Month: October 2019

I generally try not to be so under the wire, but life has been hectic lately! Here’s an interview.

Today I have an interview with Meguey and Vincent Baker about Under Hollow Hills, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a game about traveling performers and explores a new realm of Powered by the Apocalypse design. Check out what Vincent and Meguey had to say!

All art by Vincent, after Rackham.

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Tell me a little about Under Hollow Hills. What excites you about it?

Meg: Traveling together as a group, seeking audiences, dealing with a stuck wagon or a friend in trouble, showing up at birthday parties to just utterly dazzle a human child and leave them with a touch more wonder than before – that’s all real neat to me. What excites me most though, perhaps, is the core ethic of this game, of paying attention to how we are together when times are good and when times are bad. Fairies often get portrayed as either all sweetness and light or all threat and magical terror, and I’m excited to see MORE than that. We’re drawing on a lot of different fairy stories, and I look forward to the new stories that come from this.

VB: In Under Hollow Hills you play the performers and crew of a circus that travels through Fairyland and through the human world, through good times, bad times, and dangerous times. I’m excited about the tour of Fairyland that the game offers – but it’s like a working tour, not a tourist tour. You’re behind the scenes, you see what goes on in the Wolf King’s Court, you perform for audiences who think they’ve commanded you, but really you’re playing them. You see through the glamor to the mystery, if that makes sense!

I’m also excited by how much the game loves words. Metaphor, poetry, wordplay, puns, it’s a game that loves and plays with language.

There are a lot of fairy tales that people might be familiar with. Where are you pulling influence from, and what are some examples of the things you’re spinning of your own?

VB: Yeah! Meg’s history with fairies is older than mine. I think I started, these decades ago, with Alan Lee and Brian Froud’s book Faeries. For me my main sources have been Yeats’ Fairy Tales of Ireland, Sikes’ British Goblins, and Kirk & Lang’s The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. These all mix collected stories and folklore with the speculations of their authors / editors, much in the mode of a bestiary or field guide. This is where the idea of fairy kinds comes from, I think, these marvelous old collections.

I’m also influenced by Shakespeare, by Norse myths, and by more contemporary fairy tales and fairy tellers like Francesca Lia Block, Tanith Lee, John Crowley, Jane Yolen, and even Jack Vance per Lyonesse.

That said, we’ve tried to keep our interpretations fresh and playful. In the playbooks, for instance, we always try to mix and cross influences, not narrow down. The Chieftain Mouse has elements of Reepicheep and Despereaux, and also of Rob Roy. The Crooked Wand harks back to the three old women who share an eye, and to Odin, and then to Yubaba from Spirited Away and Nora Cloud from Little, Big.

Meg: I had a beloved storytelling teacher in 4th grade, Janet Glantz, who gave me Nancy Arrowsmith’s 1977 Field Guide to the Little People, which leads off with “In high summer meadows, nestled in the moors, near old castles, or behind the kitchen stove—these are the places where the Little People may be found.”. If I had to point to one clear influence alone, it would be this book and this line. The earliest fairy-tales I remember are the ones in Olive Beaupre Miller’s 1928 edition of My Bookhouse books, particularly volume two, which has fairy tales from around the world, and the first book I remember reading for myself is Midsummer Night’s Dream, when I was about 6.

The Muppet Show, of course, and Labyrinth. I saw the 1962 movie Gypsy a surprising number of times as a kid, so the backstage parts of a traveling show were there, and when I was learning to walk and talk, my parents were crew in a Shakespearean diner theater company, which was of course FULL of fairies and actors and stage effects. I spent 8 years in the 1990s doing hair design and costuming for our local Hampshire County Shakespeare Company, too. Apples and trees, you know. Decades of thinking about the natural world in a way that invites the possibility of fairies also fit into the game design, and noticing the playfulness of bees, the enthusiasm of the berry bramble, or the determination of a stream. Then blending all of that so that there are layers on layers of influence, so players can bring their own influences to their unique portrayal of fairyland.

What is Under Hollow Hills like mechanically? It seems like it might function a little differently because of the types of stories you’re telling!

VB: It does!

The structure of the game is, you travel through fairyland and the human world, and everywhere you go, you put on a show. On the GM’s side, this means that between sessions, you prep up where the circus is going next. You don’t prep what’ll happen – there’s no way you could guess! – but just what the place is like, and who’s there. There’s a quick system for this, rules you follow in prep that help you decide who the audience is, what they want from the circus, and what they have to give the circus in return.

