Speed Comics #5 - pt. 2

The pay-off: first superhero vs. dinosaurs adventure!

Right away, we've got a duck-billed dinosaur, some kind of hadrosaur, and...although it looks more like a fat sloth, I think that's supposed to be an ankylosaurus? And, ooo, that pterodactyl drawing looks so terrifying, I think I'll have to use it in the Mobster Manual!

Hmm, saber-tooth tigers coexisting with dinosaurs? Well, okay, it is a lost world, not a time travel adventure, so we can overlook it.

The huge boulder, at that size, must weigh over 1,000 lbs., which makes what he does with it next difficult to describe...

How much damage should the huge boulder do? A rock that heavy cannot be thrown with even the Extend Missile Range III power alone. But if it was combined with Raise Car, could damage be increased? It must be possible, if it can crush a saber-tooth tiger in one hit. But how much? Extend Missile Range III does 3d6 damage and is a third level power. If we stacked it with a first-level Raise power, that could up damage to 4d6, while the power Raise Elephant would then stack it up to 5d6. The rules, as I wrote them, don't specify any of this, but it seems like a simple extrapolation.

I'm not happy with the tiger getting killed.

Pterodactyls are nowhere near this big; it is a pteranodon instead. I'll have to include a note in its stats that it can lift up man-sized prey it catches in its claw attack.

Shock, stop murdering endangered animals! I'm starting to think grappling attacks need to be able to do lethal damage; not that I think necks can really twist like that.

Piloting a dead pteranodon can't be easy, maybe a skill check to maneuver it in the right direction, and then an attack roll to reach the sauropod with it.

This page seems all kinds of unlikely, but maybe appropriate for a campaign as light in tone as Shock's adventures are (minus the racism and rampant animal murdering).

So how do you handle taming a bucking dinosaur? I think it would be, for each successful expert skill check, you get a chance at a friendly encounter reaction roll. If the result is hostile, or the skill check fails, you have to save vs. science or be bucked off for 2-8 points of damage. Once you get a friendly reaction result, the dinosaur lets you ride it.

Cavemen! It's interesting that the cavemen are not so primitive that they can't learn English or build ladders.

To fill you in from the small gap, Shock has challenged the caveman witch doctor to a contest of powers, in exchange for their hostage. But what is the witch doctor? Hypnotism, we have established, is an expert skill in 2nd edition, but it works against one target, not four at once. A Sleep spell would work, which means the witch doctor is an actual Magic-User.

Raise Car should be powerful enough to uproot a tree. A generous Editor might allow wrecking things to do this too.

H&H doesn't have any fire-starting powers yet for Superheroes, but fire-starting is an advanced skill and, once started, he could make it spread quickly with the Control Fire power.

Again, evidence of a Raise power being stacked with an Extend Missile Range power.

And we'll just skip ahead real quick into our next feature, Crash, Cork, and the Baron. They are marooned in the colony of Ceylon, nowadays known as Sri Lanka. In typically racist fashion, the natives run around in loin clothes and use primitive spears.

But that's not why I'm showing this to you. I'm showing it to you for that crazy panel of Cork (I think that's Cork) grappling two opponents at once while still kicking a third. This keeps coming up because, to truly emulate these comic books, combat can't be limited to one attack per turn, but for fair game balance, it really has to have one attack per turn be the norm (there are already exceptions, but we don't have to get into those).

Or does it? I've long resisted adding critical hits for natural 20's into H&H...but what if a natural 20 gave you an extra attack? And you could keep getting attacks for every natural 20 you rolled? In theory, a string of lucky rolls could then account for every panel where we see stuff like this happening. Something to think about.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)