Hollows Factions: the House

This country is built on our bones.

Labour made The Isles strong. The Empire couldn’t have existed without mills, shipyards, factories and foundries, and the owners and workers (but mostly the owners) of the nation forced the Crown to recognise their value, and reward them with democratic representation. 

For a while, things were good. Elected officials worked to better the lives of their constituents, profits were reinvested in the community, and far fewer labourers died due to unsafe machinery or starved to death in the gutter. Then the Empire collapsed, the work dried up, exports were sunk or blockaded, armies lost war after war on foreign soil, and the House began to cannibalise itself to stay functional.

The House is on the brink of losing everything, which makes it cling on all the tighter. It armours itself in bureaucracy – contracts, statutes, and hierarchies – in the desperate attempt to maintain order. 

Hunters who work for the House are members of The Isles’ government or their assistants and enforcers – the more fortunate ones are, anyway. Others are labourers and clerks, grist to bureaucracy’s mill, or adherents of the old religion that used to provide The Isles’ structure and order before the Empire and the Temple.

House Origins

The four Origins for House hunters are: 

Ministers, who run the machinery of state. Whatever class they were born into, whether they were aristocrats, factory owners, or workers, they’ve acquired the type of power that matters, and most of them will claw and bite to hold onto it. They’re experts at obscuring the truth – or simplifying it to advance their agenda, persuading people to see their point of view, and finding and exploiting every loophole. 

Agents are the House’s enforcers. Ministers are permitted a small armed force for their own safety just as landlords and factory owners employ toughs for security. Before Agents were Hunters, they were in the employ of the House and they enforced its edicts with blood. Many of them still do. They bully, scrutinise, and escalate, and they’re very good at it. 

Labourers are the many. The common folk of The Isles. The ones trading their time and strength for a pittance of coin. They’re the faceless, countless people desperate enough to let those above them in the House hierarchy condemn them to death in industries that are more dangerous and less regulated by the year. Their strengths are gritting their teeth and working through pain and hardship, bodging together solutions out of whatever resources they have, and keeping out of trouble.

Watchers are adherents of the old faith. They uphold the tradition of fearing, managing, and placating the old gods. Some of them lead small congregations, others simply tend to whatever shrine they’ve been able to build or acquire. They play to their strengths, de-escalating conflicts, avoiding trouble, and offering sacrifices for appeasement.

House Seeds

The House’s Seeds bloom from rule-breaking – perverting the hierarchy the House upholds. 

Class Traitors broke the unwritten rule: keep to your own type. They married or loved outside their station, tried to climb the social ladder, or switched political affiliations – for example from the Crown to the House. It’s not the taboo that plants the Seed of a Hollow in these people, it’s getting caught and punished.

Criminals’ sins are self-explanatory: they broke the law. Sometimes those laws exist for a moral purpose, such as not murdering the people who raised you and loved you. Sometimes they’re the sort of laws that keep workers toiling in poverty and ill-health with no recourse. Criminals’ futures are currency for the House: transgressions allow the House to press them into service in the sort of jobs nobody else will do – and in The Isles, those are wretched jobs indeed.

Betrayers turned on those who expected their support. Sometimes that included a crime, but what really rotted their soul was the way they hurt people. They planted evidence, committed blackmail, or stole funds from their employers. They may have had good reasons, but they hurt someone or let them down, and they can’t justify that to themselves. 

Scapegoats didn’t do anything, but they took the fall for someone else’s transgression. Your boss, a senior Minister, or the rest of your criminal gang. Some aren’t as spotlessly innocent as they claim, but they definitely aren’t the only people who should be taking the fall for whatever went down. 

The House and Hollows

The House can’t legislate and administrate a fair and working society from what’s left of The Isles, but it can impose order on Hollows. There’s a clear definable state of wrongness and the House can define and implement policy to address it. 

The House has the perfect hierarchy to tackle Hollows: Ministers to give the orders, Agents to enforce them at swordpoint, Labourers to rush a Hollow en masse, selling their lives cheaply yet again, and Watchers to maintain a healthy degree of fear and caution. If they also had money and infrastructure – if The Isles weren’t crumbling around them – they might be very effective, but that isn’t the greatest factor holding them back. 

The House is a protection racket. If The Isles wants the House to save it, it’ll have to find a way to pay.