Hollows Factions: the Conclave
2 months ago
– Fri, Jul 19, 2024 at 03:04:25 AM
Nothing is meaningless.
The Conclave is older than Hollows. In fact, it’s older than most institutions that persist in The Isles, but the fact that it specifically predates the first known Hollow is significant. It’s almost as if their long-irrelevant royal founder was prescient when she formally acknowledged The Isles’ disparate circles of sages and occults as a single force. Not that the Conclave are especially known for their unity and strength of purpose: they’re fractious and petty, riven with competing interests and theories and preoccupied with secrets.
The Conclave thrives on obscuring information. It keeps secrets from the populace for their own good, and from its own members in pursuit of power and status. Conclave members learn to be both reclusive and selfish, and these tendencies have ensured it’s incredibly difficult to pursue any occult education in The Isles. Only one in six Conclave members can truly profess any mastery of the arcane arts; the rest are frauds, shysters, dilettantes, or (worse) theorists.
Make no mistake: if the Conclave isn’t obliterated in the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, it will continue to devour itself until there’s nothing left. Its crusade against Hollows is its last gasp.
Conclave Origins
In Hollows, Conclave characters have one of four Origins:
Crucible members are mystics, hailing from the Temple Malignatus – a secret order within a secret order who study and glorify the Grand Malignancies. They’re viewed with suspicion by other branches of the Conclave. They scheme and posture, jostling one another for position in their tiny, hierarchical sub-order, and they excel at it. Perhaps it’s just as well: if they turned their attention outward, their studies might bear dangerous fruit.
Knight-Alchemists are both warriors and scholars, celebrants of the ancient tradition of transmuting a worthy foe into a slaughtered prize. They’re hunters – small h – and knights errant, ever questing after some new trophy. Usually that’s figurative: a new horizon to explore and tame, or a new shard of knowledge to treasure. Knight-Alchemists are charming, enthusiastic, and superb at breaking things down into their component parts.
Geophrenologists are the Conclave’s internal opposition. The Conclave’s prevailing theory is that Hollows arise from an individual’s trauma. Geophrenologists know that’s not so. People are merely inconvenient obstacles that thwart the natural flow of energy, giving rise to the blockages known as Hollows. Remove the occlusion and nature will surely restore itself. Geophrenologists excel at reading their surroundings, interrogating written and oral information sources, and standing firm in the face of dissent or opposition.
Test Subjects are wretches and aberrations. They’re the lowest creatures in the Conclave:, not scholars, but the objects of study. They’re experiments who’ve lived long enough to be repurposed. Many of them are quite powerful; all are significantly changed by the knives and spells of the Conclave. They’ve given up everything – the Hunt is all they have now.
Conclave Seeds
The longer a person stays in the Conclave and the higher they climb in its serpentine power structure, the more parts of their lives are cut away and sacrificed in the name of advancement.
Adrift members of the Conclave gave up something irreplaceable for their position. They let go of their families, their loved ones, their wealth, or their happiness for the Conclave, and it tore them open and let a Malignancy creep in to fill the void. Some who are Adrift still believe it was worth it; others never had a choice to start with.
Cursed individuals are, arguably, suffering from an undesirable gain rather than a loss, but it certainly feels like losing – their health, their freedom, or their peace of mind, for example. They’re damned by the work of another occultist, a monster, or a stain on their soul born of their own foul rituals. In fact, they’re doubly damned, because the curse they suffered – or whatever they did to earn it – made their Seed ripen and bear fruit.
Obliviated members of the Conclave are excommunicates. They’re the Conclave members who threw caution, propriety, and self-preservation to the wind and immersed themselves in activities even the Conclave deemed taboo – cannibalism as a form of sympathetic magic, or service to a Malignancy. Then there are the Crimson Players, who committed the worst crime of all: suppressing and destroying arcane knowledge.
Hollow-Born persons came into existence inside a Hollow. They’ve been ripped out of it now, rescued by some enterprising Hunter or escaping under their own power, but where a human history and identity should be, there’s just a void. Hollow-Born don’t have lives to go back to between Hunts, just nightmares of the Grand Malignancies, the hell they once called home, or the Hunters who slaughtered everyone they once knew.
The Conclave and Hollows
The Conclave doesn’t want to rid The Isles of Hollows – at least, that’s not all they want. Before they disinfect and stitch these lesions on the skin of reality, they want to study them. There are secrets inside Hollows, and every secret is a key to power.
It follows, then, that Conclave Hunters usually have goals inside a Hollow beyond closing it. They enter with questions – what is a Hollow made of? What is a Weapon? Could a person’s Seed be deliberately made to bloom? – and strive to leave with answers. It’s both their right to do so and their nature; what use is anything, if it’s not studied, understood, and bent to serve a purpose?
Closing a Hollow is usually a necessary concession. For one thing, it’s the easiest way to leave one. What to do with its Lord is a more nuanced question. Having a redeemed Lord of the Hollow skulking around the Refuge is unquestionably risky… but it’s so terribly valuable.
Hollows Factions: The Crown
2 months ago
– Fri, Jul 12, 2024 at 03:59:03 PM
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The Crown
We were great, once.
