SUMMER OF HOLLOWS: WEEK THREE

[Content warning: I talk about suicide in this one a bit, towards the end. So skip the FLUFF section if you don't want to read about that]

More preview pictures from Sam this week. He's doing beautiful work.

You know, it’s hard to properly cocoon yourself in an impenetrable bubble of limitless creativity when you have to also run a small business. I wish I’d thought of that before committing to this Summer of Hollows thing; unfortunately, I still have to do things like:

• Answer emails
• Work on other projects that will “earn money” for the “business”
• Write marketing copy that will “earn money” for the “business”
• Have meetings about “earning money” for the “business”
• Eat breakfast AND lunch AND dinner EVERY BLOODY DAY

And so on. Exhausting. Anyway, a report on this, another disrupted week thanks to the “money” and “business” stuff I’d already mentioned beforehand:

WEAPONS, PART THREE

We’ve only got two Weapons left to do - the Staff, which should be a laugh, and the hideously complex Armour which isn’t actually a Weapon even though we treat it like one. This week we did the Spear, the Bludgeon and the Shotgun.

THE SPEAR

As discussed last email, the Spear is a threat-removal machine powered by Resolve. We gave it a core ability which lets you just sort of poke at the Entity to stop it from causing too many problems:

Arm’s Reach. It’s a tiring task, but you keep the beast at bay. Once per turn, as a free action, mark Resolve up to the amount of Threat in your area. Remove Threat from your area equal to the Resolve marked.

The fluff of the Spear is heavily focused around the idea of Us vs Them, so we thought it would be fun to focus on automatically handing out buffs to other Hunters in your area - especially if you can make an area safe by clearing threat. (Safe if you ignore the dog the size of a transit van trying to murder you, anyway.)

So lots of defence stuff, including:

- Repositioning Hunters at close when you jam the Spear in the Entity and shove it backwards

- Handing out Terrain tags for free

- Cancelling Interrupts and Repositions

Etc. As ever, the Tier 3 stuff is a reflection and intensification of the lower tier stuff. The most notable is Untouchable:

Untouchable. Level the battlefield. The Entity cannot spend Threat to enhance its attacks against you or increase its defences when attacked by you. Threat spent to enhance an attack with multiple targets does not apply to you, but it still applies to other Hunters targeted as part of the same attack.

Which is fun, right? I like the idea of getting high level abilities that just turn off entire sections of the game, and seeing what that does to the way it feels.

THE BLUDGEON

The Bludgeon is the cruellest Weapon we have by a country mile; it’s almost incapable of inflicting Wounds, and is instead focused on Breaking the Entity by reducing its Resolve to 0.

But: you can only do that so much before it gets boring, and “do more damage” doesn’t feel tactically interesting unless you worked really hard to get there. The bits of the Bludgeon that aren’t Resolve in or Resolve out to deal Resolve Damage are now inspired by one of the abilities from our first release that gave you extra Resolve but meant that you could never Take Cover.

Which was a neat idea - I liked the concept of limiting the actions that a Bludgeon user can take to reflect the brutal simplicity of their Weapon - but it meant that you just sort of missed out on quite an interesting bit of the game in exchange for some more hit points. So we expanded that power out and ran with it a bit, then give it as a core power:

Come Out Swinging. You no longer gain damage reduction from holding terrain tags. Instead, you may discard an attached terrain tag in response to an Entity attack; if you do, you gain double its listed damage reduction then return it to the terrain pool.

If you do not have a terrain tag at the end of your turn, you may Take Cover as an immediate action, but do not roll as part of this action - instead, assume you failed the roll and mark 1 Resolve or place 1 Threat on your area as normal.

Nothing outlandish really - it makes terrain twice as effective but it’s all one-shot, and you get a quick but dangerous way of picking it up without having to stand still for a turn - and it still fits the idea of the Bludgeon user streaking ahead and trying to hurt the Entity as much as possible.

This is because the actual ability that I wanted to write about discarding terrain was too complex and I had to pare it out into multiple parts. Now, see, this is the exciting bit:

Reckless. Doesn’t matter how tall you are when you’re leaping out of a second-storey window.  Discard an Elevated terrain tag and mark 2 Resolve to activate this ability. Make a Close attack at +2/+1.

Fuck you. I’m jumping out of a window and smashing its face in. Diving charges were the best rule in Mordheim and now they’re in Hollows. Perfect. You also get fun things like:

Destructive. Bring the whole thing down on top of it. When you would discard a terrain token, you may instead destroy it to inflict 1 Wound on the Entity.

Which lets you ride a building down on top of the bastard when combined with Reckless, and that’s something I want players to be able to do.

The fluff talks a lot about personal independence and power so we had to be careful how it interacted with other Hunters. We’re always wary about abilities which harm other player characters (or even consume shared resources) because:

• It’s often not a lot of fun to have another player harm your character, we’re supposed to be here for the monsters
• It’s often not of a lot of fun to harm other player characters, so you might not use the ability out of a social rather than mechanical consideration
• They encourage negotiation rather than action, and roleplaying games are already stilted enough as it is

The closest thing we had was the Destructive power above, and even then I reined it in - it used to cause damage on everyone in Close, like the Bomb hunt item. But it just didn’t feel great as something you can do more than once.

Oh and there’s a Tier 3 ability where you can spend Threat as though you were an Entity. But we’re still working out the fine details on that one, as you can imagine.

