Detective Comics #37 - pt. 2

*sigh* "Spy" used to be so good when it was Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster working on it. Ever since Maurice Kashuba started drawing it it's been so boring, I wonder if Siegel's name is only contractually on it and he's not actually writing it anymore.  

The plot here is that a bomb blows up a "conference of government officials," with no specifics as to the nature of the conference or the level of the officials present. Forensic evidence points to a suspect, which our hero Bart Regan collects from the scene, which seems odd because you would think a forensic specialist instead of a spy would be collecting evidence. 

An assassin tries to shoot Bart in the back, but facing doesn't matter in Hideouts & Hoodlums; if you win the initiative roll, you can turn around and deck someone behind you, just like Bart does. 

Undercover, Bart tries to join Ligoni's mob, what we would call a terrorist organization today. Ligoni is a skilled knife thrower and tests his new recruits by throwing knives at them until they flinch. Bart stands still for 16 knives before Ligoni gives up. I would use two mechanics for this: one is rolling to attack Bart with each throw. Since he's trying to miss, a successful "hit" becomes a miss. The other is requiring a save vs. plot from Bart to see if he flinches. If I was really mean, I'd make him make 16 different saves, but the odds would really be against him then. I would have him roll once and, if he missed, the number he rolled is the number of knives he can withstand without flinching. Then, to be fair, I would roll randomly (on a 20-sided die) to see how many knives Ligoni throws.

During the initiation, a mobster walks in who knows Bart and recognizes him immediately. Bart was "disguised" only with a change of clothes to look like a criminal, which is not enough to warrant a mobster having to make a saving throw to see through it.

Whimsically, the newspaper headline saying the bombers were captured is from The Daily Star, the newspaper Superman then worked for. This could be seen as the first cross-title continuity between Action Comics and Detective Comics.

In Cosmo, the Phantom of Disguise, Cosmo's friend is a ship captain tasked with delivering unspecified "chemicals" to England. I immediately thought this was suspicious and did some digging and saw that we did send chemicals to England -- illegal mustard gas -- in 1943. We never do learn if it's that type of chemical being delivered.

It normally took a steamship 15 days to reach England from New York then, but the captain seems to suggest it will take 1 whole month with the circuitous route they planned around the "war-infested areas," which actually does sound like quite a reasonable precaution.

Cosmo, in disguise, hears talk of mutiny on board the ship (after a skill check for listening?). In a clever bit, Cosmo pretends to shoot the captain with a blank cartridge, then dumps a dummy overboard, so the mutineers will trust him and the captain can still move about the ship. Less clear is how Cosmo further distracts the mutineers with an explosion timed to when he drops the dummy in the water. Are the explosives inside the dummy? And if so, wouldn't dumping them in the ocean stop them from detonating? The story should have ended with the captain rallying the loyal crew for a big fight, but the story is running out of pages, so the mutineers all flee to the life boats, but Cosmo punches out the ringleaders before they can board the boats (why the ring leaders wait so long, until all the other mutineers are at sea, before leaving the ship is not clear).

The Crimson Avenger returns! A rich man's daughter has been kidnapped, so the Crimson Avenger goes to work -- as reporter, Lee Travis. He apparently finds no useful clues, so he comes back that night as the Crimson Avenger and, at gunpoint, forces the dad to tell him where the drop point for the ransom money is. His only plan now is to follow the kidnappers' car from the drop point (are police not doing the same?). 

The twist is that the kidnappers' hideout is a mansion in the suburbs. The Avenger even gives us the address for the mansion, 704 West Highway, "Scarchester." That sounds like Dorchester, Massachusetts to me. When he gets there, though, all the Avenger does is point a gun at the five kidnappers and wait for the police to arrive. Boring, and the art is terrible. What a bad comeback!

Detective Comics #19 - part 2

In the adventure of Cosmo, the Phantom of Disguise, the bad guys have a seaplane (called an amphibious plane in Supplement III: Better Quality) at their island base. Who knows what else they have for Cosmo to loot; Cosmo does the one thing guaranteed to ruin any game session -- he turns the problem over to the authorities (in this case, the U.S. Air Corps) and then sits back and watches non-Hero characters solve the scenario for him. How boring!

