Tabletop Game / The Unofficial Hollow Knight RPG

The Unofficial Hollow Knight RPG is a fan-made, unofficial Tabletop RPG based on the world of Hollow Knight. It utilizes a d6 dice pool system, and has a very versatile character creation system that allows players to combine a variety of different physical traits to simulate playing as practically any kind of arthropod imaginable.

Due to the constraints of Hollow Knight's setting of Hallownest, the creators of the RPG have also made an original setting called Oakshade, meant to serve as a world more conducive to tabletop RPG adventures.

It can be downloaded at itch.io here.

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Tropes for the system in general

• Anti-Magic: Bugs with the Spiral Mark trait are able to partially absorb incoming hostile magic, and equipment such as shields with the Reflective modifier or armor with the Lustrous modifier also allow this.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: Any character with the Stinger and Prehensile Tail traits has one of these.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: The Scythe Arms trait, which is exactly what it sounds like; making two of the character's arms end in razor-sharp blades.
• Bloody Murder:
  • The Bloodboil spell causes blood-soaked weapons to burst into flame, making those weapons deal bonus fire damage. It can also be cast directly on a creature to damage them if they are also covered in blood.
  • The Toxic Blood trait makes the bug's blood caustic, spraying out at any enemy that damages them.
• Booze-Based Buff: Alcohol is considered a type of Potion, and each kind of drink comes with its own effects. They all come with the drawback of lowering the user's Grace, Insight, or both, but restore the drinker's Belly as well as granting a benefit specific to each kind of drink.
• Cast from Calories: The Energize spell is a slightly odd example of this as while it does cost Belly to work, it doesn't need to be the caster's — any nearby target, including enemies or the target of the spell's beneficial effects, can be chosen as the source, meaning that it costs other people calories when the caster uses it.
• Cast from Hit Points: The Path of the Maw and Path of the Nightmare both allow the player to expend Hearts, the former able to use it in place of Stamina while the latter can use it in place of Soul.
• Character Class System: Referred to as "Paths," each class has three ranks that a bug can take, and characters are fully able to mix and match different Paths as they increase in power. They are divided into Martial and Mystic Paths, the former granting an additional Stamina for each rank and the latter granting an additional Soul and access to spells unique to that Path.
  • Path of the Nail: The well-rounded "Warrior" class. The Path's abilities grant Boring, but Practical bonuses to combat, allowing them to hit more often and more reliably.
  • Path of the Needle: Bugs who follow this Path are agile warriors, dashing around the battlefield and dodging away from enemy attacks.
  • Path of the Tusk: Tuskbugs focus on the use of heavy weapons, battering enemies into submission with relentless force.
  • Path of the Hook: The Rogue, focusing on traps and underhanded tactics.
  • Path of the Maw: A Path favoring overwhelming aggression and the use of natural weapons.
  • Path of the Shell: The Tank, focusing on defense and keeping enemies from moving away from them.
  • Path of the Sling: The Path for long-distance fighters, granting various bonuses to the use of ranged weapons.
  • Path of the Flask: This Path grants the bug skill with the mixture and application of flasks, throwing out chemical mixtures to heal or harm.
  • Path of the Spire: The "purest" Mage of the Mystic Paths, granting bonuses to all spellcasting and a very generalist choice of spells, including support, utility, and damage.
  • Path of the Cloak: An extremely mobile Path, allowing a bug to move around the battlefield with ease and granting them spells that increases this capability even further, including Teleportation.
  • Path of the Dream: This Path allows the bug to harness the powers of mind and memory, granting them clairvoyance, the ability to communicate with spirits, and spells that allow them to weave illusions and peer into the minds of others.
  • Path of the Nightmare: A more sinister counterpart to the Path of Dream, allowing a bug to draw power from death and granting them spells that summon flames and manipulate the mind.
  • Path of the Bloom: The White Mage, with abilities themed around nature and healing and spells almost entirely devoted to supporting their allies.
  • Path of the Thorn: This path focuses more on the nastier parts of nature, granting the bug skill with poisons and spells that allow them to conjure thorns and poisons.
  • Path of the Dust: The Necromancer, able to turn dead bugs into Husks under their control and use spells that inflict pain, death, and madness.
