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)

 

Whiz Comics #2 - pt. 1

This is it! I feel like the last four years of this blog have led up to this moment, as I consider the first year and a half run of Captain Marvel to be one of the best runs in comic book history.

And, no, you didn't miss an issue -- Whiz Comics accidentally began with #2, counting the unpublished ashcan copy as #1 (which most companies did not add to their issue count).

Before we get into this, let me add that I fine tooth-combed this story previously for details, and annotated it carefully here, here, here, and here.

So what is there left to do? Why, talk about game mechanics, of course!

As I said on my other blog, it's unclear if the Phantom Companion is compelling Billy, perhaps with a Charm Person spell. 

The Strange Subway Car must be a trophy item, capable of Plane Shifting to prepared destinations.

Note the two figures in front of the Car. They seem to be real creatures, possibly lizard men or troglodytes. They are never encountered or mentioned again, though they could be natural inhabitants of the caverns inside the Rock of Eternity (not named as such yet).

There is currently no spell that makes thunder happen whenever you speak your own name, though it might be useful to have such a spell. It would probably be low level, unless treated as a Power Word spell and connected to something more useful like, say, Power Word: Transform into Superhero.

The Historama is itself a powerful, magical trophy item, like a flat-screen Crystal Ball that can view any moment in history sought for (Shazam can do so quickly because he's studied it for centuries; I would advise that new users have a very low chance of seeing events).

And here we get the alter ego "race" for Heroes which was absent from the Basic 2nd edition book, but will be in the Advanced Hideouts & Hoodlums Heroes Handbook.

Something happens to Billy after Shazam dies that he cannot remember, but it's really hard to assign a game mechanic to something we can only speculate about. My guess is, the death of Shazam unleashes such disruptive magic that it reverses Billy's transformation (Dispel Magic?), and a Forget spell on Billy.

This does bring up the question: should Dispel Magic work on Captain Marvel, at least if cast by a high enough level magic-user? I would say yes...but it does seem to set a precedent for allowing it to affect all powers of superheroes, which an Editor should think carefully about.

I statted Captain Marvel as an alien in Supplement IV: Captains, Magicians, and Incredible Men because he's not Billy transformed into a man, but a magical construct with its own intelligence that Billy's mind also inhabits. As an alien, he can make good jumps at will, and is unlikely burning a power here.

Television sets are minor trophy items in 1940.

As I've said before, breaking through windows does not require a roll for a superhero.

A radio silencer is a mad science trophy item in H&H.

Smashing lab equipment is the second category for wrecking things, Machines. Ripping open the door is the first category (Doors).

Less clear is if CM needs to be using a Raise Car power to lift up the elevator car. My quick research seems to indicate that an elevator car weighs over a ton -- too much to just hand-wave, I feel (I also missed this first indication of Captain Marvel's strength in my annotations!).

Moving on, here's a first look at Ibis the Invincible. In the comics, Ibis just has to say something while holding the Ibisstick to make it happen, but what spells could explain these things?

A glass-melting spell sounds too specific to be of much use, but a spell that mimics wrecking things would be useful to a magic-user.

The second spell is likely Disguise...and yet, if Ibis has had his eyes covered in mummy wrap all this time, how did he know what clothes modern people wore? Perhaps this is a 2nd level spell that clothes you in the illusion of how people expect you to look, rather than a disguise of your own choosing?

Mentioned just in passing, Ibis casts a Knock spell.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)