Post-Campaign Update 16: Let’s Not Mess Around: Files are at the Printer
In which we MAKE THE BOOKS.
PRINTING
As reported in January, all the print files are ready. We sent them to the manufacturer a few weeks ago. Their technical team has revi...
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Producer Chant
about 1 month ago
Post-Campaign Update 15: Over the Carcass of the Old Year
In which we send some files to the printer, and release final backer PDFs (again).
BACKER PDFS
The December release has now born a crop of final, final changes, so we’ll be...
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Producer Chant
3 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 14: Ruinous Fruition
In which the fruits of our labours fully ripen, final PDFs are released, and we collaborate violently on paper. Make yourselves comfortable, Hunters; build up the fire. This ...
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Producer Chant
3 months ago
Intermission: Wretched Domains Preview NOW!
Beware the rotten depths of your inboxes, Hunters: nine Hollows have blossomed simultaneously within.
THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE PREVIEW
These are all complete, pending ...
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Producer Chant
5 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 13: Full and Rotten Bloom
In which the seeds we planted thrive and the flowers that grew from them yawn open; we have diverged from the timeline I mentioned last update, but for good reason (see Wretc...
Hello Hunters.
BACKER PREVIEWS AND FEEDBACK
Most of you, I believe, got your preview PDF on Friday. Others received a link on Monday morning, and over the last 72 hours we'...
As reported in January, all the print files are ready. We sent them to the manufacturer a few weeks ago. Their technical team has reviewed them, and I in turn am about to review the digital proofs they produced, checking everything still looks the way we intended. This is all on schedule.
The printer has now shut down for Lunar New Year, but we’ve achieved what we wanted to before the shutdown. We’ll pick up again in early March. The key stages are Maz and I receiving samples, then mass production. By the time I write the next update in March, I should have photos of the samples to show you.
We fully expect to make changes based on those samples - their look and feel, how much we like the closures on various boxes, whether the texture of book covers, slipcases, etc. feels correct and pleasant, and whether there’s enough (but not too much) space in the component kit and Wretched Domains boxes. We’ve scheduled in time for that.
Including that stage, we’re expecting mass production to conclude in the third week of April. Once that happens, I’ll hand over these updates to my colleague Logistics Alex, who will keep you posted on Hollows’ journey to our warehouses in the UK, Europe, USA, and Australia, and then on fulfilment.
A note of caution: we will keep sampling until the books are right. There’s a non-zero chance that we’ll need to do more than one round of sampling. We think it’s unlikely enough that we haven’t planned extra time around it - unless these are real, major problems that we think will affect your enjoyment of the books, it’s time to stop refining and actually make them, so you can hold them, read them, and most importantly play the game with them. But if we get our hardbacks and find, for example, that the spines aren’t strong enough to support the rough handling a well-loved RPG book is exposed to, we’re not shipping it until they are.
LOCKING ORDERS AND CHARGING CARDS
We’ll do this once mass production is underway, meaning mid-April. At this point we’ll charge all outstanding balances on your account. For most people that just means shipping, but if you pre-ordered (rather than backing the crowdfunding campaign), or added extra products in pledge manager, you’ll be charged for those as well.
You can check your outstanding balance in your Backerkit account.
Backerkit has a standard process for this: you’ll get an email from them 48 hours before your order is locked and your card is charged.
You’ll still be able to change your address after this point: we won’t lock those down until we have the books in our warehouses and are ready to start shipping out orders.
FULL TIMELINE
A note on Americas orders: we’re applying for an advance decision from US Customs on whether the slipcase, including the books and component kit, counts as a book (which affects a bunch of import paperwork and possibly how much we have to pay on tariffs), or not. This process is supposed to take a couple of weeks, but we appreciate that the federal government is, uh, stretched a little thin right now, so we’ve allowed some extra time.
That means orders coming from the US warehouse are likely to be fulfilled in July rather than June. If the stars align and we get a decision quickly, it might be sooner.
VTT
We have now actively started work on this. We’re still too early in the process for me to give you a reliable timeline, but expect a proper announcement in March.
PODCAST
Expect this to drop around the same time as the books.
MAKE YOUR OWN HOLLOW-BORN BOOKS!
