Read the file before you touch it. Three people did not, and the file is how we know what happened to them. Latchkey Archive, handling protocol
In This Chapter
What Lot 214 is, who it is for, what it teaches, and what you need to run it.
What This Case Is
Lot 214 is a single-session case for two players and a GM, built to be a group's first night in The Hollow. It plays in about four hours.
The characters receive a Lyncean Office referral packet about a residential street in Erie, Pennsylvania, where lost things have been coming back: a cat missing for five years, a dead man's wristwatch, a wedding ring that was sitting in a hospital property office. Nobody on the street thinks anything supernatural is happening. The packet only adds up if you read it the way the Latchkey Archive reads things.
The source is a gilded reliquary of Saint Anthony of Padua, patron of lost things, taken from a closing parish in 2011 and hidden in a storage unit for fifteen years. Nineteen days ago a reseller named Curtis Hale bought the unit's contents at a lien auction and set the reliquary on his garage workbench. His twelve-year-old daughter, Maddie, worked out what it does. She has been asking it, every night at 3:07 a.m., for her mother.
The relic is trying. By 3:07 tomorrow morning it will succeed, and what it brings back will not be what Maddie wants.
What This Case Teaches
The case introduces the core habits of The Hollow in the order a new table needs them, and it holds back possession, demons, exorcism, and Corruption for later cases.
| Scene | What the table learns |
|---|---|
| The Case File | Reading a referral: pattern, mundane explanation, and contradiction |
| The Street | Interviewing sincere witnesses under Merciful Dissonance; recorded evidence |
| Lakeshore Self Storage | Research, provenance, and the Latchkey Relic Registry |
| The Hale House | Relic identification, handling rules, and the Latchkey passive Do Not Touch That |
| The Broker | A human rival from the Candleless; negotiation over force |
| Maddie | The emotional core; a curse-style resolution through the story, not a roll |
| Containment | Iron, sealing, transport, and what a breach looks like |
| 3:07 a.m. | A first ghost, only if the characters run out of time |
What You Need
- The Exodus NDS Core Rules and Exodus NDS: The Hollow Universe Guide. This book references their rules by chapter and does not restate them.
- Two player characters built with Chapter Two of this book.
- The Case File handouts in Chapter Four, printed or shared on screen.
- A way to track time. The case runs on a single day and a single night (see the Case Clock in Chapter Three).
Content Note
This case is about grief. A child's mother died suddenly two years ago, and the child has been trying to get her back. There is no gore, no possession, and no violence against children. There is a dead parent's voicemail, a grandmother who insists the problem is the wiring, and a real chance that a ghost wearing the mother's shape comes up the garage stairs at 3:07 a.m. Talk with your players before play about how close to that moment they want the camera to go.