THE SUMMER OF HOLLOWS: WEEK THREE

(Hello! Throughout this post are rough drafts of the new illustrations we’ve commissioned for Hollows from Sam Lamont. They’re rather good, I think you’ll agree.)

The important bit of writing is not, as one might imagine, choosing the right words to put in. It is choosing the right words to cut out. Any idiot can firehose letters into a text document; it takes a real wordsmith to look back at their own writing and pick over it with metaphorical pruning shears until it is as beautiful and useful as it needs to be.

(Wilde argued that utility and beauty are mutually exclusive, but then again, I think that Wilde and I might have disagreed on quite a few things had we ever had the chance to meet.)

This is all a long way of saying that today we deleted over half of what we already had for the Spear’s abilities and didn’t write any more to replace them because we ran out of collective brain. Unfortunately, it turns out, what we wrote before was utter bunkum. Well-intentioned bunkum, absolutely, and at the time it made perfect sense, but the addition of greater perspective (and six months of playtesting) shows us that Hollows has moved along since we wrote it the first time.

(Actually, it was the sixth time we wrote it. Seventh? I dunno. We redacted one of the drafts, like a thirteenth floor in a hotel. Chris and I work by slinging material at shared docs, tearing them to shreds, and eventually out of the imprints left by our work a sort of shape for the game appears, a general vibe and ethos, and at that point we can start writing. It is not an efficient way of doing things at all, but it makes for good books. It just takes fuckin years.)

A little frustrating, then, but all told a good thing. The finished book will be far better for it. Here’s a report on what few additional words we’ve added to the document this week:

THE PISTOL

Let’s learn a little bit about what the Pistol is scared of:

Fears

Ignore the flash and the posturing. The Pistol believes that it isn’t supposed to be here, but as long as no-one else finds out, it’s fine. It’s fine.

It’s not an instrument of war; no great glories, no stern sacrifices, no tactical masterstrokes owe it thanks. It’s not a tool for hunting, either; thick hides turn aside little bullets, rifles outrange it, and it’s a coward’s crutch next to the cut and thrust of finishing the beast with blade and bludgeon. It’s not a part of anything greater, or ancient, or more noble. No abstraction or artifice skirt it with the sacrosanct.

All it does is kill people. Is that enough? Is the Pistol enough?

It spins stories of its own prowess and whispers feverish in the ears of those who carry it: you’re the best, you’re the greatest, you’re streets ahead of these fools. It keeps everyone and everything at arm’s length. It never shows an ounce of weakness or confusion if it can help it. The alternative is unthinkable; a crash and burn, a dethroning, and a cold eternity of exile. Better to keep up the act forever than run the risk of discovery.

Surprise! The Pistol has impostor syndrome. The Pistol is a scared little dickhead who puts others down because it’s petrified someone is going to find out it’s not, actually, all that special. Chris and I are working through Some Stuff with the fluff for this one. It’s weird: this is a tactical combat game. And a horror exploration game. And, tangentially, a sort of meandering exploration of what it means to be a Man.

Anyway: mechanics. The Pistol is good at doing Wounds, and it has things that power it up after doing Wounds, but it had no real way of making those Wounds happen. So we put in a bunch of stuff that lets them cheat Wounds into play, or make them more likely to happen with stat increases and Focus, and that’s all rather fun.

I think my favourite Pistol ability is Keep Up The Pressure:

Keep Up The Pressure. Don’t let it rest, even for a second.  If an ally in your area misses the Entity with an Attack, you may make an immediate pistol Attack at disadvantage.

Which suits the cocky gunslinger archetype, I think. Thinking “pfft, I can do better than that” and then missing completely, wasting some ammo, that sort of thing. Or maybe hitting and getting a Wound, out of their turn sequence, which lets them trigger all their buffs again! But probably not. But maybe! 

Also this Tier 1 ability is fun:

Skirmisher. Line up the perfect shot. If you Move to a Close area, gain +2 Quick until the start of your next turn. If you Move to a Ranged area, gain +2 Sharp until the start of your next turn.

The Pistolier gets a flat 10% increase of doing a Wound as long as they’re running around like an idiot. It’s helpful with defence and things, too, and it ties in neatly with other Quick-focused weapons like the Spear or Sword, but really I want any core Pistol users to be pinballing around the battlefield. I think that’s fun.

THE BOOK

The Book is a weird one, because - well - it’s a book. You don’t kill people with books. (Not often, anyway. I think John Wick did it once but that’s kind of a Murders Georg situation.) Please enjoy my philosophical thoughts on why the Book deserves to be amongst the Weapons:

OUTLOOK

The Book is the latest form of an ancient concept - knowledge, embodied, that can be shared or jealously hoarded. What is now paper and ink was once chiselled tablets of stone or rich pigment daubed across the walls of firelit caves. It sees the world not as a chaotic mess, but instead a series of rules which can be manipulated to its advantage.

The Book’s violence is more subtle than that of its companions in the Weapons’ bloodstained pantheon. Every Weapon is a tool through which humans impose their will upon the world, and where the others may do so directly with fire and iron, the Book holds itself above such base matters. Violence is not only the crack of bone and tang of blood; pure violence, unsullied by the sweat and pain of the melee, is the subjugation of that which you deem to be beneath you. The Book knows that everything is beneath it.

In game terms, the Book gets to be there because wizards are a common thing in roleplaying games and we wanted a way for you to be a wizard. The Book is half bible and half spellbook; it’s a big bucket of Power Word Whatevers that let you fuck about with reality.

On one hand they have proper healing, which is rare in Hollows because we want player characters to die a bunch - but they have it, and they can give out Wounds, which matters a lot. They also have neat buffing abilities like SPUR:

Spur. Incite action when it is needed most. When you have Focus, you may expend it to grant advantage to other Hunters in your area. Alternatively, in exchange for marking 1 Wound damage, you may expend Focus to allow a Hunter in your area to re-roll a D20.

They also offer an excellent service in debuffing:

Abase. Bring them low. When you have Focus and are at Close, and are not Broken, reduce all of the Entity’s Defences by 1.

Broadly, we wanted them to be really useful supporting other Hunters at Close, but to give them no innate way of surviving the amount of damage that standing near a bunch of other Hunters at Close brings upon them. That’s a puzzle for them to solve themselves.

THE SPEAR

Deleted half of it, didn’t we? Mug’s game, this TTRPG business. The spear was a bit wishy-washy and we didn’t really know what it did; we wanted it to manipulate Threat but the triggers were often behind a lot of situational gates. So we’ve scrapped the Wounding thing it was doing (we have enough of that in the Pistol and Rifle as it is) and instead want it to operate as a sort of Threat-rinsing device powered by Resolve. It costs the Spear user Resolve to clear Threat, but then they get Resolve back by... we dunno yet. We’ll work that out next week.

This is top-down design: we envisioned a Spear wielder pinning down an Entity and holding it in place. And that’s not easy - these things are massive, or at least supernaturally strong, and so we liked the idea of it being effective but tiring. We try to operate from a top-down perspective here as much as we can, and then occasionally swing upside down to make sure that everything works and is, you know, fun. I like to think we get there most of the time.

That’s enough for now. God knows what we’re doing next week. Maybe a bit of fluff to change things up; I’m itching to write about the Temple, our new church of gardeners with an emphasis on pigs, and mulch, and rot.

Yours,

- Grant