Character Creation

Character sheet Investigator Record

Character Creation in Eight Steps

The Hollow uses the standard Exodus NDS character creation process with three additions: Faction, Magical Tier Access, and the Corruption Track. The process takes eight steps.

Work through them in order. Steps 2, 3, and 4 identify your profession skills: the skills your character has trained in and will develop more cheaply. In Step 5 you spend your 110 starting XP on those skills, additional skills, characteristics, and talents. Step 8 records the personal details that complete the character.

Step 1: Assign Characteristics

The Hollow uses the six core Exodus NDS characteristics:

All characteristics begin at 2. You receive one free +1/-1 adjustment: raise one characteristic by 1 and lower another by 1. No characteristic may fall below 1 or rise above 4 at character creation.

Choose your adjustment to reflect who this person was before the first session begins. A former military chaplain might have high Willpower and lower Might. A monster hunter from a killing family might have high Might and lower Charisma. A scholar who fell into the hidden world might have high Intellect and lower Might.

Step 2: Choose Background

Your Background is the life your character had before The Hollow defined them. It shapes the broad personal capabilities they carry into every investigation, confrontation, and conversation. Backgrounds grant four Universal Skills as profession skills: skills the character has lived with long enough to learn cheaply and improve naturally.

Choose one of the following:

Military

You served. Whether you were infantry, intelligence, support, or special operations, the military left something in you that civilian life never quite shook out.

Profession Skills: Athletics, Fortitude, Ranged, Composure

You know how to move under fire, hold together when everything is collapsing, and put rounds downrange without thinking about it too hard. What you learned about fighting enemies you could see is sometimes useful against enemies you cannot.

Law Enforcement

Badge or no badge, you spent years dealing with what people do to each other, and you know how to read a scene, hold a line, and make someone answer a question they do not want to answer.

Profession Skills: Perception, Intimidation, Leadership, Composure

Medical

You have your hands in the gap between living and not-living more often than most people can imagine. That leaves you steady in ways that unsettle people who are not used to it.

Profession Skills: Medicine, Fortitude, Perception, Charm

Preparation and timing are most of what separates what kills from what heals, and your training supplies both.

Academic

You have spent years in institutions of learning: university, research, postgraduate work, teaching. You know how to find things, make arguments, and sit very still inside a library at two in the morning following a thread.

Profession Skills: Technology, Perception, Negotiation, Leadership

Research comes from your Career, not your Background. You know how to move in academic and institutional environments and how to get people to give you access to things they usually do not share with strangers.

Clergy

Ordained or not, you spent formative years in the structures of organized religion: seminary, ministry, pastoral work, prison chaplaincy, hospital work, missionary service. You learned how to be present with people at the worst moments of their lives.

Profession Skills: Charm, Leadership, Composure, Perception

Theology, Discernment, and Deliverance are Career skills. Your Background supplies the pastoral presence that makes people trust you, the composure that holds during catastrophe, and the habit of hearing what people mean underneath what they say.

Criminal

You made your living, for a time, doing things that were not legal. You know how cities actually work, who the real authorities are on any given block, and how to move through a world that has no interest in being observed.

Profession Skills: Streetwise, Deception, Subterfuge, Stealth

Your history means you can move in places where institutional operators cannot and talk to people who disappear when they see a badge.

Intelligence

You worked for an organization that collected information that should not have been collectible, in places you were not officially allowed to be, for purposes that were not officially acknowledged. What happened after that is your business.

Profession Skills: Perception, Deception, Technology, Composure

Tradecraft belongs to your Career. Your Background covers the baseline: maintaining a cover, reading an environment for threats, and staying steady when the information says the situation is worse than the briefing did.

Survivor

You were there when something happened that should not have been possible. You lived through it. You are different now, in ways you cannot fully explain to anyone who was not there.

Profession Skills: Composure, Fortitude, Perception, Athletics

You are not necessarily trained, resourced, or connected, but you are already awake in a way that takes most people years of preparation, and you have a working relationship with fear that most professionals never develop.

Field Worker

You built things, fixed things, drove things, dug things, operated things. You know how the physical world is actually put together, which means you know how to use it as a weapon or a shelter when you need to.

