Famous Funnies #68 - pt. 1

We haven't seen Roy Powers in a while! Here he's on a cruise to Africa (the previous page smartly talked about how much school he was going to miss because of this, but he has a tutor on the trip) where there's going to be some big game hunting (booo!). More interestingly, here's the beginning of some mystery on the ship. What do they want in Roy's room? When laying clues, remember to leave olfactory ones too.

Uashin? I think this is referring to Uasin Gishu County, and it is located on a plateau, in Kenya. Interestingly, "Jambo Bwana" is a Kenyan pop song that will come out 42 years later. 
  

Skyroads surprises me occasionally; there is some interesting chemistry between these two characters, and I laughed out loud at "I was born quite young." Also, salt horse is slang for salted beef. 

Sure, we could talk here about how "fagged out" means exhausted, or how "I feel as though I'd been spanked by a trip hammer" reads like innuendo, but what really grabs me on this page is -- how is that record player working? Is it hand-cranked? Battery powered? I know they had the former back then, but I'm not sure about the latter.

Also note the "Wing Tip" about how 1st-level aviators would need to certify their transport rating, in addition to carrying a transport license.

Senor and senorita? That's interesting because, while Spain in its prime was one of the first countries to have U-boats in their navies, by 1940 Spain's military was in tatters from its civil war and did not have many submarines left. This is a good time to remind ourselves, though, that these are all reprints from earlier comic strips, these ones specifically from 1937 (according to comics.org), and -- according to this Wikipedia page -- Spain still had eight U-boats at that time. 

This page is a reminder, if mystery bad guys have been shooting at you, to search the ground for spent cartridges. With a skill check, you can identify which kinds of guns were being used to shoot at you, which could help you plan for your next encounter with them.

It might be easy to overlook this word through all that heavy dialect, but a yawl is that boat; a yawl is a two-masted fore-and-aft-rigged sailboat with the mizzenmast stepped far aft so that the mizzen boom overhangs the stern.

Oaky Doaks has stumbled across a wizard who lived in a cave for 20 years perfecting this flying carpet (giving us some indication for how long we can expect magic item creation to take?). The flying carpet has an incredible weight allowance, probably carrying 1,750 lbs. as it is here. Being able to reach cumulonimbus clouds suggests a ceiling height over 2,000 feet, and possibly much higher than that. There's no sense of how fast it is from this page.

How would you tell if someone is faking delirium? Perhaps a skill check at first aid. Or a Wisdom check. Or both, so characters with high WIS have a good chance of seeing through the deception, but mysterymen can also cash in a stunt for an automatic success on that skill check.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Famous Funnies #67 - pt. 1

We rejoin Roy Powers, Eagle Scout today after a long time separated. Here, we see how easy traps are in the modern age of Hideouts & Hoodlums. A simple oil flask hanging from a string in D&D would be of little threat to anyone, but substitute it with nitroglycerine and suddenly you've got a trap that can be deadly for even mid-level Heroes.

We also see some nice tactics from Roy, using role-playing to his advantage against the mad scientist.

Just a couple pages later, Roy is already jumping into his next scenario.

Editors may be tempted to roll randomly for mobsters to see which target they choose; I've done this many times, and it does present an element of fairness that keeps players from feeling picked on. And yet, if there are common sense reasons to attack one target over another, the Editor should follow his common sense.

I'll be honest; Skyroads is such a generic aviator feature that I have no idea who this guy is!

Whoever he is, he comes up with a good rationale for getting a +1 modifier to his wrecking things roll. He probably asked if there was a hoisting tackle lying around and the Editor, unprepared for that tactic, had him make a save vs. plot to determine if there was or not.

Hairbreadth Harry leaps back and forth between being a credible source for H&H inspiration and outlandishness too zany to emulate with any seriousness game mechanics. Here, Harry swings towards the latter, as he claims to have used the pushing mechanic to push his melee combat with Rudolph 3,000 miles, or the equivalent of 15,840,000 points of damage, by H&H's current rules.

When I see panels of villains trying to bribe heroes, and I remember that taking money is a huge motivation in H&H, I wonder if we need to have different mechanics, even if only optional. Or would a saving throw vs. plot cover this? Yes, I think it might, at least for Lawful Heroes to take a bribe. But would that just deter players from playing Lawful Heroes...?

