Popular Comics #46 - pt. 2

We return to the Hurricane Kids just in time for a surprising (for them) discovery. Cavemen, on a time-lost island with dinosaurs? I'd be more surprised by how they apparently have access to really good razors or waxing.

I'm amused by that "The high priest, no doubt" from the narrator, based on no evidence other than his white beard.

I do have plans on adding a high priest mobster type in the upcoming Mobster Manual. I'll have to amend the caveman entry to say that there is a chance of a high priest being among them.

This is curious to me...I can't think of any car chase scenes I've ever seen where innocent bystanders decide to chase a driver down. If I ever revisit my chase rules, maybe I'll have to add something about a chance per turn of new participants entering the chase.

A rare use of shotguns by robbers (may need to update their entry to reflect a chance of being armed with them).

These guys are just robbing out of hostility! And always committing their crimes at noon, in the same city? They're just begging to get caught. Makes it easy for the Heroes, though!

This is The Mystery of Mr. Wong Featuring Boris Karloff. The Detective class I debuted in The Trophy Case is still the last un-playtested Hero class, but that doesn't mean I can't make some use of it for non-Heroes, and will probably include details from it in a detective write-up in the Mobster Manual. And maybe it should include a chance to recognize poisons on sight?

Or should this be a skill available to Heroes? If so, it would definitely be an expert skill.

$100 may not seem like much to today's players, but then players seldom need much encouragement to get their Heroes into fights.

More interesting is the idea of a villain taking a dive initially against the Heroes, so he can come back and publicly thrash them later.

Lastly, I don't think we should equate boxing rounds with combat turns. At a guess, I'd say a boxing round should be 5-7 combat turns in length.

This is Masked Pilot. There's a mystery as to why the Black Phantom thinks he's fighting in a war, but what really interests me here are the signs at the gas station -- "6 gallons for $1" and "credit cards honored," showing how experimental credit cards still were in 1939.

The Black Phantom fights with the strength of 10 men and...sounds suspiciously like a superhero buffed with the Get Tough power. Could this be one of the earliest true supervillains in comics?

This is from Shark Egan. In 2nd edition, I gave just example values for treasure items, like gemstones and pearls and left it to the Editor to assign numbers. Had I given a range for determining random values, I would have needed to use a very generous exploding die mechanic (like 1-4 x $10, with every roll of 2-4 triggering another roll) to let pearl values get all the way up to $500,000.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Smash Comics #5 - pt. 1

Black X/Ace doesn't have a clue where the saboteurs are, but he gets a "hunch" that seems to come out of nowhere. I actually wrote a game mechanic for the never-played Detective class that allows him to get a clue from the Editor.

The fight here with the saboteur is a mix of grappling and punching, and I've talked about unarmed combat on this blog plenty (and Black X/Ace doesn't dodge in panel 6; the saboteur just misses). What's worth noting here is that circumstances -- not anything in particular that Black X/Ace does -- forces the morale save (and that saboteur either rolled well or has a fanatical morale).

It's unclear what Batu is doing here, though it seems an awful lot like the spell Locate Object. The casting time seems unusually long, but if Batu is a Supporting Cast Member and not a Hero then the Editor has a little more latitude for changing how magic works for him. Now, the Editor doesn't have a lot of wiggle room for changing things like casting times -- once or twice to heighten tension and the players might overlook it, but used too often it will have the players rightly calling foul.

The crushed forearm is an unusual complication from an injury and, of course, one incompatible with the abstract hit point mechanic. I have talked on the blog before about adding complications for injuries for SCMs, tacked on to hit point loss, but this rule is unlikely to make it into the 2nd ed. basic rulebook now, mainly for space considerations (I'm already past page 110!). I would treat this, then, as just a knockdown/trip attack (and I do need to make sure there's room for that in my combat section) with some pretty brutal flavor text.

Those are some awfully convenient papers Batu finds on Taneo's body. Black X/Ace would be wise to say they were too convenient and might have been intended to falsely implicate another country. That seems a more convincing argument, to me, not to make the papers known.

This is some interesting alternate history, a dream scenario where just the threat of U.S. intervention ends wars. Future history will clearly show otherwise, that the U.S. can't ever seem to end a war in just one year.

The Chief's curious joke about what league the Dodgers were in is, according to Wikipedia, likely a reference to this: "In 1934, Giants player/manager Bill Terry was asked about the Dodgers’ chances in the coming pennant race and cracked infamously, 'Is Brooklyn still in the league?'"  The Brooklyn Dodgers had actually been in the National League since 1890.