Profession Skills: Athletics, Fortitude, Operate, Survival

When the team needs someone who can get a van through a flooded road at midnight, you are the reason they make it.

Occult Lineage

Your family has known about The Hollow for longer than you have. Whether that knowledge was a gift, a burden, a secret, or a curse depends on the family. The result is that you grew up adjacent to the hidden world in ways that left marks.

Profession Skills: Perception, Composure, Deception, Charm

You learned early that some things are not talked about outside the house: how to read rooms, keep secrets, say the right thing to the right person, and not flinch at things that would send civilians to a hospital. The lore itself (what any of it means and how to deal with it) comes with a Career; your Background left you the instincts of someone who grew up knowing the world had a wrong side.

Step 3: Choose Career

Your Career is the skillset you bring to the work: the professional formation that makes you useful in the hidden world, whether you were trained into it, practiced at it, or fell into it through circumstance and necessity. It need not be your day job. Careers grant Discipline Skills as profession skills.

Choose one of the following:

Investigator

Cases. Evidence. Witness statements. Crime scenes that do not match any known cause of death. You know how to take a situation apart until you find what is actually happening underneath it.

Profession Skills: Inquiry, Forensics, Research

You build the picture the rest of the team acts on.

Exorcist

You are trained: formally, institutionally, liturgically, in the rites that address established possession. You know the steps. You know the prayers. You know what failure looks like.

Profession Skills: Theology, Discernment, Deliverance (Restricted)

Exorcism is a multi-step procedure, not a single roll. The Exorcism subsystem is in Chapter Eight. Your Career gives you the formation to stand in that room; the authority, rites, faith, and backup you bring determine the outcome.

This Career is most natural for Order of Mercy priests and ordained ministers with formal training. Characters with the Exorcist Career but no faction affiliation are self-trained, cross-trained, or holders of authority that is real but unrecognized by any institution.

Deliverance Worker

You show up when someone needs help and something needs to be confronted, and you confront it with what you have: your faith, your preparation, your willingness to stand between a person and what is tormenting them.

Profession Skills: Theology, Discernment, Fieldcraft

Where the Exorcist Career reflects institutional training and formal rites, this one reflects independent faith practice, improvised preparation, and the practical habits that keep you alive with no protocol and no backup. Watchfires deliverance workers, pastors with direct experience, and people whose authority comes from God rather than any chain of command usually land here.

Hunter

You kill things. You have killed things before, and you know what you are hunting, and you know how to find it and how to end it. The family business. The only life you know. The thing you do because the alternative is leaving people undefended.

Profession Skills: Monster Lore, Tracking, Fieldcraft

You are not an investigator. You are the end of an investigation. You follow the evidence the investigator hands you to the lair, and then you do what the investigator cannot.

Scholar

Libraries. Archives. Ancient texts. You read what others cannot find, understand what others cannot parse, and connect sources that have not been connected since the last person who knew them died without a successor.

Profession Skills: Research, Occult Lore, Dead Languages

Your contribution happens mostly before the confrontation: you are how the team knows what it is facing, what its rules are, what it cannot do, and what will actually stop it.

Operative

You work in the field. You maintain cover. You handle people. You extract information from difficult environments and operate in situations where being identified is the failure condition.

Profession Skills: Tradecraft, Inquiry, Deception

Intelligence officers, fixers, spies, field agents on deniable programs: this is the Career for the character who gets in and out of situations that other characters could not enter. The Directorate Vesper attracts it, as do The Candleless and anyone operating in the hidden world without a sanctioned structure.

Field Medic

You are a doctor, a nurse, an EMT, a combat medic, a surgical resident, or someone who has spent enough time in enough bad situations that you know how to keep the complicated alive while the team figures out what to do next.

Profession Skills: Medicine, Forensics, Fieldcraft

You keep people alive and you read death scenes, in conditions that would stop anyone without your formation. A combat medic who has worked mass casualty incidents in hostile terrain knows what a body that did not die the way the scene implies looks like, and can work through a blizzard, a flooded building, or a firefight to reach someone who needs them. Medicine is your primary contribution in any scene where someone is dying; Forensics is what you bring after; Fieldcraft means you do not need ideal conditions for either.

