Hollows Factions: the House
almost 2 years 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!
almost 2 years 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
almost 2 years 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
almost 2 years 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
almost 2 years 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.
