on skill level rather than character level. Frankly, this idea makes me wish even more strongly that this were an attribute + skill system, since Stunts would serve as such a great way to tip the balance in the favor of characters whose total score in an ability is based mostly on skill rather than natural ability, reflecting the skilled characters having picked up more “tricks of the trade.”
Note, however, that I said that characters can buy Stunts for certain skills. Sadly, Stunts are mostly the purview of combat skills. Other skills allow for the selection of skill specialties at each level, which give the character a +1 on rolls involving the specialty. It seems that the majority of the non-combat Stunts are actually Calling Features. That’s not so bad, but again, it makes things that much more difficult for players trying to assemble a non-combat-oriented custom character.
At this point in the process, players have a number of Custom Points to spend in an amount equal to 5 + (Unspent Attribute & Skill Points x 2). These may go to beef up the character’s attributes and skills – albeit at a higher cost than when purchased with attribute and skill points themselves – but may also be spent on Qualities, as can points earned from taking Impediments.
While some of the Qualities and Impediments are understandably generic, others have been practically basted in the setting’s juices. Here the players can inflict some of the grotesque prosthetics previously mentioned upon their characters, for example. Or perhaps the character is “Good-Tasting,” meaning that if it eats humans, it’s coming after you first. (“Bad-Tasting” has the opposite effect, naturally.) Even some of the otherwise bog-standard Qualities and Drawbacks have a distinctly UnMet spin. My particular favorite is the Quality “Giantism,” which means the character is big and tough… and will die prematurely, becoming prime specimen for dissection and/or resurrection by mad scientists. (Of course, some might not be inclined to wait for even a premature natural death...)
Chapter 4: Tools of the Trade
The equipment listed in this chapter not only provides a comprehensive price guide to all manner of products and services, but also helps flesh out the nature of day-to-day life for the Neo-Victorian. Hearkening back to the earliest days of D&D, the chapter includes prices for clothing, food, lodgings, and sundries of all sorts.
Of course, the chapter reserves its loving descriptions for the tools of the PC: weapons, armor, and assorted handy scientific doo-dads.
I found myself disappointed with the melee weapon write-ups for the most part. While some did include flavorful modifiers – the two-handed sword, for example, is both difficult to parry and difficult to use to parry, for example – details frequently seemed out of synch with their descriptions. The dreaded Exculpus of the Mourners stood out in this regard. Supposedly a meticulously-crafted and priceless weapon, it offers just a +2 damage modifier – no better than a common club with a nail through it. I suppose the Stunts possible for Exculpus-armed Mourners makes up for this a bit, but it still seems odd.
Ranged weapon technology seems to hover somewhere around WW1 levels, including clip-fed pistols; however, because the major military engagements since the Plague have been human-vs.-undead rather than human-vs.-human, careful aim (for headshots) trumps suppressive fire. Hence, while fully automatic hand weapons are possible, they’re uncommon. In fact, bolt-action rifles are still the standard, and Vickers machineguns are the military’s main auto-fire weapon.
On the other hand, Tesla technology allows for some lovely energy weapons of all sorts, from a “timidifier” that’s frequently lethal to lightning rifles to wall-mounted death rays designed to blow zombies (or anything else) to smithereens.
Tesla arrays also beam power directly to all manner of electrical appliances, from streetlights to battery-free flashlights. That makes me wonder at the apparent lack of electric automobiles, which were already in production at the time of the Plague and which would be imminently practical if batteries were no longer a factor. True, there aren’t many places to go, but I have to believe that the wealthy would much prefer to travel across town in an enclosed powered carriage, safe from the city filth and smog. (And horses, being difficult to keep in the city and requiring respirators of their own when outdoors, are supposed to be luxuries anyway.)
For you cyber-fetishists out there, the prosthetics available in the setting are downright creepy. Vibrating metal implants called “Rattlers” give a soulless robotic voice to victims of throat cancer, Eerily-glowing “Oraculums” allow those missing an eye to gaze into the spirit world, and the literally heartless can live on (temporarily) thanks to the “Ticker,” a clockwork metal heart with a winding key protruding from the chest.
Chapter 5: The Anatomy of Horror
When it comes to monsters, UnMet takes the path of quality over quantity. In fact, this chapter – the bestiary, more or less, although some creatures fall under the following chapter as well – contains only three creatures. (Granted, the descriptions include multiple versions of each creature.)
On the positive side, the chapter crafts its horrors with loving care. Each entry truly brought the creatures to life (so to speak), giving me a thorough view of their history (or as much as humans have learned on the subject), behaviors, and impact on human society.