You do not bring deep investigative reach. Inquiry (building timelines from witness statements) and Research (finding the document no one else checked) are out-of-profession for you. The investigator builds the case; you stabilize the person who survived what the case describes.

Archivist

Objects. Provenance. Item histories. The relic that three previous handlers died trying to contain, and what each of them got wrong. You know these things because you file them, maintain them, and occasionally save people's lives by knowing where the file is.

Profession Skills: Relic Lore, Dead Languages, Research

The Latchkey Archive calls this Career by another name internally, and the Order of Mercy has its own version. Independent archivists exist, though they lack the institutional backing that makes containment work at scale. The Career also suits a scholar who specializes in objects rather than texts.

Ritualist

You practice things that are forbidden. Whatever your reasons, the forbidden things work, and sometimes working is the only thing that matters.

Profession Skills: Occult Lore, Forbidden Rites (Restricted), Dead Languages

The Ritualist Career is the path of The Candleless, the excommunicated, and the desperate. The Corruption rules apply to Forbidden Rites use, and they apply harder to characters who lack the institutional brakes that trained clergy have.

Step 4: Choose Faction (or Independent)

Faction is the third character creation layer, unique to The Hollow. Your Faction is the organization, network, community, or institution you affiliate with in the hidden world. It determines your institutional methods, professional reputation, access to faction resources, and your Hard-Gated Authority Skills.

Full faction details (passive benefits, Hard-Gated Authority Skills, faction-specific talent access, and faction cultures) are in Chapter Four. This step asks you to make the choice and record what it means for your character.

What Faction Grants

Faction Profession Skills: Each faction designates a small set of discipline skills as faction profession skills for its members, stacking with your Background and Career grants.

Faction Passive Benefit: Each faction has one passive mechanical advantage in its specialty area. Full mechanics per faction are in Chapter Four.

Hard-Gated Authority Skills: Each faction has exactly three Hard-Gated Authority Skills purchasable only by its members. These cannot be bypassed by paying more XP. They represent access, authority, ordination, clearance, or trust that must be earned within the faction's structure.

Faction-Specific Talent Access: Some talent trees are available only to faction members. Chapter Six describes these.

What It Costs

Faction membership carries obligations, protocols, superiors, peers, and enemies. The Order of Mercy can recall its members. The Lyncean Office can reassign them. The Black Road can call in debts. The Watchfires expect you to show up when someone needs help, because there is no one else. Your faction is a resource. It is also a leash; how long the leash is depends on which faction you chose.

Going Independent

A character with no faction affiliation is Independent. They receive no faction profession skills, no faction passive benefit, no Hard-Gated Authority access, and no faction-specific talent access.

The trade is freedom. An Independent cannot be defrocked, reassigned, stripped of clearance, recalled, or sanctioned by an organization for disobedience. They may associate with priests, hunters, occultists, scholars, intelligence officers, and black-market contacts without violating faction rules, take the job no faction will officially touch, and walk out of any situation without explaining themselves to anyone.

In practice, Independent characters rely harder on their Background and Career skill investments, build personal contact networks through play, and have more latitude to operate across the hidden world's institutional lines. They also have less institutional backup when the situation goes badly.

Associated Organizations

At GM discretion, a player character may claim membership in an Associated Organization rather than one of the eight core factions.

Associated Organizations are smaller, more specific bodies (a religious fellowship, a regional hunter community, a scholarly society) that exist in a defined relationship to one of the eight factions without formally belonging to it. They have a history, a culture, and a role in the hidden world. What they do not have is the institutional scale of the eight.

What an AO membership provides at character creation:

• Profession skills: drawn from the linked faction's profession skill list, not a dedicated AO list
• Starting gear: the linked faction's gear package, unless the GM determines a modified version fits the AO better
• Charter Trait: a single specific passive benefit that defines what membership means in practice, narrower than a faction passive and specific to this institution
• No Hard-Gated Authority Skills: AO members do not automatically receive the linked faction's authority skills. Accessing them requires story justification: a relationship built in play, a formal sponsorship, an earned credential.