Now that we’ve made Hollows, we’d like to invite you to do the same, under our Hollow-Born licence.
You may or may not know that RRD has community content licenses for most of our games, allowing you to make compatible material (and even sell it, if you so desire). We’ve already seen excellent community content starting to emerge from the RRD Discord, and I suspect there’s a rich seam of creativity amongst you, ready to be unearthed.
Hollows is now open for community content! That also means that if you make something for Hollows we would love to hear about it: at the very least we’ll be excited to read it, and if it’s good then we might want to talk to you about selling PDFs or printed copies for you through our website.
You can read our community license here. We'll be adding a Hollows-specific section in the near future, but there's no reason you should wait to start creating!
DIGITAL FILES
These have now all been updated. If you haven’t grabbed the updated files already, they’re in your Backerkit account. If you like, you can also have them added to your Rowan, Rook & Decard account (making for easier updates in future) by emailing [email protected].
Hey there! Been looking over the PDFs, they look amazing! I'm just curious if there's any way to get the Hollow maps as separate images, without the numbers and other annotation. Would love to show them to players without that, though since it shows the entire layout... IDEK, but the idea is neat enough to tempt me ^^
In which we send some files to the printer, and release final backer PDFs (again).
BACKER PDFS
The December release has now born a crop of final, final changes, so we’ll be releasing updated PDFs through Backerkit next week. Hopefully early in the week, at that. Nothing dramatic has changed, but since we were waiting to sign off our paper choices, we thought we might as well take the opportunity for a last errata pass. If you’re really curious, the Hollows Glossary now has the details in the errata tab.
There will still be errors. There are always errors. But every pass brings the number down.
We’re also going to be releasing this on the Rowan, Rook & Decard website next week - so if you have an RRD account, and you want your Hollows PDFs added to it so you can download them whenever you need to, and also be guaranteed updates whenever we update the files, you can email [email protected] and the lovely Jim will make that happen for you.
PAPER
In last month’s update, I went into quite a lot of detail on our paper choices: the hunt for something that was suitably opaque, just the right amount of textured, and the correct shade of white to properly display the art.
We’ve done it.
We’ve chosen the paper: UPM Finesse. Huge credit to Maz here, whose investment in this process has been an absolute gift. I love watching experts work. And getting to fondle a lot of high quality paper. This has been inconvenient, but a surprisingly enjoyable process for me personally, and thank you all for allowing me (us) the time to get it right.
It’s really nice paper, folks.
Maybe next update I’ll get Maz in to explain why we’re so confident it’s the right choice.
PRINTING
At time of posting, the files for the interiors of the core book and Wretched Domains are ready. Designer Mina is finalising the cover and slipcase designs. I’ll send them to the printer on Monday.
They’ve had the files for the component kit for quite a while, and started setting up the moulds for the player tokens, which are the most complicated bits, not least because we're making plastic look like wood.
Not pictured: coloured versions.
You can fit so many custom processes in these bad boys.
Now: it is not a quick process, and Lunar New Year is now… three weeks away, and that’s going to cause quite a long hiatus. The factory shutdown is 4 weeks. And, honestly, I’m never going to criticise workers getting a good, long break.
Next week, Logistics Alex and I will update the timeline and then we’ll be able to make some fairly confident predictions of when your books will arrive.
We’re… maybe not in the home stretch, precisely, but we can definitely see it from here.
ADDITIONAL GOOD NEWS
There are several hundred sets of enamel faction pins on my coffee table. They are there because I’ve got to bag them up into sets of four (one for each faction) before I ship them on to our UK warehouse, which I will do this weekend.
Mr. Bitey the Entity token will arrive, in challenge coin form, in that same warehouse on Monday. In fact, he might already be there, but I haven’t heard for sure.
As always, the lightless cave of my living room makes for terrible photos. The enamel colours are deeper and darker than they appear here.
That's all for now. Keep your eyes peeled for the updated PDFs and timeline next week, and have a wonderful weekend.
Hey,
On the backerkit for both Hollows and Voidheart, there are always duplicate files. For example "Core book FINAL" and "Core Book Final #2". Is there any difference between them?
In which the fruits of our labours fully ripen, final PDFs are released, and we collaborate violently on paper. Make yourselves comfortable, Hunters; build up the fire. This is a long read.
