Smash Comics #2 - pt. 1

In Espionage, Black "Ace" (I always liked Black X better) is after the theft of this anti-electric raygun. It is like the larger device the Masked Marvel encountered a while back, but this one is smaller, portable, and only works on a single target.

Will Eisner seems to taken a stab at future predicting here and was off by a few years -- Russia didn't declare war on Japan until 1945, not 1939. But that's nothing compared to the stab in the dark Black Ace makes here -- correctly guessing the stolen invention will be sold off to either Japan or Russia, correctly guessing it will be sold in China, and even getting the city right! That's some hunch...and makes me think an Editor might have been railroading his player here to get him to go to the right place.

As if the stabs in the dark didn't end there -- somehow Batu knows who stole the plans and manages to find them! Is this his psychic powers on display? It seems like there are at least two pages of story missing here that would explain these connections.

On the bright side, we get an interesting trap, with a touch-sensitive chest of drawers that shoots a knife out of it at anyone in front of it (but where does the knife come out of...?).

Batu calls this hypnosis, but he's instead generating a Phantasmal Image. Curiously, Batu loses consciousness from blood loss and spell fatigue -- two things that have no game mechanic in Hideouts & Hoodlums. If he's supporting cast, this can be flavor text.

Not sure how the bad guys have a second mechanical jammer. Maybe there are three pages missing...

Black Ace's wandering encounter is with a doctor. Doctors were statted as a mobster-type in Supplement V and will probably make it into 2nd ed. too. Note that Black Ace was over India, but the doctor is a white man...

Black Ace regains consciousness quickly, having been only "nicked." It's a new mechanic in H&H that if you reach zero hp, and make a save vs. plot, you're only stunned temporarily instead of unconscious (since BA clearly wasn't out for 2-4 hours).

Black Ace is using the Aviator stunt Deadstick to fly after killing the engine.

Speaking of stunts -- jumping out of a moving plane and landing on another moving plane -- that has to be a stunt.

This is The Lone Star Rider. The snipers are going to be statted as assassins in 2nd ed., though I'll probably include a note about how they can be called snipers.

This is Abdul the Arab. The assassins he runs into use hiding in shadows and backstabbing instead of sniping at a distance.

At least one of the assassins carries poison with a really quick onset time.

Abdul's idea of disguising himself is to change his clothes.

Climbing hand over hand could be handled by just a skill check, but doing it with a full-grown woman on his back, that's got to be a stunt.

Baghdad was ruled by a king, not a sultan, in 1939. Faisal II was, in fact, the last king of Iraq.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)