Fight Comics #2 - pt. 2

I really expected Saber to be a one-shot, but he's back -- and wearing more than his underwear this time!

Yes, while other Heroes are gathering information and following leads to uncover spies, Saber just has to walk into a room and immediately senses them. I wonder if we need a Detect Spy power, and not just Detect Evil...

So often the term "freeze" is not literal when applied to paralysis, so it's somewhat novel to learn that the paralyzation raygun the Antarticans are using is actually a freeze ray.

Saber doesn't even have to fill out paperwork to requisition an electro-heat ray gun. He just asks for it and he gets it!

You can tell the filler strips by how they stretch out a story by enlarging the panels. There is little here that warrants a three-panel page -- though I do like the visual of the fore-mounted ray guns on the submarines, all firing in the reader's direction...

No one knew about climate change in 1940. Imagine, expecting there to be ice around Antarctica in the future!

Although called a ray gun, the "electro-heat" seems more like a protective feature of the submarine. Resistance to Cold?

Remarkably, the crews of these submarines are still alive, despite being underwater for who knows how long in paralyzed submarines.

Yes, it seems like a strategic victory, blowing up the munitions plants and air bases...but if the Antarcticans put those things within their city, and you blow up the city...war crimes? A far more satisfying story would have been Saber infiltrating the city and sabotaging the munitions plants and air bases from within.

What a drop in art quality poor Kayo Kirby endured this month! William Willis does us no favors on this sketchy, near background-less work. The story is surprisingly deep, with Kayo almost losing the will to live after his career tanks, but making a comeback after a new manager shows he believes in him.

I wonder what drug this is, that a little drop mixed in water can make a boxer this much. At the end of the story, when Kirby realizes what had happened and catches someone trying to drug his water again, he forces that man to drink it and that man drops on the spot. Powerful stuff!

This is Kinks Mason. A ketch is a two-masted sailboat.

Sargasso is a legitimate problem for sailing ships, but this seaweed seems intentionally grabbing the board. I can't decide, though, if I would stat Slimy Seaweed as a mobster, or treat it as an environmental hazard...

Seaweed Men seem like an unique spin on mermen. These creatures are half-plant, half-animal, with their heads in a literally vegetative state to varying degrees. They must be tough too -- three of them are able to overpower Kinks before Kinks can even draw that knife at his side!

Hmm...whirlpools acting as underwater solar panels? Underwater chlorophyll factories? Ah, comic book science...

Men can be transmuted into Seaweed Men, leaving me to wonder if any seaweed men evolved naturally, and if not, who created the first ones? We also see what a fully transformed seaweed man looks like. We might call the queen a Half-Seaweed Man and stat her at 3 Hit Dice, while a full Seaweed Man would maybe be 5 Hit Dice...?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

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.)

Adventure Comics #39

Barry O'Neill begins having post-Fang Gow adventures, though Count Guniff seems to be cut from the same mold. Indeed, when Guniff traps O'Neill and LeGrand in a water trap, Barry would have been within his rights to go "What, again?"

Two things worth pointing out from this story: one, it is one of the first time in comic books where the hero runs out of bullets; and, two, Guniff's second death trap for O'Neill and LeGrand is a much simpler affair -- he douses them with gasoline and is going to brings a match towards them. That's a pretty serious death trap -- serious enough that I'd probably have it do 1-10 points of damage per minute to heroes until they can somehow extinguish themselves (like a save vs. science to smother the flames by stop, drop, and rolling).

Cotton Carver continues exploring his Don Dixon-like lost world environment. One thing to notice is that the hideout/dungeon Cotton is exploring is taking him down quite a few levels, by stairs and slides, but his encounters are not getting significantly more challenging. He gets to a dead end where he cannot proceed without having a special stone with him that fits into an indentation in the wall -- a classic dungeon trick.

Cotton fights a half-cat, half-man called a Watcher. Watchers must be pretty tough; this thing takes multiple arrow hits without going down, and is probably at least 3 Hit Dice. They're also Lawful because, if you defeat one and leave it alive, it agrees to repay the life-debt by serving you (or maybe Cotton just had cat treats in his pocket).

