Thrilling Comics #3 - pt. 2

Here we have Dr. Strange using wrecking things, only to find his great strength "sapped." This actually happens just like that in Hideouts & Hoodlums, when activated powers run out and you're out of powers to activate. By waiting until the next day for his deathtrap, the villains have actually given him time to regain all his powers from the previous day.

I'm tempted to stat wild hill warriors as berserkers. I could also make them 2nd level fighters, using the level title of warrior from That Other Game.  I could also just use natives, since that's the broad stereotype being used here. 

I've never seen elephants in an arena before! Too bad Doc has Raise Elephant prepared. And a Leap power (looks like II or better) that makes escaping from an arena super-easy. 

As unstoppable as Dr. Strange seems to be, you have to wonder why he doesn't stay at the arena and take out Kong then, and sneaks back in disguise later. Maybe because there's more pages to fill...?

"You're fighting for freedom, men! Don't waste your shots! Keep dropping like flies - even though I could have wrecked my way through that wall for you at any time!"

Or could he? Dr. Strange has to be at least level 3, the bare minimum for wrecking stone walls, but he could also just be rolling poorly and failing to wreck the walls the whole fight so far. 

Or..maybe he really did not try wrecking through the wall until now. This is an early precedent for a trope of the superhero genre to come, that says superheroes try to stay neutral in the course of events until something occurs that ordinary people can't deal with on their own, like a deathray. Of course, not every superhero respects this trope - like Superman himself, who almost exclusively dealt with mundane crime despite being able to do so much more. 

Is this our first evidence that Doc is Neutral in Alignment? Hmm...

Interestingly, the deathray can only affect a single target at a time. So, even though it is killing them like a deathray, it is also, game mechanics-wise, perhaps no different than a Magic Missile spell (with cool flavor text). 

And here we've got a line-up of standard cliches - the big cat (a panther, this time) in the cage, the damsel in distress...and somehow Doc gets to the panther before it gets to the damsel? Now, I've covered many times before in this blog that random initiative needs to trump common sense when it comes to who goes first in a comic book story, but, Doc is wrecking things in the same turn that the panther is first attacking. So, we can only assume, then, that the panther missed with every attack on Virginia, even though it didn't even need to roll very high (reminds me of my rolls when I'm playing!). 

So, we also get the cliches of a big cat being killed (SIGH), and the villain threatening to blow himself up to take out the Hero. I bet it doesn't work...

Hmm...now, if I was running this scenario, I would have let Kong drop the potion as a free action; that is too easily done, and not a direct attack, for it to be trumped by initiative. 

Also, why not use Kong's raygun to revive the men, instead of experimenting with Alosun in a totally untested way (though, I suppose, Doc could argue that they're already dead, what worse could happen to them?)?

Here's a new character and an interesting twist on Tarzan and the Jungle Book. Instead of the infant being raised by animals, he's raised by yogis in India. They teach him potent spells like Rope Trick and ...Wall of Force, to stop mad dogs with? That seems a bit like overkill.

*SIGH* ...what I wouldn't give to read a magic-user story that doesn't throw around ridiculously overpowered spells all the time. Causing a submarine to rise into space ...well, that's got to be a Wish spell. So we've already given The Ghost 17 brevet ranks! Just to get him through a wandering encounter!

Here we get a dose of more insanely powerful magic being tossed about haphazardly -- a Telekinesis spell as powerful as the Raise Trolley Car power, and a Teleport Sandwich spell able to reach around the world. 