What the Charter Trait does: It replaces the linked faction's passive entirely. A character cannot hold both the faction passive and the Charter Trait. The trade is intentional: the Charter Trait is more specific and sometimes more powerful in its narrow domain, at the cost of the linked faction's broader institutional advantage.

The linked faction still matters: When the character needs institutional backup, calls in resources, or comes into contact with the linked faction's hierarchy, the AO's relationship to that faction defines what happens. Some AOs have smooth relationships with their linked faction. Some are complicated. Chapter Four describes each AO's specific dynamic.

If no AO fits: Go Independent. The AO option exists for characters with a specific institutional identity that isn't one of the eight; an investigator with no faction or AO affiliation is just as viable.

Full AO descriptions (Charter Traits, linked factions, institutional histories, and GM notes) are in Chapter Four.

Step 5: Spend Starting XP

Starting XP is 110 points.

Use it to:

• Purchase skill ranks in your profession skills and additional skills
• Increase characteristics above their starting values
• Purchase Tier 1 talents (including your one free Tier 1 talent from core rules)
• Unlock Magical Tier Access (paid in Wound Points, not XP: see Step 7)

Skill Advancement Costs

Costs shown per rank: raising a skill from rank 0 to rank 2 as a profession skill costs 5 + 10 = 15 XP total.

The same cost structure applies to advancement during play. The standard advancement rate is 15 XP per session, with a range of 10 XP for brief or preparation-focused sessions and 25 XP for extended sessions with significant story resolution. The Exodus NDS core rules provide full advancement guidelines; these rates apply to The Hollow without modification.

Starting Skill Cap

No skill may start above rank 2 at character creation. The one exception: one profession skill may begin at rank 3, the one area where your character's training is already exceptional before the first session begins.

Profession Skills

A profession skill is any skill granted by your Background, Career, or Faction. All three sources stack; you benefit from every profession designation simultaneously.

Hard-Gated Authority Skills are profession skills for faction members.

Restricted Discipline Skills are profession skills only when granted by Career or Faction; purchased out of profession they cost double and add 1 Bane die to every use (see Chapter Five).

Characteristic Advancement

Costs are per increment. Raising a characteristic from the baseline of 2 to 3 costs 30 XP; from 3 to 4 costs an additional 40 XP (70 XP total from baseline). No characteristic may exceed 4 at creation. A rating of 5 exists but cannot be bought at creation; see below.

Characteristics do not advance via XP after play begins. Once the campaign starts, the only path to increasing a characteristic is the Growth tree of Universal talents (Growth, Greater Growth, and Apex Growth, Chapter Six) or specific story events at GM discretion. Apex Growth is also the only way any characteristic reaches 5, and a character may ever hold one characteristic at that rating.

Starting Talent

All characters receive one free Tier 1 talent from the core rules. You may choose any Tier 1 talent for which you meet the prerequisites. Awakened Blood does not consume this slot. It is automatic and costs nothing.

Faction Starting Talent: Characters who belong to a faction or Associated Organization also receive an additional free Tier 1 talent from that faction's designated tree (see each faction's Starting Talent Option in Chapter Four). Faction members begin play with two free Tier 1 talents: the core rules talent above and the faction talent. Independent characters receive only the one core rules talent.

Step 6: Record Derived Values

Calculate and record the following:

Wound Points = 10 + Might

Wound Points represent physical capacity to absorb harm. When accumulated Wounds meet or exceed this value, the character is incapacitated.

Strain Points = 10 + Willpower

Strain Points represent mental, spiritual, and psychological endurance. The condition track for Strain is separate from Wounds. When accumulated Strain meets or exceeds this value, the character is overwhelmed.

Resistance = half Might, rounded up

Resistance reduces the physical impact of incoming harm before it becomes a Wound. Armor adds to Resistance.

Composure Initiative = Willpower + Composure

The Hollow uses the core Exodus NDS initiative rules: each character rolls an Initiative check at the start of structured play, ranked by net Successes. Because The Hollow renames the Readiness skill to Composure, the surprised / under-pressure initiative pool is Willpower + Composure; a prepared or on-watch character instead rolls Savvy + Perception, exactly as in the core rules. The Composure Initiative value above is the Willpower + Composure total used to build that roll. Full procedure, initiative slots, and surprise: Chapter Seventeen.

