The Black Campbell

Almost two years after their successful Kickstarter, Exile Games has finally rolled out their PDF for Revelations of Mars — their planetary romance supplement for Hollow Earth Expedition. The e-book is stil in proofreading (it’s being done by the people that crowdfunded the book) and it should be up for general consumption soon. The physical book should be available at GenCon, or so Jeff Combos — the head developer at Exile — claims.

The book has a similar layout and look to the other Hollow Earth Expedition products — a nice full-color cover and map of the RoM Mars in the endpapers, and color character example pages, but grayscale drawings throughout the rest of the work. It’s got a nice clear font, and the slightly gray pages are easy to read on my iPad in low light conditions without causing eye fatigue. I suspect the physical book will be hardcover, but I could be wrong about this one, and will have solid production values. Most of the HEX line has been very high quality.

The book has an opening fiction to set the flavor of the game, and does its job well enough, then after a short introduction to give the reader an idea of the goal of the setting, they jump into character creation. There are specific motivations, skills, traits and flaws to fit the creatures on Mars, as well as a selection of examples using artwork from when this book was first supposed to be coming out (five years or so, if I remember correctly.)  There’s a new skill: armed combat, that has a big blurb about various styles of fencing, etc. One of the things this brought to mind is that Ubiquity — the system Hollow Earth Expedition uses — feels like an older generation game, something from the dice pool era of the 1990s. This is not a bad thing — I’ve not been overly complementary of the new hotness of very rules lite games and shared narrative responsibility. Ubiquity feels lighter than many rules sets, but compared to Fate Accelerated, is a bit beefy. Or maybe “crunchy” is a better term. There’s a chapter of new psychic powers to fit with some of the new Martian races.

The equipment chapter give the players a nice anachronistic flavor — melee weapons galore and “blasters” — quasi-energy weapons that shoot energized slugs — and other rayguns. The skyships of Mars use sails to get around, but mysterious ancient Martian tech to fly. The how isn’t really addressed, or how new lifter systems might be manufactured (or perhaps I glossed over that bit) — something that should have be addressed, if even to hand-wave it off. This is followed by a chapter on vehicle combat that expands on the material in Secrets of the Surface World, and primarily deals with skyships, as one might expect.

The next chapter deals with the natives of Mars, and the flavor of this chapter, together with the equipment and vehicle chapters, evokes the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs mixed heavily with the more glitzy (and underrated) John Carter movie. There are the Chitik, beatle-like bugmen; Dheva, the four armed green-skinned human-looking Martians; the Elosi, more traditional “gray aliens” that are tied to the Atlantians — the ancient race that one ruled the planet and who tie this setting to the Hollow Earth of the other sourcebooks; the Grodh, four armed apemen of Mars, Praelor, four-eyed purple “smart” Martians; and Sauren, dinomen of Mars; Vrii, giant crystal humanoids that guard and feed “the Great Machine” that is breaking down, but used to keep Mars alive; and lastly the red-skinned Zhul-ya, the “demi-god” children of the Atlantian “God-Kings” that are alleged to be “sleeping” after an Age of War.

After this is a guide to Mars, including several important cities, the Great Machine in Olympus Mons, and descriptions of the wastelands of the planet. Also, they talk about how to get to the Red Planet — by rocketship, abduction by the Elosi’s disk-shaped spacecraft, an astral projection machine that lets people transport their consciousness to Mars while their body slumbers (John Carter-like), or Atlantian portals. This is followed with Atlantian History on Mars and defines the various God-Kings and their differences. There’s a chapter of NPCs for the GM to use and a bestiary.

The book ends with a Revelations of Mars adventure campaign that I haven’t read through yet; I tend to ignore these as they tend to interfere with the vision of running the setting I tend to get while reading the material.

So is it worth it? Yes — it has a nice Burroughs-esque flavor while cutting its own path in creating a planetary romance setting for the Hollow Earth Expedition game world. Comparing it to Space: 1889 (especially the Ubiquity version recently released), it has some very strong points — much more alien creatures, for instance. The look of the book is up to Exile’s standards, but it’s also obvious they had to go with another set of artists for their interior work, where the other books were very consistent in their look. The writing is solid, the system mechanics well thought out, if a bit heavier than is popular these days.

I haven’t gotten pricing for the ebook or physical product at this time, but my Kickstarter contribution entitled me to a physical book, some dice, a Martian Princess figure, and a map of Mars for $75. So yeah, it’s worth it. I assume the book will run about $50 for the physical book.

It’s a buy.

