Summer of Hollows: Week Six

(Eagle-eyed readers will notice that we have skipped a week from four to six. Turns out I had two WEEK THREES, which shows you just how on top of my project management I am. Anyway.)

Chris and I played Hollows this week. We haven’t played it in a long time - we’ve been using other people’s feedback, and focusing on other projects - but as we’re just about to finish the Weapons in full (we’re halfway through the Staff, which is the last one) I thought it might be a laugh to see how our new designs are going before we dive into the fresh challenge which is Entity design.

We met up in Sheffield town centre at a new bar called The Old Shoe, which has a wonderful range of beers on tap at eye-wateringly fierce prices. But it’s quiet, and they let you bring in your own food, so we took over a table and ate pastries I purchased from my local Lidl earlier in the day, and had a bash at it. Here’s what we learned:

CHARACTER CREATION

Chris and I made two characters each as fast as we could, operating from a mangled collection of playtest PDFs and half-finished Google docs. It’s hard to get a handle on making characters in your own game because there’s none of the “ooh what’s this?” excitement that actual players get; we already know what’s in there.

Still. I made a Temple-focused Spear user with a side order of Sword, intending to offer the best group dynamics possible: she had abilities which healed her and amped up other people’s damage as long as they were in her area. My other character was a Shotgun/Bludgeon user focused on kicking out reliable damage and not dying, ever, thanks to buckets of health.

Chris made a Knife/Book user who was almost unable to inflict damage directly but did a lot of cool stuff when they were up close and the Entity was Bleeding, and a Rifle/Pistol bearer aiming to hang back and snipe the monster to death.

FIGHT ONE

We took on the Tick-Covered Stag from Morningmire; it was easy enough to manage, with some exciting moments too. We liked the way that it could Antler Buck weak Hunters out of our Spear/Sword block and into more useful areas, and the way that while it lacked a lot of direct damage the way that it turned Threat into Curse tokens, and Curse tokens into Resolve damage, which really made it feel like our characters were wading through a mire filled with hungry parasites.

No-one died (boo) and we polished off the Stag in about eight rounds, which took about forty minutes. Timing-wise I’m happy with that - it means that you can get a couple of good fights in during a single session.

FIGHT TWO

Next up, we each took a new ability and fought the Nine-Lives Cat, also from Morningmire. I would like to take the opportunity to say that the Nine-Lives Cat was an experiment in unusual health pools, and the experiment was a success in as much as: we now know that this particular kind of unusual health pool isn’t much fun to fight.

Despite some neat abilities, the Cat really couldn’t hurt us worth a damn - and with the way that its Resolve refreshed to full every three Wounds, it knackered the expected flow of the game. We want Hunters to work hard to reduce Entities’ Resolve to 0, breaking them, and unloading a bunch of Wounds at once. This meant that neither side was making much progress, and after I pierced the Cat’s fifth form with my Spear for the third time, we called it a day and packed in the fight.

I love the idea of the Nine-Lives Cat, because it’s fun to imagine a progressively more fucked-up and large tomcat tearing out people’s throats. But the execution wasn’t up to scratch. (Snerk.)

LEARNINGS

We’ve been playing it safe. Player characters are too safe, I think, across the board. So we’re on a mission to make Entities more damaging, and easier to kill to players Wound more because that’s exciting isn’t it, and go from there.

IN OTHER NEWS

As I mentioned, we’re about halfway through the Staff. We left it until last as a kind of treat to ourselves, as it’s the most magical of the Weapons, which means that we can get fast and loose with what it does and still sell it in the fiction.

I am proud to say that this week contained my fastest turnaround on the wheel of “this mechanic is absolute undistilled genius” to “I need to remove all of this mechanic from the game entirely.” (It’s a weird wheel. I don’t know why I keep it around.) Chris and I loved what the Staff was doing with terrain tags, in that it eats them for power and hands them out like candy, but we wanted a bit more. (Needed a bit more, I should say. We had a load of abilities to write.)

Enter: the Briar. A pet terrain tag, exclusive to the Staff, which can be summoned and enhanced and generally fucked about with. My mind immediately leapt to the concept of an animated patch of murderous brambles that fights the Entity of its own accord, and I loved that, so I created a set of rules for deploying the Briar terrain tag not only on Hunters but on the grid, or the Entity itself. I sketched out mechanics for health feedback loops, and how this patch of brambles would - say - roll to defend, or take damage, and that sort of thing.

I went to sleep fitfully thinking of how you could use Curse tags as hit points on the Briar, and when I woke up I immediately disgorged all of my work onto Chris’ lap and he quite wisely said that we shouldn’t do this. In his defence, I had left a comment on the core Briar text which said “So! This paragraph is disgusting. Absolutely rancid. If it was a horse I’d shoot it. But there’s something there, right?”

Wrong, reader. Or rather: there’s something there, but what there is is a nest of fractal subsystems ranging from inelegant to actively impossible. I’m glad I got it out of my system.

Now, the Briar works like any other terrain tag - you have to attach it a Hunter, otherwise it’s not in play - and it does weird and interesting things like: attack the Entity, seal away Threat, amp damage, turn Wounds into Resolve, and so on. My current favourite is the HOLLOW WAY ability that lets other Hunters teleport to your space by discarding a terrain tag, letting you set up an emergency exit from the front lines or sneaking everyone into Flank on the same turn before the Entity has a chance to react.

HEALTH

Good heavens but I’m mad.

(A lot of people don’t like “mad,” as a way to describe poor mental health, but I’ll use it to describe myself if I want to without guilt; this feels like madness, something uncanny, so it’s the word I’m using.)

I feel as though someone has been hanging horseshoes off my spine. I am heavy with this, and every move takes five times the effort. I used to be sad all the time, back when I thought I had things worth being sad about, and now that I’ve fucked those off to one side depression is instead a leadweight thing.

Exhausting, really. But I feel more empowered and able to take care of myself than ever; to focus on my health as best I’m able, and go for walks and take joy in things and not pin all my self-worth around the external. It’s not an easy trick but it’s easier than it’s ever been before.

- G