Amazing Mystery Funnies v. 2 #11 - pt. 2

I have a new mobster type called the hag already in H&H 2nd ed., but this might be just a magic-user being called a hag. She finds a pendant that seems to work only for her; there is precedent in H&H (and That Other Game) for magic items that only work for particular classes.

The Cat's Eye Talisman has the power to age or de-age anyone it touches. It seems like it can age 50 years at a touch, which is really powerful. I might make it 10-40 years (with a save vs. spells to resist entirely).

Ooo -- the future of 2009! Behold the wonders of jet planes (called rocket planes here and, really, in most comic books of the time)!  Read of the international secret service active in the future!

Cutaway map! That's one big atomic space-ship.

I've posted before about how to dress up ordinary things to appear futuristic. Here, we have an ordinary electric eye trap turned into a proton ray that deals agonizing amounts of damage (or maybe a save vs. science or die).

Ooo, portable TV sets in the future of 2009! Still in black and white, I see.

Not sure I plan to do anything with this, but...stories where a vehicle swerves and mobsters are knocked out with centrifugal force. I really hesitate to do this because the game mechanic would be pretty nightmarish - some complex formula that took speed and angle of turn into account in computing damage.

In 2009, businessmen will show up for work in sweatsuits! (Actually not that far off from accurate...)

And lastly, this is Speed Centaur. The closest power to what he's using is Extend Missile Range III, but those boulders look like they far exceed the weight limit for that power. However...maybe the Raise powers should be stackable with the Extend Missile Range powers to increase damage.  I'm not sure how to work that out yet, and it seems like it would be confusing to mix and match powers that can be found at four different levels for Raise powers and three different levels for Extend Missile Range powers.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Popular Comics #37

This is the first issue from February 1939 to be looked at, and it's from Dell. By now, Dell's best features had moved to Crackajack Funnies and Super Comics, but this issue still has material worth discussing.

I just like that there's a trapdoor hatch on the roof; it seems like a good detail for a mobster hideout. It's also a smart tactic for villains to hold hostages like this -- forces the players to think instead of just rushing into combat.

Don Dixon must be a pretty high level Fighter by now, as he encounters large crocodiles here and takes one out with just a dagger.

Large crocodiles (if they are "large", maybe they have 4-5 Hit Dice) have both a bite and a tail attack; the tail attack can be used to tip over a small boat.

Now Don is making short work of natives, but the one thing Don can't do is sneak up on them. I'm thinking of giving natives only a 1 in 6 chance of being surprised.

Daisybelle is a pretty slight joke strip, but I am intrigued by the notion of giving out a literally indestructible fountain pen as a trophy item-gag gift, but then seeing how creatively the players can come up with uses for it.

The lesson for Editors here is to give the players a chance to spot a clue about a planned ambush before springing it on them, particularly if it's going to be a particularly brutal encounter if the Heroes are surprised.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Popular Comics #31

Reckon I best mosey on back to Dell's Popular Comics and look at this page from another Western adventure.  The whips I've seen in comics so far have either been used for torture or, like this, disarming people. Still, I think I've seen more disarming shots from guns so far, so I don't think I'm going to give whips any special bonus.

A feature of Golden Age comics is that they often don't take themselves too seriously. El Voltago, the Vulture of Chihuahua, isn't going to terrify anyone. But he might give your players some laughs!

Don Dixon looks like he's at the end of the whole campaign in this installment. For a campaign with Lawful Heroes ignoring opportunities to take loot along the way, this is the moment when the big XP rush comes with the reward. The longer the Heroes have delayed collecting, the bigger the reward should be. Here, that requires dropping them down a secret elevator into a king's treasure chamber and hearing, "Take whatever you want!"  Of course, if the players don't want the campaign to end, the reward they ask for might be a new quest...

Right now, there are no complications, in Hideouts & Hoodlums, for recovering from zero hit points; you just let time pass.  I'm currently 50/50 on whether or not H&H needs complications -- like having a concussion and needing several days of bed rest -- at least for Heroes. For non-Heroes controlled by the Editor, the Editor can assign all the complications he wants/needs for the story.

If you're planning on having an adventure on a boat, like this Shark Egan adventure, then you should choose a type of ship and research it, working from a map if you're able. This scenario doesn't skimp on describing the layout, from Shark searching the aft master's cabin to the reinforcements coming from the fo'c'sle.

Toby seems to have picked up where Patsy left off (since the Adventures of Patsy are no longer in a magical fantasy land). Here we see a strange land inhabited by at least four giants, at least one of whom looks to have two pet lions. A dangerous place for exploring!

