Adventure Comics #48 - pt. 3

When we left off with Socko Strong, he was confronting Monte on the wing of a flying plane about Monte's attempts to kill him. In a clever trick, even though both parachutes are actually fine, Socko pretends he switched parachutes on Monte to give him the "sabotaged" one. You would think Socko would use this trick to make Monte confess, but instead Socko pushes him off the wing to panic him, just to pay him back.

Moving on to Steve Conrad, Adventurer, we find Steve on a cruise where he spots and recognizes 'Singapore Sal,' a notorious jewel thief (perhaps after making an INT ability score check?). When she leaves the deck, Steve is surprised she didn't notice him, suggesting they've met before (and letting us know that Steve had surprise in that encounter?). Sal's partner is called Slick -- he's almost surely a slick hoodlum. Steve comes up with a pretty clever trick where he has his comic sidekick slip a handwritten, signed note by Steve under the door, then listen to the two of them talk about their plans through the door after they read it. 

The next wrinkle in the story is that Steve tries to stop the valuable jewels on the ship from being stolen. The would-be thief appears to be Slick, but he's wearing a mask and, surprisingly, he manages to get away from Steve easily after just hitting him once with a sap (and not even a head blow at that). When Steve confronts Slick he discovers it wasn't him -- Slick is not wearing the same jacket and hasn't had time to change it. Although the wrinkle requires a bit of railroading to let the thief escape, it winds up being a pretty interesting wrinkle. The clue turns out to be the cord Steve tore off the thief; he doesn't know where he's seen it before until he remembers it was holding another passenger's monocle in place (if the player had trouble thinking of this, maybe he was allowed to "remember" after an INT check). 

The only other thing I'm going to say about the Steve Conrad story is that it is extremely verbose with big word balloons in almost every panel.

Am I just going to have to accept that it's a lot easier to throw a missile weapon hard enough to pin it into a wall in comics than real life? In Rusty and His Pals, Rusty manages to throw a spear -- and it's not really a spear, it's just called a spear in the story but it's clearly a lance -- across a room, knocks a man's gun out of his hand, sails right past him, and still hits the wall hard enough to become embedded into it. Did I mention Rusty looks like he's 11 years old? You know...sure, why not. Embedding in the wall is just flavor text at the end of the combat turn that doesn't affect the disarming attack or anything in the following turn. 

Having cleared the bad guys out of the house, they consider the clue they have, that they're supposed to look "behind Stevenson," and then they figure out that there's something in the library behind a copy of Treasure Island -- a clever clue, so long as no one felt like reading it and took it back to their room, of course. Behind the book is a button that opens a secret door. The boys realize they need to consider illumination issues behind the secret door so they all fetch candles. They mysterious passage looks straight out of D&D, leading to a small room with a chair, desk, and a small chest on the desk. The desk contains both a clue, a journal, and a secret clue concealed in a false top -- a single sheet of paper, the contents of which we'll find out next issue.

In Anchors Aweigh, we hear about the trick of putting cotton in your nose to make it look broader, when disguising yourself as someone with a broader nose. There is an interesting wrinkle to the story where Kerry finds out the man he's impersonating has a wife who he has to push away without making her suspicious. The last page, though, is terribly confusing. When the Naval officers burst in on the smugglers' headquarters, they leave the driver tied up in the elevator. The driver, trying to escape, makes the elevator go down with his feet. Somehow, the elevator doors do not close on their own (did elevators not have automatic doors at this time?), so the boss smuggler backs up to the elevator and falls. But...somehow he falls onto the driver at the bottom of the shaft and not onto the roof of the elevator car. Were there ever roofless elevators?

