THE HOLLOW
Modern Occult Action-Horror
The world is normal.
That is the lie that keeps it alive.
An occult investigation game about impossible cases, cursed objects, hidden factions, dangerous spirits, hungry monsters, old sins, bad miracles, worse bargains, and the people trained or unlucky enough to answer when the ordinary explanation fails.
Start ReadingYou are living on top of the
wound right now.
The Hollow is the wound left in creation when Eden was removed from the world. Not a dimension, not a hell. An absence, the shape left when something holy was severed from reality, and like any wound, it bleeds.
The Flood shattered the original wound into thousands of Shards. They went everywhere: under old churches, beneath battlefields, into the foundations of buildings that wouldn't be built for four thousand years. A Shard sleeps under a farmhouse in rural Ohio. Under a cathedral in France. Under a parking garage in Phoenix.
Most Shards remain dormant. Then someone does something that matters. An occultist cuts deep enough. A murderer kills an innocent where the ground is already thin. A devil is paid. A relic breaks containment. The Shard wakes. The Wound opens. And then the phone rings for your team.
The cosmological spine is Christian supernatural horror: demons are fallen angels, devils bargain through spiritual law, holy authority has force. Angels are good. Angels are not safe.
The terror is not chaos.
It is that the order has been there the whole time.
Supernatural events in The Hollow have structure. The things you fight have names and rules they follow. Cases are assessed on the Wound Escalation Scale: it tells you what you're dealing with, what it will take to address it, and how much time you have before it gets worse.
Dormant. Hidden. A heaviness at the edge of perception that even Awakened characters might dismiss as imagination. Cold Shards can remain dormant for centuries. The danger is that they are invisible until they are not.
Something has touched the Shard. Animals behaving strangely. Persistent bad dreams. A sense of being watched. Awakened characters feel it clearly, an unmistakable low-frequency wrongness in the local environment.
Fully open. Supernatural influence flows freely. Objects acquire properties they should not have. This is where most cases begin, and still a stage where skilled intervention can reduce the Wound. It is also the stage where things escalate fastest if handled wrong.
Bleeding hard. Major supernatural events. Danger to everyone inside or adjacent. The right tools can still close it, but only if you haven't already made it worse by using the wrong ones.
Complete rupture. Continuous supernatural overflow. Catastrophic without immediate intervention. The world no longer has enough strength to pretend here. This is why your team exists.
The priest can save the girl.
The hunter can kill the thing inside her.
A case in The Hollow begins with something the world can explain badly, and ends only when the right tool is in the right hands. Getting from one to the other is the game.
Player characters are not ordinary people who stumble into one strange night and go home unchanged. They have seen enough truth that Merciful Dissonance, the world's instinct to sand smooth and rationalize away the impossible, no longer closes for them. They follow the impossible when it leaves fingerprints. They are competent. They are incomplete. No one faction understands the whole war.
You interview witnesses who do not know what they saw. Read the old file, the parish register, the autopsy, the book that should not have survived the fire. Walk the site. Test the air. Follow the tracks until the tracks start following you.
A demon is not a ghost. A devil is not merely a smarter demon. A dybbuk is not demonic possession. An ibbur may be mercy or deception. A spirit is not a human soul. A cursed object is not a relic just because it has power. Wrong tools hurt people.
A true name. A confirmed weakness. A relic's provenance. A confession. A binding vessel. A witness who remembers one detail Merciful Dissonance failed to erase. A door that only opens after midnight. A bargain the devil made with someone too clever to read the last page.
Sometimes this means an exorcism performed in stages while the entity accuses everyone in the room. Sometimes a spirit banishment where mercy matters more than force. Sometimes burning the whole site before the Wound learns how to grow legs. You will fail sometimes. Failure matters. It reveals the next path.
Every faction knows one truth.
Every truth is incomplete.
A possessed woman requires a priest and a hunter and a scholar and possibly someone willing to call in a favor from a contact no institution will officially acknowledge. This is not a universe where one faction is secretly right.
The Roman Catholic Church's hidden supernatural intervention arm. Exorcism procedure in depth. Sacramental theology. Infernal law. The largest institutional archive of supernatural case files in the world, and a Cardinal Protector who appears in no public record.
Protestant deliverance workers across denominations and none. Independent pastors, lay ministers, hospital chaplains, people who found their calling through direct encounter. Often better in a direct confrontation than anyone trained by an institution, because they have nothing to fall back on except the thing they actually believe.
Can move where the Church cannot. Every deniable operation has a bill. Tracks foreign occult threat networks, runs cover operations, handles the cases that can't be officially opened. Know what they know and tell you half of it.
Federal investigators, impossible evidence, jurisdiction as a weapon. The horror is that the evidence is real and the system was not built to hold it. Argus doesn't acknowledge the supernatural: it prosecutes what the evidence demands.
Relic retrieval and containment. The object is the threat, the clue, the weapon, and the liability. They know what can be used, what must be sealed, and what should never have been catalogued at all. A campaign can live here for years without a single possession case.
