Chant (Hollows Producer)
CREATOR
15 days ago
Project Update: Post-Campaign Update 3: DIY Hollows and New Words
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.
Writing
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:
Gaols bloom into sprawling dungeons, houses of government become nightmare warrens, and palaces rot away to show the blood and bones that built them. Armies march and murder across blasted plains and shattered cities. Legions of workers, faceless and nameless, tear themselves to pieces in service to their master.
Those in charge are physically larger than those who serve them, as they would be if represented in ancient art, and they bear oversized marks of office: great crowns, sceptres, robes, and staves, often tattered and always heavy. The ranks beneath them grow smaller, more shrivelled, and less distinctive as they descend in seniority. They take on bestial traits to denote their lower status, such as canine muzzles, a herbivore’s diet, or the wide-spaced eyes of a creature built to be prey.
Lords of Dominion (or their favoured lieutenants) often rely on manpower to move – they are picked up on palanquins, dragged onwards by cadres of devotees, or borne on the bent backs of broken men. Some might, similarly, eschew making direct attacks in favour of delegation, and rely on the blades of men-at-arms, the teeth of hunting hounds or distant batteries of cannon to get the job done.
Unlike their chaotic cousins, Hollows of Dominion tend towards order – or whatever twisted notion of order exists within the Lord’s shattered psyche. Night follows day, water flows downhill, and [a third one, not gravity-related] unless it would be beneficial for it to do otherwise. Right angles, grids and systems dominate.
Aberrant elements (such as intruding Hunters) are quickly identified and set upon so they can be destroyed or, perhaps worse, broken and reformed to serve the structures of power as another cog in the great machine.
Surveys
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.
Print Your Own Hollows
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.
Royal Blood
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.
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
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