Hollow Earth Expedition

Overall score:

Everyone knows that in the Pulp 1930s morality wasn’t grey and everything was cooler from the gloating bad guys to the rugged diesel-punk toys. It should come as no surprise that Hollow Earth Expedition is cool, too.

The creation of Seattle-based Exile Game Studio Hollow Earth Expedition or HEX combines the fantastic imagination of Jules Verne, the mystery of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the cheesy goodness of the Saturday morning Matinee.

The title should give hint at the game's premise, as should the Tyrannosaurus Rex, Giant Drill and Rugged adventurers on the cover. Yes, this game takes place in a lost world, filled with dinosaurs, Lost Atlantean Civilizations, Nazis, and weird science. While the idea is hardly new, Exile Games attacks it with gusto and plenty of hard research.

The first crunchy bit you come to while investigating the book is character creation, which is vaguely Storyteller based. Players start their characters by choosing a very general Archetype and Motivation before distributing any points on their character sheet. Archetypes have no effect on game mechanics at all, but do separate the eggheads from the rugged broad shouldered adventurers and the sexy starlets.  By committing to a particular idea in advance, players help the GM fill out the party without hamstringing anyone to a particular character class.

Tag teamed with motivation this can make for some interesting characters. Motivation is your character's “hook” and lets players decide why their characters are adventuring in the first place. Unlike the Archetype it does have an in-game effect. Whenever your motivation causes complications for you or your group, you gain style points that can be used to do many cool mechanical things in game. It’s quite possible to have a couple of overlapping characters--for example, when the Adventurer obsessed with his own fame and the one in it for love mix it up in game they may have entirely different reactions to the same situation.

After deciding who you want to be and your motivation, you start to fiddle with the nuts and bolts with your character. Players have 15 points to distribute among 6 attributes and have to spend at least one point in all of them (this isn’t true for NPCs). Their point buys also determine what values are in their secondary attributes; perception is a combination of willpower and intelligence.

Players then dole out 15 skill points in a skill list that sort of forces specialization. And when I say 'sort of forces', I mean it makes a player choose what’s really important to his or her character idiom. Your skill level is added to your attribute base and that determines how many dice you can roll to accomplish anything. Since the system uses an accumulated success model rolling more dice is better. With 4 dice your average roll is 2 successes--just enough to beat the average difficulty in the game. So it’s a good idea to take fewer skills and focus on one or two strong areas and let other players pick up the slack. This can be kind of fun in play, too, because it allows each character to really shine without overpowering the whole game as long as the GM includes scenes that give everyone the spotlight.

After skills, players need to decide if they want their character to have any special talents or resources--you can choose one or the other. Talents work like Feats in D&D and allow you to break the rules in certain situations. Resources are call-on’s for in game support, and represent things like fame, allies, cash, and other things that aren’t ability based. The choice between natural ability and social advantage is kind of cool, and again keeps someone from becoming an Übermensch at the table. Since you can “discover” new talents and gain resources, in-game play its also not deal breaking.

Finally players have 15 bonus points that can be used to augment any ability or skills, or add one more talent or resource. 
Oh, I almost forgot, you can also choose a dramatic flaw that disadvantages your character and gain an instant style point in the process.

That’s it...besides figuring out a name and some appropriate resources (gun, basic kit and so on). Like any game your first few characters might take a bit to figure out, but frankly its a very quick and streamlined process. I foresee that after a few times your players will be banging out characters in 5 minutes or less.
 
So, with character creation out of the way, we can delve into the basic mechanics of the game.

It works like this, you add your skill, and your stat and roll to beat a difficulty that can be influenced by situational stuff, like low light, or heavy rain, or crippling wounds. If you have the right tool for the right job you get to add bonus dice; if you get help from someone with a skill level of 4 or higher you get to add bonus dice (up to +10); if you pump in style points you get, you guessed it, bonus dice. Of course style points can do a lot more in game, like reduce damage, or enhance talents, or cool stuff that the GM decides you can do on the fly.

Sometimes, however, you might need that extra edge and not be able to pull it off with your dice pool. That’s when the coolest dice come into play. Chance dice let you gamble to win big, or blow it all. You can take up to 10 chance dice on any roll in sets of 2, for free, every time. Except that every pair of added dice increases your difficulty by one success. So let's say you need to roll 5 successes and you have 4 dice, and none of the right tools you can opt to take a pair of chance dice upping the difficulty to 6 but giving you 6 dice to roll with. Now if your roll 6 successes you win, and win big. Of course, if you fail the GM will begin to cackle and rub his hands together.

All this adding and subtracting dice can lead to huge dice pools, with the potential for 20 or more dice being rolled at any given time--but the game has a solution to that. Any time you roll over 10 dice you can opt to take the average (5) and then roll any remainder dice. This can greatly speed up play as can a set of special d8’s that Exile has designed for HEX. The D8’s are called ubiquity dice and come in tubes of 9 dice, white dice allow you to roll up to one success, red dice allow you to roll up to 2 successes and blue dice allow you to roll up to three. This means that rolling one white, one blue and one red die is the equivalent of rolling 6 dice, or you could roll 3 red, or six whites, or 2 blues. You get the picture. This works well for players who must roll every roll because they don’t want to take the average, but the dice aren’t mandatory. You can even use coin flips to play this game with heads representing successes and tails representing failure.

The book does delve into more complicated mechanics, like disease, drowning, exposure and the like, but that’s all you need to know when you start. The rest of the book deals with planning adventures, equipment lists, hazards and opponents, dinosaurs, 1930s setting ideas, information about the Hollow Earth, and how to get your PCs there, and, of course, advancement. There’s even a fun adventure to introduce everyone to the Hollow Earth--with Nazis. The GM advice is generally good and the flavor text is evocative of the setting. What isn’t in the book are vehicle rules (they’re just props) and detailed magic and psychic powers rules (I mention that because they are in the supplement Secrets of the Surface World).

If you like pulp and you’re a fan of storyteller style games, you're going to love Hollow Earth Expeditions. I recommend this to anyone as a pickup game due to its minimal learning curve and its setting that you can sum up easily for most players. “Its like Indiana Jones meets the Mummy ... with Dinosaurs."

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Written by Mad Dr Jeffe on April 15th, 2008