Post-Campaign Update 3: DIY Hollows and New Words
13 days 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
28 days 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
about 2 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.
Post-Campaign Update 2: Surveys Incoming!
about 2 months ago
– Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 07:49:32 AM
Hello!
It’s been nearly a month already. Wow, and also, how?
However, things are occurring. In summary:
- Writing is happening!
- Backer surveys are going out!
- Pre-order store is open!
Writing
Writing progresses apace. We’ve made some final adjustments to the character creation material and Weapons (spoiler: the Knife is even nastier now. Bleeding is horrible.), and Grant’s done some sterling work fleshing out the setting chapter with insights into life before, and outside, Hollows.
I have, reluctantly, let Grant and Chris off the leash to attend GenCon so progress may slow down, but I’ve already got some juicy little gobbets of text to share over the next month or so.
Surveys
Backer surveys are very nearly ready to go. By the time you read this, I will have sent out a smoke test to a small number of backers to make sure everything works as intended. All being well, surveys will go out to everyone by the end of the week.
Consider this the first of many reminders that we’re not charging for shipping yet: we’ll do that shortly before we start fulfilment, probably in about March next year (that's at the very earliest). That’s also when PDF rewards will start to become available.
Completing your survey doesn’t lock your order. You can still go in and add products or upgrade to a higher pledge level afterwards. The big advantage of sending out surveys this early is that it helps us plan our production – what we’re making and where it’s going. It makes the whole process of printing and assembling books (and other things) and pinging them around the globe run a little more smoothly.
Retail backers, your surveys will take a little longer; we’re playing around with some exciting extra things.
Pre-orders
The pre-order store is open on Backerkit now. You are the kind of smart, savvy person who backs crowdfunders and doesn’t hang around waiting for products to be available to the
general public so this information doesn’t affect you… but it is an opportunity to tell everyone you game with about Hollows and convince them to get their own copies.
Thank you for reading!
Producer Chant
Hollows Factions: the Temple
about 2 months ago
– Fri, Jul 26, 2024 at 07:57:05 AM
We're almost at the end of our series on the factions of Hollows! Leave us a comment if you've got ideas for what to show off next! Otherwise, Grant's been working on some lovely, nasty things.
Dead gods make fertile soil.
Before the rise of the empire, the average Islander believed dozens of malevolent gods and spirits were ever-ready to punish them for transgressions against inscrutable laws. Ramshackle amalgamations of folk beliefs coalesced into a broad tradition of fear, obfuscation and appeasement; churches were carefully-maintained divine blind spots where births, marriages, festivals, and funerals could be safely conducted out of their sight.
The empire wiped out whole communities in its endless wars and, in the process, erased everything they believed about the gods. The upstart gardeners of the Viridian Temple seized the moment: they preached that the gods were not vicious creatures, but instead dead and rotting beneath the ground providing sustenance for the world to come. Heaven could rise from the earth itself with careful guidance.
Where other factions of the Isles are in decline, the Temple is growing – spreading like an invasive weed, in fact, wrapping itself around other power structures and choking the life out of them. Also like an invasive weed, it’s fully conquered its biome, in this case the Isles. The Viridian Temple throttles, suppresses, and forces out other beliefs. But an ecosystem needs diversity to flourish and thrive; suffocating every folk belief that might have helped understand the Grand Malignancies, or the cosmological underpinnings of Hollows, is not without cost.
Now, the majority of the food supply for the Isles is controlled by the Viridians. The other factions have little choice but to toe the line. When they don’t… more than one political enemy has been buried under an orchard, chopped up and fed to sacred pigs, or burned on bonfires like so much blighted wheat.
Temple Origins
The four Temple Origins in Hollows are:
Vindicators, the Temple’s reapers. Clearing the way for new growth requires cutting down and disposing of what came before. They do the hard, ugly, nasty work so that others can plant and sow. Vindicators interrogate and pry, burn down obstacles, and calmly dispose of their enemies.
Faithful are the Temple’s devoted labourers. They’re the congregation, the lay-preachers, and other obedient (or obliged) members of the church. They might be seasonal migrants, travelling where the work is, or deeply attached to the land of their birth, but they’re Temple through and through. They’re hardy and tough, and they excel when they’re working with plants and animals or stoically labouring.
Swineherds are itinerant priests, charged with following their beasts wherever they choose to roam. The domesticated pig is held in the highest regard by the Viridians – a perfect omnivorous beast, fat from the bounty of the land, ripe and ready for the slaughter. Orthodox adherents proclaim that pigs should be allowed to roam the country as they please, and the same goes for their herders. Swineherds come and go with impunity, considering themselves as holy and as unstoppable as their pigs. They’re at their strongest when they trespass, delve, and trample all before them – and when they work with animals.
Revivalists sow new seeds of the Viridian Temple wherever they go. They preach and uplift, bringing bounteous fields and fat herds to blighted areas. They also tear down weak communities, driving recalcitrants out of their homes, and setting down roots by force. They nourish and nurture, break and enter, and strike out alone.
Temple Seeds
Seeds are the worst day of a person’s life. For the Temple, that means a crisis of faith or a transgression so deep that even the generally permissive Viridians turn their backs on you.
Heretics belong to secret sects within the Temple, working against its stated purposes. The Harvest Folk worship Greed, the Rosa Caelesti believe Hollows are the route to apotheosis, and the named splinter groups barely scratch the surface of the perverse and destructive beliefs fermenting within the Temple. It’s not the Heresy that spawns a Seed, though – it’s getting caught out and kicked out, or deciding to stop hiding and leave the Temple entirely.
Lost Souls suffered a crisis of faith. The Viridian religion doesn’t prevent the hardships of war, or the struggle of surviving in a blighted, failing nation. It doesn’t keep bishops’ hearts from turning hard or priests from preying on their flock. You saw this one too many times – for some, once is enough – and it broke your spirit and killed your faith.
Outcasts are devout, but their faith is about all they have. The Isles’ aristocrats don’t follow this peasant church, and there are outposts of the old faiths everywhere. Outcast characters are from one of these pockets of non-belief, and their eagerness to welcome in the Temple saw them ostracised and abandoned.
Sinners may still want to be part of the Temple, but it doesn’t want them. There are few unforgivable sins to the Viridians – salting the earth or someone’s ashes, selling sacred animals, or deliberately ruining good crops – but you committed one of them. Saying a Sinner is still part of the Temple is a little inaccurate, but even though the church offers them no protection or benefit, it hasn’t killed them yet – and that’s a debt the Sinner will never finish repaying.
The Temple and Hollows
The Temple are farmers and nurturers. A good farmer doesn’t wait until their crops are riddled with pests or blighted with disease. They act first, preventing problems rather than solving them. Their approach to Hollows is based on the same philosophy. Sending in a team of Hunters to collapse a Hollow is a sign the Temple failed to safeguard its domain.
As the gods rot beneath the soil, their metaphysical putrefaction escapes and catches in this earthly kingdom to form Hollows – tenacious and invasive weeds that must be plucked before they take root and spread in the minds and bodies of the congregation.
While the majority of the faithful don’t know about the existence of parasite dimensions, someone in the upper ranks certainly does, as the church has instituted an aggressive outreach program monitoring those at risk of blossoming into something terrible. Whether the sufferer is brought back into the fold or quietly removed, prevention is seen to be better than cure.
Like most farmers, the Temple are pragmatists: there’s no room for tender-heartedness. If a pig gets sick and it can’t be cured, you butcher it. Same goes for folk who bloom into Hollows – or Hunters on the verge of doing so.
