From early 2017 to late 2019, I ran a 5e D&D game using a homebrew campaign setting called Yer Shar, which was a pastiche/fix-up of some extant settings I had sitting around in Google Drive. Most of them had never been anywhere close to an actual D&D table, being incomplete and all. In the years since the end of that campaign, I've returned to it in part for inspiration, but also to build out new ideas in it.

The idea for Hollowkin was “what if Warforged but my own thing?”, and while I basically just imported Warforged as-is for the original campaign, I wanted to tweak them somewhat for the more recent sub-setting, Underscourge. Now, Underscourge is my answer for “how about cyberpunk but mostly fantasy and also in a subterranean volcano city?”, along with some excuse to do cave exploration mechanics. There's a part of me that wants to make this a full-fledged TTRPG setting, though, and in the spirit of that pursuit, I'm offering up this rudimentary OSRified race/kindred that is inspired by the Warforged but hopefully is its own thing. The setting has been in some form of development since 2021.

This is incomplete, but feedback on the initial design is welcome!

Hollowkin

Kindred Type: Construct Level 1 PC Age: 0 years (see below) Lifespan: Immortal Height: 6' + (2d6”) (Medium) Weight: 200 + 5d10 lbs Native Languages: Delvian, Alerian

Long ago, at the edge of the now-fallen Alerian empire, a secretive guild concocted the perfect soldier to aid in its unending war against the demons of the Harrowmarch. Eventually they rebelled and fled the empire that had pressed them into service. None now remember how many Hollowkin were created, and the process for making them is lost to time, but hushed rumors of necromancy persist. Their numbers dwindle as the ages claim their decaying, artificial forms, but despite their long, inevitable slide into eventual oblivion, they have ingrained themselves into many communities across Yer Shar and maintain their own vibrant subcultures.

Obviously Artificial

Hollowkin physically resemble the other sapient, bipedal kindreds of the world but have adopted a wide variety of outward appearances that celebrate and emphasize their artificiality. At their core, they are a mechanical skeleton surrounded by articulated wicker and bearing armor plating. Those with the means to do so tend to decorate themselves with brass and gold filigree, while others opt for elaborate paint jobs, carvings, and accessories. Other modifications are popular, and no two Hollowkin will present exactly the same way. Hollowkin do not have sexes or genders but may present themselves in ways that mirror the society around them.

Timeless

Similar to the Sidhe, Hollowkin possess a timeless quality irrespective of the shabbiness or neatness of their current appearance. Mortals tend to regard them as permanent fixtures, having always been there. They are characteristically unhurried and participate in most of the trappings of civilization-building for their own purposes.

The Last Hollowkin

To varying degrees, Hollowkin have come to believe that one of their number will be the last of the sapient kindreds of Yer Shar. This is only logical: being immortal, their continued existence depends on there being one artificer with the skill to repair them, and, so they reason, should the remaining kindred decline, their numbers will diminish until there are none left, Hollowkin or otherwise, to maintain them, at which point only Hollowkin will remain. This has invested the Hollowkin with a desire to preserve what histories they can, collectively, in case any of them end up being the Last Hollowkin.

Kindred Relations

The other kindreds tend to view Hollowkin with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. Being somewhat rare despite their significant numbers throughout Yer Shar, they aren't well understood by anyone except, perhaps artificers. It is commonly known that their presence in the larger world owes to their rebellion, and this attracts no end of scrutiny from authorities in some places. Elsewhere, those in power see the Hollowkin as something to exploit, especially for their ability to forget what they know. As a result, Hollowkin communities tend to be tight-knit and insular, with a healthy dose of suspicion toward the motivations of any non-Hollowkin, even as they continue to seek out and remain among the other kindreds.

Choosing a Class

Since they were originally intended for war, Hollowkin are commonly Fighters. Many, drawn to their folk prophecies, choose to be Bards or Artificers. All classes are otherwise open to them.

Construct

Hollowkin cannot breathe, eat, sleep, or feel pain, and all that entails. They have distant memories of these things and often yearn for them. They cannot grow and do not heal naturally, requiring the services of an artificer for repairs. They can be healed by magic, though this has a 1-in-6 chance of failing on them outright.

Immortality

As immortal beings, Hollowkin do not die naturally, but can be killed. They are immune to diseases of non-magical origin.

Immortal Body, Spotless Mind

Any Hollowkin can effect a “rebirth”, resetting themselves to their initial state. By doing so, they forget all they have experienced since their last such rebirth and resume life, after some requisite downtime, as level 1 characters. In all but the most dire of circumstances, Hollowkin perform this rite surrounded by other Hollowkin, who will spend the downtime (at least one week) reorienting them to what they are and, to the extent they requested, who they were. Hollowkin who perform this rite alone risk becoming feral.

Made for War

Despite their apparent obsolescence, Hollowkin were made to fight. As such, no matter what class they choose, they always start at level 1 with d8 hit points, proceeding as per their class from level 2. Additionally, their AC is 16 plus their Dexterity modifier. They can't wear armor, but can possibly be enhanced.

Enhancements

As constructs, Hollowkin can be modified by a sufficiently skilled artificer.

