Hello again! 

How time flies when you’re making myriad self-contained worlds of amplified anguish and muted hope. The short version of this update is that we’re progressing nicely, and we’ve put some useful stuff on our website. The longer version is… well, the longer version is the rest of this update, I suppose. 

Progress continues! Grant’s been thinking about Malignancies a lot over the last few weeks (I think he’s OK; I’m a little afraid to check). He’s been sketching out how Hunters perceive their effects on the real world, and the tendencies within each Malignancy’s Hollows. 

By way of example, here’s what a Dominion Hollow looks and feels like:

Surveys are still open! Please complete yours if you haven’t already. It will stop Backerkit sending you niggly little reminder emails. There’s no real rush, it just makes me feel better when I look at the behind-the-scenes Backerkit stats.

We’ve built out the Hollows offering on our website since last we spoke. It now includes a very easy link to the free quickstart PDF (in case you’re one of the three people who backed Hollows who doesn’t already have it), plus a set of free print-and-play materials for home use. 

Currently that means A4 and A3 copies of the tactical grid and all the tokens, plus form-fillable or printer-friendly (crucially not both in the same document) character sheets for the quickstart pregenerated characters. We’ll add blank character sheets once we finalise the design for them. I believe that if you download this pack now, you’ll get an email when we update it but don’t quote me on that. 

Now, it always feels a little tacky to mention one crowdfunder in another crowdfunder, but I think there’s a strong possibility that if you like Hollows, you’ll like this. Mana Project Studio (Seven Sinners, Nightfell) are crowdfunding an updated, beautified version of Grant’s 2016 tarot heist TTRPG, Royal Blood. We’re helping a little.

It’s rather lovely, and Mana Project are making an absolutely spectacular deck of tarot cards to go with the new edition. I strongly recommend following the project, if only to get a glimpse of the art. 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gshowitt/royal-blood-a-tarot-heist-rpg 

That’s all for this month! I’m hoping we’ll be able to show you some layout and design progress next month, which will make for a more visually stimulating update. 

Bye for now!

Producer Chant

We, as a team, have an unwholesome level of excitement for Hollows’ combat. Really, it’s sickening. We’re a bloodthirsty bunch. But it’s only a slice of what you can do in Hollows. Over the next few updates we’ll talk about roleplaying in Hollows, the world outside them, and the Hunters’ extradimensional sanctuary, the Refuge.

When you’re in a Hollow but you’re not in a fight against an Entity, you’re in the Exploration stage of the game.

Surrounding each Entity in a Hollow are blasted hinterlands of rotten unreality where people, places, and things have been absorbed from the real world and remade into unsettling new forms. Exploring them is your group’s main chance for roleplay. They’re not just puzzles to explore, unless you want them to be; they’re also your opportunity as a GM to weave a story that showcases your Hunters, to introduce non-player characters, to encourage your Hunters to bond as a group and share time on camera.

A Hollow is full of people and stories for the Hunters to interact with. Clues to Entities’ true natures and histories are hidden in the details of the Hollow, and investigating them is a chance for Hunters to show off how they think, how they approach problems, and how they feel about what they discover. Vassals – the NPCs players meet in a Hollow – are there for players to interact with, form opinions about, sympathise with, or despise. 

The Sins of Grisham Priory deliberately keeps Exploration light and fast-moving in order to show off a full Hollow in a tightly contained amount of game time; our recent GenCon scenario, Poor Sally Kraken, took characters through formative moments in the eponymous Lord’s development, giving them time to get to know her, watch her change, and (in at least some cases) feel intensely bad about having to execute the monster she’d become.
 

Guilt tripping players is definitely one way to make them feel things, but a) you can’t do it often or it loses its impact and b) it’s not very nice. It’s like when a video game makes you murder animals and then insists your character should feel bad about it. 

But they should feel things. Hollows expects players to feel things (guess we’re gonna need a separate article about Managing Big Feelings…), and it’s a better game when they do because while a great combat system is fun, a great combat system interleaved with high stakes and emotional intensity is practically unstoppable. 

Saving people, alleviating suffering, seeing reflections of their own stories in the Hollows they purge and cauterise, advancing their ambitions, learning new things, and just surviving all get their hooks into players and drag them bodily to the edge of their seats. And you can do all those things in Exploration. 

Set up interesting scenarios that give players meaningful choices to make, present details that let them think about the world and their Hunter’s place in it, and create NPCs for them to care about, and your quartet (or other number) of messed-up Hunters will bring the roleplay.

As a GM – in most games, not just Hollows – it’s important for the GM to create space for the players to roleplay. Don’t feel pressured to keep the action moving, or to be involved in everything that happens. If the Hunters see something that shakes them, makes them angry, or opens an old wound, give the players time to explore that. 

Draw in other players by asking how they feel about what they’re seeing – witnessing a stoic companion starting to look shaken, or hearing a story about another Hunter’s Seed, for example. 

By letting players take centre stage, and knowing when to give them their character moments, the group will bring a scenario to life. The Exploration sections of Grisham Priory are short, but it only takes a touch of description to have Hunters appropriately shaken by the Wormery, or moved to pity (or disgust) by the pathetic Viridian Congregation in the cloisters. 

Hollows has extra ways to stir up Hunters’ emotions. The more times a Hunter dies, the more Corruption they pick up. That gives them more powers but also more problems, and sometimes those problems manifest as Echoes: reflections of the people they’ve hurt, or who’ve hurt them, or the sins they’ve committed. Echoes appear inside Hollows, twisting that bespoke reality into a form that specifically rattles, unnerves, and distresses Hunters. 

Echoes ensure that over time, a Hunter’s backstory and history starts seeping into their present. One way or another, they’ll have to reckon with who they are… and what they’ve done.

If you found this post without backing Hollows… welcome! You can pre-order the game (or add delightful extras to your order) here.

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. 

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.

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 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.

Hello! 

It’s been nearly a month already. Wow, and also, how? 

However, things are occurring. In summary:

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. 

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.

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