Smash Comics #4 - pt. 3

I'm a fan of John Law the Scientective, so I might be biased in thinking there's a lot of good RPG fodder here. But, hey, it's my blog, right?

Here's a good diagram of how a falling weight trap is triggered.

Every time I think I have this nailed down, that vehicular combat must be handled with a cumulative chance of complications, a page like this happens that makes me think that vehicles should have hit points and suffer attrition just like human combatants. I don't know...maybe it'll wind up a combination of both?

John may be a scientist, but when it comes to fixing things it still takes 10 minutes (1 exploration turn) to fix a broken radio.

Okay, I was all on board with this trap, and the dry ice is a clever touch -- but is 50 lbs. of weight really enough to kill someone? I guess the short answer is, if it's in a deathtrap, it always can. Normally, though, 50 lbs. of force would only do 1-2 points of damage in Hideouts & Hoodlums. Dropped from a height of 10', it would do 1-2 + 1-6 points of damage and could potentially kill. But the ceiling doesn't look that high...?

This is Wings Wendall of the Military Intelligence. Here,  we see his plane get battered by the storm until it runs out of hit points (maybe?). On the mountainside, he meets either a planned encounter or a random encounter of 3-5 wolves. We also see him run out of ammo pretty quickly.

Oh look, it's another one of those rayguns that shoots planes out of the sky! But why would ultra-sonics be particularly useful for that...? Oh well -- remember, the science behind a raygun is only flavor text!

There are no details on what the pilots were drugged with and what exactly the drugs did to them. They seem docile...perhaps like they had the effects of a Charm Person spell on them.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)