Monster hunters. Follow the bodies, the tracks, the folklore, and the field signs. The question is not whether evil is metaphysically real. The question is whether anyone brought the right ammunition. Goes where the Order will not. Kills things the Order cannot publicly acknowledge killing.
Researchers, archivists, keepers of knowledge every other faction depends on. Archives are full of things that wanted to be remembered. They know how to find the name, and what it costs to say it aloud.
The rest of the world is right to fear them. They know the ugly solutions, and when the ugly solution is the only one left, someone has to take the call. No trust, no legitimacy, no clean spiritual authority. Results.
A party that covers multiple faction lanes is not just flavorful. It is mechanically optimal. Cases that require one faction's specialty will almost always require another's before they are finished. The possessed woman needs the priest and the hunter and the scholar. None of them can cover the others' lane. All of them are required for the outcome to be good.
Gritty. Serious.
Not hopeless.
The Hollow lives in the space between case file and confession, evidence locker and haunted road, containment vault and emergency room. It is a game of late-night phone calls, sealed archives, bad photographs, field kits, failed prayers, blessed weapons, unreliable witnesses, hotel rooms with salt at the door, blood on legal paperwork.
If the characters do the work, they can save people. Not always cleanly. Not always cheaply. Not always everyone. But salvation is not cosmetic in this universe. Containment matters. Deliverance matters. Refusing the bargain matters.
X-Files, Fringe, impossible-crime investigation. Evidence rooms, federal jurisdiction, official lies. The horror is that the evidence is real and the system was not built to hold it.
Relic retrieval and containment. The object is the threat, the clue, the weapon, and the liability. Identify triggers. Preserve provenance. Decide what can be used, what must be sealed, and what should never have been catalogued at all.
Monster hunting. Bodies, tracks, folklore, field signs, survivor testimony. Follow until you know what you're facing and what kills it. The question is not whether evil is real. The question is whether anyone brought the right ammunition.
Cults, forbidden workings, black-market relics, names and contracts, people who learned just enough truth to become dangerous. The enemy may be human, mostly human, formerly human, or something using human ambition as a handle.
Exorcism, deliverance, sacramental authority, devil contracts. Direct confrontation with the infernal. Central to The Hollow, not the whole of it.
When all the modes collide. The cursed object is a Wound anchor. The monster guards a cult site. The exorcism reveals the name of the thing that built the door. This is where The Hollow is most itself: every faction has one truth, and every truth is incomplete.
The distinction between a demon and a ghost, a devil and a dybbuk, a cursed object and a relic: these are not trivia. They determine which tools work. Wrong tools hurt people.
The Order of Mercy has rites and authority, but not speed. The Watchfires have conviction, but not always restraint. Vesper can move where the Church cannot, but every deniable operation has a bill. No one faction is secretly right.
You will meet enemies who know scripture, law, hunger, grief, contracts, shame, and the exact words your character does not want spoken aloud. Demons are fallen angels. They have been doing this longer than you.
The living have excuses. Not every ghost is an enemy. Not everything that looks like a monster is one. Not every miracle is clean. The Hollow is not about defeating evil. It is about doing what is right under impossible pressure.
The apocalypse stays private. The world outside the case remains distracted and aggressively normal while the work becomes impossible. That's the horror. And occasionally, under pressure, someone makes a dry joke, because people do that when they're too tired for anything else.
When the impossible offers a shortcut,
ask what shape the bill will take.
Rites that drive demons from bodies. Prayers that hold a room together while everything under the floor tries to crawl upward. Leverage, not an automatic win. The symbol works because the truth behind it is real, not because someone waved silver at the monster and skipped the hard part.
Magic does not make you more complete. Magic hollows you out so something impossible can fit inside. Characters who seek magical access permanently give up part of their Wound Point maximum. They become more capable and less whole. They carry the evidence in their bodies, habits, dreams, and appetites.
Blood that matters. An animal killed for the rite. A human life. A relic worn under the skin. These things work because they are awful. That is why people want them. Good investigators must know how they function, how they fail, and what they leave behind.
When you sit down to play,
the game promises this.
- You will face mysteries where the mundane explanation is not enough.
- You will learn that naming the threat correctly matters.
- You will have tools, but no tool solves everything.
- You will be tempted by faster answers.
- You will find that institutions can protect people, fail people, and hide things at the same time.
- You will meet objects that should not be touched, rooms that should not be opened, roads that remember old blood.
- You will meet people who survived things the world insists never happened.
- You will be able to save people.
- You will pay for power.
- You will sometimes have to decide whether stopping the monster is the same thing as doing what is right.
The world is normal.
That is the lie.
Welcome to the Hollow.
Explore the universe
- The World Genre, tone, and the truths the setting runs on. Open The World
- Characters Ready-to-play characters from the book. Open Characters
- What Changes How this universe departs from the core rules. Open What Changes
- Glossary Every term the book defines, A to Z. Open Glossary
- Gallery Artwork from the sourcebook. Open Gallery
The case is already
open.
The Hollow is free to read online. Factions. Monsters. Cases. Power that costs something real. A wounded world that needs people willing to do the work.
Exodus NDS Core Rules Recommended ยท Compatible with all Exodus NDS Universes