Speed Comics #7 - pt. 2

We're back to Shock Gibson out West and the hoodlums he hid amongst last time, who have upped their game from hustling ranchers to attacking oil fields. This story has been a lot about escalation of threat level, whether it's targets or transportation (they've now also gone from riding horses to having planes). An Editor needs to up his game like this on the fly if he begins a scenario that turns out to be too much of a cakewalk for the Heroes. 

Though Shock is probably buffed here with the power Fire Resistance, I like how nothing else on this page requires his powers, and lifting and twisting that valve is probably something any Hero could have done. 

It is strange, though, that Shock let them start the fire and waited until the hoodlums were gone to put it out, rather than stop them here in the act. I'm hoping an explanation for that is forthcoming and it's not just a plot hole. 

Okay, I think it's clear at this point that Shock is just toying with the bad guys. There's really no reason to trick the leader after getting him alone in the plane instead of just taking him prisoner now. 

This is, though, the kind of playing I expected to see more in H&H and never have -- good guys vastly outclassing the bad guys, but then taking it easy and trying to make it fun. Players always seem to want to end things as quickly and efficiently as possible. I have wondered before if H&H needed a game mechanic that would encourage this better, like bad guys being worth more XP if you spend longer defeating them than you need to.

Given Shock's powers, you'd think he could have just wrecked the hangars on their own, but there's a poetic justice in using their own bombs against them. Speaking of which...I love that second panel and the fun sense of overkill. I suppose I would give those hoodlums a penalty to their morale saves in that situation. 

The next page is the last page that wraps things up. There's no big reveal of the head hoodlum ("Gasp -- you were Joe the Ranch Hand all along!" or something like that) and it's only implied that the hoodlums knew about the gold and that's why they wanted the land...though the oil would have been just as valuable, so...

Lastly, Shock stops by and gives the old prospector a strange admonishment (and I won't bother showing you the whole page just for it), to "remember the unemployed" when he's rich. The unemployment rate was at 17% and dropping by the end of 

1939, better than its peak in 1933, but still high enough that wealth distribution should be a serious issue for superheroes. 

Now we're in the middle of the next story, Crash, Cork, and the Baron, as they deliver explosives to Argentina. Why, and who hired them? Eh, these guys are Neutral and don't really care about that. Oddly, they flew west to get to Argentina, so...the scenario started in Uruguay? But what I wanted to discuss here was gauchos. Gaucho was a lifestyle, not an ethnicity, but since gauchos were cowboys and not bandits, it's not hard to read some racism into this. Were they ever extinct? No, but their numbers did severely dwindle by the end of the 19th century. 

But this page also gives us more questions. Is Cork not dead after the bolo wraps around his neck (yes, game mechanics-wise, he's likely only unconscious at best, but realistically...)? Is Crash really such a bad pilot that he can't outmanuever an inexperienced pilot (very bad dice rolls, I suppose)? Who is

saying "The blitherin' idiot!"? Did the gauchos change Cork's jacket from a brown one to a green one?

It seems like Crash is using the Out of the Sun stunt from the old aviator's class here, and even though the old version of stunts is gone from 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums, there's no reason why we couldn't keep the concept as a combat modifier, -2 to be hit from below, just like how Crash should be at +1 to hit for attacking from above.

I'm pretty sure this is what only doing 1 point of damage with a bolo looks like. 

We also get one of those rare examples of a hero's gun running out of bullets. While seemingly unlimited bullets is a common trope in fiction, I love it when the heroes can't rely on guns and have to think up another solution instead.  I'm sure they'll put their heads together and come up with some nonviolent solution and...

...oh. A couple o' loads o' dynamite. Well, that escalated quickly.

I have serious reservations about this. I would need the Mythbusters team back together to resolve if you could detonate an explosion big enough to create a colossal wave. I suspect the waves would just make the water choppy, but not enough to capsize the boat. And I have to wonder if it wouldn't have just been better to let the bad guy get away than to destroy an entire coastline.

In-game, I suppose you have to look at these ideas in terms of what will make the story more exciting for the players. Maybe your players like blowing up cliffs. My players probably would have just thrown the dynamite at the boat...

We'll just glance ahead at the third story in the book, this feature being Ted Parrish, the Man of 1,000 Faces. Here, we learn that if you have a steel-lined cap, it protects you from head blows. We also see a clever trick, disguising yourself as one of the bad guys and escaping with them to see where their lair is -- but then Ted goes the easy route and leaves a note on the door for the police. Boo, Ted! What kind of action hero does that (you'd think his player doesn't want XP or something!)?