Chance's only interest in fighting crime is when the man who just hired him to entertain at parties was murdered. Had the man not been murdered, would Chance have been content to be a party magician instead?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

 

Thrilling Comics #3 - pt. 1

It's no Multiverse of Madness, but on this Dr. Strange adventure we get a trip to the Orient. Or at least as far as Chinatown, so far. Is this page worth sharing? I thought it noteworthy for three things. One, "plans for canal fortifications" felt like such a welcome relief from the upteenth adventure to revolve around a stratoplane or a new type of torpedo. Two, there's the interesting distinction between Chinese and Manchurian. Although we think of Manchuria as part of China today, and it was pretty much assimilated by China long before 1940, throughout most of the 1930s Manchuria had been conquered and "liberated" by Japan. Three, most heroes' contacts in Chinatown are "respectable" businessmen who turn out to be criminals, but this story skips over all that and reveals this guy Fang as a gang leader from the start. This is better (and less racist), as it frees up the rest of Chinatown to be represented by real respectable businessmen. 

That's got to be pretty embarrassing, falling for the ol' go-in-first-while-I-lock-the-door-behind-you trick. Almost as embarrassing as the collection of racist cliches in panel 3! But even that may pale in comparison to how incredibly dorky Doc looks in panel 4, with his incredibly misshapen shoulder, Don King hairstyle, and his short pants that barely reach his socks.   

That is a lot of attackers coming at Doc, but he does have a tactical advantage of bottlenecking them on the same side of the railing. 

More interesting to me is the last panel, with all the hideout dressing in the corner. There's a box, a pail, a coffer, a barrel, a chest, a...couch? A drip pan for oil changes? It's harder to tell with the smaller objects.

Trap doors with slides to lower levels? How D&D-like! A room filled with coffins? Also D&D-like! We only differ when the action moves away from the hideout to a new locale -- though cargo ships can also be hideouts!

I'm pretty sure Doc just killed four men with his Raise Elephant power. 

He could have wrapped up the adventure right there by capturing the men on the ship and learning from them who they worked for, but instead he inexplicably leaves the scene to go talk to someone, so the ship can slip away in his absence, and then has to get lucky trying to find it again. He can't track over water, so this is just a question of a lucky wandering encounter, and/or the Editor just being nice. 

Doc is pretty rich, owning a yacht and a plane already. We've talked many times about brevet ranks for this game. Do we need to start talking about ...brevet starting money?

Doc is lucky that plane isn't a rental!

There isn't any mechanic that would determine if your foot catches in something, so that's simply Editor's Fiat.

Kicking a plane out of the water...hmm. I'm tempted to say that's Extend Missile Range with several Roman numerals after it...but since it isn't used for combat, this could just be flavor text. 

More important is the following panel. How far can a superhero swim? Non-superhumans have swam over 100 miles without stopping, so the fact that Doc swam 30 isn't that impressive. Maybe it's the speed that he swam it? But that could be measured easily with a Race the- power. Anyway, back to my original question...I'm going to say that H&H Heroes can swim 1-6 miles per point of Constitution they have.

Hoo-hum, the old cliche of the warship disguised as a tramp! 

Shielding himself from fire is easy, that's just the power Fire Resistance at work. But shielding or blocking someone else with his own body...that requires a different mechanic, one that is universal in application and not specific to a certain power -- since there are many circumstances in a H&H game when the Heroes might need to shield people.

I am reminded of a recent time I ran Monsters!Monsters!, the Tunnels & Trolls variant where you play the monsters. In it, the only game mechanic outside of combat was saving throws. Need to hide? Make a saving throw! Trying to duck behind cover? Make a saving throw! Shield someone with your body? Oh! Hmm...

There's some insidious history alteration going on here I should point out. Kachukuo isn't a real place, but it looks like it's based on Manchukuo. Yes, Manchukuo had a ruthless dictator, but that dictator was Japanese, not Manchurian, and he was Hirohito -- Manchukuo was a puppet state created in Manchuria by their Japanese "liberator"/conquerors, as I alluded to at the beginning of this post. Suggesting that the Manchurians themselves were the bad guys suggests Japanese sympathies which surely evaporated in December 1941.

 

Besides that, there's a rare (at this point) example of a superhero punching a villain upwards into the air. The H&H mechanics deal with converting damage into feet pushed at a 1:1' ratio, but if that should be modified to account for gravity, I haven't done so yet - nor will likely do, honestly; sometimes realism just robs us of chances to have fun.  