• Combat Tentacles: The Tentacle trait gives a bug one of these, able to attack and grapple enemies.
• Counterspell/Dispel Magic: The Dispel Arcana is available to bugs on the Path of the Spire, and allows the caster to dispel magical effects or cast it as a reaction to counter another Arcana. It only works on weak spells by default, but the caster is able to counter more powerful spells by spending more Soul when they cast Dispel.
• Critical Status Buff: Just like in the video game, the Fury of the Fallen charm increases the character's damage when they are reduced to one heart.
• Cute Clumsy Girl: A non-gendered example. The Clumsy trait provides a small increase to the character's Cute score, presumably in reference to this trope.
• Cute Little Fangs: Players can choose for the Venomous Bite trait to also give their bug a small bonus to their Cute score, which Word of God explains is supposed to be because of this trope.
• Damage Reduction: Characters struck by an attack can roll a number of dice equal to their Shell score to absorb an amount of damage equal to the successes rolled. Armor increases the number of dice rolled, and heavier armors provide a flat damage reduction as well. Most bugs aren't able to soak magical damage, but some special equipment like Lustrous armor or the Spiral Mark trait allow them to do so.
• Desperation Attack: The Brutal Instinct weapon art allows a bug to add the difference between their maximum Hearts and current Hearts as damage to their next attack, as well as adding bonus dice to the attack roll equal to the number of status conditions and Damage Over Time effects that currently affect them. Immediately after making this attack, the bug falls unconscious until the end of the Scene.
• Disability Superpower: Characters with the Blind trait can choose the Scent or Tremorsense traits without having them count against their maximum number of traits, allowing them some form of vision despite their disability. Of course, since your character is a bug whose exact species is up to the player, this might instead be a case of them simply being a member of a species that naturally uses these senses instead of sight rather than them actually being disabled.
• Dream Stealer: The Dream Eater spell lets the caster consume the dreams of a sleeping bug, giving the target horrible nightmares of their greatest fear that prevent it from benefiting from its rest but fully restoring the caster's Heart and Soul.
• Dream Walker: The Speak With Dreams spell allows a bug to enter the dreams of a sleeping creature. After the fact, the target doesn't fully remember what happened in the dream and believes that anything they were convinced of in the dream was actually their own idea.
• Fantastic Medicinal Bodily Product: Bugs with the Blood of the Ancients Trait have blood with miraculous healing properties, allowing the bug to sacrifice one Heart in order to let another bug drink their blood, giving the drinker one Lifeblood Heart. The Primal Ichor trait upgrades this so that it instead grants the drinker two Lifeblood Hearts, heals attribute damage, and clears status conditions and Damage Over Time effects.
• Fertile Feet: Small plants constantly sprout in the footsteps of bugs on the Path of Bloom, giving them free access to small quantities of edible plant matter.
• Green Thumb: The Paths of Bloom and Thorn both grant the bug power to summon plant life. The former can create flowers, pollen, seeds, and vines that aid allies and hamper foes, while the latter can manifest sharp thorns.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Something of a trope In-Universe. A character with the Herbivore trait gains a small bonus to their Cute score, making them better at social interactions where they need to appear friendly and non-threatening. This doesn't necessarily mean that the character is friendly or non-threatening, just that they're more easily perceived as such by others than they would be if they ate meat.
• Hooks and Crooks: Hooks are one of the types of melee weapon, and are associated with sneaky, underhanded tactics.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Certain traits allow a bug to expend Belly to gain some other benefit, such as the Regeneration trait spending Belly to regain Hearts, or the Large Stomach trait allowing them to spend Belly in place of Stamina. The Devourer trait doesn't make a bug spend Belly, but instead allows them to regain a point of Heart, Soul, or Stamina when they consume enough flesh or blood from sapient bugs, as well as letting them eat corpses very quickly. This is generally Averted though, as while having a full stomach causes a bug to heal faster when they rest, the aforementioned traits are needed to have any kind of instant benefit from food.
• Hypnotic Eyes: The Enrapture spell causes a target to fall into a trance, unable to move or act for as long as the caster maintains eye contact. Spending a point of Essence allows the spell to be cast through song instead.
