Flash Comics #3 - pt. 2

Continuing where I left off...

Hawkman's (or Hawk-Man's) friend is "killed" by Una Cathay, a female mad scientist/magic-user, a very unusual combination in the Golden Age, when most women aren't shown as being scientific-minded. The story is (get ready for spoilers later): she has come up with an interesting spin on raising the dead; her chemical potions can resurrect dead people, but to stay alive they have to remain mostly immersed in the chemical bath. She has a collection of revivified men floating in water tanks, a spin on the "brains in jars" trope. Oh, and she can work "Voodoo" spells. If she ties her hair to someone, she can make him take burning damage even at long range (not sure what to call this spell...Voodoo Fire?).

Hawk-Man does not yet have much of a reputation as a good guy; he is able to easily fool the scientist and a Russian spy working with her (actually identified as Russian and not given a fake country) into thinking he wants to throw in with them. But she decides to kill him anyway, with the aforementioned voodoo spell. Typical of the genre, the spy is an aristocrat (or at least calls himself a count).

Somehow, when Hawk-Man goes home to pick up some throwing daggers, Shiera is there, immediately spots a long woman's hair wrapped around his wrist from across the room, and instead of jumping to the conclusion that Carter is seeing another woman, she jumps to the weirder conclusion that someone cast Voodoo Fire on him. Could that be an expert skill check in arcane lore?

The twist to the story -- as too often happens -- is that there's less supernatural or super-sciency going on than it appeared; Una was poisoning people with something that put them into comas and pretended they were dead.

Hawk-Man confronts the villains after freeing the prisoners and pins the spy's hand to the wall with a dagger, but the dagger really just disarms the spy (it was his gun hand) and the pinning is quickly forgotten flavor text.

Una escapes from Hawk-Man by using a secret door that he appears to be unable to bust through. Does that suggest that secret doors should be harder to wreck than normal doors, or is Hawk-Man only concerned that wrecking the door will take too long and Una will get away?

When the spy falls out a window, Hawk-Man makes no effort to save him.

For the first time in any medium, I've now seen a thrown dagger puncture a tire and make a car crash. Also unusual for the car crash trope, the villain actually dies in the crash, Una suffering a broken neck (and Hawk-Man even checks the body to make sure she's really dead!).

Next up is Johnny Thunderbolt, or Johnny Thunder as we know him! Training to be a boxer, Johnny has gotten ripped since last issue.

"Pile of jack" is slang for "lot of money" in this story. Johnny also uses the term "slop up" to mean "go out for a drink" (though this is Johnny, so he means a chocolate malt, not booze). There is a topical reference to Glenn Cunningham. According to Wikipedia, Glenn Vernice Cunningham was an American middle-distance runner, who was considered as the greatest American miler of all time. He received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States in 1933.

When Johnny tells bullets to go back where they came from, he activates what appears to be the Turn Gun on Bad Guy power. Since Johnny is a magic-user, that means we need a Missile Reflection spell too.

Johnny is, at least briefly, heavyweight champion of the world. We still haven't seen a physical manifestation of his thunderbolt-genie yet.

Next we're treated to a reprint of Rod Rian of the Sky Police. The Mephisians use a giant raygun (one of those that looks a lot like the dome of a planetarium) to pull Rod out of the sky using a combination of magnetism and gravity, or what we now call in science fiction a tractor beam. In a convenient moment of charity, the Mephisian leader (who's name also happens to be Mephistos) not only spares Rod from being shot and decides to strand him and the other prisoners on The Island of the Living Dead, but also is sporting enough to arm them first. I guess Mephistos isn't such a bad guy after all! On the island we haven't seen the living dead yet, but we get to see the chasm beast! We haven't seen this guy since Dell's The Comics #10!

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

Flash Comics #3 - pt. 1

The Flash's hometown is New York City, at least for this story, and the city's newspaper is the Town Cackle, a paper that sells for 2 cents. When his fiance Joan's father is framed as a spy, the Flash's first suspect is the newspaper that reported it (to be fair, it was Joan's idea, and who wants to say no to their fiance?). At the office, Flash just happens to hear the city editor implicate himself to a subordinate.

In Hideouts & Hoodlums, there can either be a random chance of coming into the room at the right moment, or the Editor can simply force the encounter to happen that way if the entire plot hinges on it. Of course, it is not a good idea to make scenarios hinge on a single choice of the player(s). Suppose no one had thought to go to the newspaper office?

Flash uses the powers Invisibly Fast and Race the Train (provided the first power's duration had ended).

