I had the pleasure of playing in a one-shot of Hollows, the roleplaying game of tactical combat in a poisoned England lookalike from Rowan, Rook, and Decard. Yet another winner from Chris Taylor, Grant Howitt, and a very capable team. The crowdfunding campaign is more informative than the product page, so read that too if you’re curious. But basically you’re playing doomed Hunters who might as well spend the rest of their lives delving into Hollows, places where the world has encysted around horrible formerly human monsters, beating up those monsters, and bathing in their life force. The only significant fights are party vs. single boss creature, and there’s a lot of shifting around the positioning map, thinking about when to use special abilities, and getting seriously hurt. My kind of game.
As may be evident, I had fun. New gaming group for me and I liked them, so even though Bellevue is a bit of a drive I hope to play with them again soon. The game also scratched the itch that 4e did: lots of tactical decisions in combat, rewarding system mastery without being punishing about it. Characters can and do come back to life after being killed – my poor swineherd/priest Caleb died twice during the course of the session. This means the GM doesn’t have to feel at all bad about really cutting loose. It’s not an adversarial game per se, but there’s definitely a bit more of a sense of competition than there is in most games I play. You can be a fan of the characters, as a GM, while pushing them to the limit.
The quickstart adventure (which you can download and play for free) is solid. It starts relatively easy and ramps up and doesn’t overload you with concerns that only matter in an ongoing campaign. I am not entirely sure about the pregens; the Priest I played had a slightly annoying dissonance between his two weapons, where one really wants you to be up close to the monster while the other hints at being back in the support range. You don’t want the pregens to be perfectly optimized but you also don’t want them to be too hard to play. Might have just needed an extra note on the sheet warning you about the dissonance, or maybe I’m just powergaming. Either way it made me want to exercise the character creation system which kind of implies the quickstart is doing the job of making me want to play the complete game.
And man, the tactics are satisfying. We did four combats in about five and a half hours, with a little bit of interstitial stuff. Each one felt different and interesting, and we always had to adjust to the boss monster abilities on the fly. We also discovered fun synergies. One pregen, the Agent, had the ability to take three manuvers (minor actions that aren’t attacks) in a turn, and also had the ability to do one point of Resolve damage every time he moved into a position close to the enemy – so his typical open was just running in a tight circle around whatever horror we were facing, moving three positions for three points of damage with no attack roll needed. On the final fight he rolled a critical on his initiative, which gave him yet another free manuver. That’s nice emergent gameplay. You could write annoying minimaxing guides for this game.
I got substantially better at playing Caleb during the session, too, which gave me the right kind of satisfaction. Oh, and another nice mechanic: every time you beat a boss, your characters literally bathe in its blood and get more special abilities for your weapons for the duration of the adventure. It really hypercharges that advancement dopamine.
I’m a little sad that our GM doesn’t want to run a campaign of this, but I also get that it’s a bit dark for him right now. But I’m quite glad to have played it once.