Chic Carter is in "Moravia" -- what seems like a clear reference to the then-Soviet-controlled state of Moldova. But the "Arlbourg Pass" must be a reference to the Arlberg Tunnel in Austria. And Brennburg is a barely disguised Brennberg, Bavaria. But, if Chic's train is stopped less than 10 miles from Brennberg, where does that put him? Regensburg is the next largest city, but I believe that would be more than 10 minutes away by train. So that leaves Chic in some little way-stop village along the tracks. No wonder he thinks the place is dead!

The abduction of a Bavarian princess kind of makes sense. The Bavarian royal family, the House of Wittelsbach, was anti-Nazi, and the family's arrest after fleeing to Hungary earlier in the 1930s might have inspired this story.

Bavaria had no king, but a crown prince.

It's a bit of a stretch that the crown prince would want an American journalist's help...but, hey, if that's what it takes to give out a plot hook!

Some Heroes would investigate the duke carefully. Maybe search his home for clues. But our man Chic, he just marches right up to the duke in public and asks him to his face. It's a risky move that angers the duke into attacking Chic with a sword and implicating himself, but an encounter reaction check could have gone a lot of different ways than that.

I'm not sure electric eyes can do what John Law, Scientective, is saying they can, but it's plausible enough for comic books, and thus for Hideouts & Hoodlums.

Also, as a Hero, it pays to check under your hood every once in awhile to look for planted devices. You can never be too careful around villains!

Given how dangerous falling damage is in H&H, levitating someone 35' into the air is a pretty effective trap. Luckily the distance to the trees is shorter, though John's player must have rolled to hit to reach the trees.

(Read at Digital Comic Museum.)

Keen Detective Funnies v. 2 #3 - pt. 2

Okay, bear with me on this one. I know the art is awful, the coloring is that cheap two-tone effect some of the publishers used to save money, it's really creepy to see babies holding guns, and the black baby is grotesquely racist -- BUT, if you get past all that, the idea of an all-baby characters scenario seems strangely compelling to me. Not that this story would be a good model for one, as these babies only look like babies, but seem to be able to do everything a grown adult can do. Maybe Little Lulu: the RPG would be a better idea.

I also like that they have an underground hideout, accessible via a chute concealed in a fake garbage can. I could see a superhero team called The Garbage Men having a lair like this.

Oh, and there's another goat joke in the background!

And, lastly, I like that they go adventuring with a bulldog sidekick. I haven't ran Hideouts & Hoodlums for a hero with a dog sidekick since Omega Archer was 1st level, but it was fun and different.

I don't know if I should reward the players who try this or be annoyed with them, but the idea of breaking into a zoo, subduing the more ferocious animals there, and then dragging them along to the nearest hideout to sic on the inhabitants is...pretty twisted. I think any Hero who even tried that would undergo an immediate shift to Chaotic Alignment.

This is Pat O'Day at the top of the page. He clearly has surprise conditions against the two people in the room. If he had chosen to combat them, Pat would have chance for one action. But since he listens instead, the surprise turn can last however long the overheard villains keep monologing.

This is from Capt. Forsyth and Sgt. McLean, (kilt-wearing) Spy Hunters. I share it because stopping a war is something one would normally imagine as a high-level scenario, but in this case just stopping a single messenger stops a war, and can be accomplished by a single 1st-level Fighter who manages to get himself in the right place at the right time.






This is a Mike Moran Mystery. Note how Mike solves the mystery by sensing that the district attorney "never did look straight". No, it's not gaydar -- as a Detective, Mike apparently has a chance of detecting crooked politicians on sight. This would be a good addition to the Detective class (which debuted in The Trophy Case e-zine) -- though the Detective class will likely not be a feature in the 2nd edition basic book.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Detective Comics #21

Speed Saunders can walk onto a crime scene, observe the body, and tell from the visual symptoms alone what poisons might have been administered to kill the person. He also just happens to know where to find a mobster's hideout, even though there were no clues in the story about where to find it. Detect Poison and/or Detect Hideout might need to be an abilities added to the Detective class -- if the Detective class ever makes it officially into Hideouts & Hoodlums (it's currently an optional class from The Trophy Case).

Cigarettes tainted with prussic acid is both a murder weapon and a death trap in this story.

The Crime Never Pays filler page talks about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "Today, motor cars, fast patrol boats, airplanes, and motorcycles are used by the Mounties to aid the apprehending of criminals. There are more mounted police in automobiles than on horses." Funny, then, that whenever Mounties appear in the comic books, they usually are not using cars to get around...

Buck Marshall spends two days unconscious from going down to zero hit points.

In Spy, spies are shown to be better than average at picking locks.

In Crimson Avenger, grave robbing only warrants a $100 reward for information.

The Crimson's gas gun is shown affecting three beat cops at once.

In this story, Slam and Shorty burn quickly through $10,000 and find themselves needing to find fresh work. But that begs the question -- what did they spend it on? A dollar went a lot further in 1938, and 10,000 of them could buy quite a lot. If Slam was being played by a sensible player, he would be stocking up on healing pills with that money, but Slam seldom seems like he's being played by a smart player.

