Wonderworld Comics #11 - pt. 3

We're still here with Patty O'Day and her rival suitors, the aristocratic Mike and the common man, Ham. Ham was climbing out of the well (we saw him get dumped down the well last time) when he pulls this stone loose. Now, we can treat this as a secret door, but it's sort of a build-your-own secret door.

Mike is a very confident climber. Had he begun from standing on top of Ham's shoulders, I would have given him a +1 modifier to his skill roll.

I just googled some pics of French cars of this time period and while, yes, they did tend to have long bodies, and I did see some two-seaters that looked like three men abreast would have to be really comfortable with overlapping thighs...but I still don't think any cars of the era were that narrow.

More evidence of damage done to cars in a chase should trigger a random chance of complication, rather than assigning hit points to vehicles.











Complicating matters about the nationality of these villains, Egroe isn't a French name, but a Dutch word (I believe it means "grand"). Dutch separatists fighting in France?

It's interesting that the bad guys "miraculously" survive, suggesting that car wrecks should usually be lethal in the game. I've got plenty of conflicting evidence on that, but maybe only Heroes should have such an easy time escaping car wrecks.

We're going to leave that story and jump into the following Dr. Fung story. Here, in Persia, Fung and Dan are shown this well by an old friend. It seems like a trap, since there is no visible explanation for how the ground around the well gives way so easily, but apparently it is just coincidental instability.

That is one of the craziest monster designs I've ever seen. I'm not even sure what to call them -- unicycle ghouls? The captions only call them things like "weird creatures" and "strange beings." How do you even rationalize a species evolving to have a built-in wheel?

Complaints aside, I like the idea of pneumatic tubes transporting Heroes quickly between levels of a hideout.

And, of course, we end this page with the cliche of monsters adopting a hot human woman as their queen.

For no reason whatsoever, one of the unicycle ghouls is a gigantic unicycle ghoul, about 20' tall. If unicycle ghouls have 1 HD (I would be skeptical about giving them more, since they should be knocked over easily), then this fella must have at least 12 HD. Rather than being presented as their leader, this thing is just one of them, so it's refreshing to know this race doesn't go in for hierarchical societies, except for elevating human women.

It's hard to imagine the young lady has never thought to scream at the monsters to take advantage of their sensitivity to sound. And then, perhaps she has, but enough of them made their saves that they could always stop her.

We're going to jump ahead again, this time into Munson Paddock's Tex Maxon, the Phantom Rider. The stop, drop, and roll campaign would not start until the 1970s, but that doesn't mean people didn't know that's what to do when you catch on fire in the 1940s.

It's interesting how guns only make lots of smoke when the story benefits from it. I'm not sure if guns every actually made that much smoke, or if this comes from old cowboy movies exaggerating the smoke clouds.

While dropping out of a tree on your opponent looks impressive, I would assign no more than a +1 to hit modifier for it, making it questionable if it was worth all the effort of clambering to get into position for it.

Surprisingly, this "Spark" Stevens of the Navy story may be our very first set in Guam. By October 1941, all U.S. dependents and civilians on Guam would be evacuated, but here at the beginning of 1940, Guam would have a burgeoning population of 22,000.

There's little that need be said about the "damsel in distress" plot hook, except that it's so. darn. easy.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Wonderworld Comics #11 - pt. 2

We're still looking at this month's Yarko the Great feature and those wacky Indian Mysterymen are up to their hijinks again. That panel 3 is really weird - if you plan on killing him in his sleep, why would you straddle him on his bed first?

The art in panel 4 reminds me so much of Vince Colletta.

It's not clear from this story if Yarko is just passing through, staying at this hotel temporarily, or if he normally lives in this hotel, which used to be more of a thing. Given the size of that balcony, it's a very nice suite he's staying in.

Initially I found panel 1 confusing. Is Yarko jumping into the pot? No, that's the mysteryman cultist he kicked off of him on the last page. Yarko has already teleported off the bed, as revealed in panel 2. I would be tempted to say he was using the simpler spell, Poof!, but there's no cloud of smoke accompanying the spell.

Panel 3 is either showing Telekinesis or Protection from Missiles.

The caption in panel 5 refers to the cultist as a Hindu, the man's words in panel 4 make him sound like a Muslim. More importantly, the earlier pages that show them having secret meetings on a mountaintop reveal him to be a cultist (a statted mobstertype in 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums). Perhaps the nature of this cult is that they mix Hindu and Islamic beliefs.

The final spell cast is revealed by Yarko's words "That will hold you" -- it's a Hold Person spell!

A cursed jewel that makes anyone looking at it save or die is pretty serious stuff. Since Yarko openly wears his twin jewel all the time means they do not share this ability.

