Post-Campaign Update 5: Presidents, Kings, and other Wretchedness
15 days ago
– Wed, Nov 06, 2024 at 10:07:30 AM
Hello backers!
This month’s update is rich with new material, but also we’ve got to talk about politics a bit. We’ll do that first and get it out of the way.
US ELECTION, EH?
Originally there was going to be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek statement here about how the election results might impact international trade. Now the results are in but it's too soon to really know the effect on tariffs etc.. so we know there will likely be some impact, but not what form it will take.
In other words, we’re not quite ready to announce delays to Hollows but that might change between now and the next monthly update.
How cryptic.
RIGHT, BOOK!
Grant has written even more setting, and given that he’s moved on to writing campaign frames for long-term Hollows play I think he might be finished. The rotten cherry on the mouldering cake of The Isles’ setting is this description of its current monarch:
KING EOTEN - A pockmarked, decrepit giant of a man doing his best to drink himself to death before the Isles falls to a foreign power. Father of six awful progeny, half of whom are poised to claim the throne with appropriate timing, forgery, assassination or social pressure. In his sober moments, Eoten laments the loss of the empire and the slow destruction of his country; otherwise he sleeps fitfully, or shambles about Allhallow Castle in a dressing gown, or tries to have sex with one of his sisters. If he were to turn Hollow, the ramifications on the Isles would be tremendous; those in the know believe it’s simply a matter of time before the spiritual heart of the Isles falls to ruin.
The fish rots from the head, as they say.
We’ve now completed all the rules and all the setting, which is basically the bones of the book and the meat on top. We’ve got a few bits of gristle and sinew to attach, and some organs we still haven’t found a home for, but we’re bloody close to finished – which is exactly where we expected to be, but we’re still proud.
WRETCHED DOMAINS
Or, formerly, “the box of Hollows scenarios.” Manuscripts are flooding in faster than Chant, then Grant, can review them – along with art for them. Every Wretched Domain is a separate pamphlet, and has a very distinct visual style to reflect the unique ugliness of the Hollow it describes. Very rarely, as a producer, do I get to work on something that ranges from the gothic grandeur of Felix Klaer (superstarfighter)’s illustrations…
…to the bleakness of Daniel Vega’s Professor Armageddon for Kieron Gillen’s endless war.
It’s a rare treat, but Hollows is a rare beast.
LOST IN A FOREST
There’s one more piece of Wretched Domains news. One of our authors, Cassandra Khaw, won’t be able to complete their contribution in time for inclusion in Wretched Domains. The Hollow isn’t cancelled, just postponed. If Cassandra’s able to deliver it, we’ll release it in some form. We’ll make sure backers who purchased the box of Hollows at least get a digital version.
Fortunately, we’re surrounded by talented TTRPG designers, all of whom are poised to make Hollows weird in entirely new ways. We’ve therefore drafted in RRD staffer Jinn Hermiston to answer the question “what if an entire forest could hold a grudge?”
Nobody writes rural horror like Jinn, and that’s probably quite a good thing.
In the next couple of days, we’ll be removing Cassandra’s Hollow from pledge manager and putting Jinn’s up for pre-order. We’re sorry for any disappointment, but also absolutely shaken by what Jinn’s delivered, which is to say they’ve hit the brief perfectly. 10/10 unpleasantness.
OUTRO
Time to play us out with Sam Lamont’s bold experiment for the map of The Isles:
That’ll do for now, I think. Stay safe out there.
- Chant
Post-Campaign Update 4: Islands and Art
about 1 month ago
– Mon, Oct 07, 2024 at 01:02:19 PM
Hello backers!
We’re ushering in October with planchettes, wolves, sinking islands, and… pigs, which despite not being a stereotypically Halloween-y beast are great animals, and we should talk about them more often.
Writing
Grant has, under some duress, been writing things down about The Isles, as in the world outside of Hollows. The place where your Hunters come from, and the locations and society that shaped every single Lord of a Hollow. So, even though you’ll spend comparatively little time in the real world during a Hollows game, we feel it’s useful to put some of this information in the book.
We’re keeping it quite light: the aim is to give players and GMs enough material to get a feel for the place; a foundation to build character-specific detail on top of.
Here’s a sample for Forland (which means pig land), one of The Isles’ four islands:
Forland, located in the west, is the largest island of the four that make up the greater alliance. The warmer climate in the south and good soil mean that it’s easy to grow things here - compared to the rest of the country, at least - and as such the Viridian Temple has made great inroads towards taking it over. Much of Forland was reclaimed from the ocean with ingenious drainage methods, but the collapse of the Empire and subsequent loss of skills means hundreds of square miles of landmass return to the sea each year.
