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)