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Post by Adminenkainen on Jul 25, 2024 16:36:47 GMT
Boy, do I love Will Eisner's Black X. Here's Will establishing the mood with narration: "'Our mighty legions will sweep Europe,' cry gold-clad war lords...and their grey puppets rise wearily to shed blood for a bit of tin, a hero's grave, or false 'isms' of hate. And now man has learned to forge new weapons for war. From the sky he rains death - while across the shell-pocked land, ride the Four Horsemen of Death..." A powerful condemnation of war! When we meet up with Black X, he's observing how people are crowding into a New York City subway station and thinking about how lucky they are that they aren't crowding into a bomb shelter like the people of Europe.
When Black X gets home, his desk lamp flickers, which is a signal that the private phone behind a sliding wall panel in his home is "ringing." Black X is summoned to a new case! He arrives at an undisclosed government building with, what looks like an old courtyard. He is walking along an upper promenade when a man throws a knife at him from the lower courtyard, a difficult angle that affords Black X hard cover. To get down to the assailant, Black X swings from a vine growing on the courtyard wall. It's a cool move; I would forgive any Editor for just hand-waving and allowing it. If I had to assign a game mechanic to it, I think it would be either a Strength ability score check, or maybe a save vs. plot to keep the vine from snapping.
Black X knocks the knife-thrower down, and I've spoken before about how a punch can be flavor text for a trip attack.
The assassin wins initiative and manages to get a pill in his mouth before Black X can stop him. The pill not only kills the man, but makes all the skin wither from his skull. The last panel on the page shows the difference in reactions between the Chief's shocked expression and Black X's grim expression.
"It's almost like a comic magazine story!" the Chief says with brilliant meta-humor. Black X says he knows of a rare herb from northern Siberia that does that - this is either an expert skill check in botany, or Black X's player made it up and the Editor gave him a save vs. plot to make it true.
The chart room doesn't just have charts in it - there is a giant floor-to-ceiling mural of the entire planet on the wall. Good hideout dressing?
Finally moving on to the mission - gun embankments have been sited on the Siberian coast opposite Alaska, in 1940 still just a U.S. territory. Instead of going to Siberia, Black X decides to start his investigation in Alaska. And then, because this plot keeps booking - the plane is hijacked! You might be excused for thinking it was just a wandering encounter, except the female hijacker did this to capture Black X. After landing in Siberia she allows the plane to take off and leave, but a gas bomb aboard releases the same deadly poison that kills the crew and passengers (you might miss that if you don't look closely at the 8th panel) and the plane crashes.
The woman leads Black X and Bantu - Black X's manservant who was on board, but spared so he could come with - on a two-day car trip across Siberia. Now, this is the first part of the story that doesn't make sense to me. Are they driving non-stop without sleep for two days? Are there gas stations in remote areas of Siberia?
The mountain fortress they are brought to belongs to a Napoleon (I guess I need to revive that mobstertype, after I was thinking of dropping it in 2nd ed) named Proxoff. It may come as no surprise that Proxoff is not a surname you can find at surnames.behindthename.com; it's likely just an alias anyway. With him are General Von Damm and Count Trini, both of which are also not real surnames, though it makes less sense that these underlings are being given aliases. General Von Damm is a pretty good villain name, though!
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Post by order99 on Jul 29, 2024 3:56:20 GMT
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Post by Adminenkainen on Aug 6, 2024 14:38:30 GMT
Proxoff monologues about "while Russia, Finland, Germany, England and France destroy each other..." (no Oxford comma, so you know he's a villain). At the time this book was being printed, Russia was supplying Germany and invading Finland and England and Germany were both skirmishing on the open seas. France won't be attacked for three more months, but surely everyone knew it was coming. The only thing Proxoff/Eisner failed to anticipate is that Norway would be attacked next and not France.
As the monolog winds down, Proxoff says he's not mad, only, "as they say in the play, 'diabolically clever'." I haven't been able to figure out which play is being referred to here.
Proxoff is so confident that Black X is allowed to keep his handgun and he and Bantu are given what seems a poorly guarded suite to rest in and consider Proxoff's offer to come work for him. At no time, though, would Black X alone be able to beat this scenario. When he thinks he has agency to move undetected, he's actually being watched from a secret door. When he takes a guard prisoner, the guard is willing to kill himself rather than betray Proxoff (I need to up that morale bonus Napoleons give their henchmen). It is only thanks to Bantu's mind control power that they are able to escape.
Bantu has demonstrated what seems like a Charm Person spell before, but here is able to control multiple victims at once. Since Bantu in no other way appears to be a high-level magic-user, I determined this was my first evidence of psionics and the mass domination power that appeared in Supplement III. Unlike Charm Person, this affect has a very short duration (the crew all commit suicide rather than assist Black X further).