SLANG AND APHORISMS
“Get your hands in the dirt” - Stop complaining and do some work
“Like a pig in a church” - Causing chaos (affectionate)
“She’s got a headful of bees” - she’s clever/organised/diligent
“It’s all compost” - no effort is wasted, there’s something to be gained from losses
PEOPLE
The stereotypical Forlander is portrayed as curious, distracted and gently weird. The ingrained folk traditions of Forland run deep, and the Viridians have done their best to syncretise them with their agricultural faith, though some Old Faith beliefs and practices survive to this day despite attempts to subsume or destroy them. Citizens favour multiple, haphazard layers of clothing - often wearing more than one coat in colder months - and wide-brimmed hats, though upper-class Forlanders take a great deal of pride in wearing the smallest-brimmed hats available. (Wide brims are for the working class, who must work outside; civilised folk have no need to keep the sun out of their eyes.)
The full write-up also includes numerous locations – including Farrow, seat of the Viridian Temple – but we’ve got to leave something for the book.
Wretched Domains
Or, as it was previously described, the box of Hollows scenarios. This is progressing beautifully. Most of the drafts are in, artists have been briefed, and we’re starting to get sketches.
Watching an artist take a writer’s idea and breathe life into it is one of my personal favourite parts of production. It’s a part where I get to sit back and applaud other people’s talent, which is always fun… but it’s also the part where a scenario starts to feel real.
Look, for example, what Johan Nohr has done with Jay Dragon’s map for Jay’s scenario:
Or how some back-and-forth between artist and writer evolved this big furry friend:
Johan has expressly requested I remind you all that these are initial sketches – they’re far from the finished artwork. I can’t help that Johan’s sketches have so much energy and punch I couldn’t resist showing them.
Components
We keep being very nearly finished with the designs for the component kit, then we fiddle with them some more. This month, we’ve been finessing the Capacity tokens that firearm users will need. We’ve restyled them from bullet-shaped tokens with tally marks on them – which were fine, but were pretty chunky and we didn’t love how they looked in painted wood – into a cross-section of a revolver’s chamber which you can load with pegs to represent your ammo.
As always, Sam Lamont has knocked it out of the park and most of the way to orbit:
We’ve also restyled the Doom tracker as a planchette, in keeping with the spiritualism that shapes incursions into a Hollow. We haven’t picked a design yet (there’s not a bad one in the bunch) but we’re leaning towards Tree. What do you think?
Like Johan’s art above, these are just sketches, not finalised designs. But they’re close…
That’ll do for this month, I think. Draw your curtains, light some candles, and stay safe until the next time we speak.
– Producer Chant
Post-Campaign Update 3: DIY Hollows and New Words
3 months ago
– Fri, Sep 06, 2024 at 02:24:59 AM
Hello again!
How time flies when you’re making myriad self-contained worlds of amplified anguish and muted hope. The short version of this update is that we’re progressing nicely, and we’ve put some useful stuff on our website. The longer version is… well, the longer version is the rest of this update, I suppose.
Writing
Progress continues! Grant’s been thinking about Malignancies a lot over the last few weeks (I think he’s OK; I’m a little afraid to check). He’s been sketching out how Hunters perceive their effects on the real world, and the tendencies within each Malignancy’s Hollows.
By way of example, here’s what a Dominion Hollow looks and feels like:
Gaols bloom into sprawling dungeons, houses of government become nightmare warrens, and palaces rot away to show the blood and bones that built them. Armies march and murder across blasted plains and shattered cities. Legions of workers, faceless and nameless, tear themselves to pieces in service to their master.
Those in charge are physically larger than those who serve them, as they would be if represented in ancient art, and they bear oversized marks of office: great crowns, sceptres, robes, and staves, often tattered and always heavy. The ranks beneath them grow smaller, more shrivelled, and less distinctive as they descend in seniority. They take on bestial traits to denote their lower status, such as canine muzzles, a herbivore’s diet, or the wide-spaced eyes of a creature built to be prey.
Lords of Dominion (or their favoured lieutenants) often rely on manpower to move – they are picked up on palanquins, dragged onwards by cadres of devotees, or borne on the bent backs of broken men. Some might, similarly, eschew making direct attacks in favour of delegation, and rely on the blades of men-at-arms, the teeth of hunting hounds or distant batteries of cannon to get the job done.
Unlike their chaotic cousins, Hollows of Dominion tend towards order – or whatever twisted notion of order exists within the Lord’s shattered psyche. Night follows day, water flows downhill, and [a third one, not gravity-related] unless it would be beneficial for it to do otherwise. Right angles, grids and systems dominate.
Aberrant elements (such as intruding Hunters) are quickly identified and set upon so they can be destroyed or, perhaps worse, broken and reformed to serve the structures of power as another cog in the great machine.
Surveys
Surveys are still open! Please complete yours if you haven’t already. It will stop Backerkit sending you niggly little reminder emails. There’s no real rush, it just makes me feel better when I look at the behind-the-scenes Backerkit stats.
