Funnies #4 - pt. 1

Knock-out drops seem to be a surprisingly common trophy item, and surprisingly effective; in fact, they seem to get used so often that maybe they have a -1 penalty to save against?

But what to make of Easy's bait-and-switch stratagem?  Is this simply role-playing, bereft of game mechanics?  Compliance determined by an encounter reaction roll?  Or does resisting the trick require a save vs. plot?  Luckily, all three are valid solutions for a Hideouts & Hoodlums campaign.

Bandits continue to be a very common encounter in comic books.  So, the Captain Easy bandit eluder is a handy transport-trophy, at least on icy terrain.  Easy's claim that it can do 100 MPH is actually modest; on the next page it's clocked at going 120 MPH by the narrator!

Dan Dunn hasn't been on this blog for awhile, but here we have a hideout map -- not of the hideout itself, but of the terrain around one.

Hats cost $2 in the 1930s, or at least this guy's hat did.

Perhaps even more common than knock-out pills is chloroform.  New thought: perhaps instead of dealing with each of these individually in the trophies section, poisons and sedatives should be dealt with in their own section of one of the H&H rulebooks.

A note about concealed doors vs. secret doors. A concealed door is an ordinary door, concealed behind something else.  A secret door can be a door concealed to look like something else, like a stone.

I have considered before adding sleight of hand, as a skill, to the Magic-User class, but it only seems to be used for flavor text -- like here -- and never in adventure scenarios.  We'll see, though, if other trends develop...

Freckles' scientist friend is a little off his rocker, thinking he's going to be traveling at the speed of light in his moon rocket.  Or is he?  Should science just work the way comic book scientists think it does in a comic book campaign?  It boggles my mind to think how that would even work.

Mutt buys a used taxi cab for $20.



The Alley Oop featured creates are cave bears, moas, mastodons, and "Devonian fish", like holoptychius.  Cave bears are mentioned in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies as having more Hit Dice than regular bears. Actually, 7 HD for a brown bear might have been a bit high (5 HD would make more sense) and 7 HD should be reserved for the cave bears.  Moas would have been 10' tall 3 HD flightless birds.  Mastodons have not been statted for H&H, but woolly mammoths were and mastodons are basically less hairy and smaller mammoths -- still 10 HD, but of the d10 instead of d12 variety.  Holoptychius, a 3' long prehistoric fish, would barely have qualified for a hit point.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)