Adam Powell (00:03.657)
Hello and welcome to Snyder's Return, a Tabletop Roleplay podcast. My guest day joins me at a time where hostile work environments are everywhere and it can feel like death was the only road out of town to discuss something done right. In a world that gets more rotten and putrid with each passing day, my guest is on the hunt for TTRPG greatness, armed and ready to roll into the Hollows that have been born into existence. It is a great pleasure to welcome Hollows game designer, TTRPG content creator, and one third of Rowan Rook and Deckard.

Grant, how we back to the show. Grant, thank you once again for joining me today.

Grant Howitt (00:37.576)
What an intro! I love the way you use the names of things I've written. That made me feel very proud. That was brilliant.

Adam Powell (00:44.841)
Well, most of those things. Come on, sorry. I know. That's.

Grant Howitt (00:46.824)
Something I released yesterday. That's bang on the money. Yes, hostile work environment. Probably my edgiest work yet. I put out a game about being murdered when your office is bought out by an international conglomerate. And I wasn't expecting it to do great numbers, but it got picked up by Spanish TTRPG Twitter. And so it's gone wild fire. The Spaniards love it for some reason.

Adam Powell (01:07.497)
wow.

Adam Powell (01:11.849)
It maybe reflect their current working environment, which is on point for many of us in employment at the moment. But anyway, moving past that, just briefly, and something we will definitely cycle back to. Grant, thank you for coming back. For those that haven't heard our previous interview, would you mind giving us a short version of how you yourself got into tabletop role playing games, please?

Grant Howitt (01:14.248)
Mmm, perhaps, perhaps.

Grant Howitt (01:19.72)
Yeah. Mmm.

Grant Howitt (01:35.112)
Sure, yeah. The year was 2000. I was attending Games Day 2000, the Games Workshop live event they used to have. And we were sleeping in Games Workshop above the shop, maybe 20 sweaty boys of differing ages waiting to hop on a bus at 5 a And some of the older boys were playing Vampire the Masquerade, sorry, Sabat, they were running Sabat. And I was immediately intoxicated by being able to make things up.

And I think also the idea that everyone was looking at the GM and paying attention to them. And I could be like, I could be him. They could pay attention to me. And that was 2000. And it's been 24 years since then. And I've been approaching it with various levels of professionalism. And now I am, as mentioned, one third of Rowan Rickendecard, which is one of the larger indie publishing houses of RPGs that there is, definitely in the UK, which is pretty cool.

Adam Powell (02:32.809)
It is pretty cool. And you put out some wonderful things, just cherry picking a few out of your... I was going to say discography, and that's completely the wrong word, because you don't sing them to us. Lydography, bibliography? Your works, your collected works. There we go. We'll go with that. Yes. There is spire, heart, die, relatively recently eat the Reich, which and...

Grant Howitt (02:40.136)
OOFRA

LUDOGRAPHY?

Mmm.

The game hole!

Grant Howitt (02:54.888)
Mmm.

Grant Howitt (02:59.048)
Mmm.

Adam Powell (03:01.513)
as mentioned about hostile work environments, lots of one page slash two page RPGs. I actually picked up one of them this morning, which I mentioned in the intro. Death was the only road out of town because you mentioned it a while back as a possibility and as soon as I saw it, I was like, I'm having that. So what's it been like pulling all these different things together? Dai, obviously, as spoken before, has

is built on an existing IP, but the others are very much your own works. What's it been like bringing these various projects to life before we get onto the latest or the newest?

Grant Howitt (03:42.696)
Well, so like I, I work, I write Google Docs for a living basically. And that is, I'm going to say.

less than half of what it takes to make a book come out. So, Maz and Chris, the two founders of Roamok and Dakar, and Maz has been very careful in making sure, in sort of shoring up my undiagnosed ADHD and my very diagnosed depression with a wide variety of people who are excellent at their jobs. I firmly believe that we're some of the best people in the world at doing this.

And I can say that because not very many people do it. But it's been interesting. It's been challenging. And sort of like changing from a business which was me, Maz, and Chris dicking about and maybe like writing a book now and then and a way of getting some effectively, at that point, pocket money, to, you know, we've got 11 people and most of us are full time now. And it's a different business. Like I...

One of the things which they warn you about, well, which would have been nicer than to warn me about when you get into Kickstarter is if you want to do a Kickstarter, sure, you can write games, but are you a marketer? How much do you know about distribution? What do you know about GSM on paper and how much that costs? What do you know about tax? And so there's like running a business has this huge amount of faster. And so like there was that initially, but there's also like, all right.

What do you know about management? And so like, I'm like, Mas thankfully has been a manager professionally for 20 odd years, 15 years before they quit their job and came onto Rowan, Rook and Deckard full time.

Adam Powell (08:04.329)
So yeah, so management sounds like it's been a real challenge and picking things up for back a kick, kickstart and all these sorts of things has definitely had a shift in dynamic. It sounds like the team has really sort of rallied around your creative endeavors to support you in this.

Grant Howitt (08:11.016)
Mmm.

Grant Howitt (08:20.712)
Well, yeah, yes, certainly. And I think it's more than I've rallied around the team, more than they're rallying around me. So yeah, your point about Dai being someone else's property, we're really wary of doing stuff with other intellectual properties because there is so much faff around it. And speaking to other companies who've dealt with

other people's IPs, especially especially ones which are like maybe in a different country or like speak a different language. That's a huge challenge. There's so much paperwork and so much back and forth to get to get through. And then also you have to pay him for it. And so part of

I used to work for Aviva, which is Norwich Union, except I didn't technically work for Aviva. I worked for a fascinating business called Swiss Ray, who were an outsourced admin company, which is like, just like, like, and it was thousands of people strong. And the thought, the idea that you can do an outsourced admin company and have thousands of people care enough about it to make it happen disgusts me at the pit of my soul.

But I worked for them legally and they paid me not enough money. But in their defense, I was terrible at my job and didn't try. But I remember quite early on working out that the only way that my job made sense was if I made them more money than they paid me. And I hated that. I hated that so much. And so, while I started stealing time from them, and I'm really, I think I got about to probably about a month's worth of time.

I'd legally owe them. Show my initials deal, which was great. But also I very quickly decided that I didn't like it when other people got my money. Because I earned that bloody money. And so the idea of working with IPs we've really struggled with because someone else gets the money. And often someone else gets the money for not doing any of the work. But thankfully we had the exact opposite with Kieran Gillan and Stephanie Hans, who did die. They were both like...