One way to make fantasy creatures -- ones you would expect to find in a swords & sorcery scenario -- "fit in" better is to dress them up in modern clothes.

One trick to allow low-level Heroes to survive encounters with powerful foes is to split the powerful foes into rival factions, so the Heroes only have to side with one and fight alongside them.

Note that Toby's magic couch predates the magic bed in The Magic Bed-Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (the basis for the movie Bedknobs and Broom Sticks) by five years.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

The Funnies #12 - pt. 2

Flavor text during combat can be confusing, and perhaps rightfully so. Is it true that "bullets don't seem to stop 'em", or are you just not hitting them well enough?  If the players are not sure, it should not necessarily be the Editor's job to correct them. Rather, players should find out what weapons can hurt certain mobster types through trial and error. Who knows -- perhaps they're ghost apes who can only be hurt by silver or magic weapons?

Og stumbles onto a hidden land where dinosaurs still exist! This is still as big a deal in caveman days as it would be in modern times.

It's interesting how Og mistakes the pteranodon for a giant vampire bat. I'm not sure a caveman would even know what a giant vampire bat is, but okay. It's fun, for the Editor, to try to withhold from the players what they're fighting for as long as possible. For another example, instead of saying a stegosaurus is approaching them, say "the stalking death" is coming for them.

Pteranodons were statted in Supplement II: All-American. Stegosaurs have never been statted for Hideouts & Hoodlums yet. Stegosaurs were 3 ton beasts -- I'd put them at 14 HD, with d10 Hit Dice.  Stalking death indeed!

What Heroes wouldn't want to go exploring underground and run into Sibyl. Agree to obey her commands and she'll give you each an Amulet of Protection (functions like the Ring?)!

And this should happen in H&H more often than you might think. Requiring Heroes to loot and steal for all their trophy items is harsh and forces them to act out-of-character -- better to hand out trophy items as rewards instead (and not all the time, but sometimes).

Also note that Sibyl seems to have a new magic item -- the Wand of Knocking, that will open any portal...

And, on the lighter side, Mutt & Jeff run afoul of $10 fines. I think we've seen speeding fines on this blog once already. I don't expect to see fines always be the same, since fines would be set locally and naturally subject to variation, but it's good to see what the overall range winds up being.

$14 for two to eat in a fancy restaurant? When preparing the price list for Book I: Men & Supermen, I found a site with scanned menus from lots of 1940s restaurants. I suspect you could still spend a lot at an upscale restaurant in the 1930s, so Mutt & Jeff must have been eating on the lighter side of the menu.


(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

The Funnies #11 - pt. 2

Tailspin Tommy is on one of those unusual tropical islands inhabited by gorillas. It seems to be a herd (is herd the word for gorillas?) of eight apes, which is pretty high and decidedly dangerous should they all turn hostile. The reference to a "big leader" is unspecific. It could be interpreted to mean "giant ape", but the art doesn't seem to support that. Perhaps it's just an unusually tough ape, with an extra Hit Die.

$40 seems to be the fine for breaking windows in the 1930s.

Here, the text describes Don Dixon's supporting cast as petrified, but they are not colored as if stone. What is more likely is that they are paralyzed, by a spell like Hold Person.

Kestra's Mirror of Time is a powerful magic item/trophy, if it's really depicting the future. Of course, this is very hard for Editors to do in a campaign that is not being railroaded towards a specific goal, and impossible in an open-ended or "sandbox" campaign. The Editor would have to keep precognitive visions in those situations deliberately vague.

There is no precognition spell and, for the reasons above, I would not recommend it. If a Mirror of Time was allowed in the game, I would set some limitations on it, like only usable once per week by Magic-Users.

If you're worried about the boy on this page, relax; he's in more danger of being psychologically scarred by being called "Pinhead" by everyone than by those crabs. Ordinary crabs are far too small to be able to do even 1 point of damage. As a general rule, an animal should weigh at least 30 lbs. to be able to do 1 point of damage, or an absolute minimum of 10 lbs.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

The Funnies #9

It's taken me almost half a year now, but we're finally one year before the debut of Superman now.

First rule of being a secret operative: don't tell people you're a secret operative, Dan!

Here's how you do it, Dan. G-Man Jim here will show you how to wear a secret camera in your jacket. And looking for clues on people's clothing (2 in 6 chance to find one, for humans).

I suppose I could say I shared this page for a playing tip, to always remember that the Editor can have people overhear your players plotting whenever they do it in public. But, really, I'm just sharing this page because he's Captain Easy, so it's awesome.

