gshowitt

SUMMER OF HOLLOWS: IT'S BACK BABY

Added 2023-09-08 08:39:50 +0000 UTC

I haven’t gone Hollow, don’t worry.

I took a couple weeks off as we were at GenCon, and then we launched the EAT THE REICH Kickstarter, and since then I’ve just been sort of pinballing about the place and reacting to whatever’s happened to me most recently. It’s not the sort of behaviour that makes books come out, I tell you what.

Anyway. I had no intention of stopping writing these, and quite honestly I’m impressed I made it as far as I did, so here we bloody go:

GENCON

We went to GenCon! Indianapolis continues to be somewhere between grim and uninspiring, but the stall did great guns thanks in no small part to the efforts of our crew. We’re hoping to get permission for a bigger stall next year but there’s a whole bunch of arcane chicanery required to get into the big leagues, and by “big leagues” I mean access to more than a ten foot square space to try and run a business out of. We’ll see.

We playtested Hollows some, too - Chris ran it with the new Weapon rules that I’ve been chatting about over the last new months, and I’m happy to report that they went excellently. The main findings were: the rules are good but the fights are too easy. So we’re working on some ways to make them harder, which I’ll go into later on in this email.

We’ve written up Chris’ adventure, which will form the basis of our Quickstart Hollow - a sawn-off but entirely functional Hollow which we’ll be distributing ahead of the crowdfunding launch next year. (It’s next year now. Chris and I - our brains, they don’t work so great. We had a bash at it but he ain’t sleeping right and at least once a day I am overcome with a sort of wild, heavy desperation that leaves my ears ringing. So: we’re getting there. It’ll be ready when it’s ready.)

CAUSING PROBLEMS ON PURPOSE

As I mentioned, Hollows is a bit easy at present. That’s not a problem we’ve faced before, but this roleplaying game isn’t like any that we’ve written before, so here we are. We wanted to ensure that the fights in Hollows were dangerous enough to allow players to feel a sense of rules mastery; we want winning a fight to make you feel clever instead of lucky. (Or maybe a little bit of both.)

We’ve been toying around with the idea of levels and/or tiers for a while. Obviously, Weapon abilities are tied into tiers - the higher a tier is, the greater impact the ability can have on the game. Some high-level abilities are better than some low-level ones, but we wanted to avoid the trap of having a straight upgrade for any of them. Abilities should give you more tricks, not just make your existing tricks more powerful. The reason that high-tier characters in Hollows should be hard to kill isn’t because they have buckets of hit points and brilliant defences, but more that they’re hard to pin down. They’ve got an answer for everything, and when they do their thing, they’re very hard to stop.

Now: balancing enemies is a bloody nightmare. It’s impossible to achieve perfect balance - all we can hope to do is skew towards a sense of fairness - so we’ve had a couple of ideas as to how to make the game harder if people want that. Enter the LEVEL ADJUSTMENT TABLE:

Here’s the pitch: you can make a Hollow more (or less!) difficult by visiting the Refuge and messing around with something called a RESONANCE CHAMBER. The higher level you go, the more rewards you get. While the majority of this table is “number go up,” which is fine from a balance point of view but not terribly interesting to read, we also have a TERRIFYING SECOND FORM section. Entities above level 4 get access to another form, and they include:

ADAPTIVE DEFENCES. Armour shatters, wards falter, miasma floods the battlefield - but the creature fights on. Reduce one of the Entity’s Defences by 3 and increase a different Defence by 3.

INVERSION. The beast grabs a new weapon, or changes its tactics - anything to bring you down. Swap the Resolve and Wounds values of each of the Entity’s Attacks.

FRENZIED. Wild-eyed, muscles spasming, hungry for the kill. Halve the Entity’s Resolve (rounding up). They can make one additional attack action on their turn, but they cannot make the same Attack more than once in a turn.

UNLEASHED. Terrible news: it now considers you a threat. Choose one of the Entity’s attacks that targets a single Hunter. That attack now targets all Hunters in an area.

SWOLLEN WITH POWER. Something shifts within the creature’s body and opens a channel to untapped power. The Entity gains the following Manoeuvre and Attack actions.

Manoeuvre: FOCUS. Place 1 threat in 3 adjacent zones and end your turn. You must make a BLAST attack on your next turn, and cannot make Interrupt actions until the end of your next turn.