Major Williams' science project is the "neutronic bombardment of uranium," which suggests that with minimal research you could learn some reasonably accurate atomic research talk at the beginning of 1940.

Flash is smart to interview Williams to find out what he knows and who he suspects (indeed, it might have made more sense to do this before starting to investigate the Town Cackle), but his timing works against him when Williams' house is robbed at the same time Flash is in jail interviewing Williams. When super-speed is available (or Teleport, for high-level magic-users), plots will need to hinge on this sort of lucky timing.

Not sure what the average temperature was in March 1940, but if Flash strips you down to just your dress shirt and leaves you on the top of the Empire State Building, you'll take a point or two of cold damage.

Rather than use his powers to coerce confessions out of the editor, Flash goes incognito and uses a concealed dictaphone to record his confession. And then the same trick works again when he talks to the spy above him. It's like, if you try to trick a mobster into confessing, the mobster has to save vs. plot to resist the urge to monolog about everything.

When Major Williams is cleared and released from the county jail, he blurts out to the warden that the Flash's real last name is Garrick.

Flash spends a considerable amount of time running out of costume, putting to bed the conceit in 1st ed H&H that superheroes would not be able to use their powers out of costume.

Is that Flash is using some sort of spinning power against the boss spy when he spins him around by his heels (he's pretty strong to lift a man up by his heels!), but the end result is the mobster simply being prone on the ground, so this could have been a simple trip attack with a lot of flavor text added to it.

Further analysis of this issue can be found in The Trophy Case #1.

Next up is Cliff Cornwall, Special Agent. In Panama, Cliff is apparently seduced by a vamp working for spies in the employ of a fictional country called Bortola. Bortola is an Italian female name, meaning that "Bortola" is likely a stand-in for Italy. The naval plans spies are after this month are for a new design of battle cruiser. There's a wrinkle to this one, as the plans currently contain a fatal flaw known to Cliff and the inventor. Instead of keeping it away from the spies, Cliff needs to get these faulty plans to them without making them suspicious -- a good scenario for players who enjoy role-playing over combat, I suppose.

There are a few flaws in the execution. Keeping Cliff's girlfriend in the dark about the seduction was stupid and should have lost him a girlfriend before the end. The Bortolan navy spends "$1 million" on their new fleet of faulty cruisers. Why are they spending American currency?

In this issue, Hawkman is spelled "Hawk-Man," and the narrator also refers to him as "The Phantom of the Night," which doesn't really make much sense. Hawk-Man isn't too concerned about his secret identity (neither was Flash, really), as he sees an old friend of his out for a stroll and calls out to him, "I'm Carter Hall!" He's wearing a completely different design of helmet in this adventure too, one that rests on top of his head and leaves his whole face exposed.

(Flash story read in Golden Age Flash Archives vol. 1, the rest read at readcomiconline.to)

Whiz Comics #2(b) - pt. 2

Before I get back to the next feature, the discerning reader may be left wondering how this issue can be #2(b). That's because they printed two #3's, forgetting that they started numbering the series with #2! This is actually the first #3...but I'm calling it #2(b) because I can.

Next up is Ibis the Invincible! Again, this story proves problematic for H&H, or rather, we have to make allowance for Ibis' wand, the Ibistick, to have extra powers of its own besides holding Ibis' allotment of magic spells, and it can transfer magic-user abilities to anyone who holds it. The nameless thief who swipes the Ibistick is able to cast Wall of Stone and something that seems like an advanced version of the Dig spell, since it makes a chasm between him and Ibis -- although cast at a high-enough level, maybe there is no difference.

More difficult to explain is when the thief is using the Ibistick to make piles of gold for himself, as there's no spell for that -- or is there? Maybe the Ibistick interprets what you ask for into the closest equivalent spell. So it's casting Fool's Gold for him, or maybe creating illusionary gold with a Phantasmal Image spell.

Somehow, Ibis trips on a loose floorboard while charging up to tackle the thief. I'm guessing that's flavor text associated with a botched die roll, though if I was playing Ibis, I wouldn't be too happy if my Editor told me I tripped like a clumsy idiot just rushing into a room.

The Ibistick has another nice feature: it has decided that Ibis is its true owner, making it the first intelligent magic item in comic books (not a magic sword!). As such, any spell cast with the Ibistick at Ibis is turned back on the caster. The spell is Turn Flesh to Gold, a variant on Turn Flesh to Stone.

