SUMMER OF HOLLOWS: WEEK ONE

“Week one” is one hell of a misnomer because we’ve been writing this book for the best part of three years and we’re only just now getting towards a first draft. After we finished Heart and all of its associated sourcebooks, Chris and I noodled around with ideas for the best part of a year - the closest thing to a playable game I had was an unnamed fantasy RPG where every single magical effect was powered by eating some kind of bizarre ingredient. I had the idea that it would be funny if wasps made ketchup the way bees make honey, and things really got out of control from there on in.

We meandered back and forth between concepts and, despite many experiments, didn’t commit to anything. But Hollows, Chris’ pitch, stuck with us like a sore tooth. We kept coming back to it, over and over: the concept of rooting out supernatural horror in grim environments. Hollows began as a much more investigative, less bombastic game - Chris’ influence in spades there, as he loves a horrid mystery - and over time, and through successive iterations and a wide variety of completely abandoned ideas, we pushed towards the tactical combat monster hunting game that we put out to playtest earlier this year.

(At one point, believe it or not, Hollows centred around what time of day it was. Expanding from the concept that High Noon was a thing in the Wild West, we concocted a wide variety of classes that did certain things at certain times of day, and sketched out some interesting time mechanics too. I should like to go back to that some day.)

Anyway. We’re here now, and we’ve got our next two months planned out ahead of us divided up into how many days each section will take to write, and quite honestly our estimates are veering on the ambitious side, but for once I feel like being idealistic about this.

I will attempt to write this assuming you don’t know much about Hollows, but full warning: the more in-depth I go, the more inscrutably technical I will become. So if you want to fully understand what the merry fuck I’m going on about, you should give the playtest a read.

Here’s how the first week went:

WEAPONS

Weapons come with a base profile to generate damage from attacks, which is all well and good, and some of them have weird core abilities that contain their own rules. (For example: the shotgun doesn’t have capacity like other ranged Weapons, and is only ever Loaded or Unloaded, and being Unloaded activates certain tricks.)

But the meat of a Weapon is the abilities - ways you break or modify the rules of the game -  which plug together to form a sort of class for your character. The Armour lets you tank and buff the defences of others; the knife offers mobility and evasion; the bludgeon inflicts mass amounts of Resolve damage, weakening the Entity to allow other Hunters to finish it off. We’re tightening up and modifying the existing six abilities granted by each Weapon, and writing another six for each to go alongside them.

Here’s a fun fact: abilities are the hardest thing to write in the game. 

Any character can have any combination of abilities (give or take), and a key part of Hollows is finding groups of abilities that work interestingly together. For example: one ability might allow an ally in your area to Guard when you hit with an attack, and maybe they have an ability which allows an ally to make a Move action when they Guard, so you can quite easily set up cascades and powerful gambits which are only counteracted by the way that every Entity can quite confidently smash you into paste.

And! As complex as these mechanics may be, they have to come from the fiction. So that means getting a grasp on what the Weapons are in-universe, and what they want and what sort of behaviour they encourage, and ensure that the rules back up the fluff even if that means changing one or both of them.

So far this week we’ve overhauled three weapons, so brace yourself for some technical details:

THE KNIFE. Chris loves bleed mechanics, and we didn’t have any in the game in the current version, so we figured that the Knife was a good place to slot them in. When the Knife Wounds an Entity, that Entity is now Bleeding. We cooked up a bunch of interesting things that key off Bleeding, my favourite being SIGILS CARVED IN SKIN which lowers the Entity’s defences as you cut a magic circle into its flank.

THE RIFLE. The Rifle felt like a one-trick pony, and while it was a good trick, we wanted some variety. The Rifle is rewarded for standing still, which can often not be very exciting, so why not let them build up Dragonball Z levels of power while they’re doing it? Rifle bearers can now Focus multiple times and store the tokens to reflect their absolute patience and precision, and we’ve popped in a few abilities that are triggered by spending multiple Focus at once.

THE SWORD. The Sword was useful but felt like a secondary Weapon, and the abilities were a bit of a grab bag, so we drilled down on our favourite element of it: offering buffs to your mates whilst simultaneously causing them huge problems by attracting Threat to their area. We loved the idea of the Sword as a gung-ho leader, overconfident and brash, so we’ve given them a nice little Resolve heal when Threat is placed on their area and encouraged them to hang out with other, squishier characters to see what happens.

Tier three abilities - which aren’t in the playtest but are something of an ultimate form for weapons where we get all daft with the rules - are most interesting for the Sword, where we’ve implemented a pretty useful passive Stance ability that you can give up in exchange for a powerful, once-per-fight Tactic with some guaranteed results. My current favourite is the one where you get to spend all the Entity’s Threat on you once and increase your accuracy, the way that it would against you. How much danger can you get yourself in to generate extra damage?

Unfortunately, Chris was ill with a cold for most of this week, so the above was what we managed to patch together from a couple of hours here and there. I’ve also been writing up fluff for the Weapons on my own, which has led to some quite serious thinking this afternoon about what the Spear is scared of. Turns out it’s abandonment.

That’s quite enough for now.  More next week.

- Grant