Hollows Weapons: the Book

Words have power. If you name something, you can know it, and if you know it, you can control it. Speak a word aloud and the ground trembles at your approach; the beasts of the land recoil and cower; eyes are struck blind, muscles wither and crops die. A chain around the neck of the world, binding it to your will.  Nothing is beyond your comprehension and nothing is outside of your reach.”

The Book is the latest form of an ancient concept – knowledge, embodied, that can be shared or jealously hoarded. What is now paper and ink was once chiselled tablets of stone or rich pigment daubed across the walls of firelit caves. It sees the world not as a chaotic mess, but instead a series of rules which can be manipulated to its advantage.

Absolute truth is not only possible but extant, and it lies within the pages of the Book. Where others stumble around in darkness, you have the intellect and the determination to pierce the veil of ignorance and see the world for what it really is.

What is the Book? 

The Book deals in control. It makes the rules and others abide by them. It doesn’t do its own dirty work; it’s above that. The Book is the first Weapon we’ll look at that isn’t primarily geared around dealing damage. 

An individual Book takes one of three forms: Sacred, Profane, or Eldritch. Those who read from Sacred books inspire their allies, restoring their Resolve. Eldritch Book wielders strike fear even into Entities’ maniac hearts. The secrets in the Profane Book make for viciously painful attacks. 

Whatever form a Book takes, its wielder has access to the same wide range of abilities. At Tier 1, they split into three groups. You can Leash or Ward, punishing the Entity for acting against you. You can lead your allies from behind when you Spur them to action, granting them advantage or rerolls, or Brand the Entity, marking a target for your friends. Once you’ve built up a few abilities Witness, which allows you to Focus when you miss with an attack, starts a cascade of free actions that mean a Book wielder’s missed attack empowers their allies. Alternatively, you can take Remake and speak your injured companions’ bones back into place. 

Tier 2 abilities build on this control, making the Book wielder more effective, close to indomitable. Tier 3 goes further: take ownership of the battlefield and deny an Entity its ability to place Threat – limiting its attack and banning interrupt actions – and reject death itself, bringing your companions back from the dead with a well chosen word. 

What is the Book, Really?

When you impose structure on the world around you, you give it a form pleasing to your eye. You create species and periodic tables, constellations and countries, ethnicities and social classes, heretics and saints. Everything you see is yours to control and order with you, bright and brilliant as the sun, at the centre. The book is enlightenment and, as students of history might recognise, Enlightenment, which is closely tied to imperialism. If the Sword and the Rifle built the Isles’ empire, the Book mandated it. 

The Book’s violence is more subtle than that of its companions in the Weapons’ bloodstained pantheon. Every Weapon is a tool through which humans impose their will upon the world, and where the others do so directly with fire and iron, the Book holds itself above such base matters. Violence is not only the crack of bone and tang of blood; pure violence, unsullied by the sweat and pain of the melee, is the subjugation of that which you deem to be beneath you. The Book knows that everything is beneath it.

These are the lies the Book tells to preserve its own importance. Deep down, it knows that  from the moment its final page is written, any insight it offers becomes less relevant. Contexts shift and erode. Touchstones crumble, idioms invert themselves, and audiences die out.

That’s the truth the Book doesn’t want you to know: it’s only true as long as you believe it. The moment you reject it, it crumbles to dust.