Magical Girls X Hollows - An Experiment

I’ve had a weird couple of months. Mainly because I’ve been working on [SECRET UNANNOUNCED PROJECTS] that I can’t tell you about.

COME AT ME, SONY INTERACTIVE LLC

I’m not unused to NDAs, given my career before games design - back in my mid-twenties I was a games journalist for a bit. I’m very glad that I did it fifteen years ago instead of right now, because aside from more free games than I knew what to do with, the main upside of the job was being wined and dined by keen PRs who had worked out that for the low cost of six beers poured directly into one dork they could almost guarantee a decent preview article.

Most previews and reviews came with an NDA to sign, especially if I was dealing with an international company. I heard that Rockstar’s contracts are the most punishing, and bear in mind this was fifteen years ago now, so presumably these days they just inject a miniature explosive into your carotid artery that will detonate if you award GTA 6 anything other than a perfect score and be done with it.

My favourite one, and I’m going to break it now so strap in, was for the Tomb Raider reboot (also called Tomb Raider) released in 2013. It’s the one where you got to see Laura Croft’s first kill in a cutscene (emotive! Harrowing! Foundational!) and her subsequent one hundred and fifty-odd kills during normal gameplay (neutral! Unremarked-upon! Basically Fine!), and also the one where the lovingly-rendered protagonist was brutally torn to shreds in such a wide variety of ways that it started to feel a bit weird. 

There is a light supernatural undertone in the game, especially towards the end, which is common in your Tombs Raider and your Indianas Jones and your Uncharteds: turns out that there’s like, oh, ten percent wizard behind everything. Monstrous blue guys with ancient grenade launchers in a city of gold. A cult to the mother goddess in the mountains of somewhere or other. Only The Penitent Man May Pass. You get it. 

If I ever mention that there is a light supernatural undertone in the game, like I did in that previous paragraph, then in accordance with the document I signed thirteen years ago I am legally obligated to pay Sony Interactive LLC to sue me into the fucking ground. Most other companies at least had the decency to pay for the lawsuit themselves, but Sony? If I said that maybe a ghost was there? Or that you opened a door with a glowing rune instead of a keycard? All my money gone.

Ridiculous business. Given the spread of information about Tomb Raider (2013) available on the internet since its release, I have to assume that Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC are no longer interested in taking the shirt off my back because I at any point suggested a witch may have been involved.

But we’ll see. If next month’s post is 12 Ways Astrobot Is Better Than Mario, you’ll know. 

(I wrote this quite good piece about the game later that year for The Average Gamer where I lauded Rhianna Pratchett’s narrative design in, perhaps, quite a verbose trying-to-prove-myself sort of way.

I enjoyed writing for The Average Gamer - the editor, Debbie, would accept basically any pitch I flung overarm in her direction and she paid okay, too. My other articles there include Guns Don’t Kill People, Cigarettes Do (an exploration into the relative risks and rewards of smoking in video games) and Adam Jensen - Death Vendor (a portrait of ennui through the medium of hucking fully-stocked vending machines at unsuspecting corporate security guards))

I COULDN’T POSSIBLY SAY

There’s something quite cool, I think - or rather, I think that other people seem to think there’s something quite cool - about not being able to mention what you’re working on, but that you ARE working on it. It establishes an immediate in-group and out-group. It lets the listener know that there’s something above them, and they’ll be granted knowledge when capital deems it most profitable.

Personally, I hate it. (You could probably tell that from the previous paragraph.)

Running off dopamine alone, the bit of my job I enjoy most is telling other people about half-finished things I have written. Less than half. Quarter-finished. One-sixteenth complete. Ideally just the sell at the top and none of the hard work of mechanising it. Maybe just the name and the tagline. If it’s great, I’m a genius, and if someone finds fault with it, well, it’s not done yet is it so reel yer fucking neck in, eh? 

But as RRD grows ever-larger - there are eleven of us right now, bumping around the virtual office like a bunch of chubby bees in a modem - the dreaded serpent of Oversight looms over every discussion. We’ve drawn the attention of outside interests, eager to work with us (and who, I must be clear, we are eager to work with) and suddenly we’ve got Stakeholders that don’t work with us and/or who maybe even don’t understand what we do involved, wedging their greasy fingers reckon-wise in my otherwise pristine and perfect work. 