In the adventure of Steve Malone, District Attorney, Steve's opponents have a smokescreen ejector in their car (as found in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies).

Steve offers a bribe for tips to help him gather information faster, feeling $100 is a good deal for valuable information.

When Steve and his supporting cast member, Jim, are about to raid a hideout and split up, Steve says he has a whistle he can use to summon Jim if he needs help. This seems like a good idea for any Heroes to have.

When the boss mobster flees to his private airplane, Steve jumps up, grabs the underside of the plane, and then clambers up into the plane.  I'm not even sure how to handle that game mechanic-wise. Sure, I suppose you could break it down into smaller components -- roll to hit the plane, save vs. plot to reach the top of the plane -- or just assign what seems like a good random chance, like a 1 in 10 chance of success.

Jerry Siegel liked to start his Slam Bradley stories with a bang and this one has Shorty walking into their shared apartment to find an ape!  An Editor can keep things moving in the campaign with random encounters, even when the Heroes are being relatively stationary. This is especially good for when the Editor doesn't know what to do next; just toss a wandering encounter at them and, hopefully, by the time the encounter is resolved you may have thought of a good reason for it to have happened (or your players will come up with something even better while they're guessing!).

Disguise works both ways; not only does a little domino mask or a pair of glasses keep people from learning the good guy's true identity, but a bad guy can disguise himself with just a fake mustache and avoid detection by Slam and Shorty.

In Africa (man, this story sure went a long way from an ape in his living room!), Slam and Shorty find a hidden city behind a waterfall, and across a chasm spanned by (of course) a rickety bridge. The city is called the City of the Ape-Men, but it seems to be a city of apes and men instead of ape-men. The tribesmen keep and control the apes and have Slam fight them with whips. How the Man in the Tall Hat controls the tribesmen, how he found them, and what he was doing in the U.S. is never explained. That the Man in the Tall Hat resembles the Man in the Yellow Hat from Curious George is purely coincidental; Curious George came out in 1941!

(This issue can be read at Comic Book Archives)

Detective Comics #14

200th post!

There's no Bruce Nelson on this page of Bruce Nelson, but there are some interesting items here. Skeleton keys always seem to work in comic books, so they must make for great trophy items.

Hollow brushes also make for useful items. Note that our burglar wasn't intentionally searching the brush, but just got lucky on her "notice things" roll.

Bart Regan and Sally are up against spies who have stolen a molecular friction raygun -- which sounds a lot like a fancy name for a heat ray to me. On the bright side, it seems to take a full turn for the friction to build up enough to wreck things or harm anyone, plenty of time for people to, oh, hop out of a car that's been struck. A good threat for 1st level Heroes, maybe.

There's not a lot of Hideouts & Hoodlums content on this page of Cosmo, but I'm really amused that these guys are poultry racketeers. "You're gonna buy your chickens from us, see?" "You buy our poultry at our price, or you'll get your head cracked open like an egg." I can't see statting them anyway special, unless I made a new entry called laughable hoodlum.



There's also a nice Slam Bradley story I'm not going to share here, that starts with a plane crash, includes surviving a blizzard in an igloo, and lots of punching people. Worth noting is that Slam beats up a drunken hoodlum, and that his plane cost $13,000 (Heroes have really been enjoying revealing how much their planes cost/are worth lately).

There's also a short, but pivotal fight where Slam and the unnamed master criminal grapple underwater, trying to drown each other. This would be difficult to play out in H&H, with its 1-minute combat turns. Likely, the combat would be resolved by a single pair of attack rolls before it would be over -- which is actually pretty close to how quickly the fight is resolved in the comic book.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Archives)

Detective Comics #11

Okay, now back to 1938!

Who knew Speed Saunders was so science fictional? Here, Speed has an oxygen evaporator on his diving suit that keeps him from needing an air hose. I'm pretty sure this was never a thing.