Attack: BLAST. Target every Hunter in every area that contains threat. TN14, 3/3 Vs Quick.

Now, I will say, I didn’t think that I’d be giving out a beam weapon to Entities in Hollows. It really didn’t seem like that sort of game. But as we were working through this, it seemed like “become huge and shoot a big laser beam that sweeps across the battlefield” is right up there as one of the classic second forms. (A classic that we didn’t include was “become huge and fight you on the edge of a cliff, and when you inflict enough damage to the hands their head droops down near the cliff so you can hit it,” but who knows what the sourcebooks will bring?)

REFUGE

Refuge is done. We’ve standardised and formalised a lot of it, meaning that there are now five actions you can take when you enter the mysterious interdimensional pub:

RECOVER lets you heal, or add temporary health on top of your standard;

RESEARCH lets you find Entity weaknesses to make them a little bit easier to fight;

REARM lets you modify and enhance your Weapons;

RESUPPLY lets you swap out or enhance your Hunt and Explore equipment;

REVEL lets you clear Corruption.

(Plus, they all begin with “RE,” which is kind of cute.) During the process of writing up the Refuge, we decided that - in a game where everything is, by default, awful - that the Refuge should be nice. Chris and I don’t do nice in our games if we can help it; things are either horrible, luxurious but somehow unfair, or approachably shit.

We also wanted to take this opportunity to reexamine the game’s stance on masculinity and mental health, which has been developing and growing over the last year or so. In the playtest, the Refuge offered a SHRINE that you could use to clear Corruption from your character - but that didn’t quite ring true to us any more. (What was it a shrine to, anyway?) So now, REVEL - having a nice time with your friends - is the only way to remove Corruption from your character. You can remove more Corruption by installing things like a bar, a piano, and so on.

And! We’ve got little things spread around here and there which offer party-wide permanent upgrades. Some of them are pretty standard - you can buy special gunpowder which makes your guns do a little more damage, you can get a tannery which gives you an extra slot for carrying anchors and relics, and the like. But also we snuck this one in, real quiet:

[U] [2 Bone] Community

Open your doors to those lost between worlds.

[8 Bone] More room at the table. All hunters gain +1 maximum resolve

[8 Bone] A place for someone to lay their head. All Hunters gain +1 wound

You may buy these upgrades any number of times.

You want extra hit points? You’d better welcome in some refugees, motherfucker! Oh, you want a stat boost? Here you go:

[U] [4 Bone, Heart, The Magus] Essence Syphon.

Shackles, sigils, fire and pain.

[Anchored Entity] Each Hunter increases a stat of their choice by 1 and marks 5 Corruption. The Entity is destroyed.

To get plus one to a stat you gotta go fight a Lord, slap an Anchor on it and make the fight significantly harder, rescue the person out of the Entity by redeeming them and helping them grow, bring them to your house, and then kill and eat them. Yeah - it’s horrible! Don’t do it! But you can do it if you want. But don’t! But you can. Here it is. Get away from it!

I’ve always loved presenting players with the option to do absolutely fucking horrible things to NPCs, and indeed offering a substantial reward for doing so, and then seeing them either do it or not. In Spire we made a habit of detailing every enemy’s next of kin so - if you decided it was worth it - you could abduct their kids and their husband to use as leverage. Watching players say “Oh, we wouldn’t do that. Would we? Hm. Could we? Should we just find out where her kids go to school, just in case?” and the like is tremendous stuff.

So, uh. Maybe it's not all nice. But you have to actively seek out the not nice bits and put them to use.

I think the next part of our job is to go back over the character creation stuff and round it out a bit - we kept it all fairly bare-bones in the playtest, and I think that’s a relic of an earlier draft where we were trying to be as brisk as possible. Instead, we’re taking a bit of time (and word count) to elaborate on character options available to players and talk about the world of the Isles in a broader sense. Like this bit here:

Regimental Peon. Cannon-fodder in the Crown infantry.

Boundaries, borders and kings be damned; you are the Isles. You and yours have fought and died for generations to keep this place safe. (Not that it’s safe any more.) Your ancestors knew what it meant to be part of something great, and they bound their blood to the Crown. That blood runs in you still whether you like it or not, and everyone expects you to do your duty. Maybe you were honour-branded when you came of age to remind you, and everyone else, of the promises sworn on your behalf that you felt powerless to escape or uphold.