Is it spring? Hope? Or smoke from the chimneys of the ever-toiling word factories? Things are definitely happening, that's what matters.
TIMELINE
After I wrote the February...
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Rowan, Rook and Decard
about 1 month ago
Intermission: Would You Like Some Hollows NOW?
Hello again!
First! Look what Sam's done with the map of the Isles!
My favourite parts are the broken bridge and, if you look closely enough, the dilapidated train lines....
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Rowan, Rook and Decard
about 2 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 7: Prognostication and Midwinter
Apologies, Islanders - I managed to miss January's update. It would have been a brief one anyway, I admit. So is this month's update - a lot is happening behind the scenes, t...
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Chant (Voidheart Producer)
4 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 6: Storms and New Eras
Hello backers!
This is the final update of 2024, and headline: everything’s going roughly to plan.
TIMELINES
Last month I said there was potentia...
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Chant (Voidheart Producer)
5 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 5: Presidents, Kings, and other Wretchedness
Hello backers!
This month’s update is rich with new material, but also we’ve got to talk about politics a bit. We’ll do that first and get it out of the way....
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Chant (Voidheart Producer)
6 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 4: Islands and Art
Hello backers!
We’re ushering in October with planchettes, wolves, sinking islands, and… pigs, which despite not being a stereotypically Halloween-y beast are grea...
Is it spring? Hope? Or smoke from the chimneys of the ever-toiling word factories? Things are definitely happening, that's what matters.
TIMELINE
After I wrote the February update – days after, I think – we decided to squeeze in some more playtesting. The good news is that, after some initial stumbling blocks (a few bits of missing or conflicting information, now fixed) that’s going well.
We haven’t started getting feedback yet, so whether the timeline remains good or we have to pump the brakes and rewrite a couple of subsystems remains to be seen. Watch this space.
MANUSCRIPT
Still in editing! So far, so good – Editor Supreme Maz has tightened up some writing, streamlined some sections for clarity, and called us on a few common sense issues (“You cannot call two distinct and separate categories of people ‘Allies’. Stop.”). We’ve also sent the manuscript to our sensitivity consultant, who has not yet emailed us a massive bill for future therapy, so I think that’s going well too.
ART PROGRESS
Sam’s drawn almost everything he could possibly draw for us, barring a few chapter header illustrations and the slipcase for the special edition and component kit pack. The most recent treasures are his pictures of Hollows’ sample Entities – imagined as carved wooden tokens from a Hunter’s personal collection, used to plan and prepare for the battles ahead – and another version of the Isles map, also from a Hunter’s gear.
The Isles | Art by Sam Lamont (moonskinned)
The Learned Beast and The River Witch | Art by Sam Lamont (moonskinned)
COMPONENT KIT
We are, I think, a couple of weeks away from seeing samples of the component kit. This will be our second prototype, and hopefully the final one. More to say next month, hopefully.
First! Look what Sam's done with the map of the Isles!
Art by Sam Lamont (moonskinned)
My favourite parts are the broken bridge and, if you look closely enough, the dilapidated train lines. How the mighty empire has fallen.
As I may have mentioned before, we're creeping ever closer to release, with all that entails - editing, layout design and refinement, and so on. We at RRD have never been the types to do things the easy way. We take the road less-travelled. March to the beat of our own drum. Run a final playtest mere months before release.
(Producer Chant is fine about this, it doesn't mess up the spreadsheet at all and everything is great.)
Jokes aside, there's quite a bit of material in Hollows that only comes into play when you start running longer-term games. Players get to develop the Refuge, their Hunters' interdimensional pub/guest house; Hunters die, gain Corruption, and gain new boons and banes in the process; GMs develop storylines that run across multiple Hollows. The Refuge and Corruption are some of the most iterated upon parts of Hollows and, while we've had a good time with them, we'd like to open them up to wider feedback while there's still (just about) time to tweak them if we need to.
So, if you would like to be the first to see these unreleased chapters of Hollows, for the low, low price of giving us some feedback, please sign up using the form linked below. We'll send out a packet of rules and other content in the first week of March, and try to squeeze in a couple of months of testing while we're laying out the rest of the book, getting sensitivity reading done, etc.
Apologies, Islanders - I managed to miss January's update. It would have been a brief one anyway, I admit. So is this month's update - a lot is happening behind the scenes, to be unveiled over the next couple of months.
TIMELINE
Remarkably, things are looking... OK? Good, even? No news is good news, under this heading.
THE BOOK
Hollows is still in editing - and that's normal. There's a lot of book, ergo there's a lot of editing. This very afternoon, I've had a delightful meeting with Mina (McJanda; art director and layout maven) about page design, paper weights, and ribbon - so we've done a lot of good groundwork ahead of starting layout.
WRETCHED DOMAINS
Last update, writing was nearly complete; now it is complete. It's nice when a plan comes together. Art is still trickling in, but that's almost complete too. Behold, for example, Letty Wilson's stunningly unpleasant sketches for Chris Taylor's fairytale Hollow.
Art by Letty Wilson
That lupine thing is called The Worst Wolf. It's the manifestation of every wolf in every story. Every child's nightmare, now bound in service to a teacher whose personal hell is the power of children's imagination.
