One last visit to this issue, and we'll resume where we were with
Lt. Jim Cannon of the British Navy. This page will give you a good sense for how hard it is for a low-Hit Die mobster/low-level villain to hit a target. Jim isn't far off when he mocks Devilfish for not being able to hit the broad side of a barn.
---
While this author was spot-on last time with the British using 15-inch guns, the Germans had already switched to metrics by then. These German "6-inch guns" were really 15 cm naval guns, and yes, the Germans were using those (the scale being to the ammunition, of course, not the gun itself!).
However, there seems to be significant artistic license going on here with the "torpedo cruiser." I've seen no pictures of torpedo cruisers that looked like small motorboats, nor have I seen any that launch from the bow of the boat yet.
Moving on, we're going to look at a super-creepy installment of
Landor, Maker of Monsters. Voldemort's Dad here has created a new mobster-type, the cat man, in the most disturbing way possible. He's apparently shrunken a woman's body down to the size of a large cat, say 3' tall, traded her head for a real cat's head, and made it so that it would act in very un-cat-like ways, like listening to you when you tell it to do something.
So they just
happened to be within sight of Landor's castle. Maybe not the safest place to take your niece for a picnic? And if they
know this is Landor's castle, why do they leave it unguarded? Or why not buy it and raze it to the ground? Or convince the nearest municipality to annex the land and rezone it?
---
Cat-people are good for fighting half-pints and small dogs, but pretty useless against full-grown men. I would be generous giving this poor thing 1-1 Hit Dice.
The hammer toss is an unusual grappling maneuver, but I'm not sure if we need to add it, as this could be replicated with the throw result. In game play, I would say Torrence's player asked if he could throw Landor into the generator and make it explode. The Editor then said, let's break this down mechanically; you can roll to grapple Landor, then you can roll to hit the generator with Landor, then you can make a wrecking things roll vs. the generator. Torrence's player then got some pretty good dice rolls!
---
"If only we could be sure! If
only...we could wait for the fire to die out and then check the ruins for his remains. Or watch the entrance and see if anyone comes out..."
---
Moving on to
Smoke Carter, we find some unusual clues to find at an arson scene, including blood, a counter cut away with an automatic inserted in the opening (like finding a trap), and a letter addressed to himself from the arsonist (not generally a good thing to be carrying when you're committing crimes, but it makes things really easy for your players!).
Guard dogs makes a lot of sense from a mobster's perspective, though it makes things tricky during game play -- do you discourage your players from beating up on dogs and make them outsmart them, or let the players play out the encounter anyway they want (spoiler: odds are 50/50 they will beat up the dogs)?
---
Hey...where did Smoke get those steaks from? Are you telling me he routinely carries steaks around in his car for emergencies just like this?
And lastly, we're just going to peek in on
Spike Marlin, with a more whimsical than normal adventure courtesy of George Tuska (whose figure work is as stiff as ever here).
---
Spike pulls off a coupe most players of
H&H would be envious of: a two-man press gang fails to capture him, so he beats them up, disguises them, and sells them back to their own boss -- netting him XP
and $!
(Scans courtesy of
Digital Comic Museum.)
No comments:
Post a Comment