Wonderworld Comics #10 - pt. 2

This is only Yarko the Great's eighth story, but already his second trip to the land of the dead -- and surprisingly his way there is entirely different this time. Instead of transitioning through a Dante-lite version of the afterlife, Yarko is able to transport himself (Plane Shift spell?) directly to the Valley of Shadows, or an area of it that is more desolate and uninhabited than when we last saw it. Interestingly, Yarko needs an item belonging to the Baron in order to track him across the planes; one could interpret from this that Yarko would wind up in some random space on the same plane without the sword to attract him to the Baron.

Shining Knight, no! (Just kidding; the old knight just has the same coloration as the Shining Knight will have a year or two from now).

Here we see Yarko fighting with a sword, and fighting well, invalidating the "magic-users can only fight with daggers" conceit.

We also get a good example of why we want to put powerful Heroes in environments where they can't use their full range of spells or powers. We know Yarko can still cast spells in the Afterlife, but there must be anti-magic zones throughout and Yarko had temporarily stepped into one.

Yarko's spell -- conjuring the ghosts of his past victims to attack him -- reminds me of the Phantasmal Killer spell.

This is Shorty Shortcake, and those are some really big germs flying out of that watch case! Rigging something to release tear gas -- or "crying germs", as it's called here -- is not a bad trap.

Hideouts & Hoodlums has rules for pushing opponents, but pulling them? That's trickier, I think. It would probably be a grappling attack and then, if successful, I would allow the grappler to make half-moves and pull the victim along, so long as the grappler had the higher Strength score.

While grappling your opponent, if you have a strong enough hold on them (that means at the Editor's discretion), you could roll to make another attack and put a hat on your opponent's head, if that was really something you wanted to do. I'm definitely not opposed to giving free attacks if they're used to do something in-character, but not actually harm anyone.

I'm glad I've never statted giant bats as having very many hit points, as these giant vampire bats (simply called vampire bats here, but the scale is always way off in a Shorty Shortcake adventure -- oh, I wonder if that is a feature I should talk about?) fall easily after just being hit with a rubber-band ball (an improvised weapon, doing no more than 1-3 points of damage, if ever there was one).

I'm kind of surprised that I've never seen a Hero track a bad guy by his cigar ash until this point.

This is also the first time I can recall seeing one trophy item specifically able to counteract another trophy item.

This is Patty O'Day, so naturally I'm going to focus on her partner Ham being awesome instead. Here it takes not one, but two head blows to knock him out, demonstrating that head blows are not automatic knockouts.

We also get a glimpse of a secret door concealed as a wall panel.

How long, in game time, should it take for eyes to become accustomed to the dimness? It probably doesn't matter for this scene, but if combat was about to begin it could be relevant. Or maybe not; I'd probably ignore the issue, unless Patty lost initiative, and then I could use the "eyes adjusting" thing as an excuse to explain why.

It's a smart tactic to keep the rope you were tied up in. Awesome Ham has figured out a use for it already!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)