Marvel Mystery Comics #5 - pt. 3

Two features left!

Second to last is Irwen Hasen's Ferret, Mystery Detective. In it, we learn that the police code for a shooting is 23. At the crime scene, Ferret gets a good encounter reaction roll and the commissioner on the scene let's him keep a clue. We learn that Ferret's car has bulletproof glass, improving its Armor Class value and shielding Ferret from a lot of bullets as he is chased from the crime scene. Mobsters force him to crash -- treat it as an obstacle in a car chase, but with a save vs. science or a skill check to avoid? -- and he emerges with just a light wound on his arm.

We learn that "they've been doing this in Europe for years. You place a dry sheet of paper over a wet one and write a message with a matchstick. When the paper dries it's blank - but wet it again - presto! A message!" I haven't tested this to see if it really works.

Before going into a suspicious building, Ferret leaves his pet ferret outside, so he can whistle and summon it to rescue him later. Which turns out to be a good thing, as Ferret is vulnerable to the "surprise head blow" trope that fells so many golden age heroes. We learn it takes a ferret 30 minutes to chew through a wall (interior wall, I'm guessing -- or that ferret needs to be statted as a superhero!).

After escaping, Ferret has three hoodlums chasing him. He uses a length of rope to trip all three of them. Okay, I've talked about allowing this before, but giving them a bonus to their saves to reflect how his efforts are being divided. What's unusual here is that only two get back up right away to fight him, while the third takes longer. I've always ruled that it takes 1 melee turn to get back on your feet...but what if it should take 1-2 turns, to stagger how fast your opponents can get back into combat?

Speaking of combat, a ferret, at only 2-3 pounds, shouldn't even add up to 1 hit point, but Ferret's ferret Nosey looks like he does 1 point of damage in a fight.

In a queer bit of slang, counterfeit money is called "the queer" in this story.

In Ka-Zar, Ka-Zar steals into de Kraft's tent and steals all his guns. Rather than use the guns against him, he wants to make for a fair fight, so he wrecks the guns against a big rock (possibly for fighters to do, as guns fall only in the doors category).

Ka-Zar is later captured, though, tied up, and slashed with sharp weapons 100 times by natives. This has to be flavor text, there is no way Ka-Zar has over 100 hit points. Despite having been able to wreck guns, Ka-Zar is not strong enough to snap the rope tying him. Without leverage, he could have a significant disadvantage to his rolls. 

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

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.)

Smash Comics #7 - pt. 3

And we're back with Invisible Justice, starring the Invisible Hood.

I get the creepy factor IH is going for, but being invisible inside a visible suit seems to take away any advantage that he has in combat.

Steele seems more than capable of mowing down the bad guys without IH's help. This is why it's important to have your supporting cast lower in level than the Heroes, so the Heroes are less likely to be upstaged (though bad dice rolls can still make it happen).

It's too bad that Steele is one of the good guys, because it would be a much more interesting tactic if IH had tricked one of the bad guys into thinking the two fire-eaters (stat as arsonists) who show up are more ghosts, and then get him to shoot them.

Lastly, it must have been super-awkward when Steele was feeling around in the air for IH's shoulders...

Wandering encounters are the potatoes that go with the meat of role-playing games, but sometimes an Editor may doubt himself and feel he's being too subtle with them. That's when you start having bad guys literally crash into the good guys out on the streets.

Tripping is a surprisingly rare fighting technique in comic books, but rarer still are examples like this that show how a trip attack can set up an opponent for a follow-up attack. So I'm wondering, should I add a game mechanic where you forego your own ability to do damage in the turn, in order to give the next attacker a bonus?

The enemy planes use a stunt (Fly out of the Sun).

Chic's readiness to use guns tells me he belongs to the fighter class.

I'm not sure how often pilots in dog fights would crash into each other, but if I ever write formalized dog fight rules for Hideouts & Hoodlums, it will likely include something about a low chance of crashing per turn.

I've posted plenty of times with examples like this, showing how you should not try too hard to hide clues from your players in your games. In fact, judging by this page, you shouldn't even hide them at all -- just leave them sitting out on a desk for anyone to see.

The 2nd edition rules for transportation includes ramming damage for just this type of scene!

The ramming damage for vehicles can be really high; perhaps it would be fair to split those dice between multiple opponents, like how Chic hits three guards at once here.

This is John Law, Scientective. The brightly-colored cellar is the result of the four-color process and the difficulty of printing gray tones back then.

A skill check to hear noise should also include a general sense of where it is coming from, even if only a basic skill check was successful.

A delightfully scientific trap! The strobing neon light keeps you from being able to see that the bar is actually moving back and forth very fast, when it appears to be still, and anyone walking through that door would take at least 1-6 points of damage. It's a good trap for hurting someone, but I'm not sure about it killing them...

In this rare instance, the villain loses a foot race to a woman in high heels. June can really move! Competing skill checks -- some combination of successful ones on her part and failed rolls on his part -- determined her close call.

