Hollows Weapons: the Rifle
3 months ago
– Fri, Jun 14, 2024 at 01:10:47 PM
“The world is dangerous but you are more dangerous; you are the apex predator. You are calm; you are methodical; you are operating far above your base instincts. There is no wilderness or threat that you cannot tame or kill. The land is rotten and corrupted but you, paragon of patience, stand pristine above it all.”
The rifle is modernity, and modernity is calm and orderly. No swirling melee, no barbaric brawling, but a measured march towards victory. The Rifle bides its time, and when it acts, it does so decisively, precisely, and professionally.
What is the Rifle?
The Rifle kills at range. It does so without mess or fuss. A Rifle wielder never needs to look their victim in the eye or hear their final scream.
Whether it’s repeating, high-calibre, or scoped – high capacity, high damage, or geared for sniping – the Rifle’s core ability is the same. It lets its user Focus more closely than any other Hunter. Most Hunters can get one Focus token, which they can spend to get advantage on a roll. Rifle users can have up to five Focus, and they have more options for using it: they can avoid harm, deal extra damage, make more manoeuvres, or claim terrain. Rifle users also gain Focus more easily, creating a satisfying game loop that allows a Hunter to spend a couple of turns setting up, then make one devastating, battle-defining shot.
The Rifle rewards positioning and patience. Pin down an Entity with covering fire to cancel its manoeuvre, find cover and use it to avoid deadly attacks, or simply fall back on training and attitude to keep doing what you were made to do – firing shot after predictable, repeatable shot.
At Tier 3, the Rifle user’s Focus boosts Sharp, their attack stat, and grants them an extra attack. That’s what training gets you. You’re a reliable, professional killing machine.
What is the Rifle Really?
The Rifle conquered the world. When the dominion of the Isles was at its height, it was at the heart of every conquering force: trade and diplomacy may be what cements an empire in place, but violence digs the foundations.
But one Rifle doesn’t win a war; ten thousand Rifles do. To deliver ten thousand Rifles - and the ammunition needed to fire them, and the tools to maintain them, and the spare parts to swap out during a campaign, and the soldiers to carry them - you need infrastructure. You need steel refineries and weapons manufacturers and cargo ships and iron ore mines and anti-union laws and strikebreakers and vassal nations and bloodlines and flags and the continual threat, whether implied or explicit, of absolute violence against those who disagree with you. You need civilization.
The Rifle is but the foremost, sharpest point of the grand machine that was the Empire.
The Rifle tells you: you are untouchable, unimpeachable, unflappable. You can do whatever you want because you are in charge and whatever you want is the right thing to do. You’re the conquering army. You’re the state. You’re the rules. You’re the boys’ club, the back-room deal, the secret handshake. You cannot be stopped.
But the Rifle knows, deep down, that it’s nothing alone, without the great machine of Empire to support it. Without bullets and production lines and foundries it’s just dead weight to carry around – an obligation you’ve brought upon yourself that you’re too proud to forsake.
That’s the Rifle’s secret and its truth: if left alone and told to manifest its destiny, it’s dead in the water.
Hollows Weapons: the Armour
3 months ago
– Wed, Jun 12, 2024 at 07:42:31 AM
“It doesn’t matter how you feel, what you do, or who you are. What matters is what people think of you – and people think you’re great. You’ve made it. You’re a success. The world lays down a constant assault but you stand alone and unbroken against it all.
Why shouldn’t they be impressed? When the storm rolls in, why shouldn’t they take shelter behind you? Perhaps they would rather die alone and exposed; so be it.”
Since the moment humans discovered they could wield tools with which to hurt each other, they’ve sought ways to avoid being hurt. The Armour started out as animal pelts, thick furs layered over soft, vulnerable skin. It’s come a long way since then.
Armour is polished steel, layered silk, lacquered wood and hardened leather. Armour is as much the filigree and flash as it is a physical barrier. It’s
expensive. If it’s not, it’s not Armour – it’s just safety equipment.
What is the Armour?
