Unhallowed Metropolis

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Unhallowed Metropolis is a Grimdark Screampunk RPG set in a dystopian future Earth that teeters on the very edge of annihilation.

In December of 1905, human civilisation almost ended. Across the world, the dead began to rise and feast upon the flesh of the living. A years-long war followed, in which survivors desperately fought at first for mere survival, and later to reclaim the zombie-infested cities. Eventually, the more powerful nations of the time managed to return to something resembling a stable society, with large numbers of humans crammed into fortified cities while Animates (the 'scientific' term for zombies) prowled the Blighted countryside.

Skip forward two centuries to the year 2105 and things aren't much better. The game focuses primarily on what's going on in London, and portrays an exceptionally grim view of life in a post-apocalyptic metropolis. The Plague which gave rise to the animate hordes has mutated, producing various undead monstrosities. Bloodthirsty vampires and human psychopaths have come crawling out of the woodwork to prey upon the faceless masses. Many of mankind's attempts to fight or harness the Plague have backfired spectacularly, though they have also resulted in some unexpected and rather awesome advances in the fields of medicine, alchemy and galvanics. To try and avoid from going mad at the hopelessness of everything, humanity has reverted back to an idealized form of the "last golden age of civilization", resulting in a "Neo-Victorian" culture with the knobs twisted way up.

There's been 200 years of zombies, 196 years of restless ghosts, 177 years of flesh-eating ghouls, 161 years of Thropes, and 152 years of vampires. Entire countries and regions no longer exist in any meaningful sense of the word. Bizarre blighted wastelands are expanding throughout the world. The dominant power of the world is a new Victorian Britain with its social inequities and depravities turned up to 11. France is ruled by a mysterious king who is almost certainly not human, and what little information on its state escapes its borders suggests that terms like "unholy" and "unnatural" barely suffice to describe what's going on there. The air in London is so foul that going out without a gas mask or at least a damp cloth can lead to unconsciousness and death. Anarchists plague London, failing to realize that although there are very real social ills, dealing with them by dismantling the government entirely will just end up killing everyone still living in the UK. On top of all this, it's hinted that the Zombie Apocalypse is actually the least of the world's problems — that the world has become wrong on some deep, fundamental level, and the rise of the undead is just the most obvious symptom. And the heroes? The only people who can make a difference, make things better? They're suffering from physical, mental, or moral corruption — as is anyone who isn't doomed to inevitable death — and they're likely to just get worse as they fight for humanity's future. This is not a nice setting.

If this sounds a bit much, you may want to head for something happier and more optimistic. Like Warhammer 40,000. Or the (New) World of Darkness.

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