In play, then, you arrive at this new place, and you know that you’ll be performing here, but before you do, you want to get the lay of the land. As much as your audience here wants something from you, you want something from them too. So you introduce yourselves, enjoy your hosts’ hospitality, get people’s stories out of them, and meddle as you see fit. When you’re satisfied, then you plan your show and perform.

Planning and performing your show are distinct phases in the game, and they give you a lot of power. In your performance you can change the season of the place – “season” here includes mood, fortunes, history, even who rules and who’s ruled over. You can win from the audience what they have in plenty, or win from them what they hold most dear. You can also change the circus, switching up the performers’ jobs, welcoming new performers or bidding old ones goodbye, and opening the way forward from one world to the other.

Now this is the large view, the overall structure. Your character has cycles and structures of their own. Your capabilities include, yes, ways to get the lay of the land, and ways to plan a show and perform in it, but they also include your own angle on things. Ways to get what YOU want, whether you line up with the circus or not.

Meg: A lot of game mechanics are designed in terms of a linear progression, from point to point to future point. Under Hollow Hills mechanics cycle and spin, as we spiral through the seasons and through our own emotions and the characters’ emotional relationships with each other. Players may come back to things that feel familiar several times in the course of play, but from a different angle each time.

I’m intrigued by the implicit theme of transience in these stories because of the traveling nature of the troupe and the temporary nature of performance. How does Under Hollow Hills address the concept and experience of transience by the characters, and naturally, players?

Meg: Playing with time and space is part of fairyland, as well as of stagecraft and performance. The magical thinking of childhood when summer never ends, and how it takes forever for a special event to arrive, and the way time moves oddly when you are fully engrossed in the current moment even as an adult, are all part of the game. All those can be tiny windows into fairyland, that may open only for a fleeting moment. We all change over time, in myriad ways. Major ways that come to mind are gender fluidity and variance and how that permeates Under Hollow Hills in reflection of the actual world we live in, and seasonal cycles as they affect all life on the planet. There’s a third, of course, which is mortality, and the questions around death that come up from the fay viewing it as a game and the mortals knowing that for them it is the biggest and most permanent change. Shifting through these moments smoothly takes practice.

As characters pass from moment to moment, in terms of Under Hollow Hills game design specifically, we built in ways to shift your character’s expression fluidly across their summer aspect and their winter aspect, and we recognize the impact people have on places (and vice versa) in the way that the Circus can move the place they perform towards different seasons. Illustrating the pinwheel of the seasons, choosing as a group how you move the circus and spaces through the pinwheel, helps convey the transient but also the cyclical nature of the game, and therefore of life. Movement is a basic part of the game.

Building a game where travel is intrinsically part of the story helps address some fictional issues in storytelling as well. Have you ever encountered a detective series you like, set in “a small country town” where there’s multiple mysteries and murders in each book? For heaven’s sake, get out of that town! It’s a hell-mouth! Making the circus mobile, building an interconnected group that is traveling together, with the inherent community needs and relationship complications that arise when people come to rely on each other, and when they are constantly encountering new groups of people wherever they go, allows for very different stories than having the characters in a fixed location.

Another topic that interests me is the diversity found in traveling troupes in history, and the prejudice with which they’ve been treated. A hard topic, I know, but have you addressed it at all in Under Hollow Hills, and why or why not?

VB: Not so hard a topic! Historically, traveling people, especially traveling performers, have been treated all different ways – with horrifying violence and racism, with glory and celebrity, with suspicion, with reverence – all different ways. Right now in the US, for instance, a lot of carnival workers are seasonal migrant workers, vulnerable to the US’ racist anti-immigrant policies and sentiments.

In Under Hollow Hills, we’re definitely presenting a romantic version of the traveling circus. When the circus travels, it’s usually easy. Where it arrives, it’s usually welcome. When you come into conflict with your audience, usually it’s a personal matter, a disagreement or personal animosity. It’s possible in the game for you to come into town to find a racist hate mob waiting for you with knives and clubs, but the way violence works in the game, it disarms even this kind of situation.

Our goal isn’t to examine real-world racism and violence, or even just the real-world difficulties of taking a show on the road. Those are different games, and ones we’d love to play!

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Thank you to Meg and Vincent both for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Under Hollow Hills on Kickstarter today!