The ol' pit trap filling with water trap! Making it a little easier, the Avenger left the hose accessible in the pit, giving John an improvised rope and grappling hook.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Mystery Men Comics #7 - pt. 2

We're moving on through Mystery Men Comics and have reached the Rex Dexter of Mars feature now. There are some interesting predictions here, including automation replacing the workforce (coming true in the 21st century), a "people mover" (ala Disneyland), vitamins replacing food (never going to happen), and slide projectors in history class (occurred by mid-20th century).

That "high-powered machine" does look fairly realistic for a rocket car.

A truth ray gun is handheld, has a short range, but requires a save vs. science or the victim is compelled to tell the truth. The fatal ray gun is unseen, but the effect is save or die.

Moving right along, this is from Green Mask (what started out as the lead feature). The idea presented here intrigues me, that mobstertypes can be further broken down by geography-linked specialization -- so that a St. Louis hoodlum would be a kidnapper, but a Chicago hoodlum wouldn't be a kidnapper because their specialty is bumping off the competition. I think it's too late to restructure the hoodlum entries to fit this concept, but it could work for an individual campaign.

I'm also intrigued by this, where the bad guys use the Hero's own stool pigeon to invite him to meet with them. Everything I've written to date about supporting cast members is from the player's perspective, but the Editor can have villains using or manipulating those same SCMs too. 

Note just that last panel -- it's very rare for us to see a knife-wielder disarmed by an attack, while the gunman manages to hold onto his weapon. This points to the randomness of disarming attacks and that gun disarming should not be automatic, despite how often it happens in other instances I've cited here.

$50 million might just be the biggest jackpot any bad guys have talked about going after to date.

These same bad guys are stupid enough to discuss their secret plan without checking to see if Green Mask really left first, or if he might be listening in.

I just spoke the other day about complications in vehicular combat. I need to compile a lot more of them; here is the best/worst case scenario (depending on your point of view -- the direct hit, which automatically (?) destroys the vehicle.

This is an unusually racist installment, even for Chen Chang, but long-time readers know I'm a sucker for this Munson Paddock artwork. There have been some efforts to portray the Chinese-Japanese conflict of WWII in the early comic books to this point, but none that portrayed the savagery of the fighting with the intensity that Munson manages here. Bear in mind how rare 3-panel pages were in comic books of this time; the creators of this story really wanted to highlight how terrible the war over there was by making it impossible to ignore on this page.

But the rest of the story focuses on Richard Kendall's efforts to save these school teachers from Chen's clutches. Just out of sheer malice he tortures them in a spiked-descending-ceiling trap, and then instead of tying them to railroad tracks, ties them to the front of two trains and plans to smash them into each other. That is EVIL!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Mystery Men Comics #7 - pt. 1

And we return to Fox's second title and a feature that had started out as a small back-up strip and now is lead feature in Mystery Men Comics.

We start with a rare example of a bad guy (the Blue Beetle impersonator) using tear gas as a weapon.

Mike Mannigan is the perfect example of the copper -- a police officer so incompetent that he stumbles when there is nothing to trip on -- he's not even close to a crack in the sidewalk.

The Blue Beetle imposter could count as a doppelganger, as they are now defined in 2nd edition rules.

Although we've seen million-dollar crimes so far in the comics, $50,000 is still a large amount in 1940 and one mobsters are willing to kill over.

This is one of the earliest instances -- if not the earliest -- of cussing in a superhero story.

 I'm not sure if the Blue Beetle qualifies for the new Avenger class that is going in the AH&H Heroes Handbook, but I'm giving this ability to that class. The ability is to trigger morale saves without even being present, but via the presence of the avenger's "calling card."

Letting a bad guy get away so you can follow him back to his lair is already a cliche by this point.

I've never considered Blue Beetle to be much of a source for inspiration, but now I want a tall chest disguised as a bookcase just like that.

This may be the first and last time Blue Beetle ever carries "trick make-up" with him.

BB is teetering right on the edge of switching from the mysteryman class to the superhero class, but we're not quite there yet. BB can get two punch attacks if his opponents are unarmed, so he's not necessarily buffed with any superpowers here.

 An avenger can trigger so much fear as to cause damage.

Wing Turner takes on a "costumed" foe, though one just wearing short shorts and fake horns. The Devil goes for a bigger pay-off than BB's villains had. 

I've written plenty before about how vehicular combat needs to be based on complications rather than hit points. Hitting the fuel tank is a particularly good complication, one that cuts down how much longer the vehicle can move, while giving it a chance each turn of exploding.

Lava pit? How did he get a lava pit under his castle, when there's no sign of an active volcano anywhere in the vicinity of that castle? You just never know where lava will turn up in a comic book story.

(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)

Popular Comics #47 - pt. 2

This is the end of Between Two Fires. Last time I was talking about how hard a scenario would be if the goal was not to get in a fight in a war zone, but here we see the secret is to carry a white flag around with you.

It also helps when the Editor throws you a bone and lets you come across an unguarded motorcyle and sidecar.

Here's a new look for The Masked Pilot, and I'm liking the black domino mask more than the white handkerchief that his nose is clearly visible through.

Here's a map! It looks like a pretty believable map of an airplane factory to me, though it would be nice to see it closer.