Lastly, Cotton Carver and Deela crash-land in a petrified valley where the challenge of this scenario is finding food! On day 2, they find a tree with edible berries (skill check to identify they are not poisonous?). Hunting for meat, Cotton knows he will run out of bullets soon, so he builds a bow. The terrain gets progressively worse for them; they come across a chasm thousands of feet deep filled with hot geysers, and at their backs they encounter three ape men armed with warclubs weighted for throwing. The ape men seem unusually intelligent and manage to defeat Cotton, then carry them away down to the bottom of the chasm by leaping from branch to branch growing out of the rock wall. Cotton was only stunned and cowardly shoots the ape men in the back (I guess with his last bullets?). Too bad he didn't try to talk to the ape men, because it seems like they could talk. They probably also were responsible for making the stairs they find, and the tall ladders that lead to the top of a volcanic cone. The volcanic cone is dangerous because of poisonous fumes in the air. Both of them make saving throws vs. poison and Deela fails, faints, and falls off the ladder. Cotton grabs her with an attack roll, then makes a Strength check, probably with a significant penalty (-5? More?) to continue climbing the ladder one-handed, while holding Deela with the other.

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

  

Adventure Comics #47 - pt. 3

Rusty and His Pals is worth mentioning for its setting; the old mansion with suits of armor, the graveyard, and the old-style inn back in the village all feel like they could have stepped out of a D&D module.

Anchors Aweigh still pleases sometimes, even though Fred Guardineer hasn't worked on it in eight months. In this installment, Lt. Commander Kerry is captured by Capt. Skinner. Skinner isn't your typical villain; he'd rather bribe Kerry than kill him and is willing to offer a cool million. I'm not sure how many players I've ever had who would turn that down as quickly as Kerry does.

In an unexpected twist, Skinner explains how modern day zombies are made, with witch doctors using drugs that leaves someone "mentally dead."In typical racist fashion, the Caribbean natives are not shown wearing normal clothes, but wear shorts and fight with spiked clubs. The witch doctor gives Kerry an antidote to get Skinner back for trying to get out of paying him.

Cotton Carver disarms a group of spear-wielding natives (The First Ones - this is stolen right out of Warlords of Mars and the Black Martians) by flying low and hitting their spears with his one-man flyer. As long-time blog readers know, I'm not comfortable with allowing multiple attacks in the same turn as often as it happens in the comics for the sake of brevity.

Oddly, although the flyer clearly has a wheel on it, it's turned around by use of a lever.

Cotton is knocked out from behind by a head blow.

The First Ones live in caves high up on cliffs that can only be reached by tall ladders, or by being pulled up on what look like swings. The First Ones put Cotton in the worst deathtrap ever; they leave him sitting out with his hands tied, waiting for vultures to eat him, though the vultures won't touch him until he dies of starvation several days from now. In retaliation for being minorly inconvenienced by this "death"trap, Cotton throws their leader off the cliff, and shoots two of his guards.

(Read at readcomiconline.to.)

Adventure Comics #46 - pt. 3

In Anchors Aweigh, Lt. Commander Kerry and Lt. Murphy are on vacation in California when they encounter spies who are armed with rifles and hand grenades (that's pretty dangerous to use against a party of two!). The spies have taken over a cottage because the land is useful for them to reach via seaplane. There are five spies, and they already have a radio room set up in the cottage's basement. Seemingly unknown to them, the shack behind the cottage is the lab for a chemist making another one of those super-explosives, and Kerry uses the explosives to blow up the spies. The one interesting wrinkle in the story is that the chemist initially appears to be a bum just pretending to be smart.  The explosive solution winds up being worth $500,000 to the chemist (good news, since Kerry blew up his house!).

Lastly, Cotton Carver has a new quest in his hollow world adventures -- the pirate chiefs (who are good guys?) ask Cotton to lead them to the mythical land of Sere, which is rich in radium. Cotton thinks this sounds like a great idea, despite the fact the people of Sere seem to be the rightful owners of the radium (Chaotic?), and that the Princess of Barlunda wants to marry him. Or does she? She doesn't put up much of a fight when he leaves ("You need excitement, Cotton.").

