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 #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.

The Funnies #4 - pt. 2

While a stone age campaign based on Alley Oop would be more like modern-day living with a stone age backdrop, a campaign more like Og Son of Fire would deal with more realistic issues, like hunting to survive, and navigating threats like superstitious people and the constant threat of stoning.

Should "sinister stranger" be a mobster type? These two are obviously some type of hoodlum.  Perhaps sinister hoodlums would try to corrupt others into working with them.  Looks like they have a vamp in their "secret hideout" too.

Don Dixon falls into a trap; the bridge is rigged so that the ropes can be pulled taut enough to snap (mechanically, from a remote distance), dropping anyone on it into the water below (it looks to me like a 30' drop).  Not sure what the bad guys mean by "microscope" here, unless they meant "television"...

Look-outs are a mobster I should have added ages ago.  A look-out would not be much in a fight, so maybe 1-1 HD at best, but they were be hard to surprise -- 1 in 6 only.

Added to the bridge-drop trap is that the water Don was dropped into is a "raging torrent" that leads to a whirlpool. A whirlpool is a pretty serious deathtrap, maybe save or die every turn until rescued.  I can't be sure why the water is warmer around the whirlpool, but can guess that Don might have wet himself...

H&H does not have much for dangerous fungi, a niche that the honey death mushrooms introduced in The Trophy Case v. 2 no. 6 was meant to fill.

Elks have not yet been statted for H&H, but would likely have 5 HD.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)