The old man being attacked feels like a wandering encounter, while the twist of the "main bad guy" being so civil is refreshing, even if he's just being civil in a Bond villain-way.

Doing random good deeds have a way of coming back to help Heroes later, like how the old man knows a secret entrance. It would have been nice to see how the secret door operated! We do get some nice hideout dressing, with the carved pillars, and the closing walls trap is a classic. 

 

I think it's interesting how there's guards stationed at the secret entrance. I guess Kong doesn't like to take any chances? Or perhaps they too were just wandering encounters, heading back to their guard station.

 

It's interesting that Kong is so sure this cage will work when he knows Doc just busted through a stone wall. I wonder what the bars are made out of/what they were treated with? 

I also like the prismatic raygun, each color having a different power. This one is quite powerful - not for the charm ray, but the raise dead ray.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)
 

 

Fantastic Comics #5 - pt. 3

Welcome back to our blog, where we discuss the game Dungeons & Babes. Oops, that's not a thing?  Well, you'd think it was from this page of Golden Knight. Because, obviously, medieval maidens went around stabbing men while dressed in modern swimsuits. I'm familiar with the phrase, "never trust a dame," but who knew dames could backstab for double damage? Is Alice a femme fatale? A D&D thief? Or just a highly effective, perhaps mid-level fighter?

Does wrecking things get easier during confusion? I don't think so, but it allowed him to act undetected. 

Then there's the concept of "saving your strength." It actually is a Hideouts & Hoodlums rule that you get +1 to hit if you take a turn to aim. What if you took an extra turn to rest for each +1 you wanted to your wrecking things roll? 

"Stay away from this fight, Alice!"

"What, are you kidding me? I just killed two guys on my way here, while you were being tortured so long your hair grew out!

"Alice! Alice! Are you hurt?"

"Well of course I'm hurt, you moron! You took my sword and left me with this little knife, and now you're not even using the shield I laid down for you!"

It turns out to be a very awkward family reunion, that Alice mortally wounded the man who turned out to be her dad.

Isn't a flying torpedo a missile? 

I like those guard uniforms. Those will be very handy for any heroes looking to knock out a guard and disguise himself as a guard!

There are real Edgewood's in Florida and Washington, but a Meadowlark Village? A real counterpart for that is proving hard to find.

Waaiiit -- the torpedo has to be controlled by a two-man crew inside it? Willingly sitting inside an armed torpedo? I may have to lower the morale save number for guards -- these guys are fearless!

"Hurry - we'll tell the Professor!"

"You know, Ted...not only couldn't the Professor figure out a way to remote control the torpedo, but he didn't even give us a portable radio to contact him with. Do you suppose we weren't meant to come out of this alive...?"

Waaaiiiiit (again). The torpedo made no noise and there was no sign of a plane -- then how does Yank follow any trajectory back to that forest? Is he just flying randomly over hundreds of square miles until he spots something that looks like a hideout? 

And really, Professor? You're planning to blow up the country, but you can't even remember to lock the front door?

A sliding panel in the floor that catches your foot sounds like the most "1st-level" trap I've ever heard of. Would that even do a point of damage? At best, if you miss your save, you can't move during combat until a turn when you do make your save.

Waaiiiit (third time) -- what's with this strange plane that just happens to look like the torpedoes that just happens to land outside in panel 1? Did the artist put panels in the wrong order somehow? It seems like even the author couldn't make sense of what was going on there.

Gee, Yank, if punching them in their helmets doesn't work, maybe you should aim somewhere else? In game, Yank's player is either rolling terrible, or those uniforms are giving a much better Armor Class bonus than I would have thought.

They didn't check to see if Yank was still alive? Classic villain blunder there. Maybe a villain should have to save vs. plot before he can check.

If the "heart of the country" is the continental geographic center of the country, then we're in Kansas, near Lebanon (or Lebanon has been renamed Edgewood). If "heart of the country" means its governmental heart, than Edgewood means Washington, D.C. -- though that doesn't make much sense (but what in this story does?).