Grant Howitt (10:33.32)
full in all the way. Kierrengul wrote every sodding word in that book and when we had to cut a quarter of it out because he overwrites and he's very effusive. And so I was really happy to make that connection and really happy to publish Die and it's good and we've done it justice and I think in a way which I don't think anyone else would have done so. And so we're not ruling out the idea of working with other people in future and we do have something quite exciting coming up actually.

author which we can't announce just yet. But we want, part of the fun of writing your own stuff is that you get complete control over it and so if we want to make, alright so for Spire actually we want to knock down Spire for the next edition, we want to destroy Spire and it's a war game based on the ruins.

we can do that and no one's going to stop us aside from sensible people within the organization will say don't do that grant the building's really important. But no one else is telling us what to do. And that's something which I'm which I'm really proud of and something which thanks to my father's upbringing, I am largely unemployable. Just from just just from a method of like a mix of incompetence and disdain. I really don't employ well.

Adam Powell (11:37.865)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (11:55.88)
Setting up my own business, and also all the mental illnesses. So setting up a business which lets me have an idea about an elf and then a year and a half later that makes hundreds of thousands of pounds. Brilliant, perfect, love it.

Adam Powell (12:10.825)
It is amazing. Spire is a fantastic game. So if you haven't checked that out, please do. Actually, while we're on checking you out, where can we find yourself? Where can we find Rowan, Rook and Decard and everything you are producing and associated with, please?

Grant Howitt (12:16.744)
Mm.

Yeah, sure.

If you go to rrdgames .com, that'll take you to our website. It's been recently overhauled. Well, maybe within the last six months or so. We have a person who does the website now. And we have a person who does all of any sort of internet -based stuff. So the website looks fucking great. It's full of lovely pictures. We teamed up with a chap called James Shaw in Sheffield. And he said, we want to get product photography because...

if you don't have a picture of something people won't buy it, which makes sense because they can't imagine it existing. And so we teamed up with James and his pitch was like, I want to suspend the books in midair and throw shit at them. Yes, James, absolutely. Let's do this. So if you go on our website, again, rrdgames .com, there's like 80 odd free games on there, maybe close to 100. There's a bunch of games you can pay for as well as quick starts of most of our big stuff, which you can get for free. But broadly,

Any picture on there where there's atmospheric smoke, that was me, crouched off camera, huffing a vape, because the smoke machine broke. And then James fixed the smoke machine, but didn't tell me because I think obviously I liked to be involved. And I was getting something out of all the nicotine. So yeah, that's all straight from the writer's lung on the pictures. But yes, you can go there, download pretty much everything. Take a look.

Grant Howitt (13:44.36)
And we've also got a Discord, which we have no easy way of joining you to. But it's good. Take it from me.

Adam Powell (13:51.529)
Also link to your socials on X, still Twitter X now. I'm staying with Twitter. Until it gets deleted or sold or whatever, yes. It'll be Twitter. I will put your links down there for yourself and Rowan, Rook and Deckard on there as well. That is all right. So scroll down, follow those links. There will also be a link to Bacchicit for something we're going to discuss very shortly, which is Hollows. But before we do, you mentioned IPs, you mentioned...

Grant Howitt (13:55.816)
I'm calling it Twitter. I'm calling it Twitter till, I'm telling it Twitter till he sells it.

Grant Howitt (14:07.048)
Thanks very much.

Grant Howitt (14:11.912)
Mm.

Adam Powell (14:19.849)
the off idea which became sort of spire and then there's heart and then something very much more left field and oddly linked to today's date but not is eat the right which is which is in itself unique so if you wouldn't mind spinning us a little bit about that before we delve into the hollows.

Grant Howitt (14:31.144)
Mmm!

Grant Howitt (14:35.624)
Mm. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So, either like was a, it was a pun. I thought that the word right sounded like rich, like eat the rich, obviously. And then I think it was put out a tweet or as, or as you'd call them now, a Zit and X, a post about it saying, like, like, you're a bad enough dude to drink all of Adolf Hitler's blood. And that went really well. And I was like, this might be the back page of a one page game, actually.

And then I did a bit of work on it. I was like, this might be the front page of a one -page game, actually. I did a bit more work on it. This might be a 30 -page game, I think. But it's now 86 pages long and finished. The idea of being a vampire who drinks all of Hitler's blood in a not -especially -classy way, that was my motivation for doing this. And then the day I was moving out of London, I live in Sheffield now. It's much better.

I live in the countryside and I can hear sheep from where I am, which is spiritually great for a human being, as opposed to hearing four different people's musical interests. So I messaged Will, who happens to live in Sheffield, I didn't know that, but I messaged Will Kirkby, who did all the art, and I said, I've done something similar like this with a truck called Rollincons, we did a book called Orkborg, I did all the words, he did all the art and the layout, and we put it on Kickstarter. And that...

It did okay. It did it did broadly fine. I was like, well, you might get you might maybe like five, 10 grand out of it at the end of the day, we'll split the profits. Do you want to do you want to do that? Maybe like 30 pages, 510 grand. Do you want to do some drawings? Yeah, absolutely. That sounds great. And then a scan near and a half later, it's the most popular thing we sell by a country mile is 80 pages long. And the reason why so again, weird length for a role playing game.

Adam Powell (16:27.305)
the

Grant Howitt (16:33.768)
a mid -length game, most of them are shorter or longer. From a game design point of view, I adapted an older game I wrote called Havoc Brigade and took that and streamlined it, because I wrote it 10 years ago. So it's very much big, over -the -top, ultra -violent nonsense, where the dice are more of a pacing mechanic, the dice are an afterthought, and they are prompts for you telling an interesting story, rather than...

I've been describing it at UKGE. If someone says, what sort of system does it use? I'm like, it's the exact opposite of Call of Cthulhu. It runs the opposite to that. It never tells you no, basically. Yeah, you can do it. Why not? It's based on a log, which itself is based on a log game called Wushu, which was released, I want to say 2002, 2003.

by a writer called Daniel Bain. And it's been such a huge influence on all of my work, was she? It was the first game I ever ran. And so it ruined every other role playing game for me. It's a fascinating role playing game where you just do the thing. You just describe your character doing the thing unless someone says, I don't want you to do that. And either that can be that doesn't fit tonally. I don't like what you're doing on a, I think that's gross sort of level. Or like, actually I'd rather, I'd rather we told a different story. I want to try something else. But basically role playing games.

Adam Powell (17:52.457)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (17:58.248)
It's Mother May I and this is, well your mother at this point or daddy. I don't know how it works. I don't know what the kids are calling it these days.

But Will put a huge amount of effort into the book. And one of the things which I've really enjoyed with this relationship with Will is that normally when you hire an artist for a role -playing game, you've probably written most of the text, maybe half of the text. And at that point, it's a going concern, so you start hiring writers. And also, if you're just starting out, generally you'll write the whole thing first and then look for artists. And you're like, well, I can afford maybe six pieces.

And, and like, I like this one artist, but I can only afford one piece of them. So we'll get them to do the cover and then we'll get some other, some other cheaper piece, do the thing. And Will did every single page, laid out every single page, every, every word of text, drew every single piece of art and every single spread of text is individually hand drawn. So there's no reused assets.

