RSS
Home
Review: Hollow Earth Expedition
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
It was over a year ago that I first played a demo game of Hollow Earth Expedition at Ides of Gaming. I enjoyed it greatly and bought the PDF version soon afterward, but didn't give it another look until I recently become involved in a couple of campaigns using the game's core rules, the Ubiquity system.
Hollow Earth Expedition (HEX) is a pulp game that nominally takes place in a lost world located, you guessed it, inside the hollow Earth. You can get there via giant drill vehicles, but it's inevitably harder to get back out. Time flows differently, so there are dinosaurs, Nazis, evil sorcerers, Spanish conquistadors, and essentially anything else you'd like to throw in there. It's good, silly, pulpy fun.
While it reads well, you really don’t see the beauty of the game mechanics (the Ubiquity system) until you play it. There are the standard tropes -- attributes, skills, resources, which you purchase with a pool of character generation points. Task resolutions is a simple die pool system. You can roll any type of dice because it’s just a matter of counting up the total number of even-numbered results rather than specific numbers. Want you use standard six-sided dice? Go for it. Want to roll a handful of d20s? That works. Feel like rolling mixed polyhedrals? You can. you could flip coins if you wanted to. This makes it a good system for new players who might be intimidated by all the funny dice required by other games. There are Ubiquity dice available for sale separately, which represent multiple dice based on the way they’re numbered; instead of rolling three dice, for example, you can roll one of the “three dice” dice. For me half the fun was rolling huge handfuls of dice, so the Ubiquity dice seemed sort of like a buzzkill.
Ubiquity also uses a token system called Style Points. You get them for doing cool stuff. You get them for doing specific things related to your character’s abilities and flaws. You spend them to roll extra dice, or for a player-initiated deus ex machina. I personally do that a lot, and it makes the game so much more fun than just declaring tactical actions and rolling dice. For instance, when a troop transport truck full of Nazis pulled up in a demo game, my character took a bead on one of them with his rifle… smiled… then shifted his aim to the fuel depot right behind them. Yeah, I spent a point to have a fuel depot there. BOOM! Later in the adventure, stick of dynamite in one hand and pistol in the other, my character stepped into a room, yelled “think fast!”, tossed the unlit dynamite as the Nazi, then shot the dynamite. Realistic? Not at all. Appropriately pulpy? Yup. Any system that let’s me try stuff like that, let along get away with it, gets a Good Touch in my book.
My favorite part of the system, however, is the ability to "take the average". You don't roll, you just get automatic successes equal to half you die pool total (round down). Have 6 dice in Driving, don't think what you're doing is that hard and don't want to risk rolling badly? Take the average, you get a 3. If there's a remainder, you get the average rounded down plus get to roll 1 die. For example, if you have 5 dice in a skill, your average is 2+. Taking there average gets you 2, and you roll 1 die to see if you can make it 3. It's a concept that can easily be ported into other systems.
Buy Hollow Earth Expedition at Amazon
Buy Hollow Earth Expedition at RPGNow
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
