Two New Game Books Are Due From Hollow Press This Month
Brad Hock and Andrea Laperni extend the Italian publisher’s catalog of printed play, timed to Lucca Comics & Games.
Hollow Press, the Italian publisher behind Plastiboo's Vermis books, has previewed two new titles due at the end of October. Big Sally: Lake Emulator is a "lore game book" by Brad Hock, announced in a four-image preview on Oct. 21. What Lies Here Is Not a Gift, by Andrea Laperni, is billed as a "cartography investigation game" in a preview posted Oct. 6. Neither is listed in the Hollow Press shop yet, and the press has not given prices or exact dates.
The Big Sally pages mix photo collage and sculpted clay figures: a frog-headed tower standing in a playground, a corridor walled with pale masks, and a text panel repeating "Come to the Sally World." Hock, who posts as bardo.bread, previously wrote How to Bake a Breadling for the press, a "cookbook" framed as the reprint of a document found in a sidewalk library box in 1973.
Laperni's preview is drawn in graphite: dense conifer forests, a rocky outcrop and trees topped with branching, antler-like structures. The announcement does not say whether What Lies Here Is Not a Gift is a printed game book, a tabletop game or software.
Hollow Press files its lore game books as guides to games that were never made. Its shop describes Vermis I as "an official guide of a game that doesn't exist," and the line now includes The Salamander King's Mock Soul and Nostalgia Nest. The press will run a games booth at Lucca Comics & Games, which takes place Oct. 28 to Nov. 1 in Lucca, Italy. In September, Killscreen covered John Walsh's Hollow Press hardcover of 21 fake games.
For more reading, see Hollow Press's lore game book catalog, the Hermetic Library on How to Bake a Breadling and Hollow Press on Wikipedia.
Preview pages from Big Sally: Lake Emulator (top row) and What Lies Here Is Not a Gift (bottom row). Images: Hollow Press.
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