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.)

Mystic Comics #1 - pt. 3

In part 3, we finally get to our first mystic!

Dakor seems to have limited spells; he can't use magic to get onto Tom Denver's trans-Atlantic steamer, so he has to take the next one and arrives in Paris after Tom has already joined the Foreign Legion. Dakor, with no ability to magically persuade the Legion to give Tom up, joins the Legion to look for evidence against Tom. Tom makes it easy for him, openly admitting to have the dead man's cursed gem. To protect Tom, Dakor casts a Phantasmal Image of two lions, this being his first spell. Later, he uses this spell to make someone think their gun has turned into a snake so he drops it.

Dakor hypnotizes Tom later, but in Hideouts & Hoodlums hypnotism can be a skill and not just a spell. Hypnotism is not the same as mind control; Dakor can't make Tom stay and fight later when he turns chicken and deserts.

Dakor supposedly has "super-sensitive hearing," but you know how suspicious I am of those caption narrators, and indeed the panel showing a guard easily sneaking up on him from the side doesn't back up that claim.

The Tuareg people of the Sahara sure get shot at a lot in old comics; here, the Foreign Legion spends hours shooting at them. We're told the Tuareg are ferocious raiders, but we see no evidence of this. Maybe they were riding up to the fort to say hi? Anyway, the Tuareg capture Tom. Dakor follows invisibly. He polymorphs a sword into a dagger (an Alter Weapon spell?) to keep Tom from getting killed, then uses Poof! to move across the room when swordsmen rush him. It looks like he plans to use Rope Trick to escape, but the spell fails when a swordsman gets in the rope's way. Or, he cast Rope Trick just so the rope would lift the man into the air, which seems like a waste of a 2nd-level spell. Surprisingly, Dakor fails to rescue Tom -- a guard kills him! Something happens to the guard in the next panel, but it is so confusing I can't even tell what it is.

Later, Dakor reveals that he had earlier used telepathy (ESP/Detect Thoughts) to discover where Tom buried in the cursed gem, back in his cell. In a pretty insulting/bigoted second-to-last panel, the Tuareg allegedly tell Dakor that Allah would fear him. And to top it off, in the final panel Dakor casts a high-level Control Weather spell and creates a snowstorm. Surprise! He was actually powerful enough to stop this adventure way back before it ever left New York. Double surprise, there's actually one more page! In a sort of epilogue to this story, Dakor travels to China to return the cursed gem to a statue of "Kung," a deity worshiped by millions of Orientals, which is of course nonsense. In a final insult, Dakor fools the Chinese with ventriloquism from the statue, as if they were stupid natives.

In all, Dakor reveals enough magical firepower to need 11 brevet ranks to pull all this off.

The final feature is Dynamic Man, a feature with another android superhero, and one who's introduction is very Frankenstein-like (substitute Prof. Goettler for Dr. Frankenstein, and Dynamic Man is made from synthetic materials instead of human parts). In a twist, Goettler dies of a heart attack immediately, denying our hero a parent/supporting cast member/potential future enemy. Dynamic Man, we are told, has X-Ray Vision (a 3rd-level power), can Change Self (a 1st-level power, but he really uses it just to alter his clothes), and can fly because of his magnetic field (we aren't told how fast, but later he outpaces a train, putting him at Fly III, a 4th-level power!).

Dynamic Man soon takes the identity of Curt Cowan and applies for the FBI. The FBI, apparently not suspicious of his lack of a birth certificate or naturalization papers, takes him in, but he intends to work as Dynamic Man in secret while performing his field work.

The mobsters DM goes after are causing a drought by generating lightning -- which isn't how you would cause a drought -- and they do it to buy up some farmland cheap. Though, after building a mountain retreat and a giant electrical generator, you would think their profits would be a wash. DM has to lift a boulder blocking the entrance to their hideout with the Raise Car power. Then Nigh-Invulnerable Skin protects him from bullets. Then he uses magnetism to disarm two gunmen at once, and that's a little trickier; he may be using Gust of Wind to disarm them with a lot of flavor text covering up the wind part. He throws lightning bolts, but not to wreck the generators, not harm people, so this is actually Wreck at Range. 

