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Hollyhock is a GM-less TTRPG, built for short play sessions and concise storylines. Players build characters that each have goals, unique move sets, and a set of one powerful boon and one powerful restriction.
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Over the course of 5 stages, players draw, give away, and place cards to activate their moves, progressing their stories and moving towards their goals. At the end of each session, everyone tallies up their ending hands to determine how successful they each were.
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Hollyhock isn't just a game, either; it's an intricate world, full of beautiful stories, dangerous political machinations and fantastical characters. The book is filled to the brim with art, stories, and game rules to bring it all together.
Hollyhock Design Reel - What's in the Cards?
Designing Hollyhock
As lead game designer, I was responsible for building the core mechanics of the game and creating a foundation in which other designers could develop additional game content.
The core systems expand on the Belonging Outside Belonging system created by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum, but worked to resolve some of the issues I had noticed with similar GM-less games. We had found that GM-less games often struggled with pacing and consistency of action, so we structured our gameplay around Acts, Stages, and Scenes, in order to give players a more clear breakdown of how the game was meant to progress.
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I had also been longing for more tangible value from the actions of players, so using the idea of building a hand of cards to guide a player's mechanical progression in the game slotted in perfectly.
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We were still making this game in conversations with other Belonging Outside Belonging TTRPGs, so we decided to reach out to some experts. We talked with Benjamin Rosenbaum, one of the designers who created the system our game was inspired by, and Jay Dragon, who had made many very successful games in a similar form, on the MRAH podcast!
Writing for Hollyhock
While I didn't lead the writing for the game, I did certainly write. My writing responsibilities involved content and technical writing to teach the rules of the game in an easily understandable but still thematic way, creating in-world fictional texts to disperse throughout the book, and of course, editing and polishing the final product to be publishing-ready! I also collaborated on the world-building and narrative design of the game, to build out the context of the game and ensure that all of the gameplay elements and writing enhanced each other!
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One of my favorite works for this game was a small side story titled Tulip Wine. Writing these stories tested my skills of quick world-building and punchy narratives, while still keeping them only a few sentences in length.
Tulip Wine
“They’re back! I told you they were back!”
The horse-faced bartender tugged at a flowering vine that had sprouted from one of her faucets. Her regular, the only one she had, looked over from the other end of the bar. The bartender twisted at one of the flowers, and as it broke from the stem, a wonderful aroma filled the room.
“Hm.” The bartender said. She paused, then leaned over and took a small bite out of one of the petals. A grin spread across her face. “I think I might have a new drink for you to try.”
Working with the Playhouse Team
The Nervous Playhouse Games team was one of the strongest I'd ever worked with. All four of us were talented game designers and narrative designers, but we each brought different skills - art, gameplay design, layout, production, and more, pooling together into a perfect mix.
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We even briefly started a business! Although it dissolved as we got caught up in other projects, working with this team taught me so much about what makes good collaboration: the key is trust, knowing that everyone is pushing towards the same goal, and can do it well.
Postmortem
When we heard that Hollyhock had been nominated for the Indiecade tabletop design award, we were thrilled. We were nominated alongside Jason Morningstar, a designer who created the first game our group had ever played together. To us, this meant that we were real.
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Designing Hollyhock taught me to think like a designer. We went through several iterations, constant refinement and testing, and shifts in vision and direction, all while keeping our eyes on the player experience at all times.
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Working on Hollyhock was a challenge in so many beautiful ways, and I couldn't be prouder with the end result.