Before smokestacks and presses, before looms and workhouses, before cutting-edge science and an empire that spanned the globe, the Isles were a place of quiet majesty. Of noble knights, gleaming armour, slain dragons and momentous destinies. The Crown clings to this ingrained mythology tighter each decade, and as the country falls into disrepair and chaos, it redoubles its efforts to be perceived as an ancient and worthy tradition worth keeping.
Even this imitation of power can’t last. The Crown knows that the next war The Isles fights will be a civil one, and they hope that there’ll be a country left to rule over when the dust settles.
Not everyone in the crown is an aristocrat, but they all shelter under the banners of noble houses. Peers of the realm military officers hold the power in the Crown, but the labour of servants and soldiers props them up.
Crown Origins
Hollows includes four Origins for Crown members.
Bluebloods are the remnants of the ruling class, their ancient and crumbling bloodlines’ last hope. Their position is precarious: blighted land and generations-old debts threaten to strip them of their remaining power – or maybe they’ll be their own downfall; the selfish, wanton ruiners of their own family.
Chamberlains are bluebloods’ staff and servants. So were their parents and grandparents, for as long as there’s been a Crown to serve. The Crown has little power left to share, so their servants now make life worth living by blending in, causing little fuss, and quietly undermining or rebelling against their self-proclaimed betters.
Knight-Sergeants are military officers. They’ve benefited from what passes in The Isles for social mobility, dragging themselves up through the ranks of the army until they command respect. Knights fit in nowhere, uncomfortable amongst nobles and distrusted by the rank and file.
Regimental Peons are the thousands upon thousands of common folk who fight and die to defend The Isles. That’s their duty and they’re expected to perform it without complaint. Regimental peons have endured a lifetime of hardship. They’re tough, and inured to suffering.
Crown Seeds
Crown characters’ Seeds typically open up when they turn their back on, or fail at, the role marked out for them - whether that’s ruling or dying.
Abolitionists see the way things are and take steps to raze the rotten old institutions to the ground. They’ve betrayed their noble family, joined a rebel cell, or incited a mob to riot. It’s not their actions that form the Seed, but the consequences: shedding family blood, losing their cell to a noble’s revenge, or feeling the weight of the lives taken by the rabble they roused.
Deserters abandoned their duty. Some are soldiers who left their post or got drunk on their watch, and whose comrades died as a result. Others are nobles who married for love and damned their family to poverty, or servants who blackmailed or leeched from their masters. Whether they feel guilty or proud, whether it took a lifetime or a moment, their dereliction lacerated their soul and let a Malignancy in.
Murderers didn’t just kill, they killed someone who mattered – to them or the rest of The Isles. Their victim was a beloved noble, a ranking officer, or one of their own family. The victim was probably deserving, but blood stays on the hands.
Sole Survivors are the last person standing. Some lived through the massacre of their squad, family, or employers by luck or cunning. A noble refused to pay for their household’s medical treatment, and the sickness took every servant but one. Infidelity and a dinner party massacre killed off all but the most useless and overlooked family member. A soldier survived multiple massacres before being discharged for being bad luck. How you survived matters less than how you feel about it: lousy.
The Crown and Hollows
The Crown regards protecting the Isles as its duty. It’s the weighty mantle of leadership; noblesse oblige. Many of the cosseted blue-bloods at the top of the heap do not, however, feel obliged to intervene personally. They have people for that, and those people are Hunters.
There’s no unifying doctrine for any faction (except perhaps the Temple) but there are often tendencies. The Crown tends to resolve the problem of a Hollow by sending as many Hunters as possible into it to nobly slay the Entities within. And the slaughter is always noble, because it belongs to the Crown.
Hunters with the Crown in their origin stories often adopt some of this dogma. Whether they’re a humble servant, a bloodstained veteran, or the bastard offspring of a titled jackass, many perceive themselves as heroes, the last line of defence, restoring the Isles to its former glory. Others mutter sullenly about the burden of responsibility or having no choice at all unless they fancy a brief and deadly flirtation with a firing squad.
Hollows Factions: How Factions Work
3 months ago
– Fri, Jul 05, 2024 at 04:06:07 AM
The Isles are a state in mid-collapse – it might even have collapsed already, depending on how high you set your standards. In recent memory the Isles had an empire and industry; it had pride. But first it ripened, then it began to rot.
The four factions of the Isles are the people in charge of the ruins. Not everyone is in a faction, and not all the factions are formal organisations. Even so, it’s impossible to avoid their influence – even for Hunters.
What is a Faction?
It’s easier to start with what a faction isn’t. It’s not a membership organisation or a corporation with an agenda and a plan. It’s not even a particularly neat definition: there’s no tight, clearly drawn delineation of who is and isn’t in one. Some factions are more concrete and easier to map than others (which is why we’ll be starting our series of faction-related blog posts with the Crown) but really, what a “faction” is, is a description of what kind of power someone holds or is beholden to.