There's no, there's not every, like, and it's all done up to look like a sort of like a manky World War II dossier, which also has like, it's got like lit cigarettes on it and like tongues nailed to the thing and like dad's army jokes, which he stuck into the margins and stuff. And he has put a huge amount of effort into that. And we've been rewarded for that. Like we marketed it well. It's a, it's a solid pitch. And one of the things I take pride in is putting together a solid pitch because

The RPG market is, like any market, it's very crowded. And so you have to be able to communicate the thing you need, like, hey, here's the thing, here's what you've been doing in the game, do you want it? And then often people are like, yes. But thanks to the pitch and thanks to Will's incredible devotion to this and the fact that he drew these six gorgeous vampires, which don't look exploitative or cheese cakey, they're sexy, but not sexualized. Everyone's fallen in love with these beautiful vampires.

Grant Howitt (20:05.512)
and it's selling like hotcakes, it's bright pink. We've got the edges of the book painted in Germany. And so people would walk past at UKG and they'll be, what's that? what's that? Yeah, it's a bright pink book and the front glows in the dark. Do you want it? It's 25 quid. It's basically free as far as role playing games go. So yeah, it's going great guns. And I think it has been described derogatively as smooth brained one shot bait. And I'm not entirely against that description.

Adam Powell (20:19.977)
Yeah.

Grant Howitt (20:35.848)
because it is designed to be run in one shot. It's not a complex game. It's designed to be very easy to run, very easy to write. And you're not making tactical decisions. You're not playing the game wrong. You're describing an interesting scene that's going on. And you're supposed to play it for tops, tops nine hours and do that in three sessions because the pace is unsustainable. It is exhausting, 100 % full -time.

Adam Powell (21:00.809)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (21:04.328)
Like you're kicking a Nazi through a window and then surfing on him down the street and then jumping into a different building and making yourself a drink. And so what I wanted to do was take the idea of this really quite big schlocky pulpy game and then one, not bog it down with rules, but make it to a point where anyone can run it. It basically runs itself. The GM's there to celebrate the players, update the numbers and describe Nazis doing things and describe their injuries, basically.

Adam Powell (21:27.209)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (21:34.728)
But it's for a group of people who've never role played before, for a GM who's never game before, I'm really hoping that Eat the Right can be my wushu that ruins every other role playing game for everyone else. That it lets you do whatever the hell you want. And then suddenly you come along to D &D and you're like, I'm going to roll to hit. I missed. Well, I guess I'll try again in half an hour when it gets shown to my turn.

Adam Powell (22:01.257)
Yes, that's another topic that I have feelings for as well. But we will move away from...

Grant Howitt (22:07.024)
Hmm. please no, let's wrap brother. What's the issue?

Adam Powell (22:11.657)
No, I want to go into something that other people have said, yes, we want that. And it's on Bacchicuit right now. And it has raised at time of recording over 145 ,000 pounds. Sorry, Americans, I can't convert that.

Grant Howitt (22:16.808)
Mm.

Grant Howitt (22:27.4)
Yeah, grow up Americans, look it up.

Adam Powell (22:30.953)
It has over 1600 backers and has at times recording 22 days left to fund. It is on backer kit known as the Hollows.

Grant Howitt (22:31.24)
some.

Grant Howitt (22:39.208)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (22:44.041)
please describe because this is very different to Eat The Reich and it's why I wanted to shift from one that has this very pulpy, schlocky feel that you mentioned to this one which tips the scales in a very different direction.

Grant Howitt (22:46.536)
Yeah. Yeah.

Grant Howitt (22:58.704)
Yeah, so much in the way that Eat the Reich is our attempt to make a game which is very light and impactful and fun and cathartic, but also like a little bit dumb, a little bit silly and easy to approach and which you play and then you don't have to go back to it ever again. That's one spire and heart run for about

Six to ten sessions and the idea like our leveling is built in such a way that after ten sessions It really doesn't make sense to carry on playing so Retire your character start again golf and play a different game doesn't matter We've always tried to push back against the idea that I that the the correct length of a role -playing game is forever until you get bored Which is I think how most campaigns go? Most of them don't end

just kind of sad. And so Hollows has been in development for bloody ages and we wanted to do something different. I have been leading the game design charge at Roanoke and Deckard for a long time. And so the reason why Spire and Heart are quite wooly games mechanically, like there's a lot of wiggle room, there's a lot of abstraction and not a great deal of say like tactical stuff.

Because that's not my that's not especially what I go to games for when I GM games I like being able to make stuff up easily and so anything which like you also know There's I don't think any number in any of my games goes over five So I don't like imagining numbers higher than five and like we've got random dice Which might push it a little bit higher, but it's very rare to get anything over five Especially in terms of like damage or like that because I just I don't like I don't like having to do that much maths but Chris

And my co-author led the charge on this one instead. And so I remember we launched Heart, we went into the pandemic, and we both said, well, we're going to have six months, because Heart did really well on Kickstarter. So we've got six months to come up with something else. And we don't know what it is yet. We don't want to do another game set in Distera, the Spire Heart universe. We want to try something else. And so Chris and so I went away and wrote three Cyberpunk games, which weren't any good.

Grant Howitt (25:24.68)
I think that was what it was. There was Bubble Gum Jungle, Ocean Bastards, and a third one about AIs as gods. And none of them were any good, and they didn't get off the ground, and whatever. And Chris developed a game called, it started off being called the, what was it, the Swamp Saints of Sumpsuckle Hollow, which was inspired by Hunt.

Hunt Showdown, which is a multiplayer game on PC, and Bloodborne, and the idea of, I think, very quickly on the idea being that you are hunting monsters and you cannot die properly. That resonated with us and that was interesting. And then about a year into development, we worked out how to do combat. And from then it was like, right, Holos is basically my full -time job now. And unfortunately,

I have three other full -time jobs. It's like, well, not full -time, but I'm writing one -page games every month and that takes a surprising amount of work to write one page. I think for every one page you see, there's six I don't publish or just six pages of notes or stuff I'm throwing out or I'm pacing back and forth, smoking cigarettes, trying to work out what I can make goats do this time. And management and strategy and cons and, and, and, and, and, and, and.

Adam Powell (26:36.649)
Thank you.

Adam Powell (26:44.329)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (26:51.816)
But Hollows has been our main thrust for a long time now. And we've done extensive playtesting with it. Because it is primarily a combat game. And we don't write those. If you think of heavy combat games, you'd think of D &D, you'd think of Exalted, maybe even something like... bugger, what's it called? Gloomhaven.

Adam Powell (27:20.745)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (27:21.)
coming out of that, where the fights are the point and the role playing is secondary. And we've tried to make the role playing less secondary. We've also tried to make sure that there's lots of opportunity in fights to role play, because fights are role playing. And I think that our producer, Chum Evans, has a big thing where it's like, you never stop role playing. It's just like fighting has a pace and a rhythm to it, which.

doesn't work for the traditional style of talking to one another. But if two of you have got swords, you're using them in different ways. How does that function? But the way in which the combat works is we've developed lock -on targeting, which will be familiar to anyone who's played any game since Legend of Zelda on the N64, I think. I was one of the first ones, but I was an N64 kid, so I don't know. I don't know. He did it on PS first.

