Fight Comics #4 - pt. 3

We're back, looking at Chip Collins. Now, in my very last blog post I was crediting this story with some ingenuity; Wang (again, he's Mongolian, even though his name isn't) has hired Chip to kill his enemy, Chin Lo (also Mongolian), and is tricking Chip into thinking Chin is the bad guy. So, it makes no sense to kidnap Chin's daughter and be holding her prisoner somewhere Chip might find her. Sure, it's good to have a back-up plan to finish off your hated enemy, but you should only try one scheme at a time so they don't thwart each other! 

I almost missed this on first reading the page, but - how does Chip get the manacles off of Chin's daughter? It's not clear if he's picking the lock, if he found the key in the room, or he's forced the manacles off the walls; it seems like all he had to do is touch them and they magically fell open.

I know the aviator genre is too big a part of early comic books to ignore, and I've tried to accomodate it in Hideouts & Hoodlums as much as possible...but I feel this page best exemplifies my problem with the genre. Chip, on the ground, fighting overwhelming numbers, may seem heroic, but as soon as his air support shows up, the balance of power swings way too far in his favor. The scenario might as well be called over at that point - unless you give the enemies planes/air support too, which evens the odds again.

I did say seems heroic. Let's go over again what happens in this story: Chip is hired through trickery, doesn't figure out he was tricked but just stumbles across evidence he was, changes sides, asks the other side to help him in the shootout and putting them all at risk, and barely manages to even hold his ground until the cavalry comes to save him. But this can easily happen in H&H if you suffer enough bad dice rolls.

I have some serious problems with this page, the least of which is that Chip is served "exotic oriental food" that looks like turkey and ...pumpkins?

My second biggest problem with this page is the perceived outcome of Wang Chi's death. No taxes? Wasn't Chin Lo a rival warlord? He's going to absorb Wang's territory and make those people pay to him now. And even if not him, someone is going to step in to fill that power vaccuum. This libertarian fantasy of a suddenly tax-free zone wouldn't happen - unless what they mean is Chin Lo declared a temporary tax break to celebrate Wang Chi's death, which would actually be pretty smart to ingratiate himself in with his new subjects...

But the biggest issue is scenario-wise: If you are dropping a bomb on a hideout to eliminate the bad guy, how do you know he didn't survive? How do you know he was even home at the time? Game mechanic-wise, I am not going to award you experience points for everyone in the hideout you just killed, because your Hero was at no risk while murdering them. 

(Disguised plug!) So we're pretty far into the Minnesota Campaign Sourcebook now and the last thing we're adding are 10 short, 2-page scenarios you can run as part of a MN-based campaign. Something I've been thinking much about, then, is how to make sure the outcomes of failure scale upwards. For example, I don't want the level 1 adventure to involve saving the world because - how do you scale upwards from there? 

You can't get much more low-end on the failure scale than this - if you fail to stop the racketeers, they will go on making exactly 800 pennies off of each farmer! It's hard to imagine the FBI even getting involved in a case this small, let alone put their resident superhero on the case.

Rip Regan is based in San Francisco and we got told on the last page that he is at a farmers market. But what a weird farmers market it is...according to the background, there are buildings, an open field, a wooden dock, and some sort of body of water here. I guess this isn't downtown! 

The nickname of "Si" is the only indication this farmer is Hispanic, a very rare sighting for a 1940 story taking place in the United States. 

This is already a bad story, but this is just a particularly bad page of this story. Rip is FBI, right? You'd think better tactics would come to his mind than letting one bad guy get away and come back with reinforcements, so they can have a shoot out in a public place. Maybe Rip should have, oh I don't know, questioned the hoodlum? Or followed him back to his lair? 

The hoodlums know a bullet bounced off Rip's back. Why are they so confident he's vulnerable from the front? It's almost like they know game mechanics - Rip is buffed by Nigh-Invulnerable Skin, which still means a lucky shot will hurt him.