Anyway, this is how Black X and Bantu manage to get onto Proxoff's submarine - and it does seem strange that Proxoff has a submarine when they had to drive inland for two days to reach Proxoff's fortress. Maybe it's a small enough sub to navigate a river for two days, and the story just glosses over that part? At least this explains why there is only one submarine, as no other subs take off in pursuit.
The action picks up as the sub tries to cross the Bering Strait to freedom. Depth charges are dropped, but keep missing the sub. These are bad attack rolls; even though a depth charge is technically an area of effect attack, it is so difficult to aim them accurately that I would require attack rolls. Black X tries creating an oil slick to fool them, but Proxoff is aware of that old trick. Knowing that the ice is too thick for the sub to surface near Alaska, Proxoff orders the water mined behind the sub so it will be difficult for Black X to turn back. Black X's player is either making a piloting skill check to miss the mines or maybe a save vs. science.
This might be the end of Black X, if the sub didn't have a paravane - a "water kite" -- attached with a razor wire, that cuts the mines loose from their ballast. This destroys the cutter that was dropping the mines, and this completely turns the tables. Black X is able to surface and use the sub's deck gun and torpedo to destroy the gun embankment on the coast. Proxoff himself was amongst the guns on the shore, so Black X risks going ashore to see if Proxoff is still alive and take him prisoner if he is. He is, but Proxoff is pinned under a girder with only a revolver to defend himself. He wastes his bullets trying to hit Black X while he hides behind hard cover (-2 to AC), and when that fails, Proxoff takes a poison pill to kill himself.
Moving on...in Abdul the Arab, Abdul and Hassan are still traitors to their people, working for the British invaders - though readers in 1940 wouldn't have thought of it that way. They have already been given their latest scenario to complete - capture three robbers, and they already have one. They can't make their prisoner talk because he literally can't talk...but are we to believe Arabs are illiterate too? Or he couldn't just be made to draw a map to where the other two are?
Since Abdul doesn't know, it's easy for the other two - Khabib and Saudah - to lure Abdul into a trap at a watering hole. Both are actually legit Arabic names, except that Saudah is a girl's name.
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Post by Adminenkainen on Aug 15, 2024 4:43:22 GMT
The ambush didn't turn out to be very effective; Saudah is just standing nearby with a gun, close enough for Abdul to close into melee range in the first turn of combat (there was no surprise turn; Saudah failed to achieve surprise). By splitting up, though, Saudah and Khabib both have different chances of surprise, and Khabib does get the jump on Abdul.
It's weird whenever a Hero stops and considers themselves held at gunpoint, when other times the Hero just rushes in and disarms or subdues the gunman. Maybe, when a main villain gets surprise on you and tries to hold the Hero at gunpoint, the Hero has to save vs. plot to attack. Since monologing usually follows being held at gunpoint, this is really just an extension of a precedent already in the rules since the first draft.
It's also weird that Abdul left alone, with his sidekick Hassan trailing far behind. Maybe Abdul felt he had to leave immediately, but Hassan needed a bathroom break first...? Despite having taken 1d6 damage from a left shoulder gunshot wound in an earlier, unseen encounter with Khabib, Hassan is able to catch up and disarms Khabib with a thrown knife. Then Abdul either watches Hassan beat Saudah and Khabib unconscious with his fists, or is rolling to hit so poorly that he only appears to be standing off to the side and watching.
Next up is Wun Cloo, the Defective Detective (and racist Chinese caricature). His antagonist, Professor Ratheart, invents a tractor beam and repulsion ray (though he doesn't use those terms; he calls them a driving and a magnetic ray). The ray projectors are miniaturized to the point that he can insert the tractor beam into his ring and the repulsion ray into the head of his cane. Give him a slightly less lame name (Professor Merlin?) and this is a perfect early Silver Age villain! Despite not being a superhero (or is he...?), Wun Cloo survives being repelled through a floor without serious injury. Although this is a cartoony story, it does set a precedent for mirrors being able to bounce back rayguns.
Next is Flash Fulton, Newsreel Ace. Amazingly, Flash is sitting in the middle of wartorn Europe and thinks it's boring. The Editor listens to his whiny player by having a mysterious woman come up and pick his pocket (successful skill check, a mysterywoman with a stunt, or hand-waved in order to start the scenario...?). An officer (of what country?) strolls by and warns Flash she's trouble. Later, the woman is in Flash's hotel room. She returns the wallet, saying she had to borrow it to find out where Flash was staying (I guess he keeps his hotel receipts in his wallet?). Her story is she's seen documents of a plot to overthrow the military in this still unnamed but clearly allied country. She can't get the papers safely to any government building, no newspaper dares publish them, but maybe Flash can take them out of the country to be published in some neutral country. It's a clever way for an Editor to nudge players away from an area that's too dangerous for them...
