Post-Campaign Update 11: Through Parting Shadows We Approach
In which the time of our Hollowing impends, and we feel our own Malignant majesty bloom within. (We’re most of the way through layout.)
MANUSCRIPT
The tech edit is complete...
1
0
2
Chant (Voidheart Producer)
about 1 month ago
Intermission: Updated Quickstart Available
No updates for nearly 6 weeks, then two in one day?
When I sent this morning's update, it was supposed to include the promise of an updated quickstart PDF. It has new graphi...
5
0
2
Chant (Voidheart Producer)
about 1 month ago
Post-Campaign Update 10: Measure by Measure, We Advance
In which we feel the Seed stir within and the omens of our grim purpose steal over us. In other words… we’re getting there.
MANUSCRIPT
Last time we spoke, we thought we wer...
8
0
2
Chant (Voidheart Producer)
3 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 9: The Slow Creep Toward Publication
In which progress is made, largely invisibly, and we continue to creep up on our ultimate goal like a Hunter with a Knife.
MANUSCRIPT
Editing. Still editing. Maz has given ...
10
0
2
Rowan, Rook and Decard
4 months ago
Intermission: A General Note On The Whole Tariff Thing
Hi folks, Maz here.
As you’re probably aware, the US has announced new tariffs on almost every country in the world, including the ones where we make our games, and the ones...
16
0
4
Chant (Voidheart Producer)
4 months ago
Post-Campaign Update 8: Something in the Air
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...
In which the time of our Hollowing impends, and we feel our own Malignant majesty bloom within. (We’re most of the way through layout.)
MANUSCRIPT
The tech edit is complete! Maz is typesetting the last section even now, as I write these words to you. The rest of the book is in layout, and the to-and-fro of “that spacing’s a bit funny”, “move that box up a bit? No down a bit?”, and “can we ram another bit of art in there?” is well underway. (Dear Mina, I am sorry for everything.)
It may not come as a tremendous surprise, given all the extra writing, revising, testing, and refining that we’ve done that the book is very big now. We were expecting a svelte 320-page artifact. We’re… not there. A lot of the to-and-fro with our graphic designer, Minaerva McJanda, is over ways to conserve space while still making the text clear and easy to read – and still leaving room for all the special treatments we want to do for, say, Weapons, Entities, and rules sets like The Refuge.
Overall, we’re pleased.
Once that last section is laid out, we’ll share the complete PDF with you for your review and interrogation – and I really do mean interrogation. This will be the last chance to correct typos, clarify wording, and tell us if something’s just weird before we go to print. Expect a PDF sometime in mid-August.
COMPONENT KIT
No changes to report here. We made a couple of small changes to designs based on the production samples (remember those? Beautiful things.), and our manufacturing partner’s ready to go.
I’m not pushing the big red button until the core book’s ready too. See above for how close that is.
WRETCHED DOMAINS
We have not been idle on this. Chris Taylor and I have been giving the Entities in these Hollows a final pass, ensuring they still work with the updates to the core rules (broadly: Entities have become nastier and more punishing since the first drafts of these scenarios were written!). Maz will then edit them to a high shine, Mina will lay them out, and they’ll go off to print. This should all happen while you’re enjoying the core PDF, so everything’s falling into place nicely.
SUNDRIES, AND A PODCAST
The other pieces of the Hollows puzzle are small: we have some enamel pin badges to order, and a metal Entity token. These designs are ready, and mainly in need of some packaging design. We also committed to a “Making Of…” podcast. Now we’ve made the game, we can make the Making Of.
Is there anything you’d like to know about Hollows or the process of conjuring it from the depthless void of Grant and Chris’s nightmares? Come and ask it in the comments, and I’ll make sure Maz, Grant, and Chris see it before the podcast. I can’t promise they’ll answer it, or that they’ll answer it seriously, but Grant once asked an interviewee what the sexiest polyhedral die was, so I think it’s only fair that you throw him some tough questions here.
In which we feel the Seed stir within and the omens of our grim purpose steal over us. In other words… we’re getting there.
MANUSCRIPT
Last time we spoke, we thought we were just about done with the technical edit; that turned out to be not the case. Hollows is easily the most technical game we’ve created, and we’ve been taking the time needed to make everything as robust and watertight as possible. We’ve been working through the feedback on abilities, Entities and campaign play from our playtest - thank you to everyone who took part and took the time to give us your thoughts! - as well as ongoing playtesting discussions in our Discord (thanks to everyone there, too; Maz would like to shout out hierotelephony in particular, whose questions prompted a full review of combat action sequencing).
So we’ve now fully reworked the entire Weapons chapter to bring everything into a specific set of standardised language. We’ve also got new sections in the rules to make it easier to understand what happens in what order, and how to cope with strange edge cases. Most of the changes we wanted to make in response to playtest feedback have now been fully integrated.