Waiiiiittt (gah!). Yank is hitting the percussion caps on the nose of the torpedoes with a length of chain? This means the crews aren't arming the torpedoes just before bailing out, but well in advance for some reason and -- what really bugs me -- Yank's plane is somehow always able to zoom out of range just before the torpedo blows. Why is there that long a delay? Whhyyyy?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Mystic Comics #2 - pt. 4

Back to Blue Blaze! A sudden cave-in forces Blue Blaze to break out his higher level Raise powers and we observe blue flashes radiating from his body, flavor text any player can choose, but then has to be consistent with.

There's an odd plot hole where Blue Blaze learns the man who just walked out of the room was the bomber, but instead of just walking through the door and capturing him, BB ignores the man and speeds off to the next mine the bomber had threatened.

Second plot hole: Even though Blue Blaze's speedster has unlimited speed, Barko (a terrible name for a villain, by the way) somehow gets ahead of him on the way to the mine. Does Barko have a speedster with even more unlimited speed?

Blue Blaze's Raise power might still be active from earlier, allowing him to catch a heavy boulder. If the boulder missed him then he didn't need to lift it, but if it hit, I'm hesitant to let the Raise power thwart it...and yet...I have to admit that the Raise powers are currently of limited utility except when you need to lift something heavy, and that's seldom going to be important during combat. This warrants more thought.

Next Barko shoots out one of BB's car's tires and makes him swerve, but a skill check helps BB regain control. So how does Barko follow that? He sics two dogs on BB. BB chokes the dogs to death. Not cool, BB! 

Barko has a pair of ice guns that put BB in a block of ice. Hold Person with flavor text? BB is only faking so he can get taken to Barko's hideout, which is sound strategy, or would be if he didn't let Barko leave, just so he can chase him to the next mine. If he really wanted to stop the mine attack, he could have just knocked Barko out sooner. At the mine, BB punches out two thugs working for Barko first before taking out Barko, following the Hideouts & Hoodlums rules about taking out underlings before you go after the main bad guy (just like in the H&H play-by-post game I'm running now!). 

The next story is Taxi Taylor and His Wonder Car. It's your typical story of a mechanic who invents a car that can do anything, tries to gift it to the U.S. government, he gets laughed at, out of spite, he keeps the car without even showing them what it does, he becomes a taxi driver with the car that can do anything, until he just happens to overhear spies in his backseat one day. So what is "anything"? It can intercept radio messages, like most radios can. It can transform into a plane, though it isn't the first car-plane in comics. It can also transform into a sub - also not the first car-sub in comics. It can fire "contra-magnetic electric rays" that can neutralize magnetic mines, and now we're finally in new mad science territory. 

The German spies are called Swastikans, by the way - perhaps the most obvious stand-in for the word Nazi ever in a comic book. 

Oh, the wonder car has 6" steel plates all around it, so acetylene torches can't cut through it. That's a difficult game mechanic to rationalize because armor normally only makes something harder to hit, not more resistant to energy attacks. Perhaps this is special steel plating that confers fire resistance.

Taylor isn't reluctant to cut air hoses and kill underwater Nazis. 

Back to mad science, the wonder car can emit gas bubbles underwater that cause enormous suction, enough to pull a ship underwater. That is also hard to rationalize with game mechanics. Maybe some kind of wrecking things? 

The wonder car has a collapsible ladder that can project out of the top of the car. There is a belt and rope attached to a winch that will automatically reel back in in two minutes. There is a trampoline-like net that pops out of a hatch in the top of the car, and I don't even know how Taylor activated that before falling towards the car. The car also has two revolving chemical water jets for putting out fires. Taylor even has a fireman's hat in his car, just in case he has to put out fires. 

There is a nice trap in the spies' HQ. When the wall safe is touched, electricity causes one's hand to be stuck to it. Raising the stakes of the trap is that the building is on fire and a temperature-sensitive bomb (controlled by a thermometer) is rigged to go off nearby. Taylor takes maybe 2-7 damage from being pulled away from the electrified safe, but is still only lightly injured. 

