Tip Top Comics #30, 32

Today's entry might be mostly price examples, but we'll get to game mechanics later on.

First, in Fritzi Ritz, Nancy finds a wishing stone that doesn't work for her -- but this made me think about wishes, or just powerful magic in general, and the issue of how common these things should be in a Hideouts & Hoodlums campaign. Should a wishing stone be just randomly hidden in plain view in the urban setting, that the Heroes may or may not find? Or

should it be at the end of a long quest involving beating dragons and giants?

In the next page, Fritzi rents a canoe for $3, and that does seem like a lot, because Ella Cinders was able to rent both a boat and aquaplane for just $3 per 15 minutes three issues ago. Now, maybe Fritzi can keep the canoe much longer, but the point to remember here is that you can't separate Heroes from the money they've been accumulating with high starting price points,

because that's not how things worked in the '30s and '40s. You didn't just go up to a guy with a canoe and offer him $100 to buy it outright; he'd look at you funny like you were up to no good, or trying to pull one over on him.

Also, on the subject of pricing, Frankie Doodle buys baloney by the nickel and buns are two for a nickel at the grocery store.

I can never tell if the dates are legitimate or just made-up, but How It Began seems to be legit when it gives us things like a timeline for bullfighting -- which could be handy during a time travel adventure. You wouldn't want to plan a bullfighting scene in a 1350 scenario and have a smart player telling you that bullfighting wasn't happening then.

Electric toasters for just 69 cents. Granted, it's a special sale price, but still...

We're now jumping ahead to vol. 3, no. 8 (Dec. 1938).

We do have a game mechanics issue to discuss on this one. The grappling rules, as they currently stand, require both the attacker and defender to spend the whole combat turn making grappling attempts at each other; the only time a bonus action is inserted is when the victim wins initiative before the grappling combat starts. But here, the Professor is able to get "bonus actions" of slipping capsules out of his belt and rubbing them under noses during grappling. Or is he? He doesn't manage to when facing a Hero in battle, and I've already established that the Editor can hand-wave combat rules applying to non-Heroes.

As to the wrestling moves: the "aeroplane spin" is a simple throw. I don't have a good equivalent for the drop kick, but I don't think I would count that as a grappling move anyway; kicking is just another form of unarmed combat and I treat it no differently than punching.

I'm not going to bother showing you how Jim Hardy finds the clue that there's a secret door by the half-footprints right up against the wall, and I'm going to spare you how Dick Moores consistently spells clue as "clew", but I did want to show you this page because of the example of how the catch for opening a secret door can be hidden in plain sight. Also, the novelty diner as hideout was an idea I thought worth sharing.

Here we see that animal attacks can disarm as well as attacks from people (indeed, just a page earlier, a mountain lion swats Bill's rifle from his hands in almost identical fashion).

Large eagles might need to get statted at some point, as this one is strong enough to partially raise a young man into the air. It's tricky to do and stick to my formula of 1 hp = 30 lbs, since the largest eagles in real life are no more than 17 lbs.

And now we come full circle back to Fritzi Ritz, with an idea you can use in your hideouts -- a trophy room where all the animals are stuffed, except for one real one hiding among the others, that can really attack!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)