• Interrogating the Dead: The Speak With Dreams spell allows a bug to form an incorporeal pseudo-spirit from the residual memories of a dead bug, capable of speaking and answering questions.
• I See Dead People: The first rank of the Path of the Dream allows a bug to see and converse with spirits.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields allow the bug wielding them to parry incoming attacks, making a Might roll against an incoming attack in order to negate it. The shield's quality is also added to this roll, meaning that even characters with fairly low Might and high Grace will find a Parry to be a more reliable defense than a Dodge.
• Magic Knight: Something of a necessity; the fact that the most reliable way to generate Soul for spellcasting is to attack enemies in melee means that even a healing and support-focused bug is going to have to wade into combat sooner or later, so magic-focused characters are likely to be at least passable in a fight. There's also nothing stopping a player from taking ranks in both Martial and Mystic paths, or making a spellcasting-focused character with high Shell and Hearts who wears heavy armor.
• Magic Is Mental: Insight is the stat used for most spellcasting, described as representing the bug's perceptiveness and intellect.
• Magic Missile: The Missile spell, which simply deals a small amount of damage to a target without requiring any sort of attack roll.
• Magic Staff: A staff can be used as a focus for storing spells, and can be affixed with an ornament that allows the wielder to alter the Difficulty of a spell by 1 point without increasing the cost of casting the spell, as long as the Ornament is aligned to the same Mystic Path that the spell belongs to.
• Magic Wand: One of the foci that can be used to store spells is the wand. It counts as a 1-damage ranged weapon and allows the wielder to use Grace for spellcasting in place of Insight.
• Mana: Called "Soul," just like in Hollow Knight. Soul can be regained by resting, as well as by striking enemies with a melee weapon, and a few Mystic paths add other more situational methods to regain it.
• Master Poisoner: The Path of the Thorn focuses on crafting poison, with even most of their spells being focused on applying and empowering poisons.
• Me's a Crowd: The Swarm spell allows the caster to split into a number of smaller versions of themself, all able to act independently of one another and each possessing a portion of the caster's resource pools. Overlaps with One to Million to One, as the caster can choose to cast it as a reaction to taking damage, negating that damage at the cost of essence.
• Mind-Control Music: The Enrapture spell typically works through eye contact, but spending a point of Essence allows the spell to be cast through song instead. This allows the spell to affect creatures who use senses other than vision such as scent or tremorsense, increases the spell's range, and (if the caster is actually good at singing) makes the effect harder to resist.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Due to the flexibility of the game's character creation, it is full possible to make a bug with physical traits from all sorts of different arthropods, such as a bug with no shell, several dozen legs, a scorpion's tail, wings, and the ability to spin webs.
• Morph Weapon: The Trick modifier can be put on a weapon or shield, allowing the wielder to transform it into another specific weapon and back again.
• Necromancer: The Path of Dust allows a bug to create and control Husks.
• No Ontological Inertia: One of the possible durations for a spell is "lifetime," which means that the spell fades only when the caster is killed.
• The Nose Knows: The Scent trait allows a bug to "see" their surroundings via scent, though this sense can still be "blinded" by especially strong odors.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: Most two-handed weapons can be wielded with just one hand by any bug with at least 5 Might or the Bug of Burden trait, though some weapons are so unwieldy that they always need two hands to wield no matter what.
• Point Build System: At character creation the players can choose from a variety of traits, both physical ones (such as flight, extra legs, or blindness) and mental ones (such as a personality trait), and even a few magical traits. Positive traits increase the character's Hunger score (up to a maximum depending on the bug's size), while negative ones decrease the bug's Hunger. Having a higher Hunger causes the bug to require more food with each rest, and to starve more quickly if they are unable to eat.
• Poisonous Person: Any bug with the Poisonous trait inflicts a damaging status effect on any enemy that attacks them with a bite attack. The bug's corpse also cannot be eaten without damaging the one eating it.
• Shear Menace: Scissor blades are one-handed weapons that can be dual-wielded or linked together to form a pair of scissors which functionally allows you to hit the enemy with both blades at once. Notably a single Scissor counts as both a Nail and a Hook for the purposes of weapon arts, while a linked pair of scissors is in the Needle and Tusk categories, meaning that a scissor-wielding character has access to a wide variety of weapon arts.
