Everyone else in the soul economy binds a ghost to a machine and calls it labor. You bind one to yourself, sit down across from it, and negotiate like it still gets a vote — because it does, and it remembers every time you forgot that.
The Hollowbound doesn't cast spells. They keep an appointment. Six words you'll need before any of the rest of this makes sense.
Your bound vessel — a corroded saint's mask, a reliquary box wired crooked into your sternum, a conductor's lantern with no bulb left in it. Whatever shape it takes, it's the one thing every wandering soul you've ever struck a deal with has had to move through. Lose it and you lose everything downstream of it.
Your two working states. Quiet is the spirit sitting latent behind the Hollow's seal — you get its patience, its trade-knowledge, its quiet utility. Unveiled is you letting it rise all the way to the surface for a scene — sharper, stronger, and no longer entirely you.
What you owe. Every favor asked of the spirit adds weight to the Toll; every night's rest and honest conversation pays some of it back down. Let it run high enough, or spend past what's fair in a single ask, and the spirit stops being generous about how it collects.
The act of asking — your version of casting a spell. You don't recite words at the dead. You make a case, and the Hollow carries your case to whoever's currently housed inside it.
What happens when a Parley asks for more than the spirit is willing to give and the Toll can't cover the difference. Never fatal on its own. Never pleasant either.
The setting's word, borrowed by every Hollowbound alive, for the ordinary unhoused dead still wandering the wastes — the raw population you might, with time and risk, talk into the Hollow once your current arrangement runs its course.
At 1st level you choose what kind of dead you've learned to talk to. This is your Covenant — it shapes every boon you'll ever Parley for, how fast your Toll climbs, and what a bad Fraying looks like when it happens to you specifically.
You house the dead who never really left their posts — factory hands, rail conductors, gunnery crews, the countless souls the pre-Turning war machine wired directly into its equipment and then simply forgot to unwire when they died. They're calm, competent, and think in schematics.
You house the dead who are closer to raging than any sane broker would recommend — the murdered, the starved, the ones who died mid-scream and never finished. Ferociously powerful. Ferociously unstable. Everyone else in the trade will ask you why.
You house the dead who finished — the ones who lived out a full life before the world ended it for everyone else. Grandparents, elders, the last honest foremen. Patient. Slow to anger. Extremely difficult to rush.
A note for tables running Residuals: a Long-Shadow Hollowbound cultivates a chosen relationship with someone else's dead. A Residual is born already carrying a fragment of one, unchosen. The two rarely have much to argue about — usually the opposite.
The Hollowbound's signature mechanic. Any Parley can be pushed — asked for more than its base effect — by taking on additional Toll on the spot. The spirit doesn't refuse. It just stops being careful about what "yes" costs you.
When you Parley, you may add 1 or more points of Toll to the ask before resolving it, escalating the effect (more damage, longer duration, a boon the base ability doesn't normally grant). For each point of Toll added beyond what your current Covenant and level comfortably support, roll on the Fraying Table below. A well-paid-down Toll pool shrugs off a push with no roll at all; a Toll pool already running hot turns every push into a coin flip you don't get to see the odds on.
Toll comes back down through downtime spent honestly in the spirit's interest — a night kept, a promise fulfilled, silence sat through instead of another ask. It does not come back down because you won a fight with it left over.
| Roll | The Fraying |
|---|---|
| 1 | The spirit sulks. No further Unveiled use this encounter — it's gone quiet on principle, and principle doesn't negotiate. |
| 2 | Old grief surfaces. The spirit's dying moment bleeds into yours. You're briefly frightened or stunned by a memory that was never yours to have. |
| 3 | The Hollow cracks. The vessel itself takes real damage — a hairline fracture, a seized hinge, a burnt contact. It'll need a proper repair before it stops leaking a little of every future Parley. |
| 4 | Backseat driver. The spirit briefly takes a hand it wasn't offered — one action this turn goes to its judgment, not yours, and it does not share your priorities. |
| 5 | The debt gets called in. Toll spikes further immediately, and somewhere down the line, someone or something with a prior claim on this spirit notices you've been spending it. That's a conversation for another day. |
| 6 | Full eclipse. Worst result on the table. The spirit takes the whole seat for one round, acting through you according to its own nature before the Hollow reasserts the seal. Everyone at the table gets to watch you find out what that nature actually is. |
A Hollowbound's growth is less about getting louder and more about getting a longer leash — a bigger Hollow, a steadier Toll, and eventually, the standing to renegotiate the whole arrangement.
