Hollows Weapons: the Book
about 2 years 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
about 2 years 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
about 2 years 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.
Hollows: the Story So Far
about 2 years ago
– Wed, Jun 05, 2024 at 07:28:56 AM
It’s been one week since we launched Hollows. There’s still a long time to go before we see how far this infection spreads, but reality rots a little further with every passing hour.
We’re about £7,500 away from our next stretch goal, an additional Hollow written by Jay Dragon (Wanderhome, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast) and illustrated by MÖRK BORG’s Johan Nohr. It’s an emotionally raw tale of childhood harm, and one where the question of whether to save the Lord or doom him looms large over the adventure.
Their collaboration is a triumph to be sure, but this is not the pinnacle of our ambition.
What Comes Next?
After Jay and Johan’s scenario, we look at making the component kit even more substantial with upgraded finishes and adjustments to some of our designs. If we get our way, opening the box will feel like delving into a Hunter’s case of accoutrements, painstakingly assembled and well-used for planning and reviewing the conflicts that might kill them – or did kill them.
Once we’ve made Hollows’ presence in the real world even more weighty and… Hollows-y… we’ve got additional Hollows coming. The next warped little worlds come to you from an ENNIE and Indie Groundbreaker Award-winning TTRPG designer (and research scientist), and a Bram Stoker Award-winning author. We invite you to speculate on who that might be in the comments.
FAQ
We’re gradually incorporating your questions about components, scaling, and other topics into the FAQ. Keep asking, and we’ll keep answering.
Also…
Clearly you enjoy games that are dark as pitch and thoroughly violent, because you’ve backed Hollows. On that basis we suspect you’ll like Vast Grimm too. This brutally horrific sci-fi RPG, where the stakes are only the trifling matter of keeping humanity alive until (and maybe beyond) the death of the universe, has a Backerkit campaign for three new sourcebooks. Vast Grimm Horde: No Safe Haven adds a setting book, a dungeon crawl through derelict space barges, and a starter adventure to introduce new players to Vast Grimm. From the looks of it, it’s real unpleasant. In a good way.
They’re funded and tearing through stretch goals, including adventures from guest creators and an online character builder. And they’ve got patches. We haven’t even got patches.
Hollows Weapons: the Shotgun
about 2 years ago
– Mon, Jun 03, 2024 at 09:41:31 AM
The Shotgun
“There are things out there that want to kill you – terrible things, wretched things, bestial things. You’re not scared of them. They should be scared of you. You’re mess and you’re chaos, you’re indiscriminate, you’re a massacre waiting to happen. There’s nothing you can’t kill, nothing you can’t break, nothing you can’t ruin.”
That’s what the shotgun tells you. That’s what it wants you to believe. It is immediate and indiscriminate violence in physical form. It promises absolute destruction at the pull of a trigger; an attack without patience or restraint that sends even the fiercest foe reeling. It wants you to fire it. It needs you to fire it, over and over until there’s nothing left but splatter.
What is the Shotgun?
The Shotgun’s a simple, highly effective weapon. Load, aim, fire, repeat. The design hasn’t changed in centuries; it doesn’t need to.
In Hollows, the Shotgun’s what you choose if you want to regularly cause huge amounts of damage. The sawn-off variant is superb up close, the long-barrel at range. The repeater needs less reloading, so offers even more bang for your buck, as it were.
It’s a berserker weapon; the essence of fury and intimidation. Tier 1 abilities let a Hunter do things like batter an opponent with their empty Shotgun while they reload; knock an opponent back with the blast; deal more damage when the Hunter’s injured; or unnerve an opponent with their rage when a Shotgun attack misses. A Hunter can even arrange their build so their Shotgun yells at them until they reload it, which is damaging but doesn’t cost an action.
Later abilities refine and concentrate the Shotgun’s violence. You’re fearless; your bloodlust gives you counterattacks; you’re so riled up you barely notice injuries. By Tier 3, you cause such massive damage you make the Entity easy pickings for your companions and you’re at your most dangerous when you charge directly into an Entity’s snarling jaws, blowing chunks off it as you approach.
What is the Shotgun Really?
Every Weapon in Hollows has a specific outlook, and represents a specific facet of human deficiency. The Shotgun’s perspective is simple: violence solves everything. The more rapid and massive the damage, the better the solution works. It wants to break things to prove they can be broken, to prove its own strength.
The Shotgun tells its wielder: don’t hold back. Do the unthinkable. Kill and maim and ruin. The world is a web of social mores designed to hold you down, but you can blast clean through it.
The thing is, the Shotgun knows it’s lying. It knows violence can’t solve everything. It just doesn’t like to think about what happens after the shot is fired and the smoke clears; that it is empty, and powerless, and open to retribution. What it desires is intoxicating but impossible: no waiting and no need for recovery, but only an endless instant of fury.
That’s the truth of the Shotgun: hurting and killing until the consequences catch up to you.
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