The Hollow Country is the second volume in Frontier Histories, the sourcebook line for Children of New Rome - a tabletop roleplaying game of duty, faith, and conscience on the long Byzantine frontier.
Cappadocia, 838. The swallows have come back to the same eaves they came back to a thousand years ago. The salt is moving on the white roads. The village is preparing to go down into the rock for the winter. Somewhere a hundred miles west, the caliph's army is on the march, and not one Cappadocian in ten will see them.
This is a sandbox sourcebook that treats the land itself as the protagonist. The calendar is the dungeon. The rooms are the months. The campaign in Cappadocia is not a sequence of quests but a sequence of seasons, in a country built to be ridden through without drawing a sword.
Inside you will find:
• a year-long calendar campaign keyed to the return of the swallows, the salt caravans of October, and the descent into the rock at the first hard frost;
• Caesarea and Tyana as full sourcebook cities - markets, monasteries, gossip, and the cathedral school's least patient grandmother;
• the painted valleys, the underground cities, the white roads, the cave-church feast days, and the villages the country quietly knows are unlucky;
• Cappadocian voices in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Hittite, Luwian, and Karamanlidika - every quote chosen because its author stood on this ground;
• a folk-tale appendix, a child's-eye vignette, three free-standing stories, and a bench of familiar local faces;
• and a deliberately short, deliberately gentle first-session guide so a GM who has never run an RPG before can walk a table into the country on the first evening and know how to leave them there.
A sourcebook for tables who want to know what it felt like to live there - not what happened, but what happened slowly. For the cave-dwellers, and for those who travel the white roads in October still.
