HOLLOWS

by Chris Taylor and Grant Howitt

The Pitch

You play as Hunters, people living in an alternate history version of the British Isles at the end of the 19th century, who have experienced some form of traumatic event. The event was an entry point for cosmic entities known as Malignancies, who planted a Seed reflecting themselves into you, and are causing pocket hell dimensions to form across the Isles. As Hunters, your task is to cleanse and seal these hell dimensions, or Hollows, using weapons that may or may not be sentient, and become more corrupted by eldritch powers the stronger you get.¹

The Experience, in Brief

• This game has entered a side of my brain that I didn't even know I had.
• I have playtested entities as part of the Fight Clubs held in the RRD Discord server since 2024, and the semi-final version of the game in late 2024, both as player and GM.
• I also co-founded the Hollow Marches online community with someone who is even deeper into this game as I am - and I have its logo tattooed on my arm. We are currently past our 100th game on the server.
• I have run the game at conventions, and both run and play in the Hollow Marches.
• If I were to point at one piece of art by Sam Lamont to understand the joy that this book gives me in telling stories, it would be four pieces of art, and it's the chapter headings of the four sections of the core book, which tell a story in and of themselves.

The Really Good Bit

Here's the thing: I am not a strategic or tactical person. I lose sight of boardgames about an hour into them, and much prefer cooperative games overall. I love to chew the scenery in role-playing games because I genuinely have a hard time focusing on the details of how different pieces move and click together, but I can keep pretty good track of stories and moments that make up those stories.

Enter the two evil geniuses of Taylor and Howitt.

Immediately remove said evil geniuses, because the fact that they made me understand, care, and even feel capable of creating mechanical trappings for my stories - there are almost 80 pages on how to design Entities and Hollows in the core book, as it's expected you might want to run your own once your Hunter blossoms - isn't even the best part about Hollows.²

The Really Good Bit about Hollows - to this storyteller - the horrible little nugget of truth at the core of its premise is that it wants you to play the game.³ On page 114, a boxout about "The Purpose of Hollows" reads:

Hollows are here for a reason, though the Hunters likely aren’t fully aware of it yet: If a Hollow grows to its maximum malevolence and defeats a group of Hunters, the Lord can use that fell power to step into the real world as an Effigy. There’s more about the metaphysics and malevolence involved starting on p. 228.

Page 229, which is part of a section called "What is a Hollow?" starting on the previous page, has this to say (my emphasis):

All of this serves two purposes. Firstly, by establishing a Hollow, a Malignancy can spread itself through the real world (albeit at metaphysical arm’s reach). The second function only comes to fruition after a Hollow has served its purpose: to eradicate the Lord’s final vestiges of humanity and fill their tattered shell of a soul with foul energy. When a Hollow is complete, the Lord is remade as an Effigy, and it is through Effigies that Malignancies can physically interact with anything other than themselves. Effigies can visit other Hollows, speak with travellers, and infect people with their master’s emotional blight.

Hollows - the book wearing its references on its eldritch sleeve - are incubators. When a person is infected with a Seed during the worst day of their life, they have a choice: embrace it, and become a Hunter, or succumb to it, and immediately blossom into a Hollow.⁴ Choosing the former will eventually lead to the latter, unless something even nastier is done to the Hunter first. For each Hunter that moves through a Hollow, the chances of it making its Lord into an Effigy increase. And at some point, all Lords were people, a good part of them Hunters.

As soon as you start playing the game, you're playing right into the Malignancies' hands. Because killing an incarnation of depression and greed with a weapon that also hates you feels good. But the more Hollows you explore and fight, the more you become corrupted, and the closer you get to blossoming into a Hollow yourself.

And that's the trick that Taylor and Howitt, evil geniuses that they are, along with all the other people involved in the book, have pulled: they're offering us a tactical grid combat game, hiding inside a story engine that provides you with the opportunity to lean into making your trauma your whole identity, and lashing out at its causes, mastering the system of ability combinations, build synergies and game boss design. And then there's the secret, third option between the lines:⁵ foster community and friendship, nurture the part of you that accepts the trauma but does not let you be defined by it, in order to let the parasitic urge shrivel inside of you. Because a long time ago, something very bad happened to you; that much is undeniable. Now you get to choose whether you’re something very bad that happens to other people, or sit this one out, and share a meal with a loved one.

The only way to win is not to play at all. And we all know you really want to play.

Hollows is -as RRD sickos like to say- imminent, to the point that we know it's actually on several ships moving around the world right now. It will eventually live at this page on the RRD site.