Adam Powell (27:52.489)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (28:16.936)
but your Souls porn games, your Dark Souls, your Blood porn, your Elden's Ring. The idea of you and a lot of your mates running into a largely empty boss arena and locking onto some guy and then kicking the tar out of him. Or more likely getting absolutely mullered. And there's something really fun about that. And so like the idea of Lock -On, the way in which we developed it, and we went back and forth for a lot of different designs of things.

Adam Powell (28:36.201)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (28:47.784)
But the body never moves. Like, we don't have a map, we have a grid. You put the entity at the center of it, which means you don't need a model for the entity. You can have one if you want, which is kind of nice if you've got some models knocking around, but it doesn't move.

it either, the only thing which we want to display is where you are in relation to the monster. And so we've got like front, rear, flank, flank, and then ranged and then support basically, and slightly different positions within those. But there are maximum, let me do the maths, eight places you can be in a fight in Hollows. And we've managed to, with that abstract away, a lot of the

You don't have to measure distances. You have to remember how far you move. You don't have to work out, am I in the flank of this thing, or am I behind it? And especially if you're operating at range, much like, say, fate or for a game for a much earlier game of ours, if anyone's played it, Unbound, the idea of a zone being where something interesting is happening.

in effect, and we've only got eight of those. But if you move, you shuffle around the board. If the entity moves you, you either, it either picks you up and throws you, so it's just like moving yourself, or we've got something called repositioning, which took a long time to work out, because we had to have rules for what if the entity moves in the fiction, but we can't move the model, we can't move the center of the board, it's printed there. And so coming up with a way to be, to stand still, but still move mechanically.

Adam Powell (30:24.489)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (30:32.2)
was kind of interesting and challenging. But we've got something, we've got a combat system which isn't really like anything else in the RPG sphere. And I think some people said it's a bit like a board game. And I think like, we've been really focusing on the combat mechanics, primarily, because that's kind of the interesting novel thing mechanically about the game. They're all playing, they're all playing, the exploration bits, the non -combat bits, they're fine, they do the job, you know, it runs, basically runs like into the odd.

but slightly less complex to roll under the D20 system. And then we get more complex in the fights, much like pretty much any other role playing game. But we expressly use this grid because you can't theatre in the mind. And we wanted to, like, we've tried to do tactical fights in theatre in the mind. And you end up abstracting it to the point where it doesn't feel satisfying. It just feels like another ability you're waiting to use. I used this example actually, it was in an interview yesterday. 13th age.

Adam Powell (31:03.337)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (31:26.441)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (31:31.592)
And D &D 3 .5. D &D 3 .5 spears have a range of 10 foot. And so that means you can technically position yourself. You can't attack through an allied square, but you can hold off a little bit. And so there's some quite clever positioning you can do, but it's quite hard to make work because enemies run towards you. And so your actual 10 foot reach doesn't really come to play that often. Maybe once per fight, let's say. And 13th age lets you take a feat, which lets you do some tricky shit with a spear once a fight and roll with advantage.

And like, that's a much easier way of doing it if you're working on a tactical map. But if you want the actual experience of, I've done something clever here, that doesn't work because it's, you use the resource once per fight. It doesn't matter where you are effectively. So we wanted to try and abstract as much of the minutiae away as much of the like edge cases and the, where am I? Or, you know, does this weapon.

plug in with this sort of thing and have a game where everything plugs together and you've got a fight which is over and over in an hour, basically like an hour to 90 minutes depending on how complex the boss is. So you can get a couple of them in in a night. And the idea being that you are building these horrible, horrible bastards carrying weapons that hate them. And we can get onto the fiction of it a little bit later. But the...

Adam Powell (32:52.713)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (32:54.92)
The idea, Chris had an idea fairly early on that every time you beat a boss, you level up. And then at the end of the adventure, at the end of the dungeon or hollow as we call them, you pick one ability to make permanent and get rid of all the others. Which means that you have this, it works a bit like a MOBA. And also it takes the idea of theory crafting, which is something which everyone kind of loves theory crafting.

It's kind of fun to look at the books and go, what if, what if I could turn most of me into an octopus? Or like, what if I can balance on that, on that rope I've just shot into the dragon, that sort of thing. We wanted to take that out of theory and into, no, no, try, go for it. And so we've got these really snacky powers and you pick the things and you go through it and effectively you do a build anew every single time, except you're starting slightly better off. And you can swap out your weapons and a lot of the weapons cross over into each other. And so.

Adam Powell (33:34.601)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (33:51.848)
inspired by theory crafting and 3 .5, inspired by like build making and MMOs, especially a game like Secret World. Secret World used to have this absolutely fascinating, well, say fascinating, ludicrous skill wheel, which had every single skill visible in the game. And the idea, and that you had to sort of like plug in and get towards it. But like what we, like one of my builds in Secret World had an assault rifle passive, and I didn't like using the assault rifle, but I'm like, well.

I'm gonna piss about with the assault rifle for a while until I can get that passive and then plug that into my traditional sledgehammer build. I had fun doing that. And like, there's something, there's something really exciting about seeing your characters change, but also reacting to the situation as it goes ahead. And like, we've tried to have every holo which we built, we haven't done, we've done like four or five at the moment, and we've got a lot more coming. We tried to have them as like, each entity will share mechanics through that.

Adam Powell (34:28.713)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (34:49.96)
So if you're getting the tar knocked out of you, like, well, actually, I want something which lets me guard more often, or I want something which buffs other people's guards, or like, actually, I was running out of ammo a lot during that fight because I was making a lot of attacks, so I need to get a better reload. Or actually, you take a reload. You take the ability which lets me reload on your turn. And the way in which you win Holos, and it's a game you can win or look, well, you can't lose. It just takes you longer to win.

Adam Powell (34:57.961)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (35:18.577)
You

Grant Howitt (35:19.4)
and it gets harder the more, the longer you go. But the way in which you do well in Hollows is by combining your efforts, is by working together. And it is very, it's like, if all four of you make Lone Wolves, you might be able to effectively alpha strike the entity and take it out on round one or two, but you don't have the capacity to last longer than that. You can take one or two hits. And so,

the one of the things which we want to talk about in terms of like the fiction of the game and the idea of, cause we want to talk a lot about masculinity. Chris and I are both coming towards 40 now and we are like, we've been, I've been a man for 37 years. Well, I've been a man since the age of 18. So 20 years, give or take. And it's not been great. I can't, I mean, like I've got to say of all the genders you can pick, man seems to be very much the easiest.

but it's just like the internal turmoil has been wretched. And also like, what does it mean to be a man? And what are positive examples of masculinity? And how are we performing violent acts upon one another without really understanding in terms of our language, in terms of our actions, in terms of our, what's the word? Like our policies and our communities we're building. How are these cruel?