Corruption Track = 0 at creation

Corruption is a third tracked condition: separate from Wounds and Strain, representing spiritual compromise, moral failure, and infernal leverage. It starts at 0 for all new characters. Full mechanics are in Chapter Eight.

Magical Tier Access = 0 at creation (unless purchased in Step 7)

Record the highest Magical Tier you have unlocked (see Step 7).

Step 7: Record Awakened Blood and Magical Tier Access

Awakened Blood

All player characters in The Hollow possess Awakened Blood. Record it. It is free, automatic, and does not consume a talent slot. Chapter Two covers what it means; its mechanical implications are:

• You are immune to standard Merciful Dissonance rewriting. What you witness, you witness correctly.
• You may perceive supernatural presences, Wound sites, and hidden-world activity that ordinary people cannot notice without a roll.
• You are eligible to purchase Magical Tier Access.
• Supernatural entities may perceive you differently than they perceive ordinary people: in some cases as a threat, in others as a target.

Magical Tier Access

Magic in The Hollow is organized into five tiers. You may only use magical talents of a tier you have unlocked. Unlocking a tier costs 1 permanent Wound Point: your maximum Wound Points drop by 1, unrecoverable by any means except specific story events. The loss is outside of any rules about tier costs and cannot be avoided.

Once a tier is unlocked, all magical talents of that tier are available for normal XP purchase, through the talent trees in Chapter Six.

They do not require additional Wound Point costs beyond the tier unlock.

At character creation, you may unlock Tier 1 (cost above). Most characters begin at Tier 0.

Step 8: Record Corruption, Passion, and Personal Details

Corruption Track

Corruption starts at 0. Record it as a tracked value; the full track (thresholds, effects, devil leverage, and reduction procedures) is in Chapter Eight.

Passion (Watchfires Only)

If your character is a member of The Watchfires, record their Passion.

A Passion is a personal, unavoidable driving force: a compulsion the character cannot fully set aside, specific enough that the GM can look at any situation and say clearly whether it engages or not.

Mechanical benefit: When acting in direct service of your Passion, after the dice are rolled and the result is visible, you may suffer Strain to add successes to the result. The first added success costs 3 Strain; each further success on the same roll costs 1 more than the last (3, then 4, then 5, and so on). Keep buying as long as you can pay the next success's full cost without reaching your Strain Points; you can never incapacitate yourself with Passion.

Passion is singular. Write one declaration, in first person, in the character's own voice: a specific wound, a specific line, a specific thing that cannot be looked away from, rather than a broad category.

Write it so you can answer: "This fires when..." with a concrete, nameable situation. "Protect people" is a principle. "No child goes into the dark alone while I am breathing" is a Passion.

Passion cuts both ways. Ignoring a trigger has mechanical consequences; acting against your Passion has serious ones. The full mechanic (example Passions, adjudication guidance, both directions of consequence, the penance procedure, the resolution procedure for situations where player and GM disagree about whether the Passion engages, and GM notes on using Passion as a pressure point) is in Chapter Four.

Personal Details

Record the following:

Name and Appearance. Who is this person, physically and by name? What do they look like walking into a room? What does their presence tell people about them before they speak?

Age. Age affects what the character has had time to accumulate: experience, damage, history, loss.

Background and Personal History. A paragraph or a few notes. Where did they come from? What did they see that opened the door? What did they lose along the way?

Faction Ties. If affiliated, who do they report to? What is their standing within the faction? Are they trusted, tolerated, probationary, or operating outside their mandate?

Connections to Other Player Characters. How do these characters know each other? Prior case, referral, shared history, or strangers assembled by circumstance? The GM may set this up; if not, the table should discuss it.

Backgrounds at a Glance

Careers at a Glance

(R) = Restricted Discipline Skill. Profession access only through Career or Faction grant.

Character Creation Example

The following worked example builds a complete starting character using all eight steps. This character is one of the suggested pregenerated archetypes.