Meanwhile, Ibis' love Taia is trapped in an airtight glass case, but with enough air that she is little harmed during the long minutes Ibis is chasing the thief. Once he has the Ibistick he dissolves the glass. It is not clear why he didn't just break the glass with a rock.

Ibis is correct that the ancient city of Thebes is gone, though how he learned that when he had just recently awoke in this millennium. Ibis recreates the city of Thebes, which could be nothing short of a 9th level Wish spell.

I'm sure I've shared this opinion before in regards to Zatara, but comic book magic-users are usually ridiculously broken, and Ibis is strongly in that category. Sure, breaking out a 9th level spell to make Taia happy is deeply romantic and probably worthwhile to both of them, but after she is foolishly kidnapped by Arabs, Ibis polymorphs their plane into a falcon and then a horse -- all to do what he could have accomplished by simply following the plane in the first place. This new Chain Polymorph spell (for lack of a better name) is probably also 9th level.

Ibis has little to worry about from desert nomads, but he still wastes powerful polymorph spells on them, including a Mass Polymorph spell (also 9th level?) that turns a group of armed men ("Arab cut-throats" = bloodthirsty hoodlums?) into geese. Polymorphing a bullet into an apple is an unusual trick -- and there is more to it than transformation, because Ibis' spell is able to drain it most of its momentum. He casts the same spell soon thereafter, turning a dagger into a dove. This must be another new spell, Polymorph Missiles (5th level spell?), and perhaps it is not a one-shot spell but a duration spell that allows him to temporarily transform any missile weapons aimed at him into living things and steal them of their momentum until the spell ends.

In Lance O'Casey, we learn that Lance's home is on Maloana Island, which isn't a real island as far as I can tell -- but it does have a nice South Seas sound to it. Lance's boat is called the Brian Boru; I don't recall if we learned that last time or not.

Lance gets a visit from a plot hook character, a native who says he knows where to find giant pearls -- and then conveniently gets lost during a typhoon. At this point, out in the ocean and surrounded by islands, Lance could be at the beginning of a "sandbox"-type campaign, where he could explore the islands in any order he wants. And maybe it was meant to be that way, except that he finds the "giant pearls" island first try out of the box.

On the island, Lance encounters a "renegade half-breed." Golden Age comic books seemed to love making half-breeds villains, but we're going to rise above that and ignore it in Hideouts & Hoodlums. Instead, we're going to stat him as a pirate, because he looks like a pirate. Actually, with an eyepatch and skull and crossbones tattooed on his chest, he would look like a pretty fearsome villain had he been drawn better.

The story takes a surprise twist when, instead of rescuing slaves from the pirate-slaver, one of the slaves frees himself, captures the pirate, and tosses him to the sharks -- then Lance finally takes action and dives in to save the pirate! To save the pirate, he has to kill a shark and punch out the slave who justifiably wants this bad guy dead. This is not that rare in RPG scenarios, that you just don't know what is going to motivate your players, or at least it's not what you planned.  Unfortunately, what's really going on in the story is that Lance saved the half-breed because he was half-white, and he likes how the natives call him "white master" now.

Further disgusting me about this story, Lance is rewarded by the slaves with a giant pearl, despite the fact that he just sided against them. And it turns out that he didn't even want to keep the giant pearl, he just wanted to find one. I do not like Lance O'Casey...

From a telegram, we learn that Dan Dare is based out of Sea Castle, Florida, another of those places that sounds real but really isn't. This might also make Dan the first comic book hero based in Florida.

This month's adventure takes Dan to San Francisco, California. Dan wisely takes a plane to California, since it's such a long trip, and appears to have a small passenger plane of his own that he pilots on the trip. A truck tries to hit his taxi once he's in San Francisco, seemingly on purpose, but Dan simply notes the event and does nothing about it (once again, not that rare for RPG players to ignore your planned encounters and just keep moving!). 

Dan, being a renowned private eye, was summoned to investigate an extortion letter that's surprisingly easy to figure out, as the dumb hoodlums (should that be its own mobstertype?) left a fingerprint on the letter -- that amazingly wasn't obscured when Dan held the letter with his own bare hand.

The next day, Dan tours San Fransciso's "Barbary Coast" neighborhood, a red-light district that hadn't actually existed since the 1910s, but was still featured in popular culture into the 1970s.


The villain, at least, is memorable. Dynamite Davis was horribly disfigured in an explosion and now has gray skin, no hair, and no ears, and not much left of a nose. Yet he compensates by wearing nice suits and sitting in a throne in his underground hideout, just waiting for someone to accidentally find him. He even has his own Asian sidekick named Taxi.

