Hollows: Exploration

When you’re in a Hollow but you’re not in a fight against an Entity, you’re in the Exploration stage of the game.

Surrounding each Entity in a Hollow are blasted hinterlands of rotten unreality where people, places, and things have been absorbed from the real world and remade into unsettling new forms. Exploring them is your group’s main chance for roleplay. They’re not just puzzles to explore, unless you want them to be; they’re also your opportunity as a GM to weave a story that showcases your Hunters, to introduce non-player characters, to encourage your Hunters to bond as a group and share time on camera.

A Hollow is full of people and stories for the Hunters to interact with. Clues to Entities’ true natures and histories are hidden in the details of the Hollow, and investigating them is a chance for Hunters to show off how they think, how they approach problems, and how they feel about what they discover. Vassals – the NPCs players meet in a Hollow – are there for players to interact with, form opinions about, sympathise with, or despise. 

The Sins of Grisham Priory deliberately keeps Exploration light and fast-moving in order to show off a full Hollow in a tightly contained amount of game time; our recent GenCon scenario, Poor Sally Kraken, took characters through formative moments in the eponymous Lord’s development, giving them time to get to know her, watch her change, and (in at least some cases) feel intensely bad about having to execute the monster she’d become.

Emotion and Stakes

Guilt tripping players is definitely one way to make them feel things, but a) you can’t do it often or it loses its impact and b) it’s not very nice. It’s like when a video game makes you murder animals and then insists your character should feel bad about it. 

But they should feel things. Hollows expects players to feel things (guess we’re gonna need a separate article about Managing Big Feelings…), and it’s a better game when they do because while a great combat system is fun, a great combat system interleaved with high stakes and emotional intensity is practically unstoppable. 

Saving people, alleviating suffering, seeing reflections of their own stories in the Hollows they purge and cauterise, advancing their ambitions, learning new things, and just surviving all get their hooks into players and drag them bodily to the edge of their seats. And you can do all those things in Exploration. 

Set up interesting scenarios that give players meaningful choices to make, present details that let them think about the world and their Hunter’s place in it, and create NPCs for them to care about, and your quartet (or other number) of messed-up Hunters will bring the roleplay.

Making Space for Roleplay

As a GM – in most games, not just Hollows – it’s important for the GM to create space for the players to roleplay. Don’t feel pressured to keep the action moving, or to be involved in everything that happens. If the Hunters see something that shakes them, makes them angry, or opens an old wound, give the players time to explore that. 

Draw in other players by asking how they feel about what they’re seeing – witnessing a stoic companion starting to look shaken, or hearing a story about another Hunter’s Seed, for example. 

By letting players take centre stage, and knowing when to give them their character moments, the group will bring a scenario to life. The Exploration sections of Grisham Priory are short, but it only takes a touch of description to have Hunters appropriately shaken by the Wormery, or moved to pity (or disgust) by the pathetic Viridian Congregation in the cloisters. 

Echoes

Hollows has extra ways to stir up Hunters’ emotions. The more times a Hunter dies, the more Corruption they pick up. That gives them more powers but also more problems, and sometimes those problems manifest as Echoes: reflections of the people they’ve hurt, or who’ve hurt them, or the sins they’ve committed. Echoes appear inside Hollows, twisting that bespoke reality into a form that specifically rattles, unnerves, and distresses Hunters. 

Echoes ensure that over time, a Hunter’s backstory and history starts seeping into their present. One way or another, they’ll have to reckon with who they are… and what they’ve done.