Also note one of my pet peeves about golden age comics -- colorists who just don't care and get wrong obvious things, like the constantly changing suit jackets. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

  
 

 

Speed Comics #6 pt. 3

We're still looking at this month's Crash, Cork, and the Baron adventure and, as always, talking about comic book stories and how to emulate them using the game Hideouts & Hoodlums.  If you don't play H&H, you're still welcome to stick around and look at the pretty pictures.

Under most circumstances, and as we've talked about many times on this blog, H&H makes no distinction between subdual damage and lethal damage; the only time injuries kill is when the character is already unconscious or in a deathtrap. So the question here is, is Crash in a deathtrap?

No, the natives' intentions are to torture Crash, not kill him, so this cannot be a deathtrap. Indeed, rather than full damage, it appears that the natives are being careful to do less than full damage.




I hesitate to allow either side, players or Editor, to have such control over their damage that they can specify an exact number of points of damage they want to inflict, but misusing or under-utilizing a weapon should make it work like an improvised weapon, which do half weapon damage.

I really hate how this story ends. They threaten the chief, feed him a baloney story about how oil pipes leaking into their drinking water isn't bad for them, and then apparently get him addicted to cigarettes to force compliance. I just...ugh.

So let's move along and look at Ted Parrish, Man of 1,000 Faces.

Right off the bat, I'm wondering about that fall. Is Ted -- disguised here as Pedro -- really knocked unconscious by that, or just pretending? Ted is a 2nd level mysteryman by now, so it seems awfully humiliating to have a 10' fall knock him out. On one hand, maybe he's feigning unconsciousness, so no one can ask him any probing questions about where Pedro had got off to, but on the other hand, maybe the Editor wanted him unconscious so he couldn't do anything that would derail the story before the sub reaches Central America.

So, the next question I have is -- where is this? What Central American country was producing oil circa 1940? With some effort, I was able to find that Mexico started drilling for oil back in 1916, but I can't verify any other countries were drilling that early.

Even this page, which talks about a jungle, does not invalidate Mexico as a likely suspect. Though one normally thinks of Brazil both in terms of jungle and oil, Mexico has the smaller Lacandon Jungle within it.

And look, the ol' stick in the mouth trick!

Moving on, this is Dick Briefer doing Biff Bannon. For humor, the superhero-soldier turns out to have a fear of public speaking. But what does that mean, in terms of game mechanics? Is this evidence that Biff has a low Charisma score? Perhaps Biff's player really wants Miss Lee for his supporting cast, and is afraid of messing up the recruitment roll?

This first tier is rather remarkable. Firstly, it's a stirring mini-speech about the value of integrated public education to combat racism. I think that was Dick's genuine intention, as the second remarkable thing about this tier is panel 2, and the black boy who is drawn completely normal (or as normal as Briefer's highly stylized art allows). Remember, this is a time when even artists as progressive as Will Eisner were drawing black people in minstrel show style.

I'll spare you from the strange subplot that gets Biff put in a dress and wig. The important thing here is the sheer mass of improvised weapons half-pints can use, including things I never thought of, like B-B guns, firecrackers, blowguns, and inkwells. The inkwells come with a little something extra, the chance of producing a blinding attack, but I would say that's pretty unlikely; maybe if the inkwell hits on a natural 20.

This page is noteworthy because the mobster in panel 2 acknowledges that they live in the same world with Shock Gibson. So many characters lived in their own isolated universes before this, even in the same anthology title.

This is Lt. Jim Cannon of the British Navy. By "15-inch guns" it probably means the BL 15-inch Mk I naval gun. "It was the first British 15-inch (381 mm) gun design and the most widely used and longest lasting of any British designs, and arguably the most efficient heavy gun ever developed by the Royal Navy. It was deployed on capital ships from 1915 until 1959, and was a key Royal Navy gun in both World Wars," according to Wikipedia.

Leaving your big, protective ship, and putting yourself in harm's way in a shot-range plane or a torpedo launch seems like a terribly unsound tactic, and yet what else can a Hero do? Share XP with everyone on board the Hood? Not likely!

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

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.)

Speed Comics #5 - pt. 3

And we're back with Crash, Cork, and the Baron in their Ceylon adventure. I was very pleased to look up arrack and find out that's a real thing, but it's only an Indian liquor. So, he wasn't actually "doped" so much as they just got him drunk.

Covering him with leeches was an unusual deathtrap.

