// THE PREMISE
What this world is
Meridian City is a vast rust-and-glass metropolis on a polluted bay where, eleven years ago, an event the world calls the Bloom changed everything. A cascade of strange energy washed over the city for ninety seconds, and afterward a small fraction of those it touched began to manifest powers - the Altered. The city has spent a decade learning to live with them. You are a newly-Altered ordinary person whose power has only just woken, and who now has to decide what kind of person it makes you.
This is an origin story first: the dizzy terror and thrill of discovering what you can do, the first clumsy attempts to use it, the secret identity, the choice between hiding, helping, and taking. Director Vivian Crane's Halcyon Bureau registers, licenses, and quietly controls the Altered, and her Sentinel commander Silas Vance hunts the unregistered with power-suppression tech and does not much care about the difference between a villain and a frightened kid. Captain Atlas leads the Vanguard, the city's corporate-sponsored celebrity heroes. Damien Voss - the crime-lord called Kingmaker - runs the Undertow, the criminal underworld of rogue Altered, and offers freedom, money, and a family to powered people the system would cage. And Sister Anya's Children of the Bloom worship the energy as a god and pray for it to come again.
The uneasy peace is cracking. The Bureau is pushing a hard new registration law, the Undertow is recruiting the newly-Altered faster than the heroes can reach them, and there are signs the Bloom was not a one-time event. You, freshly powered and unregistered, are exactly who everyone wants: the Vanguard to recruit, the Bureau to register, the Undertow to buy, the cult to claim. What you become - hero, villain, vigilante, or something the city has no name for yet - is the story.
// PLAY PROFILE
What this world plays like
Your first ten turns are the terror and thrill of a power you can barely control. You hide what you are, you test it in an alley, you save someone or you level a wall doing it. The city is already deciding what your name means.
By turn fifty your standing with the Halcyon Bureau, the Vanguard, the Undertow, and the Children of the Bloom is tracked as real attitude, and the choice you made on turn twelve - to register, to run, to take Kingmaker's hand - has closed some doors and opened others. The Sentinel you slipped on turn nine has your face on file. A reputation, heroic or infamous, is forming in the headlines.
By turn one hundred the registration war is breaking open and the question of a second Bloom is no longer rumour. Whoever you saved, whoever you crossed, whatever you became, Meridian City keeps the account - and a symbol, once made, cannot be unmade.
Hollow City does not reset between sessions. Close the tab. The Bloom site still hums at the city's heart.
// FACTIONS IN MOTION
Principal factions
The iron-fisted federal agency tasked with monitoring, registering, and neutralizing all Altered activity in Meridian City. The Bureau wields absolute extra-judicial authority, viewing the Altered not as people but as unstable weapons to be controlled or dismantled. Their public mission is safety; their secret mission is to regain control of the energy they unwittingly unleashed.
A team of city-sanctioned, corporate-sponsored Altered who serve as Meridian's celebrity heroes and first responders. Polished by a relentless PR machine, they represent the acceptable face of superhuman power, but live under the constant surveillance and strict command of the Halcyon Bureau. They are symbols of hope to some, and collaborators to others.
A decentralized criminal network that thrives in the city's shadows, managing the black market for illicit tech, unregistered Altered services, and new identities. Operating from the flooded ruins of the Sump, they use the untraceable cryptocurrency 'Nix' to build a kingdom of outcasts and dissidents. They are the only real lifeline for an Unregistered Altered, but their help always comes at a steep price.
A secretive doomsday cult that worships the Bloom energy as a sentient, divine entity. They believe the Altered are prophets and that the biological cost of their powers is a form of sacred communion. Operating from the condemned zone around the Scar, their ultimate goal is to trigger a 'Second Bloom' to complete humanity's violent evolution.
// KEY FIGURES
People you'll meet
// SITES OF RECORD
Places that matter
A district of contrasts, where manicured corporate parks and sprawling server farms abut the polluted bay. Beneath the sterile surface lies the Sump, a flooded, forgotten industrial under-level that has become the domain of the desperate and the criminal.
The vast, sprawling residential and commercial heart of Meridian. A sea of mid-rise apartments, strip malls, and public parks that represents the city's rapidly shrinking middle class. It's a place of quiet desperation and simmering resentment.
This residential district was Ground Zero for the Bloom. At its heart is the Bloom Memorial, a massive, glass-walled crater surrounded by a permanent Exclusion Zone. The surrounding neighborhoods are a mix of abandoned, crumbling buildings and low-income housing for those who couldn't afford to leave.
A working-class district of dense residential blocks and public parks built around Meridian's aging harbor. The air smells of salt, rust, and ozone. It's a community of dockworkers, fishers, and families who have been here for generations.
Perched on the city's highest elevations, this district is a collection of luxury high-rise condos and secure data facilities, all with pristine air and commanding views. It is an island of extreme wealth, physically and culturally detached from the city below.
The glittering heart of Meridian City, a forest of corporate skyscrapers and data farms under constant electronic surveillance. By day it's a river of commerce; by night, an empty, windswept canyon of glass and light, patrolled by private security and MCPD.
// LIVE TURN
A real turn from this world
Damien Voss watches you from behind the desk like he already owns the answer. "The Bureau will put a tag in your neck and a file with your name on it the day they find you," Kingmaker says. "I'm offering the opposite of that. A place. People like you. Nobody asking you to register what God gave you." He slides a phone across the desk. "Or walk out and let Silas Vance's Sentinels find you first. Your call. It always is."
Somewhere across the city, Captain Atlas is on a billboard, smiling, sponsored, asking you to do the right thing.
Standing with the Undertow: offered. The choice is logged. In Meridian City, the first side you take is the one everyone else remembers.
// SYSTEM RATIONALE
Why Hollow City holds up over a long campaign
Most AI roleplay tools are built around a single session. They start to fall apart at hour ten and are barely playable at hour fifty. Hollow City doesn't, because the world isn't living in a chat history - it's living in a database.
Mechanical truth in a real database. Coins, inventory, NPCs, factions, locations, properties - all in real database rows. The narrator describes around the database; the database is what's true. By turn 500, your business ledger still balances and your apprentices still have the names you gave them.
Long memory that doesn't fade. The hundredth turn still knows what happened in chapter two. Old threads stay intact instead of blurring into vague backstory.
The right detail, when it matters. A promise you made 800 turns ago resurfaces at exactly the moment it counts. The world kept the receipt.
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