Print Your Own Hollows
We’ve built out the Hollows offering on our website since last we spoke. It now includes a very easy link to the free quickstart PDF (in case you’re one of the three people who backed Hollows who doesn’t already have it), plus a set of free print-and-play materials for home use.
Currently that means A4 and A3 copies of the tactical grid and all the tokens, plus form-fillable or printer-friendly (crucially not both in the same document) character sheets for the quickstart pregenerated characters. We’ll add blank character sheets once we finalise the design for them. I believe that if you download this pack now, you’ll get an email when we update it but don’t quote me on that.
Royal Blood
Now, it always feels a little tacky to mention one crowdfunder in another crowdfunder, but I think there’s a strong possibility that if you like Hollows, you’ll like this. Mana Project Studio (Seven Sinners, Nightfell) are crowdfunding an updated, beautified version of Grant’s 2016 tarot heist TTRPG, Royal Blood. We’re helping a little.
It’s rather lovely, and Mana Project are making an absolutely spectacular deck of tarot cards to go with the new edition. I strongly recommend following the project, if only to get a glimpse of the art.
That’s all for this month! I’m hoping we’ll be able to show you some layout and design progress next month, which will make for a more visually stimulating update.
Bye for now!
Producer Chant
Hollows: Exploration
3 months ago
– Thu, Aug 22, 2024 at 09:59:09 AM
We, as a team, have an unwholesome level of excitement for Hollows’ combat. Really, it’s sickening. We’re a bloodthirsty bunch. But it’s only a slice of what you can do in Hollows. Over the next few updates we’ll talk about roleplaying in Hollows, the world outside them, and the Hunters’ extradimensional sanctuary, the Refuge.
Exploration
When you’re in a Hollow but you’re not in a fight against an Entity, you’re in the Exploration stage of the game.
Surrounding each Entity in a Hollow are blasted hinterlands of rotten unreality where people, places, and things have been absorbed from the real world and remade into unsettling new forms. Exploring them is your group’s main chance for roleplay. They’re not just puzzles to explore, unless you want them to be; they’re also your opportunity as a GM to weave a story that showcases your Hunters, to introduce non-player characters, to encourage your Hunters to bond as a group and share time on camera.
A Hollow is full of people and stories for the Hunters to interact with. Clues to Entities’ true natures and histories are hidden in the details of the Hollow, and investigating them is a chance for Hunters to show off how they think, how they approach problems, and how they feel about what they discover. Vassals – the NPCs players meet in a Hollow – are there for players to interact with, form opinions about, sympathise with, or despise.
The Sins of Grisham Priory deliberately keeps Exploration light and fast-moving in order to show off a full Hollow in a tightly contained amount of game time; our recent GenCon scenario, Poor Sally Kraken, took characters through formative moments in the eponymous Lord’s development, giving them time to get to know her, watch her change, and (in at least some cases) feel intensely bad about having to execute the monster she’d become.
Emotion and Stakes
Guilt tripping players is definitely one way to make them feel things, but a) you can’t do it often or it loses its impact and b) it’s not very nice. It’s like when a video game makes you murder animals and then insists your character should feel bad about it.
But they should feel things. Hollows expects players to feel things (guess we’re gonna need a separate article about Managing Big Feelings…), and it’s a better game when they do because while a great combat system is fun, a great combat system interleaved with high stakes and emotional intensity is practically unstoppable.
Saving people, alleviating suffering, seeing reflections of their own stories in the Hollows they purge and cauterise, advancing their ambitions, learning new things, and just surviving all get their hooks into players and drag them bodily to the edge of their seats. And you can do all those things in Exploration.
Set up interesting scenarios that give players meaningful choices to make, present details that let them think about the world and their Hunter’s place in it, and create NPCs for them to care about, and your quartet (or other number) of messed-up Hunters will bring the roleplay.
Making Space for Roleplay
As a GM – in most games, not just Hollows – it’s important for the GM to create space for the players to roleplay. Don’t feel pressured to keep the action moving, or to be involved in everything that happens. If the Hunters see something that shakes them, makes them angry, or opens an old wound, give the players time to explore that.
Draw in other players by asking how they feel about what they’re seeing – witnessing a stoic companion starting to look shaken, or hearing a story about another Hunter’s Seed, for example.
By letting players take centre stage, and knowing when to give them their character moments, the group will bring a scenario to life. The Exploration sections of Grisham Priory are short, but it only takes a touch of description to have Hunters appropriately shaken by the Wormery, or moved to pity (or disgust) by the pathetic Viridian Congregation in the cloisters.
