Amused instead of revolted by the vile ectoplasmid she’s conjured, the Medium weathers the cold caress of her pet. What will she command of it? Some unsavory deed, best left to the already-damned? Mere amusement for a colleague’s soiree? A personal pleasure, perhaps, developed over intimate years of truck with the dead? She is enigmatic and serene, with a demon on a leash.

The Medium will be featured in Unhallowed Necropolis, the follow-up book to Unhallowed Metropolis, “the gas-mask chic role-playing game of Neo-Victorian horror.”

Unhallowed Necropolis TM is the supernormal source book for Unhallowed Metropolis TM, the gas-mask chic role-playing game of Neo-Victorian horror. The 250 page, lavishly illustrated book introduces ghosts, psychics, and mediums to the Unhallowed world. Unhallowed Necropolis features the secret history of the supernormal, 5 new Callings, rules for psychosurgery, and a treasure trove of aethertech devices. Look for Unhallowed Necropolis in early 2009.

It’s finally happened. Jason Soles has managed to con me into throwing in for yet another retropostapocalytic nightmare. My illustrations for this book are currently several months overdue, mostly thanks to my immense investment in making the project perfect. I swore off RPG illustration and look what happens. I hope you’re all very fucking happy.

Unused shot for Unhallowed Metropolis.

Modeled by Zack and Allison. Photo by Robert Brown.

The moustache, dear friends, belongs to me. And it is a doozy. Human hair, delightfully brown, and set lovingly into a flesh-colored mesh base, which we savagely glued to Zack’s upper lip. He was not allowed to remove it until his tears softened the spirit gum.

Unhallowed Metropolis is the tabletop roleplaying game of retropostapocalyptic horror that I’ve been working on for the past couple years. The process has been arduous, the art draining, the photography persnickety, and the entire concept so ludicrously appealing that I did it anyway.

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. […]

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. […]

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.

I heard recently from Jason Soles, one of the writers and project heads (the other being Nicole Vega) that the first UnMet book will be released at GenCon Indy, a gigantic gaming convention in Indianapolis. I will probably be in attendance to sign and shmooze, we’ll be hawking books and prints, and you’ll finally get to see what the hell we’ve been posting about for the past however many months.

Unhallowed Metropolis: Zombie Touchup, originally uploaded by Ectomo.

Behind the scenes at Unhallowed Metropolis‘ last photoshoot, a leprous RN burnishes a zombie’s buboes. Photo by Robert Brown.