Speed's plan is even more unbelievable. He's jumping out of a biplane, after a power dive, in a diving suit, to get quickly to the bottom of the ocean right outside of New York Harbor.  So Speed wants to add the momentum of diving at maybe 300 MPH to his falling speed before hitting the water, bearing in mind that the water here may not be all that deep (New York Harbor was only about 20' deep, though I don't know how deep it falls off outside that).

An Editor would be within his rights to assign Speed's reckless player 30 points of damage...or an Editor could award him 25 XP for a creative way to keep the scenario exciting...

Here, Speed has a portable submarine detector, also known as a remarkably convenient plot device. This is something else that didn't exist; RADAR was around in the 1930s, but you couldn't work it from a device that tiny.

Well...no. Being a kindly Editor is one thing, but "area of effect" or "blast radius" are still things that need to be considered. If you jump overboard from a submarine full of TNT with seconds to spare before it explodes -- and you're a human swimming in a diving suit -- there is no way you swam out of range of taking some damage.

This is from Larry Steele, and I include this as a maybe history lesson. I was not aware they had underground parking garages in the 1930s -- and maybe they did, or maybe this is as fanciful as Speed's portable submarine detector...

Cosmo is a tough character to pin down to a class. My first thought was Fighter, last issue he acted like an Explorer, this issue he starts out like a Detective, and here he is, slinking into the shadows like a Mysteryman.

Speaking of classes, this is the third time in two issues I've seen a disarming shot by someone who's not a Cowboy. I am seriously thinking we need an easier mechanic for disarming shot. Maybe it could be automatic on a successful hit, in lieu of damage?

This is Bruce Nelson using a penknife to pick a lock. Bruce Nelson is clearly a Fighter. Should lock-picking be a skill available to everyone, or a special stunt?

It's also worth remembering, for those of us not in big cities, that street level is not always uniformly level, creating instances like here where basement windows might be accessible in an area behind and below the sidewalk.

No one intentionally kicks a bucket while sneaking; this is what happens when the Editor fails your surprise check.

Like a Jackie Chan fight scene, make sure you've stocked encounter areas with stuff the Heroes can interact with and use to their advantage. Here, Bruce has one bullet left and two "bandits" (they are called bandits, but are not like typical comic book bandits) to defeat, so he shatters a jar of acid and splashes both of them with it. 

I would have handled this by assigning the jar a simple AC of 9 (it is stationery, after all), with a hit causing a 5' radius splash for 1d3 damage.



And, lastly, in this issue's Slam Bradley adventure, Slam demonstrates the Aviator stunt, Wing Walking. I'm more convinced than ever that all of the genre-specific stunts I had previously assigned to the Cowboy and Aviator sub-classes need to become available to all Fighters.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Archives)

Detective Comics #8 - pt. 1

We've gone through seven months of comic books since I last had access to an issue of Detective Comics. No, still no Batman yet. This time we join Larry Steele, Private Eye, as he explores a hidden catwalk under the docks. And, while the story only shows one catwalk, an interesting hideout would be a maze of hidden catwalks running under an entire waterfront.

The lonely building at the end of the pier is a good place for a hideout, and easily defended from anyone approaching by the pier.

But the main reason I was going to share this page was because of the suggestion that in melee combat it can be "too late to shoot".  It seems odd to suggest that a gun is useless at point blank range, when it is actually most deadly, and yet in a game mechanics sense it works to make clear distinctions between melee and missile combat.

And here Larry gives us a tip about approaching spooky old mansions. Skip that front door and go in through a window!  Then head down to the basement as fast as you can, because that's where the real action is.

It's hard to believe that National Comics was so poor, per-Superman, that they couldn't print all their comics fully in color...

We know from TV cop shows that morgues use long drawers to hold bodies today, but if this page is accurate then morgues were still leaving bodies exposed on slabs as late as the 1930s.

I have a feeling this is not a lair of literal ghouls that Cosmo is going to find, which is unfortunate -- that would make for a really exciting adventure, with the morgue robberies being a great plot hook to lead to a ghoul adventure.

Bruce Nelson observes that yellow peril hoodlums use outdated weapons like knives and hatchets, while Americanized Orientals favor automatic pistols.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Archives)