In which huge in-roads are made globally towards the creeping malady known as ‘Hollows-fever’.

TL;DR: Books are in Australia; APAC fulfilment now imminent. Books for all other territories remain on boats and on track (presumably the track is wet?) for fulfilment to start this month.

This update is going to focus almost exclusively on fulfilment plans for getting physical objects into your hands. That’s because Logistics Alex wrote it. Producer Chant has locked himself away in a cupboard at the RRD fortress of solitude, but occasionally I hear him mumbling "ingesting the mechanics” or “startling display of genius!”... so I assume that further news on all things VTT is fast approaching.

I feel like we’ve been hunched over our desks scratching away at the fulfilment and freight plan on this project like an aether-addled Conclave researcher for the best part of this year. Chant and I squirrelling ourselves away in various meeting rooms discussing ‘carton marks’ and ‘shipping schedules’ like we’ve been plotting the fall of an Empire.

And now… well, things are coming to fruition, and finally the process of contacting all you  patient, wonderful people who share our frankly preposterous levels of excitement, to say ‘IT IS BEGINNING!’

Below is an overview for Backers in each location so you can skip to the section that matters to you:

Books are landed, freight is freighted, inspections are complete! 

We can confirm, we have a project.

Our fulfilment partners at Aetherworks have shared photos of the delivery, which occurred without drama or issue. We couldn’t ask for more.

This means that we can move ahead with some packaging tests. 

We’re asking them to do some extra special tests on a few combos of package types, just so we can be sure that your parcels will get to you in the best possible condition. That should take up a few days this week.

So by Friday evening, your time, we should be in a position to Lock Addresses for the Asia, Pacific, Australia area. You will receive an email from BackerKit reminding you to update your address (if necessary), and after 48hrs they will be locked.

Once we have them at the beginning of next week we’ll take some time to check order details and process them so that we can upload the orders to Aetherworks. They will then do a final check with you to confirm your delivery addresses.

And then the parcels will be packed, wrapped and sent on their way!

We have 5 Australia orders with the Tactical Map. This has been slightly delayed in arriving at the Australia warehouse. We will fulfil these orders as planned. If the item arrives before fulfilment occurs it will be included immediately. If not, we will send it in a second parcel as soon as we have it at the warehouse.

Our freight delivery is due to port this week. There was some slow moving around the Horn of Africa that added an extra day or two, but right now there’s a bay at Rotterdam port just waiting to open up for our beautiful big boat.

There will be about a week after that for the goods to be unloaded, inspected by customs, transferred through a few warehouses and freight networks. And eventually it will be with our EU fulfilment partners.

They will also be running some packaging checks, again to make sure that the goods that we ship you have the best opportunity to reach you in a great condition.

Current expectation is that we’ll be able to Lock Addresses for EU Backers (including EEA, and Near East) by the end of next week (16th October) - but this will be led by the customs process. There will be another update from me shortly before we send the BackerKit ‘Lock Addresses’ email.

USA boat is due to port in about one week. Once it lands on the East Coast there’s paperwork, assessments, a few trips on some trains, unloading etc. There’s so much Hollows coming to the USA that it’s actually an entire Container. Our freight forwarder has explained that this means processes happen in slightly different orders and locations… but it definitely means we don’t have to worry about goods being delayed by the paperwork of other businesses. Perfect. Very happy.

From past experience there will be about two-three weeks between goods arriving at the seaport, for unloading, railroads, unloading, customs inspections, and last mile delivery in the trucks to our warehouse.

Once Studio2 has the goods in hand, guess what… packaging checks. 

Making sure that the goods that we ship you have the best opportunity to reach you in a great condition, especially given how many miles some of our Canada, Hawaii & South American parcels will have to travel. Also, pretty sure there’s one postal worker in Chattanooga, TN who just hates our books. So we’ve got to wrap them safely to withstand the horrors of the real world.

Current expectation is that we’ll be able to Lock Addresses for North America Backers (including Canada, 50 states, and South America) by the end of the month (30th October) - but this will be led by the customs processes. There will be another update from me shortly before we send the BackerKit ‘Lock Addresses’ email.

UK boat is due to port in about 10 days. There will be paperwork & assessments, but the process should be pretty swift and the last mile distances mean things often more quickly once it’s out of the HMRC warehouses. 

It’ll soon be with our fulfilment partners at Peregrine Coast Press. We’ve gone with PCP after they did a fantastic job with our Royal Blood boxes earlier in the year, and they recently ran the UK fulfilment for Stonetop. So we trust them to handle heavy and boxed products with the care and attention they need. 

We have decided that PCP will handle all of the books and boxes, but if you have ordered pins or the coin these will be shipped separately from our usual UK warehouse. This will also help to protect the books from damage in transit.

Once PCP has the goods in hand, it’ll be time for (all together now)... packaging checks, that’s right. Safe books = happy backers. We want to make sure you get the goods in the condition you deserve, whilst also considering our obligations to reduce plastic and cardboard waste in the system. PCP will be working closely on this with us once they have the goods in hand to run tests.

Current expectation is that we’ll be able to Lock Addresses for UK Backers by the end of the month (30th October) - if we can go earlier we will. There will be another update from me shortly before we send the BackerKit ‘Lock Addresses’ email.

Maz here! I’ve snuck into Alex’s update to tell you that the Hollows community content licence is now live, so if - like the folks in the Hollow Marches server - you’ve already played so much Hollows you’ve started writing it yourself, you can now start to get it ready for publication. The licence is over here if you want it.

Also! That line up there about the VTT is accurate. Chant is currently chewing on the first iteration of the Foundry VTT system; we’ll be running some internal tests, as the team makes progress on getting all the bits of Grisham Priory loaded into the system. Expect more news on this soon.

Thank you for supporting this project, folks - it’s been a fantastically huge creative endeavour and we couldn’t do this without you. We’d love to see pictures of your parcels as they start to arrive - you can tag us on Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook, or pop links in the comments here. 

Or join our Discord server and chat to others about all things Hollows? 

As always, there’s a risk things will get dinged, damaged or lost in transit. 

If that happens to you, we want to put it right. If anything goes wrong with your parcel, get in touch with Jim or myself in the Customer Service mines by emailing [email protected].

Expect more communication in the next week or two,

xoxo

– Alex, and everyone at RR&D