Barlunda has advanced airships that travel through unknown means (jets?). He also has a personal flier that looks like a surfboard on wheels (really not sure how that one flies). The flier is tough; Cotton can crash it through a wall without it getting a scratch. It can carry two people in a pinch, so long as one lays on top of the other.

The people of Sere (Sereians?) have advanced tech too; they can control the weather with electrical control staves; a priestess decimates Cotton's ship and his pirate allies by whipping up a tornado. Staff of Weather Control duplicates the mad science machine found in the trophies section of Hideouts & Hoodlums, only is much more portable.

Luckily, the priestess has another quest for Cotton, and when that turns out to be incredibly easy, he gets back to Barlunda and finds that the princess has been kidnapped. Really, if the Editor just put more effort into these scenarios, they would last longer and he wouldn't have to come up with so many of them.

(Read at fullcomic.pro)

Adventure Comics #44 - pt. 2

Rusty and His Pals explore Chen Fu's Liverpool opium den. As it typical for waterfront hideouts, there is a trapdoor leading down to a water level, where a motorboat awaits for a swift getaway.

In Anchors Aweigh, Don Kerry is a Lieutenant-Commander (I don't recall what his rank was before, but I don't think it was that high. Promotion through leveling!  In this installment, Don and Red attack gambling boats with grenades and machine guns, showing that your players can never be too ruthless for a Golden Age campaign.

In Cotton Carver's generic version of Pellucidar, he's gifted a magic sword that is explained like this: "encased inside the tiny ridge of the blade was a small drop of mercury. When the blade is held up to strike, the mercury rushes into the hilt making it seem lighter, then when it is brought downward, it slips in to the blade's tip making the blow harder and nearly unblockable."  It sounds like neither magic nor physics to me, but do we really need a better explanation for how a Sword +1 works?

Cotton easily takes out all opponents with his magic sword, but this installment features a rare instance of a Hero losing consciousness from environmental cold damage.

(Sandman read in Golden Age Sandman Archives, the rest read in summary at DC Wiki).

Adventure Comics #41 - pt. 2

Anchors Aweigh starts with a wandering encounter instead of a plot hook -- a known spy just happens to walk by! But it's to lure Lt. Com. Don Kerry and Red into a trap. It's a goofy sort of trap, though, as they run into a glass wall that somehow knocks them unconscious. How fast were they running?

Don and Red wake up in a deathtrap an hour later. Sin Yen, the spy, has them in an arena where they'll have to fight monstrous beasts until Don tells Sin what he wants to know. The first opponent is a large ape; at 7' tall, the ape should be 4 or 4+1 HD (being halfway in size between an ordinary ape and a prehistoric ape). Other opponents include a spider-snake (it's a huge spider with a snake tail, I guess, not sure what the advantage of that combination is!), and an octo-dile (a crocodile with eight tentacles -- new version of a carrion crawler, anyone?).  Further complicating the trap is more traps within the trap, including spiked pit traps, and a glass wall that slides down so one half of the arena can be flooded with water.

Skip Schuyler is given an interesting scenario to problem solve his way through: hi-tech cattle rustlers are using planes to make cattle stampede away from ranches, and then rounding the cattle into trucks, and guarding the trucks with machine guns. Interestingly, Skip doesn't even try to stop all the rustlers; he considers the pilot the weak link and goes after the rustler's plane. He engages the pilot repeatedly in a recklessly dangerous game of chicken with a plane of his own and causes enough failed morale saves that he forces the pilot to land. Then Skip hits the pilot with a rock and ignites the gas in the plane so the rustlers can't use it anymore. Skip is apparently fine with letting the local law handle the guys with machine guns...

In Rusty and His Pals, Rusty and his pals are lost at sea and spend three days drifting until a ship bound for Liverpool passes them and picks them up. Plot contrivance, or random encounter? Could the Editor have planned for several options, or even just rolled randomly between a choice of ports? Or was the next adventure pre-set for Liverpool?

