#baxa

I love Hollow World. Deep irony here, because I kind of hate how versions of real world cultures crept into Forgotten Realms, and here I am being all “The Known World, which is a collection of fantasified real world cultures is the best” but taste is weird like that.

Hollow World spins out of the Gazetteers, a popular series of sourcebooks that, practically country by country, detailed pretty much the known entirety of the Known World. Having run out of stuff to cover on the outside, Bruce Heard and Aaron Allston decided that the Known World was hollow and started in on the inside. To my knowledge, this is the first time in RPGs that a hollow planet is investigated, which seems strange considering how large the concept looms in 19th and early 20th century fantasy and science fiction.

There’s all sorts of awesome, pulpy stuff down there (including an interior sun — this ain’t no Underdark). The inside is populated by surface cultures that were on the verge of extinction. Rather than let that happen, the Immortals brought them inside, so you you have fantasy Aztecs and fantasy Egyptians and fantasy Greeks alongside stuff like talking dinosaur gods and pirates and more (and, in a couple years, Alphatians too, after the events of the Wrath of Immortals box, which I covered back in January).

The thing is jam packed, too. Maps of course, a 128-page book for the DM, 64-page book for the players and a 32-pager of adventures. The packaging is half the fun, I love how the covers of all the Hollow World books have the big hollow globe. Something about the lady evokes the idea of Vril energy and all that nonsense. Baxa does a lot of the interior art.

First off, special note as to how much I like Fred Fields’ cover here. Nice Baxa stuff inside, too, and some real nice maps and architectural drawings!

This is Nightstorm (1991), the final part of the trilogy of Hollow World adventures. There was one other, and a couple Gazeteer-style sourcebooks (we’ll look at one of those tomorrow) and that’s basically it for Hollow World, which is a bummer!

Nightwail is the first of a trilogy of adventures that bring players into the hollow world then introduces them, in turn, to three of the major cultures within. This first one involves the Azcan Empire, a stand-in for our Aztecs.

The first segment is pretty typical — some royalty is missing, investigate the crime, explore a dungeon and then, whoops, fall into the world inside the world. I really the love swerve of this, and how all of a sudden the players have to deal with pyramids and jungles and dinosaurs. Once there, they become embroiled, unwittingly, in the plots of the Immortals.

This is Dragon Magazine 162, from October of 1990. The cover painting, by Michael Weaver, is called “Lost Soul,” which takes on a dual meaning since I am otherwise unfamiliar with Weaver’s work. I like the idea of this knight just staying in that one place, unmoving, night after night.