And so we wanted to look at that in terms of the weaponry and in terms of the malignancies, which is kind of what we have instead of gods. And the way you get around it is by teaming up and working together. And the way you stop going mad and dying completely is by, and I'm really proud of this, hanging out with your friends and playing piano. You clear corruption by something called the Revel Act in your down times. And the only thing which has saved me...

Adam Powell (36:58.345)
Nice.

Grant Howitt (37:10.088)
from relentless depression is one, gardening, and we've got that in the game too, but also spending time with people and like depression really, and an awful lot of the stoic masculinity, which I think which has espoused, it has been espoused for hundreds of years, the idea that like men should be, men should be, yeah, you sat up straight, there you go, men should be like.

especially in England as well, stiff upper lip, don't complain, except you can complain as long as you're angry. And like, of course women are emotional now, don't upset him because he'll flip out. And like this sort of this double thing which rots you. And so spending time, one of the things which I've really struggled with depression and.

Adam Powell (37:44.201)
It's a sad truth.

Grant Howitt (38:04.296)
is retreating from other people and hiding myself and seeing this as this sort of almost elegant martyrdom where I'm like, well, I don't want to hurt other people. I don't want to get like there's something hideous and toxic at the core of me. I don't want to get it on other people. I am, I am, I am an island. You were wrong. This man is an island. It's bullshit. It doesn't make you any better. It just, you just like, you become, you become.

bound up and toxic and horrible and you invent your own world in your head and that's really what hollows are. The idea being that these are people who like the way it works in the fiction, if you are very, if you suffer a great trauma, if you're cruel, if there's something gone toxic in you, we take the idea of, well I took the idea, I pushed quite a lot for this, the idea of a...

an imagined world inside your head, which is replacing the real world. And then like, well, what if that was Silent Hill? And then what if we had people of exalted power levels? And then what if they kicked in the door and did it like Bloodborne? And like, that's quite, there's something quite exciting there. It's a game about hope fundamentally. And like, we've had to keep like our editors and our producers keep coming back and saying like, lads, this is great. Can you put some hope in please? Yes. Yes. Sorry. Forgot. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Okay. Here's how to save people.

But it's a game about depression and manliness and the death of empire and toxic masculinity and violence. And we've disguised it as a 1vMany board game.

Adam Powell (39:36.345)
You

Yeah, so there was so many interesting mechanics that build up this game and the way you've outlined it there is beautifully sorrowful almost. And I'm actively trying to sell this game because I'm very interested in it. I've backed it and I can't wait to sort of play and experience it and build up that sort of teamwork to...

Grant Howitt (39:53.48)
Well, thanks very much.

Adam Powell (40:09.769)
save or salvage the individual within the hollow, as it were. But it uses a single D20 for the roll under system you mentioned, which has... Well, how would you best describe the game mechanics with respect to tests and target numbers and outcomes?

Grant Howitt (40:28.968)
Blackjack. It runs like Blackjack, basically. It's a strange hybrid, just because we wanted one role to do a lot. And so there is a... You are rolling under your stat, but you are also looking to roll over a task number. So it's like you're playing D &D and the Blackhack at the same time. And if you manage to roll under your stat and over the task number,

That's good. You do a wound, you evade damage. Basically, what you want to happen happens. And if you don't roll over the TN, you just roll under your stat. That's what's called a standard success. And you inflict a glancing blow or you take a glancing blow. And you lose. So like, superior successes do wounds. Standard successes do resolve. And resolve is very easy to get and very easy to lose. I liken it to the like Halo.

So Halo has a rechargeable shield, which means you can afford to take a bit of damage and then you've got ongoing wounds track, effectively, or health, which you have to interact with the environment in some way to recharge. Which just means that it's much more, you know, death spiral in the same way. As long as you have some resolve, you're not exposed unless you roll badly. And so you can play the odds and your tank,

Adam Powell (41:53.129)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (41:56.488)
can, even though we're not working with like 300, 500 hit points and the way in which you'd normally do variants in an MMO, we've got some variants in there and your tank can go, yeah, I can lust for a round. No matter what happens, I can lust for a round. And I might not be very pretty at the end of it, but you can do what you need over there. And there is tanking. We've got a mechanic called threat, which I'm really chuffed with, and which is kind of why you need the, one of the reasons why you need the board.

Adam Powell (42:14.217)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (42:24.552)
and why you need the grid to play on. I will also say we're selling the grid. You can get a nicely printed out cloth sheet of it, but we are going to make it... Anything you need will be printable and available, so we'll have token sets ready to print, which you can stick on cornflakes packets and cut out. And that's how we prototype the game. And I always want to... I think the fundamental part of a role -playing game is a book.

And if you can't run it from just the book, it doesn't really work as a role playing game. And so the book's very nice and you can photocopy it and you'll have all the PDFs and stuff. But we've got threat. And so threat is we tokens that you put on a player space when they hit you. And also, like, and because every entity in Holos uses like different strange rules, some of them will be like, when you hit someone but don't inflict damage, place threat. Or when they hit you, place double threat.

And then at the end of your turn, the monster, the entity gets to place a set amount of threat on the board, but there's a cap. So there's effectively only, there's a maximum amount of attention the entity can use. And then you spend that threat to make your attacks more accurate, more damaging, or to attack out of turn. So every entity has something called interrupts. And in between every single player action, every single player of...

round turn go, the entity can spend threat to make an interrupt. And they usually set something else up, or they're a little attack, or they're smaller. But it means that you can't, like, if you focus your attention on someone, you can tear them down. And similarly, it's kind of an interesting balancing thing. Because if you, like, one of the most damaging things we have in the game is a pistol ability called Unload. And you make.

Adam Powell (44:08.585)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (44:18.888)
as many attacks as you have bullets in the gun. And that's your whole turn. And if it was all hit, you've got five threat on your square and you can't leave or do anything about it. And so like you're massively open to reprisal at that point. And part of the game and part of playing hollows is interacting with that threat. And so there's a lot of classes which shuffle it around. There's a lot of classes which like make a huge amount of noise over here, which means that the threat cap gets hit. And so they have to, so they can draw attention.

There's classes which remove it, there's classes which place it, there's classes which shift it around, and it's an interesting... It lets us do aggro in a tabletop game, and it also lets you set traps for the players, which I really like. And so if I want to keep a player somewhere, I'll put threat around the two areas next to them, and like, okay, so you have to spend your whole turn running away from me, or stay where you are in this terrible position.

Or I guess you can move there and I'll hit you twice, three times, or I'll enhance the next attack. And so it lets you strutting players in an interesting way. And one of the things I found with running Holos is it is, compared to everything we've put out, quite adversarial. And the idea being that the players are supposed to be playing as hard as they can. And the GM, I think, when I've been running, I think as the GM, I'm taking slightly more of a tone for the feeling of the table.

