Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 3

No, "Arrows of Doom" isn't a Fantastic Four adventure (though wouldn't that be cool?). There are British research foundations, but not one called British Research Foundation (that I've found). Bwana is used as a form of respectful address in parts of Africa, so it's a weird name for head hunters. Matadi is the chief sea port of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the capital of the Kongo Central province.

Larry does something you don't normally see in these short adventures -- collecting rumors about the scenario before he heads into it. 

Though we're told that's a giant python, it doesn't look any larger than normal pythons, which can reach 15' in length. 
 

The arrow in panel 2 is puzzling. Did it pass through his shirt before going up into his head? 

You shouldn't be so surprised, Larry; poor Magu has already succeeded at three morale saves this adventure and his time was up. Speaking of Magu, that's apparently a real name you might find in countries like Tanzania (there's a Magu District in Tanzania).

But what is Larry holding over Magu's sleeping bag? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with what's being said in the panel. 

Just as I'm thinking about congratulating the author for his research, I'm forced to deal with the trope of bad guys being willing to kill everyone but the hero, who gets captured instead. Or is there some subtle racism here, that it's only black guides getting killed?  I think it's impossible to call here, because we can't see if the two men accompanying Ronald are black or not. Maybe Larry's guides were just unlucky.

It's really hard to take a villain like Debree seriously -- but what to make fun of first? Should I be making cheese jokes? Debris puns? Laugh at his outrageous mustache? 

Igor is not, as you may have guessed, an African name, but I think we can forgive this, especially if Debree is the one who named the 'holy lodge.' 

People who don't want to sound racist have always had a hard time figuring out how to describe people without sounding racist. Dark? Black? Granted, Larry is tied to a post that's about to be lit on fire, so he doesn't really have time to ask for the man's name...and yet, Larry does manage to fire off a pretty long speech instead...

Here's an interesting twist on the Western hero. Is it a modern hero or a 19th century hero? It's so hard to tell with the Mythic West, though a clue may be the posters on the walls advertising the menu, which seems more like a 1940 thing, as well as the price of 25 cents for bacon and beans.

I never would have thought of this -- and I'm not sure if it's really legit -- but maybe the next time I've playing in a game where I need to find out if someone's been out riding on his horse recently, I'll check the horse for sweat. Of course, this may not prove useful results on a hot day, or if the horse is sick...

It seems like everything has been wrapped up neatly -- unless the three robbers recant their confessions in front of the mob, or tell a new lie and implicate Jim. That is one mercurial mob. Maybe they don't care who they string up, they just want to hang somebody today! In a RPG like Hideouts & Hoodlums, you can roll randomly for encounter reactions of every individual in the mob, group them into sets of five and roll for every set, or just roll once for the whole mob. 

Wow. I did not see that twist ending coming! The Headless Horseman's a horsewoman!

This is Harry Campbell's Jon Linton (it's different from Dean Denton and John Law because it takes place in the future!). I like the building of suspense on this page with the running countdown. Harry always tries to add more realistic details to his stories than the typical comic book writer, which I appreciate, but without inches of latitude and longitude, those bombers are going to have an awful huge swath of Asia to search for the hidden city. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.) 

 

Amazing Mystery Funnies #18 - pt. 3

We're going to speed through the rest of this issue today, picking up where we left off with Larry Kane. This old castle is so like Old School dungeon design, with random layouts that don't make much real world sense -- like coming in through the main entrance and finding a long hallway lined with doors instead of, oh, maybe a foyer or something.

I didn't know this, but a garret is an attic that's been finished so it can be lived in.

Well, darn! Instead of some spooky ghosts, it's just some mobsters making all the noises. From the descriptions, if I was running this as a Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario (and don't think I wouldn't!), I would stat them as two robbers and a thug. Though I would personally shake things up in this story by having mobsters and undead in the house -- much like my Palace of the Vamp Queen module.

Spoilers: Larry wins. So let's jump ahead to the next feature, Spy A-5 (we're also told his name is Storm King, but that feels an awful lot like an alias as well).

The story is pretty run-of-the-mill, with this being like the eighth or ninth story I've read about an inventor with a stratoplane since I started reading these stories. The only thing worth considering here, then, is the game mechanic issue of the splashing-liquid-in-their-faces-to-distract-them trick. If I was a fan of the new edition of D&D and its mechanic of advantage and disadvantage, I might say the distraction gives them a disadvantage on their next attacks. While the mechanic is clearly popular with today's players, it's a big game-changer in that it alters the dice rolls far more than a small modifier does. I would have to say it goes against the flavor of H&H.

Speaking of flavor...the other use for this trick is simply flavor text to explain how Storm wins initiative on that turn. In H&H, the dice rolls determine the result, and then the result is described; you don't normally pick the result you want and then the mechanics help you get that result (although there are situational modifiers that will give you a 5-20% bonus).

Anyway, on to this next page. First, I wanted to point out that the mobsters are able to use escape artistry as a skill; normally we only see that working for Heroes.

We see corners being used for hard cover. We also see a Hero taking a rare hit and needing first aid afterwards.

