Rowan Rook and Decard today have launched the Backerkit campaign for their upcoming tabletop RPG of grimy horror and tactical combat in Hollows. The campaign’s funding goal is set at £75,000, and will run for 30 days.
From the team who brought you the likes of Eat the Reich, Spire: The City Must Fall, Heart and others, Hollows is designed to echo video games like Dark Souls, where death is expected (and intended). The game takes place in The Isles, the heart of a once-great empire now crumbling under its own weight and complacency. It has strong echoes of Victorian Britain with a knotty class struggle running throughout the game: who holds power, how they use it, and what it does to them.
Four groups (the Crown, the House, the Temple and the Conclave) vie for control of the Isles – and commission Hunters to breach Hollows and slay, capture, or occasionally rescue their Lords. They’re not the most pressing threat in Hollows, but they keep the world in its miserable squalor, and many of them profit from it.
Hollows is all about you and your group taking down giant bosses in epic fights. Players each choose two Weapons to wield, mixing and matching their abilities to create a character that feels unique and personal, and working with their allies to build combos that work on and off the battlefield. Players select new abilities with every kill and choose which ones to make permanent when they baptize themselves in the blood of a Hollow’s Lord.
Gameplay moves elegantly between exploring a Hollow’s poisoned world –rules-light and roleplay-heavy– and many-v-1 tactical boss fights. 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. Hollows’ combat keeps the player characters right at the heart of the action, with the battlefield changing and developing 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.
Currently, following the project will get you the Hollows Quickstart guide, The Sins of Grisham Priory, to give you a taste of what’s to come. The guide features trimmed-down rules, pre-generated characters and a whole scenario – a Hollow – for you to Hunt a loathsome Entity through.
For the Backer kit, in addition to the corebook (which contains everything a group needs to play) there are several levels of pledge available to Hollows backers, including: a specially-designed component kit, a cloth-bound slipcase, a Crown-red Special Edition, and the option to purchase original art from the book to hang on your wall.
Following the culmination of the campaign, Hollows is set for a Q2/Q3 2025 release, and will be available “in as many games stores as [Rowan Rook and Decard] can convince to carry it.” If you’re keen on learning more about Hollows, check out Aaron’s interview with Rowan Rook and Decard’s Christopher Taylor.