Reader: I am working on a game for a charity. I can’t say which one yet and I don’t one hundred percent know why I can’t. People keep using phrases like “keep the powder dry,” which I believe is an attempt to tell me to shut the fuck up about something but in an exciting way that evokes muskets or cocaine or, I dunno, Angel Delight. Many thrilling powders to consider. 

Similarly, during the last days of September we finished a collaboration with another company on a standalone product that unites one thing of ours and one thing of theirs in what I hope is a neat combination. I believe I am not allowed to mention specifics on what our thing is and what their thing is for just over three weeks. And it’s printing now, as I type! 

(You can’t tell, but I just cut a page of text from this essay whinging about an attempt at a licensed project we did last year that frustratingly went nowhere because, you know, dry powder.) 

I’m tired of it. I like being able to tell people about what I’m doing. All of this is to say that: I’ve had one hand tied behind my back when it comes to talking about my work for a while now, and I’m grumpy about it, so I’m going to get in trouble by talking about a Magical Girls X Hollows game I’ve been writing in my spare time that I have no plan for.

IT’S TIME TO STOP THINKING ABOUT SPACE MARINES

The last thing I put out, Falling Angels, didn’t come with much of a blog post attached because I struggled to write one. But, thinking about it for a few weeks, I’ve worked out what I wanted the central point to be: I have been thinking about Falling Angels in some form for the best part of five years. The idea of a big sad space marine surrounded by four to six well-meaning dorks lodged in my consciousness and refused to leave.

It has, in fact, been the thing that I think about when I need to put my brain somewhere. Maybe I was on the bus without headphones; maybe I was laying in bed slightly too stoned to sleep, maybe I was struck with loose creative verve but had nowhere in particular that needed it; I would think about rules for big sad space marines. But then, you see, I wrote the fucking thing, and I did a decent job with it (aside from the way that I forgot to include a crucial rule for how space marines gain and lose momentum, making the entire game unplayable), and so I’d lost my thing. I was bereft. It was like discovering my tulpa had moved out without telling me. 

We were in Portugal a couple of weeks ago. (We had to go look after my dad for a bit while mum was away. Dad is easier to get on with now in some ways since dementia took most of his brain, because he can’t remember that he’s supposed to be having an argument with you and gives up. But he’s about six gags on repeat now, and his short-term memory runs to less than five seconds on a bad day, so he can be difficult to deal with sometimes. He’s putting the whole world together from context clues and he’s not very good at it.) 

Anyway, we were in Portugal without much to do, and I explained my space marine situation to Maz, and they said:

“What about that Hollows Magical Girl game you were talking about?”

Reader: I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about a Hollows Magical Girl game. But it sounds like the sort of thing that I’d say, and by god, it lodged in there just like a sad space marine, and I immediately started writing it.

TODAY, YOU ARE A HUNTER. AND TODAY, YOU WILL TURN INTO A SPACE PRINCESS

Full disclosure: I actually don’t know a lot about Magical Girls.

I did some research (ninety minutes on Wikipedia, a couple of academic essays on the male gaze through the lens of Sailor Moon, an extended distraction into the concept of Marianismo which is the female counterpart to Machismo, I’m told) and discovered that while there’s certainly a lot of material to get through, I wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to watch it.

Problem is, I don’t really like anime. Not as a genre. I loved Yuri On Ice and I had a fun time with Azumanga Diaoh at University and I sat through all of Dorohedoro a couple years back (it reminded me of Spire) and I developed a quiet appreciation for Ouran High School Host Club in my mid-twenties and I really wanted to like Kill La Kill and of course Hellsing ranks up there with the Matrix in terms of Things I Think Are Cool and then you can’t avoid Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop and and and. 

But anime is just another kind of telly for me, and I don’t really care much for most telly, so that combined with the way that it keeps drop-kicking wink-nod paedophilia or at the very least some rancid sexual politics into the side of already pretty daft plotlines means that I’ll give it a miss more often than not.

Crucially, my Magical Girl experience extends to half a season each of Cardcaptor Sakura (a nine year old girl learns the true value of friendship: a fabulous bespoke wardrobe) and Puella Magi Madoka Magica (pubescent child is pressganged into fighting lunatic dimensional incursions at the cost of her sanity and the lives of her friends and maybe the universe?), and whatever cultural osmosis Sailor Moon has performed upon me. I hadn’t even heard of the lumbering thousand-episode behemoth that is Pretty Cure until last week. 