Kohat is a real city in modern-day Pakistan.The "Order of Aribah" is completely fictional.

The significance of being the seventh son of a seventh son stretches into antiquity, across multiple cultures.

Yarko is using the spell Project Image, which apparently has a super long range.

As goofy as it always looks, Iger's Shorty Shortcake is at heart a solid adventure story, and perhaps the first one ever set in Guatemala. I don't think there's any particular reason why this story would need to take place in Guatemala, though I suspect Iger simply thought it sounds funny.

Here we have a mad scientist who doesn't look that much more comical than some other mad scientists, and his water magnet is not that much goofier than a lot of comic book science.

Birds are a tricky thing to stat accurately because, even if you make them bigger, a hollow-boned animal still doesn't have much mass to assign hit dice to. However, if you go up to 40 x normal size, you can get a carrier pigeon that weighs (unless my math is way off) 1,300 lbs. That bird is 7+2 Hit Dice, and has a wingspan of 80'!

If the world's heaviest worm, the Megascolides australis, was subjected to 40 x growth, it would weigh 700 lbs. and have 4 Hit Dice. However, at some point we need to max out the Hit Die gain from enlargement, or a 100 lb. Shorty would grow to 80 tons and have 266 20-sided Hit Dice!

It seems odd that Shorty assumes the water shrunk him, not that the lightning changed him (as often happens in comics!), or that the duration just coincidentally ended.

A glider seems like a nice trophy reward. Good for getting Heroes from plot location to plot location, but can't do much else to spoil scenarios (unless outdoors, and Shorty simply rains dropped items down on mobsters).  

Loraine spies have to be from the Alsace-Lorraine territory that, at this time in 1940, was still part of France! The politics of these revolutionaries isn't clear, but it seems they would be a political group wanting either independence or want to be annexed by Germany, which would be a very bad call, but -- hindsight is 20/20, right?

Cab drivers are a good source for plot hooks. Even international ones, apparently!

"Pan-chromatic film" sounds fancy, but "a panchromatic emulsion produces a realistic reproduction of a scene as it appears to the human eye, although with no colors." Almost all modern photographic film (since 1906) is panchromatic. All this is from Wikipedia, of course.

It's a discouraging start to your scenario when your best fighter gets beat up and dropped down a well in your very first encounter.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Wonderworld Comics #10 - pt. 2

This is only Yarko the Great's eighth story, but already his second trip to the land of the dead -- and surprisingly his way there is entirely different this time. Instead of transitioning through a Dante-lite version of the afterlife, Yarko is able to transport himself (Plane Shift spell?) directly to the Valley of Shadows, or an area of it that is more desolate and uninhabited than when we last saw it. Interestingly, Yarko needs an item belonging to the Baron in order to track him across the planes; one could interpret from this that Yarko would wind up in some random space on the same plane without the sword to attract him to the Baron.

Shining Knight, no! (Just kidding; the old knight just has the same coloration as the Shining Knight will have a year or two from now).

Here we see Yarko fighting with a sword, and fighting well, invalidating the "magic-users can only fight with daggers" conceit.

We also get a good example of why we want to put powerful Heroes in environments where they can't use their full range of spells or powers. We know Yarko can still cast spells in the Afterlife, but there must be anti-magic zones throughout and Yarko had temporarily stepped into one.

Yarko's spell -- conjuring the ghosts of his past victims to attack him -- reminds me of the Phantasmal Killer spell.

This is Shorty Shortcake, and those are some really big germs flying out of that watch case! Rigging something to release tear gas -- or "crying germs", as it's called here -- is not a bad trap.

Hideouts & Hoodlums has rules for pushing opponents, but pulling them? That's trickier, I think. It would probably be a grappling attack and then, if successful, I would allow the grappler to make half-moves and pull the victim along, so long as the grappler had the higher Strength score.

While grappling your opponent, if you have a strong enough hold on them (that means at the Editor's discretion), you could roll to make another attack and put a hat on your opponent's head, if that was really something you wanted to do. I'm definitely not opposed to giving free attacks if they're used to do something in-character, but not actually harm anyone.

I'm glad I've never statted giant bats as having very many hit points, as these giant vampire bats (simply called vampire bats here, but the scale is always way off in a Shorty Shortcake adventure -- oh, I wonder if that is a feature I should talk about?) fall easily after just being hit with a rubber-band ball (an improvised weapon, doing no more than 1-3 points of damage, if ever there was one).

I'm kind of surprised that I've never seen a Hero track a bad guy by his cigar ash until this point.

This is also the first time I can recall seeing one trophy item specifically able to counteract another trophy item.