Armour in most TTRPGs is purely for defence. Not in Hollows. You can do a lot of damage to someone with an armoured fist. Even so, most of the Armour’s abilities are protective. They allow the wearer to weather blows that would fell other Hunters and – very much in line with the Armour’s arrogant belief that it’s the shield behind which others cower – set up bulwarks to defend allies.
Armour takes many forms. Metal, which predictably reduces Wound damage; Hide, which turns aside the glancing blows of Resolve damage; and Silk, which offers an Armour build based on the Quick stat, and allows you to become Ready when you move or defend. (Aside: everyone should try running around in Silk Armour with a Knife at least once. Sickening.)
The Armour’s abilities are based around the wearer’s status as Ready – on guard, prepared to turn aside a blow – or not. At Tier 1, when you’re Ready you’ll reduce or ignore Wounds, or take them so your allies don’t. Alternatively, you can use your Ready status to command your Allies, granting them extra manoeuvres if they listen to you and fall in line.
At Tier 2, you’ll shrug off killing blows, make counterattacks, and throw yourself into the Entity’s jaws to deny your companions the glory of suffering. At Tier 3, every use of Ready gives you an extra attack. By that stage, you can choose to always use your Hard stat for defence, which makes it really easy to push one stat to its maximum and become almost impossible to harm.
What is Armour Really?
The Armour is a message, turning the wearer into a beacon of security and prosperity. The Armour says: you’ve made it, and it wants others to hear.
The Armour wants you to understand that what people think of you is infinitely more important than what you do or who you are. Honesty, integrity, and earnestness are all well and good but they’re useless compared to letting others bask in your glory. Everyone else is looking blindly for the answers to questions they don’t even know how to ask, but you can show them the way.
The Armour’s favourite lie is of the self-made man – that the bearer did it all themselves, that they had no unfair advantages on their path to success, and that similar outcomes are available to anyone with enough gumption. It laughs at the thought that anyone helped them get to the top. It despises the idea of luck. You don’t need luck when you’re this good.
The Armour knows it’s lying, and it’s doing it to cover the real truth: each time you drown out the weak part of you inside, what little humanity remains is made smaller and weaker, until you’re left strange and empty, and only the image of the Armour remains.
Hollows Weapons: the Book
3 months ago
– Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 08:25:57 AM
“Words have power. If you name something, you can know it, and if you know it, you can control it. Speak a word aloud and the ground trembles at your approach; the beasts of the land recoil and cower; eyes are struck blind, muscles wither and crops die. A chain around the neck of the world, binding it to your will. Nothing is beyond your comprehension and nothing is outside of your reach.”
The Book is the latest form of an ancient concept – knowledge, embodied, that can be shared or jealously hoarded. What is now paper and ink was once chiselled tablets of stone or rich pigment daubed across the walls of firelit caves. It sees the world not as a chaotic mess, but instead a series of rules which can be manipulated to its advantage.
Absolute truth is not only possible but extant, and it lies within the pages of the Book. Where others stumble around in darkness, you have the intellect and the determination to pierce the veil of ignorance and see the world for what it really is.
What is the Book?
The Book deals in control. It makes the rules and others abide by them. It doesn’t do its own dirty work; it’s above that. The Book is the first Weapon we’ll look at that isn’t primarily geared around dealing damage.
An individual Book takes one of three forms: Sacred, Profane, or Eldritch. Those who read from Sacred books inspire their allies, restoring their Resolve. Eldritch Book wielders strike fear even into Entities’ maniac hearts. The secrets in the Profane Book make for viciously painful attacks.
Whatever form a Book takes, its wielder has access to the same wide range of abilities. At Tier 1, they split into three groups. You can Leash or Ward, punishing the Entity for acting against you. You can lead your allies from behind when you Spur them to action, granting them advantage or rerolls, or Brand the Entity, marking a target for your friends. Once you’ve built up a few abilities Witness, which allows you to Focus when you miss with an attack, starts a cascade of free actions that mean a Book wielder’s missed attack empowers their allies. Alternatively, you can take Remake and speak your injured companions’ bones back into place.
Tier 2 abilities build on this control, making the Book wielder more effective, close to indomitable. Tier 3 goes further: take ownership of the battlefield and deny an Entity its ability to place Threat – limiting its attack and banning interrupt actions – and reject death itself, bringing your companions back from the dead with a well chosen word.