And look at that one hoodlum in panel 8 - reduced to a midget suddenly so his reaction is visible below the caption!

The mobsters came back with guns, the farmers are defending themselves by throwing tomatoes, and Rip thought this was going to be a fair match-up? 

Although I didn't always think this way (I have run some pretty lethal H&H scenarios in the past..), I am more with than against Rip's line of thinking now - if the players don't want to offer lethal force, then the villains can tone down their response to match the same tone of play (what I've always called campaign mood).

That said....there should also be a logical expectation of a certain level of resistance from the bad guys and choosing to go against them unarmed shouldn't necessarily keep your Heroes safe. It's a situation that requires balance.

We're going to jump right into Big Jim McLane, and I have to say I almost admire his directness. When Jim thinks these rival lumberjacks are stealing his wood, he doesn't watch them, or wait to find evidence - he walks up, basically says, "Hey, guys, come fight me!" They get goaded into attacking him, and then he can charge them all for assault. 

This reminds me of another old RPG campaign, one I was playing in, where we knew who the bad guy was and that he was up to no good, but we wasted so much time being super-cautious and hunting for evidence, forgetting the directness of these old stories.

Inverting the order of how a story normally goes, Red has already defeated the bad guys when he finds out what the stakes are and the reward. I would be tempted, if this was my scenario, to shrink the reward for two reasons: 1) the fight turned out to be really easy and the risk-reward is unbalanced in the reward's favor ($500 per bad guy?), and 2) the Hero already took care of the bad guys, so the reward isn't needed any longer as a plot hook. 

(Scans courtesy of digitalcomicmuseum.com)

Fight Comics #4 - pt. 2

We return to Kinks Mason to find he's...well, improvising a club to bet a pirate captain with, I have no problem with that, but using a cape, underwater, to distract swordfish like a bullfighter...that seems problematic to me...

...especially since Kinks does it to pull off this trick, which I find flat-out impossible. I know, as a good Editor, I should be encouraging my players to come up with clever solutions and give them a chance to work, but sometimes you need to consider the mood, or tone, you want for your campign and if the idea is compatible. 

We're jumping ahead now into the futuristic adventures of Saber. How can you tell it's the future? Well...there's that weird machine next to his desk, and that weird machine hanging from the ceiling. And no clutter!

Saber unlikely has active powers buffing him in panel 3. The spies failed to gain surprise, which allowed Saber to "size up the situation." Saber appears to be using Leap I, but the distance crossed is no different than what he could have reached running, so the leap is flavor text.

Saber is rolling great for damge to knock out one person per punch, but it is possible without buffing. It is also possible he is buffed with the Get Tough power. 

Saber fails his saving throw vs paralysis.  

It's nice that, in the future, spies will all wear uniforms so you can tell they are spies.

It's unclear if Saber is saying he "must get out of here" from within his jail cell because he is frustrated with the speed of the judicial system or because his cell is somehow Saber-proofed. He doesn't look like he's trying very hard to escape, but maybe we missed all his wrecking things checks.

It's also unclear why that exchange with the guard had to happen through telepathy; I would be comfortable with handwaving that as flavor text, since it doesn't really impact the story whether they spoke out loud or not.

An electo-mort seems to be short for electric mortar, though I can think of several better names for the weapon than that, like an electro-mortar, e-mortar, or - heck - why not just call it a raygun?

500-foot leaps are covered by the Leap I power...but the rules as written are intentionally vague as to what the lifting capacity is while leaping. If my explanation for the leap power is my super-strong leg muscles, then maybe I should be able to carry more than someone who can leap because their magic belt lets them float. The important thing is to reach a decision between player and Editor and remain consistent.

"That just about finishes everyone in this stronghold! Oh, that's the wrong building? I just murdered dozens of sunbathers? Oops!" It never ceases to amaze me when I find someone arguing that heroes didn't kill in the golden age, because people like Saber had absolutely no compunctions stopping them from casual slaughter. There is absolutely zero consideration of bringing these traitors in for trial going on here; it's more like -- ooo, this is easy!