Next up is The Invisible Man Known As Dr. Gade. When I first read this story a few years ago I graded it with an A. Will it hold up as well this time?

In his origin story, Gade is working in front of an open furnace in his lab when an assassin comes up behind him and pushes him in. Now I'm interested in giving assassins a backstab ability so they can increase their damage from behind, but then transfer those points of damage into pushing. 

Soaked in chemicals he was pushed into, and then set on fire, the strange reactions transform him into a ...magic-user? Because what he demonstrates when he comes out is is Invisibility and Resist Fire. Well, not normal Invisibility, because Gade is still invisible after punching and grappling, so it must be Improved Invisibility. 

Gade is not a live and let live kind of guy. Just for trying to kill him, Gade knocks the thug/assassin from earlier out a 40th floor window. As the two guys who hired the assassin wait to shoot Gade once he becomes visible, he forces one of them to shoot the other by moving the man's hand. That's not something the game mechanics of H&H is really set up for, and I'd be inclined to say that the Editor rolled to hit Gade, but rolled so badly that he accepted the player's suggestion that the bullet hit an unintended target. 

Although Gade is angry for being initially given his powers, apparently they were only temporary and wouldn't have lasted, so Gade had, between scenes, invented a ray that bathes him with the same energy and renews his powers. For some reason that's not clear to me, he can't turn visible easily on his own, but he's wearing some kind of a belt or harness with a button on it and when he presses it, the device...maybe dampens the energy field that render Gade invisible? 

Mystic Comics #2 - pt. 2

Next up is Flexo the Rubber Man. This is like old home week for me, as both of these heroes (Mastermind Excello and Flexo) were played in my 1962 Marvel Super Heroes campaign I ran two years back. 

Flexo's inventors, Joel and Joshua, aren't ones to rest on their laurels; they're already hard at work reinventing those common comic book staples, the torpedo repeller and the new, more deadly explosive. And our enemies are up to the same tricks, because they have one of those dime-a-dozen rayguns that turn off electric motors. The 2nd edition basic book has no tables for specific trophies, but if it did, they would be weighted by frequency and these items would have some of the widest ranges on the table. 

Joel, captured by spies, is placed in a pretty lame deathtrap; he is tied to a tree with rope and left for wolves to eat. Wolves? Do these spies think they're in Siberia? The spies also don't think to check Joel's pockets, or they would have found the portable transmitter. Portable transmitters are also pretty common among comic book characters, but what makes Joel's different is that he taps on a button on his jacket, Morse code-style, and that transmits the message. 

When Josh gets the message, he takes the hi-tech approach of using Flexo to get him there and the low-tech approach of tying himself to Flexo's back with rope. I hope you're really good at knots, Josh! The comic book doesn't really explain how Flexo flies, but in the RPG campaign I ran that Flexo was played in, we came up with the idea that he shoots gas out his butt for propulsion. 

Josh reaches Joel just as 4 or 5 wolves arrive and, even though the wolves have shown nothing but curiosity about Joel so far, Flexo is made to viciously attack the wolves.

Flexo lifts their plane over his head (its head?). I think a 4-seat, single prop plane weighs about 1.5 tons, which is almost to the point where the power Raise Car tops out. Then they follow the repeller because it's magnetic and their compass in the plane points towards it because...you know, magnetism has no range to it.

As they charge into the spies' hideout, the marching order is unusual in that Josh and Joel go in first, with Flexo trailing behind. You'd think the human beings would want to use him for cover. Unless Flexo just moves really slowly on foot? 

The entrance is trapped with dynamite and all three of them are buried beneath "a mass of rock and heavy timbers" (without specifying how much a mass weighs). The entrance is trapped with dynamite and all three of them are buried beneath "a mass of rock and heavy timbers" (without specifying how much a mass weighs). The panel is pretty dramatic, with it looking like the timbers are exploding towards them instead of just falling. I would rate that as at least 3-18 points of damage. It makes sense that Flexo is not harmed by it if he buffed himself with a strong defensive power, but what's really surprising is that Josh and Joel only have scratches. I had considered them noncombatant supporting cast members - but are they actually mid-level scientists with a fair amount of hit points?