King Bascom, the millionaire financier for this scheme, has super-science at his disposal like -- a two-way television! And a hose that sprays liquid "lantholum," a fictional element that is both insulating (blocks electricity-based powers) and corrosive (does damage to DM while also paralyzing him). He also has a deathtrap room that can be flooded with liquid nitrogen and the ceiling lowers to crush occupants because -- hey, he's rich, so why not? Turns out, Bascom is working for the "Richonians," which sounds like Russians a little when you say it out loud. Bascom sics a dozen hoodlums on DM, but he beats them all up. When Bascom tries to escape by plane, DM uses Wreck at Range to destroy it.

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

Silver Streak Comics #3 - pt. 1

With this issue, Silver Streak Comics finally gets its own feature called Silver Streak! Doubly important, this serves as a long origin story for the superhero Silver Streak, so long that we never see him in costume yet in this installment -- making this the longest origin story for a superhero published so far.

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Okay, Hideouts & Hoodlums hat on...it's hard to take this giant fly seriously. Besides looking seriously cartoony, I prefer to cap my giant animals at 8x normal size, which would put a giant fly at less than 1 hit point. Further weirdness comes in this fly's special features, like a ...breakaway proboscis that can impale people...?

What the swami does is the equivalent of a D&D campaign where a powerful wizard puts a Geas spell on the entire party and makes them go on his quest for him. Nobody likes that. Still, in this instance, it also explains how Silver Streak gets his powers.

Speaking of weird features on this giant fly...tentacles? Where? Aren't those just legs?

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Oh dear...swamis are Hindus, not Muslims, so it seems unlikely this one would be invoking Allah by name. It's also pretty unclear how being hypnotized kept our Hero from dying in the car crash.

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Back to gaming talk; can a target hurl away two men trying to grapple him at the same time? Here we have to consider the impact of this on the combat. If combat is being affected, then we should be careful not to invoke "flavor text" on this, and it does appear that, since the two men are knocked prone, this allows Silver Streak to leave the area without them getting free back attacks on him as he flees.

On the other hand, this could be appropriate flavor text if SS is buffed with the Untackleable power.

It's hard to imagine the police are baffled without a clue, when a fly the size of a car must keep flying away from the scene of each crime. How hard can that be to follow?

This may be the earliest example in a comic of the main villain not even being mentioned until the second half of the story. Of course, because this is a golden age comic, the villain is a mad scientist, but a mad zoologist is a new twist.

$20 million dollars is one of the steeper ransoms we've found in these early comics.

Silver Streak has not really demonstrated any traditional superpowers yet (though Feign Death appears to be one of them earlier), but here he clearly uses the Leap I power to reach the giant fly and grapple it.

I'm going to include giant flies now in the Mobster Manual...but am going to cap them at 3 Hit Dice.

No, he's not Bruce Wayne or even John Wayne, but Bill Wayne, and this is one of the earliest cowboys to have a vigilante name not itself a blatant rip-off of The Lone Ranger.

Mesa Bluff seems like there should be a real Mesa Bluff out there somewhere, but while I could find examples of streets and neighborhoods called that, I couldn't find that there is any real town called Mesa Bluff anywhere. 

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Bill is clearly getting two attacks in the same turn with his guns here. I've previously ruled out getting a bonus attack by carrying a second weapon, which means Bill must be at least a level 3 cowboy/fighter to get that many shots with single-shot firearms. Since Bill Wayne is debuting in this story and should not be third level yet, this could be our first confirmed instance of a fighter class getting (two) brevet ranks.

Lastly, let's revisit the curious intersection of physics and game mechanics. If you throw yourself down a flight of stairs at a group of people all bunched up together, can you defy the "one attack per turn" guideline for H&H combat? I would still be inclined to say no...and yet...I have previously encouraged Editors to go easy on their players in solo play and make more allowances than the rulebooks suggest. And, in this case, the Editor could offset the bonus with some serious repercussions. For example, the player might get only one chance to hit the whole group, and a miss means taking 1 point of damage on the stairs, plus lying prone for that turn, plus losing initiative on the following turn. A player would have to think about how lucky he was feeling before making that call...

Or, this could just be an example of a third-level fighter getting to use the combat machine special ability, giving him three attacks in combat against non-classed opponents.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Popular Comics #48 - pt. 1

We come back around to Dell as it celebrates the fourth anniversary of its very first title. With no sign of its original licensed comic strip features, like Moon Mullins, Dick Tracy, or Little Orphan Annie, we begin instead with the now-completely forgotten Captain Tornado. Although Tornado, Professor Bordani, and Jane are all stranded on an alien world, they might as well be just shrunken to insect size on Earth, because this whole feature is just an excuse to teach kids about bugs. Well, "teach" might be too strong a word for a feature that shows spiders as having only two eyes.