But here is a list of things I like very much about the genre, from my limited exposure:

- Elaborate transformation sequences

- Idealised or at least expressive inner forms

- Beautiful costumes

- A general sense of female empowerment

- Heirloom magical items

- “Come on! Together, we can defeat them!”

- Catchphrases which are also the names of attacks you shout out loud when you do ‘em

- Accessible interpersonal drama

- That “Ah! Ah! Ahhh!” anime villainess laugh

- Clueless, handsome boys who usually mean well

- A lot of fighting, albeit with magical blasts instead of brass knuckles

And one important thing I like, which makes it a good match for our pet tactical masochism simulator:

- It often focuses on characters who, chosen through circumstance but enduring through choice, fight society’s ills made manifest in the form of some kind of monster

Which is, you know. Hollows. But with more ribbons.

TO ARMS!

I haven’t made a new Hollows thing in a while unless you count (he sighs audibly) two unannounced projects currently in progress. 

The last real incursion I made into the territory was for 2025’s We’re Not Going To GenCon Games Jam in the office, where I repurposed it into a mech-fighting game in which rogue Scandinavian automata raid the northwest coastline of post-apocalyptic Britain.

When we were writing Hollows in its nascent state - somewhere in-between “hm, we really oughter make a game about killing bigger guys than usual where you can’t die properly” and “should the Single-Action Pistol do 2/1 or 2/2 considering the benefits granted by Unload?” -  the Weapons were the place I set my firmest anchor. Once we got the idea of building a character out of their kit, instead of sticking to classes like we’ve done in the past, I was able to understand the system a lot better.

So when I leaned into the Very British Survival Horror where we essentially do Vikings Again but this time they’re big robots, I went for the weapons first to give myself something to hang on to. I had a neat Do It Yourself approach to offensive tech, given that everything was harvested from an encroaching robot, so you picked a rig and an output and mashed them together:

Which meant that you could - and Jinn did, in playtest - have a fully-automatic spanner (or “Autojack”), or - as Chris chose - a magnetically-accelerated maul (or “Railhammer”) that would break both your wrists if you tried to use it outside of your special armour. 

(That said, I did put classes in as well, and I got the chance to make ‘em bloody fuckin’ old-timey Bri’ish di’n’t I, even more so than Hollows, so there’s a Bull (who explodes as a defensive manoeuvre) and a Butcher (who ruins enemy weapon systems) and a Candle (who pulled agg) and a Knave (basically a rogue) and a Sergeant (buffs) and a Surgeon (who severs robot components for later use))

So when it came to tackling Magical Girls, after I had done my brief research, I the bit I wanted to start with - the bit I was most excited about, really - was the weapons. Magical Girl weapons and Hollows weapons have a little but not much crossover, so I put together a list of vestiges that might be relevant and expanded it with the sort of things that you’d swing around and/or hold above your head and yell in an anime:

As you can see, I had better ideas for some than others: “Ranged damage, area control, light defence” gives me a lot more to work with than “Oh sir, really, you forget yourself!” but them’s the breaks. 

A BRIEF ASIDE ABOUT MADOKA

(Spoilers below.)

I’ve been pretty vocal about how premier Magical Girl Horror anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica has inspired Hollows. For those not in the know, it’s famous because it’s nasty; it has all the cute bits of a Magical Girl anime and then combines them with genuine insanity, sudden gut-wrenching death, and cosmic conspiracies that undermine the show’s surface conceit. It’s great! It’s so upsetting I haven’t had the gumption to finish the series! And I just found out there's a film!

But it’s also often the only thing that people have watched from the genre - “people” here very nearly including myself - and, given that we’ve been steeped in Magical Girls since Sailor Moon made its way overseas in the mid-to-late 90’s, it’s possible to “get” much Madoka from context cues and loose cultural miasma without being an aficionado of the format.

(I experienced a similar thing trying to review breakout visual novel hit Hatoful Boyfriend, which is ostensibly a high-school romance game where you fall in love with one or more of several kinds of photo-realistic birds, or trying to get to grips with the fundamentally distressing Doki Doki Literature Club - I knew just enough to know that I wasn’t understanding everything as well as I could.

I'm coming in at the end point and trying to make sense of it from reactions and inversions, like writing a side-scrolling platformer about Waluigi when I watched him play tennis a couple of times and have only the vaguest idea of who this “Mario” character is.)

