The time has come.

Today, in fact. I’m going to push the big button in Backerkit that starts the process. That will prompt an email to each of you from Backerkit, informing you that your orders will be locked in 48 hours, and subsequently charged - so this is a good opportunity to check your card info is up to date in Backerkit. 

If the charge fails, you’ll get follow up emails from Backerkit advising you of what to do in response. Backerkit will also periodically try again to charge your cards - so if it doesn’t work first time, fear not: your order is safe and sound as long as your card’s been successfully charged before we start trying to ship out packages.

IMPORTANT: We’re not charging shipping fees at this moment in time. We have shipping costs, but the world is currently… turbulent (even more so than it has been for the last few years)... so while we need to lock orders and finalise our print quantities, we’ll charge shipping fees once the products are actually on the way to our warehouses. 

EVEN MORE IMPORTANT: Maz and I have just received the physical samples for everything except the Hollows slipcase. Once I hit send on this update, I’m going to tear into the massive cardboard box and start reviewing them! If I can find some decent light in this benighted dwelling, I might even do you an unboxing video.

- Chant

WE HAVE SAMPLES! At least, we have videos of samples, and the physical samples are in the post and on the way to me and Maz. 

Based on the videos, they look really good - the gold foil on the special edition core book looks like it might be a little off-centre, but I’ll get a measuring tape out when it arrives and check. Other than that: real nice. See?

As per the previous update, Logistics Alex and I will be doing that this month. For more information, see the last update.

Assuming the samples all pass muster when Maz and I inspect them, we’re on track. 

This also means I’m one, maybe two, updates away from handing communication over to Logistics Alex, who will keep you informed about where the books are, once printing and assembly is complete.

Thank you to the nearly 500 people who answered the short survey about VTTs that I opened up last month! The data’s analysed, and now I just need to squeeze in a meeting with the rest of the team to discuss the results before I tell you about them. 

I did notice quite a lot of people are sleeping on the Glossary, which I personally think is one of Maz’s finest creations. I use it heavily when I’m running (or writing) Hollows. Now, that might be because I haven’t shown it off yet (I genuinely don’t remember). Just in case… here it is.

Onwards!

Chant

As promised last time we spoke, there's an update coming on VTT plans later this month. This is a sort of prequel to it.

We've reached a point where we have several good options for a virtual tabletop. We've also got ideas for additional online tools that we think will be useful and fun.

We could just make all of them (OK, not all, some are quite expensive, but certainly any of them), but we're not going to spend time making things nobody wants. So before I make any big announcements, I want to know what you think.

To that end, I've made a survey. Fear not: it is short. Two questions, plus some quite detailed descriptions of the tools we're thinking about. The survey will be open for feedback until 22nd March, giving you just over two weeks.

https://forms.gle/8E12J6prVsefB5yq8

Expect results at the end of the month, and an update on what else is happening on Hollows sooner than that.

- Chant

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Expect this to drop around the same time as the 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!

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]. 

We’re getting very, very close now, folks.

Onwards, Hunters! 

- Chant

In which we send some files to the printer, and release final backer PDFs (again). 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

That's all for now. Keep your eyes peeled for the updated PDFs and timeline next week, and have a wonderful weekend.

- Chant