Planet Comics #3 - pt. 4

We're down to the last feature -- poor lonely Auro, Lord of Jupiter! - but we're not going to ignore it because I have some things to say about this one.

We start with Auro doing a lot of showing off. We don't need game mechanics to handle simple showing off; any Editor should let his players describe any showboating as flavor text without making them roll for it.

But what if we did need to roll? Like, if Auro was competing with someone else for showboating? If Auro was a mysteryman, competing with other mysterymen, they could try to outbid each other on how many stunts they will expend. Other heroes could rely on the skill system, treating acrobatics as a skill. If only one contestant makes his skill check, then we have an obvious winner. If more than one makes it, the one who makes it by the most wins.

But on a d6, there is not much room for nuance there. In which case, we might switch to the unofficial game mechanic of ability score checks; have everyone try to roll under DEX, with the roll closest to the score winning.

This is not just a dragon; a few pages later we learn it is a dragon man. That would be because it can polymorph between forms. It can also breathe fire through its nostrils, but we never see it breathe fire far enough to function as a weapon. It is massive in size and probably has quite a few Hit Dice. Maybe 12?

Morale saves are very easily triggered in Hideouts & Hoodlums; any time your players say "I do this, does it make them run?" you should probably check with a morale save.

I'm amused that Auro feels he's "armed to the teeth" with only two visible weapons. Did he crotch some grenades?

How is there a kingdom within a few miles of your palace, and you don't know about it?

The leopard -- wandering encounter or fixed encounter outside the kingdom? You decide!

I like how the dragon man, as powerful as it is, chooses to throw a rock at Auro. And it's actually the most effective attack it gets in the entire story!

Spoiler - after pages of set up, the dragon man gets killed with one sword thrust, like most golden age opponents. Bleah!

That "scientific explanation of the Earth's origin"...I wonder if there is any truth to that, or if someone just misremembered what they had once learned about the theory of the Moon's origin...?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Planet Comics #2 - pt. 4

Last post on this issue! We're still looking at Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force. On this page, their tiny fleet encounters floating radium asteroids. Instant destruction within 1,000 miles? I don't know about that...how about giving them a saving throw vs. poison at least? Saving throws don't work like that for inanimate objects like spaceships, but if the crew all dies, that's effectively the same as destruction, right...?

Skipping ahead...Nelson is the sole survivor of his entire fleet and when he arrives on the planet they were heading for, he gets upgraded with magic trophies. How awkward it would have been had more crew survived than there was magic trophies to go around to!

So, one, it's a pretty weird shift to go from a science fiction story into a magic-fantasy story. Weirder, he's given a fake mustache and told he has to pretend to be this world's Zorro now. What a mid-campaign shift!

Two-headed giants are already planned to be in the Mobster Manual, but this one at 40' tall might mean revising the entry to be tougher.

In Hideouts & Hoodlums terms, it's possible that Nelson/Torro hasn't been given actual trophy items at all, but has been allowed to switch classes to Superhero. Or maybe one or more of the items gives him levels in Superhero. Because the first thing he does seems very much like the 1st-level power Feather Landing. And then he wrecks things on the tree with his magic whip.

Wrecking things in front of mobsters provokes a morale save, as we see here.

"Boy, let me tell ya all about what my magic clothes can do! And don't get me started on what my socks and underwear are capable of..."

This makes me even more strongly suspect that "Torro" is a superhero now using flavor text to describe how his powers work -- because it seems a lot like he's describing Nigh-Invulnerable Skin, Leap I (well, technically, a much higher level Leap power, but maybe he's exaggerating), and wrecking things to me. Or maybe the clothes give him 1 level in Superhero, and the whip gives him another.

And lastly, we're going to jump ahead to the final feature, Auro, Lord of Jupiter. Again, there's a lot of John Carter of Mars influence here, right down to how common apes are just wandering around.

Auro is likely another superhero, buffed with one of the Get Tough powers, to be able to beat a gorilla bare-handed like that.