The animated statue Cotton meets seems straight out of Dungeons & Dragons. I wonder if it's a living statue, a golem, or if I'm going to be disappointed next issue by it getting explained away as ventriloquism...

In Federal Men, we learn more about how reefer works in the comic book world. It's "the drug that causes the smoker to lose all moral restraint". So, if you smoke marijuana and fail a save vs. science, you become okay with killing others (just like most of my players) and don't have to save vs. plot before you can take a life.

Jack Woods (fresh over from More Fun Comics) faces a bandit and an unusual dilemma -- a victim who isn't glad he was saved. Soon he's confronted with another dilemma much like one I recently used in my Monday night campaign. The Hero is hired to deliver something under suspicious circumstances. Does the Hero do the job and go home, investigate the sender, or investigate the receiver? It's a nice scenario because the Hero is free to choose and shouldn't be railroaded into investigating one before the other.

Steve Malone finds a cuff link. This is important because a cuff link is never mentioned in a story unless it's a clue.  If your Editor so much as says "cuff", you'd better be ready to take notes.

Steve does a lot of searching. He finds the first cuff link searching by a gong (not where you'd normally expect to find one), but finds the second one searching a bedroom where you'd expect to find one (maybe at a +1 bonus then?). There is a secret compartment hidden in a model castle and, unless the Hero has reason to suspect it's there, the chance of finding it is the same as a secret door.

Tom Brent is sailing down a jungle river, seeing no natives, but they see him and track his boat's movement. Which might not bear mentioning, except that there seems to be a lot of natives and they evade being noticed for quite some time. Maybe natives need to have a better (3 in 6?) chance of surprise?

The Skip Schuyler story has him pitching for the Yankees during a special game for charity. Which might not bear mentioning, except that it's so rare for a real baseball team to be named, and real players (Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio) cameo. Of course, in your home campaigns, whether you go with real historical figures, characters obviously based on real historical figures (with similar names, like Jim DiMaggia?), or entirely fictional characters is entirely up to you.

In Anchors Aweigh, because the Editor clearly doesn't have a new plot for them lined up, Don and Red decide to go hunt up some experience points, literally, by hunting crocodiles off the Panama Canal. They meet a wandering encounter while hunting who turns out to be a mad engineer who makes bombs (I can't decide if that qualifies him to be a mad scientist (Book II), a madman (Supplement V), or even an anarchist (Supplement I). Once the encounter has been rolled up, the Editor has to think up an excuse for the engineer to be there, so he concocts a plot on the spot for foreign powers to have hired him to blow up the Canal.

(Summaries read at DC Wikia)

 

Funny Picture Stories v. 3 #2

It's still feast or famine, art-wise, from Centaur Comics, and we return to Funny Picture Shows with some surprisingly amateurish art in this outing. Still, there's a good number of clues to look for at a crime scene listed here.

It is just assumed by the story that the tug skipper comes to the warehouse without any trouble, but getting non-Heroes to move around to where you need them can be a tricky part of any Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario, particularly for Heroes with low Charisma, or bad luck at encounter reaction rolls.

The plot also relies on the cliche of flushing the bad guys out with a classified ad. More crooks would avoid getting caught if they stopped reading newspapers!

When you ask for a motor launch and provisions and get that, plus told where to go and given a sailor to help you, you've either made a really good encounter reaction roll, or your Editor thinks the scenario might be too difficult for you after all.

But if you're ever playing H&H and feel like you're not catching any breaks, just remember this guy. He got a motor launch, provisions, directions, and a helpful supporting cast, then got to trade the motor launch for a seaplane, but then crashes the seaplane and loses his SCMs. And when he does try to confront the villain alone, he's immediately captured. The Editor would be well within his rights to just scrap the entire campaign at this point. If something unbelievably unlucky happened to the villain now that flipped the situation back around for the Hero...well, that would be too unbelievable even for a comic book, right?

...Apparently not.

As hard as it is to believe, this guy in green is supposed to look like a mummy. Fake mummies will become such a common cliche in comic books that maybe they should be their own mobster type.

This trap is really weird. The pool in front of them is full of acid, so just pushing them in would finish them off pretty fast. But instead the killer ties them up so they are balanced right on the edge of the pool, so they will...yeah, I don't get it. Even if they lost their balance, they would just be dangling from the rope, right?