What is the Book, Really?
When you impose structure on the world around you, you give it a form pleasing to your eye. You create species and periodic tables, constellations and countries, ethnicities and social classes, heretics and saints. Everything you see is yours to control and order with you, bright and brilliant as the sun, at the centre. The book is enlightenment and, as students of history might recognise, Enlightenment, which is closely tied to imperialism. If the Sword and the Rifle built the Isles’ empire, the Book mandated it.
The Book’s violence is more subtle than that of its companions in the Weapons’ bloodstained pantheon. Every Weapon is a tool through which humans impose their will upon the world, and where the others do so directly with fire and iron, the Book holds itself above such base matters. Violence is not only the crack of bone and tang of blood; pure violence, unsullied by the sweat and pain of the melee, is the subjugation of that which you deem to be beneath you. The Book knows that everything is beneath it.
These are the lies the Book tells to preserve its own importance. Deep down, it knows that from the moment its final page is written, any insight it offers becomes less relevant. Contexts shift and erode. Touchstones crumble, idioms invert themselves, and audiences die out.
That’s the truth the Book doesn’t want you to know: it’s only true as long as you believe it. The moment you reject it, it crumbles to dust.
Hollows Outside Hollows
3 months ago
– Sun, Jun 09, 2024 at 05:50:54 AM
A lot of Hollows’ action happens inside the titular Hollows, violent psychodramas of other people’s personal hells. They’re bleak and they’re awful, but they’re not everything.
The world outside of Hollows matters most at the beginning and end of a Hunt: when Hunters find and breach a Hollow and when they have to find ways to occupy themselves until the next Hunt.
Entering Hollows
Tracking down the entrance to a Hollow – or the spot where you’ll make an entrance – is more of an art than a science, despite what the scholars of the Conclave might claim. Each one spreads sickness, rot, and delirium around itself from an origin point of great importance to the Lord (their quarters, the place where they died, the site of a personal tragedy, and so on) and it’s a matter of asking sensible questions, making the correct assumptions and kicking in the right doors to track back the infection to its root.
Stepping inside a Hollow is no easy task; mortal bodies are not meant to enter these places intact. Entrance methods are equal parts ancient ritual, superstition, religious rites, symbolic acts, and improvisational magic – whatever it takes to catch the attention of the Hollow, communicate with the Lord within, and then break open the spiritual connection to force a point of entry. Although each Hunter has their own individual method of breaching the barrier, the majority of approaches follow four steps:
Gather. Hunters find or fashion fetishes that represent the Hollow’s Lord. To do so, they have to search the real-world site of the Hollow or negotiate with people who knew the Lord.
Resonate. The Hunters mimic the behaviours of the Lord in ways that evoke their presence. The better they understand the Lord, the better the performance.
Commune. Through seances or other occult methods, the Hunters conjure the spirit of the Lord and speak with them. Through questions asked and answered, they learn whatever the Lord will tell them about their sins and what awaits inside the Hollow.
Rend. Finally, the Hunters use one of their Weapons to carve, burn, or tear a doorway into the Hollow, then force their way inside.
The first two steps require the Hunters to do some work in the real world. This is where they see the impact of a now-Lord’s life on the Isles; the hurt they caused, the way the poison of their Hollow still afflicts what they left behind.
This, for the GM, is how you show the players the story of a Hollow in a way that matters. It’s also when you see Hunters at their most human. Outside of Hollows, they’re not avenging, deathless antiheroes. They’re veterans and clerks, scientists and petty nobles. They’re vulnerable – to blades and bullets, but also to empathy. They see shadows of their own worst moments and the potential they have to cause as much suffering as any Lord of a Hollow.
Between Hollows
Each time a party of Hunters meets to commence a Hunt, you can opt to illustrate what happened during their time away from the Hollow. Every player who wishes to can describe the most important thing their character did during their time apart; this is all they can bring to mind, when pressed.