Abigail Torres: Watchfires Deliverance Worker

Abigail is a lay Protestant deliverance worker: not ordained, not institutional, not answerable to any denominational hierarchy. She came to this work through her pastor, who recognized what she was and put her in a room with a situation he did not know how to handle. She handled it. That was six years ago. She has been on the road since.

Step 1: Characteristics

Base: all at 2. Free adjustment: +1 Willpower, −1 Might.

Abigail's strength is spiritual. She is not a fighter by body. Six years of this work have left her thin, road-worn, and harder than she looks, but Might 1 means she leans on other team members for anything that requires lifting or breaking.

Step 2: Background: Clergy

She spent her twenties in lay ministry: college campus pastoral work, hospital chaplaincy, eventually a small Pentecostal church outside Nashville before the pastor who changed her career trajectory found her.

Profession Skills from Background: Charm, Leadership, Composure, Perception

Step 3: Career: Deliverance Worker

Not institutionally trained. Trained by circumstance and mentorship.

Profession Skills from Career: Theology, Discernment, Fieldcraft

Step 4: Faction: The Watchfires

Membership is mutual recognition between people in the same fight rather than formal enrollment; Chapter Four describes the network.

Faction Profession Skills: Theology, Discernment, Deliverance (Restricted), Composure

Faction Hard-Gated Authority Skills available to purchase: Watchfire Network, Congregational Trust, Righteous Fire

Faction Passive Benefit: Passion (mechanics in Step 8).

Passion: "Where the vulnerable are preyed upon, I am sent."

Abigail cannot walk past a situation where something is using a person. That instinct has kept her alive and has nearly gotten her killed in equal measure.

Step 5: Spend Starting XP (110 XP)

Profession skills marked with ★ receive the profession cost rate.

Total spent: 105 XP | Remaining: 5 XP (held for advancement)

Free Tier 1 Talents (two, as a faction member):

• Core slot: Steady Ground (Iron Will tree, Tier 1). When rolling Composure to resist fear, supernatural dread, or panic, treat a result of one Success as though it were two for the purpose of determining the check's outcome.
• Faction slot (Watchfires): Raise Your Voice (Righteous Fire tree, Tier 1). Add 1 Boon die to Righteous Fire checks made in direct defense of another person.

(Full talent list in Chapter Six.)

Step 6: Derived Values

Step 7: Awakened Blood and Magical Tier Access

Awakened Blood: Recorded. Abigail perceives the supernatural clearly.

Magical Tier Access: None. Abigail relies on spiritual authority through Righteous Fire and Discernment rather than magical talent access; if that changes in play, she will unlock Tier 1 at the cost given in Step 7.

Step 8: Personal Details

Age: 34

Appearance: Road-worn, sharply attentive. She wears a cross that belonged to her pastor, out of habit rather than display. She always knows where the exits are and she always knows where the children are.

Personal History: She does not talk about the first case much. The pastor who trained her is dead. She has not fully decided what she thinks about the manner of his death, and until she does, she stays on the road.

Faction Ties: No central authority to report to. She is known, by reputation and by Watchfire Network, to a loose web of deliverance workers, pastors, and ordinary believers who have seen enough to recognize what she is. She calls in favors rarely and pays them back.

Connection to the Group: To be established in Session Zero or the campaign's first case.

Starting Gear

Starting gear packages by faction are detailed in Chapter Four.

Independent characters and characters whose Background or faction does not provide a specific loadout begin with the following:

General Loadout (all characters): Appropriate personal clothing and a plausible cover identity. A personal phone. A vehicle or reliable transit access. Cash for one to two weeks of field expenses. Personal faith items or professional tools relevant to Background and Career (e.g., a medical kit, a clerical collar, a hunter's field bag, a scholar's reference materials). A bag that holds everything else.

Weapons: Characters with a Military, Law Enforcement, or Criminal Background may begin with a sidearm and one additional weapon appropriate to that Background. Other characters may begin with a simple weapon (knife, small firearm) if their Career or Background justifies it. Ask the GM; the story should support what the character carries.

Faction Gear: Faction-specific equipment (Archive containment kits, Lyncean Office credentials, Order of Mercy ritual materials, Black Road hunter caches, Directorate Vesper field equipment) is covered in Chapter Four and Chapter Seven.