The final night of our Atomic Robo game went off quite well. We jumped straight in from a cliffhanger where one of the PCs — a WAVE with a penchant for machines — and her team had been captured by the Japanese soldier/scientists of the notorious Unit 723’s “Division X” who were working on creating a TeslaTech machine that would be able to shield their military units from sight. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the other half of the team, led by a PC “PT Boat Commander” with an Omega aspect of “Heroics First, Politics After” is able to slip in under cover of a scene aspect DARK AND STORMY NIGHT…

They slip into the massive underground base in a cavern created by a lava bubble, rescue the WAVE, before setting off grenades to cover their escape and put the kybosh on the Jap’s program for good. Problem: a crappy roll led to a succeed but situation: one of the scientists killed by grenades turns on the machine, which is hyper-powered by the lightning storm striking their collection antennae! The machine starts “hiding” sections of the cave and mountain as it had in Philadelphia. The characters know that there is some kind of temporal effect, as well, and start hoofing it for the furthest section of the island they can, as portions of the island disappear into the effect, letting seawater spill into the now exposed lava of the seamount below. Steam, scalding cinders, earthquakes, and panicked Japanese soldiers complicated their mad dash to a small fishing boat with a convenient outboard motor (thanks to Fate Point use) and barely escaped the destruction.

They were able to link up with their Catalina and fly back to Wake Island mostly unmolested, and that was where the characters in modern day closed the report on the Incident at Koro Jima in 1943.

The modern day characters choppered into Koro Jima — now back and having “merged” with the existing island just under the surface — with the assistance of the US Navy and a scientist from Big Science! Corporation of Japan. They find the island is unstable — with the volcano now active, earthquakes, and felled trees and burned sections of foliage from the event during WWII. They also find starving Japanese soldiers and their two American prisoners that had not escaped the effect. After a bit of contentious attempts to convince the Japanese the war is over, they manage to get the last 25 people or so off the island by SH-60s right before the island suddenly flashes out of existence again, causing another massive volcanic eruption.

After some wrap up on character bits, we closed out our first Atomic Robo volume successfully.

Overall, the response from the players was good. We liked the modified version of Fate and thought it played remarkably quickly. One place it fell down — more due to the limited number of players — was the Brainstorming rules, which are tres cool, but require more bodies to get that arguing scientists in the midst of a crisis feel from the comics.  The other was having players throw aspects or complications on scenes; my group isn’t used to that sort of input, I suspect, and I usually handle these bits of narration on the fly in our other game. It’s not an issue of game design, but more of we’re used to running/playing differently. I suspect this would become a bit more natural over time.

Here’s a site with flooplans for an assortment of pre-WWI apartment buildings in New York City that should be useful for pulp games set in the 1920-1940s.

Game 4 of the new Atomic Robo campaign went off well last Thursday, with the characters picking up from their San Francisco adventure on Wake island, where the United States had only a week or two ago defeated the Japanese. The characters have been on the move since the “Philadelphia Experiment” in night two, where they had to try and stop a Japanese agent and her Philly mooks from stealing the plans to some TeslaTech the Navy and the Strategic Science Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers were testing to hide ships from sight and radar. Apparently, the device did more than that — possibly displacing the vehicle from our time and space for five minutes. (One of the characters is convinced they’ve accidentally invented a “time machine.”)

The officers — a PC from the navy, his Army Air Corps pilot friend, and the SSD Captain Nolan (was supposed to have been a PC, but now an NPC) — meet with Admiral Nimitz and General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, USMC (the “father of amphibious assault”) and brief them on the Japanese agents that managed to escape by submarine with the plans. They figure themselves only a day or two ahead of the Japanese, having flown in legs from San Fran to Hawaii, then to wake in a PBY Catalina. They have the coordinates of the sub thanks to some good interrogation work in San Fran…but it’s 1500 miles behind the lines on one of the Bonin Islands, Koro Jima. It’s a small island with a small fishing village on it, and they have no current intelligence. Getting there in force is not an option: they can go by submarine or plane, but either way, it’ll be a small force of eight or ten.

The other PC, a WAVE aviation mechanic’s mate, modifies their Catalina, Shanghai Doll, for an asset of LONG RANGE, which should allow them to get to and from Koro Jima, and they put together the gear they’ll need to slip in and destroy the Japanese project (they hope…) There was some nice scene setting — palm trees and warm but not hot central Pacific weather.

The team flies west and is intercepted by a few A6M Zeros launched from a nearby ship. There was some hard flying and aspect throwing as the characters tried to gun down the Zeros (successfully), but not before the Catalina was hit for a moderate complication (engines down!) While the plane was fitfully heading for the drink, the WAVE, tied to a rope, crawls out onto the wing to fix the fuel lines, stepping back the damage enough to escape the combat scene and later fix the plane.

They get to the Japanese island a few hours ahead of an incoming storm, land the Catalina on beach near the island’s volcano (of course it has one!) and camouflage the craft. After some late night stealth, they find the sub is already here, and that the Japanese have set up a small landing field and some kind of bunker against the side of the volcano. The rim of the caldera is lined with the same kin of antennae that the Americans were using to pull power from the Earth’s magnetic field.

While doing recon, the navy officer was able to avoid capture, unlike the WAVE and the portion of the team that she was with. Taken into the bunker, which leads through a dead lava tube to an underground chamber, she sees the Japanese are well along in their project, but she also sees that they are still working with the Tesla plans to try and fix their equipment. While she is roughly interrogated, the navy PC links up with the other half of the team that has been disabling the antennas to stage a daring rescue…

This week should wrap the WWII period portion of the adventure and bounce us back to modern day, where the agents of the Office of Scientific Intelligence are approaching the island that suddenly appeared out of nowhere after 72 years!