You’ve just finished making your way through the industrial nightmare of Steel City, a land populated by exploited workers, animated forges and vicious rust wolves. Upon finally reaching the Lord of the Land, a former industrialist warped into an undead wizard known as the Furnace Lich, you brandish your sword and pistol, prepared for battle.
And that’s when your gun starts whispering to you.
This is the type of scenario you can expect in Hollows, the new tabletop roleplaying game from Rowan Rook and Decard’s Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor, the designing duo behind award-winning games like Heart: The City Beneath and Spire: The Tower Must Fall, among many others. They’ll be releasing a playtest version of the game sometime later this year, so Christopher Taylor sat down to chat with us about their latest project.
Photo Credit: Lucas Utani
Hollows throws you into horrific landscapes that twist and rot, full of all sorts of nightmarish creatures for you to hunt and kill. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Hunt: Showdown have all influenced the game’s development, both thematically and mechanically. Taylor, who often is the one on the writing team that pushed the horror themes of their games, has always been interested in the genre.
“I love horror because horror is the only genre I’ve ever seen that can fully explore difficult subject material. In horror you can actually look at some incredibly difficult and abstract concepts and piece them apart, deconstruct them. You can see people’s best and worst in horror, and you just don’t get that in any other genre.”
Hollows takes this concept and runs with it. The titular Hollows are created when people’s traumas poison the land, requiring you to hunt down and kill the source of the rot. Taylor says they stumbled upon this concept from an unlikely source.
“It’s a game where you go and brutally murder other people’s problems. And I don’t mean that they’ve got a problem with goblins in a field. I mean like there was some massive trauma in their history, let’s murder that problem. It came about by my love of M.R. James ghost stories. The way in those stories you’ve got a way of dealing with a ghost, like an anchor, to put the soul to rest.”
In addition to the rich thematic exploration, part of the creative drive behind Hollows was also a mechanical one. Spire and Heart were more fiction-forward roleplaying games, and while they still had clever mechanics around their conflict resolution, it wasn’t about positioning on a map during tactical battles. With Hollows, they wanted to create a game with a combat system they were truly happy with.
“We butt up against combat systems a lot in both the games we write and the games we play. They never quite feel fun. You’ve got the higher end of things like Pathfinder and D&D, there’s a lot of rules. Then you’ve got the extreme other end theater of the mind, like Spire, where it doesn’t matter where anybody stands [on the battlefield]. We wanted a fun halfway house, so we designed a new combat system.”
Photo Credit: Lucas Utani
Looking at the boss fights of FromSoft games led them to realize that it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, but rather where you are in relation to the monster you’re fighting, resulting in the creation of an unconventional, arc-shaped tactical grid.
“In Bloodborne specifically, when you’re fighting Vicar Amelia, if you’re standing to the side of her, you’re basically immortal as long as you can stay there. It’s very difficult to stay there, but if you can stay there you’re much more powerful than just standing in front or behind her. With Hollow what we wanted to do was take that representational positioning and put that into a combat game. The combat grid has front, rear, the flanks, and ranged areas. You can move and so can the entity, but the entity never actually physically moves on the tactical map.”
In order to create a space that gives the players more options for combat, they decided to forgo traditional classes you might expect to see in a tabletop game. Initially they wanted to just let players all pick from a large pool of abilities to build their character, but they found that led to a lot of analysis paralysis. Instead, they decided to have the player pick a combination of two weapons from a list of eleven. This allowed them to create interesting combinations in abilities granted by each weapon.
“One of the things we’re really fascinated with in video games especially is the incredibly clever and complex interactions with different parts of the system. In some games you get an ability where when you do a dodge roll, you also set the ground on fire behind you. So you take that, and that is a discrete ability that’s is quite neat, and now it actually helps you over here because I’ve got another ability from somewhere else which makes my dodge roll weirdly long. Now I do a really long bit of fire. Finding those little combos, like a Magic the Gathering deck, was a lot of the inspiration behind doing a proper combat system.”
Photo Credit: Lucas Utani
Even though you play as part of a group in most tabletop RPGs, fight scenes can still feel like a bit of an isolated experience, with each player doing their own thing on their own corner of the map. Combat in Hollows is built to encourage synergy between players’ abilities, allowing them to continue to chain actions off of each other.