It reminds me of this one section of Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign, "Special Interests".  It broke expenditures into seven categories: wine, women, song, wealth, fame, religion, and hobbies. In this system, experience points for treasure were only awarded after being spent on one or more of these categories.  Hideouts & Hoodlums doesn't have that rule, and maybe doesn't need that rule, but the categories themselves are worth thinking about.

Wine:  Likely only the recourse of hard-knuckle Fighters, making your Hero a raging alcoholic not only gives him some pathos, but an excuse to do nothing useful during downtime.

Women: This doesn't have to be anything sordid. It could be a Hero bribing people to keep tabs on a femme fatale adversary, or a Superhero who has to hire people to serve as his alibis to fool his girlfriend, who doesn't know about his dual identities yet.

Song: Or partying, is the best way to rub shoulders with other members of your social class. It can be a great way to bring plot hooks to you, instead of going out and pursuing plot hooks.

Wealth: Or the generation of wealth, by investing. If players were interested in tracking this, it could be an annual rate of return equal to the Hero's Wisdom score.

Fame: Heroes generally don't, but could pursue licensing deals, court the press, or even stage events to increase their popularity. Maybe for every $1,000 spent, the Hero gets one +1 bonus to use on a future encounter reaction roll?

Religion: I'm not sure how to put a game mechanic bonus to donating to one's own church, or if that would even be appropriate. Most comic book Heroes are a pretty irreligious bunch.

Hobbies: Again, maybe not so useful for game mechanics purposes, but could be handy for role-playing purposes.

I'm not sure which, if any of these ideas, merit adding into 2nd edition.

Also, there's a trap, where Slam is supposed to fall into a pit lined with spikes. I'd like to keep additional damage for falling simple. If there are not too many spikes, maybe an additional d6 of damage. For a moderate amount of spikes, it could be an additional 2d6, and for a large amount of spikes, it could be 3d6.

(Read at Read Comics)

New Adventure Comics #22

I'm doing New Adventure Comics twice in a row to catch up, so this is the December 1937 issue.

And we'll start with Steve Carson of Federal Men, who's helping out the local police on a case (because different levels of law enforcement cooperate perfectly in the comics) and is able to crack a safe, despite safe cracking being "not exactly" in his line. More evidence that skills like cracking safes (picking locks?) should be available to everyone, or at least as one-use stunts.

Further, here Steve Carson applies make-up to disguise himself like an expert.

Previously, I would have bet money that Steve Carson was a good example of the Fighter class...but with these new skills on display, maybe he's a better fit for the Detective class, which appeared in The Trophy Case v. 2 no. 6.

This page is from the Monastery of the Blue God serial. Our Heroes see tat old stone tower and think it would make a nice place to sleep. I see that old stone tower and think it calls out for exploration!  There could even be a multi-level hideout under a spooky old tower like that.

This page also gives us a mini-history lesson, revealing that inflatable air mattresses were around in the late '30s.

New feature star, G-Woman, is pretty lucky here to have a charitable Editor. There is no game mechanic reason why kicking someone in the knee should make them drop their gun.



(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Archives)

Popular Comics #12

We're finally up to 1937, a year and a half pre-Superman.

And first up is Dick Tracy, who demonstrates disguise skills. Should this be available to everyone, or a special feature of the Detective Class?  The Detective Class debuted in The Trophy Case v. 2 no. 7, badly needs playtesting, and will probably have to sit out from re-release in the next edition of Hideouts & Hoodlums.

There's also a neat ambush trap, with gunmen loaded up inside a fake gas tanker blocking the road.

One of the oldest tricks in the game for making mobsters seem fresh and different is to combine them. So here we get a mad scientist, coupled with a jaguar on a leash, and you get an encounter more interesting than it would have been with either one of them alone (who were statted in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies and Supplement III: Better Quality respectively).

Tiny Tim has graced these pages before, but no previous installment looked as gonzo-creative as this one!  Here we get ride-able giant robots in the shape of a man (large robot?), a stork robot, "Dreadnaught Crabs", and a mechanical dragon.

Despite how impressive the latter two sound/look, I'd guess they're really no more than 6 HD robots, since they are easily destroyed by the "fire-spitter" weapon mounted in the beak of the stork robot. This seems to shoot fireballs or concussive blasts of devastating effect.  At least the stork robot has to be piloted by a midget or child-sized pilot.

Skippy learns that the most satisfying traps are sometimes ones the victim has to trigger himself -- like a camera that sprays ink in the face of the person activating it. In a more dangerous hideout, you could replace the ink with acid -- but be careful of clever Heroes taking that trap and turning it into a weapon!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)