Given their sheer numbers and importance to the nature of the setting itself, zombies are up first. The basic version pretty much follows the Romero standard: flesh-eating mindless shamblers vulnerable only to the destruction of the brain. The chapter includes two much rarer versions as well: the “Zombie Lord,” a more intelligent animate with the ability to control hordes of its lesser kin, and the modular zombie, an animate with the ability to control lost body parts.
The setting includes two breeds of vampire: feral and intelligent. The former hearken back to the bestial imagery of the medieval vampire, while the latter more closely resemble the modern stereotype of the suave Gothic vampire. Neither breed exhibits much in the way of mystic powers and vulnerabilities – fear of crosses, the ability to shape-change, etc. – although both can mesmerize their prey. The section also re-states information on the Dhampir, giving more attention here to the possible methods of their creation.
Finally, the chapter details the Ghouls: degenerate half-living creatures that may or may not be the result of human exposure to the Blight. The beasts form large tribes in both the Wastelands and London’s Underground, with individuals from the latter treated as barely-tolerated pests by the citizenry. Ghouls start out as squat, strong, and agile monsters not unlike Lovecraft’s ghouls and slowly age into enormous, bloated, immobile Jabba the Hutt-like beasts overwhelmed by madness. The section gives the Ghouls a distinct society and outlook that makes them much more than orcish goons, and their intelligence, limited though it may be, allows for interaction with humans in anything from comedic to horrific circumstances. Unfortunately, their description leaves one large obstacle to my suspension of disbelief: their dependence on human (or Ghoulish) flesh to survive. I don’t see how there could be a sufficient supply of food for Ghoul tribes in the Wastelands, where humans are (presumably) vanishingly rare, nor for tribes within the city, where Ghoulish law forbids attacking and eating live humans and where most corpses get put to the torch to prevent reanimation.
Chapter 6: Miracles of Science
Despite the name, this chapter doesn’t focus on advanced Neo-Victorian science in general, but rather on medical breakthroughs… including the reanimation of the dead and the creation of new life.
The section starts with drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. Drugs that can achieve effects from the mundane (like getting you stoned) to the miraculous (like increasing healing time or intellect) to the absolutely horrific (like causing your flesh to agonizingly warp and cover your eyes while bone spurs burst through the skin, all to temporarily incapacitate you). Here, too, you’ll find the setting’s equivalent of Dr. Jeckyll’s formula – called (appropriately enough) “Hyde” – complete with stat modifiers for those inclined to take a swig. All of the drugs include ingredients, legality, cost on the open market (if legal), and the time and difficulty of creating them.
The middle portion of the chapter covers the state of Neo-Victorian medicine in general, which is, to put it mildly, damned impressive. Aside from psychiatric care, which has only progressed slightly from the pre-Plague years, medical care can cure most any disease, replace missing limbs, and rejuvenate the entire body… for those who can afford it, of course. The poor generally have to make do with home remedies and “miracle tonics.”
The last and most substantial section deals with the various means of creating new life forms and of reanimating the dead. Alchemists can create half-living artificial humans called Anathema (which may be chosen as a Calling, by the way); brutish, mentally feeble Homunculi for use as assistants (think Igor); and chimerical Lesser Homunculi cobbled together from both human and animal for use as… well, whatever you'd use such a thing for. They can also create their very own zombies known as Mercurials. (If you’re wondering why anyone would want to create more zombies in this setting, keep in mind that (1) some scientists believe that understanding reanimation can lead to the defeat of death itself, and (2) they’re called mad scientists for a reason.)
Other scientists called Galvanists rely on the power of electricity to create Prometheans: undead assembled from the body parts of multiple “donors” as well as from mechanical elements. Some of these are basically robots with undead brains; others (known as “rimmons”) are primarily organic creatures in the vein of Frankenstein’s monster.
By far the most fearsome creation is the Thrope (as in lycan-): a failed attempt at creating an anti-zombie supersoldier that instead created almost unstoppable infectious monsters that are part werewolf, part caveman, and part Incredible Hulk. The creatures start out as involuntarily shapeshifting humans who gradually evolve into full-time Thropes. The original formula that created the Thropes has been lost, but some scientists see the Thropes’ ability to regenerate from any injury that doesn’t kill them outright – including the effects of aging – as a key to immortality; hence, said scientists tirelessly seek to re-create the formula. (Are you starting to see a pattern here?) The effects of the various imperfect Thrope formulas floating around combined with the various stages of Thrope infection – not to mention pure-breed Thropes – allow sadistic GMs to utilize everything from the Lon Cheney/Wolfman-style monster-as-victim to savage bands of bloodthirsty, bone-crushing horrors ready to show Mourners and Undertakers the true meaning of “combat monster.”
Chapter 7: Smoke & Mirrors
StyleOkay, this is the GM advice chapter.
