Culling the Collection: Hollow Earth Expedition

I purchased Hollow Earth Expedition a few years back at GenCon, and I have had a chance to run it a few times in the intervening years. I picked up all of the books that were available at the time, the core book, Secrets of the Surface World, Mysteries of the Hollow Earth, and the GM's Screen. I really like the Ubiquity system that it uses, the game moves fast and players have a lot of freedom to describe their actions and try off-the-wall things.

That said, the actual Hollow Earth Expeditions setting is pretty generic pulp. I understand that this is on purpose, and I do not fault them for it. But, there is little here that I could not get from an hour or so on TVtropes (do not click if you do not have the time). This raises the problem that while I like the system, I have a lot of generic systems, and the setting offered is very generic here.

The Ubiquity system has some clear advantages over both Savage Worlds and GURPS, it is much lighter than either. It has the same pulpy feel that Savage Worlds has, but does not use a map and moves a lot faster.

Luckily that is not a choice I am forced into with HEX, because I also have All For One, Paul "Wiggy Wade's supernatural musketeer game, another Ubiquity game with a much stronger, and cooler, theme. So I will be holding on to All For One and selling Hollow Earth Expedition.

Comments

Hex Crawls

Those of you who have been reading this blog know that I have never run a megadungeon before. I have always used more realistic dungeon settings, keeping all underground areas to a minimum and keeping the over all size of castles and the like fairly small. There is another style of gaming I have never indulged in: the hex crawl. I have never seen hexes as discrete chunks of the map. I always just used them as a guide to find distance if they were present and not worrying about themif they were not. I have always taken a more continuous view of overland maps. This is another streak that will be ending with my upcoming OSRIC game. I will be using James M's Outdoor Map as a starting pont in my campaign. I will be heavily modifying it for my purposes but most of the features will stay the same. I will be adding my own versions of Castles Blackmoor and Greyhawk to the map. I have been struggling with how a hex crawl works. How do I know if they find features in the hex and isn't 5 m

Traveller: Session 5

This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar. This session was run on October 27, 2022. This session contains secret communications between me and the individual players. This means that these recaps do not cover everything that happened in the session. I will be reporting only the information that all players had access to. 131-1116 After the council meeting ended, Nashu, Archduke Ishuggi’s chief of staff, pulled him aside. Following the revelation that Yuri Lang, the emperor’s would-be assassin, had been a member of Archduke Adair’s intelligence service and had been involved in a combined operation with Gateway Intelligence, she had the staff run overlap checks on all recent contacts. The goal was to determine if there were any more unexpected connections between people that could be a threat to Ishuggi or the emperor. She learned that, in 1113, Yuri Lang (“Baron Pazi”), Zurzi (Archduke Bzrk’s chief of st

Traveller: Session 33

This session was run on June 15, 2023. 130-2108 They confronted Reverend Kavanaugh about the wrench and the explosive bolts and he changed his story again. He now claimed that, even in his revised story, he had still tried to protect Dieter and his memory. Dieter had not just surrendered to fate and drawn straws after his failed attempt to poison Kavanaugh at breakfast. As soon as it was clear that the paralytic was not working, he attempted to choke Kavanaugh. As the two wrestled, Kavanaugh grabbed a wrench from the toolbox, left in the common room during their repair efforts, and bashed Dieter over the head. He had then flushed Dieter’s body, along with the wrench, out of the airlock. He claimed not to have known about the explosive bolts and said that, because there were only two of them aboard, there were sixteen hours each day where only one of them was awake. Unable to determine if this latest story was true, they informed him that they stil

Circle of Dar Janix

Search This Blog