If one had the Hollow Earth Expedition is that sufficient to run the game or is there a core book that is needed as well?
Hollow Earth Expedition is the "core"
Ubiquity book. Just like the
Savage Worlds core book, it has everything you need to play; character creation, the rules, equipment tables, a bestiary, NPC organizations, and a GMing section. The only difference between the two is that
Savage Worlds is (kind of) universal and has no setting, while
HEX specifically does 1930's real world pulp. The first chapter is an overview of the state of the world in the 1930's, broken down by country (including lots of adventure hooks), and also includes a section on what life was like for the average person. It tries to be quasi-historical by saying "this is what was actually happening back in the 1930's, and think of all the great adventures those facts can create."
So all you need to play
Ubiquity is that one book. To be fair though, all the other books I mentioned (
All for One,
Desolation, and
Leagues of Adventure) do the same thing; they give you all the rules needed to play and also provide you with a fleshed out setting. I was kind of unimpressed with
Leagues of Adventure though, both because of it's massive price tag and because I felt I didn't get anything new. As I said,
LoA is really just
HEX with the world rolled back about 40 years. It didn't need to be a complete rulebook in my opinion; it could've been a supplement or splat book to
HEX.
Unfortunately you can't get away from dice pools in Ubiquity,
malifer. It's kind of like saying "I don't like that stats are a die type" in
Savage Worlds. That's the core of the system, and changing it would be so much work that you're not really playing that specific game anymore. All I can say is that dice pools in
Ubiquity are a snap. Each die is binary (generating only a success or failure) so it's really easy to count up your successes. You actually don't even need dice. You coud just flip a bunch of coins and count heads as successes and tails as failures.
Honestly
ironnikki, all you need to strip out of
HEX to make it into something else is the fluff. There isn't any world specific mechanics in the ruleset. In fact, you could run a
Firefly-type game using only the
HEX book; all you'd need to do is rename the weapons, gear, and use the airplane stats as spaceship stats. As I said, that's why I was disappointed with Leagues of Adventure. It was so similar to HEX that I didn't feel like I got anything new.
All for One and
Desolation were different enough settings from
HEX that I felt I was getting my money's worth. Plus they both have nice magic systems that
HEX and
LoA didn't have.
Yeah, I realize that I've hijacked a thread in the
Savage Worlds subforum,
malifer. Sorry. But this subforum is one of the more active ones on the HJs boards. Plus, I'm jealous of all the plot point settings that
Savage Worlds has and wish that someone would step up and start translating them over to Ubiquity. Triple Ace Games did that with a few of their
Daring Tales of Adventure modules, but only like 3 or 4 out of nearly 20.
Oh, sorry for scarring you for life
JiB. Hopefully you can drink enough booze to wash that image out of your head without dying.