The Hushed Metropolis is a multiplayer card simulation set in Greyharbor, a fictional American city in the mid-twentieth century. Choose a background, earn a living, and build enough influence to pursue your own ambitions. You might buy a factory, organize a gang, run for office, or start a cult. Other players are pursuing their own plans in the same city, often with an interest in something you own.
A match follows the city from its early struggles over money and territory into an open conflict between occult powers. The businesses you build and the people you recruit remain useful throughout. By the final night, they could be helping you take a throne, or helping someone else stop you.
A city worth taking over
Choose from nine distinct characters, including Vivian Pryor the casino dealer, Jack Mahoney the washed-up private eye, and Ilse Dietrich the occult scholar. Each character has a different background, and no character appears twice in the same match. Your starting cards and livelihood differ, but where you go from there is up to you.
Buy businesses and property, negotiate a price, and put the deal in writing. Recruit muscle to collect protection money and seize territory. Investigate crimes, publish scandals, and bargain for votes. Win the mayoral election and you can appoint a player as police chief, pardon someone in jail, and issue a city order.
These pursuits put players in each other's business. A burglary gives a detective something to investigate. A corruption story can damage a candidate's campaign. A promised vote can disappear when the ballots are cast in secret. If you are arrested, you stay in jail until dawn the next day unless you pay bail or someone else posts it for you. Getting elected matters because the mayor decides who gets a badge, who walks free, and which city order comes into force.
Put your resources to work
Your contacts, equipment, property, and information appear as cards on your personal table. Place them in action slots to talk, work, investigate, or pray. Several actions can run at once, so you can follow a lead while another job pays the bills.
Cards have uses beyond the obvious. Evidence can support a prosecution or a blackmail attempt. The same hired muscle can guard a business or attack a rival. Experiment with cards whose properties meet an action's requirements to discover new recipes and occult practices.
If you're not sure where to start, every character has a list of Goals for the match, laid out in early, middle, and late stages. Pick one and the game shows you which card goes into which slot. A tutorial is included as well.
Make deals, and watch your back
Other characters also appear as cards. Make contacts, hire help, negotiate contracts, and form a crew of two to four players. Depending on who leads it, your crew can become a company, gang, or cult. Send a counter-offer if the terms don't suit you. You can also post a bounty on the public board: whoever gets the target arrested or caught in a scandal within one in-game day collects the money. Deals bring resources and obligations, while successfully turning on a crewmate breaks up the crew, leaves the victim with a grudge against you, and becomes known across the city.
Take an interest in the occult
As the city's supernatural activity grows, new paths open according to what you've done during the match. Any starting background can pursue them. Study forbidden books, enter pacts, undergo a transformation, or learn to hunt those who do.
These abilities come with rules you can exploit on either side. A vampire lives by feeding, but is weaker by day. Before attacking someone's property at night, they need a contract bearing the owner's signature. Blood oaths bind allies together, and anyone who breaks one pays for it. Knowing what a rival has become can be as useful as acquiring a power yourself.
In the final struggle, factions compete for districts. Offer your Source's relics to take its throne and hold the Great Ritual there, or track down a rival's hidden sanctum and burn it before any Source grows too strong. The outcome depends on each Source's control of the districts. Everyone aligned with the winning Source shares in its victory. If no Source meets the victory conditions, the Hush wins. Players also receive a separate ranking across the whole table, and the city's ending and each player's personal ending are revealed.
