Speed Comics #6 - pt. 2

Continuing on with the latest Shock Gibson adventure, we find Baron Von Kampf is finally using the tactic I had predicted last time, of using the truck's radio to lure Shock into a trap.

It's very unclear to me how a cave mouth wide enough to drive a truck through is a secret entrance, particularly to a well-explored cave complex.

And man, someone really smoothed out those tunnels to allow a truck to drive for miles through them!

When we do see bats in comic books, they tend to be just hideout dressing and not an actual encounter.

An electrical field on the other side of a doorway marked "enter" is fiendishly clever.

A deathtrap worthy of Houdini!

This is the second time electricity has drained Shock's electricity powers. I still don't get how that works, but I appreciate that his player wanted him to have a weakness. By Hideouts & Hoodlums rules, he doesn't need one unless he's statted as an alien, android, or merman superhero.

Shock is using wrecking things to escape this deathtrap -- and it really is a good deathtrap, because if he missed one or two wrecking rolls, he might actually have suffocated inside the concrete. But what category is Shock wrecking? A brick wall is in the cars category, but this concrete hasn't had time to harden yet. On the other hand, Shock has to move with zero room for leverage, so that penalty might negate any advantage he has from the softness of the concrete, so I would stick with cars.

Every villain's hideout needs a lever that opens trapdoors. The question is, does the trapdoor need to be placed in advance and the Hero's movement through the cave accurately mapped, or simply make him save vs. plot to avoid passing over the trapdoor by chance? The former has a certain amount of built-in suspense, as you put a map in front of the player and ask him to show his route, but it requires some prep work from the Editor in advance.

Pit traps that fall into water filled with alligators are a dime a dozen; what sets this trap apart is the waterfall in between. What purpose does the waterfall serve? Not much that I can imagine; it would not disorient the Hero and give him a penalty on his surprise roll any more than falling into the water initially would. If anything, the waterfall gives the Hero a little more time to save himself before winding up in the lower pool with the alligators.

It's usually sharks that are shown attacking each other when one is hurt (the myth of the feeding frenzy), but it's a real stretch to say that having its tail in its mouth makes it so helpless that the other gators go into a feeding frenzy. Couldn't the gator just spit his tail out anyway?

The result is the same anyway; Shock basically chickens out from the fight and exits the pool, using this so-conveniently forgotten ladder left in the pool.

Wrecking a stone wall is in the trucks category, and I would put support pillars in the same category. Now, did Shock make some kind of geology skill check first to determine those were load-bearing columns, or did he just start wrecking columns at random and get lucky?

The Villain class has a percent chance, higher per level, of being "lucky to escape" just like this.

And now we'll skip the beginning and jump further into the next story. Crash, Cork, and the Baron (now also referred to as the Three Aces) are in South America navigating what appears to be the Amazon River. Their riverboat has hard cover in the form of protective screens, but it's not enough to keep some "arrows" from getting in. And I use "arrows" because, if they're 5' long, we should really be calling them javelins.

Of course, from a modern perspective, it's difficult to side with the Three Aces here. That pipeline is going to spill crude oil into the river and pollute the environment; they are really on the wrong side of this conflict.

...Not that the natives seem interested in solving this diplomatically. The native on the far right in panel 1 seems to be drawn more like a monster than a human, betraying the racism of this story.

Hurled stones are improvised weapons and do 1-3 points of damage.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)