Hollowreach

Read this before you make a character. It isn't rules. It's what you're signing up for.

What this is

Hollowreach is a long-haul campaign. Not a few months — years, if we do it right. It starts at F-rank with rats in a cellar and it is built to end somewhere very far from there.

It is also entirely custom. The world, the map, the gods, the guild, the economy, the monsters and what drops off them, the ranks on your card — none of it is out of a book. There's no module to spoil, no wiki to read ahead on, and no adventure path I'm quietly following. If you want to know what's over the hill, the only way to find out is to go over the hill.

That cuts both ways. It means I can say yes to almost anything. It also means nothing is on rails, so nobody is going to hand you the plot if you don't reach for it.

The commitment

We play once a week, or once every two weeks. We'll settle which when we know everyone's schedule.

Missing a session is fine. Life happens — work, family, illness, a week where you just don't have it. You don't need to justify it and you won't be penalised for it.

• The world keeps moving. The party goes on without you. Your character is written as present but quiet, or off doing something sensible, whichever fits the scene.
• You won't fall behind mechanically. You still get the session's rewards and progress. Nobody gets left at a lower level because they had a bad month.
• You can catch up. Every session is recorded, and the recap goes up here.

Everything is possible

This is the part people don't believe until they test it.

You can try anything. Not "anything on your sheet" — anything. Talk the monster out of it. Buy the building. Marry the wrong person. Start a business. Adopt the goblin. Refuse the quest entirely and go do something else. Steal from the guild. Ask a question nobody's asked.

I will not tell you "you can't do that." I might tell you it's difficult, or expensive, or that you should think about it for a second first. I might ask you to roll something brutal. But the answer to a genuinely creative idea is going to be yes, and here's what it costs.

The flip side: there is no correct path. I'm not hiding a right answer behind three wrong ones. If a plan seems like it should work, it probably works. If it seems insane, it might still work — insane plans that are actually committed to have a way of going somewhere interesting.

A note on money

Hollowreach mints gold. Only gold. No copper, no silver, no electrum. A price is a number of gold coins and that's the whole system — including at F-rank, where the coins are few and each one still matters.

But every kingdom strikes its own. Vaurenne pays in gold couronnes. Vargheim in gold rings. Sarranthe in sarrans, Ostreach in ostmarks, Elowyn in aelens. The fairy lands deal in gold boons, when they deal at all.

They are gold, and they are not equal. A couronne is worth less than the gold brand the guild reckons its ledgers in. A ring is worth a little more than a couronne, an ostmark a little more again. An aelen out of Elowyn is worth more than a brand. A single boon is worth several — which is one of many reasons nobody is comfortable around fairy money.

• Where you sell matters as much as what you sell. The same haul, the same day, two borders apart, is not the same purse.
• Changing money costs money. Every border has moneychangers and every one of them takes a cut.
• This is a business model. Buying cheap in one kingdom and selling dear in another is a completely legitimate way to get rich, and one of the better uses of downtime.

Nobody expects you to memorise any of it. Ask what something costs where you're standing and I'll tell you. Just don't assume the price you paid last time is the price this time.

Between adventures

Downtime is not filler. It's a whole second game, it runs in parallel with the campaign, and for some of you it will end up being the more interesting half.

Train. Work on something you don't have. Skills, weapons, languages, a spell you shouldn't know yet, a technique somebody has to teach you. Find the teacher, pay the teacher, put in the weeks.

Craft. Everything you pull off a corpse is a material. Bring me hide, bone, venom, scale, ichor, whatever it was, and you can commission or make custom gear from base materials. Not "a +1 sword." Your sword, made of the specific thing you killed, doing the specific thing you wanted it to do.

Run a business. A forge, an inn, a caravan line, a brewery, a mercenary outfit, a theatre, a fence's back room. Businesses generate income while you're away and problems while you're away, which is roughly the same thing from a story perspective.

Own property. Land, buildings, a workshop, a manor, a wreck of a tower you intend to fix. Property is permanent, it's taxable, it can be attacked, and it makes you somebody in whatever place it sits.

Get into politics. Back a candidate. Take a title. Buy a seat. Marry into one. Fund a faction and find out what they do with your money. One of the fastest ways to change how the world evolves — and one of the fastest ways to make an enemy who never has to fight you personally.

Take loans. Once you're known — once your rank and your reputation are worth something — the bank will lend to you. The bank is not the guild. It's its own institution, it holds the accounts your guild pay lands in, and it does business on its own terms: your rank is your credit limit and your reputation is your interest rate.

Invest. Ships, expeditions, mines, other people's businesses, a scheme somebody pitched you in a bar. Returns can be enormous. You can also lose every coin of it, and I'm not going to soften that.

Buy the big thing. A mount. A ship. A caravan. An airship, if you get there and can pay for it. These aren't rewards I'm holding back for a story beat — they're purchases.

Mission pay scales with difficulty — and it scales hard. A contract that could kill you pays like a contract that could kill you. But a mission pays once, and a business, a piece of land in the right town, or an investment that lands pays every week you aren't looking at it. The wealthiest people in Hollowreach are not the ones who took the most contracts.

