Gordie Murphy. Art by Gordie Murphy. Itch.io, 2021.
1–5 players plus a Game Master | 2 hours+ | Adult
They Are Hollows of Desolation is an independent tabletop roleplaying game designed by Gordie Murphy using the d6 Trophy storytelling system developed by Jesse Ross for the Gauntlet. During Hollows, players invent and explore a collapsing ecosystem in order to discover and retrieve treasure contained within it. A ravaged and animated landscape emerges in play through the interactions of the GM, the players, and the imagined world itself, which is not pre-designed but invented and described through the course of play. Magic is central to the game and functions as a metaphor for the magical thinking of extractive capitalism. If player characters use magic to progress through the landscape, which they frequently must, they accelerate the collapse of the hollow, and dangerous ‘dredge’ effects manifest: monstrous creatures, toxic extrusions from the land, or other consequences determined collaboratively by the players in conversation. The playbook invites players to co-construct their environment before play begins, posing questions about the hollow, asking players to draw a rough map, and marking important natural features.
Hollows of Desolation is notable for the way its mechanics actively work against the extractive logic its premise appears to endorse. The ‘dredge’ effects that follow the use of magic emphasise the interdependence of human and more-than-human worlds: human magic draws on and damages the landscape, making the journey ever more perilous and the need to use magic ever more urgent. This feedback loop enacts what Timothy Morton (2017) calls the ‘symbiotic real’, a realm of ecological belonging in which relations between entities are jagged and incomplete, and the distinction between host and parasite becomes undecidable. Rather than staging a straightforward ecophobic encounter, in which nature functions as an antagonist to be overcome, Hollows uses the aesthetics of the dark fantastic to foster uncanny intimacy with a damaged environment and to implicate players in its degradation (Germaine 2023). This implication is structurally enforced: the landscape is not a passive backdrop but builds itself in play, disclosing its own subjectivity through each new encounter and dredge consequence. In this sense, Hollows exemplifies what Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux (2017) call metagaming — a critical practice of playing, making, and thinking — since players must reflect on the consequences of their actions outside the fiction in order to generate the world within it. Such collaborative worldbuilding enacts Karen Barad’s ethics of worlding (2007): ethical responsibility is not a response to an exteriorised nature but an accountability for the entangled ‘lively relationalities of becoming’ of which players are already a part. Nick Mizer’s observation that TTRPGs cultivate ‘concreteness’ in imagined worlds (2019) is particularly apt here: the respect players develop for the hollow they have built together is the point at which eco-ethical reflection emerges intuitively through play.
Content written by Chloé Wake. Adapted from Germaine, C. (2023) ‘Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers: An Ecocritical Reading of Horror Roleplaying Games’, in Torner, E. et al. (eds.) GENeration Analog 2021: Proceedings of the Tabletop Games and Education Conference. Pittsburgh: ETC Press, pp. 129–139. See, also, the Ecogame Ludography.
References
Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Boluk, S. and LeMieux, P. 2017. Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Germaine, C. 2023. ‘Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers: An Ecocritical Reading of Horror Roleplaying Games’. GENeration Analog 2021 Proceedings, pp. 129–139.
Mizer, N. 2019. Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Morton, T. 2017. Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London: Verso.