This is Patty O'Day, so naturally I'm going to focus on her partner Ham being awesome instead. Here it takes not one, but two head blows to knock him out, demonstrating that head blows are not automatic knockouts.

We also get a glimpse of a secret door concealed as a wall panel.

How long, in game time, should it take for eyes to become accustomed to the dimness? It probably doesn't matter for this scene, but if combat was about to begin it could be relevant. Or maybe not; I'd probably ignore the issue, unless Patty lost initiative, and then I could use the "eyes adjusting" thing as an excuse to explain why.

It's a smart tactic to keep the rope you were tied up in. Awesome Ham has figured out a use for it already!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Wonderworld Comics #9 - pt. 2

We rejoin Yarko the Great still messing with con men. He clearly casts Telekinesis, and maybe a Ventriloquism spell? Unless he's still just using ordinary ventriloquism skill there.

Now he casts Teleport and Speak with Dead.

I am going to spare you the first part of the Shorty Shortcake story, a racist tale about how Mexicans are lazy and sleep all the time, only waking up to watch cock fights. Here we see that thrown stones -- well, gold nuggets -- do damage. I would treat them as improvised weapons and do 1-3 points of damage.

I would be extremely cautious about allowing people to be tied up like pretzels in Hideouts & Hoodlums, as it might be too unrealistic for H&H combat. However...if you did enough grappling damage to break lots of bones, maybe it is possible...

So where is the fighting zone where Patty O'Day is? It's got to be Finland, unless this is an earlier story, and then maybe Poland. The officer arresting them speaks French; France has not yet been attacked, but French soldiers may have reached their allies in Finland or Poland. Plus, forces were already massing on both sides of the France-Germany border, so while no fighting had taken place yet, it was definitely a zone.

It's peculiar that this is "against regulations," as war correspondents were common in WWII and female ones were not rare. She must have just failed to gain permission.

I think Patty would be dead three times over by now if it wasn't for Ham. Here he displays successful skill checks at raft-building, sailing/navigation, fire-building, and hunting/tracking. I'm sure it's a product of the times that Patty can't be shown as being good at anything, but it leaves me puzzled why this feature isn't just called Ham.

Ham appears to get in two punches -- including a "two-in-one" punch -- before anyone can attack him back, but unless Ham is a buffed superhero, that seems unlikely. More likely, Ham has attacked over two turns (the "two-in-one" being flavor text for two hits in the same turn) without anyone being able to land a hit on him until the end of the second turn.

That Patty and Ham are locked in their cell with their camera stretches my suspension of disbelief. They must have made a save vs. plot to not have it confiscated, with something like a -3 or -4 penalty.

That is one stupid guard. She either scored a max roll on her encounter reaction check or he badly failed a save vs. plot to resist falling for that (an Editor could use either mechanic in that instance). The guard entry in the Mobster Manual is going to include a penalty on saves to resist whatever ploys the Heroes come up with to fool them and a chance for guards to stupidly turn their backs on Heroes.

The Moth seems like one of the earliest costumed supervillains in comics, or would be if he really wasn't just a bodyguard to the main villain. The Moth's costume is bulletproof, which only means it is at least as hard to hit as AC 7.

The gas gun looks to have a range of at least 15'.

The scientist/madman responsible for the Moths thinks they fly because they are "sensitized to a powerful energy wave," but it seems obvious to me the one in that first panel is wearing a jetpack.

This is one of the first evil scientists to use shrinking technology, and definitely the first for such a novel purpose.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Wonderworld Comics #5 - pt. 2

This is Patty O'Day. You missed the page before this, because I didn't share it, but mobsters shot at Patty and Ham's boat with a machine gun, and our Heroes were lucky enough to escape with only damage to their boat.

I've been thinking about what to do about damage to vehicles. My first thought was to give vehicles hit points, but now I'm not so sure about that. More so than with Heroes, vehicles are often stopped by complications -- like leaking, in this case -- long before they are destroyed.

What about...competing saves vs. plot? In a chase, the chasee could make a save vs. plot to try to trigger a complication, which the chaser would be able to fix or compensate for with a save vs. plot of his own.

We've already seen that Ham is no ordinary supporting cast; here he takes on a shark single-handed with a knife and seems to easily win. Though, we don't actually know that he killed the shark; maybe he it missed a morale save as soon as it was lightly injured.

I skipped a page again, but the missing information you don't have is that Patty and Ham were captured and thrown into the "lower dungeon". They have more than one?  The lower dungeon floods when the tide comes in. We've seen that trap before, but this one has a trapdoor above the dungeon they can reach pretty easily.