“For instance, one of the dagger’s abilities is to make a move between areas, and then somebody in the area you’ve moved to gets to do a free maneuver. There’s a short list of maneuvers: you can defend, you can move, you can reload your weapon. Then if that person is a sword user, when they defend they can heal someone in their area. So you can get these chains, so rather than one person doing one thing it kicks off a load of different abilities.”
Taylor said that they didn’t want the weapons just to be purely mechanical, so they decided to give them an interesting lore twist. Whether it’s just in your head or actually happening, all the weapons talk to the player, with distinct personalities.
“We strapped these visions of toxic masculinity to each one of the weapons, because there’s something totemic, violent, and inherently negative about a weapon. An ax is also a tool, but there’s very few good things to say about a gun, they’re not nice items. It’s about trying to deal with and overcome part of the horror that you’re experiencing constantly from these weapons, and doing bad things for good reasons, which we put in a lot of our games.”
While the combat system is the backbone of the game, there’s a lot to do before you get to the huge boss fight. Each adventure in Hollows sees the players tracking down and killing three Vassals before being prepared to take down the Lord.
“Everytime you kill a Vassal, you bathe in its blood, you have a baptism. You are innately connected with the broken magic of Hollows, so you can benefit from taking some of it into you. It’s a very risky proposition, but it’s also the advancement mechanic. What that does is it gives you a temporary ability for one of the weapons. When you kill the Lord, you pick any one of the abilities you’ve got and make it permanent. Then you carry that onto the next one.”
Photo Credit: Lucas Utani
There’s a very large exploration phase between the Vassals and Lords where you find yourself dealing with the inhabitants of the land and learning more about the background of the Lord that’s plaguing the area. Anytime you succeed on a roll outside of combat, you’ll get a currency called Lore. If you fail a non-combat roll, the GM takes a different currency called Doom. These give you fictional pieces of information about the Lord while also having a mechanical effect on the fight itself.
“Before you start the initiative phase, you both spend the accumulated Lore vs the accumulated Doom to change the way the fight goes from the standard one that’s in the book. So the players can do things like look at the stat block of the entity, reduce its armor class and hit points before the fight starts. They can break certain parts of its character sheet. The DM has the option to do the inverse, to add bits to the monster to make each fight harder.”
When players die, they go to the Refuge, a place reminiscent of Bloodborne’s Hunter’s Dream. There you can spend resources gathered to upgrade your character, in addition to upgrading the Refuge itself. As the game developed, they added another interesting wrinkle to the Refuge that’s both mechanically and narratively satisfying.
“You can actually take the corruption and negativity around a Lord, cleanse it, and bind them to an Anchor which you can then hold safe in the Refuge, kinda like Ghostbusters, sticking them in a trap. When they’re in the Refuge, they’re their old selves before they became evil, so you can upgrade the Refuge by basically Pokemoning your way through the game and collecting the Lords and having them help you out. But if you want to do that it turns the fight into hard mode, so you’ve got this optional difficulty where you get high risk, high reward.”
With such a mechanically dense game, they wanted to make sure they organized a large-scale playtest. They ran the game earlier this year at GenCon, which resulted in a lot of great feedback, but now they’ve got nearly one thousand people signed up on the Hollows playtest mailing list. Taylor says the playtest, which they are hoping to release before the end of the year, will come with two prewritten adventures, making it easier to run with your regular RPG group.
As for the future of Hollows, once they take a few months to process the feedback from the playtest, they’ll be full speed ahead on the book. They’re hoping to be able to run a crowdfunding campaign to publish the book in a nice boxed set with everything you need to play the game.
“We’re looking at putting Hollows in a box with tokens and dice, so you’ve got all the tokens for things like terrain that you can put into the field, status effects so you don’t need to put dice next to it and forget what it is.”
If you want to sign up for the Hollows playtest, join the Rowan Rook and Decard mailing list here.
The post ‘Hollows’ – Christopher Taylor Previews the Lore and Unique Combat of Upcoming Tabletop RPG [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.