Hollows Weapon: the Staff

“The world is riddled with power that roils and pushes at the seams of the real, and it is yours for the taking. You were born for this. The world is your birthright. You draw chaos up from the roots and it is shaped by your hand, your mind, and your will. The world is stumbling, primitive, blind – you are sharp. You are aware. You are in control. No one is ready for what you can do.”

The Staff is of the old blood. It is steeped in old magic: gore and gristle, stone and stars, root and bone. It is the herald of old gods, long-slumbering, now awakened. It is the first and greatest tool designed by humans, and the lever upon which they lean to exert their will on the world.

What is the Staff?

The Staff changes the world around it. In game terms, it’s really good at manipulating terrain. It gives its wielder access to a special type of terrain, the Briar token, that many of the Staff’s abilities utilise.

Even at Tier 1, the Staff’s abilities indicate power in excess; unnatural vigour and overflowing power. Hunters with Briar get a screen of living plants that reduces Threat, are infused with will and energy (Resolve) at the cost of a little health (Wounds), or can draw strength from the Briar to boost their attacks. Not all the Staff’s powers are linked to Briar, though. You can destroy terrain to replenish your health, or restore others’ Resolve from the overspill of power when you miss with an attack.

At Tier 2, you can travel to wherever your Briar is (an excellent trick for Book and Staff wielding healers), change your Staff’s form, create a simulacrum of a useful piece of equipment, or manipulate your Briar to make an extra attack in your turn. By Tier 3, you’re the ultimate master of the land. You can sacrifice terrain, including your Briar, to resurrect a dead or dying Hunter or deal massive damage to an Entity.

What is the Staff Really?

The Staff knows that humans, for all their ingenuity, are nothing but meat. Meat rots away, but symbols endure far beyond the reach of the most powerful. Some meat is lucky enough to bear those symbols and carry them onwards to the future – a small link in a chain that extends back before the dawn of history.

No Weapon’s relationship with its wielders is more fraught and fragile than that of the Staff; it rides a razor-edge balance of abuse and reward, hoping to keep those it ensnares enticed by the promise of power.

It knows it’s lying. The Staff is useless without a hand to hold it. It is entirely reliant on humans – it wouldn’t exist without them – but it postures and pontificates and spins tales of ancient power, of unknowable secrets buried in the mouldering tears between worlds, of its absolute majesty and the artless grasping hands that sully its surface. 

The Staff’s secret truth is this: the world is not as complex and mysterious as it makes it out to be; it just needs you to believe that it is.