I'm not sure how this would work, game mechanics-wise. Nooses are a simple entangling attack, but how to handle pulling them up into the trees? A second save vs. science to avoid (the first save would be vs. the ensnaring)? A skill check does not make much sense here; it's almost necessary to introduce ability score checks so the Heroes could make Strength checks for this.

This is Ted Parrish, the Man of 1,000 Faces. Thankfully, we don't have to discuss disguise again this time; I'm sharing this page because of the unusual entangling attack. It looks like he's attacking two people at once with the bed sheet, but in the next panel it is clear that the two men are tied up in separate bed sheets; Ted must have thrown one over one mobster's head and then a second sheet over the other on the following turn (since he has surprise for the first attack, the second could have occurred at the beginning of the first regular combat turn).

Since bed sheets are not made for ensnaring attacks, I might give the mobsters a +1 bonus to save vs. being ensnared.

Now we'll jump ahead into Biff Bannon of the U.S. Marines. Biff has an unique challenge to start this scenario, as I can't think of any comic book before or since where the Hero had to park a battleship. Looks like a failed expert skill check, but here the Editor allowed something good to come of the failed roll; Biff crashes into the underground lair of saboteurs (just feet away from hitting all their dynamite too -- lucky he only missed his roll by 1!).

All of Biff's mini-adventures in this installment are random/wandering events. Here, a subway driver has fallen unconscious behind the wheel and Biff has to jump onto a careening subway train. Jumping is a skill check when you have to jump higher or farther than normal, but to jump "on target" like that, you need to make an attack roll instead.

The following newspaper headlines make it clear these mini-adventures are taking place in New York City.

I'm just going to share this one page of Smoke Carter as we race through this issue, and for just two things. One, this long-winded confession is emulated by only one game mechanic, the unconditional surrender of mobsters who fail morale saves. And two, "Flames like the stamp that seals his doom" is so melodramatic that Stan Lee should have used it as the title in a Marvel Comics story.

Now we'll jump to Landor, Maker of Monsters, who creates a 20' giant mole in this story.

It makes no sense at all that a) Landor has his pet mole start digging from so far away instead of driving it closer, and b) that Landor left no guards behind to protect his castle, even though he knows Tony Terrence knows where the castle is. Further, I am skeptical of gunshots causing a cave-in so quickly, but maybe it could happen...plus it's a good way to make guns less of an option in an underground hideout.

Now this is Texas Tyler, and this page demonstrates how easy it is to get information out of drunken hoodlums (I'll have to add a note to their stat entry).

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Speed Comics #5 - pt. 2

The pay-off: first superhero vs. dinosaurs adventure!

Right away, we've got a duck-billed dinosaur, some kind of hadrosaur, and...although it looks more like a fat sloth, I think that's supposed to be an ankylosaurus? And, ooo, that pterodactyl drawing looks so terrifying, I think I'll have to use it in the Mobster Manual!

Hmm, saber-tooth tigers coexisting with dinosaurs? Well, okay, it is a lost world, not a time travel adventure, so we can overlook it.

The huge boulder, at that size, must weigh over 1,000 lbs., which makes what he does with it next difficult to describe...

How much damage should the huge boulder do? A rock that heavy cannot be thrown with even the Extend Missile Range III power alone. But if it was combined with Raise Car, could damage be increased? It must be possible, if it can crush a saber-tooth tiger in one hit. But how much? Extend Missile Range III does 3d6 damage and is a third level power. If we stacked it with a first-level Raise power, that could up damage to 4d6, while the power Raise Elephant would then stack it up to 5d6. The rules, as I wrote them, don't specify any of this, but it seems like a simple extrapolation.

I'm not happy with the tiger getting killed.

Pterodactyls are nowhere near this big; it is a pteranodon instead. I'll have to include a note in its stats that it can lift up man-sized prey it catches in its claw attack.

Shock, stop murdering endangered animals! I'm starting to think grappling attacks need to be able to do lethal damage; not that I think necks can really twist like that.

Piloting a dead pteranodon can't be easy, maybe a skill check to maneuver it in the right direction, and then an attack roll to reach the sauropod with it.

This page seems all kinds of unlikely, but maybe appropriate for a campaign as light in tone as Shock's adventures are (minus the racism and rampant animal murdering).

So how do you handle taming a bucking dinosaur? I think it would be, for each successful expert skill check, you get a chance at a friendly encounter reaction roll. If the result is hostile, or the skill check fails, you have to save vs. science or be bucked off for 2-8 points of damage. Once you get a friendly reaction result, the dinosaur lets you ride it.

Cavemen! It's interesting that the cavemen are not so primitive that they can't learn English or build ladders.