But instead of sending Flash away, the Editor has three officers burst in, ask for the papers, and then threaten to beat the information out of the woman. Flash has no choice but to try and intervene - and get beaten unconscious (that's sure like a H&H scenario!). When he comes to, the officers and the woman are gone and the room has been searched - but the officers somehow failed to think to check Flash's wallet, where the incriminating documents are!
The officers later agree to exchange the docs for the girl; luckily these officers are dumb and don't think about making copies (or in Flash's case, he films each page). At the airport, an officer tries a last-moment betrayal and plans to shoot Flash, but is conveniently standing close enough to the plane that Flash can lean out and punch him. Also curious, Flash and the still-unidentified woman are sitting in the backseat of what appears to be a two-seat plane.
Clip Chance at Cliffside is a strip about a college athlete so I don't usually talk about it much, but in this episode Clip is on the track team and needs to win five out of six decathalon events for his team to win. His discus throw is just 25' shorter than the 1935 world record. Clip's time for the 110 meter hurdles, 14.2 seconds, would have tied the world record until 1936. His pole vault height is 14'1", a world record that wasn't beat until 1928. Past that, numbers aren't given for the rest of the events.
For the past two weeks I've been mulling over how we can come up with a simple game mechanic to determine how close to the current record we can get in a sporting event. And I think the answer is...there isn't. Let's take, for instance, that just to win a 400 meter run against two opponents, you need to roll more successful consecutive skill checks with no failures than both of them. Let's say you're playing a 3rd-level human fighter, so your skill chance is 2 in 6. Your chance of failure is 4 in 6, or 66%. So to figure out how close to the current record we are, we start at 66 years prior to the current year. For every skill check success, advance 1 year, or 2 years if the skill check was made by half or lower (1 in 6, if normally 2 in 6). At no time, though, should the result tie the current world record without using a stunt (this will be available to higher level non-mysterymen if the Heroes Handbook is ever finished), and a world record can't be broken without using two stunts.
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Post by Adminenkainen on Aug 31, 2024 5:49:56 GMT
In Wings Wendall of the Military Intelligence, Wings is at Army HQ in San Francisco (The Presidio?) when he's given a decoded message about an enemy ship targeting a U.S. Army Supply Ship in the Pacific, bound for Hawaii, but this is still backstory to the scenario, because a submarine sinks the ship before Wings gets a chance to leave San Francisco. Wings' mission, when it's presented to him, is to find out which foreign power is behind this, as well as the unidentified military planes doing reconnaissance over Hawaii. From our modern perspective, we can go "Oh, this is easy! It's Japan!" But poor Wings doesn't have a clue until the radio room reports to him that they've found the source of the decoded messages using "directional loops." Off-panel, the radio man probably goes, "Ha ha, just kidding - I meant triangulation!"
The call was coming from inside California! Wings identifies the location as "the old Enterprise" building. It would be interesting if this was the Enterprise in San Bernadino, a 5-story office building built in 1927 that at one time contained the city's first brewery. What an appropriate place to find trouble brewing!
Wings goes with just two men for back-up, one carrying some kind of rifle and the other is perhaps carrying a handgun concealed under his coat. Rather than take them inside, Wings orders them to guard the exits. In the rapid pace of comic books, it seems like Wings just walks through the front door and finds three enemy spies. In H&H, he would have to systematically explore a five-story building, room by room, for clues as to which room houses the three spies. For some reason, the spies left their door unlocked (just forgot?), so Wings is able to just walk in and surprise them. Only one is armed, and Wings disarms him by shooting the gun out of his hand, at which point the three spies all surrender.
None of the spies look remotely Japanese. We move onto the next scene too quickly with Wings leaving for Hawaii. We are left to surmise that, in between, Wings interrogated the three men, learned they were actually Americans working for the as-yet unnamed foreign power, and they traded some kind of leniency for information about their larger operation in Hawaii. Wings is now in a plane, launching from an aircraft carrier as soon as he's within range of reaching Hawaii. Three unidentified fighter planes flee from Wings, but it's a trap to lure him off-course and then turn around and dispatch him. With "deadly accuracy," he shoots down his first plane, though the art in the panel indicates he actually shot the pilot.
Next, Wings uses a "snap roll" to get his second plane in his sights. If I was still designing an aviator class and wanted to assign mechanics to a snap roll, it would allow the pilot to restart combat with a 2 in 6 chance of surprise, essentially offering the pilot the chance of getting a bonus attack.
Wings follows the third plane to a landing on a small island; we are not told if this is part of Hawaii or a island encountered before reaching Hawaii. Again, the men on the island are all Caucasian, with not a Japanese person in sight. Wings improvises a landing strip (I believe that was already an aviator stunt back in the day). While he's exploring the island, the bad guys find his plane and place two guards on it. Wings finds their base, which is a trio of buildings - an office/HQ, a hangar, and a smaller photo development lab with just one guard.
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