Although Josh and Joel normally control Flexo with a remote, it seems it can respond to voice commands too. The really interesting thing about Flexo is that bullets don't just bounce off of him like you'd expect from a rubber robot; instead, Flexo reseals after being punctured, like self-sealing tires. Only, as far as I can tell, self-sealing tires weren't a thing until 2006, so this seems to have anticipated the technology.

Flexo's "machine gun blows" must be the Flurry of Blows power. What's harder to describe with game mechanics is when the spies' car bounces off of Flexo, as there's not really a good power for that. Bounce Back Blows, maybe, if you let it work on vehicles and not just living attackers. Bounce Back Blows is powerful, so Flexo has a lot of brevet ranks. At this point, Flexo should still be just a first-level superhero. 

Moving on, the next adventure features Dynamic Man, and it starts with a curious mystery. Saboteurs are planning to blow up a bridge to crash a train. Dynamic Man is riding, in costume, on the top of the train. Is that because he knows the train is in danger, or is it just coincidence? Like Mastermind Excello, Dynamic Man has Clairvoyance and can see the bomb being placed, but Clairvoyance only has so much range, so he shouldn't have known about this until the train was close. 

Dynamic Man can fly fast enough to catch up to a speeding car, which is difficult to do with Fly II, and might require Fly III if the car had enough of a head start. He is buffed, possibly with Imperviousness, or relying on Nigh-Invulnerable Skin and a little luck, before going in so he doesn't have to worry about the bullets bouncing off of him. He picks up the men with ease, suggesting he has Raise Car activated, and appears to be beating the men against the ground like clubs, doing clubbing damage to them (which would be 1-6 points only -- unless he is also buffed with one of the Get Tough powers). The one surprise is that Dynamic Man seems to have a power that works just like rayguns that shut off engines, though you might be able to duplicate that effect with Wreck at Range, if the Editor allowed you to use it on just the engine and not the whole car. 

The bad guys' car has a special add-on; a radio transmitter in the back seat so their boss can listen in on everything...

(Read in Marvel Masterworks: Mystic Comics vol. 1.)

  

Feature Comics #30 - pt. 1

It's been a long time since we last checked in with Quality Comics' flagship title. Here, the Clock (sans mask) investigates how a car was tricked into careening off the road, and anticipates the movie Goldfinger by 24 years.

That the Clock wakes up after 30 minutes suggests that he was simply stunned and recovers 1-6 turns later, but the Editor has decided to make those 10-minute exploration turns (which the Editor can do, at his discretion).

Monogrammed cigarettes must have been a novelty item of decades past.

That's also quiet an expose in the newspaper, that the dead man was a FBI man with secret industrial mobilization plans on him. I bet the FBI was wanting to keep that a secret. Industrial mobilization was, of course, a real thing, and had been ongoing since Sept. 1939 in the U.S.

I've seen this in games before, paying kids to run messages for you. In a pre-modern age it can be more reliable than technology for communication, though it could put the kids in danger.

Panel 3 is a good example of how easy it is for Heroes to scale walls, even in dress shoes and tuxedos, while carrying canes in one hand.

This is Lena Pry and we haven't looked in on this comic strip in a dog's age. I include this bit because of the discussion of relief checks, which was another real thing. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was a United States federal law of the New Deal era designed to boost agricultural prices by reducing surpluses. The government bought livestock for slaughter and paid farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land.

The Great Bear Lake is a real lake. It is the largest lake entirely in Canada, the fourth-largest in North America, and the eighth-largest in the world. Moose Creek is also real, running through Ontario.

There really is a Nugget City in the Yukon, but it's a RV park and, I suspect, doesn't date back as far as 1940. It's possible that "Nugget City" is a euphemism for the Town of Dawson, which was at the center of the Klondike Gold Rush.