Meanwhile, Grant has finished writing up new material on the nations beyond the Isles, and that’s also been read and discussed with our sensitivity consultant; it’s now being adopted properly into the setting chapter where it belongs.
All of which is to say: progress has been slow, but when we’re in a position where we have to choose between doing something fast and doing it properly, we’ll choose properly every time. I will need to give you an updated timeline, but I’ll do it once we’re finished with edits and firmly into layout.
When I say we’re thankful to the Discord and our playtesters, by the way, I mean we’ve significantly overhauled sections of text to address the very sensible questions they asked. This introduction to using Weapon abilities is a great example:
Using Abilities
Both Hunters and Entities have access to a variety of abilities, including generic manoeuvres available to all, and other abilities that are unique to the Weapon wielded or the Entity being hunted.
There are a variety of ways that abilities can be triggered or activated. Ability text usually includes at least one of the following:
Limits, like “once per round” or “on your turn”.
Conditions, like “while you are in Ranged” or “while you hold Focus”.
Triggers, like “when your turn starts” or “when you inflict damage”.
Costs, like “spend Resolve” or “place Threat on your area”.
In general, if you fulfil all the requirements to use one of your abilities, you may choose to use it but do not have to.
Entity abilities often also specify targets or target areas, like “all Hunters in Close” or “one Hunter in a Flank area”. There must be at least one target who matches the ability’s target description in order for it to be triggered.
Some ability effects are automatic, while others depend on a dice roll or on additional conditions. Generally the ability text will say what happens and when, and sometimes multiple abilities on both sides of the fight can trigger off each other. If there’s doubt about what order things should happen, the GM decides.
UPDATED GLOSSARY
All that work on the technical detail means we’ve been able to bring the rules text closer to its final form, so we’ve also spent some time applying all the edits to our player-facing glossary. You can't quite run Hollows straight from this document, but it's not far off.
And if you think this is good, you should see the 10-tab spreadsheet we've got behind the scenes.
ARTWORK
We are now officially art complete! Last month, Sam Lamont was still working on the slipcase. He’s finished, and it’s beautiful. The idea is that the yellow areas will be cut out and you'll see the hideous, roiling interior design on the back cover of the Hollows book through them.
The outside...
...and the inside
COMPONENT KIT
We’ve received our production samples! Look! Look at them! BEHOLD!!!
Obviously, the box won’t be white in the final version, and nor will the cardboard dividers inside it. We’ve got a couple of small tweaks to make - the ones you’ll notice most are replacing the dice with a sort of bone effect, and making the capacity holder and tokens darker, more gunmetal and brass than the silver and gold of the samples. This is progressing very nicely and we’re well on track.
It’s about time to start ordering our challenge coins and faction pins, so there’s a good chance we’ll have some visuals to show off there next time, and we’ve also got a delightful set of page backgrounds for the scenarios.
No updates for nearly 6 weeks, then two in one day?
When I sent this morning's update, it was supposed to include the promise of an updated quickstart PDF. It has new graphics, reflected the final designs of our token set, and updated rules, Entities, and pregenerated characters in line with the tech edit.
It's overall cleaner, clearer, and most importantly it reflects the current state of the game.
You should have received an email from Backerkit with a download link. If for any reason that email doesn't arrive or the link doesn't work, you can download directly from our website:
In which progress is made, largely invisibly, and we continue to creep up on our ultimate goal like a Hunter with a Knife.
MANUSCRIPT
Editing. Still editing. Maz has given Hollows a brilliantly thorough shakedown, and they’re now down to the setting chapter. The glossary of game terms and mechanics they’ve made is a thing of beauty, and I look forward to sharing it with you in the near future.
We’ve reworked the two scenarios that are going into the core book based on all the rules revisions etc. I’ve just finished my readthrough and they’ll go to Maz for editing next week. I had forgotten how many ways Chris Taylor knew to describe ticks, and also his knack for evoking sympathy and sadness in the same paragraph as describing ticks the size of apples.
We’ve heard back from our sensitivity consultant, who has taken Hollows pretty much in stride. The single biggest piece of feedback was that we needed to build out the nations beyond The Isles more, so Grant’s been working on new material to meet that need. We’re not quite ready to show it off yet: it may not surprise you to learn that writing a concise travelogue of colonised countries in a roleplaying setting is delicate work.
PLAYTESTING
If you took part in the extremely late-stage playtest over the last couple of months: THANK YOU! If you’ve provided feedback, THANK YOU EVEN MORE! If you haven’t, I’ll be sending out a Google form to everyone who received the playtest materials. Depending on how this week goes, it might have gone out before this update, in fact.
ART
The dashing, heroic, noble Sam Lamont is working on what I believe to be the final piece of art: the slipcase that encloses the special edition and component kit set. This is quite a fiddly, technical brief (there are cut-outs and stuff), and I look forward to proudly showing off the finished product in due course.