But: the obvious move here would be to make Hollows into a nasty Magical Girls game, in the vein of Madoka. (Or, perhaps, something more cynical, in the vein of the excellent Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want To Be A Magical Girl.) It’s got all the elements ready to go, and on first blush it feels more grown-up to make it that way - the nice original versions are for kids, and the brutal psychological horror version is for postmodern adults with literature degrees and sweater vests. And you feel cleverer saying “oh it’s like X but...” than just offering a straight-down-the-middle attempt at recreating the base elements of a genre.

However! Fuck that. I want camp and I want positive. I’ve had enough grimdark for a while.

I am making a lovely magical girl game. It is not nasty. You do not go mad. You do not have to rummage around in your dying classmate’s guts to rip out their Witch Egg, or whatever it was that happened in Madoka when I was hiding behind the sofa. You will not die. Or if you do, you do so valiantly and gloriously and it’s a proper mid-season plot point.

You will wear delightful outfits. Your hair will look great. You will have problems at your new school. You will most likely have a small talking animal companion and his intentions for your future are pure.

LIKE SLIPPING INTO AN OLD, VIOLENT PAIR OF SHOES

It was exciting to get to grips with Hollows again, and I noticed something about my work when I did.

It was the same thing I noticed when I was writing abilities for Sin - the second Spire sourcebook that we published in, oh, 2022? Maybe? - in that I wasn’t blindly grasping at mechanics but operating from a position of experience and knowledge. The abilities in 2017 Spire nickel-and-dime you a bit, it’s D4 stress here and Minor Fallout there, but in Sin we took much bigger swings. Take, for example, the AMPUTATION ENTHUSIAST ability from the Order of True Physicians cult:

A bit wordy, perhaps, so to sum it up: whenever anyone nearby gets hurt in any way, you can cut off one of their limbs and “cure” the damage completely. It even works on death if you’re fast enough. (And it’s a Low Tier ability! You can have it in Session 1!) I’m reminded of Chris McDowall’s advice in Electric Bastionland when advising the reader on making up their own rules: just have it do the damn thing. Have as few rolls and variables as possible, and make your numbers as big and impactful as you can. 

And: I’ve written a lot of Hollows now. So to come back to it unfettered with the idea of “having to publish this ever” or “working with anyone else at all” or “explaining my decisions in any way” I forged forward with a new, less gritty, less boots-and-bullets style of Hollows rules suitable for games about saving the world in a natty wee sailor costume. A lot of people would call it power creep. I call it a bold new direction.

Here, for example, is my rules for the Shield (inspired largely by Stephen Universe, who I guess is magical-girl blooded, sort of):

As you can see - hopefully - the average length of abilities is shorter, and they generally do a bit more when you trigger them. The other thing you can hopefully see is that they are much more named with an eye to shouting the name of the ability aloud as you use it; not that you have to, but you could, and that helps push us in a certain direction.

FOCUS ON WHAT’S IMPORTANT

Whilst removing the grit from Hollows - and the grit is a lot of the reason why it’s fun, so I made sure to be careful as I went through the core system with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass - I decided that it would be interesting to make a system that utilises only the core core bits of the component set. 

Focus (a token that lets you roll with advantage when spent) and Threat (tokens that trigger and enhance enemy attacks) both seemed crucial. Curse (our catch-all marker for any ongoing badness) felt too useful to remove.

Everything else I could probably peel off and end up with a more Saturday-morning vibe. Magical Girls don’t really Take Cover, so those counters can go; they don’t often carry shotguns, so the loaded/empty token isn’t needed; they’re not big on inflicting Bleed, so the bleed token can go. 

One of the things I notice with folks who are making new baddies or weapons for Hollows is a propensity to introduce additional mechanics that require tracking, whether it’s a new currency for the Hunters to spend or a new keyword that the Entity can inflict that has X or Y effect on ‘em. 

I didn’t put this in the corebook because we had to write it before we released it to the public, so cause and effect get me out of this one scot free, but my advice to you is: do not do this.

We’re so sparing with additional mechanics. Mainly because I don’t think they work terribly well in a tactical fighting game, and also because Maz very firmly told us that there was an upper limit to the amount of superfluous bullshit we could fit in the component kit. That’s why Curse does absolutely everything that isn’t direct damage or aggro, and honestly I’m kind of proud of it. We make it work. We strongarm a limited set of concepts into a bunch of strange and interesting shapes.

So: could I do it even harder here? 