This is Spin Shaw and Spin is in an unusual gaming situation that I've only seen once before in a Star Wars session; Spin is "grounded" by a captain who doesn't want him involved in the scenario, so part of the scenario becomes finding a way to get into the rest of the scenario. Here, Spin's player wisely finds a use for his plane that nothing else can do, forcing the captain's hand to let him take off. No dice rolls should be needed to judge a situation like this, and the player should certainly be rewarded for ingenuity.

Unlike Reynolds of the Mounted, which was surprisingly easy to place in the real world, San Luray seems to be entirely fictional. There actually is an archipelago called the Barren Islands -- but it's in Alaska, and it's very unlikely that this adventure takes place there. "Barren Islands" was surely meant to sound evocative, but also generic enough that they could be anywhere.

The cliche of the hollow statue that can be made to appear to be talking to its worshipers is as old as racism in adventure fiction. I include this example, though, because of the added details, like the density of the foliage concealing the entrance (find as secret door?), the fact that the entrance is a "queer opening" because it's much smaller than a normal door, and the shots of the interior show that the body has just one hollow column leading up to a small floored room in the head.

Eisner makes a point of showing us that Dollman is a good fighter at full-size to explain how he is still so capable at tiny size. Why I share this particular page, though, is for the use of "tomahawk" to describe a sap/blackjack. This may be purely a joke, as I can find no evidence that tomahawk was ever a slang term for a sap or blackjack.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

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.)

More Fun Comics #51 - pt. 2

Still on King Carter. There are at least 10 more natives on the island, with a pet watchdog who alerts them to King (and his kid sidekick, Red). The natives really don't like intruders and throw spears as King and Red flee. In a cliched ending, a volcano just happens to erupt and sink the island as they escape, which seems a waste of a good encounter area to me.

The Buccaneer's new story begins with an odd premise. A man adrift is rescued, but goes berserk and kills a crewman. Then the man gets amnesia from the head blow and wants to help everyone follow the treasure map hidden in his wooden leg. The problem is...did everyone get amnesia about the dead crewman, or are they really that greedy for the treasure?

Later, the Buccaneer uses a whip to disarm a knife from a man's hand. And this is the last we see of The Buccaneer (who strangely looks just like Tex Thompson), as he retires so we can get the Spectre's debut next month!

"Kit" Strong is a "manhunter" (Private detective? Plainclothes detective?) working a kidnapping case when he finds bits of coal on the floor where the abduction took place. He smartly asks the father if they use coal in the house, and they don't. Just as smartly of the mobsters, they have the maid working as their inside mole and she tips them off that Kit is on the case. It is only dumb luck, or a freebie from the Editor, that allows Kit to accidentally hear the maid calling them.

Kit is waylaid by the kidnappers on the road and they try to force his car off a cliff. Last month I talked about the game mechanics of cars pushing cars, but timing it so it happens right at the cliff seems like it would take more luck than skill. I would, as Editor, perhaps pick a number between 2 and 5, roll a die, and if it comes up as that number or 1 away from it, then the timing is just right to go over the bridge (like a modification of the initiative rules). It's a risky maneuver, as the Editor fails the die roll and the mobsters go over the cliff themselves.

The mine where the rest of the kidnappers are using as a hideout is located in the "Larksville Mountains." It turns out that there really is such a thing as Larksville Mountain, in Pennsylvania. We don't know where Kit is based, but he needs a plane to reach the mountain quickly.

Lieutenant Bob Neal of Sub 662 tangles with spies this issue. Despite the adventure still taking place around Honolulu, the spies are Germans. The main spy is a femme fatale (a new mobstertype in the Mobster Manual, distinct from vamps). She is skilled at disguises, but her main tactic fails her. Had she not had hired thugs try to rough up Bob and his men first, Bob would not have been suspicious later when she tricks Bob and Dr. McDonald (the scientist who invented all the trophy items from last issue) into leaving a party. Later, Bob has to resort to throwing ink in her face to stop her because he must need a save vs. plot to strike a femme fatale (I'll need to make sure that's in their description).