I suspect the last option, as there's a bad guy waiting for them in Liverpool with a connection to their last adventure. Indeed, it's often a good idea to have at least one bad guy per scenario with a connection to the last adventure, as it helps keeps the adventures linked into an overarching campaign.

Cotton Carver meets a priestess who takes him through a secret door from the Shrine of Dagan to an underground river and a magic boat that travels on its own with just a command. They reach a magic gate that also opens when a command word is spoken (should I treat that as a trophy item too?). Elara the Priestess takes Cotton to a castle and a tomb where she gives him a magic sword called "Malar". Malar is the only weapon that can kill the Scarlet Seeress -- and that is the quest she gives him! She also gives him a "good luck" bracelet (a luckstone?).

Cotton journeys through an underground forest (how does that work? Is this a hollow world setting?). He is caught in a trap (a giant glass jar) and ...hypnotized? Charmed? ... by the Scarlet Seeress. The Seeress just leaves then to go lead her army towards world domination. Later, an old man uses a magic divining plate (like a crystal ball) to show Cotton where his sword went to while he was asleep, then offers to drive Cotton after the Seeress in his magic flying ...car?

I don't know what to make out of the "dark horde" the Seeress leads. Dark-skinned men? Demons? It's so hard working from summaries!

(Read as summaries at DC Wikia.)

Adventure Comics #39

Barry O'Neill begins having post-Fang Gow adventures, though Count Guniff seems to be cut from the same mold. Indeed, when Guniff traps O'Neill and LeGrand in a water trap, Barry would have been within his rights to go "What, again?"

Two things worth pointing out from this story: one, it is one of the first time in comic books where the hero runs out of bullets; and, two, Guniff's second death trap for O'Neill and LeGrand is a much simpler affair -- he douses them with gasoline and is going to brings a match towards them. That's a pretty serious death trap -- serious enough that I'd probably have it do 1-10 points of damage per minute to heroes until they can somehow extinguish themselves (like a save vs. science to smother the flames by stop, drop, and rolling).

Cotton Carver continues exploring his Don Dixon-like lost world environment. One thing to notice is that the hideout/dungeon Cotton is exploring is taking him down quite a few levels, by stairs and slides, but his encounters are not getting significantly more challenging. He gets to a dead end where he cannot proceed without having a special stone with him that fits into an indentation in the wall -- a classic dungeon trick.

Cotton fights a half-cat, half-man called a Watcher. Watchers must be pretty tough; this thing takes multiple arrow hits without going down, and is probably at least 3 Hit Dice. They're also Lawful because, if you defeat one and leave it alive, it agrees to repay the life-debt by serving you (or maybe Cotton just had cat treats in his pocket).

The animated statue Cotton meets seems straight out of Dungeons & Dragons. I wonder if it's a living statue, a golem, or if I'm going to be disappointed next issue by it getting explained away as ventriloquism...

In Federal Men, we learn more about how reefer works in the comic book world. It's "the drug that causes the smoker to lose all moral restraint". So, if you smoke marijuana and fail a save vs. science, you become okay with killing others (just like most of my players) and don't have to save vs. plot before you can take a life.

Jack Woods (fresh over from More Fun Comics) faces a bandit and an unusual dilemma -- a victim who isn't glad he was saved. Soon he's confronted with another dilemma much like one I recently used in my Monday night campaign. The Hero is hired to deliver something under suspicious circumstances. Does the Hero do the job and go home, investigate the sender, or investigate the receiver? It's a nice scenario because the Hero is free to choose and shouldn't be railroaded into investigating one before the other.

Steve Malone finds a cuff link. This is important because a cuff link is never mentioned in a story unless it's a clue.  If your Editor so much as says "cuff", you'd better be ready to take notes.

