the Service1:1
The Service
Discipline, clean execution, results that hold up in a report.
- Plan the operation before the operation plans you.
- A clean result is a professional result.
- See first, act second, never the reverse.
Hallowbound
Universe
Everything the opening chapters will tell you, and nothing they will not. The rest is worth meeting in the game.
Start here
The world in five sentences
That is the whole of it. Everything else you learn from a room, a label, a piece of gear, or something a character does without stopping to explain it.
- 01
The Bound carry an inherited essence in the blood, and every piece of magic in the world comes out of it.
- 02
Humans are born without it, so they built tools instead, then engines, then weapons, and they have taken most of the map doing it.
- 03
The Bound cannot replace their own numbers fast enough to hold ground, so they take human children and graft the essence into them with the rite.
- 04
A child who has been through the rite keeps the shape of their body and loses almost everything of who they were.
- 05
Human laboratories now run the mirror of the same act, taking children of the Bound and drawing the essence back out to power human equipment, and neither side calls its own version a crime.
- 04CharactersWho they are, who they were before, and what each of them is to the others.
- 03The worldEvery place in this story exists twice: as it was, and as it is now.
- 02FactionsThe two sides of a war, neither of which describes itself as the wrong one.
- 03ChaptersThe opening, and nothing past it. The rest is written and it is staying off here.
- 10GlossaryEvery word the game uses and never stops to explain, because nobody in it lectures anybody.
The world
Each place, twice
Every location in the game is built at two time periods, fifteen years apart. You are meant to recognize the second one.
- The Undercity, 202716:9
The Undercity
Home, built up instead of out.
- Then / 2012
- Firelight, stone, and the ordinary business of a home.
- Now / 2027
- The same home, fifteen years further into a war it did not start.
- The Village, 202716:9
The Village
Two names for the same ground, fifteen years apart.
- Then / 2012
- A dirt path, a working farm, and pink light through the canopy at dusk.
- Now / 2027
- A wall follows the old fence line, and one roof still remembers what it used to be.
- The Installation, 202716:9
The Installation
Ordinary, on purpose.
- Then / 2012
- The ground the compound now stands on, before any of it was here.
- Now / 2027
- Clean, quiet, and fully staffed. Nothing about it looks like what it is.
Factions
Two sides, both certain
Written in their own framing, the way each of them would put it to a new arrival.
the Bound1:1
The Bound
A people who continue by taking.
- Cubs eat first. Not as a kindness. As the order.
- A brought one is raised, not marked.
- Read the near before you put a foot in the room.
Characters
The people it happens to
The center of it
The hand game
A counting game two children made up in a house that does not exist anymore.
It is a mechanic, not a symbol. Two players perform it, and the prologue teaches it before there is any combat to attach it to. Half of it is written down on this site. Half of it is not.
ChaptersWhere it startsOnly the opening is listed. The later chapters are written and they are staying off this site, because finding them yourself is the point.GlossaryWords the game usesThe world arrives through rooms, gear and things people do without explaining them. When you want the explanation anyway, it is here.
All of it is the ground two children were taken from.