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Hollow Earth Expedition

Summary

Pulp fantasy books by genre giants such as Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle serve as the inspiration for this two-fisted pulp adventure RPG. Hollow Earth Expedition is set in the mid-1930s, on a world that is very like our own except for the fact that it's hollow, and contains a whole new Lost World within. Mad scientists, tough broads, and lantern-jawed heroes square off against assorted rotten scoundrels and scheming Nazis to learn the secrets of this hidden land.

Appearance

Hollow Earth Expedition is a thick hardcover book with a stunning full-color cover by artist Stephen Daniele. "HEX" features a section of color pages for its character archetypes, with the rest in black and white. Great sketch-style art of adventurers and creatures in action generously illustrates the book. There are a couple of clunkers in the mix, but overall the art is terrific, especially the map of the world (with secret sites called out) featured in the front and back of the book. I hope this map is made available as a poster eventually, because it's really a nice piece.

I should note that my evaluation is based on the unbound production proof pages, so I'm not able to evaluate things like the quality of the book's binding.

Setting

HEX covers all of the things you expect in this genre, including a decent overview of how the world stands in 1936. Short entries on each country give basic information about its political situation and such, though it's necessarily far from exhaustive. Getting into the meat of the genre, the book covers secret societies, cultists, Nazis, dinosaurs, strange phenomena, amazons, ancient temples, lost pirates, pulp-science technology, and so forth. Overall it's a really fun read.

System

Creating a new game system is daunting today in the shadow of d20, so it's nice to see that HEX remains fairly minimalist.

Dice

Most of your scores are rolled as dice pools, and success is always 50/50, so you can theoretically roll any kind of die you like. If your skill adds up to 5, you roll 5 dice. Any die that gets over half of its value (say 4-6 on a d6) is a success.

HEX also comes with its own unique dice, if you like. They're 8-sided dice, coded white, red, and blue, and numbered from 0-3 depending on the die. I'm not going to get into the math, but the spread of numbers on the dice is such that whites are "1-die," reds are "2-dice," and blues are "3-dice." So if you are told to roll 8 dice, you could roll two blues and one red. The result is the number of successes you get. As an old Champions player, I appreciate the idea of rolling less dice :-)

As I said, you don't need the unique dice to play the game, but I like neat dice, and these are pretty cool.

Style Points

HEX employs a "Style Point" system, whereby players get awarded Style Points (represented by poker chips, pennies, beads, or whatever you want to use) that they can spend to increase their rolls, mitigate damage to themselves or their friends, and generally help make sure things go more like a pulp adventure and less like a tragedy. They're fun to spend and easily replenished through play.

Exile Games sells very nice "Style Point" chips; heavy poker chips color-coded and labeled with "1," "2," or "3" values. They're certainly nice, but you can use regular plastic chips or anything else if you like. Get them if you think they're cool, or leave them if you prefer.

Summary

I think Hollow Earth Expedition looks terrific. The setting appears to stay faithful to the source material while adding lots of new details to explore and discover. The art is for the most part very good, and enhances the pulp feel of the game. The system is simple and pretty clean (though I did not get the chance to generate a character -- we used pre-made characters for the playtest sessions I participated in).

I'm told the book will be $40, which seems reasonable to me, for a thick hardcover with great art and some color inside. The dice are supposed to be around $5 for a set of 9 (but apparently will come for free if you buy the book at Gen Con).

Disclaimer

I'm a freelance writer and I contributed some material to Hollow Earth Expedition. I didn't have anything to do with the rules design, so I was fresh as anyone else going into playtesting sessions. I've enjoyed the game, I think it looks great and is a lot of fun to read. If you're a fan of pulp adventure from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Indiana Jones, I think you should check out Hollow Earth Expedition.