Steve does a lot of searching. He finds the first cuff link searching by a gong (not where you'd normally expect to find one), but finds the second one searching a bedroom where you'd expect to find one (maybe at a +1 bonus then?). There is a secret compartment hidden in a model castle and, unless the Hero has reason to suspect it's there, the chance of finding it is the same as a secret door.

Tom Brent is sailing down a jungle river, seeing no natives, but they see him and track his boat's movement. Which might not bear mentioning, except that there seems to be a lot of natives and they evade being noticed for quite some time. Maybe natives need to have a better (3 in 6?) chance of surprise?

The Skip Schuyler story has him pitching for the Yankees during a special game for charity. Which might not bear mentioning, except that it's so rare for a real baseball team to be named, and real players (Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio) cameo. Of course, in your home campaigns, whether you go with real historical figures, characters obviously based on real historical figures (with similar names, like Jim DiMaggia?), or entirely fictional characters is entirely up to you.

In Anchors Aweigh, because the Editor clearly doesn't have a new plot for them lined up, Don and Red decide to go hunt up some experience points, literally, by hunting crocodiles off the Panama Canal. They meet a wandering encounter while hunting who turns out to be a mad engineer who makes bombs (I can't decide if that qualifies him to be a mad scientist (Book II), a madman (Supplement V), or even an anarchist (Supplement I). Once the encounter has been rolled up, the Editor has to think up an excuse for the engineer to be there, so he concocts a plot on the spot for foreign powers to have hired him to blow up the Canal.

(Summaries read at DC Wikia)

 

Adventure Comics #37 - pt. 1

Poor hippo!  I hate this cover...

Barry O'Neill and Fang Gow definitely hate each other. Ol' Fang has Barry in a familiar death trap --  "the 'Water Cure' - drops slowly fall on his forehead, which will eventually cause insanity, then death."  I have never understood how that would actually work, but it's enough of a genre staple that it must at least work in Hideouts & Hoodlums. But how, exactly? Since it's obviously not an impatient man's trap, I'd say the victim would have to save vs. plot every four hours to avoid going temporarily insane. Then the victim would have to save vs. plot every four hours to avoid going permanently insane. Then the victim would have to save vs. plot every four hours to escape death.

Fang Gow's followers are described as bandits.

Cotton Carver and Volor the Dwarf are overwhelmed by the "reed men", so called because their skin is green like reeds. In situations like this, when "new" mobster types are clearly just "reskinned" humans, I do not plan to give them their own stats; reed men sound an awful lot like natives to me.

The bigger issue is, how to overwhelm foes with superior numbers in H&H?  If, say, 100 natives all try to pile onto a Hero, do you only roll to attack for the 9 who can immediately surround him, or take the collective pushing force, weight, and mass of the whole crowd into account? I here propose rolling to attack for all of them, and giving the Hero a -1 penalty to save vs. science for every hit after the first to avoid being pinned. Even high-level Heroes will have to avoid confronting huge mobs now!

Steve Carson of Federal Men is being led out into a field by three gunmen who plan to shoot him down. No slow death trap, no source of cover -- it looks like Steve's Editor has either decided to stop going easy on him or is ready to end the solo campaign! But Steve's player is smart and comes up with a good plan, to ask the hoodlums which is in charge and get them to fight each other. Given the life-and-death nature of the situation, I might just give him a win and let the trick fool the hoodlums, to reward him for his creativity. But if I was feeling less merciful, I might roll a save vs. plot for the hoodlums to determine if they fall for it or not.

Tod Hunter runs afoul of a jealous wizard with a new magic potion -- Potion of Suggestion (makes him vulnerable to everything said to him, as if the Suggestion spell) -- and a new spell, Life Link. I'd say this spell has to be maybe 7th level, as it's pretty powerful; the Magic-User links his life to someone else and if one dies, the other dies too. Tod gets Dispel Magic cast on him too.