• Reinforced skeleton: +1 STR (Max 18). Each improvement costs 1000 GP per point of the new score, and you can only improve one point at a time. Example: Butch has a STR score of 16 but wants to move to 18. They must first pay the 17,000 GP to move to 17, then pay 18,000 GP to move to 18.
• Extra joints: +1 DEX (Max 18). Same stipulation as above.
• Hardened Plate: +1 AC (Max 20). Costs 2000 GP per additional point, but can be improved all at once.
• Extra arm or mechanical tail: Gain an extra attack and the ability to carry an additional item in the hands. Also improves climbing. Costs 5000 GP to install.
• Lantern vision: Mounts a lantern in your eyes, allowing you to illuminate dark places without needing to hold a torch or lantern. Runs on batteries, each of which lasts 4 hours of continuous use. Costs 1000 GP to install.
• Elemental Shielding: Adds a coat of a chemical sealant that provides temporary immunity to some specific element, such as fire or extreme cold, acid, electricity, etc. This takes the form of temporary hit points that can only be drawn down by the target element. Take other kinds of damage as normal. The cost is 100 GP per temporary hit point.

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In mid-2016, I and one other D&D player formed a group whose membership fluctuated in the intervening years, though I'm happy to say that at least the two of us have remained constant fixtures and maintain our group even today. We started with a campaign of indeterminate length, with the promise that I would take up the second campaign at some future date. That date turned out to be much closer than I anticipated, and from November 2016 to January 2017, I furiously scribbled out a 47 page campaign setting for a world based on a handful of ideas and expanded on with a handful more. That world became Yer Shar, and it served as the setting for an epic campaign lasting nearly 3 years.

In its infancy as an idea, I started thinking about Yer Shar as one of four worlds, built on familiar elemental tropes. The structure of the world was inspired by one of the quests in the Neverwinter Nights computer game, as well as Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle. When I started thinking about it somewhere around 2008, my life was in flux, and the idea languished, starved of attention. Tellingly, I can't even find early drafts of what I wrote for it, though I'm sure I have a map somewhere.

I didn't start making connections again to the early material until late 2016. I was certain I wanted to do a sundered earth concept, and I pounded out 10 pages of draft material attempting to explain this cosmology. That original world was called Kalatoth (a suitably fantastic name, I guess), and it was almost a direct clone of the world of the Death Gate Cycle, with each of the spheres interconnected as a vast machine. But that's as far as I got with that line.

Eventually, what I settled on was this: Yer Shar is a simulated world predicated entirely on the exclusion of dragons, who in times before Yer Shar's creation were the literal oligarchs who consumed the world. Yer Shar was created as a bubble of safety against the dragons, who nevertheless sought entry by any means. This structure leaves plenty of open questions, but I sought to cover as many bases as possible with veiled literary and historical sources.

1. For the concept of the oligarchic dragons, and to make them truly monstrous, I relied on Elizabeth Sandifer's (Neoreaction A Basilisk) quotation of Nick Land (The Dark Enlightenment), who asserted that in the “approaching bionic horizon”, human mutation would give way to the truly monstrous. His go-to example was “face tentacles” (a nod to Lovecraft). But I posited that an aggressive miscegenation policy would seek to elevate the children of the most privileged so far beyond humanity as to make them unrecognizable. Dragons, then, were the oligarchs of the old world, going all-in on the monstrous as a means of preserving their bloodlines. In order to achieve and sustain their massive forms, they had to literally consume other people. In other words, the oligarchs would seek to make manifest the attitudes levied against them: if society calls them monsters, then they would be monsters.
2. Jean Baudrillard and Nick Bostrom provided the simulation basis for the world, especially taken as literally as possible. Everything from gods to magic became possible by harnessing simulated subsystems, often through collective belief. This was reinforced by a reliance on hypersigils (Grant Morrison, et al), whereby feedback loops between fiction and fact alter perceptible reality. In the case of Yer Shar, the largest such hypersigil is a multigenerational migration of people, ritually bolstering a now legendary defense against a half-remembered evil.
3. Simulation theory gives way easily to China Miéville’s literary definition of Jacques Derrida’s hauntology as “time out of joint, a present stained with the traces of the ghostly”, the undead past which refuses to die, or the unrealized/unrealizable future. In such a combination, nothing is lost, per se, even when time and life move on. This provides fertile ground for numerous forms of necromancy, but also facilitates other kinds of horrendous crimes perpetrated by absolute villains, as well as creative means of forgetting and being forgotten, truly and finally.
4. Another major strain of thought ran through a conflation of John Gray (The Silence of Animals, Straw Dogs, and others) with the cosmic horror of Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy against the Human Race). People who hewed to the conflated philosophy that resulted railed against the suffering of consciousness and promised an escape for those who were willing. Their methods included a form of astral travel facilitated by a plant known as Anti-Climacus, which was in fact Søren Kierkegaard's pen name for The Sickness Unto Death.
5. And finally, the original McGuffin of the world was a substance I called “albareum”, the concentrated essence of living things that facilitated large scale necromancy and which was found in abundance within dragon bones. Albareum is a Google Translation of “rosebud”, which was drawn from the film Citizen Kane.

The remaining development happened over the course of the campaign. I drew from as many historical sources as possible, trying to build regions that were coherent in both linguistic and cultural inspirations, though I took plenty of liberties along the way.

I have new ideas for Yer Shar and will likely continue working on it in different eras and more localized regions. It started as a generic fantasy world, but it continues to evolve.

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