It's very gracious of Saber to give credit to Lt. Chandler, but I think we can trace a lot of his success to the absurdly deadly weapons Saber keeps finding, and that the spies have nothing compatible. The spies/sunbathers on the rooftop apparently had no weapons to fire back. While Saber is zipping around with an atomic disintegrator, the enemy ships are just trying to ram his - the equivalent of letting your 1940-era Heroes arm themselves with sub-machine guns, while the mobsters are armed with sticks and broken bottles. 

This is the second half of a two-page strip called Slug-Nutty Sam. The end gag isn't particularly good, but neither would the fall be lethal in Hideouts & Hoodlums; falling damage always leads to unconsciousness, except for falls resulting from deathtraps. And that is assuming an average or higher damage roll for the fall; a three-story fall could still be as little as 3 points of damage if the rolls are lucky enough.

Wang Chi and Chin Lo are surprisingly realistic Chinese names...so it's all the more disappointing that this story takes place in Mongolia. Although most Westerners, even at the time, thought of Mongolia as a province of China, Mongolia was more closely aligned with the Soviet Union than to China at this time.

The twist plot - that the Heroes are recruited by the bad guy under false pretenses - is worth pointing out, and an exciting scenario alternative when used sparingly.

Shanghai is probably a thousand miles from where "Wang Chi" lives; that's a long distance to travel to recruit the Americans. Geopolitically, the story makes little sense; Wang would be better off and have a shorter route to go heading north/northwest to recruit some Soviet pilots. 

Again, when you ignore these particulars, the plot itself is clever, using your own gunmen to convince Chip an innocent man is the enemy.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Fight Comics #4 - pt. 1

If you'd asked me this morning what I planned to do with my day, writing about George Tuska's Shark Brodie boxing a kangaroo probably wouldn't have been any of my guesses. 

Not that he's actually boxing the kangaroo yet; at first, he's just sailing along, minding his own business, when he gets his first wandering encounter (spoiler: there will be more of these). The encounter is a chance for a good deed and some easy experience points, so Shark leaps at the chance. 

A dory is a small boat with pointed ends and high, flaring sides, like a large rowboat, only it can also support a sail or a motor. 

Here's a clever tip for Editors; when the players aren't spoiling for a fight, but you want to make a fight happen, have the bad guys make this mistake. 

I'm honestly surprised that players have never actively sought this out in one of my H&H campaigns yet, but fighting for gamblers seems like an easy way to make both xp and $, though Lawful Heroes should not be considering this option. 

Ten to one odds is very good odds. I would probably sink some levels in the fighter class into that kangaroo if I wanted it to be that challenging.

I like how there's no overarching plot to this installment, but just a series of random encounters that are made to overlap thanks to Stubby and Fritz motivating each encounter.

I hope I'm not reading too much into this page to think Susie and Dolly are prostitutes, but since Susie is a pickpocket we can always stat them as thieves instead of vamps. 

We're going to jump from there into the next feature, Kinks Mason. 

A 100-lb. swordfish is average size, so at 300 lbs. would be a large swordfish, at 900 lbs. a huge swordfish, and ...well, luckily giant swordfish don't exist in real life, and I would call this a huge swordfish. 

Huge swordfish can overturn small boats.  

I'm interested in how treasure can be concealed on a fish and be hook enough for an underwater adventure.  Treasure is always a good adventure hook, but don't forget that treasure should usually be guarded.

Sometimes it isn't enough to dangle plot hooks and Editor's can get impatient. When the Editor wants to get a character to an adventure locale so badly that he takes extraordinary measures to move the character there against his will that's usually called railroading, but here we can call it swordfishing.

Ooo, nice surprise encounter at the end here!