Focus was the key. There’s a few Weapons in Hollows that play with stances - the Armour, for example, is either Ready or Unready. The Shotgun is Loaded or Unloaded. The Knife inflicts Bleed, which is a sort of Entity stance that they don’t want to receive, if you squint. All of them have tokens. 

But the Rifle uses Focus, which is our standard “do better” currency, and we tweaked it so that unlike everyone else in the game they can carry up to five of it at a time and spend it on different things. 

What if I just used Focus for everything? If you have a Violin and you’re Focused, that’s you playing the Violin. If you have a Shield and you’re Focused, that means you’re ready to receive an attack. If you have Wings and you’re Focused, that means you’re flying. 

Now: the answer to the question in the first sentence might be that it’s not designed to do this much and I might end up completely knackering a character who’s reliant on it. But hopefully there’s enough options in there that you’re not entirely reliant on gaining and then spending or holding Focus, and even if you are, there’s hopefully enough options in there that you can cheat your way into getting it when you need it. Or if there aren’t, to have it be exciting when you’re on the back foot and struggling to recover.

So Focus is neat. And then: what if I used other tokens in other ways? What if we put Threat on the Entity, instead of just on the grid? Enter the Scythe:

(“Hang on a second,” you say, “What’s that word in the LIKE WHEAT ability there? Why are Thralls in combat? I thought Hollows was many-vs-one boss fights only?” And to that I say: shh. Still working on the mechanics. You keep it under your pretty little hat, sweetheart.)

As you can see, once the idea of “place threat on resolve damage to boost eventual wound damage” comes to the fore, the rest slots into place pretty straightforwardly.

• Let’s come up with other ways to place that Threat, like PAYMENT IN KIND and EXECUTIONER’S EYE.

• Let’s give you a reason not to spend it, like DAMOCLESIAN ART.

• Let’s give you other stuff to spend it on like HASTEN DEMISE.

• Let’s pop in some quality of life upgrades, like INEVITABLE and SEVER STRINGS.

• Let’s reinforce the reaper/death theme a little with SELF-SACRIFICE.

From these, you can build an engine of sorts - a trick your character can do which makes the enemy die, or at least makes them less effective, and every dangerous Hollows character is a string of these engines that pair up with other characters’ engines and generally make the GM’s life much more difficult.

WHAT NEXT?

At present, the Magical Girls X Hollows crossover is a feral google doc with a list of weapons in that have no particular tier ranking on their abilities, and no setting, and no specific Entities. It is in the order I wrote it, and it the page setup is my standard "no fuckin margins please sir" mode which I use for one-page games design and consistently forget to turn off, much to the chagrin of my associates.

But here’s the deal: I ain’t keeping my powder dry on this one. I’m getting my powder sopping wet. (I think? Or exploding it? Or making it into pudding? Snorting it? Still not 100% sure what kind of powder it is) I’m showing you it when it’s unfinished and not terribly useful and we could make significantly more money and a far greater impact if I just shut the fuck up about it and wrote the other things I’m on the hook to be writing instead. 

But I’m excited. I’m fizzy about it. So come look. 

Here’s what you can do with it: with the core Hollows rulebook open in another tab, you could bodge out some characters that use these abilities. Assume two weapons each, as normal. I haven’t changed any of the stats yet, so they all still use Hollows ones. (I want to change them, as you’ll see in the attached document, but for now they’re compatible). Work out what the stat bonuses and maluses, and the relevant Health pool elements, yourself. I believe in you. It’s just a bunch of +1s and a few 3’s and 4’s around the edges. There’s only so wrong you can get it.

Reskin some Entities. Have a fight. Yell your ability names aloud.

Or: you can just read it. Imagine a Hollows where you can enter battle with Wings and a Violin instead of a revolver that hates you and a trench club that hates the revolver. 

So where do I go from here? I dunno. Maybe I publish this in four years in a leatherbound book jam-packed with art. Maybe I keep doing it in my spare time with my off-hand and never worry about it making money. Maybe it’s a mainline Hollows sourcebook after I wrench it into a shape that fits the setting; you’re all grubby urchins who awaken into Malignancy-slaying uberwomen thanks to the power of friendship. Maybe after I’ve shown you it, now, I’ll lose interest and wander off and find whatever new Sad Space Marine my brain needs. 

Feels good to get it out, though.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to incorporate some third-party feedback on a press release before I send it off for approval again.

Stay beautiful,

- Grant “Power of Friendship” Howitt