• Shield Bash: A shield can be used as a melee weapon, but unless it has the Balanced modifier it has low damage and no bonuses to the attack roll from its quality, so it's not recommended. Even with the Balanced modifier it's inferior to an actual weapon, but being able to wield both a shield and a passable offense in the same hand can be useful.
• Suffer the Slings: Slings are the main type of ranged weapon, though the "sling" category also includes throwing weapons such as darts and boomerangs.
• Touch the Intangible: Spirits cannot normally be touched or harmed by the living, but there are a few exceptions. A weapon with the Dreamforged modifier works just as well on spirits as it does on physical objects, while a Dreamnail can only harm spirits. The Semicorporeality spell also allows a character to harm spirits with normal weapons by partly entering the Dream.
• The Undead: Husks are the shells of bugs filled with sand and dust, animated with magic. They're typically mcreated by Dust mages, though can also be created when a bug who suffers from the the Dust Curse dies of natural causes or starvation. They have no Hearts, only Shell, and take Shell damage when they would lose Hearts. They can also be "killed" by reducing their Soul score to 0, removing the magic that animates them.
• Vampiric Draining: Any character with the Bloodsucker trait is able to drain blood from other creatures in order to feed themselves. This is useful for stretching out the party's food supplies and getting around disadvantages from the Carnivore and Herbivore traits - even if there's no food that the bloodsucker can eat, they can just drain nutrients from their allies who don't have such restrictions on their diet.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: Any weapon with the Beast-Slaying modifier deals a flat 2 bonus damage to feral bugs.
• White Mage: The Path of Bloom grants a bug magical abilities to heal and defend their allies, and is notable for being the only Path that doesn't grant any abilities that can deal damage. Though this ends up being somewhat subverted by the fact that the most reliable way to generate Soul for spellcasting is to attack enemies in melee, so even a healing and support-focused bug is going to have to wade into combat sooner or later.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: Food is a fairly major gameplay mechanic, with beneficial traits in the game's Point Build System making your character require more food when you rest and several traits and Paths allowing characters to expend Belly for some other benefit.

Tropes for the setting of Oakshade

• Adventure-Friendly World: The entire point of the setting is to provide a world more suited to TTRPG adventures than Hallownest. The centerpiece is a massive tree inhabited by numerous cultures from enigmatic nomads to ruthless autocrats with a Great Big Library of Everything in its leaves and an Eldritch Location beneath its roots; while the land beyond the Great Oak has pirates, spirits, witches, monsters, and mysteries aplenty. Not to mention that the region has been thrown into instability due to a desperate war for survival against an Evil Overlord and his armies of twisted Battle Thralls, adding even more chaos and conflict in which adventures might take place both in the Oak and outside of it.
• Alien Sky: The setting's "sun" is described as following unknowable patterns rather than any kind of regular cycle.
• Amicable Ants: The ants of the Kingdom of Sidhean were a meritocratic people who revered diligence, hard work, and self-improvement, and close allies to Oakshade. Even now that their lands have been blighted and conquered by the forces of the Sandwyrm, the survivors have reorganized into a ferocious resistance movement rather than give up to the Lord of Dust.
• Battle Thralls: The Lord of Dust has a habit of taking a single species from each kingdom he conquers, typically against their will. The scorpions are the exception to this, as they chose to serve him.
  • The Locusts were once a peaceful and rustic society of crickets, twisted into a ravenous swarm by the Lord of Dust's foul magic.
  • The Cicadas were enslaved by the Lord of Dust for their hibernation, as it meant that they could sustain themselves without food for the long spans between invasions.
  • Though they have not been added to his ranks yet, the Lord of Dust has his eyes set on enslaving the ants as a force of diligent and loyal workers to support his army.
• Black Magic: Dust magic is this. Aside from being this setting's equivalent of Necromancy, dedicated to inflicting pain, hunger, and undeath, it also originates from the Lord of Dust and causes the wielder to slowly turn evil. Just knowing it transformed the peaceful and pastoral crickets into the endlessly ravenous locusts, and it's the reason why his Battle Thralls are so loyal - they're just as twisted and evil as he is.
