hollowpoint. bad people killing bad people for bad reasons. B. Murray C.W. Marshall VSCA Publishing Vancouver, BC, Canada Toronto, ON, Canada VSCA Publishing authorizes any owner of this digital book to print and bind the document for their own use. This includes the right to print and bind the book in whole or in part for personal use or for the use of the other players at your table. So if you’re a clerk at some place where someone might want to do this, and have a policy about printing material in copyright, please be advised that the owners of the copyright do not consider you making three or four copies at any one time an infringement. VSCA Publishing does not grant rights to redistribute the file to other people or make copies for resale; that would be wrong. Hollowpoint is the property of the authors and VSCA Publishing. Copyright ©2011 by VSCA Publishing All rights reserved. Digital release ISBN 978-0-9811710-7-4 Revision 1.1 VSCA Publishing http://www.vsca.ca Contents 1. Introduction • 7 1.1. The Game • 8 1.2. The Setting • 11 1.3. Examples from fiction • 13 1.4. Thanks • 14 1.5. Reference material • 15 2. Agency • 17 2.1. The Charge • 18 2.2. The Enemy • 19 2.3. The Era • 20 3. Characters • 21 3.1. Step one: Rank • 21 3.2. Step two: Skills • 22 3.3. Step three: Name • 24 3.4. Step four: Traits • 25 3.4.1. Traits by Q and A • 27 3.4.2. Traits On the Fly • 28 3.4.3. Company Traits • 28 3.5. Step five: Complications • 30 3.6. Experience • 32 4. Conflict • 35 4.1. Dice Pools • 37 4.2. The Fight • 40 4.2.1. Skill • 41 4.2.2. Teamwork • 42 4.2.3. Fan Mail • 43 4.2.4. Go to the dice • 43 4.2.5. Effects • 46 4.2.6. Moving on • 47 4.2.7. Wash • 48 4.2.8. Special Abilities • 48 4.3. The Catch • 49 4.4. Skill Checks • 50 4.5. Narration • 50 4.6. Ending a Conflict • 52 4.7. Tactics • 54 4.8. Sample Conflict • 55 4.9. Conflict, with a Catch • 59 5. Mission • 65 5.1. Objectives • 65 5.2. Exploding into action • 67 5.3. Mission Building • 68 5.4. Sample Adventures • 71 5.4.1. Arena • 71 5.4.2. Magnificent • 74 5.4.3. Callisto • 77 5.5. Pacing • 81 Appendix: Stories • 83 A.1. Enzo’s Ambition • 83 A.2. Behold A New Creation • 90 Field Guide • 95 Personal Weapons • 96 Grenades • 97 Shotguns • 98 Cons • 100 The Fight • 101 Knives • 102 Pistols • 103 Ammunition • 104 The Sub-machinegun • 106 First Aid • 107 Index • 109 The windshield of your Cadillac explodes and Joel hits the gas. It’s exactly the wrong thing to do, but you trust Joel because he has that special kind of aggression that makes everything work out even when it’s a bad, bad idea. This is no exception. The heavy sedan fishtails as the right rear bursts and the tick tick tick of small caliber ammunition flicking through the dash, your seat, and your suit is just another countdown to zero. As the car stops, Joel ducks down with expert timing and you bring your custom .40 Smith & Wessons to bear throughOne the driver’s side window at your assailants—half a dozen punks with foreign sub- machineguns taking cover behind the dumpsters. Those dumpsters will come in handy in a bit. You grin. Joel laughs. It gets loud. 1. Introduction Hollowpoint is a role-playing game about hyper-competent, unpleasant, violent people doing what they do best. They work in a team, even if that isn’t their natural inclination. The game at once tries to capture the essence of modern-day competence mythology and bind these super-individuals into a functioning unit. This is the essential strain: these are people who like to be the best, and working together is stressful. Cooperation makes them less effective as individuals. Each knows his or her plan is the right one. Disclaimer: This is a game that deals with torture, execution, terrorism, and other illegal and immoral activities. It is a form of make believe that some people will find offensive or unpleasant. But it’s just a game: it’s safe and no one gets hurt as long as everything stays at the table. Do not do these things in real life, please. Play games instead. 