The Crown and its institutions hold constitutional and military power. The Conclave holds both academic and occult power. The Temple is a religion and exercises that power to define what is taboo and what is expected, what is sacred and what is profane. Oh, and tithes. There’s quite a bit of tithing. Finally, the House – a complicated set of affiliations between industrialists, landowners, and politicians – wields the power of money, manpower, and the legal code.
The people who benefit from membership want to uphold that element of the status quo. The Conclave needs arcane studies to be under its control so they don’t create rivals. The Crown needs people to keep believing aristocrats serve a purpose and that empire and expansion are the Isles’s right.
People in the faction who aren’t benefiting from it are trapped there. They’re bound by contracts, bloodlines, oaths or belief and they either can’t break free or are too institutionalised to try.
Nothing’s ever so black and white, of course. Years of military service – an association with the Crown – might have ruined your body and rattled your mind, leaving you fit for nothing else but continuing the same nightmare career… but wearing your old medals still gets you respect and gives you the right to order around people with even less power. Plus, one day you might get to be one of the people in charge.
It’s helpful to think of factions in terms of specific groups or manifestations, rather than mighty, towering pillars of society. A group of Hunters probably doesn’t think of themselves as working for the Conclave but for a university; not the Crown but the Fitzclair family; not the House but parliament or an industrialist’s staff.
Because factions are so murky, it’s hard to definitively say who is and isn’t in one. We can say, however, that millions of people in the Isles derive no benefit from the factions’ existence. Factory workers labour in dangerous conditions, farmers toil on exhausted soil, and the wrong sorts of people are shunned or exploited.
Factions in Play
In practical terms what faction a Hunter is associated with shapes their experiences before they became Hunters. It defines your ORIGIN and your SEED.
Your Origin is who you are – or were. You might have been (and still be, when you’re not lancing pustulent quasi-realities) a blue-blood noble, a knight-alchemist, a holy gardener, or a member of parliament. Or you might be less fortunate: cannon fodder in a Crown army, an escaped lab experiment, a sinner, or a worker on a factory line.
Your Seed is what made you a Hunter: the thing you did, or that was done to you, that made a gash in your soul for a Malignancy to get in. Your Origin suggests some likely tendencies. In the Crown, family politics end in bloodshed, nobles abuse their servants, and soldiers do unspeakable things in the name of Crown and country. The House’s ambition creates criminals and class traitors. You don’t have to choose a pre-written Seed for your character, but the factions provide a plethora of possibilities that both make sense and tell you something about the Isles.
Factions have less of a hold over Hunters inside a Hollow and someone’s origins, whether they’re high or low, only matter if you let them. In these rotten little pockets, power resides in a Hunter and their Weapons. Whether you were born in a palace or a workhouse, the Seed inside you and the Weapons you wield make you an unstoppable force, glorious and mighty until the rot in you blossoms and you become something else.
On the other hand, your Seed becomes more important with every Hollow you breach and destroy. The more corrupted you become, the more that Seed echoes and pulses, manifesting itself in those private worlds you invade and piling more dangers atop the Hollow’s own.
You can never escape your past.
Post-Campaign Update 1: Thank You, and It Begins
3 months ago
– Tue, Jul 02, 2024 at 03:51:25 AM
Hello!
The Hollows crowdfunder ended four days ago. We did it. You did it.
Now we’re on to the best part: making the book. Books. And components, and extras, and all the delicious stretch goals we achieved.
PLEDGE MANAGER & SURVEYS
We’ll be opening up the pledge manager and backer surveys by the end of July (at the latest). If you’ve used Backerkit before, this will be a familiar process. You’ll confirm your pledge includes everything you want, have an opportunity to add extras, and give us your address for delivery.
We’re not charging shipping yet. We won’t do that until we’re nearly ready to ship out books. The cutthroat world of international logistics moves like lightning, so we hold off as long as possible to make sure our shipping calculations stay accurate between charging you for shipping and actually doing the shipping.
SNEAK PREVIEWS
The Weapons information we shared with you during the campaign seemed to go down well – so we’re going to keep sharing glimpses of the Hollows over the summer and possibly beyond. We’ll start with a blog post about Hollows four factions – the Crown, the Conclave, the Temple, and the House – each week throughout July.
After that, we’ll be picking setting and story elements to share as and when we’ve got something bite-sized to tell you about. It’s difficult to unpack, for example, ideas and expressions of class consciousness in the Isles in a 5–600 word blog post (but we might try).
STAYING IN TOUCH
Apart from those sneak previews, you should expect an update from me about once a month – more often if we’ve got something exciting to show off.
We’ll also be in touch more often if there’s a problem you need to know about, so if we’re unexpectedly quiet it means we’re busy making books: all is well.
If you’ve got questions for me (Chant) or the team as a whole, you can leave a comment on this or any future update and I’ll get back to you as soon as I have an answer.
You can also come and
join our Discord. It’s nice there, and there are lots of people talking about
Hollows.
Let’s make some books!
Producer Chant
Finale Stream Starting Now!
3 months ago
– Fri, Jun 28, 2024 at 06:59:35 AM
Come and join Grant, CJ and Chant as we watch number get big, congratulate ourselves and you, and air the final episode of our AP!
