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.

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