Play your character. Be your character.

There's a difference between "my rogue tries to convince the guard" and "look — we both know what's in that cart, and we both know what happens if your captain finds out you let it through. So let's talk about what it's worth to you."

Both are legal. The second one is the campaign.

I want you in your character — thinking in their head, wanting what they want, making their mistakes instead of your smart ones. Speak as them where you can. React as them. Let them be wrong about things.

Voices are optional. If you want to do a voice, do it — it's fantastic and it makes the recordings sing. If you don't, that's completely fine, and nobody will be judged for playing in their own voice. Half of great roleplay is word choice, not accent. Do what you'll actually keep doing for two years.

Relationships matter

Every named NPC you meet remembers you. Not vaguely — mechanically. The guild tracks your standing. Towns, factions, and individual people track how they feel about you. It changes prices, it changes who'll talk to you, it changes what work you're offered, and at the high ranks it changes whether the guild will let you advance at all.

Some things that will get around:

• How you treat people with nothing to offer you
• Whether you finish what you took payment for
• Who saw you do it, and who they talk to
• What you did when it was expensive to do the right thing

Reputation travels at the speed of gossip, not instantly — you may get a head start on your own reputation. You will not outrun it forever.

Your choices change the world

The world state is persistent and it responds to you.

If you clear a road, trade moves along it and a village gets richer. If you don't, it doesn't. If you leave a problem alone, it grows — and it will still be there in a year, bigger, with your name attached to the fact that it was there in the first place. If you install someone in power, they hold that power, and they remember who put them there.

There is no reset between arcs. Nothing quietly reverts because it'd be more convenient for the next adventure. Two years from now you will be walking around inside the consequences of things you did in session four, and some of them will be very good and some of them will be awful, and both of those are the point.

This is streamed

Be clear-eyed about this before you say yes. Sessions are streamed live and recorded. Edited versions go up afterward as VODs. People will watch you play, and some of them will have opinions.

Chat may occasionally be able to affect play in small ways. That system is still being built, and I'll explain it fully before it ever touches a session.

If any part of this makes you uncomfortable, say so now rather than in month eight. There's no hard feelings in either direction.

The fourth wall

It can be broken. Occasionally. For laughs. A joke about the dice. A groan at my voice acting. Someone at the table saying the quiet part out loud. That stuff is good — it's funny, it's human, and it plays well on stream.

But it's a seasoning, not a meal. The reason a fourth-wall gag lands is that the other 95% of the time we're actually in the world. If the table lives outside the fiction, the jokes stop being jokes and the serious moments stop landing.

Rough rule: break it, laugh, get back in. If we've been out of character for five minutes, we've drifted. I'll pull us back and I'd like you to do the same.

What I ask of you

1. Show up when you can, and tell me when you can't.
2. Know what your character wants. One sentence.
3. Try the thing. The answer is usually yes.
4. Stay in it. Break the wall for a laugh, then get back in.
5. Send me your downtime between sessions, not at the table.
6. Talk to me about anything — content you'd rather avoid, something you want your character to do, something on stream you're not comfortable with. I'd much rather hear it early.

Welcome to Hollowreach.

Make someone you'd be happy to spend two years inside.

The one thing I actually need

Know what your character wants. Not their backstory — their want. One sentence, present tense, something they could get or fail to get.

"She wants her family's name off the debtors' roll." "He wants to be the one they send." "They want to find out who paid for the fire." Everything good at the table grows out of that sentence, and a five-page history without it gives me nothing to aim at.

Backstory is welcome. Keep it short enough that you could tell it to a stranger in a bar, because at some point you will.

Custom races

You can ask for a custom race.

If you have something in your head that isn't on the list — your own species, your own people, something you've been carrying around for years and never got to play — bring it to me. Custom races may be authorised. I'd like to say yes.

If that's not for you, take a standard race. Nothing in this campaign is gated behind being custom, and no custom character will be better than yours for it.

Where you start

Everyone begins at F-rank. No exceptions, no head starts, no character who's already famous. The card in your hand on session one is the same card everyone else is holding.

Your registry number is assigned when you first sign in to the ledger, and it's yours permanently — including if this character dies and you roll another.

Bring me

• Their want, in one sentence
• A name, and how it's pronounced
• Where they're from, roughly — I'll tell you what that means about them
• One person from their past who is still alive
• Whether you're doing a voice, so I know what I'm playing against
• Anything you'd rather not have come up in play

It is not an army, a temple, or a noble house. It is a ledger with a roof over it.

What the guild is

Kingdoms rise and fall, borders move, and lords forget their promises — but a monster on the road is a problem in every language, and someone must be paid to solve it. That is the guild. It takes the work no crown wants to claim, it matches that work to hands willing to do it, and it makes certain those hands are paid.

It does not care where you were born. It does not care what god you knelt to this morning. It cares about one number, and that number is your rank.

Your card

When you sign the book, you are handed a card. Don't lose it. Replacing it is expensive, humiliating, and slow.

