More Fun Comics #19

Sometimes, just entering the hideout is itself part of the challenge. In this case, Barry O'Neill has to fall down a pit to enter Fang Gow's concealed entrance. How everyone else got down there without having to jump and get hurt is not explained. Perhaps there was another secret entrance. Of course, if you do put a safer backdoor into the hideout, be prepared for your Heroes to find it!

Brad Hardy gives us a surprisingly detailed map of the lost world he explores. Less thought seems to have gone into the reptaboa, which just seems to be a funny-looking constrictor snake.

There were plenty of times that I "cheated" on mobster types for Hideouts & Hoodlums, making ones that I felt the game should have, but didn't actually have samples of from my readings. One was the anarchist, which I pictured as a crazy communists running around with round, lit bombs -- just like the guy in this gag picture!

Predicting the future is a curious game to play; you just never know when you're going to win and get it right. Here, we can only hope that the Interplanetary Police's clothes are not the fashions of the future.  But a telemirror? That looks a lot like a flatscreen TV to me.  And race change is possible today through plastic surgery.

Hideout rooms tend to be at a 10' scale, which tends to make for big rooms.  What I like about this page is that it shows spacious interiors, very appropriate for H&H. Giant bats are a threat for low-level Heroes, but a cavern full of ordinary bats is basically just flavor text, as it is here.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Famous Funnies #32 - pt. 2

A few leftovers from yesterday:

Flight includes some useful information about the DeHaviland Comet, and how useful it would be as a transport-trophy.

For a kids humor strip, Toddy has an interesting trap here -- a fake floorboard that actually catapults the victim towards an open window.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Famous Funnies #32 - pt. 1

Watchdogs may not attack on sight, but they are noisy and that could be enough to alert a hideout of approaching intruders.

Firearms owned by mobsters will often have the serial numbers filed off.  In fact, it's a good way to identify a gun owner as a mobster! Without the help of the FBI, local police are unlikely to be able to ID a specific gun if its serial numbers are filed off.

Goat joke #8 (last goat joke here).

The supernatural in Hairbreadth Harry?  No, it's hi-tech pills of transparency. Good for spooking non-Heroes, or being a model for a biology class, but likely not much else.

There's a useable plot for a Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario right here.  Also note how quickly the trip to get to the plot hook is glossed over. This is entirely optional -- but probably a good idea. One of the last times I ran H&H, I spent too long on the trip to the adventure locale and it drained a lot of the momentum from the scenario.

The Phantom Magician debuts in Adventures of Patsy -- and the Magic-User class is born!

(Yes, Mandrake the Magician has already been around, but not in comic books I have access to)

H&H has, up to this moment, always relied on the spells of The Original Game for Magic-Users, but here we see the Phantom Magician using considerably different spells, mostly of the alteration school of magic.

I call the first spell "Poof!" after its sound effect, and it allows the M-U to teleport over a short distance.

The second spell we see here is Alter Costume, which allows a M-U to change his or someone else's clothes (or even add or subtract armor?).  I see both of these spells as being 1st level spells. 

We also see some familiar spells as well.  Invisibility is referred to.  Thimble seems to be under the effects of a Polymorph spell, including the possibility of losing your mind to the assumed form. But the short duration of the polymorph and the ability to dispel the mental change by a blow to the head seems to have weakened the spell, perhaps to a 3rd level variant called Minor Polymorph.

The joke ending is harder to define. Some sort of illusion spell that distorts people's sense of proportions?  It's hard to imagine how this would affect game mechanics. I'll work on it.

High Lights of History tackles mythology instead of history again! This time we get a magic item, the wax wings (or simply wings of flying).

Jane Arden provides good tips on how to look for secret doors without relying on a d6 roll.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

The Comics #1 - pt. 2

Inspiration for both the Silver Age Dr. Doom and the Golden Age Sandman -- or just coincidences?

Incendiary bullets have a history in aviation warfare going back to WWI. Useful for setting combustibles on fire, these bullets shouldn't do more than maybe 1 additional point of damage against living foes, and would have a reduced range for that effect (since they burn out quickly).

The Comics #1 - pt. 1

Before Captain Easy had his own strip, he was just an adult sidekick to Wash Tubbs.

Here, Wash tells us that silk shirts cost up to $10 in the 1930s -- a then expensive luxury!

Easy is also in a car with a ridiculous amount of nitroglycerin; I hate to estimate how much damage that explosion would have done to the poor guys had their car been hit by that TNT!

At present, there are not specific game mechanics for unarmed combat moves like flipping your handcuffed opponent over your head -- this would simply be a generic grappling attack.

This is from In the Name of the Law, a cheap knock-off of War on Crime.  In it we are reminded that, while a Hero's chance to hear noise might not work through hideout walls, it should work through ordinary interior walls in buildings.

Tom Mix learns, the hard way, how to burn down a wooden cabin (though most Heroes will avoid burning down a hideout, for fear of destroying valuable loot inside!).

Prairie Bill's feat of strength could be achieved a couple of different ways, both starting with successful grappling rolls (very successful; I plan to switch to a grappling system with more than one level of success).  The Editor could then allow the grappled victim to save vs. science to keep from being thrown in the drink.  Alternatively, if the Editor could leave the successful grappler in control of the next step, by having him roll to-hit the water -- AC 9, let's say.