What I can share is some of Sam's work on the chapter header art. We've devised what passes in The Isles for a morality tale: the Seed of a Hunter's story, his development - Weapons in hand and foes at his feet - and his Last Good Death and eventual shift into the Lord of his own Hollow. Here's Chapter One.
COMPONENT KIT
The component kit manufacturer’s just finished the latest (and, I hope, final) round of sampling. I’ve been promised a set to review in the next couple of weeks, but the videos I’ve seen are looking nice. So are these snaps of the tactical grid and token bags.
So, all in all, the pieces are continuing to grind into place. This is the dull part where there’s nothing to show off, but work is continuing and no news is good news.
Until next month, when I will return with no news, which is good news!
As you’re probably aware, the US has announced new tariffs on almost every country in the world, including the ones where we make our games, and the ones where we could make our games in future. What this means is that for every item imported into the US, there will be an additional tax levied at the ports, based on where it was manufactured. For some countries that’ll be an extra 10% of their manufacturing cost; for others it’s up to 50%. Those are taxes paid to the US government, and they have a big impact on importers like us (and almost every other importer in the games business).
As I write this, it is super unclear what the impact will be for us, and for Hollows in particular. We are still waiting for clarity about what the actual rate will be for various territories once multiple tariff levels are combined, and for clarity about deeply wonky things like which HTS codes precisely are exempt and whether the implementation of those exemptions will be in line with the order as it’s written. We might be waiting for that for a while; the details of the legislation and how it’s intended to work in practice are not clear right now, not just to us but also to the experts we rely on to help us navigate global freight in calmer times.
In the meantime: work continues. We’re writing, editing (I now have strong opinions about the definition of the word "would"), playtesting and making art, as well as checking the headlines. We don’t think these tariffs are going to prevent anyone from getting their games; we’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes to build resilience against this scenario, and we’re hopeful that - relatively speaking - we’re in a better position to weather this than we’d feared.
But: that “relatively speaking” is doing a lot of work. Assuming that what we believe to be true about these tariffs remains true - and pending the massive impact this will have on global shipping, freight and US ports - we may have to raise shipping costs higher than we’d hoped, and there may be other knock-on effects too.
It’s too early to say exactly what we will do in response to these events. We expect the situation to evolve in the coming days and weeks; we’re monitoring it and we have contingency plans. If you’ve got specific questions, you’re welcome to ask them here, come to our Discord where we’re discussing this in more detail, or email [email protected]. We want to be very transparent and open about this; we regularly talk about how our business and the broader industry works in our Discord, and it’s been an active topic today. You’re welcome to join in.
A deeper dive If you’re still unsure of how these tariffs might impact the games industry, Meredith Placko, CEO of Turbo Dork Paints and Steve Jackson Games, wrote a helpful and live explainer:
A company makes a product in, let's say, China. It costs them $3.05 to manufacture (not counting tooling fees, color process, freight). Say that company wants an 8-to-1 ratio (because they're thinking scale, and if they sell in distribution, that can take upwards of 65%-72% off MSRP). Now that product is priced, to consumers, at $25.00 (rounding up for easy maths).
Alrighty. $25.00 for the item. That's a reasonable price for a decorative bowl found at Target, a card game with some tokens, a baseball cap.
However, to make that product in China, we have to add 20% to the cost, because of tariffs. That now means it costs the company (not counting tooling, color process, freight) $3.66 to manufacture. And to get that same 8-1 ratio, the item will now sell for $29.99 (because taking that one penny off $30 makes it seem "cheaper".).
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
Today, if Trump announces 20% on ALL incoming imports, on top of the current 20% already lobbed on Chinese goods, and that 25% extra if the country of origin is buying gas from Venezuela.... the company who makes that item for $3.05 needs to add an additional 65% on the cost, making the base price for said item $5.03, and the new cost to consumer is $40.26.
A product you would have bought for $25.00 now costs you $40.00…
For cost comparison, and using a semi-recent real world example. I quoted a product in both China and the USA. In China, the price for the item was $1.26. In the United States, it was $7.42 per unit (and that was with a reasonable MOQ). Even with the 65% increase, it was *still cheaper* to produce overseas. This wont always be the case, but most of the time... it is. And companies will *still* raise the prices to the consumers to cover their costs.
And everything else Given everything else that’s happened and is still happening in the USA, in the last three months, these tariffs are just a part of a very concerning and frightening picture. Some of us are in the USA; some of us are now trying to work out if we’re still safe to cross the border to come to Gen Con; others have already recognised that we’re not. If you are living in this, right now, we are sending you strength and hope for the future, and we recognise that TTRPGs are really quite unlikely to be the most important of your concerns at this time.
Thanks for all your support; sorry about all this; no pasarán.