To fill you in from the small gap, Shock has challenged the caveman witch doctor to a contest of powers, in exchange for their hostage. But what is the witch doctor? Hypnotism, we have established, is an expert skill in 2nd edition, but it works against one target, not four at once. A Sleep spell would work, which means the witch doctor is an actual Magic-User.

Raise Car should be powerful enough to uproot a tree. A generous Editor might allow wrecking things to do this too.

H&H doesn't have any fire-starting powers yet for Superheroes, but fire-starting is an advanced skill and, once started, he could make it spread quickly with the Control Fire power.

Again, evidence of a Raise power being stacked with an Extend Missile Range power.

And we'll just skip ahead real quick into our next feature, Crash, Cork, and the Baron. They are marooned in the colony of Ceylon, nowadays known as Sri Lanka. In typically racist fashion, the natives run around in loin clothes and use primitive spears.

But that's not why I'm showing this to you. I'm showing it to you for that crazy panel of Cork (I think that's Cork) grappling two opponents at once while still kicking a third. This keeps coming up because, to truly emulate these comic books, combat can't be limited to one attack per turn, but for fair game balance, it really has to have one attack per turn be the norm (there are already exceptions, but we don't have to get into those).

Or does it? I've long resisted adding critical hits for natural 20's into H&H...but what if a natural 20 gave you an extra attack? And you could keep getting attacks for every natural 20 you rolled? In theory, a string of lucky rolls could then account for every panel where we see stuff like this happening. Something to think about.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Speed Comics #4 - pt. 3

Random design, that makes no internal sense, is a feature and not a bug of Old School dungeon design -- and the same seems to be true here of outdoor hideouts. Does it make sense for a band of slavers to have a stockade for keeping elephants? Not really. Does it lend the hideout a fun, zoo-like quality? Yes. A seemingly unrelated question: can elephants be forced to make morale saves simply by flying low over them in an aircraft? The answer to that is apparently yes too.

This is Ted Parrish, Man of a 1000 Faces, and he seems to really like different modes of getting around. First he's got an ordinary car, like any starting character can buy. Then he's got a plane that he only uses to do recon in for one panel, and we don't know if he owns it or he rented it. Lastly, he has a jalopy with a "powerful engine" hidden in it -- that sounds like trophy transportation to me, and I wonder where he picked that up.

That's a pretty good place to put a sentry with a machine gun (as long as you're okay with your Heroes getting their hands on a machine gun!).

I like how Ted's plan is to summon the state police, but then he gets impatient because they're taking too long and he decides to just do it himself. I've had players like that.

This could be our first time seeing a Hero launch himself from a catapult before. I don't care how good his save vs. science is; I'm pretty sure he's going to take damage from this.

Okay, maybe the Editor gave Ted a roll to hit the window (AC 4, maybe? It is a pretty small target and catapults are not accuracy weapons), and then only 1-6 points of damage for hitting the window. I'd give him at least twice that had he hit the wall.

We get some details of a two-story ranch house with attic here. Note the spacious rooms and spartan furnishings. Better for making room for big combats.

I was just talking about plane rentals too -- now we know how much they cost.

I don't think planes were so unreliable in 1940 that Heroes will have to worry about a random chance of the motor dying per flight. Rather, this looks a lot like the set-up to a scenario before play begins, with the flight and the engine failure being prearranged to get Biff in the right spot.

Of course, play could begin right at panel 3, requiring Biff to make a skill check for a safe improvised landing.

I'm confused by this page. If the entire canal is underwater, and Biff crashed into it, where are Biff and the soldiers he's fighting standing? It's like we're missing some panels where he climbed into the submarine.

Curiously, the secret canal was dug through Panama, west of the Panama Canal, where the country is thicker and there are no lakes to take shortcuts through. A cursory glance at a real map would suggest that east of the Panama Canal, short-cutting through Lake Bayano, would have been easier.

It interests me that the secret canal was dug "years ago." Often in these stories, Heroes stumble across something like this when they are new, or still being built, before they can affect history. It would be interesting to conjecture how a secret canal through Panama would have impacted world history.

I also have to say, I'm liking the distinctively cartoonish art on Biff Bannon.

Convincing a tugboat captain to put someone else's freighter and his own livelihood at risk like this would have required an encounter reaction check at a substantial penalty, maybe as high as -3. Biff's player is a lucky roller, or Biff has a high Charisma and a bonus to offset some of that penalty.

Spotting a periscope in the water, at distance, without binoculars or a telescope? I'm going to rule that Biff only had a 1 in 8 chance of spotting it under those conditions. Lucky roller indeed!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)