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Plunge into the nightmare realms of Hollows and slay other people’s personal demons.
The world of Hollows is rotten and more putrid by the day, infested with awful realities that swell like boils around the worst people in the Isles: Hollows. If there’s to be any hope at all, Hollows need lancing. Armed with your Weapons – no mere blades and shot, but manifestations of humanity’s worst instincts – you and others like you are the only things powerful enough to do it and human enough to still care.
Players are Hunters: people infected with the same rot as the monsters they fight. Somewhere in their painful history they did something, or suffered something, that planted a permanent Seed of rot in their soul. They turn that corruption to a grim purpose: exterminating those whose Seeds have blossomed and who have become Lords of a Hollow. The only difference between Hunters and their prey is time and Weapons.
The Weapons a Hunter chooses to wield and the abilities they select for them open up hundreds of possible character builds. Players select new abilities with every kill and choose which ones to make permanent when they baptise themselves in the blood of a Hollow’s Lord.
Gameplay moves between exploring a Hollow’s poisoned world – rules-light and roleplay-heavy – and many-versus-1 tactical boss fights on a unique combat grid where the boss is always at the centre of the action.
Fights are fast but easy to follow, and players quickly get into the swing of planning their tactics and adjusting them as the battle intensifies and the battlefield changes and develops with every action. It encourages players to work together, paying close attention to each other’s moves and devising clever, cooperative strategies to take down Entities far bigger and stronger than they are.
And if they don’t take them down? Death isn’t the end for a Hunter; they’ll blossom into a Hollow all of their own once they meet their end, and it’s up to their allies to put them down.
Here, you can buy the game in several forms:
The standard edition is a 360-page hardcover book, lavishly illustrated throughout. It comes with the PDF of the game.
The special edition is an exclusive, limited edition of the book with soft skin-like binding and two-colour, verdigris foiling. It comes with the PDF of the game.
The PDF is our digital edition: fully indexed, crosslinked and bookmarked to make your digital play experience easier.
The deluxe slipcase set includes the special edition of the Hollows book, the PDF, and our Component Kit: a stash of wood, fabric and resin tokens designed to make the play experience a delight. The book and box come nestled in a grey-and-green slipcase, featuring artwork and cut-outs showing off the book inside, which is exclusive to this edition.
What's in the book?
Hollows uses a simple D20 mechanic where actions can fail, succeed, or succeed brilliantly – and failure is always interesting.
Weighing in at 360 pages, this glorious tome contains everything you need to play Hollows.
Full rules for exploration and combat
Character creation and advancement
Create, maintain and expand the Hunters’ Refuge, their safe space amid the darkness
Information on the Grand Malignancies – Dominion, Fear, Hunger and more – that have sunk their claws into this world
The Victorian-era inspired setting of The Isles, in the last days of a crumbling empire, and a run-down of the world beyond its borders
Guidance on designing and running Hollows scenarios
Twelve horrible Entities to murder Hunters with, and rules for upgrading them
Two ready-to-play Hollows to get your campaigns started
Hollows contains mature themes and is recommended for adult players.
Hollows resources
We’ve put together a pack of play aids and resources to help you bring Hollows to your table, from character sheets and rules references to map handouts and print-and-play tokens. Download it for free here!
This hasto be my desert island game. The boss fights are the main event and they are so damn clever with the circular map that follows the boss, not the players. The abilities are simple but stack together with your party members so cleanly that teamwork becomes explosive. We live or die by the blade of friendship.
Praise for Hollows
The short campaign of this I played on the Open Hearth, with determined story gamers, had something of the thrill of forbidden fruit about it. Yes, we have this patina of victorian-hell-atmosphere, and “if you die, you become the next dungeon” horror stuff, and all those big ideas, but there was a moment when we all went… man, this tactical combat thing is all right, innit?
This game has entered a side of my brain that I didn’t even know I had… they made me understand, care, and even feel capable of creating mechanical trappings for my stories – there are almost 80 pages on how to design Entities and Hollows in the core book, as it’s expected you might want to run your own once your Hunter blossoms – [and that] isn’t even the best part about Hollows.
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