Echoes
Hollows has extra ways to stir up Hunters’ emotions. The more times a Hunter dies, the more Corruption they pick up. That gives them more powers but also more problems, and sometimes those problems manifest as Echoes: reflections of the people they’ve hurt, or who’ve hurt them, or the sins they’ve committed. Echoes appear inside Hollows, twisting that bespoke reality into a form that specifically rattles, unnerves, and distresses Hunters.
Echoes ensure that over time, a Hunter’s backstory and history starts seeping into their present. One way or another, they’ll have to reckon with who they are… and what they’ve done.
Hollows Factions: the House
4 months ago
– Fri, Aug 02, 2024 at 09:27:49 AM
This country is built on our bones.
Labour made The Isles strong. The Empire couldn’t have existed without mills, shipyards, factories and foundries, and the owners and workers (but mostly the owners) of the nation forced the Crown to recognise their value, and reward them with democratic representation.
For a while, things were good. Elected officials worked to better the lives of their constituents, profits were reinvested in the community, and far fewer labourers died due to unsafe machinery or starved to death in the gutter. Then the Empire collapsed, the work dried up, exports were sunk or blockaded, armies lost war after war on foreign soil, and the House began to cannibalise itself to stay functional.
The House is on the brink of losing everything, which makes it cling on all the tighter. It armours itself in bureaucracy – contracts, statutes, and hierarchies – in the desperate attempt to maintain order.
Hunters who work for the House are members of The Isles’ government or their assistants and enforcers – the more fortunate ones are, anyway. Others are labourers and clerks, grist to bureaucracy’s mill, or adherents of the old religion that used to provide The Isles’ structure and order before the Empire and the Temple.
House Origins
The four Origins for House hunters are:
Ministers, who run the machinery of state. Whatever class they were born into, whether they were aristocrats, factory owners, or workers, they’ve acquired the type of power that matters, and most of them will claw and bite to hold onto it. They’re experts at obscuring the truth – or simplifying it to advance their agenda, persuading people to see their point of view, and finding and exploiting every loophole.
Agents are the House’s enforcers. Ministers are permitted a small armed force for their own safety just as landlords and factory owners employ toughs for security. Before Agents were Hunters, they were in the employ of the House and they enforced its edicts with blood. Many of them still do. They bully, scrutinise, and escalate, and they’re very good at it.
Labourers are the many. The common folk of The Isles. The ones trading their time and strength for a pittance of coin. They’re the faceless, countless people desperate enough to let those above them in the House hierarchy condemn them to death in industries that are more dangerous and less regulated by the year. Their strengths are gritting their teeth and working through pain and hardship, bodging together solutions out of whatever resources they have, and keeping out of trouble.
Watchers are adherents of the old faith. They uphold the tradition of fearing, managing, and placating the old gods. Some of them lead small congregations, others simply tend to whatever shrine they’ve been able to build or acquire. They play to their strengths, de-escalating conflicts, avoiding trouble, and offering sacrifices for appeasement.
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House Seeds
The House’s Seeds bloom from rule-breaking – perverting the hierarchy the House upholds.
Class Traitors broke the unwritten rule: keep to your own type. They married or loved outside their station, tried to climb the social ladder, or switched political affiliations – for example from the Crown to the House. It’s not the taboo that plants the Seed of a Hollow in these people, it’s getting caught and punished.
Criminals’ sins are self-explanatory: they broke the law. Sometimes those laws exist for a moral purpose, such as not murdering the people who raised you and loved you. Sometimes they’re the sort of laws that keep workers toiling in poverty and ill-health with no recourse. Criminals’ futures are currency for the House: transgressions allow the House to press them into service in the sort of jobs nobody else will do – and in The Isles, those are wretched jobs indeed.
Betrayers turned on those who expected their support. Sometimes that included a crime, but what really rotted their soul was the way they hurt people. They planted evidence, committed blackmail, or stole funds from their employers. They may have had good reasons, but they hurt someone or let them down, and they can’t justify that to themselves.
Scapegoats didn’t do anything, but they took the fall for someone else’s transgression. Your boss, a senior Minister, or the rest of your criminal gang. Some aren’t as spotlessly innocent as they claim, but they definitely aren’t the only people who should be taking the fall for whatever went down.
The House and Hollows
The House can’t legislate and administrate a fair and working society from what’s left of The Isles, but it can impose order on Hollows. There’s a clear definable state of wrongness and the House can define and implement policy to address it.
The House has the perfect hierarchy to tackle Hollows: Ministers to give the orders, Agents to enforce them at swordpoint, Labourers to rush a Hollow en masse, selling their lives cheaply yet again, and Watchers to maintain a healthy degree of fear and caution. If they also had money and infrastructure – if The Isles weren’t crumbling around them – they might be very effective, but that isn’t the greatest factor holding them back.
The House is a protection racket. If The Isles wants the House to save it, it’ll have to find a way to pay.
