Trivia / Hollow Earth Expedition

• Author's Saving Throw: The basic rulebook was so single-mindedly focused on Great White Hunter archetype and all related cliches, it lacked any sort of rules for martial arts, melee combat or magic, while barely gliding over the surface of Weird Science. The game creators admitted themselves that they overfocused and thus what was intended to be "generic" ruleset that should be included in the basic rulebook wasn't generic at all. As a result, Secrets of the Surface World, the very first expansion, provided all the missing stuff in a single go, rather than splitting it into all the planned and released later expansions.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • A portion of original help materials and resources is nowdays considered lost and impossible to recreate, including one of the basic versions of the character sheet. It's up to people that still have their copies to scan them and share around.
  • Original Ubiquity dice went out of production years ago. The replacement was done on a license, but with closure of Exile Games Studio, that became void. There is in turn a small, cottage industry of people that make and sell "Ubiquity-like" dice sets, as there is nobody left to chase those for copyright infringement. As for Exploding variant of the die (a d14 die with 8 hexagonal and 6 square faces), they are completely gone.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Exile Games Studio was considering to, but ultimately never released Ubiquity system as a stand-alone product. Instead, they've licensed it to other studios, resulting in bunch of games using Ubiquity (Desolation, All For One, Space 1889 and others), but you can't exactly "get" Ubiquity itself. It always comes in package with specific setting and its sub-rules.
  • Perils of Mars, an expansion tied to the previous Revelations of Mars, was having a crowd-funding campaign in 2018 and was intended as the big revival of the game. It was never completed, with accusations of money scam and fraud going on for months. Soon after, Exile Games Studio closed the shop, leaving not only the expansion unfinished (not to mention unpublished), but also cutting all future support for HEX in the process.

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