Under Hollow Hills

There is a traveling circus under the Hollow Hills.

It travels by moonlight, small wagons creaking in the night silence. It travels lost roads, where fireflies and whisps hover to watch it pass, where goblins peer down from their treebranch perches, and owls. It travels the night world and the day world, fairyland and the living earth, and places otherwise, and no border can keep it. It has mysteries to pose, drama to perform, it has music, juggling, acts of death-defying peril, pratfall comedy. It has dangerous secrets to tell.

You are its performers, its ringmaster, its clowns, its sideshow, its stars. Youre its crew, rigging the tents, mending the costumes, planning the show, selling t-shirts and popcorn. Youre fairy kind and human kind. Youre the circus, and the circus is you. The circus is a leveler of all. Youre not subject to the usual games of status and wealth, hierarchy and social value, that society plays. To you a human childs birthday party in a vacant lot is the same as a command performance for the great Crowned Heads of fairyland. (And more like stuffed heads, saith the Hob.) You travel through fairyland and the mortal world, performing as you choose. Wherever you perform, you change: you change the seasons, you change the fortunes of those you perform for, you change their hearts. You change yourselves. This is the game: we change.

Under Hollow Hills is a tabletop roleplaying game. Its Powered by the Apocalypse, which in this case means that its got playbooks for the players, a system of moves based on rolling and summing two dice, a GM, and a play to find out approach to prep and plotting. Its good for small groups and large groups, people whove never played a roleplaying game before and people whove played a hundred. Its designed to be literary, over cinematic. It loves metaphor and wordplay. Its episodic like a series of short stories, not like a TV show, or sometimes like a long welcoming rambling novel. Its designed for drama, action, romance, and comedy, both in the circus rings and outside of them. Your characters are warm, funny, sad, and whimsical. They have their time on the stage, their time in the chorus, their solos, their encores. Their tragedies, their great accomplishments, their small victories. Sometimes they come, sometimes they go. They change with the seasons and with the beating of their own hearts. You might even fall in love with them. The GM is the games first and most important audience. As GM, its your job to be entertained. Throw roses, throw tomatoes, and call out for more.