Adam Powell (45:25.545)
Yeah.

Grant Howitt (45:47.88)
So like I might make some non -tactically viable moves because I think it'd be more exciting or I think it'd be more interesting or generally just because I've forgotten what I'm doing and one player's pissed me off and I'll just focus on them. We've got a really irritating tank in our actual play. By the way, also, if you go to our YouTube channel, it's Rowan Rick and Deckard on YouTube, Rowan Rick and Deckard, you can see an actual play of the Quick Start, which we're doing in -house. There's a bunch of people from Rowan Rick and Deckard who play.

Adam Powell (45:57.961)
Talk.

Grant Howitt (46:18.12)
and something about our tank means that I want to bring them down to the extent that I'm not attacking the healers, I'm not attacking the DPS, I'm destroying it. I keep throwing fights basically, not on accident. But yeah, threat's interesting. And that's kind of like talking about the tactical grid and talking about the threat and talking about ways in which we've tried to get every, try to get the feeling.

of a tense Dark Souls battle, of a tense boss battle from any game you've enjoyed where it's like, quick, get out of the way. Because boss battles don't work like normal fights. It's weird. They're testing a completely different set of abilities. And so being able to have this effectively as a puzzle which you're trying to solve through shotguns is tremendously good fun. And everyone who's played it and like, so like.

Adam Powell (46:48.809)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (47:14.856)
I mean, I still struggle with thinking all my work is shit and I've done quite a lot of it. So like by this point, some of it ought to be decent. And occasionally I'll put something out and I'm like, that's great. But if we're taking a risk and Hollows is a risk because this is not our normal sort of thing. We like a lot of the people who are backing the backer kit are not existing customers because we make story games and we make tragic story games about death. And this is, well, this is a combat game. And I believe that every story player, every story game player desperately wants.

Adam Powell (47:34.505)
Yeah.

Grant Howitt (47:44.488)
occasionally to play a game where you can maybe flank because it's kind of exciting to flank and it feels good. And so like, how a little bit of flank is a treat. But whenever I do this stuff, I'm always nervous that my work is shit and I'm useless and I'm just making a loud noise about it. And that's why people are playing it. But so many people who play Hollows are actively engaged and excited and like...

turn to turn, even when it's not their turn, they're paying attention, they're excited. It's rattling through at a fair old rate. It is swingy in a way that's exciting rather than frustrating. And people seem to be having fun with it. People are getting what we're putting forward and then collaborating together and winning fights. And that's magic. And it keeps doing it. And I think we've built quite a good game, which is quite nice.

Adam Powell (48:23.721)
Yeah.

Adam Powell (48:39.721)
I would certainly definitely agree. I've just pulled up one of the stat blocks which is in the the quick start, the Sins of Grisham Priory. I have it open and I've completely mind -blanked there for a second so I do apologize. So within the Sins of Grisham Priory, which is a fantastic type, the artwork is incredible and it's very thematic, but working through, I've come down to the Bishop and I won't spoil it for those that...

Grant Howitt (48:46.248)
Mm -mm.

sins of Gresham Priory.

Adam Powell (49:07.433)
that want to be a player in this, want to experience this quick start. But you mentioned feeling how your games may not be very good and potentially feeling broken. And broken is a mechanic within this that sort of amps up that Souls -Born type game, that second phase. You mentioned players having to stay engaged because at any time they could be next to be struck, whereas other games potentially,

Grant Howitt (49:19.304)
Mm.

Grant Howitt (49:26.312)
Yeah.

Adam Powell (49:36.969)
don't allow that sort of ongoing engagement.

Grant Howitt (49:40.168)
Yeah, I quite admire what D &D did with legendary actions and like lair actions. I think those are really good fun and giving you other things to do other than walk up and use your hit point reduction on the hit point back. But I think that keeping people engaged all the time is a real challenge. And I think that hopefully we made it dangerous enough that people are like, actually.

I look away and 30 seconds later all the threat on the table is on me because something happened. And it's quite good fun.

Adam Powell (50:14.761)
So within the Quick Start, just touching on its contents. Absolutely.

Grant Howitt (50:17.704)
Mm.

Free, by the way, download it entirely free. Go to the back of it. There's an image you can click on it and you can have it. Go ahead.

Adam Powell (50:27.177)
which is exactly what I did. And also if you want to access those YouTube videos, there is a link to do so there along with some fantastic trailers and awesome voiceover work by your good self as well. Well.

Grant Howitt (50:38.664)
Thank you very much. I did the voiceover on the gameplay trailer, but we've got an actual Northern man to do the voice on the cinematic trailer. This world is sour. It doesn't quite ring true when I do it.

Adam Powell (50:46.537)
Hahaha

Adam Powell (50:53.353)
close enough to keep the keep the sales train going maybe slightly slower but anyway doesn't matter so the quick start the sins of Gresham Priory what do people get within it what helps to sort of sell is the right word and also the wrong word sort of immerse people within within the world of hollows

Grant Howitt (50:56.2)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (51:09.352)
Yeah. Nice.

Yeah, so it's it's no it is sell rather than a must. This is a so it's a cut down version of everything. So we have like all the core rules from the core book are there and we're probably not going to change that much. By telling you what you can do on your turn, what you can like what you're rolling over rolling under that sort of thing. But the the what we tried to do with Christian Priory was make a fact of the make a tutorial which wasn't boring.

And so the fights get sequentially harder, but each of them teaches you about a thing. And so like the first fight against the guardian hound, which is kind of a skeleton dog, twice the size of a horse covered in chains, that teaches you about positioning. Because it has really horrible attacks on the flanks and the rear. And up front, it's OK.

It's got my favorite, my favorite attack in the game is that it bites one hunter and then hits another hunter with them, which I think is inherently funny. But it does, it does like a decent amount of damage to the side fairly easily. And so it's telling you like, okay, don't stand there. And also if you stand in front, it's going to bite your head off, but be clever about it. It's teaching you about positioning. And then we've got a fight against something called the tailor. And the tailor is a biomechanical seamstress slash.

textile workshop that you fight. And that teaches you about curse. And curse is a basically the one status for players to have in the game. And so every entity, if they use curse, they'll use it slightly differently. And we've tried to explain that as briskly as possible. So it's never more than like a paragraph of text. But you explain to players how it works at the start of the fight, how you can clear it. And so for the tailor, the way she does it is she as curse represents her like tying your body together, your limbs together with like...

Grant Howitt (53:05.928)
Crimson Thread and Silver Needles. And so the more curse you have on you, we just use D6 to represent them, you spend equal to a curse in resolve every time you make an attack. And so the Tailor fight has this really lovely rhythm to it, where at the start of the fight, it's quite easy. And then you slowly build up curse. And then you realize that every time you make an attack, you're completely ruining your defensive capabilities. And then she bites your fucking arm off and heals. And because...