• Eldritch Location: The Abyssal Expanse is a massive cavern far beneath the Tree's roots, filled with a sea of liquid Void and inhabited by mysterious and inscrutable beings.
• Emotion Eater: Spirits that feed on emotion naturally accumulate in the Bayou for reasons unclear, and are divided into the So'Raseo, Dream spirits that eat positive emotions, and the En'Raseo, Nightmare spirits that eat negative emotions. The former are considered malignant entities often blamed for woes such as a sudden loss of passion in a relationship or lack of motivation, while the latter are summoned by witch doctors to relieve bugs of things like anxiety and depression.
• Furry Confusion: Naturally for a setting where most of the people and animals are bugs, you can run into this on occasion. As an example, Oakshade has a species of unintelligent beetle used as beasts of burden while also having clans of sapient beetles.
• Great Big Library of Everything: The Living Library consists of pretty much the entire canopy of the Great Oak, with the writings within being inscribed on the tree's leaves. It's so big that finding a particular piece of writing typically requires several days of travel and the aid of a dedicated ranger.
• Hive Mind: The fungal creatures at the depths of the Great Oak's roots all share a single consciousness, referred to as the "micomind." This consciousness is as old as the Oak and possesses perfect memory but is so alien that it's impossible to learn anything from it without the use of Dream magic, and even that doesn't help much.
• Horror Hunger: The Lord of Dust's influence on the peaceful and pastoral crickets transformed them into the locusts, endlessly ravenous horrors who never stop eating. They never die of old age, as they simply grow larger and larger with age until they physically cannot find enough food to sustain themselves.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Pretty much any location related to the Lord of Dust. The place where the Sandwyrm shed its shell is called the Tumor of Dustbarrow and the cactus he currently uses as a base of operations is called the Throne of Thorns, while the lands he conquered were all renamed to something suitably sinister; what was once the bountiful fields where the grasshoppers lived is now the Sallow Garden, the bamboo forest of the cicadas is now the Shattered Forest, and the highlands of the ants is now the Ashen Moor.
• Insect Queen: The leader of the Vespine Authority holds the title of High Queen while individual cities and provinces are ruled by Low Queens, who are also called Overseers. The society of the ants has mostly collapsed following the Sandwyrm's conquest of their lands, but they seem to have had a similar system. The bees were a subversion, as while they did have "Queens," the Apidaen Union was actually a democracy where the Queens only acted as temporary leaders in times of crisis.
• La Résistance: Though the Kingdom of Sidhean has fallen to the Lord of Dust, the ants haven't given up the fight. What's left of them has reorganized into a literally underground resistance movement, hiding in a network of tunnels to shelter themselves from the searing sunlight as they work to undermine their conquerors.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Dragonflies, also known as Lesser Wyrms, are massive, flying, predatory bugs possessing great speed and an electric Breath Weapon.
• Parasites Are Evil: This trope is Downplayed with the ticks and fleas, who are portrayed as mostly being made up of criminals who use trickery and misdirection to pull one over on their opponents. This is implied to be due to their size rather than their parasitism though, as they need to use underhanded tactics to make up for just how much smaller they are than all of the other bugs. It's worth noting that the other two bloodsuckers, leeches and mosquitos, are painted in a fairly positive light.
• The Perfectionist: The Mantid Clans' hat. They believe in seeking perfection in everything, refusing to do almost anything publicly until it can be done flawlessly. This applies to nearly everything they do from combat to crafts, to the point that most mantises will even refuse to lie as they consider it imperfect speech.
• Politically-Active Princess: "Princess" is the title for any of the Overseers that the High Queen deems worthy of becoming part of the line of succession, and as such any wasp who holds the title of princess has already proven herself a competent ruler.
• Proud Warrior Race: Several.
  • The Wasps are renowned for their ferocity in combat and pride as warriors, and it is generally agreed that Oakshade would be in a far worse state than it already is if not for their skill and cleverness in defending it.