Gambling, whether a friendly game or not, is beyond the purview of simulating with Hideouts & Hoodlums.  The easiest way of handling it, of course, would be to sit the H&H books aside for an hour or so and play some hands of poker yourselves.  Failing that, or if pressed for time, the players could simply roll d20s, highest score wins that hand.

G-Man Jim demonstrates the proper way to use a wireless radio to summon reinforcements.

Though drawn in a horribly unprofessional manner, G-Man Jim has all the earmarks of a classic H&H hideout crawl.  There is a definite goal to the scenario -- find the missing girl -- but lots of rooms to search, including a secret room to find. There's even a trap -- a button that will set off an explosion if pressed!

Again, we have a poorly drawn, but evocative scenario in The Arizona Kid. Just riding by and finding what appears to be a guarded well, but is actually a mine entrance, Arizona descends into a subterranean world that...well, it wouldn't be very H&H, but I wouldn't be surprised to see orcs or goblins show up down there.

I'm not sure how literal to take Myra North's description of this gas. Does she feel weak from the gas, or is she really, physically weakened by it? A weakness-inducing gas might be an interesting trap, though since there are not actually a lot of game mechanics tied to the Strength ability score, it might wind up only affecting flavor text...unless it was also tied to Movement rate.


(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

The Funnies #6 - pt. 2

A long-standing trope of the action adventure genre (of which one could argue even the superhero genre is just a sub-set) is that prisoners can be intimidated into giving up valuable information. Here, Tailspin Tommy takes an unusual aeronautical approach to this, while taking advantage of the fact that his prisoner is afraid to fly.  Without that disadvantage, it seems unlikely that loop de loops would trigger a morale save.

The people of the Hidden Empire call these terods (or is that teroos?), but they look an awful lot like dragons to my trained eye.

Since terods breath poison gas, it seems safe to stat them as green dragons, despite the fact that they seem to come in every color but. They are defeated, not by Don Dixon, but by the magic ring worn by one of his supporting cast. It is unclear exactly what the ring is doing, but it seems to be a Ring of Light Rays that shoot like lasers (for at least 4d6 damage, I'd guess).

Og and friends manage to hug the ledge, even during an earthquake, by virtue of saving throws vs. science or plot, depending on which is better (or worse, depending on the severity of the quake).

One could make an argument that balance would be measured by Dexterity and that the Dexterity score should be somehow tied into this decision (whether to fall or not fall).  However, even assuming there was a modifier for ability scores that could be applied to any roll, it would still be a random chance of success, and there already is a mechanic for random chance of success in the saving throw mechanic. So ability score checks seem, to my mind, superfluous.  Though some game referees do love them, and they could certainly use them if they really wanted to.

Eggs are 40 cents a dozen.

The Funnies #6 - pt. 1

Okay, starting off the next 100 issues, we jump right back into Dell's comic strip reprint anthology and an Alley Oop creature feature!

This is bradysaurus, an early pre-dinosaur giant reptile big enough to warrant 8+1 HD, using d8 Hit Dice.

Though fiercer looking, edaphosaurus was smaller, much lighter, and would only be 4 HD.

Dinicitis was a primitive version of the modern day great cat. It was not far off from a cougar in size, so this would be maybe a 2+1 HD.

Truth serum is apparently a real thing, but it's also something of a cliche in all kinds of fiction, not just Dan Dunn. In Hideouts & Hoodlums, it could be called Potion of Lie Detection.

He's a pretty sharp shooter, that Dan Dunn!  Now, the cover rules only apply to soft cover and hard cover, with hard cover providing just a -2 penalty to hit. However, for a shot like this, where the target cannot even be seen behind the cover, an additional penalty for shooting an unseen target can be added, making a -6 penalty to hit in total!

There is always a chance for wrecking things, even for non-Superheroes. So, Dan would get through even a steel door with an axe eventually, but it does make sense that he could forego this for time considerations (it might take many turns for the Editor's rolls to get lucky enough!).

Lastly, the trap of a false floorboard flooding the room with poison gas if stepped on is quite nasty.  Of course, the Heroes still get saving throws vs. poison, and something less lethal, like knock-out gas, could be substituted.  The chance of stepping on the right floorboard might be 1 in 6 per turn spent in the room, per occupant.

I fear if more players saw what a G-Man gets for a starting equipment package on this page, that everyone would want to play nothing but G-Men!  I would not make this package available to starting players, though if a Hero became a G-Man during the course of a campaign, I could see rewarding him or her with such a loot crate!

It's unclear in the bottom tier if we are seeing the benefit of a Charisma modifier being applied to an initially low encounter reaction roll, or if the Editor is applying a situational modifier after some good role-playing.

Captain Easy had a tough time finding the gun in the snow because it became a concealed object, with only a 2 in 6 chance per turn of him finding it (though the Editor could bump that up to 3 in 6 if he felt the gun could not be buried too deep).

Landing on the railroad car could have been a simple attack roll -- unless the Editor wanted to make it really challenging and added the penalties for hitting a moving object, from the vehicular combat rules.

Flipping a coin and having the direction the head is facing determine what direction you head is a novel idea to me; it could be replicated with a real coin or a roll on 1d8 to determine compass direction.

The man Easy meets in the snow could be the result of a wandering encounter check, but since he has such a valuable plot hook for Easy, I suspect he was pre-planted in that location -- which is okay for the Editor to do.  Not everything needs to be random.

Wolves, particularly in whatever part of Europe Easy is supposed to be in, may be encountered in groups of 3-36.

Easy slipped on the ice because of a missed save vs. science roll.