Dan seemingly just happens to stumble across the barbershop over Davis' hideout by dumb luck. The solution of how he got there comes at the end and, while slightly more satisfying, is still suspect. Somehow, Dan recognized the paper the ransom letter was written on as the kind of paper used in barbershops (and even if that was a thing, who's to say Davis didn't just steal the paper from one?), and on just a hunch he suspected the chauffeur was in on it and trusted the chauffeur would drive him to a trap (which was true, the barber had a trapped chair on top of a pit trap, just in case something like this happened).

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

Whiz Comics #2(b) - pt. 1

Back in 2009 I last wrote about Captain Marvel's second adventure on my oldest blog.You can read it here, here, and here.

Back so soon? Now let's talk about that story in terms of playing it out using Hideouts & Hoodlums.

Rushing into combat with Sivana's army, Captain Marvel is buffed by Imperviousness, if not Invulnerability, to be safe from heavy ordinance. He then is able to pick up tanks over his head because he is buffed by a level 4 Raise power. The tanks weigh too much for the Extend Missile Range powers, so that doesn't explain how CM is throwing tanks at each other. Instead, I would say he is using the Wreck at Range power for this. All he really needs the Raise power for is tipping them over, which really is just as effective at taking them out of the fight.

Taking out the tanks forces a morale save from the army. I would not normally roll once for the entire army, nor roll for each soldier, but maybe roll for each sub-commander on the field, and have him pull back his men if he fails.

It's always a conceit of the Captain Marvel stories that CM can't sneak around, but as Billy Batson he can. It certainly has nothing to do with bright colors, since they largely wear the same colors, but with size. I have long been tempted to make half-pints a race option because it seems like it should have its own special abilities, like a bonus for stealth.

CM later chases after an airplane and jumps up to catch it, but it's impossible to say from those panels how fast the plane is taxiing and how high it gets before he jumps, so it's possible he's not using buffing powers at all in those panels. If he is, then Race the Train and Leap I would be sufficient.

CM is rendered unconscious by a gas trap. Given how difficult it is to render CM unconscious, this must be super-potent gas, probably with a big penalty to the saving throw vs. poison.

There must be something special about the chains that Sivana thinks they will hold CM for five whole minutes, given what he knows CM can do. Maybe they get wrecked as if the generator category. Had he stayed there longer, it's possible the explosion would have killed him, but it was probably an explosion with highly variable damage, like 1-100 points, since Sivana survives it.

Golden Arrow's second adventure ever starts more low-key, with him shooting and killing a gila monster with an arrow. It's just an ordinary-sized gila monster, something I wouldn't normally grant a full hit point, but it's apparently venomous enough that it's bite can cause humans damage (1-4 points?).

A rancher hires GA to help find his missing cattle. Interestingly, it's the rancher who does most of the tracking on the journey, demonstrating how important it is to keep a supporting cast member with you in order to give you a second skill check.

When a sniper tries to kill GA, GA shoots an arrow into the man's rifle barrel, "wrecking it." Now, if GA was a superhero, this would merely be an instance of the Wreck at Range power, but I have not seen enough evidence yet that GA should be of the superhero class. If the rifle wasn't wrecked, this would be a simple disarming attack, which you may recall is easier than normal to do against firearm-wielders in H&H. The damage to the rifle could be flavor text if the "wrecking" isn't serious and the rifle is still usable. We never find out because the sniper/assassin misses his morale save and flees on the next turn.

Soon, GA is roped by a lasso and dragged from horseback, but he starts up a contest of Strength and pulls the horseman from his saddle. This is one of those situations I've talked about before that my own H&H rules don't cover, where you have to bring in ability score checks and opposed rolls.

GA summons his horse, White Wind, by calling it to. The cowboy class, if it's going to come into 2nd edition ever, needs to have special skills still that other classes don't have, like Summon Mount.

GA's bow skills prove difficult to explain by the rules again when he shoots an arrow hard enough to break the wooden bar across a pair of doors. At this point, I think I have enough evidence that GA is of the superhero class, just like the earlier archer hero, Arrow. That makes it much easier to explain how he wrecked the bar with the Wreck at Range power.

Moving on to Scoop Smith... the reporter is sent on a mission to look for a missing person in Antarctica. It's amazing that, in 1940, newspapers had bottomless resources to fund months' long expeditions for wild goose chases after stories. They have a freighter, a "snowboat" (it looks like a truck), and a biplane. It seems like it's going to be a realistic story -- until the Antarctic is shown to have natives. And polar bears. Oops! The writer seems to have the South Pole confused with the North Pole! Among the natives are pseudo-giants -- people who the narrator calls giants, but don't really look that much bigger than ordinary people. The natives are supposed to be primitive, but they have elaborate ice palaces. Somehow the palaces are heated so people can wear normal clothes inside, which makes no sense at all.