Normally people don't shoot into crowded melees in comic books, but Prof. Bordani does take time to aim first, which (at least in 1st ed. Hideouts & Hoodlums) always got you a +1 bonus to hit.

Everyone seems fine with the Professor's math, and not curious at all how the entire planet is not a barren desert, with three suns beating down on it, all at those sizes in the sky. In fact, I'm pretty sure they should be taking heat damage every turn.

Look out, Jane! In its belly, you will find a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a thousand years! Oh wait, it's only a giant ant lion. I might have to include giant ant lions in the Mobster Manual now (if I ever get it done!), probably as a 4-5 HD giant animal mobstertype. It is tough, taking a bullet or two from Tornado, and then still being able to chow down on a giant bug on the following page (not shown here).

Finally giving us something besides insects, our auteur here introduces an alien bug man. Professor hypothesizes that the man has a broken wing, failing to consider that his weight might just be too much for that type of wings to support (vestigial wings, perhaps?). As a nocturnal race, unaccustomed to daylight, they would likely be -2 to hit in broad daylight.

Here we get evidence that our "wingman" (for want of a better name) comes from a civilization with at least 20th century elevator technology.

I don't have much to say about Shark Egan this month, but this page seems like a great example of grappling working the way I imagined it in the 2nd ed. H&H rules, with the attack and counterattack taking place in the same turn.

Shark seems to have no idea what Buddhists believe in and is just wildly guessing. It's okay to say you don't know, Shark!

Finally, Martan the Marvel Man is still flying around Earth, talking smack about Earthlings, which I guess is only fair as we keep shooting at him and the ...invisible armor on his ship? I can't help but wonder what the point of making armor invisible is. Does Martan mean that the armor is blended seamlessly into the structure of the ship (he's now bragging about his aesthetic superiority?)? Does he mean that his ship is surrounded by an invisible forcefield? Regardless, I'm guessing his ship has a very low Armor Class and those bullets are just going to bounce off it on the next page...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Fantastic Comics #2 - pt. 3

This is Richard of Warwick, possibly intended to be the real-life Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, but here is called The Golden Knight. It's telling that the Muslim knights are taking him prisoner, treating him well, and still all he wants to do is kill them all.

Ironically, one of the reasons I made Hideouts & Hoodlums is because I wanted to get away from RPGs where the main goal is always to kill your adversaries. Oh well...

If Richard was a Mysteryman this would be easy -- spend a stunt, instant arrow split!  But The Golden Knight is obviously a fighter archetype, which means we are bound by the attack roll mechanic fighters have to follow.

Now, for hitting a bulls-eye, we could probably assign Armor Class values to the target based on the average probable chance of hitting the bulls-eye. Unfortunately, it's not easy finding an absolute average for that -- just too many variables. I've seen numbers for the probability of hitting a bulls-eye range everywhere from 1% to 36%. So let's go with the average of that and say 18.5%, and maybe we'll even round up to an even 20%.  The AC that has an equivalent value for level 1 fighters is AC 2. Let's assume that is at short range.

How to account for splitting the arrow, as opposed to the second arrow just bouncing off? Let's assume the difficulty is just 5% worse for that, and drop the target's AC to 1. If someone then came along after Richard and wanted to split his arrow, they would have to hit AC 0.

Oh, and that feast? All I see is a bowl of fruit, so I don't think it's the "feast" that Richard finds so splendorous...

Despite a fair amount of historical bigotry, I can't help but like this feature. A major part of that is this girl, Lady Elissa. By coincidence, Ehlissa is a major character in my own webcomic, and I once ran a 10-year D&D campaign in the Land of Ahlissa (South Province).

This first panel is a little confusing. The "one blow" that "felled" that man did not knock him unconscious, because he's still talking. Was he knocked prone by the blow (which means we need a knock down rule for H&H?)? Was the "blow" a grappling attack?

Later, it looks like Richard killed the two guards. Is he making a cruel joke about them being "quiet for a long, long time"? Are they dead? Remember, at the normal mood setting for H&H campaigns, it is almost impossible for a Hero to accidentally kill someone, so these guards are unconscious -- unless the mood of the scenario is set to very dark.

This is Yank Wilson, Super Spy Q-4. The spy was an unpopular Hero class in 1st edition H&H and is unlikely to return in 2nd edition.