Dale Daring seems a little useless in her scenario; she's surrounded by a company of fighters of up to 4th level (F4 = lieutenant). Still, every good die roll can be important in a scenario, and Dale is able to make the listen check that everyone else fails and allows her to hear the poachers coming.

Captain Desmo is hidden world-exploring and encounters a "prehistoric crocodile."  I'm not sure how big it looks in the comic book, but prehistoric crocodiles could weigh up to 8 tons -- we're talking maybe a 30 Hit Die crocodile here. I'm guessing the author had something less dangerous in mind -- maybe a giant crocodile should only go up to 15 Hit Dice? Regardless, Desmo and Gabby wisely run from it.

The human natives need Desmo's help against giants called the Mudas -- and the summary writer wasn't kidding when he called them giants. One of them apparently picks up Desmo in his hand! So we're talking frost giant size here, if not cloud giant size. And yet...the natives manage to bring these giants down with mostly spears? Something seems amiss here to me. I would probably stat the Mudas as hill giants to make them more killable. And I do plan on weeding out some of the giant types from H&H, so it'll be important to watch how many I recognize here in the blog.

Tom Brent, in a rare stand-alone story...is captured by an old man with a shotgun and misses out on most of his own scenario, as the local police catch the smugglers who threatened him. If you ever have a session of H&H that goes badly for you, you can take some consolation if it didn't go Tom Brent-level bad.

(Summaries read at DC Wikia)

Adventure Comics #36 - pt. 1

We rejoin Barry O'Neill's supporting cast, Jean Le Grand, collapsing from exhaustion, heat, and dehydration in the desert. It has already been pointed out on this blog that Hideouts & Hoodlums has no game mechanic for exhaustion, and that environmental damage should be accounted for by hit point loss. Does this story make me want to revisit that? No, because unusual effects can be assigned to supporting cast always at the discretion of the Editor. If it was the hero, Barry, suffering -- or more examples to that effect -- then I might need to work harder at emulating those conditions.

Barry O'Neill goes in disguise and it's a merchant disguise he's apparently worn before. Maybe disguises could be treated like outfits that can just be bought -- merchant disguise, old lady disguise, hoodlum disguise, etc.

Cotton Carver is still on a lost world adventure. He enters the domain of the White Warriors -- some pretty wimpy warriors who still have some remarkable advanced technology for some reason. They have paralyzing ray guns (though maybe not all their soldiers do), and some of them ride around in something called a "Vicla" -- a red tornado (no, not the Red Tornado, she comes later!) -like ...thing that you float inside and control by thought. The Vicla goes fast, but not extremely fast (maybe a 24 Move?), and seems to offer little cover (soft cover?) to the occupant.

Cotton also encounters a dwarf that sounds like he's straight out of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Tod Hunter moves through a trapped temple in his adventure. One of the traps is a heated floor ("Volcanically" heated -- so hot enough to do 1-10 damage? I recently used a similar trap in one of my home campaigns, where the floor magically burst into fire under people's feet if two or more people entered it).

Tod runs into a magic-user, but we have to wait until the next installment to find out what spells the magic-user can cast.

No game referee likes it when the players bring along too much help. A squad of cops or a couple of G-Men take some of the element of danger off of the heroes and makes the game less challenging for the players. Dale Daring and Don Brewster take that notion and crank it up a notch when they have trouble with a bunch of ivory smugglers -- and recruit an entire Naval regiment to aid them (Dale must have rolled 12 on her encounter reaction check!). The Editor can do two things at that point; he can either kiss his scenario good-bye, or he can up the threat level. In this story, the smugglers -- who had a hard enough time with Dale and Don in the past four installments of this story -- suddenly have mines they can use to try and sink the approaching naval vessels.

Don and Dale also use a cabin cruiser, which makes another transportation item that needs to be statted.

