YMMV / Hollow Earth Expedition

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The game is an Universal System for pulp adventure... that unfortunately got tangled and strangled by the Hollow World setting. This alienated pretty much everyone who wasn't already into that (highly specific) niche, while the much broader market for Two-Fisted Tales remained untapped... all while the game caters to that and is most useful system to date for this kind of campaigns. The misleading advertising didn't help matters, extensively focusing on the setting, rather than the potential of the ruleset. To make things somehow even worse, Exile Game Studio licensed out Ubiquity to other companies. As a result, Leagues of Adventure and the Ubiquity-based Space 1889 variant came to life, focusing on the broad pulp adventure appeal rather than narrowing it down to something as specific as Hollow World. Not only did they fare far better on the market^note Space 1889 is popular enough that the only way to still get a factory-grade Ubiquity dice set is to buy one for it, years after EGS stopped their own production, but got reprints. By contrast, when Exile Game Studio tried to make a comeback, they did so by yet again doing a very narrow focus on the setting, this time with Perils of Mars expansion - attracting less than 450 people over their Kickstarter campaign.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • While specialisation is normally superior to rising skills as such, the reverse is true during character creation, especially for skills with truly broad application. Chargen is the only time when increasing skill happens at a fixed, 1-to-1 rate, rather than it increasing with each rank. There is no real point getting specialisation at this point. Thus anyone with any experience with the game tends to follow the exact same pattern: picking and especially increasing as many skills as feasible during character creation, and getting specialisation(s) only with experience points rewarded from the game sessions.
  • While it borders on Min-Maxing, during character creation it is possible to pick two Talents: one due to every character simply having a Talent or Resource to pick, and another for the 15 experience players are given in the final stage of char-gen. Some of the Talents are listed as Unique, meaning they can only be picked during character creation, meaning getting two of those is a "now or never" decision. And since everything else can be bought later on (Skills and especially Specialisations cheaply, at that), there is a very strong incentive to cram two Talents right off the bat.
    • Taken into Violation of Common Sense when one is dumping stats for the Talents... increasing stats. You will eventually be able to rise those stats up with experience, but by picking related Talent, they have the potential to reach 6, while normally the scale ends at 5.
• Default Setting Syndrome: On the creator's side. While providing tonnes of material for playing on the surface (dedicating most of the expansions to that, no less) and even ON MARS!, all the official scenarios still expect to roll with the Hollow World and tie even surface occurrences to it and the Atlanteans anyway. Right down to having an almost obligatory mention that the scenario can conclude with the party ending up trapped inside the Hollow Earth as a cliffhanger.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Savage Worlds playerbase, at least back in the early 10s, since both games were made with Two-Fisted Tales in mind, but approaching them with completely different mechanical solutions.
• Fan Nickname: HEX, an acronym from Hollow Earth EXpedition.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With players of various Roguelike games that are heavy on exploration and pulp, most notably Curious Expedition and Pathway. It is no exaggeration to claim those two games doubled the size of active playerbase in the late 2010s, a decade after HEX premiered.
  • With both Pulp Cthulhu and, weirdly, Eldritch Horror players. While Pulp Cthulhu has very strong overlap with HEX in terms of themes, character types and scenarios, the cordial terms with Eldritch's playerbase is more unique, as it's a Cosmic Horror board game. It's pretty common for groups of players of all three swap around their members to try out the other game(s).
• Game-Breaker: Now with their own page.
• Genius Bonus: The game and its expansions list and reference an enormous amount of real life explorers, occultists, scientists and various organisations, without pointing out if they were real or made up for the sake of the game. This can completely fly over the players' heads if they aren't familiar with those (often obscure) figures and societies.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The 2019's Iron Sky: The Coming Race involves Those Wacky Nazis using a Rag Tag Bunch Of Misfits as their handy pawns to take over the center of the Hollow Earth, accessible by a shaft in the Antarctica. Said Hollow Earth is ruled by lizard-like Vril-ya, who live in an Advanced Ancient Acropolis and like to fancy themselves gods. Oh, and there are dinosaurs everywhere around and some Schizo Tech for a good measure. Sounds a bit familiar?
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: While it has its defenders within the fandom, the general consensus about the game is how utterly pointless the whole "Hollow Earth" setting is, all while providing superb ruleset and mechanics for pulp adventure campaigns. This goes up to being a joke among players - the game "obviously" went into printing in wrong order, so the supplement for Hollow Earth campaigns was printed in the main book and the real deal had to be retooled into Secrets of the Surface World, the first expansion.
• Popular Game Variant: Since the expansions suffer from a highly visible Power Creep when it comes to Talents^note They went from linear improvements to quadratic ones with each rank, a pretty popular house rule is to treat all Talents as 1-3-6 bonuses. This is a compromise between the basic ruleset's 1-2-3/4 and expansions' 2-4-8 bonuses to specific tasks, while at the same time elevating various Cool, but Inefficient default Talents and decreasing various Game-Breaker elements from the expansions.
• That One Disadvantage: Short for securing an easy source of Style points and highly-specific roleplaying style combined with character idea, there really is no point picking any of the Flaws, as the penalties they provide tend do be delibilating. And since you can reliably get Style points without crippling your character, there is even less incentive to do so.
• That One Rule:
  • Ask any first-timers how they understand Total Attack and how multiple attacks work after reading the rules. Chances are, they will completely misunderstand them, in no small part due to how they are worded and how the text is edited, splitting what's a continuous text over two pages and in separate paragraphs, causing all sorts of confusion.
  • The difference between Skill Specialization^note A bonus to a specific aspect of an already narrow skill, like a gunslinger having Pistols Specialization for Firearms Skill and Specialized Skills^note A sub-category of already very broad skills, like History skill of the broad Academia skill, and especially their different costs. Someone had the bright idea to not only name them nearly identical, but to explain them next to each other, too.
  • Less the rule itself, but how and where it's explained. The alternative rules for Initiative and turn order, called Continuous Combat, are very vaguely explained in the main book. They are, however, thoroughly covered in a small booklet sold with the GM screen... and nowhere else. Without any hint it's even covered in some obscure, collectible-like booklet. On top of that, the only way to legally get it since the mid '10s is tracking it via PDF selling sites. This makes the rules as described in the main book flat-out incomprehensible, while getting access to the actual explanation is nearly impossible, since it wasn't marketed in the slightest. Ironically, with the explanation provided in the booklet, Continuous Combat is easier than the standard turn order used in the default rules.

---