For game balance, sometimes it's good to introduce trophy items with a built-in drawback, and this stratosphere has a doozy. Unless the pilot can keep the fuel mixing just right (skill check? Per take-off?), the plane explodes for, I'm guessing, a lot of dice of damage.

And now we get to Fantom of the Fair, and a really nice location for a hideout. I can imagine some cool, water-based traps in that place.


Is Dr. Loy babbling, or does he have voice-activated machinery?

So how tough are these things? We're not talking about golem-level tough if Loy can mass produce a thousand of them. Probably not even gargoyle-level tough, to make them immune to normal weapons. Rather, I'd say they have good Armor Class and that's why the bullet doesn't harm him.

But what to call them? Loy calls them his masterpieces, but that's a terrible name for a mobstertype.  "Weird hideous creature" is too long. I would shorten that, then, to The Weird.

Although the weird are undoubtedly tough, their chief advantage against The Fantom seems to be only numbers. I would give them maybe 2, no more than 3, Hit Dice.

The Fantom has gone from a mysterious figure with a fascinating backstory to just some redheaded guy in long underwear and cape. Or is the Fantom in disguise, as he definitely seemed to have black hair in his earliest appearances...?

I had to look up "water bubbler" and learned that it's a slang term for a water fountain, used in New England.

That the weird melt into puddles when hit with water makes them pretty useless, but also easy for low-level Heroes to face.

Fantom's chemical analysis seems like a longshot, depending on a) the weird's creator to not be from some foreign country, or smuggle the chemicals into the country, and b) that they were all made in the last six months.

And what is up with that ugly cowl the Fantom is wearing? It's like he has a red condom pulled down over his head...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Mystery Funnies #18 - pt. 2

We're still looking at Jon Linton's adventures in the future; a future where men wear robes and women wear short skirts.

It seems like a huge design flaw that Satan Rex's atomic power plant is controlled by two exposed electrodes. I was going to say the place should also have some fail-safes in place, but I suppose the power shutdown is a fail-safe, preventing something worse like a meltdown.

I don't think any 1940 writers knew about meltdowns yet...and yet, Harry Campbell did seem to have more knowledge of science than your average comic book writer of the time, so...?

I just complimented Campbell for his smarts, but there seems to be a glaring mistake here; two pages back, Jon learned the systems would need 30 minutes to reboot, and here the "wall of force" is rebooting well before then. Of course, maybe Satan was smart enough to have a back-up system kick in for the force wall.

It's interesting that Campbell calls it a wall of force and not the more common term, force field (in use in science fiction going back to 1920!). Wall of Force is, of course, a magic-user spell as well.

The second to last panel spells out that the Scientist class normally takes a week of downtime to invent something, but has a chance to kit-bash something in just a day.

The Mount Wilson Observatory telescope would be the largest in the world until 1949. I'm not sure where the "6,000 billion million miles" came from, but researchers could see nebulae over 5 trillion miles away.

The "reveal houses on the moon, if there are any" is as optimistic as telepathic television-phones.

Bill and Davey is an odd duck, a comic strip coming from a minor league syndicate that was picked up by both Dell and Centaur (though neither for long). It's hard to see what they saw in it -- unless they just picked it up cheap.

There were headhunters, and cannibals as well, on the Solomon Islands, so while the depiction of Ajax might seem racist, the description isn't. 

This is Tippy Taylor on Fantasy Isle, a non-subtle rip-off of Swift's Lilliput. This scenario should be a cakewalk for even a class-less half-pint; since I'm still working on the assumption that 1 hit point represents roughly 30 lbs. of mass, and a 6" tall person would weigh less than an ounce, then Lilliputians...or Fantasy Islanders don't even come close to having a full hit point, or being able to do any damage themselves.

The tank poses more of a threat, even scaled to tiny size. Since it's the size of a gun, I would allow it to do a full 1-6 points of damage if it shot Tippy in the leg.

That must be a 3' high jump by Tippy. Impressive! 

This is John Degen, Private Detective, from a one-shot called "The Fiend of Halwith Hall." Shadowing someone, by car, on a country road, should be a basic skill check.

John is smart to head straight to the cellar, as most of the good stuff in a hideout is underground.

John has a skeleton key, a minor trophy item that gives him a bonus to skill checks when opening locked doors.

Here we have a mad scientist with the emphasis on mad. Like many mad scientists, he wants to do a brain transplant. Now, he might be just a raving loon, or maybe he has the science to do it; we never do find out.

Two wolves are unusual pets for a mad scientist.

The pit trap in the driveway is very unusual. It also doesn't make a lot of sense, since the car was parked when John goes inside, and is in the pit trap after he gets out. Maybe it took a long time for the weight of the car to activate the trap?

That's a lot of blood loss, to make the gunpowder too wet to burn. The Hideouts & Hoodlums rules don't account for blood loss and there's no way to make yourself bleed faster to foil traps.

Wow, that is one dark ending. It's rare for Heroes in comics to fail, but John not only failed to save this poor guy, but we find out just what horrible fate befell him.

Lastly, we're going to look at a verbose page of Larry Kane, investigating "The Ghost of Kirkwood." There's a pretty good set-up for a haunted house scenario here, with lots of rumors being supplied on this page.

My curiosity has been aroused too, but it's late and I'll read the rest next time!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)