Captain Desmo flies into the Himalayas this time and encounters a new threat we haven't seen before in comics -- cold damage to planes. It's true, I have considered assigning hit points to vehicles for vehicular combat. I don't know how that would work yet. Hit points for living things is based on the mechanic of 1 hit point = 30 lbs of weight (roughly), but that would make for cars with 100 hp!  Maybe the weight allowance would double for each hp -- so 1 hp = 30 lbs, 2 hp = 60 lbs, 3 hp = 120 lbs, and so on.  That would put the average 1940 car around 8 hp, but a small passenger plane would be far more vulnerable with 4-5 hit points.

Regardless, another way to deal with this would be to simply tell Capt. Desmo's player that ice is forming on the wings, and ask him to save vs. plot or something bad might happen because of this.

Desmo hires guides and porters once his mountain trek starts. Obviously, porters are there to keep heroes from traveling encumbered, while guides give you extra rolls for noticing things along the way, like tracks, concealed cave mouths, and so on.

The footing is treacherous on the mountain, though. There is probably a 2 in 6 chance of someone falling into a snow-concealed crevice (like Irma Gladstone almost does in the story), so the more guides and porters you bring, the more likely you are that someone is going to fall, in that circumstance.

(Summaries read from DC Wikia)
  

Adventure Comics #35

In this installment of Barry O'Neill, Barry dives underwater and the bad guys assume he's dead because he stayed under so long. Villains seem to be terrible at underestimating how long Heroes can stay underwater -- so much so that they should have to save vs. plot to avoid making this cliched mistake.

Doctors are treated as a Lawful mobster-type in Supplement V: Big Bang because they have special abilities in comics -- one found here is the ability to quickly concoct antidotes. Dr. Bonfil crafts an antidote for Fang Gow's hypnosis drug in less than a day.

Shades of the Savage Land!  Cotton Carver's adventures debut in this issue. When forced to land on Antarctica, Cotton is saved by a group of people from the lost world of Mayala, a tropical valley long ago found and settled by both the Mayans and Incas (who are rival tribes here now). Though the natives have seen gunpowder weapons before, they have none of their own and Cotton's six-shooters make him a fearsome foe for the natives (and awfully handy for a solo campaign!).

It is unclear how Mayala can only be entered by swimming underwater, if the valley is open to the sky -- unless it is assumed that Mayala is a "hollow world" setting like Pellucidar.

Sleeping gas takes out an entire bank-full of people in this installment of Federal Men. This will be neither the first nor the last instance of sleeping gas being shown to be much more effective in the comics than it is in real life. The amnesia-suffering Steve Carson seems to have no trouble acquiring this super-sleeping gas, as well as gas masks for his gang, despite the absence of such things from the starting equipment list. Though perhaps we are just not privy to the separate adventure Steve went on to find these trophy items.

In Dale Daring, Don and Dale seek shelter in a cave from an approaching storm. The weird thing about storms is that, in real life, everyone rushes out of them, but there is little in-game reason to do so. Is your Hero going to take damage from getting wet? Is the Editor going to pull out all the stops on that storm and start pummeling Heroes with lightning strikes? Probably neither -- and yet Heroes should have to save vs. plot to resist the urge to seek shelter.

Tod Hunter becomes the second Hero in comics to suffer amnesia (since the other is Steve Carson, they both happen in the same comic book!). Maybe there needs to be a 1% chance every time someone is reduced to zero hit points and recovers of suffering temporary amnesia.

Large gorillas are strong enough to wreck things, at least against doors.

Both the Dale Daring and Rusty and His Pals installments revolve around finding something in the back of a cave -- a pile of stolen ivory and a secret door to a hidden lair respectively. It makes me think Hideouts & Hoodlums needs a random table for random cave contents.

In Rusty and His Pals, the villains have a seaplane. The villains also benefit from the Heroes lighting a fire in the cave, serving as a reminder for the Editor that any light source the Heroes rely on can be seen by mobsters some distance away (and vice versa).

(Summaries read at DC Wikia)