This is an interesting escape, for what Easy doesn't need to pull it off.  He doesn't need a climb skill; since he reaches the rooftop off-panel, we could easily assume he used a ladder. He doesn't wreck things or bend bars to open the window -- he hands her a saw and makes her do it!

I include Tailspin Tommy here because of that great closing shot of the Sargasso Sea. What a hideout crawl that would be, moving from ship to ship, separated both by centuries and only a few feet...

This page is a handy companion to the article on famous jewels I wrote for The Trophy Case no. 9.

This page of Og Son of Fire is fascinating. First we see the cavemen fighting a snow leopard (leopards were last discussed here). We see a caveman skinning a giant sloth (both cavemen and giant sloths were statted in Book II: Mobsters and Trophies) -- and the last encounter looks an awful lot like my gibbon men!  As I mentioned back here, the gibbon men were a cheat, intended to fill a niche in the game without any evidence of their existence, but it's nice to finally see them on the page!

Don Dixon is in a humdinger of a deathtrap -- he and all his friends are tied to a huge stone that will swung down into an active volcano. Other than waiting for the volcano to erupt and make your superstitious executioners afraid, how would you escape?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

The Funnies #7

Freight tunnels and sewers are good places to hide hideouts right under a metropolis.

Dan Dunn, because of his level, should be able to boss around lower level Fighters. But being able to talk one into authorizing a hundred-man search party? That's a bit much for Hideouts & Hoodlums.

Dropping seven stories, with burns, sounds like a lot of hit points' worth of damage, but that's definitely possible in H&H, for a higher-level Fighter.

Numbers tend to run a little high in the comics, but sometimes need scaling back because of the more incremental nature of H&H.  Eight hundred troops might seem like a nicely dramatic number for railroading your player's Hero in the direction you want him to go -- but then what if he decides to stay and fight?  Not a good idea to use numbers this high when you can't predict what your players are going to choose to do.

I also wanted to share this page because the idea of climbing up and down a tree to keep warm seemed novel.  And it's Captain Easy, so it's just darn amazing.

And the lesson here is that players can plan all they want, but they can't control the actions of characters other than their Heroes, even their own horses.

Bronc Peeler, which switched from a humor strip to an adventure strip, here demonstrates an early use of the whip as an entangling weapon. Whips may need some special mechanic for that, as I don't think it will work with the grappling rules, as I have them now...

Og and friends simply use thrown rocks as weapons.

We don't actually see any wolves here, but the great grey wolves are certainly talked up as being larger than normal. Maybe 1+2 HD?

Don Dixon now gets full pages!

It's hard to say what's going on with the whistle here. Were the blue dwarfs really that close-by, by coincidence, or is the whistle magical and summoned them?

Note this would be a good way to introduce decidedly non-Tolkien dwarfs into H&H.

Less deservedly, Tad of the Tanbark gets a whole page now too.

H&H Book III: Underworld & Metropolis Adventures has rules for vehicular combat, including ramming with cars, and how much damage the occupants take.

The Funnies #6 - pt. 2

A long-standing trope of the action adventure genre (of which one could argue even the superhero genre is just a sub-set) is that prisoners can be intimidated into giving up valuable information. Here, Tailspin Tommy takes an unusual aeronautical approach to this, while taking advantage of the fact that his prisoner is afraid to fly.  Without that disadvantage, it seems unlikely that loop de loops would trigger a morale save.

The people of the Hidden Empire call these terods (or is that teroos?), but they look an awful lot like dragons to my trained eye.

Since terods breath poison gas, it seems safe to stat them as green dragons, despite the fact that they seem to come in every color but. They are defeated, not by Don Dixon, but by the magic ring worn by one of his supporting cast. It is unclear exactly what the ring is doing, but it seems to be a Ring of Light Rays that shoot like lasers (for at least 4d6 damage, I'd guess).

Og and friends manage to hug the ledge, even during an earthquake, by virtue of saving throws vs. science or plot, depending on which is better (or worse, depending on the severity of the quake).

One could make an argument that balance would be measured by Dexterity and that the Dexterity score should be somehow tied into this decision (whether to fall or not fall).  However, even assuming there was a modifier for ability scores that could be applied to any roll, it would still be a random chance of success, and there already is a mechanic for random chance of success in the saving throw mechanic. So ability score checks seem, to my mind, superfluous.  Though some game referees do love them, and they could certainly use them if they really wanted to.

Eggs are 40 cents a dozen.