After digging up gold from the underwater volcano, Bob jokes that they have enough gold to pay off the national debt. At the beginning of 1940, the national debt was somewhere around $41.5 billion.

Ah, Flying Fox... DC, I get that you were trying to meld the mysteryman genre with the aviator genre, like Dell had with The Masked Pilot, but Flying Fox just never works for me. Here, someone sends Rex Darrell on a mission to investigate a missing aviator. What does Rex do for a living again? Rex/Flying Fox arrives at the man's house in time to see an assassination, but he can't stop the mobster from getting away because he has to land his plane first.

This is really the frustrating thing about the aviator genre, in terms of putting a new class together for them in 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums - half the time they are on the ground, and have no special abilities when not in a plane.

At least there's an interesting angle to this scenario in that the stakes are unusually high; the killings are to gain control of the shares of an island where the missing aviator found an old pirate fortress and $5 million in buried treasure. There still seems to be a big plot hole here -- why is ownership of the property so important, when they could just steal the treasure and leave the island with it? 



(Read at fullcomic.pro)

More Fun Comics #50 - pt. 3 - More Fun Comics #51 - pt. 1

Sergeant O'Malley of the Red Coat Patrol tangles with arsonists. Since this is a rural adventure, the arsonists don't need any special skills; they just show up in the woods with lit torches. After they escape O'Malley in a scuffle, his faithful Indian companion Black Hawk finds evidence of blood at the scene and helps tracks them down (more of the "natives are excellent trackers" cliche).

Bulldog Martin and his racist caricature black friend Jonah are mountain climbing together in the Alps. To be fair, Jonah at least has a normal name and appears to be a friend instead of a servant. This is the first instance I can recall of climbers being shown tied together. Bulldog also claims that they cannot climb back down the mountain without their picks after they lose them; what he might mean is that climbing down will be an expert skill without tools instead of a basic skill, halving their chances, and he's not willing to risk it.

At the top of the mountain, they stumble across robbers planning to rob a hidden stronghold. Bulldog explains that "every foreign country has a hidden stronghold in which they store their gold." This was mostly true back when all countries relied on the gold standard, though I don't see how their locations would be secrets.

Unarmed against the robbers, Bulldog jury rigs bolos to attack them with. Normally, I consider improvised weaponry like that to do half-damage (1-3), but these bolos seem wicked effective.

Moving on to #51, which will catch us up!

Wing Brady has his first adventure in Paris, though it begins more like a sight-seeing tour (we are even treated to a surprising amount of untranslated dialog in French). He punches out a cutpurse and then socializes with two American tourists who have favorable encounter reaction rolls from him and could become supporting cast members for him later.

Biff Bronson deals with a Tong war in a caricatured version of Chinatown. I know I said recently I would do away with the yellow peril hoodlum...but maybe I need to keep them and revise them so they have a bonus to hit with hatchets? They sure use hatchets a lot in comic books.

Biff finds a vital clue hidden in a jade box that can only be opened after finding the concealed spring latch (find as a secret door). The murder list also serves as a directory for what 1940s whites thought of as typical Chinatown locations: curio shop, warehouse, silk shop, hotel, incense house, gaming place, restaurant, barber shop, laundry, joss house. "Joss house" is white slang for an Asian temple.

The "mayor" of Chinatown, a master criminal (as usual), wears a hollow signet ring containing poison powder for slipping into drinks. Biff foils him with a "spot check" (basic skill check) to notice that the signet ring is not sealed tight.

King Carter runs afoul of a shark while trying to reach an island, and a native on the island who (despite having as spear) hurls rocks down at him (maybe because weapon damage is essentially doubled when it's falling; see yesterday's post). King wisely dispatches both foes with his knife, rather than risk bringing more wandering encounters with the loud noise of his gun.

(read at fullcomic.pro)