At first I thought he was going to be a ghost pirate, but that he's got a Potion of Water Breathing with a really impressive duration is a novel wrinkle. Since he's a captain, level titles tell me that he's probably a 5th level fighter. Having trained huge swordfish instead of a pirate crew is another interesting wrinkle. Did he have a Potion of Animal Control as well?

I'm not sure what's going on in panel 5. Either Kink is knocking over the table to serve as cover (which is sensible), or he knocked it over so he can jump off of it and lunge for the sword, burning a stunt and essentially wasting a turn of combat. 

If he managed to keep the sword maybe the extra damage over punching would be worth it, but Sneely (a terrible name for a villain, by the way, other than the villain's sidekick) manages to break the sword. This could be a non-superhero wrecking things roll, or the Editor had simply decided in advance that the sword was rusted and useless and just there to inconvenience the Hero. 

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Amazing Man Comic #11 - pt. 4

Wrapping up this comic, we return to The Shark. We find the Shark has buffed himself with the Super-Tough Skin power, almost correctly identified by name by the narrator. 

Spoiler: The Shark wins.

Now we'll jump right into Mighty Man.  Here is what finding a secret door in the game looks like. 

Comic book fans are expected to be familiar with Hollow World settings, so the reader is meant to be no more shocked by sunlight in an underground setting than Mighty Man is.

Okay now, if you can look past the implied racism of these black men, the idea of coal giants itself is pretty good and not that different from stone giants in D&D. 

I appreciate that, even know after taking his blows, Mighty Man still doesn't think of them as the enemy and wants to make peace.

Again, if you look past the "White Savior" cliche...and the suggestion of black cannibals, you'll find that this is a surprisingly dark scenario (especially given the Filchock cartoony art), with the 12 missing people having already been eaten and beyond rescue.

The origin of coal giants - that they have to eat chemically altered coal - is ridiculous, but it's not that out of line with golden age comic book origins; we're about a year away from a speedster getting his powers from a transfusion of mongoose blood. 

"Making every blow count" sounds to me like Mighty is buffing his damage rolls. 

This is maybe the first time a trap has been triggered to aid a Hero. It looks like that pit trap really hurt him too, though he could have already taken a lot of damage in the fight. 

So far we don't really learn much about the coal giants, physically, other than they are tough and they are not faster than Mighty Man.

We are told, but do not see the dozen coal giants here. It's interesting that this is the same number as the missing people and it would have been a nice twist if the coal giants were actually the 12 missing people.

The last thing we learn about the coal giants is that seeing fire triggers morale saves for them, and we can presume that they take additional damage from fire (+1 point per die?). 

Didn't the old man tell us that he found the hidden kingdom by a different method? So they're not hidden forever.

 

Jumping ahead into Magician from Mars, we have a rare instance of authority figures not doing whatever it is the Hero asks them to do. Could it be because she's a woman? 

Jane uses pyschic paper!  Or is it a Phantasmal Image spell, cast on the paper...?

500,000 MPH seems fast, except in space travel, where it would still take almost six days to reach Mars from Earth.

Jane casts Wall of Force.

Martian tanks look pretty much like normal Earth tanks, except they have windows? And better shielding around the treads. 

The king's city has a force field, but the generator must be enormous and costly; they don't have the technology for smaller forcefields until Jane teaches them how to make them. Or she just gives them the idea, because they never thought of it...?

Yet another bad guy with a television.

Gravity shoes allow them to fly. They must be wearing some other device that creates the personal force field. 

Jane uses the ...well, there's no Raise Tank power, but the Raise Bridge power should be more than strong enough to let her toss tanks around.  If we didn't know she was a Magic-User/Superhero, we do now!

