The Holloway
- sandbox
- Difficulty: beginner
- coming soon
- Game Systems: Combat (Coming Soon), Transformation (In Development), Dynamic Portraits (Live), Travel Hubs (Live), Party Members (Live), NPC Possession (Live)
- Horror
- Monster
- Mature
- Power-Fantasy
- Sandbox
- Vampire
A glass-and-steel hotel off I-95 between DC and New York, buried in a January snowstorm. Forty-one strangers trapped till dawn - staff, snowed-in guests, one hidden hunter who suspects what came in with them. Choose what you are: vampire who hollows lovers a memory at a time, beast that chases and tears, demon whose deals close before the mark notices, elder thing who unmakes minds. Six floors. Over a hundred rooms. One long night. Feed. Seduce. Deal. Unmake. The night is yours.
The Holloway
A Snowed-In Hotel on I-95
The Holloway is a six-storey glass-and-steel hotel sitting on a parcel between an off-ramp of I-95 and a frontage road, somewhere between Washington DC and New York. Anonymous luxury - the kind of building no traveller remembers afterwards because nothing about it is meant to be remembered.
Tonight is a Tuesday in the second week of January. The dead month, post-holidays, the lowest-affect weeknight of the year. It started snowing in the late afternoon and hasn't stopped. By full dark the parking-lot lights are halos in the falling white, the highway outside is moving at twenty miles an hour, and the next exit with a hotel is over an hour away in good weather.
The doors aren't locked. The parking lot is buried. No one is leaving until the snow stops, and the snow is not going to stop tonight.
The Cast
Forty-one people are in the building tonight. Staff working a graveyard Tuesday they had no reason to expect would matter. Snowed-in guests who never planned to stop here - a first-grade teacher driving away from a wedding she's not sure she wants, a corporate lawyer drinking alone in the bar after the worst week of her career, a former coach holding a club soda at the rail like both hands need it, a man two nights into a stay under a name that isn't his. None of them know each other. Each has their own private reason for being on the road tonight. They locked the doors against the cold and the dark and told themselves they were safe.
They were wrong.
You Came in With Them
You came in after the snow started, after full dark. Some of you went through the front doors and took a keycard from a clerk who couldn't quite meet your eyes. Some of you came in another way.
What you are decides what tonight is.
A vampire who hollows lovers out a memory at a time and keeps the husk close, calling it a thrall. A beast who carries a second body inside the first and lets it out when the building goes quiet, to chase and catch and tear. A demon who works in conversation - the small offer, the small acceptance, the slightly larger one, the moment the mark realises the cost was bigger than they thought and signs anyway. Or an elder thing, whose presence in a room takes a small concept out of someone's head, and the someone does not know what they have lost.
Each appetite has its own craft. Each craft has its own night.
One of Them is a Hunter
Somewhere in the prey pool tonight is one guest who isn't a guest. They came here for you. They have what it takes to end your night permanently if you make the wrong move at the wrong moment. They are slow, careful, and need to confirm what you are before they act. The night may be long enough that they never act at all - or you may notice them noticing you, and decide what to do about it.
A Long Night Is Yours
The night has no clock and no hard endpoint. It lasts as long as you want it to last. Spend it on the ones who catch you - the woman at the pool at 1 AM, the recent graduate texting her best friend through the door, the British widower watching the lobby with a folded newspaper. Feed. Seduce. Tempt. Corrupt. Hollow out a marriage. Make a good person agree to something they'll spend the rest of their life regretting. Sit in a chair across the lobby from someone whose mind is the wrong shape for you to be near, and watch what happens. Or wait until the building goes quiet and let what's inside you out into the corridors.
The snow is the gift. The building is yours. Choose your nature. The night is long.