It's going to take weeks for that bite wound to heal? Does Auro have an immune system deficiency, or is he just making that up to score pity points from Ava?

Actually, if he was statted as an alien, and needed to have a racial weakness, I would allow slow healing to be his -- though I can't imagine a player choosing such an agregious handicap.

So the game mechanic question here is, is there a combat penalty for fighting with one hand behind your back? Technically, no, and judging by this page, there shouldn't be. However, I think an Editor would be well within his rights to assign a -1 penalty to attacks, and maybe a -2 penalty to grappling, while one-armed.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Planet Comics #1 - pt. 2

Here's something you didn't know would happen! Early in the 21st century -- like maybe 2018 -- interplanetary travel will become so commonplace that a single family might take their cruiseship out for a joyride to Uranus.

Now this is where things get interesting. The boy is a lone survivor in a savage land...adopted by a saber-tooth tiger. Could this have been the inspiration for the Silver Age Ka-Zar?

Luckily, Jupiter is not a gas giant at all, but a very Earth-like environment except for the gravity.

Auro appears to be using the powers Raise Car (to uproot a tree) and Wall-Crawling (to climb that sheer mountain).

Auro appears to be using the power Multi-Attack here. I have no doubt anymore that he would be statted as an alien superhero (alien because this isn't his home world and he has strange powers here).

These natives are ape men in all but name, no doubt the only line this sci fi Tarzan clone won't cross.

This page interests me for two reasons. One, how did Martha fix her plane? In the page I didn't bother sharing, her plane was hit by a raygun and fell into Jupiter's atmosphere because of some unspecified complication the raygun caused. So what could she have fixed from the inside? And should pilots always have a chance to fix a complication when their vehicle takes damage? This actually came up in my home campaign last session; the mad scientist's autogyro was shot down with a machine gun, but I gave the scientist a skill check to get it back in the air.

And then the other thing is the weakness in this plan. The "pretend to be captured" plan is an old cliche, but how can the King of Neptune be dense enough to think he has ape men from Jupiter working for him?

The Red Comet is billed as a mystery man and, I am hoping, we will soon see evidence that he belongs to the mysteryman Hero class.

Spider-people "return", though they look a lot different than they did in the Basil Wolverton story in Amazing Mystery Funnies. Their webs are somehow so powerful that rayguns cannot blast through them.

Okay, The Red Comet is decidedly not a mysteryman; he's superhero all the way! Here he wrecks things on the steel nets and covers 50 miles in seconds. That second feat has to be the Race the Plane power, as there's no way size alone would give him the ability to move that fast. In fact, though he may well be using an "infra-atomic space adjuster" as a trophy item that lets him Enlarge like the magic-user spell, the enlargement would not be responsible for any of the things he pulls off here, and might just be flavor text.

That Red Comet is back down to normal size again suggests to me that Enlargement must have a duration. Or maybe it's a giant spider-man? I'm not sure at this point.

There is no result on the grappling table for "tied up like a pretzel," though I kind of wish there was now.

His shrinking ability seems much less impressive than his growing ability, as shrinking ability usually is. Diminution seems to only grant him a better chance of surprise, while Enlargement lets him...well, let's say squashing hundreds of spider-men takes a considerable number of combat turns, even buffed with both Multi-Attack and Flurry of Blows.

This page interests me for two reasons. One, Red Comet finds it easier to bust through 20' of solid rock (using his wrecking things ability, or maybe the power Dig) than it is to bust through 20' of spider-man web. The web gun, then, in addition to being a powerful entangling weapon, seems to also be able to generate walls equal to a Wall of Force spell.

The other thing is Red Comet's "Robin Hood"-ness, which I guess places him in the Chaotic Alignment category.

This is Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force, and this building is amazingly unharmed after rockets are shot out into space from the side of it.

150,000 miles from Earth is closer than the Moon. The enemy is really close!

Magnetic rayguns can sort of act like tractor beams, I guess.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)