It’s fairly unusual that a game blows me away with entirely different gameplay to what I’ve seen before, but Under Hollow Hills has done that. It’s also really great for one-shot gaming! So here’s my guide to the game, and how to get a great one-shot out of it.

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Under Hollow What?

Under Hollow Hills is a Powered By The Apocalypse (PBTA) game by Megeuy and Vincent Baker. Its core gameplay system is standard PBTA, but it twists some other aspects of the system in other ways – you’ve got Plays, not Moves, and instead of choosing Attributes in character generation, you assign bonuses directly to the Plays. 

In it you play a fairy circus, travelling through Fairyland and the Mortal World, putting on shows at various Occasions. These could be a change of seasons, a funeral, a wedding – or sometimes your circus just shows up, and an audience wanders in. The core gameplay loop is that you arrive at a location, explore and find out what is up with the people there, and then put on your show – where you’re probably trying to resolve some of the problems you heard about in the first part.

One-Shot Structure

In a one-shot, I play for 3 hours (even with a 4 hour slot, this gives you some wriggle room). Expect character generation, bonds, and deciding what the circus’ last show was, to take the first hour (and don’t skip this – it’s really useful for your PCs to have a past and links to one another). This gives you an hour of play to explore the location and meet some of the key NPCs, and an hour for planning and performance.

That middle hour might feel tight, but that’ fine; you want to have lots of issues unresolved, so they can be solved in the show – this gives a purpose to the performance. They might also not meet all of your NPCs – this is also fine; they might still be there, to show up mysteriously at the performance, or you might just drop them as surplus to requirements.

Under Hollow Hills is great for 3 players (plus MC) online, or 4 face to face with these timings – maybe one more player could be squeezed in, but you’d need to extend the timings a little.

Prep

Under Hollow Hills belongs to the exalted top tier of TTRPGs (along with Blades in the Dark, Feng Shui 2, and others) where to prep it you should read what the game says about prepping it, and do that. You pick an occasion, and there are some choices to make for how it goes and what happens – just follow this procedure. Hooray for instructional rulebooks – let’s have more of these!

Likewise, for NPCs, you’ll have choices to make for key ones. I wouldn’t recommend doing all the ones recommended for each occasion, just the essentials and a few that sound interesting to you. I’d recommend 5-7 NPCs, and 1-2 groups of NPCs (design these just like the others, and add a list of names if you think you’ll need it). As I mentioned before, you might not need all of these – and that’s fine!

Have a think about the setting in terms of describing it and what it looks, sounds, and smells like, and who will greet the circus when it arrives. There’s ideas in the occasion prep pages – but these are more inspiration that definitive description.

I also like the location to be bounded, with a clear “out of the location” area where your circus performers can get lost – a great Play if they miss a move. Getting lost in the woods is very fairy circus, and  “I’ve got to get back to perform” is a great motivator.

Play

You’ve seen the structure above – take them through the character generation process, and discuss what their previous show was. If they’re struggling to respond or are too polite to collaborate, it’s fine to just go around and get one player to pick where it happened, one what the occasion was, and so on. I don’t, personally, talk about the next show they’re going to, because I think it slows the momentum – but of course you can if you’d rather.

I like to have lots of stuff laid out when the circus arrives. For example, in Star-Crossed, a betrothal occasion, they are greeted by one of the grooms – but there’s also owls in the woods watching, a tent with an argument going on in it, and another missing groom. Three things at least that are obvious leads – even if the players choose something else – and the options visible to them.

Encourage splitting the party – they’ll probably want to see different things – and I tend to use “say what you’re all doing, then resolve in turn” for this – it’s absolutely fine for them to be in three different places. Under Hollow Hills is a PBTA game where speaking Plays explicitly is good; feel free to nudge players towards them if you need to. In particular, sniff the wind is triggered when they are exploring or seeing what’s going on, and size someone up can be done whenever they talk to an NPC and helps to drive the plot. These are the closest things to a perception check in this game – they should be used when figuring out what’s going on!

Stop them exploring before everything is resolved, when you’ve just got lots of unsolved problems and issues dangling in front of them. They might have fixed some of them, but it’s good to have things they want to resolve in the circus performance instead.

They need to plan their playbill now – use the playbill sheet, and follow the procedures noted for it. You will need to remind them that they have 1 Circus Power, and 2 Votes, and how these work – and that they can vote against, which is sometimes more interesting. Also, for 3 players, I rule that 1 positive vote and 1 abstention is a Majority – you’ve only got 2 people able to vote. If you get the chance to introduce a Problem Person – if there’s one set up from the previous play – do so; they add another obstacle as well.

Roll Up, Roll Up!

Well, what are you waiting for? Why haven’t you run Under Hollow Hills yet? Or maybe you have – let me know how it went in the comments!