It is your name. Proof of who you are in every kingdom that trades with the guild — which is all of them. Gate guards, harbourmasters, innkeepers, and toll collectors accept it where they would not accept the word of a stranger with a sword. Some of you will find it's the first document you have ever legally owned.

It is your key to your money. Guild pay doesn't cross a counter in coin — it's deposited into your account, and the card is what opens it. Present it at any guild hall on any continent and the ledger knows your face, your balance, and every contract you have ever completed.

It is your word made visible. A card is a trust credential, and it scales. An F-rank card gets you through a gate. A B-rank card gets you an audience. What people are willing to hand you, tell you, or leave you alone with is a function of the rank stamped on it.

It changes when you do. The card's face is not reissued and not redrawn by any clerk. On promotion it simply becomes the card of your new rank, in your hands, wherever you're standing. Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained this. The guild considers the question settled and the matter closed.

The ranks

Eight of them, and the distance between each is greater than the last. F is a card and a warning. E means you've survived the work. D and C are where most adventurers stop, retire, or die. B and A are names people know in a region. S and SS are names people know everywhere, and there are never many.

Rank is earned in points, awarded for completed contracts and scaled to their difficulty.

How promotion works

Two steps, always. They are not the same step and the guild will not let you confuse them.

1. You cross the threshold. Enough points, and the ledger marks you eligible. This is arithmetic. It happens on its own and nobody's opinion is involved.
2. You are sealed. Eligibility is permission to be tested, not a promotion. There is a trial — different at every rank, and increasingly less about combat as you climb. Pass it and the registrar sets the seal. Only then does the card change.

At the higher ranks the requirements stop being things you can grind. Sponsors. Council votes. A specific deed. Standing that no amount of contract work will buy you if you spent it badly.

The mission board

Contracts are posted at the hall and taken at the hall. Take what's within your rank or one above it; the guild will not stop you reaching higher, and will not come looking if you don't come back.

• Pay scales with difficulty. Hard contracts pay hard. This is the whole ladder.
• F and E contracts require proof. Physical proof, brought back. Word of mouth is for adventurers with a reputation, and you don't have one yet.
• Pay is deposited, not handed over. It goes to your account. A party's contract pays into the party's account.
• Unfinished work is recorded. Taking a contract and abandoning it costs you more than never taking it.

Parties

A registered party has its own charter, its own card, and its own rank — and party rank climbs more slowly than yours does.

• A party can never outrank its best member.
• Each party rank has its own requirements: a share of the roster at a given rank, sometimes a specific item, sometimes a trial taken together.
• A party loses nothing when a member dies. The charter survives the person.

Death and the register

Points belong to the character, not to you. If your character dies, their record is closed and their rank dies with them. The next one you bring in starts at F, like everyone does, and can rejoin the party immediately.

You keep your registry number. It was never the character's.

Commerce

The guild buys. Whatever you brought back — hide, bone, venom, scale, salvage — there is a counter for it and a price for it, and the price depends on where you're standing. Selling to the guild is fast, honest, and never the best offer you could have got if you'd carried it further.

The bank is a separate institution. It holds the accounts the guild pays into, it lends against your rank and your reputation, and it does not consider itself bound by the guild's patience.

Standing

The halls keep leaderboards — one global, one for each continent, one for each kingdom. Your name is on them the day you register, somewhere near the bottom, along with everyone else's.

They are public. So is your rank, and so is your card. The guild has never seen the point of privacy in a business built on trust.

How the twelve are arranged

The gods wear fur. Every one of them. No scholar can tell you why, and the priests who claim to know disagree so violently that the question is no longer asked in polite company.

The Twelve stand in six opposed pairs. Each pair is a single argument the world has never settled — the hunter and the hunted, the debt and its discharge, the thing remembered and the thing let go. They are not good and evil. Both halves of every pair have temples, and both halves are right about something.

All six pairs are arranged around a thirteenth who belongs to none of them, because he is the one who set them out.

Why faith has lapsed

The official position of every temple is that the gods still walk. This is true — a Vurn-sign in the snow, a Cindra-warmth in a house that should be freezing, Ilka putting a drowned child back on the bank breathing. Appearances are documented, recent, and credible.

The problem is that they are rarer than they were, they are less coherent than they were, and nobody can agree on when it started.

1. The temples' answer. The gods withdrew because mortals stopped deserving them. Convenient, unfalsifiable, and good for donations.
2. The scholars' answer. The gods were never as present as the old records claim, and the records are exaggerations. This requires the records to be unreliable, which the scholars are content to assume and disinclined to investigate.
3. The heresy. They are not withdrawing. They are being forgotten, one unsaid prayer at a time, and a god nobody remembers to pray to cannot come when called. Held by cranks, hedge-priests, and the last few attendants of Marrowmother Hone. Not taken seriously anywhere that matters.

What happened, in the order it happened. Miss a week and read your way back in.

How catching up works

If you miss a session, you don't need to do anything. Read the recap here before we next play and you'll be current — and I'll fill in anything that touched your character directly before we start.

Every session is recorded, so the edited VOD is always an option if you'd rather watch than read.