THE SHOTGUN

We struggled with the shotgun a bit. Mainly because we were caught between the real-world shotgun and the video game/movie shotgun, and the applications and resonances of both, but I like to think we ended up more on the fictional side than the real one.

The gimmick for the Shotgun is that it’s always either Empty or Loaded, and there’s no in-between stage with less than maximum ammunition. It always fires everything at once. This is almost 100% due to the game FarCry 3, which I played with the self-imposed restriction that I would only use guns that the enemies dropped - when I was lucky enough to find a shotgun I would immediately and enthusiastically empty it into a crowd of goons and get in way over my head.

We toyed around with the Loaded/Empty states as stances, unlocking alternate versions of abilities with new attacks or clever tricks. While we got somewhere with it, I was never quite satisfied with the way it played. We were really keen to avoid the situation where someone takes a Shotgun, fires it once, and then leaves it Empty for the rest of the fight to access a passive ability they wanted.

Back to the drawing board, then. Since doing the rules for the Shotgun the first time, I’d written the fluff for it, and it’s an absolute lunatic. Even the Bludgeon has an end goal - the Shotgun just wants immediate violence now. So we came upon the idea for the Shotgun making you do things depending on what state it’s in, like:

TRIGGER-HAPPY. At the end of your turn, if your Shotgun is Loaded, you must make an immediate attack with it at disadvantage.

And:

HUNGRY. At the end of your turn, if your Shotgun is Empty, you must mark 2 Resolve and make an immediate Reload action.

We’re still getting to the bottom of the Shotgun, but the core’s there. It has the capacity for tremendous damage, but you have to cheat it out of the system and squeeze it for everything it’s got.

FLUFF

Did a bit of fluff, too, on my own this week while Chris wasn’t feeling great - I was rounding out the stuff around the Weapons and talking about their ability to communicate with their bearers, and then got to thinking about how malevolent influences can change the real world, and then realised that we’d never really talked about how a Hollow forms past the briefest details. So I wrote it!

It was fun! And by fun I mean: horrific, and cathartic, and I’m proud of it. Much in the same way that the Weapons fluff is me and Chris working through how we feel around traditional masculine wisdom, this was me working through how I feel about being so sad you stop functioning as a person.

My depression is no secret - I speak about it openly, here and elsewhere - and thanks to some absolutely crackerjack therapy from a nice soft man called Richard, it no longer has the hold over me that it once did. I’ve written a game about it - Fetch - and I believe I’m in a place where I can channel the profound experience of being so upset you no longer want to be alive all the time into something artistic.

So: what if trauma opened you up to a Malignancy, a sort of formless demon, that infested your brain and turned you inside out?

Our Malignancies - the Grand Ones, the closest thing we have to gods - are Fear, Fury, Grief, Hunger, Pride, and Dominion. These are all things which are useful concepts, but have the capacity to grow toxic and cause great harm when applied in excessive amounts. The Malignancies aren’t sapient, they don’t have long-term schemes or personalities or anything human like that - they’re just raw want bundled up in an ugly package. They creep into your head, set up shop there, and use your psyche to make a parasite otherworld that infects the world around it with whatever toxicity the Malignancy prefers. Here’s an excerpt:

It begins as a quiet undoing of reality and stability around the victim: hours slip by in an instant, locked doors are found unlocked despite frequent checking, and clothes thought to be put away clean are pulled from the drawer stinking of old sweat. Food spoils, mechanisms break, and friends stop calling to visit. The outside world looms large and loathsome and the sufferer retreats from it to nurture what mouldering comfort they have left.

The Hollow grows within them like a cocooned caterpillar. Teeth rot and fall from the jaw, hair and fingernails come loose, and scabs and rashes bloom across their greying skin. Most complain of a dreadful itching; others of headaches that threaten to burst their head open, a constant roiling nausea, or joints that feel like broken glass and sharp gravel.

Here’s a fun thing to know about me: my greatest fear, my absolute top 1 nightmare, is not being able to take my own life. I don’t want to, and I know I’m not going to, and every single day I’m going to choose not to, and do whatever this is (*gestures around his office*) on as close to my own terms as possible.

So naturally I put that in the game:

Malnourished and self-destructive, the subject might well die at this stage. If they’re lucky and the malignancy has not yet taken full root in their soul, then it’s all over bar a poorly-attended funeral: the budding Hollow withers, the malignancy retreats, and the surrounding world slowly returns to normal levels of grinding poverty and ill repair.

If they’re unlucky, the malignancy will simply not let them go. Taking the form of a doctor, or angel, or loved one, (or something less kindly) it brings them back to life - a decrepit facsimile of it - and infests them further, turning their waking and sleeping worlds alike into a blurred mess of memories and hallucinations. Some die a dozen times before a Hollow takes hold.

Grim stuff, huh? Feels good to get it out. Also feels good to find my voice for Hollows, to differentiate it from Heart and Spire - the fluff here is much more grandiose, and I spend more time making sure that the words sound nice together at least once a paragraph.

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Three weeks in, then, and already we’re a bit behind. We’ll see how it all goes. I’m having a tremendous amount of fun doing this, even if it’s taking it out of me - it’s thrilling to get a games design problem in my head that I can’t put down, and that follows me around after work and keeps me up at night.

If you're interested in reading through the Weapons that we've completed so far, I've attached them to this post. Let me know what you think of them in our Discord, if you'd like.

- Grant