The Masked Pilot lands his plane on the road, but you'll note how he lands at an angle to the road, drastically shortening his runway. That's an expert-level skill check -- or a burned stunt -- for sure.

It's somewhat remarkable that we're only up to January 1940, and rayguns that can stop planes from working are already a worn-out cliche.

I'm more interested in Tom, so generic a sidekick that he doesn't even seem to have a last name, but seems to be really good in a fight. Or is he? Although it appears that he's kicking that guy right into the gunman so the gun will go off in his back, the more rules-focused explanation for this is that the gunman tried shooting into a melee, which gave him a chance of hitting a random target.

This is a sound use of tactics, baiting the bad guys out into the open. And, sounder yet, The Masked Pilot uses their own weapons on them. What usually doesn't happen -- and I suspect we'll see the same this time -- is the raygun ever turning up again in future installments. Maybe it had a set number of charges and (conveniently) runs out after this adventure.

This is from Gangbusters, and it's interesting evidence that grappling damage maybe cannot cause unconsciousness, but only stuns. I had not thought of this before, but I can't actually think of examples of grappling causing long-term unconsciousness in comics I've read, and if I continue to not see examples of this, this aspect of the grappling rules might need to be changed.

The more difficult issue is, do we need game mechanics to determine when and how cars can push each other off their trajectories? We sort of already do -- the 2nd edition Basic book includes lots of examples of ramming damage for various vehicles -- and if we apply the same rule for pushing to vehicular combat -- that points of damage can be transferred 1:1 into feet moved -- then a car can push another car pretty far off its path.

This page is troubling, in that the cliche about cover is that any old object between you and a shooter can stop a bullet. I mean, if even walls serve no protection from bullets, then you might as well throw Armor Class out the window when firearms are in play. I am not prepared to make guns even more attractive to my players, so I'm going to be ignoring the evidence on this page.


Also, this story supposedly takes place in Cleveland, Ohio. You'd think Superman would show up! ;)

It's interesting to see someone shot in the hand and be told that took "all the fight out of him." Essentially, Carlson had so few hit points that one hit took him out of the fight and it didn't matter where the shot hit him to do that.

Herky sure hasn't graced this blog in a long time! The toddler with the strength of Hercules tries to wreck through a brick wall and hurts himself trying. I have actually long toyed with the notion of having failed wrecking things attempts hurt the person trying them and, while it remains not an official rule, I have used this in my personal games on occasion when a Hero keeps trying and gets four or more failures in a row.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Wonderworld Comics #9 - pt. 1

Our return to Fox begins with The Flame and something that I would never let players do at the beginning of a scenario -- locking themselves in a laboratory and trying to invent the most powerful explosive ever. Come on, this is game night! Try the scenario and leave this for downtime. You've got cool superpowers at your disposal (I even let you have all those brevet ranks; see previous posts about the Flame); try using those.

Not a map, per se, but an interesting cut-away of the interior of a submarine. Submarine design is very linear, making for a pretty boring hideout to explore.

Teleport through Focus is a great, high-level power for getting the Hero straight to the trouble, without having to do any slow investigation first. Maybe I'm not an expert on torpedo strikes, but I don't think they set fires in most cases -- seeing as how they punch holes into ships that quickly fill up with water. I wonder if there should be something like a 1 in 6 chance of vehicles sustaining damage catching on fire.

Now this is interesting...apparently the Flame isn't just immune to fire, but can interact with fire like it was a solid object. This is flavor text for the spell Water Walking.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just put all powers and spells in the same pool and let players pick from both...but then, some powers are very un-spell-like (the Get Tough, Raise, and "Race the" powers, for examples). Maybe there needs to be a rule for researching ways to transfer a spell into a power, and vice versa.

This can happen in Hideouts & Hoodlums. Superheroes are deliberately not good at fighting without buffing themselves with offensive and/or defensive powers, so if you want your power slots for other things, nine low-level fighters could conceivably take out a mid-level superhero just by doing enough damage.

Interestingly, steam is harmful to the Flame, even though fire and, presumedly, heat is not as well.

The Flame uses his explosive to blow up the hideout, which is also odd because usually hideouts blow up on their own just as the Hero is escaping.

Our villain, Doyoff (not a real name), reminds us that it pays to have more than one escape route.

And we're on to Yarko the Great, here reading a lot like that early Superman story of the con man posing as Superman. Like that story, these con men have no special abilities and are so generic as to be practically mobstertype-less. We do learn, however, that $300 watches were a thing in 1940.

This is a really curious Yarko story. After fighting vampires, the Devil, and Death itself, Yarko seems content to use his ventriloquism spells to play pranks on the con men -- even though they may have shot and killed a woman (though that scene seems out of place and really out of character for them). So far, Yarko hasn't cast a single spell.

Now we get into the spell-casting! First there's Hold Person, and then Yarko...well, he casts some kind of spell that summons stolen items and makes them float in the air in front of him. Maybe something called Thief's Bane? But it would have to be a 5th or 6th level spell, being a combination of Locate Object (for multiple objects) and Telekinesis.

Also note that, because fire extinguishers were not common yet, the theater has a fire bucket on the wall by Yarko.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)