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.

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: 

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.

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. 

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

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.