| Lvl | Proficiency Notes | Class Feature |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Trained Parley DC, trained in your Covenant's key skill | Bind the Hollow; choose Covenant; Quiet / Unveiled; starting Toll pool |
| 2 | — | Class feat |
| 3 | Expert in one Covenant skill | Steadier Seal (Toll decays faster during honest downtime) |
| 4 | — | Class feat |
| 5 | Ability boosts, expert Parley DC | Widen the Hollow (carry a second, dormant spirit as backup) |
| 6 | — | Class feat |
| 7 | — | Raised Toll ceiling; Fraying die improves by one step |
| 8 | — | Class feat |
| 9 | Expert in all Covenant skills | Second Whisper — borrow one minor boon from a Covenant you don't hold |
| 10 | — | Class feat |
| 11 | Master Parley DC | Long Parley — Unveiled duration extends significantly |
| 12 | — | Class feat |
| 13 | Master in all Covenant skills | Weathered Seal (a Fraying result may be downgraded once per day) |
| 14 | — | Class feat |
| 15 | — | Unbinding and Rebinding — release your spirit and court a new Drifter over a downtime ritual, changing Covenant if you choose |
| 16 | — | Class feat |
| 17 | Legendary Parley DC | The Hollow steadies for good — Toll no longer accrues from base (unpushed) Parleys |
| 18 | — | Class feat |
| 19 | — | Capstone: The Last Toll Paid |
| 20 | — | Capstone: Ascend the Hollow / Free the Hollow (choose one, permanent) |
A representative slice of the Hollowbound feat list. Feats marked with a Covenant tag require that Covenant; everything else is open to any Hollowbound.
General Choose one minor boon from your Covenant's list as a bonus, always-available Quiet-state ability, on top of your ordinary starting selection.
General Take on a Toll cost willingly, before the ask, to guarantee a Parley's base effect lands without a check.
Ghost-Static Overclock Voice can now target a second machine in the same use, splitting the cost between them.
Wailing Debt Borrowed Grief can now be aimed at a location instead of a target — the dying moment plays out for everyone standing in it.
Long-Shadow The Long View can be asked twice per scene instead of once, and a second Hollowbound present may ask alongside you.
General Once per day, erase a single point of Toll immediately by doing the spirit an unprompted, unasked kindness in the fiction.
General Your Quiet-state boons remain active while Unveiled — previously the two states were exclusive.
General Parley with your dormant second spirit (from Widen the Hollow) without first swapping it into the primary seat, at double Toll cost.
General Learn your bound spirit's true name. The Fraying die drops one permanent step for this specific spirit — it can still refuse you, but it will never again pretend it doesn't know you.
General If the Hollow is ever lost, stolen, or destroyed, its last-bound spirit's Quiet-state boons persist for 24 hours through sheer habit, giving you a window to get it back or bind another.
General Once per day, briefly house a crowd of unbound Drifters at once for a single massive, uncontrolled burst of Covenant-flavored effect — automatic maximum Fraying afterward, no exceptions, no rolling.
Nineteenth level resolves the debt. Twentieth decides what you become once it's gone.
You and your bound spirit settle the account in full, in one long, honest sitting. Your Toll pool empties and stays empty at rest going forward; the spirit becomes a genuine ally rather than a debtor, and stops rolling on the Fraying Table for any Parley you make in good faith. Push it dishonestly, and it still remembers exactly how.
The defining choice. Choose one, permanently:
Fuse the Hollow into your own body for good. You're not quite alive in the way you used to define it — the boundary between you and every spirit you've ever housed gets permanently thinner, and permanently stronger.
Send your spirit on, somewhere gates are still supposed to open. In exchange it leaves behind a legendary, standing favor — a boon you can call on once when nothing else is left, from a spirit who no longer technically exists to grant it.
Two additions to the setting that fall directly out of the Hollowbound's existence: a place where the trade actually happens, and a name every Hollowbound has heard whether they wanted to or not.
Before the Turning it was a telephone switching station, one of the last still standing with its brass and copper mostly intact. Nobody remembers who first noticed that a building built to connect voices to voices still did that job rather well even after the world it served for stopped answering. Now it's a sunk, half-flooded bazaar and unlicensed guildhall where Hollowbound come to trade vessel relics, argue Covenant technique, and — mostly — get introduced to a specific Drifter with a reputation, the way you'd get introduced to a specialist rather than picked out of a hiring line.
The Exchange charges no membership fee and enforces exactly one rule with total consistency: no one is permitted to Parley inside the building itself. Too many voices already competing for the line. Everyone who's tried has regretted it, and the regret is contagious enough that nobody's tried twice.
Bound, by every account, into a dented conductor's lantern that keeps finding its way back into circulation no matter how many times it's supposedly been melted down, lost, or buried with whoever last carried it. The Brakeman will strike a deal with almost anyone — he's famous for never once refusing an honest ask — and every single person who's taken him up on it has arrived somewhere. Just never quite where, or in quite the condition, they were expecting.
Hollowbound trade Brakeman stories the way rail workers used to trade ghost-train stories: half warning, half brag. Everyone at the Last Exchange has heard of someone who bound him. Nobody currently there is holding the lantern.