Sergeant Stoney Craig, even without his U.S. Marines, really (ahem) mops up with an improvised weapon in this combat. The spears are uncommonly short, and are maybe harpoons instead of spears. A harpoon would not count as an improvised weapon.

The knife is thrown by an assassin. There's a considerable amount of racism here, with the half-Asian man being called a "breed," but this actually plays well in the story, with the locals' racism explaining how quickly they accept this scapegoating.

Near Island is a real place, in Alaska. It seems strange that anyone in Alaska would hear "They had Jeremy Blade at near" and not think of Near Island...but this would make sense at a game session; players never get clues.

Dickie Dare is relegated to cheerleader in this month's installment, as these pages focus on the gorilla-lion battle. I'll have to add a note to the lion entry that, even when grappling, lions still get raking attacks.

I'm not even sure what's going on here, so it's even harder to figure out how this might apply to game mechanics. I guess...hearing Miss Karson's voice reminds Tiny that someone loves him, and gives him the will to keep fighting, even as his body tells him to quit...?

Yeah, that's really hard to quantify into crunchy rules. I suppose you could include a rule that supporting cast can rally you once per day to give you a +1 bonus to something -- and that would give players more impetus to bring supporting cast along besides the meager XP award.

Or, this is all flavor text and Miss Karson's rallying cries didn't influence Tiny's dice rolls at all.



(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Famous Funnies #66 - pt. 1

That the skeleton is apparently afraid of the dog is yet more evidence for morale applying to the undead. But $1-2 million in gold seems a bit excessive for treasure.

One thing to keep in mind in the kids' adventure genre, if you ever run it using Hideouts & Hoodlums, is that combat is almost never an option. Had the man in green goggles been the villain in an adult protagonist's story, he would have been punched out before now! Half-pint Heroes should always have to save vs. plot before resorting to violence.

More evidence that you should always check your cell for secret doors.

An interesting scenario where, instead of combat, the hero and villain engage in a lying contest against each other. This could be resolved by a simple encounter reaction roll for each contestant, perhaps modified by how good a whopper the player can come up with.

The book is only $1.

This seems clever to me, hiding out in the rhino cage because the rhino is too valuable to shoot at. I'm not sure I would take my chances on the encounter reaction roll from the rhino, though!

Intriguingly, the Editor seems to be rolling for surprise individually here, since Joe is surprised, but Dickie isn't.

The bullets seem to have been responsible for wrecking things on that cage, something that I would not normally encourage (this development is more likely Editor's fiat).

If the Aviator class is going to get resurrected for 2nd edition (and it seems to me it should be), it is going to need special stunts not accessible to other classes. Break Formation could be one of those stunts.


(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Famous Funnies #65 - pt. 1

Spunky gets an unusual layout to his page here. The mine is guarded by bats and a skeleton. As fake undead, the skeleton has a chance of scaring people. There's an awful lot of gold strewn around the mine, which means easy XP for anyone who gets past being scared by the skeleton.

Also, having a goat and a turtle for Supporting Cast is pretty novel.

There's some unusual pricing information here, for rare scenarios where Heroes would have their babies photographed. More likely would be Heroes being paid to parachute somewhere (probably somewhere dangerous, which could lead into a scenario...).

Hidden in this page of Goofy Gags is the price for a cobbler to stretch your shoes. And to think I kept buying new shoes for my son all those years when he was growing up.

There's two features I like from this page of Roy Powers. One thing I like -- and an old trick many game referees has mastered, is to make sure the player characters don't get to see the monster they're facing right away. Hearing it, or catching shadowy glimpses of it, allows the player to imagine something there that might be much worse than the encounter will actually wind up being.

And then, "Witch's Acre" is just a great name for a hideout area.

Although we never see the alchemist (other creators might have given us a nice flashback scene here), and most likely the alchemist will turn out to not be real since (since this is a realistic strip), the rumor of the alchemist is a great story and sounds like it could be part of a really fun scenario.

Here's more atmosphere-building from Roy Powers. Old ruins are always fun for characters to explore. Mysterious noises are always good for luring characters in certain directions. And darkness can be a handy tool for making encounters more challenging. But I really have to take issue with how the eagle scouts see the spooky man in the shadows and just let him go. My players would be talking to him, trying to grab or tackle him, or -- heck -- some players would just shoot first and ask questions later!