There's an interesting little subplot building with Taal - you'll have to read the comic to see what happens!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Man Comics #11 - pt. 3

We're still on Minimidget, so today we're going to talk about the trouble with shrinking and game mechanics. I have proposed before on this blog the radical idea of using no new game mechanics at all -- that shrinking is entirely flavor text. The benefit is that you are -4 to be hit, the same as if your opponent couldn't see you (in this case, because you're so small).  But that ignored one critical issue with being small, and that's getting from point A to point B when any common sense ruling at normal size would say you could not pass through that opening.  You could hand wave the common sense ruling, but that could be granting more power through handwaving then I am generally comfortable with, particularly in a scenario like this where escaping from a locked room is critical. 

Where that leaves us is that the shrinking Hero must be a Magic-User with the Poof! spell. The flavor text of the spell has been replaced with shrinking, but the spell effect - of getting from point A to point B over a short distance - is still there.

Ugh, Google isn't letting me wrap text around the images today. Thanks so much, Google!

I shared this second page for more evidence of the importance of random initiative rolls for each combat turn. Even as I've turned away from random initiative rolls when running D&D and back towards Old School common sense order, it's clear that common sense has nothing to do with who gets to attack first in a comic book panel. Here, the hoodlum has three guns trained on him, yet he's still able to rush up and punch Minimidget before anyone can make a move to stop him.

What you just looked at was Zardi the Eternal Man, a brand new character, and an interesting spin on the Mandrake clone. You'll notice in the following pages that Zardi sometimes appears to be using real magic, like when he makes himself young again, and other times his wand seems to be more like a scientific tool akin to the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. The last panel even seems to allude to this when it refers to what Zardi does as "tricks," instead of spells.

Now the question is, do I need a spell that de-ages someone? I would say probably not, since there are no game mechanics attached to age in H&H (except between minors and adults, and even then just for mobsters). More on this shortly.

"Conquering gravity" is a Levitate spell. 

And, of course, it's ridiculousy racist to make your ethnic manservant dress in period clothing and not let him even wear a shirt.

For a magic cane, it sure looks like it's just a trick cane with a retractable silk line reeled up inside it. The only magic I'm seeing here is that Zardi is strong enough to lift Jeffry aloft with one hand - but then, we can chalk this up to flavor text, since Zardi isn't using his other hand for anything important.

Here we can see that Zardi's age actually does figure into the scenario, as a disguise. Since that is the only purpose it is serving, this could simply be a Change Self spell. 

He also casts Invisibility on Jeffrey.

There is no explanation for how Silky faked that photo, but Silky is a great nickname for a Slick Hoodlum. 

Zardi is either casting Knock, or his cane has some electronic door-opening feature -- which it looks more like. 

The magic cane "works" because he's using it as a whip and actively whipping them. No magic here.

Chaldean illusions are the Phantasmal Image spell. 

I think it's refreshing that Zardi seems to be no more than a 5th level magic-user. 

I'm jumping into the Shark story in progress. 

There's not really a good in-game rational for how Shark just happens to find this going on with his "magic" television just in the nick of time...except....the Shark's TV probably has a certain chance of finding bad guys per turn, which were measured in rest turns, until the moment a combat happened, and then his turns became melee turns. This explanation is a little dodgy because the Shark is not in her combat until after he already benefits from being slowed down to her turn speed.

Another example of a gun being disarmed with a thrown knife.

I don't recall if any other Shark stories feature this weakness, but it's a good idea and makes the last two panels of the previous page all the more heroic. 

I don't get how Fritz is able to tell just by looking at him that he's helpless, or manages so quickly to tie it to the thrown knife. 

I'm also surprised that belt buckles can do that kind of damage. Were belt buckles made sharper in 1940? I would think they would each do 1-3 points of damage, at best. 

Pretty good art, though! 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

 

Amazing Man Comics #11 - pt. 2

Welcome back! Let's pick up where we left off last time with Chuck Hardy. Chuck has met a new species in his Hollow World setting and, no, it's not lobstermen, it's pygmy lobstermen. That implies that there are "normal"-sized lobstermen out there somewhere too. We don't learn anything about the pygmy lobstermen other than they use a monarchical system of government, are matriarchal, extremely friendly, and technologically primitive. We never once see them fight, so they could have 12 HD for all we know, but I think it's a safer bet that they have a 1/2 HD, or 1-1 HD at best.

