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.)

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.

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.

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.  

- Chant