The Antarctic has some realistic hazards, at least -- mile-deep chasms and snowstorms seem possible. We never see much of either, but I'm guessing they involve falling damage and cold damage respectively.

That natives' deathtrap is a giant block of ice held between the walls by two icy struts, one of which is slowly melted by a lit torch.The weight of the ice would probably make it do a lot of damage, but it would only render the victims unconscious if they were not trapped underneath it (what makes it a deathtrap instead of just a trap).

Scoop is in no hurry for deadlines; after spending months getting to the Antarctic, he spends a whole month just hanging out with the missing man and the natives before heading back home to report his story.

(Captain Marvel story read from Shazam Archives vol. 1, the rest read at readcomiconline.to)

 

Silver Streak Comics #3 - pt. 4

I have just a few pages left of this issue that I want to share, all from the final feature, Planet Patrol. It's the future of 2000. Remember when we had a colony on Mercury in 2000?

Long before space travel was real, if you didn't understand the mathematics behind figuring out where planets are at any given moment, you might believe that compasses would need to be reset so that the sun is north.  

It's not true that Mercury's axis is locked so one side always faces the Sun. I wonder if people believed that was true in 1940?

The real temperature on Mercury varies from -279 Fahrenheit at night to 801 Fahrenheit during the day. Those who remember Hideouts & Hoodlums Supplement III: Better Quality may recall that I suggested balancing real world physics with comic book physics, smoothing out these inhospitable elements so they are only mostly inhospitable. So, without Ken's heat-resisting outfit (itself a trophy item), he would take 1-4 points of damage per turn spent on the surface in the daytime. 

It's odd to call something that is so clearly a plane a "land cruiser."

The blast-ray gun fires a true ray, making it an area-effecting weapon.

It's really tacky to insult them for their speed while killing them.

Even in the future we have dungeons!

Most importantly, consider Aavon's pocket transmitter. This alone is the only accurate prediction about the year 2000 -- Aavon is using a cellphone!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Silver Streak Comics #3 - pt. 3

We're still looking at Ace Powers, who I thought was a private eye, but it looks like he's actually a police officer. Or maybe this patrolman in the car just owes Ace a big favor? Or should be considered one of his supporting cast members?

That last panel...some of the artwork is terrible in this feature...

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I'm sure this scene has played out in plenty of gangster movies and TV shows, with the car conveniently flipping right after the driver is shot, like there was some symbiotic relationship between driver and car. But I'm not going to talk about that so much as the tommy guns and facing. Because, if you're firing out the side window of a car, should you be able to aim straight ahead?  Normally, and I've said this before on this blog, facing is largely irrelevant to the Hideouts & Hoodlums combat system, but there are common sense occasions when facing can't be ignored, like when you're sneaking up from behind, or like when you have to lean out a window to shoot sideways. I think I'd be charitable in giving the mobsters only a -1 penalty to hit.

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The clearest picture of a 1940 drivers license I've ever seen. Looks remarkably like the ones we have today!

Now we're going to move on to our next feature, Dickie Dean, a half-pint scientist. In a very rare instance, we not only learn what city Dickie is from, but we learn his exact address from that letter!















This machine is a two-in-one mad science trophy. See if you can follow this: sound waves don't ever disappear, but keep echoing back to their original source for weeks, just too faint to be normally heard. And shadows last just as long, but you can't see them under normal lighting conditions! If you can swallow that kind of science, you could include this invention in your next campaign!

The first panel suggests the kind of world-altering change that super science would bring to the campaign world, if it was followed through on.

We never learn what kind of improvements Dickie plans to make to the machine. It's hard to imagine what else it could be made to do.

I did have rules in 1st edition H&H for inventing things, but it didn't cover improving things.

I love this page; a Hero who doesn't use brute strength or even something sharp to free himself from being tied up. He burns the house down around him!

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Now we're going to jump to the next feature, which is Sgt. Drake.


This chauffeur should be statted as a guard, since his uniform can be stolen once he's knocked out.

As if we didn't have enough mad science in this issue, we now have a radio-controlled plane...which is really weird, because Drake is in the plane. Why he is controlling it with his radio instead of, say, manual controls, is deeply puzzling.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)