I wish we had a sense of scale for that curious lizard, as it looks more fearsome than pygmy lobstermen and frogmen. 

I'm going to spare you the next page and the results of Chuck's trap. Here's a hint: had it been drawn realistically, there would be blood flying everywhere. So how do I stat this trap? A catapult-launched spear is going to be pretty powerful - I'd even be willing to say 3-18 points of damage worth - but it's also going to be an impractical, poorly-aimed weapon. Despite the number of spears, they would each have a chance to hit equal to just a 1 HD mobster. 

Incidentally, missing from this story is any explanation for how people with pincers for hands were able to make rope ladders.

If panel 3 makes you think of the Ewok Dance...then we think alike.

The only real reason I shared this page is the peculiar wording of "knock him kicking!" Google that phrase and the only thing that comes up is a sports article from a 1965 newspaper, and it's behind a paywall so I can't tell what the context is. I can only imagine that Chuck's dialogue is being written intentionally silly.

Moving on to Iron Skull...

I was confused at first by the term "pet suspects," never having heard it before. Apparently it's a real term meaning the same thing as "most likely" suspects, though my first thought was that the Chief had a pet that suspected them.

It's incredible that the Chief is unable to see the two dead men both belonging to the same cult as a clue. Or perhaps I should say it's suspicious... coincidentally, Drago hears that the Skull is after him right after the Skull leaves the police station. 

This episode of Pinky & Jim, Slave Cultists is interrupted by Iron Skull, climbing up the bricks instead of the easier drainpipe right next to him. To be fair, the Editor could rule that a drainpipe isn't strong enough to support an android's weight (there is no game mechanic behind that; it would just be a common sense ruling by the Editor). It's also possible that Iron Skull is so strong that he's pinching fingerholds into the bricks (which would be handled by a wrecking things roll). 

Here we have a new type of robot - grotesque robots. What's special about these is that Iron Skull's annod comptod machine doesn't work on them. Now, no one knows what "annod comptod" means, but we know from past issues that this machine is what Iron Skull uses to Wreck at Range (the power). It seems that grotesque robots are immune, or greatly resistant, to being wrecked. The Skull has to defeat them the old-fashioned way with punches. 

In the future (or maybe because this is a comic book?), you don't have to smother someone for 10 minutes with a chloroform-soaked rag to knock him unconscious, you just toss the rag on his face and if it lands he is knocked out. 

Both the art and the caption in panel 3 are confusing. The rod must run through the center of the sphere and spins it. The "pyramids" would more properly be called spikes. Being scraped against the spikes wile being rotated past them seems like it would do at least 4-24 points of damage to me. Good thing that the Skull is being held with nothing but rope - easily wrecked as if a door. 

Now this is interesting - Yagani is a Hindu name. In Iron Skull's future, he has to watch out for spies from India! (Unless Burgos just mistakenly assumes this is a Japanese name, since otherwise his WWIII is awfully similar to WWII). 

The bald guy is an assassin, as detailed in the Mobster Manual.  

I think this is the first time I've ever seen a comic book character actually swallow a key; this is usually a cartoon thing.

"Dragon has a time bomb hidden here!"

"We have no time to look for it! In a 10' x 10' cell with almost no furnishings!"

We can see it makes no difference whether Iron Skull wrecks with his head or his fists, so that's all flavor text.

I've never been impressed with Burgos' artwork, but that last panel is particularly rushed. That "BOOM!" going off a few feet away looks like it was set off by a firecracker instead of a bomb.

Note that we never did find out who Drago's informant was - my money is still on the Chief!

Before we go, let's peek in on just one page of Minimidget. All I have to say about this page is that Boma is a real city, in the Congo - and also that ordinary people seem to be really cool about tiny shrunken people in this strip.

(Scans courtesy of Comicbookplus.)