  • The culture of the Beetle Clans is oddly described as being similar to professional wrestling, of all things, right down to having Faces and Heels. Each clan devotes itself to a particular fighting style and takes part in a highly ritualized, non-lethal "war" with one another to prove the effectiveness of their chosen style.
  • The crabs and crayfish of the Stillwater Sea are both this, which has led to a fierce rivalry between the two.
• Scarab Power: Oddly Invoked by the scarabs of Sourcepool, who were once common dung beetles who gained their gleaming shell through selective breeding specifically to distance themselves from what they viewed as a demeaning title. Their Sultan Nasyrin is apparently so highly regarded that his subjects believe he could defeat the Lord of Dust in single combat, though it's unclear how accurate this belief is.
• Scary Scorpions: The scorpion tribes inhabit the desert wasteland to the northeast of the Great Oak. As a culture, they're described as a horde of brutal, merciless barbarians who take from the weak, worship the Sandwyrm, and practice Dust magic. Unlike the other two species who serve the Lord of Dust, the scorpions do so willingly.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: Due to their yearly hibernation cycle the cicadas didn't even realize that the Lord of Dust had invaded them until the war was already lost. Unfortunately for them they woke up just before him and his armies started to move on to the next land, and the Lord of Dust forced them into his army of Battle Thralls due to the utility of having soldiers who can sleep through supply shortages.
• Sneaky Spider: The spiders are a mysterious tribe of nomads about whom little is known, save for the facts that they come from somewhere beyond the Oak and hoard secrets with an almost religious zeal.
• Tough Beetles: The Beetle Clans are a Proud Warrior Race with a culture oddly described as being similar to professional wrestling, of all things, right down to having Faces and Heels. Each clan devotes itself to a particular fighting style and takes part in a highly ritualized, non-lethal "war" with one another to prove the effectiveness of their chosen style.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: The scarab who rules the desert oasis known as Sourcepool is named Nasyrin, Renowned Sultan of the Great Oasis Sourcepool, Guardian of the Sacred Waters, Gilded Lord of the Endless Sands, Kin to Wyrms, Slayer of Dragonflies, Ouster of Traitors, Master of the Dunes, and Bearer of a Thousand Honors, He Whose Ichor Flows Through the Ages.
• Virtuous Bees: The Apidaen Union ruled Oakshade long ago, before they were ousted by the wasps. Not much detail is given on them, but they're described as being deeply spiritual, approached their subjects on more equal footing than the wasps, and despite having an Insect Queen they were actually a representative democracy where the queen only served as a temporary leader in times of crisis, all of which paints them in a very positive light.
• Warrior Prince: The current High Queen of the wasps, Gorgatha, was the former Overseer of a fortress right on the frontline of the Dust war, earning a reputation as a skilled warrior and general. Due to their nature as a Proud Warrior Race this is implied to be quite common for wasps.
• Wicked Wasps: The Vespine Authority rules Oakshade, and is presented as authoritarian, fanatical, and elitist, as well as discriminating against non-wasps - particularly Oakshade's remaining bee population.
• Witch Doctor: This is the hat of the leeches inhabiting the Bayou, who are explicitly referred to as witch doctors. They practice a ritual form of bloodletting, believing that by drinking the blood of a patient then can also drain them of both physical ailments and of the patient's sins. They also perform magical services like the conjuring of helpful spirits and exorcism of harmful ones, though it's noted that some less benevolent leeches will intentionally conjure harmful spirits to inflict them on a rival.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: All wyrms possess an innate desire to forge a great civilization, but this is an impossible goal for the Sandwyrm whose presence spreads madness and death regardless of intent. It sought the advice of other Higher Beings, but even the merciful Tree-Mother could not abide something so antithetical to life and cast it out. Eventually it shed its skin to take a new form as the Lord of Dust, deciding that if he could not forge his own kingdom, he would steal the kingdoms of others, moving on to the next as each inevitably withered and died from his influence until the entire world is reduced to a barren, lifeless wasteland.
• World Tree: The reason why the setting is called "Oakshade." The Great Oak, also known as the God-Tree, is large enough to house an entire civilization and is said to have been created in order to shelter the bugs of the land from the scorching sun. Though seeing as everyone in the setting is a bug, it's unclear if the tree is only enormous relative to its inhabitants.

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