Besides the unusually distinctive artwork (comics.org says it's by Jack Parr, but I wonder if he was only inking Fine or Eisner?), I like this page for the unusually specific planning of the bad guys. We know they need 50 spies to work the plan. We know they need 100 tons of super-explosive -- which is scary, because this is what exploding 100 tons of TNT looks like. We know they plan to use "misleading and subversive propaganda to shatter public morale," 56 years before Fox News. And it's interesting how Count Lustig Von Blackgard either slips up, or mistakenly thinks the U.S. has a secret police as his own country does.

Now, despite all that elaborate planning, Count Von Blackgard went and spelled "sabotage" backwards as the name of his dummy company. Now, I am torn about this because, while it makes the villain seem like an idiot if the players figure it out too quickly, it also seems like the sort of puzzle that players will likely be able to solve on their own, and little is more frustrating for players than puzzles they cannot figure out.

I'm curious what "devious legal channels" it took to rent the office next to Egatobas', but I can imagine they had to use some sort of subterfuge to get the previous tenants to leave quickly and quietly.

Hmm, drugging bad guys with narcotics? A very rare, but not unprecedented move for a Hero in the Golden Age. At least it's just a sleeping drug; I would have to draw the line and forbid Heroes from using lethal drugs.

At this point in the scenario, Yank has little to do but coordinate. As players, it would be more fun for the players to control squads of the G-Men attacking the saboteurs at the docks. Given their love of bombs, I wonder if it would make more sense to stat the saboteurs as anarchists, rather than spies. To date, I have not seen anything distinctive about saboteurs to build their own mobster type/archetype around.

Fletcher Hanks' Space Smith faces Martian ogres, which I'm guessing are like normal fantasy ogres, except their number of appearing can be over 100, and they have their own spaceships.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Smash Comics #2 - pt. 2

My first draft of Hideouts & Hoodlums' new grappling rules specified it was for one-on-one combat only, but I'll be adding a new paragraph on assigning modifiers if multiple grapplers all attempt against the same target, as they do on poor Abdul the Arab here.

The "Sultan" is not lucky with women. Interestingly, King Faisal II, the closest thing to a real world analog to this character, never married and had to call off two engagements.

Vernon Henkel had a good grasp on foreign politics. There was considerable unrest in Iraq over the king allowing British occupation.

First of all, that executioner's outfit would look great on a supervillain. Secondly -- unless Hassan is a superhero -- I seriously doubt he can chop through chains with a sword in one chop. "Hassan chop!" indeed!

Now, I'm about to back up and show you the first page of this story, because I had not shared it yesterday, and I want you to see what Abdul's mission was.

It was simple reconnaissance you were supposed to be doing, Abdul! But here you are, mowing down the king's men with a machine gun, until your tribal leader father shows up to take over. Now, in real life, the tribes were anti-British while the monarchy was pro-British, but Vernon has reversed allegiances in this story. So...this is a win, and all those deaths are justified, because the pro-British side won? This is from the same creator who had Gallant Knight hacking down saracens recently. Anything you want to tell us about your personal biases, Vernon...?

This is Hugh Hazzard and His Iron Man. Science, physics in particular, is only as important in a H&H story as you and your players need it to be for suspension of disbelief (and maybe to force some save vs. science rolls!). If you want a robot to be able to fly simply by having a beanie hat and propeller on its head -- then go for it!

I've written before about how there can be no hard and fast mechanic for reputation, but I've also written how it doesn't take much to qualify as a disguise in comic books/H&H. So, just saying you're someone else is a type of disguise, and a successful save vs. plot would see through that and mean that someone did recognize you -- I mean Hugh by reputation.

And as for shooting with two guns, I don't intend for that to give you any kind of game mechanic bonus. Hugh is getting the same number of attacks he would normally; carrying two guns is just flavor text.

How far Hugh has fallen, that he's already gone from fighting mad scientists with robots to hoodlums with an antique biplane.

We also get a sense here that Hugh's remote control over the robot has a pretty long range (a mile or more?).

Captain Cook of Scotland Yard reminds me about the penalty I had for hitting humans in dim light in 1st ed. It was a tough rule to enforce -- when was light dim enough?  So I ditched the rule. If you can see, you can attack at no penalty. If it's too dark to see, then you get -4 to hit. But this one panel makes me think the dim light rule had some merit. I mean -- the thief is clearly silhouetted by the light from the window, but Cook still misses because the room is dark.

It makes more sense to me -- and in fact would be a sign of a good player (and/or a Lawful Hero) in my book -- for Cook not to want a shoot out in a street with pedestrians around.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)