The more broken and ramshackle a Hunter’s soul becomes, the less attention they pay to their mundane existence. Outside of the brutal nightmare of the Hollow or the precious sanctuary of your Refuge, the world dissolves into a grey and undifferentiated smear. The Seed germinating within you steals your life away. Days fold into weeks, weeks fold into months, and you struggle to pick apart one instant from any other; your life becomes a vast, dark expanse with only pinpricks of light punched through to piece together an existence.
As burdensome as this dreary existence is, it’s necessary. Trudging through that life reduces a Hunter’s Corruption – meaning they’ll be human for longer.
Why Go Outside?
Without the world outside of Hollows, Hunters’ victories inside them would be meaningless. There are two stories at the heart of Hollows:
The first is the Hunters’ struggle to remain human; to wield the rot in their souls like one of their Weapons to do some good while they still can. To give that story shape and weight, the Hunters have to know what they’re losing. They need to know what life looks like, or looked like before the Hunt, to see what they’re giving up. That’s what makes Hollows a story about suffering and surviving, and not just a game about dealing a lot of damage to ugly monsters.
The second story is the change Hunters effect. When Hunters collapse a Hollow, they disperse a little of the corruption from the Isles. They loosen the Malignancies’ hold a tiny bit. Hollows shows what victory means. The world gets a little bit better. Quiet, even hopeful moments related as an epilogue or at the start of a Hunt aren’t afterthoughts or ornaments, they’re the reason victory feels good.
Well, they’re a reason. The bloodshed’s fun too.
Hollows Weapons: the Knife
4 months ago
– Thu, Jun 06, 2024 at 08:56:21 AM
“The world is trying to hurt you. But you won’t let it – you won’t be taken advantage of – you’re sharp and cruel and quick and clever – and the Knife is here right alongside you, pressed into your palm, guiding you through the darkness and chaos. You’re going to show them they were stupid to underestimate you. You’re going to bleed them dry.”
The Knife is everywhere. It’s in every house in the kingdom, every pocket in the street. It’s out of the shadows and at their throats. No-one sees it coming. But no-one fears it, either. Not the way it wants to be feared.
What is the Knife?
The Knife is fast. It’s subtle. It’s what you use when you want to dart around the battlefield, opening veins and vanishing before the blood spray hits. When you want to leave the Entity bleeding, hamstrung, softened up for the kill.
You can do a great many things with the Knife. Weighted for throwing, you can use it from range. You can sharpen it like a straight razor, so even the slightest nick leaves your target soaked in its own gore, or you can use a stiletto or punch dagger and strike straight for an enemy’s heart.
The Knife leaves enemies bleeding, which makes them vulnerable to an array of the Weapon’s other abilities. Depending on the choices a Hunter makes, bleeding Entities take damage at the end of their own turn, or the Knife wielder can bathe in spilled blood to restore their own Resolve.
The Knife’s other Tier 1 abilities make the wielder slippery. They can attack or dodge using Quick (usually their highest trait) instead of whatever stat an attack usually uses, or scramble to another sector of the battlefield when they miss with an attack.
At higher tiers, the Knife wielder is almost impossible to catch. They can move or defend after an attack, giving them more manoeuvres than other Hunters. They can fade into the shadows, disappearing from the battlefield entirely at will (at the cost of a little Resolve damage). The rivulets of blood streaming from their target inflict damage on it when it tries to act, or offer easy targets for other Hunters, adding extra damage when the Knife wielder’s allies strike.
What is the Knife, Really?
The Knife says: the world is out to get you. The odds were stacked against you before you even drew a card. At every turn, someone’s arrived to steal what you’ve fought so hard for without giving you a second thought. You need to fight back and take what you’re owed. Your only mistake was not doing it sooner.
If you win, you’re a hero. If you lose, you were never supposed to succeed. There’s a comfort in occupying the bottom rung, especially when it opens your enemies up to retribution.
The Knife is scared of not being underestimated. Of not being hated. It doesn’t want to be accepted. It doesn’t want people to think it’s important, or welcome it as a part of something larger and more important. It can only imagine the world as a frantic battle, and for its unceasing, spiteful aggression to make any sort of sense, it must be under constant attack. If it’s not a victim, it’s nothing.
That’s the Knife’s truth: nicking and needling, and hoping to keep folk from seeing how insignificant it is.
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