Making change matter in Under Hollow Hills
When improvement and experience are of the table, how do immortal characters evolve?
Under Hollow Hills, designed by Vincent and Meguey Baker, follows a fairy circus as it travels between the human and fairy worlds. Player characters are members of a this circus, and they can choose from a variety of playbooks, both fairy and human. (The difference is important but subtler than you might imagine.) Before characters perform the circus show, they spend a bit of time in the area, meeting NPCs, taking stock of the situation, and establishing themselves in the setting. Each character then performs in the circus and is allowed to make a circus move, which changes a single person’s fate or the fate of the entire circus. It is this deliberate decision to center change that separates Under Hollow Hills from the rest of the Bakers’ oeuvre of games.
The crowdfunding campaign for Under Hollow Hills launched in 2020, but Vincent and Meguey Baker had been playtesting their new game for a few years. (It would later be delivered to backers in 2021, and the full book was released in 2022.) On the Kickstarter page, the Bakers state that Under Hollow Hills is their “most profound collaboration, the game so far that most expresses who we are when we work together.” They consider it the best game they’ve ever made. It’s a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game ten years after they began working on Apocalypse World and in my opinion it shows their growth as designers and as people much more than any other game, including the upcoming Apocalypse World 3e: Burned Over.
Compared to other games that the Bakers have written that they also consider PbtA, like Firebrands: Mobile Frame Zero and The Sundered Lands, it sticks much closer to the original form; playbooks, moves that use 2D6 (called in this game “plays”), a game master (or, in this case, a Mistress of Ceremonies) with principles and agendas. If you’ve played any “classic” PbtA game, it’s a largely familiar format and setup. The differences are more subtle, and only really emerge during play. The most obvious change is evident on the character sheet; there’s no experience track.