Maybe the best thing to take away from this page is the idea of using mummies to smuggle dope. I never would have guessed that was what was inside the missing mummy.

I have to say, in 15 1/2 months of doing this blog, this may have been the worst single issue I've ever had to plow through. At the end, completely incongruous to the rest of the issue, is a weird prototype of the Tales of Asgard stories Marvel Comics will start doing over 20 years later. Truer to Norse mythology than Marvel, Loki is not a villain in this story.

More Fun Comics #25

We'll start this revisit of More Fun with Sandra of the Service and this question -- in Hideouts & Hoodlums, do non-Heroes have to roll to notice things, like the men on the larger boat spotting Sandra's rowboat? It does make the game more fair if everyone rolls and plays by the results of the dice rolls. If, however, a specific result would make for a better story, the Editor should hand-wave the dice roll, or fudge the results to a better one. The most important thing is that the players should never feel cheated by hand-waving of dice fudging.

A seemingly simple, 2-page story of Doctor Occult, the Ghost Detective, actually requires a lot of unpacking. One point is that, in the climactic scene, the scientist seems to be casting a spell, one that can transmute, or polymorph, a human being into a small statuette. It's worth pointing out again that the narrator specifically refers to the villain as a scientist.  

Another point is that we see Dr. Occult's magic symbol reflecting the spell back on the scientist. Now, this seems very much like the Superhero power Turn Gun on Bad Guy, but the scientist has no visible weapon. A less literal interpretation of the power might allow it to reflect any form of attack. Or perhaps we need a new spell for spell reflection. 

The difficulty we're seeing here in Doctor Occult we've seen before -- it's the trope of magic and advanced science being indistinguishable and it tends to play havoc with a set of game mechanics that tries very hard to keep magic and science separate. Ultimately, I'll have to look at whether this is really the exception, or is it the rule, when dealing with magic in comic books. The latter situation could require a drastic overhaul of H&H.

Less dramatically, Johnnie Law deals with the threat of -- marijuana!  Reefer madness will occur frequently in comics until all mention is squashed by the comics book code in the 1950s, and it will be interesting to trace all the permutations of how the effects of marijuana were perceived by the average comic book artist, who was almost always too square to know anything about the drug other than its name. Here, we learn that marijuana causes hallucinations and fits of violence. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Western Picture Stories #4

We've seen lots of bad guys called bandits to date, but these might be our first "desperadoes".  Apparently, desperadoes like to abduct women; they can ride by and snatch a woman up without slowing their horses.

This game isn't as concerned as some other games are with "stacking" -- that is, the game-within-the-game of finding ways to build bigger and bigger modifiers by stacking cumulative ones. There are some instances where "cumulative" matters, though.

One mechanical area that Hideouts & Hoodlums shares in common with some other current games is "buffing" -- that is, certain powers and stunts "buff-up" a Hero so that he can do things he can't normally do. And, so long as they last long enough that one's duration does not end before the next one is activated, powers and stunts can accumulate.  So that, on this page, it is possible that the good Cowboy on the right has both Quick Draw and Disarming Shot prepared as active stunts.

And then, of course, since this is a Centaur book, there's blatant racism.

Now this page intrigues me for the Chinese Cowboy's apparently throwaway reference to dope. It is possible, of course, that he isn't being too literal here, but then that just begs the question, what did he put in their food?  Dope is not going to show up on either the starting equipment list or in the trophies section of the game anytime soon, which is partly because the comics themselves never seem to know what dope actually does. In this instance, dope makes you sleepy. Later, I'm sure we'll see other, stranger examples of what dope makes characters do.

This page and the next has useful illustrations of weapons that might still be around in an H&H game.

Here we see the Fancy Shooting Cowboy stunt.

This is not a game mechanics issue, but it is a good idea for an Editor to assign a strength and a weakness to each Supporting Cast Member, even animal companions, to help flesh them out as real characters. Sometimes these may figure into the story, such as how this Cowboy Hero's horse is afraid of tumbleweeds, and gets frightened and just the right moment, as someone is trying to steal her.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)