Chant (Hollows Producer)
CREATOR
about 1 month ago
Project Update: 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 great animals, and we should talk about them more often.
Writing
Grant has, under some duress, been writing things down about The Isles, as in the world outside of Hollows. The place where your Hunters come from, and the locations and society that shaped every single Lord of a Hollow. So, even though you’ll spend comparatively little time in the real world during a Hollows game, we feel it’s useful to put some of this information in the book.
We’re keeping it quite light: the aim is to give players and GMs enough material to get a feel for the place; a foundation to build character-specific detail on top of.
Here’s a sample for Forland (which means pig land), one of The Isles’ four islands:
Forland, located in the west, is the largest island of the four that make up the greater alliance. The warmer climate in the south and good soil mean that it’s easy to grow things here - compared to the rest of the country, at least - and as such the Viridian Temple has made great inroads towards taking it over. Much of Forland was reclaimed from the ocean with ingenious drainage methods, but the collapse of the Empire and subsequent loss of skills means hundreds of square miles of landmass return to the sea each year.
SLANG AND APHORISMS
“Get your hands in the dirt” - Stop complaining and do some work
“Like a pig in a church” - Causing chaos (affectionate)
“She’s got a headful of bees” - she’s clever/organised/diligent
“It’s all compost” - no effort is wasted, there’s something to be gained from losses
PEOPLE
The stereotypical Forlander is portrayed as curious, distracted and gently weird. The ingrained folk traditions of Forland run deep, and the Viridians have done their best to syncretise them with their agricultural faith, though some Old Faith beliefs and practices survive to this day despite attempts to subsume or destroy them. Citizens favour multiple, haphazard layers of clothing - often wearing more than one coat in colder months - and wide-brimmed hats, though upper-class Forlanders take a great deal of pride in wearing the smallest-brimmed hats available. (Wide brims are for the working class, who must work outside; civilised folk have no need to keep the sun out of their eyes.)
The full write-up also includes numerous locations – including Farrow, seat of the Viridian Temple – but we’ve got to leave something for the book.
Wretched Domains
Or, as it was previously described, the box of Hollows scenarios. This is progressing beautifully. Most of the drafts are in, artists have been briefed, and we’re starting to get sketches.
Watching an artist take a writer’s idea and breathe life into it is one of my personal favourite parts of production. It’s a part where I get to sit back and applaud other people’s talent, which is always fun… but it’s also the part where a scenario starts to feel real.
Look, for example, what Johan Nohr has done with Jay Dragon’s map for Jay’s scenario:
Or how some back-and-forth between artist and writer evolved this big furry friend:
Johan has expressly requested I remind you all that these are initial sketches – they’re far from the finished artwork. I can’t help that Johan’s sketches have so much energy and punch I couldn’t resist showing them.
Components
We keep being very nearly finished with the designs for the component kit, then we fiddle with them some more. This month, we’ve been finessing the Capacity tokens that firearm users will need. We’ve restyled them from bullet-shaped tokens with tally marks on them – which were fine, but were pretty chunky and we didn’t love how they looked in painted wood – into a cross-section of a revolver’s chamber which you can load with pegs to represent your ammo.
As always, Sam Lamont has knocked it out of the park and most of the way to orbit:
We’ve also restyled the Doom tracker as a planchette, in keeping with the spiritualism that shapes incursions into a Hollow. We haven’t picked a design yet (there’s not a bad one in the bunch) but we’re leaning towards Tree. What do you think?
Like Johan’s art above, these are just sketches, not finalised designs. But they’re close…
That’ll do for this month, I think. Draw your curtains, light some candles, and stay safe until the next time we speak.
– Producer Chant
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