Famous Funnies #65 - pt. 2

Morse code is a handy way to send messages to Heroes, but as a non-traditional language it is not necessarily something Editors will let all Heroes know. Translating Morse code could be a basic skill check.

The "sounds phony" clue is a tricky thing to impart in game play. Is my player going to know I know it's not the Navy Secret Service, is he going to assume I didn't know and just got it wrong, or is it going to go right over his head? I've talked about this before on the blog, and there's really no easy solution to this other than to talk to the player out-of-character and explain that this was a clue or hint.

This is the flipside of the issue I just talked about -- what to do if the player is the one testing your knowledge while in-character? Did he just trick the mobster into admitting he was a phony just because I didn't know that thing about West Point? Again, this will require out-of-character discussion about what the player is trying to find out.

The gunshot through the window is evidence of how difficult it is to shoot the correct target in melee, though I do suspect that it did not really matter for these bad guys' plans which one of them was shot.

Dickie Dare features a partial map of the interior of a steamer ship. Looks accurate enough to me!

This deathtrap sounds pretty brutal -- scalding water shot through a firehose seems like it would do 1-6 points of damage. It's not a lot, but because a hose has an area of effect (let's say it's a ray 10' wide at its base), the pirates don't have to roll to attack with it.

A "steam cock" is an actual thing, by the way; it's part of the boiler.

No one is dying too fast from this steam, but I have a couple of possible explanations for that. One, the Heroes in the room, at least, should get saves vs. missiles (or maybe science) for half-damage. Two, the pirates might have started their trap too early, before the water was hot enough to do more than a few points of damage.

That ape looks pretty intense. Note the value of a captive ape. They're almost too valuable to give Heroes a chance of capturing one!

All I'm going to say here is that is some pretty fancy shooting, to spray bullets from a sub-machine gun and only hit his hand, for a disarming shot.

Here's an interesting page! For starters, Dickie and friends have a problem that no players ever have because of player knowledge -- knowing which of them was shot in the dark. To do this in-game, the Editor would need to keep information from everyone -- even the player who was shot, in order to make sure the others do not know.

Being a non-Hero, Kit can bleed to death from being injured (strict hp rules only apply to Heroes).

There was recently a kerfuffle in my home campaign, where one of the Heroes gave a semi-automatic to his 12-year old sidekick. Here we have Dickie, arguably even younger, hauling a sub-machine gun.

I'm sharing this because I'm amused by the fact that Oaky has been sleeping under a tree, and his supporting cast has been out doing much more exciting stuff without him. When your players' SCMs come back after being away from the campaign for a bit, make sure they have interesting stories to tell.

Seaweed Sam surprises me again with more Hideouts & Hoodlums-relevant content. Here, in this land of giants, we see that giants (and, really, any mobster class we want) can also be magic-users. This giant magic-user is at least 7th level if that is a regular Polymorph Other spell. The Polymorph Other spell is not supposed to be able to turn you into any animal smaller than a bird, but bear in mind that the scale is way off in any panel with giants in it, and that butterfly is really quite large.

Not sure, but I probably won't be statting large butterflies, unless I find much bigger and more dangerous examples.

Big Chief Wahoo's feat here could have been accomplished with one of two powers -- either Improved Missile Weapon, with the heavy lifting hand-waved, or more likely Raise Car, since the distance thrown itself looks pretty normal and the lifting is the only really impressive part.

We also learn how much it cost to shoot that much of a movie.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)