That brings us to the end of a short but gruesome update. More soon.
This is the final update of 2024, and headline: everything’s going roughly to plan.
TIMELINES
Last month I said there was potential for the project timelines to slip. There still is, but at the moment estimates are holding up: we should start shipping books out in Q3 of next year. Now, I think it will be later in Q3 than I would have ideally liked, but still Q3. Watch this space.
THE BOOK
We’re still not 100% finished but the outstanding bits are:
Revising the Steel City and Morningmire scenarios you might remember from the original playtest, to match the new updated rules and some setting developments
GM advice on how to beat up your players’ Hunters and make them enjoy it
The small but important bits of front matter like “what is a roleplaying game?” and “what is this roleplaying game?”
I hope you’ll agree that isn’t much, in the greater scheme of things.
Our own Maz Hamilton is going to start the first editing pass in the next week or two. This is both exciting and terrifying. Maz is one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with, and what they do to the manuscript will make it several times better (and it’s already bloody good), but it’s also going to ask some difficult questions and force Grant and Chris to answer them, because that’s what a good edit does. We’re fine, though. I mean, I’m smoking a lot, but that’s OK, right?
WRETCHED DOMAINS
We have eight complete Hollows, and the author is working on the ninth one in our virtual office co-working space as I type. This collection's looking good, folks. And the art! Oh my goodness, the art! This month, I’ll send you off with these absolutely revolting works by Morgan Robles, for Sasha Sienna and Helen Gould’s Hollow. This was formerly called The Lord of the Dockyard and is currently Break! Break! Break! – the story of a mutineer who Hollowed when his uprising failed and he proved powerless against the navy that crushed his spirit.
Bleak, right? And Morgan’s art brings it to life perfectly.
Art by Morgan Robles
That’s it for this month, for 2024, and damn nearly for the writing stage of this game.
I hope your year ends peacefully and the new one starts strong.
This month’s update is rich with new material, but also we’ve got to talk about politics a bit. We’ll do that first and get it out of the way.
US ELECTION, EH?
Originally there was going to be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek statement here about how the election results might impact international trade. Now the results are in but it's too soon to really know the effect on tariffs etc.. so we know there will likely be some impact, but not what form it will take.
In other words, we’re not quite ready to announce delays to Hollows but that might change between now and the next monthly update.
How cryptic.
RIGHT, BOOK!
Grant has written even more setting, and given that he’s moved on to writing campaign frames for long-term Hollows play I think he might be finished. The rotten cherry on the mouldering cake of The Isles’ setting is this description of its current monarch:
KING EOTEN - A pockmarked, decrepit giant of a man doing his best to drink himself to death before the Isles falls to a foreign power. Father of six awful progeny, half of whom are poised to claim the throne with appropriate timing, forgery, assassination or social pressure. In his sober moments, Eoten laments the loss of the empire and the slow destruction of his country; otherwise he sleeps fitfully, or shambles about Allhallow Castle in a dressing gown, or tries to have sex with one of his sisters. If he were to turn Hollow, the ramifications on the Isles would be tremendous; those in the know believe it’s simply a matter of time before the spiritual heart of the Isles falls to ruin.
The fish rots from the head, as they say.
We’ve now completed all the rules and all the setting, which is basically the bones of the book and the meat on top. We’ve got a few bits of gristle and sinew to attach, and some organs we still haven’t found a home for, but we’re bloody close to finished – which is exactly where we expected to be, but we’re still proud.
WRETCHED DOMAINS
Or, formerly, “the box of Hollows scenarios.” Manuscripts are flooding in faster than Chant, then Grant, can review them – along with art for them. Every Wretched Domain is a separate pamphlet, and has a very distinct visual style to reflect the unique ugliness of the Hollow it describes. Very rarely, as a producer, do I get to work on something that ranges from the gothic grandeur of Felix Klaer (superstarfighter)’s illustrations…
Artwork by Felix Abel Klaer (superstarfighter)
…to the bleakness of Daniel Vega’s Professor Armageddon for Kieron Gillen’s endless war.
Artwork by Daniel Vega
It’s a rare treat, but Hollows is a rare beast.
LOST IN A FOREST
There’s one more piece of Wretched Domains news. One of our authors, Cassandra Khaw, won’t be able to complete their contribution in time for inclusion in Wretched Domains. The Hollow isn’t cancelled, just postponed. If Cassandra’s able to deliver it, we’ll release it in some form. We’ll make sure backers who purchased the box of Hollows at least get a digital version.
Fortunately, we’re surrounded by talented TTRPG designers, all of whom are poised to make Hollows weird in entirely new ways. We’ve therefore drafted in RRD staffer Jinn Hermiston to answer the question “what if an entire forest could hold a grudge?”
Nobody writes rural horror like Jinn, and that’s probably quite a good thing.
In the next couple of days, we’ll be removing Cassandra’s Hollow from pledge manager and putting Jinn’s up for pre-order. We’re sorry for any disappointment, but also absolutely shaken by what Jinn’s delivered, which is to say they’ve hit the brief perfectly. 10/10 unpleasantness.
OUTRO
Time to play us out with Sam Lamont’s bold experiment for the map of The Isles:
