Under Hollow Hills

There is a travelling 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, or owls. It travels the night world and the day world, fairyland and the living earth, and places otherwise, and no border can keep it.

You are its performers and its crew, its ringmaster, its clowns and tumblers, its lookouts and roustabouts, its planners and problem-solvers, its stars. You are its celebrated headliners and you are the fugitives who travel, opportunistically, with it. You are the mysteries it poses, the dramas it performs; you are music, juggling, acts of death-defying peril, pratfall comedy; you are moments of beauty and moments of loss. You are the circus and the circus is you. You have dangerous secrets to tell.

You go where you go and you perform where you choose. To you, a human child's birthday party in a vacant lot is the same as a command performance of the great Crowned Heads of Fairyland. (And more like stuffed heads, saith the Hob.)

Wherever you perform, you change: you change the seasons, you change the fortunes of those you perform for, you open their eyes, you awaken their hearts, you lull them to sleep. You change yourselves. This is the game: we change.

Step up, step up. Come great, come small, come revellers all!

---

Under Hollow Hills is a PbtA game of a travelling fairy circus, getting into situations and changing them. The overall arc of each stop by the circus is to find the lay of the land, rekindle or dampen old friendships or enmities, and finally put on a performance for the people at the stop.

The focus is on forming connections with the people you meet. As with most PbtA games, there's no set plot or outcome for any particular performance or tour: people add to the conversation as they see fit and the conversation takes the game where it will.