Wonderworld Comics #9 - pt. 1

Our return to Fox begins with The Flame and something that I would never let players do at the beginning of a scenario -- locking themselves in a laboratory and trying to invent the most powerful explosive ever. Come on, this is game night! Try the scenario and leave this for downtime. You've got cool superpowers at your disposal (I even let you have all those brevet ranks; see previous posts about the Flame); try using those.

Not a map, per se, but an interesting cut-away of the interior of a submarine. Submarine design is very linear, making for a pretty boring hideout to explore.

Teleport through Focus is a great, high-level power for getting the Hero straight to the trouble, without having to do any slow investigation first. Maybe I'm not an expert on torpedo strikes, but I don't think they set fires in most cases -- seeing as how they punch holes into ships that quickly fill up with water. I wonder if there should be something like a 1 in 6 chance of vehicles sustaining damage catching on fire.

Now this is interesting...apparently the Flame isn't just immune to fire, but can interact with fire like it was a solid object. This is flavor text for the spell Water Walking.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just put all powers and spells in the same pool and let players pick from both...but then, some powers are very un-spell-like (the Get Tough, Raise, and "Race the" powers, for examples). Maybe there needs to be a rule for researching ways to transfer a spell into a power, and vice versa.

This can happen in Hideouts & Hoodlums. Superheroes are deliberately not good at fighting without buffing themselves with offensive and/or defensive powers, so if you want your power slots for other things, nine low-level fighters could conceivably take out a mid-level superhero just by doing enough damage.

Interestingly, steam is harmful to the Flame, even though fire and, presumedly, heat is not as well.

The Flame uses his explosive to blow up the hideout, which is also odd because usually hideouts blow up on their own just as the Hero is escaping.

Our villain, Doyoff (not a real name), reminds us that it pays to have more than one escape route.

And we're on to Yarko the Great, here reading a lot like that early Superman story of the con man posing as Superman. Like that story, these con men have no special abilities and are so generic as to be practically mobstertype-less. We do learn, however, that $300 watches were a thing in 1940.

This is a really curious Yarko story. After fighting vampires, the Devil, and Death itself, Yarko seems content to use his ventriloquism spells to play pranks on the con men -- even though they may have shot and killed a woman (though that scene seems out of place and really out of character for them). So far, Yarko hasn't cast a single spell.

Now we get into the spell-casting! First there's Hold Person, and then Yarko...well, he casts some kind of spell that summons stolen items and makes them float in the air in front of him. Maybe something called Thief's Bane? But it would have to be a 5th or 6th level spell, being a combination of Locate Object (for multiple objects) and Telekinesis.

Also note that, because fire extinguishers were not common yet, the theater has a fire bucket on the wall by Yarko.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)