I haven't included Skyroads in a long time, but I'm including this one because ordinary hoodlums with cool codenames like Scorpion is such a rarity. Plus, the definition of "service ceiling" could be handy in an aviator-themed scenario.

This page illustrates the importance of facing during aerial combat, but more importantly I think, the sidebar gives us a figure for the blast radius of a bomb. If planes need to stay more than 50' from the ground to avoid bomb blasts, then bombs must have a 50' blast radius.

From Hairbreadth Harry we learn that pirate maps are worth $10,000. Also, villains sometimes carry up to $10,000 in cash on their persons.

Harry is accosted by a hired thug. Thugs have been a statted mobster type since Day 1 of Hideouts & Hoodlums, though I don't think I ever gave them a chance to be armed with sub-machine guns, as this one appears to be.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Famous Funnies #63

Roy Powers and his eagle scout troop might be onto something here. If you have a wild animal to capture and you don't want to fight it, try penning it in with lots of chicken wire. But how to handle this with an in-game mechanic? I would probably make an encounter reaction roll for the lion. If it was positive, he would stay put while being hemmed in. If it was negative, he'd jump the fence as it was being erected. And, of course, if it was hostile, he would maul the eagle scouts.

Here's an interesting trap -- the stairs fall away into a slide. Harry slides down the slide, head-first, into the stocks with a guillotine set up above them. I guess, had he gone down feet first, there would have been a chance of his leg going into the stocks and getting cut off, which is still pretty bad.

Maybe I'd roll randomly for what direction he was facing when he hit the bottom of the slide, then make him save vs. plot to avoid whatever part was at the bottom going through the hole and getting stuck. The long delay on the guillotine blade drop seems like it makes it too easy to escape, but a quick drop would make this a nasty encounter.

I'm torn on whether this qualifies as a trap or a deathtrap. On one hand, Harry falls into the trap and isn't placed directly into it. On the other hand, his nemesis is present and clearly expects Harry to die. If it's a trap, I would have the blade only do 1-10 points of damage. If it was a deathtrap, I would make it potentially lethal, or at least limb-cut-off-able.

From the gag filler Life's Like That, here's a corner panel that made me chuckle out loud.

This is Jack Kirby's Lightnin' and the Lone Rider, one of the only cowboy features to give title billing to the horse. Which is extra appropriate today because, in this installment, the Lone Rider would be dead if it wasn't for Lightnin' sensing his trouble, kicking a door in, and coming inside to get mixed up in the fight. Hideouts & Hoodlums has rules for Supporting Cast Members, and even accommodates animal SCMs -- but how do you summon a SCM when you need one?

Right now, in H&H, the Editor always decided when and if a SCM shows up, unless the Hero has a means of directly contacting him/her/it. I was reading the Cortex game system recently for the Smallville RPG. In that game, a player can spend a plot point to make a featured character (SCM) show up. It merits consideration.

I had to look up what a yawl is. Apparently it's like a schooner. One or the other will likely be a trophy transport item.  But freighters? We'll see on that one, as I might stop smaller on sea-going trophy vessels.

This is why Heroes seldom take food or drink offered by suspicious people.

We haven't visited Scorchy Smith in awhile!

I'm working on the treasure section of the H&H basic book right now and here are three examples of treasures -- $200 in cash, a ring (we can assume it's worth roughly $200; if it was a lot more, the stolen cash wouldn't be as relevant), and the deed to a gold mine.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Famous Funnies #54

Here's a fun item to throw into a hideout -- a bucket with a glass bottom. What's it for? For seeing underwater, of course, as any eagle scout can apparently tell you.

This is from Skyroads, and I've done this too. Your players want to know exactly how many gold coins are in that sack, but you cut corners preparing for the game and only worked out what the dollar value of the whole contents are. Who has time to go check the price of gold in 1940, divide the total dollar sum by it, and get a number of coins? So you tell them, "it's a sack of 50,000 bucks in gold" and, if they ask for details, you add "don't worry about it..."

From the gag filler Life's Like That, here's something I thought was funny.