Since Ham and his opponents are all unarmed, they each get two attacks per turn -- which is one explanation for how Ham could punch both of them. He also gets two shots with the gun, but if it's an automatic he would get those as early as first level.

Patty, rather cleverly, turns the rickety pier into a trap. Under some circumstances, I would treat this as a skill check, but there's little other than physics at work here and all Patty did was leave a rope attached. I would probably make this automatically succeed, especially as a reward for smart playing.

A personal letter of thanks from the President is its own rewards -- but this one might come with some bonus XP too, as if it was a trophy item.

Meanwhile, Dr. Fung Master Sleuth of the Orient, and his companion Dan Barrister, are getting into trouble in Africa. Here they encounter ape-men, making this the third time I've seen ape-men in comic books so far this project. They don't seem to be particularly strong, but they can manage the "blow to the back of the head" cliche.

Note that Dr. Fung appears not to have put up a fight at all. I wonder if he's even a Hero, or just Dan's supporting cast, despite the title of this feature.

I have no intention of having cold water revive unconscious Heroes. Rather, Dan was just stunned for a number of turns that coincidentally ended when they hit the water.

Ape-Men, or at least their leaders, speak excellent English.

A lot of grappling goes on here. Grappling does damage -- sometimes considerable damage in 2nd edition -- so it's possible that the ape-man chief is just down to his last few hit points when that knockout punch comes. Or, there needs to be a percent chance of a stun per fist blow, which is something I've toyed with.

Losing a leader is definitely good cause for a morale save.

I can't tell what that animal next to the Sheena-like character is supposed to be. Some kind of dog...?

This is K-51 Spies at War.The King is named King "Arnold" in this story, but I can't help but wonder if he is meant to represent King George VI of Great Britain.

K-51 senses danger because the mobsters missed their surprise roll.

The terms "thug" and "assassin" seem to be used interchangeably here, unless one of them is a thug and the other the assassin.

K-51 seems content to let his supporting cast mow the mobsters down with sub-machine guns. No XP for you, K-51!

Mob Buster Robinson is the man running around in the swimsuit, and I call shenanigans here. One panel, mobsters are shooting at him from maybe ...20' behind him? After that, Robinson seems to somehow lose them and has time to search this yacht for hidden loot. This seems to suggest an awfully generous evasion mechanic, that the mobsters can't keep up with him and lose him so easily. I mean, how big a yacht can it be?

I'm amused by the TNT box that says "use no hooks". Maybe that's a real thing, but what I picture is fishermen, trying to keep their hooks away from TNT boxes...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Wonderworld Comics #4 - pt. 2

When you're seeing a stunt in a comic book, it's always really easy to tell what's going on. When you're seeing a power, it's usually pretty easy to tell what's going on. But with spells...

So the game is, What Spell is Yarko casting? Did he get shot, and then somehow cast Gaseous Form, Spirit Form, Astral Projection, or the like to spy on them? Or is the image on the floor an illusion and Yarko is really invisible?

And here's why the answer is relevant -- if Yarko is having an out of body experience, it seems that going back into his body heals himself. That's a pretty cool and useful spell (with the danger being that the mobsters could have shot him full of more holes while he was Astral projecting).

A polymorph spell that lets you turn two people into pearls is heavy stuff -- like a 9th level spell.

This is Shorty Shortcake again. I include it because, not only is it a classic example of a rich benefactor feeding plot hooks to the Hero, but it's got a good rationale for using half-pint Heroes instead of full-grown ones.

This is Patty O'Day again, and I'm amused that Patty has to go to a special costumer to sell her clothes that make her and Ham look like mobsters (or a sailor and a girl going to Paris on vacation). A costumer could be a useful supporting cast character to have, though we're a long way from Edna Mode here.

I love the unusual slang here -- "toots" as a masculine pet name? "Janes" instead of "dames"?

I also wonder if biting should do more damage if a woman or child does it. Men never bite each other in comic books, so their bites must be less effective?

This is interesting! Vampires needing gems to stay on this plane of existence? It's like liches and their phylacteries.

No reflections in mirrors is obvious, but expressionless eyes is surely a lesser known (made-up) way of identifying vampires.

Vampires can, predictably, turn into bats and back at will.

That's a really curious thing Dan says. If they "can't keep her awake until sunrise, she will really die!" So, if they fail to keep her awake, the vampire dies. So putting her to sleep is the way to end her...?

Note the convenience of the stairs that run all the way down to the cellar. In a game like D&D, many dungeon maps are deliberately made with staircases spread out to force adventurers to explore.

Another curious thing -- if vampires need gems to "exist among the living", then how is the vampire okay without the gem? Is the castle some underworld place outside the living world?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)