It's to teach you, okay, one, this is cursed, and two, you've got to keep your health up, otherwise you're going to lose an arm and die. And as we go through, so yeah, I'll save descriptions of the later enemies so you've got something to look forward to, including the bishop, who is very much not well. They're all teaching you something, whether that's terrain, whether that's threat, you know, all the different weird parts of our game.

Adam Powell (53:40.009)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (53:47.305)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (53:59.08)
And in terms of what you get as a character, we've got five pre -gen characters. So all the stats and stuff are filled out. The resolve and wounds are filled out, so you don't need to reference that into your own clever bit. But each of you has two weapons, and every character in Hollows has two weapons. And these are, we tried to work in iconic strokes with these. So the idea being that rather than having the rules for a rolling block Winchester rifle, you have the rifle.

And then we have a few different forms of the rifle, which you can pick out, but everything else is up to you. And like, well, why is it important? And it like, this is that this weapon matters to you. This is one of your basic, like a wand to a wizard. It's very important to you. Tell us about it. What does it do? Dress it up in the fiction. And then you've got six abilities at tier one. You pick one from each weapon and they mesh together in interesting ways. And every time you kill an entity, you pick another one. And so you are making your own character and we've tried to build it. So there's not really any terrible choices at level one, but.

That's part of the game. Part of the game is working out, actually, this one doesn't work. OK, well, I won't take that again. Or, this one doesn't work with this build, so I'm going to combine and put this one in a different way. And there's no reason to take both of these abilities next to each other. So let's get rid of one of them. And so that's what you get. You don't get corruption, which is kind of our ongoing, like the ongoing tragic element of things. You don't get the idea of anchoring.

Adam Powell (55:07.049)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (55:24.232)
which is when you save the Lord rather than kill them and it gets much harder. You don't get like a broader description of the world. You don't get... there's two weapons we didn't put in there because they're slightly more complex, which is the bludgeon and the staff. And so like the bludgeon is a... the bludgeon is...

Adam Powell (55:39.241)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (55:48.168)
that sort of really irritating alpha male masculinity. They're like, they're like, they're like, they're like Jim bros, basically. And so we want to embody that. And so they can't take terrain because they're not fucking scared. They can't take cover. And so like they can still use the token, but they have to discard it if they ever get hit. So like, like you get them like dashing in and out of buildings and the staff summons its own terrain token called the briar and does all sorts of really like.

Adam Powell (55:56.585)
Right.

Grant Howitt (56:17.672)
Stuff which we couldn't cram into an understandable amount of space without also having to teach you how to do something weird. And so like we've got, yeah, the blidgen and the stuff aren't in there, but we wanted to try and create effectively a vertical slice. And so we don't talk about how you get into the hollow. We're not really interested outside the hollow. We want to demonstrate, right, here's the game. Here's this weird allegorical world built around one person's trauma or one person's badness.

Adam Powell (56:24.809)
Yeah.

Adam Powell (56:46.761)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (56:47.528)
kind of like a ghost story in that. So you're exploring this guy's personal health, so it's very relevant to them. And then sort of using that to be like, OK, how can we use this against them? And we've got little bits of that in the full game as well. So you can research what we call edges, which lower the stats, which lower the attack damage, which let you say, all right, actually, we're getting TPK'd by this guy. It's been twice now, and we're quite bored. Let's knock this down.

And so, and so you can, you can, there is a way to actively balance creatures in the game backed up by the fiction. And one of the things which we've always tried to do in our games, much like the way that heart, the character of the heart itself in heart is a good, but good, but overwhelmed GM in the, in that the heart, the heart, the heart gives you, the heart gives you whatever you want, even if it kills you trying. And it might,

Adam Powell (57:25.545)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (57:42.985)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (57:46.472)
not be able to understand what you want. And the way in which that we do progression in the heart is at the end of the end of each session, you tell the GM to beat, pick from a list. And then if you do those things, you level up. And so you are actually directly telling the DM, the GM what you want, and they're actively giving you that. And the deal is, well, how much are you going to get hurt while you're doing it? And what happens on the way? And so trying to bake in the ideas of

Adam Powell (58:07.497)
Yeah.

Grant Howitt (58:16.2)
white gamey things like directly saying, I want this to happen and expecting it to happen in the next session, or balancing an entity which is too difficult either for your because we've written it too hard or because it's a fan -made entity or because your party composition just isn't set up to deal with this challenge. We were really keen to take that and make it fictionally viable so it doesn't feel like, OK, we're going to stop playing the game for a bit and then do this bit over here and then come back.

Adam Powell (58:34.185)
Yeah.

Grant Howitt (58:45.832)
And that's hugely challenging, but I think we're getting close.

Adam Powell (58:50.057)
Fair enough. And I can only award and be excited for what you guys create and what you release as a team and all that sort of good stuff. So when is the Hollows going to be available to us?

Grant Howitt (59:04.872)
I think it's quarter three, 2025, so about a year after this. The Quickstart has enough for you to get a flavor of it. I will also say there is a, like on our Discord, there's a community who are already building their own monsters, who are already building their own weapons. And so there is a, there's stuff you can play around with and do, but we are...

Adam Powell (59:11.369)
Okay, well.

Hmm.

Adam Powell (59:23.849)
Thanks.

Grant Howitt (59:33.224)
We have, there's a lot of moving parts behind this one. We've been play testing it extensively, which means that there is like, there's still fiction to be plugged in. There's still like, I haven't done all the background stuff yet because we've been focusing so hard on making sure the game works. But also there's a lot of interesting authors and artists who we're teaming up with. So we've got J -Dragon and Johan Knorr. So that's Yezeba's bed and breakfast and Merck Borg respectively teaming up to do something.

Adam Powell (59:47.977)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (01:00:02.792)
And we wanted to, much like with Eat The Right, how I got to work with Will, to be able to find people who have interesting art style and interesting writing style and then like, okay, write something really horrible together, on you go boys, and send them off. And so I don't know who we've announced yet. We've got Kieran Gillan, who did Die. He's writing a story about future war. And we've written up a specific machine gunner enemy. And...

Adam Powell (01:00:20.713)
Mm -hmm.

