Hollows Weapons: the Shotgun

“There are things out there that want to kill you – terrible things, wretched things, bestial things. You’re not scared of them. They should be scared of you. You’re mess and you’re chaos, you’re indiscriminate, you’re a massacre waiting to happen. There’s nothing you can’t kill, nothing you can’t break, nothing you can’t ruin.”

That’s what the shotgun tells you. That’s what it wants you to believe. It is immediate and indiscriminate violence in physical form. It promises absolute destruction at the pull of a trigger; an attack without patience or restraint that sends even the fiercest foe reeling. It wants you to fire it. It needs you to fire it, over and over until there’s nothing left but splatter. 

What is the Shotgun?

The Shotgun’s a simple, highly effective weapon. Load, aim, fire, repeat. The design hasn’t changed in centuries; it doesn’t need to. 

In Hollows, the Shotgun’s what you choose if you want to regularly cause huge amounts of damage. The sawn-off variant is superb up close, the long-barrel at range. The repeater needs less reloading, so offers even more bang for your buck, as it were. 

It’s a berserker weapon; the essence of fury and intimidation. Tier 1 abilities let a Hunter do things like batter an opponent with their empty Shotgun while they reload; knock an opponent back with the blast; deal more damage when the Hunter’s injured; or unnerve an opponent with their rage when a Shotgun attack misses. A Hunter can even arrange their build so their Shotgun yells at them until they reload it, which is damaging but doesn’t cost an action. 

Later abilities refine and concentrate the Shotgun’s violence. You’re fearless; your bloodlust gives you counterattacks; you’re so riled up you barely notice injuries. By Tier 3, you cause such massive damage you make the Entity easy pickings for your companions and you’re at your most dangerous when you charge directly into an Entity’s snarling jaws, blowing chunks off it as you approach.

What is the Shotgun Really?

Every Weapon in Hollows has a specific outlook, and represents a specific facet of human deficiency. The Shotgun’s perspective is simple: violence solves everything. The more rapid and massive the damage, the better the solution works. It wants to break things to prove they can be broken, to prove its own strength. 

The Shotgun tells its wielder: don’t hold back. Do the unthinkable. Kill and maim and ruin. The world is a web of social mores designed to hold you down, but you can blast clean through it. 

The thing is, the Shotgun knows it’s lying. It knows violence can’t solve everything. It just doesn’t like to think about what happens after the shot is fired and the smoke clears; that it is empty, and powerless, and open to retribution. What it desires is intoxicating but impossible: no waiting and no need for recovery, but only an endless instant of fury.

That’s the truth of the Shotgun: hurting and killing until the consequences catch up to you.