Although we haven't been told yet, I'd bet good money that Ken is secretly the Devil's Dagger. This is twice now that he's openly clobbered hoodlums as Ken so I'm not sure why he even feels he needs a double identity.
Letting the mobsters go so they can be followed back to their hideout has got to be one of the oldest tricks in the book. What's interesting here is that the hideout is a gas station, converted from an abandoned hotel. I never would have thought of that in a hundred years. It's actually kind of brilliant; he would suspect it was a criminal hideout, when they let any stranger who asks go inside their front door to use the phone. What's not brilliant is that there are zero guards inside stopping Ken from exploring the place.
Without special permission from your Editor, your starting SCM should not have levels above 1 (as an "ex-prize-fighter," the implication is that Pat is above 1st level).
The highlight of this page is panel 6 -- I see so many comics in this project with minimal backgrounds that I treasure ones that a lot of planning seemed to go into, that show us a glimpse into the real lives of our heroes. From here, we can infer that Devil's Dagger is well-read (books on his desk), a fisherman, and a marksman.
Bullet-proof glass is listed as a special add-on for transportation trophies, but tinted windows should be on that list as well.
It's worth mentioning, I think, that if Ken hadn't taken the time to change clothes at home, he would have got there in time to stop the villains from nearly escaping.
It's also worth mentioning that it was a good idea to have a SCM waiting outside with directions to call the police after X minutes -- though, in a
Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario, you probably want to leave yourself more time than that to explore a hideout.
Throwing a dagger so that it snatches sheets of paper and pins them to the far wall is definitely a stunt.
It looks like Devil's Dagger has a clear headshot in that third panel, but we're told Jeff (and what kind of master criminal name is Jeff?) escapes. Maybe it was just a flesh wound (1 point of damage)?
This is from
Morton Murch the Hillbilly Hero. It is...really awful. Morton is a weird cross of comic hillbilly and serious action hero. The science is ridiculous. His hot-air balloon is stitched from quilts and full of methane. The floating island has a volcano on it. The island that
isn't attached to the ground has a working volcano on it.
The island people take Morton as a leader and he modernizes them by teaching them how to build anti-aircraft guns -- bear in mind, he is supposedly an uneducated hillbilly. He also must have precognition because he has them do this just before enemy aircraft arrive. Oh, he also builds a flexible glass net, flies over the enemy fleet in a slow-moving hot-air balloon, and nets all the planes. This campaign world would be perfect for players who want to be able to do anything, no matter how impossible.
Although it's hard to take Shipwreck Roberts and Doodle seriously (isn't "Shipwreck" a nickname you would give someone who
causes shipwrecks?), Dr. Drown is such a great name for a villain I'm shocked it hasn't been recycled since. Dr. Drown has a French assistant who looks like Igor and sounds like Batroc and, best of all, new mobstertypes! Yes, he creates his own sea monsters, like Dr. Demonicus at Marvel in the 1970s-80s.
I would like to call these first ones sea dragons, but...
...the assistant Romez, who quickly loses his French accent as soon as Dr. Drown reminds him he's Spanish, calls them brontosauruses. Which is an odd thing to call them since they're much smaller than brontosaurs, don't look like brontosaurs, and breathe underwater unlike brontosaurs. So sea dragons it is! They aren't very big, but they are trainable, so they could in theory be trained to fight. I'd put them somewhere in the range of 3-4 HD.
The next new mobster is a giantocrab. That's right, not a giant crab, but a giantocrab. You can tell it's not a giant crab because the artist didn't reference any real life crab and just made up something goofy, a rock monster with human-like arms. It's both goofy and creepy at the same time! I would also give it up to three grapple attacks per turn. The giantocrab proves to be too much for Roberts and Doodle to handle, so I'd make it at least 6 HD, maybe 7...
...and give it a really low AC (maybe 3 or 2?) since it appears to be made of rock. It's unclear if this is supposed to be a naturally occurring sea monster or if it's one of Dr. Drown's creations. Drown
is able to shoo it away rather easily.
It's also worth mentioning that Drown's hideout is a submerged yacht with all the comforts of home, including this nice-looking study with desk, bookshelves, and a safe just right for Heroes to break into.
Sea dragons only have flippers, so they lack claw attacks, but they can grapple instead.
If Dr. Dream is firing torpedoes, then what is the Radar gun? Do they mean the torpedoes are Radar-guided?
The colostopus must be bigger than a giant octopus, so...maybe 10 HD?
Frontier Marshal is one of those cowboy stories that is hard to place in time, here thanks to the anachronistic look of Helen Wright. I spent a lot of time writing about the Mythic West in
Supplement III, a sort of "demi-plane" where time flows differently and the "wild West" continues to modern times.
I can find no evidence that "pipe" was ever slang for "look," but "pipe th' duds" doesn't seem like it could mean anything different. Plus I can find on Google other people who have been posting the same question online, so this is surely not the only instance out there of pipe being used this way.
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