This is from War on Crime.  It seems that hoodlums always have a chance of identifying "dicks" -- or good guys in general, on sight. A 1 in 6 chance, perhaps?

I am not a fan of Jitter, a pretty humorless gag strip, but this page has some mini-history lessons for us -- specifically what a street-cleaning wagon looked like in the 1930s, and the fact that gas stations also had water hoses.

It's rare that the entire hideout turns out to be one big trap, but in this case the entrance is rigged so that, if someone pulls out some of the support stones, the entrance slides shut and traps you inside.

There's two interesting things to point out from this page of Dickie Dare.  One is the clue, mysterious words written on a piece of paper, meaningless without context, which turns out to be the last name of a villain to be met later (and will be recognized then as foreshadowing).  Two -- and this has come up before -- is that every hideout should have more than one entrance, even if you need a crowbar to break into the secondary entrance.

This is from The Adventures of Patsy.  Animals won't cross a line of fire unless they make a morale save. This might apply to ordinary hoodlums as well, since the line of fire could do 1-6 points of damage to the crosser.

Seaweed Sam is back because of the iron robot he encounters this month. It's far stronger than the version found in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies, though maybe it could use an upgrade -- give it the Raise Elephant power?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Famous Funnies #39

One of the challenges Editors like to put in Heroes' way, when running Hideouts & Hoodlums, is environmental challenges. Can the Heroes navigate safely from one side to the other of a treacherous creek? True, an alien could just leap over it, an aviator might fly over it, but there are other races and classes that, with limited resources, might be challenged by even so simple a scenario.

Here we see that the best route for non-powered, non-magical Heroes is to only risk one Hero in the crossing and have him post a guide rope for the others following. The first Hero would still need to make a save vs. plot or science (depending on which is easier, or harder, which in turn depends on how treacherous that stream really is), but the Heroes who follow would not need to roll.

Tetra-nitro-cellulose, as we see here in Skyroads, is one of those nonsense-word explosives so common in comics. It's apparently intensely powerful -- able to vaporize a man who's clearly missed his saving throw vs. science. But note the small size of the blast crater; bear in mind that, in comics, the intensity of an explosion tends to have little bearing on its blast radius.

We haven't spent as much time with Hairbreadth Harry lately as we used to spend in the early days of this blog, but here his outer space adventure continues. Aliens were, until this point, usually drawn to look like ordinary humans in just funny clothes. This might be the first distinctly nonhuman, though still humanoid, alien I've yet seen in the early comics.

Sarians are, apparently, potbellied dwarfs with pointy ears and advanced technology; the ray-rod is capable of making any object it hits disappear.

Dickie Dare's climatic battle with the Black Panther ends with the pearl everyone's been fighting over winding up in the maw of a giant devil ray (that is, a giant manta ray). This is a story trope I've used in my own games, where the "macguffin" item the Heroes are questing for is actually too valuable or too powerful for you to want them to be able to keep it, so it's lost to a bigger and badder adversary the Heroes should not be able to beat (or catch). Of course, that might not stop them from trying and -- if Dickie and Dan's players are that dead set on hunting down the ray...maybe the Editor should just relent and let them catch it.

Giant sting rays were statted in Supplement II: All-American. I daresay, now, that I was a tad conservative. I would likely put a giant devil ray at 7 Hit Dice, of the d8 variety.

Meanwhile, it's a good idea to have a Supporting Cast Member around to tie up the bad guys for you, while you're busy beating up still more bad guys.

By the size of them, these should be "ordinary" 2 HD robots, but the scenario calls for some dressing to be added to these robots. They've been given the ability to wreck things (probably as a 2nd level Superhero), and they seem intelligent (though not too intelligent).

An upgraded mobster should always be worth more Experience Points, probably as if 1 Hit Die higher in this case.

For a strip about aviators, we've seen Scorchy Smith engage in very little dogfighting, until now. Here we see him using the stunt Tight Circle to counter the stunt Find Blind Spot, exactly as they are described in The Trophy Case v. 1 no. 7.

Scorchy Smith's player might have a case for his Editor being out to get his Hero. The armored cars pictured here are close to the light tanks statted in Supplement I: National. Let's hope Scorchy makes lots of saves vs. missiles!

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)