Post-Campaign Update 2: Surveys Incoming!
4 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
4 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.
Hollows Factions: the Conclave
4 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
4 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
5 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.