Here, the book gathers the various foes described elsewhere in the book and suggests how they can best be applied in an adventure. While some of it may be self-evident, the section really does make everything fit together.
The chapter suggests three basic methods for creating PC groups: the combat-oriented group, the non-combat-oriented group, and the mixed group. This really drives home the limitations of the Callings. Setting aside custom characters for a moment, you’ve got three Callings based around combat and three that aren’t. Moreover, of the three non-combat Callings, two – the Aristocrat and the Criminal – will be vital to get clues in their respective social circles, where other characters may be hard-pressed to follow and where they’ll have little to do even then. Essentially, what we have here is a variation on the hacker issue that’s annoyed players in cyberpunk RPGs.
Conversely, Aristocrats, Criminals, and (especially) Doctors just won’t have a whole lot to do in any combat dangerous enough to pose a challenge to the fighter types without getting their Neo-Victorian asses handed to them.
Then there’s the question of why a mixed group would get together in the first place. The chapter has some okay ideas, but some of these require jury-rigging Callings to serve other purposes – the use of a Doctor as a consulting detective comes to mind. (And for that matter, Consulting Detective seems like an obvious Calling for a Neo-Victorian game. Thankfully, the game’s web site now offers that calling for free download here.)
After covering the awarding of Experience Points, the book suddenly returns to the rules with details on the mechanics behind scandals – how to avoid, inflict, deflect, and expunge them. This seems to me like one of those areas better left to roleplaying, however much the mini-game aspect of the rules may benefit players of socially-adept Aristocrats. Either way, it’s a strange place to include such rules, and an even stranger way to end the book itself. Intentionally or not, it screams “afterthought.” And, given the pages dedicated to the mechanics, it also screams, “Yet another place where information about psychics and ghosts might’ve been included.”
The artwork of this 8-1/2” x 11” hardback ranges from very good to outstanding, starting with the thoroughly eerie cover featuring an Undertaker in respirator and top hat gazing out from a distorted picture frame surrounded by a hellish mix of wire, chains, and gears, his Oraculum’s unhealthy green glow matching that of the title. The interior is exclusively black and white, but the art remains of high quality. I especially like the skillfully staged photographs incorporated into the book, including an appearance by Nicole Vega herself as a creature of the night.The writing remains well above average for a roleplaying game, evoking the mood of the setting with skill worthy of a good novel. Unfortunately, the text tends to run on at great length in places – a trait that may well hearken back to the style of Victorian literature but is awfully tiresome for someone who just wants to learn how to play a game. Worse, it takes up space that could have gone to cover key setting elements that have instead been relegated to future supplements, like psychics and ghosts.
That problem only compounds the issue of the book’s poor organization. While I like the way the book hits the fundamentals of both the setting and the system early on, digging up the specifics takes more effort than it should. For instance, the first and only example of the sort of post-Plague fauna to be found in the Wastes shows up not in any sort of bestiary, but rather in the description of the drug it can be used to produce. For that matter, all of the monsters in the setting created by science show up in the science section rather than alongside their fellow creatures in Chapter 5. Furthermore, both Dhampiri and Anathema are available as Callings; however, the Dhampiri appear in both the character creation and monster sections, while the rules for Anathema as PCs appear only in the science section, far from the eyes of players reading up on how to create their characters.
The kicker, of course, is the lack of an index to make this quirky arrangement more navigable. Trying to find some detail regarding the rules or (especially) the setting requires a sharp eye and a very good memory.
The quality of the proofreading far exceeds that of the editing, although I did run across several “page XXXX” references.
Conclusion
I love this setting. Adore it, in fact. And even with its flaws and good ideas that could be even better, the system works for the sort of bloody action the game seeks to evoke.
I just wish I had a better idea of what to do with it. The game seems to revolve very much around monster-hunting, which in turn involves dramatic-but-deadly combat; yet a large number of these monsters will require the social skills of combat-inept characters to find. That’s the case largely due to the urban setting. The Wastelands with their apocalyptic abandoned cities seem ripe for exploration and survival horror, but the sparse number of potential adversaries and the even more sparse descriptions of the Wastelands themselves make that approach problematic.
So, if you love the idea of the setting, give the game a chance; otherwise, I’d go with something more generic that can cover the same concepts, such as All Flesh Must Be Eaten. If you do love the idea of the setting, my money’s on you being completely enamored with it after reading the book… and, if you’re like me, wishing for more. A little less depth and a little more breadth could have gone a long way here.
That said, the style and atmosphere of this dark world flow as thickly as the smogs of Neo-Victorian London. If you want a setting that combines both traditional and survival horror with a Victorian sci-fi twist, this is the game for you.
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