Grant Howitt (01:00:30.28)
And again, because of the way Hollow is flexible enough, the machine gunner enemy has ammo. And one of the tricks you can do is stop him from reloading. Because he just keeps making attacks all the fucking time. And it's a nightmare unless you get up close and put a man trap around his arm, which means he can't reload his gun. So he can't do anything aside from kick -keeping. So it's kind of fun. So yeah, we're looking at about a year's time once the Kickstarter ends. And we are...

very keen at Roanoke and Decart to be as transparent as we can. Within reason, we don't want to admit all of our fuck -ups, but generally on Kickstarter, and we'll back a kit for this one, people are wary, perhaps a little bit wary, of giving their money upfront. It's a pre -order system, basically. They're wary of giving their money upfront for something which may not happen. And there is a culture of...

these nightmares behind the scenes and you have to just pretend that everything's fine and not explain why it's late. And we really try to avoid that. And so like with any Kickstarter, with any sort of anything with as many moving parts as this and anything, which is like, okay, well, we'd have to ship books halfway across the world. If we're getting printed in Latvia and we need to get them to America without coming anywhere near England because then we get charged huge amounts of tax. There's all kinds of faff.

around the whole affair. So we want to make sure that we do that right. We want to make sure the book's good. And we want to make sure that we can work with as many interesting people as possible and to create a... One of the bits I haven't spoken about, and I'll mention here as we're sort of wrapping up, is to... One of the things, like what we like doing, Chris and I, is one, writing cool abilities.

really like writing cool abilities. Anyone who's read our games can see that. Spire and Heart and Hollows is a list of cool abilities with a game stapled on a... with either Necromunda or Annihilation stapled on the outside. But we also like writing monsters. And if you go back to Unbound, which is the second game, which we put out as a company in the first one, which Chris and I wrote together, every single baddie in that has something interesting and something weird they're doing. And we love doing that.

Grant Howitt (01:02:50.568)
I absolutely love writing that. And so what was really important, and especially considering how Hollows is a game about this sort of a personal tragedy, both on the part of the players, but also on the guy who you're going to go kill, we've done a fair amount of like, here's how you make an entity. Here's how to do it. And I think that really you start playing Hollows, you start jamming Hollows when you're making it up yourself. Because we've got plenty of stuff in the book, I think there's like 12 or 15 entities in the book, which you can take and...

We tried to make them iconic rather than specific so you can sort of reskin them and move them around and they're all doing a different thing and no one's serving double duty. But really what we want to do is use these. You look at these and you go, right, I've got it. And you write your own monster and it doesn't work. And the players can bounce it in the system and then you learn for next time and then you do another one. And it's this really, it's like chess but you get to kit bash. It's fun. And we really want people to be able to...

make up their own things because there's nothing really, there's nothing better than that as a game designer. It's to work within a system, but to see, and already people are coming up with fascinating things to do with threat, which I hadn't thought of, but the idea of taking these limited options, threat, terrain tokens, moves, attacks, maneuvers, we've got this quite tight lexicon of words, and then being like, okay, but how can you make them play differently?

How can you push them together in different ways? And so we've been playtesting a version of the game where you are deployed in a coaching in the middle of the table and all the threat and the curse on the board is an enemy army coming in to kill you. Now I will say, doesn't work, but it might do. And we want to open this design space because we've got something, I think we've got something pretty novel here, pretty exciting of a way of doing a fight on a tabletop game which hasn't been done before.

Adam Powell (01:04:33.033)
Okay.

Adam Powell (01:04:43.593)
Hmm.

Grant Howitt (01:04:47.688)
which emulates something interesting and is its own thing. And so being able to like, I want to see that. What I want to see, right? This, the hollow setup. Yeah, cool. 1860 super superhero depression revolver. That's an abusive boyfriend. Brilliant. Cool. Love it. What if there were four guys with explosives try to take down a mech? Isn't that exciting? And like you're climbing the thing and you're putting like, like, like, like melter bombs in the back of it or what have you. And that like, I think there's, we haven't, we haven't got boss fights yet. Right. And I think that we've,

Adam Powell (01:05:05.129)
Yeah.

Grant Howitt (01:05:17.576)
We've come pretty damn close with this. And I really hope that we can take, I don't think it's going to be apocalypse world influential, but like what gumshoe did for investigative games in terms of like, okay, you don't have to roll for it. You can just spend the points. And the point, like the, like the interesting part of investigative games, getting all the clues and putting them together, not rolling to see if you find it. And I really hope that we can like, other people can see this and then run with it.

Adam Powell (01:05:19.273)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (01:05:27.625)
Hmm.

Adam Powell (01:05:43.145)
Yeah. Yeah.

Grant Howitt (01:05:43.912)
and they can do exciting things about boss fights and you have someone say, okay, well, how do we just bring, which isn't a boss fight in this? Or what does Dungeons and Dragons feel like if you do it in this? And that sort of thing. And yeah, I hope it lands.

Adam Powell (01:05:57.385)
So we can see how it all plays out and see what grows from within your own internal creativity. That's you and Rowan Rook and Deckard and what grows from the community surrounding you. Where can we go to find you? Where can we go to support yourself and Rowan Rook and Deckard, please?

Grant Howitt (01:06:14.792)
Sure, yeah. So if you want to back Hollows, search the words Hollows Backer Kit. I'll go to Backer Kit. It'll be on the front page, I think. It's doing quite well. But search Hollows Backer Kit or Hollows RPG, and you'll find it. And you get a quick start. You can get videos of the AP and lots of lovely pictures and details and a lot of adjectives, which basically amount to the word disgusting. But we have to come up with a lot of them. In terms of our games, again, you can go to rrdgames .com or rowanrookanddecard .com.

I have a wonderful site with lots of pictures of my vape breath. And because I put out a free game every month, and I'm graciously supported by Patreon to do this, which means that I get to, I affected to get carte blanche to do something once a month. And if I'm really bad at it, the money goes down, but the money seems okay. The money's been pretty decent for a while. So I put out a free game, which I get paid for, which is magic.

And so as Adam was saying earlier, we had hostile work environment, which I released yesterday. Before that, we had, what was it? Miracle Workers, which is a game where you play gig economy clerics going into the site of TPKs and bringing back the remains for resurrection. And before that, we had Dogmasters of the Wasteland, which is a game where you are a mercenary company in charge of a dog the size of a caravan.

Adam Powell (01:07:33.353)
You

Grant Howitt (01:07:39.88)
can you hear my cat on the recorder?

No, good. Okay. He's, he's, he got rained on. He's upset. But yes, that's, that's where you can find me. And if you want to go, if you want to follow me on Twitter or whatever the fuck it's called now, you can go to GS how it G S H O W I T T. I'm that most places. And if you want to see, and also we'll see if you like Warhammer, you like conversions, basically all I post on Instagram is hot. It's like sad little nights I've made who aren't getting it right.

Adam Powell (01:07:44.329)
very yeah it's all good dear

Grant Howitt (01:08:12.584)
I think my favorite genre is increasingly Sad Little Nights. So yeah, come and have a look.

Adam Powell (01:08:18.537)
I will make sure all of those links are down in the description below. Definitely that Instagram one for my own personal enjoyment. Thank you so much, Grant. It's always a pleasure to get to chat with you. I'd love to chat with you again when there are, well, just again in the future because it's always a joy.

Grant Howitt (01:08:29.576)
Pleasure to be here.

Grant Howitt (01:08:34.632)
There's, there's, look, look, there's, there's, I'm gonna keep doing this until someone kills me. Even if it's me. So, let's dance.

Adam Powell (01:08:41.993)
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Grant.

Snyder’s Return

Interview - Grant Howitt - Rowan, Rook and Decard - Hollows TTRPG

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