1.1. THE GAME So, this is an RPG, a role-playing game. If you aren’t already comfortable with terms like “NPC”, “ref” (or “referee”) and “GM”, the player/character distinction, and what we mean by dice or an abbreviation like 4d6, then this text may seem a bit arcane. The target audience for Hollowpoint is a group of established role-players who are interested in exploring a new system, that focuses on violence and storytelling. We will, however, pause for a moment on one concept that might be new, and that’s the table. When we talk about the table, we mean everyone sitting down where the game is taking place, regardless of their experience, regardless of who’s the ref, regardless of whose place it is. We’re giving authority to the group that trumps that of the ref or of any individual player. The table is the final arbiter of what goes on, and it is assumed that the table wants to have fun. You’ve come together to enjoy yourselves. Maybe you’ve just had a pizza, or you have snacks and drinks. The gaming experience is collaborative storytelling, and everyone is there for a good time. Hollowpoint needs at least three people at the table to play: one to ref, and two players. It can handle five or six without needing any further modifications. Hollowpoint uses a dice pool system, so everyone will want to have a whole mess of six-sided dice. We like to color-code them so each player has his own, but that’s not needed. You’ll also want a bowl of some kind in the middle of the table to keep the teamwork dice. Players might roll anywhere from three dice to as many as ten. The ref needs twice that. The math isn’t transparent, and the system doesn’t always reward a more-is-better approach. Players offer narration: they relate what their character is doing, how they are doing it and what is happening. The world and everybody that the players encounter are run by 8 the ref, who also provides narration. Everyone at the table is working together to tell a story, but this isn’t a story just about some characters: they come and go, and players will make replacements on the fly. The story ends up being about a group of bad people doing bad things, and the reasons they do them. Life and death are only parts of that. The story offered by the players is at times constrained by the game mechanics, and particularly by dice rolls—once dice hit the table, players have to explain what the dice mean, seeing a story emerge from the numbers, and using this to create more story. Each session begins with a mission. The players narrate their characters addressing objectives, completing the mission and dealing with any fallout. And this is a rough world. Players shouldn’t become too attached to their characters. You should feel free to provide glorious over-the-top deaths for your character if the dice roll demands it. These are fictional characters, and they only have as much life as the players give them. Embrace that: an awesome few hours of ultraviolent role-play from invested players working together to tell an unforgettable story is better than making your way through the next few 30’x30’ rooms in a dungeon somewhere. Hollowpoint makes a great pick-up game and can be played in a single session. An hour’s prep for the ref is all that’s required in advance. Just write the mission, make characters, and go. Each session is a series of scenes which may or may not have a conflict. If dice are rolled, that’s a conflict and players can lose and characters can die. It may be that the mission has several stages, and that each stage gets resolved in a conflict scene. It may be that the mission is resolved in the first conflict, and everything else is fallout. The emphasis is on teamwork, on group dynamics and not on guy-versus-guy action. There’s a bank robbery scene in Michael Mann’s movie Heat (1995): the crew has robbed a bank and in the course of exiting they are bounced by the police. The crew has automatic weapons, great training, and willingness to cause harm and hurt others, but they are also professionals: their objective is to escape with the money. 9 Now in most guy-versus-guy gaming, this would be a really And so, Hollowpoint isn’t about a series of guy-versus-guy hard scene to model, because the system will focus on which incidents. It’s about effective use of ammunition, mobility, cop your character is trying to kill each time-slice. The player aggression, planning, knowledge of the space, sustaining fire is focused on the wrong thing with distinctly uncomfortable (rapid reload!), and effective fire (shooting at the target—a effects: notoriously hard thing for non-sociopaths to do).