BACKER PDFS
The Wretched Domains feedback period is now complete. All revisions have been implemented, and files finalised.
This means that your final PDF versions for:
The core book
Wretched Domains
The Sins of Grisham Priory (the Hollows quickstart)
Are coming today. We're not locking and charging orders yet; at this point you've earned your books.
By the time you read this, you may have an email from Backerkit containing direct links to the final downloads. If you haven’t seen one by tomorrow:
Click your profile icon in the top right corner of the homepage
Go to Your Pledges and Surveys
Find Hollows and click on it
Then go to View Order, under Surveys on the right hand side of the page
Click on Get Your Digital Downloads, near the top of the order page
Download your files
PRINTING
Which is, in fact, a deep dive into paper specifications.
We are particular about papers. I knew this, but I didn’t really know it until we started looking at Hollows materials samples. Every book needs different paper: for Hollows, we need something that:
Can tolerate really high ink saturation (we have a lot of art, and it has intense colours)
Is fully opaque, even when it’s got dark-coloured art on one side and text on the other
Has a high enough brightness that images are sharp and vivid
Doesn’t make the book so enormous it’s unwieldy, at its 360 page finished length
Feels right for the words that are in the book.
The last point requires explanation.
Hollows is set in a Victorian-esque era. Every design and production choice we’ve made reflects that: we’ve kept plastic out of the component kit to the greatest extent possible, and we want our boxes and slipcases to evoke the kind of objects Hunters themselves might own (you’ve seen the covers for the Wretched Domains).
The paper we use for the books is one of the most crucial elements (if not the most) of expressing that choice. If it’s too glossy, for example, it feels too modern. If it’s not bulky enough it’ll feel flimsy, and not in the fun, onion skin paper way (if you’ve got a very old Bible or other religious text printed on really thin paper, you probably know what I mean; same if you had - like I did - tiny versions of Shakespeare plays printed in two inch high mini-books).
And there are practical choices too: if the paper’s too thick, or not bulky enough, it’s heavy, and that means the book is impractically large and weighty, and becomes harder to use.
I say all this to explain what comes next.
We are still selecting the right paper for Hollows. We’ve received numerous samples, and are waiting for another batch. We’re not going to print until we’ve got one that both Maz and I are happy with, because otherwise we’ll end up disappointed in the final product. We think you will be too, even if you’re not a paper sicko; our job is to work out why it wouldn’t delight you the way we want it to, and keep pushing the specification until it does.
You’ve guessed the conclusion to this story, right?
Hollows is further delayed.
UPDATED TIMELINE
We now expect to start printing in January. This will, unfortunately, lead to a knock-on delay as our printer will fully close for Lunar New Year in February.
This means, in very condensed form:
Printing begins in January
Transport begins in April
Fulfilment happens in June, or even July
This allows for some additional delays in the process, just in case. Tooling for production will be starting imminently, and the elements that we can go ahead with immediately are going ahead. Pre-press is almost complete, and after several lengthy discussions with our manufacturers, we’re hoping that the new paper winging its way to us this weekend will be The One. Fulfilment is set up and ready to go as soon as everything lands in warehouses, and we’ll be transporting everything from our producers straight to local warehouses for delivery, skipping our normal consolidation step.
If you’ve read any updates on our other projects recently, you’ve probably seen my mini-manifesto about us needing to leave time to do things properly, and getting better about building processes that account for that from the outset.
There’s more to say on that as it concerns Hollows, but this month’s update is already long, so I shall save it for next time.
IN CONCLUSION
This has been a mixed update with some good and bad news, so I will end as I began: the final PDFs are ready, which means you can continue to play Hollows while you wait for the books. Know that we are, and always will be, conscious of the need to balance how much delays add to the finished product against actually needing to send you the books, and that if we didn’t think the paper choice was fundamental to your experience of Hollows, we wouldn’t be doing this.
Meanwhile, and somewhat unexpectedly for us, there’s now a thriving West Marches Hollows Discord full of people running Wretched Domains as well as testing their own creations. Next time, I hope to be able to update you on our plans to make Hollows easy and rewarding to create for, as well as our plans for line support once the core game is in your hands.
