Detective Comics #33 - pt. 2

Larry Steele, Private Eye is pulling nightwatchman duty for a week before he sees some action. A masked mobster catches him by surprise. Throwing the vase to distract Larry doesn't give the mobster a bonus to surprise, it explains how the mobster gained surprise. In a rare instance, the mobster misses on his surprise head blow attack, but knocks Larry out on his next attack, in the first turn of regular combat. Larry must have only had 6 hit points or less.

This month's Speed Saunders story is nothing to write home about, except for the unusual plot hook -- while out hunting, Speed kills a moose with a dead man tied to its back!

Speed and one other man he rescues are outnumbered by natives 11 to 2 -- though for some reason these modern-day Native Americans are attacking with spears or hatchets instead of guns. The natives are consistently referred to as "breeds."

Speed volunteers to be the one to sneak out of the cabin and try to get help. The other two men in the cabin apparently think nothing of Speed being the only one of the three of them in a bright red sweater. Apparently, bright colors do not modify surprise changes.

This is the first adventure where Speed is referred to as a private detective; you may recall that in his first adventure he was with the FBI's River Patrol Division and, since then, it hasn't been clear who he worked for.

...And I had to skip the rest of the issue because readcomics.net was spamming me so bad.

Detective Comics #12

Speed Saunders is in a cross-genre tale here in the Mythic West. But aside from the pretty scenery and racism, the real lesson here is how long a fight can last in a comic book story -- 60 one-minute combat turns.

I thought Hideouts & Hoodlums needed fatigue rules for realism, and to keep combats from going on too long, but I didn't want to overdue it so there's only some minor penalties after too many consecutive turns. Past that, I did nothing with exhaustion, or setting a maximum number of turns you can fight. It looks like I made a good call.

Larry Steele finds out the danger of hanging out with people who have 100' deep pits ending in pools of lime behind their closet doors.  It's the fall that kills, doing 10d6 damage. Lime is dangerous, but not that dangerous; immersion would do maybe 1 point of damage per hour. The lime is clearly there just to remove evidence.

Here, Larry loses control of his car and crashes. Though Book III: Underworld & Metropolis Adventures has some guidelines for vehicular combat, I never wrote anything for car chases, or a mechanic for losing control of a car. My article on plane mishaps (The Trophy Case no. 8) comes closest and some of it might be applicable here, with some creative fudging.



The Slam Bradley story has an interesting twist -- there's a waterfall and no one falls down it!  The trope, of course, is that waterfalls never hurt anyone in stories, but it should.  There's also an interesting chase scene, with running across floating logs. I should think that's a lot tougher to do than it looks in the scene, maybe requiring a save vs. science at a -2 penalty?

(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 #9

Speed Saunders sees three hobos on a park bench and gets an unexplained hunch that only one of them is suspicious. What just happened?

Well, if this was a Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario, there are a few possible explanations. One, if the Editor wants to control the scenario, he could just tell Speed's player that one of the three hobos looks suspicious. If the Editor wants to let the player control the scenario, then Speed's player decided one of the three was suspicious-looking and the Editor just went along with it. There's also the possibility that all three of them were suspicious, and each served as a different plot hook. Leaving it to chance, the Editor rolled 1 die, with a 2 in 6 chance of Speed noticing the suspicious-ness of each hobo, and he only got lucky once.

It's also hard to determine how this scene would be handled in H&H. That incorrigible prankster, Speed Saunders, could probably have defeated this slick hoodlum, hobo, and corrupt politician from under the table any number of different ways, but elected to tie all their feet together instead. It's hard to imagine how an Editor would justify making his player roll to attack in order to tie each foot to the next one. More plausible is that the Editor rolled for surprise and let it work because of a lucky surprise roll. It's also justifiable for the Editor, in this scene, to make a saving throw vs. science for each mobster to see if he fell down, or managed to keep his balance.

This is Larry Steele, who's pal happens to have a gun on him still, missed by their captors. So what's happening there, if this is a game of H&H?  A freebie from the Editor? Or did the player suggest it and the Editor allowed him a save vs. plot to have an undiscovered weapon left on him?

This is Buck Marshall, and I'm half-tempted to add a "crease the skull" rule to the game, since it seems to occur so often. It does seem that weapons can sometimes leave victims unconscious for only short periods of time. Perhaps, when someone rolls maximum damage for a weapon attack, there should be a 1 in 10 chance of it temporarily rendering the opponent unconscious for 1-6 minutes?




I'm not going to show it this time, but I'm going to tell you about the Slam Bradley pages from this issue. One page shows Slam scaling down the side of a skyscraper at a dizzying height. Originally, climbing as a special skill was assigned to the Mysteryman class, but Slam is definitely a Fighter, not a Mysteryman -- strengthening the argument for making stunts available to other classes in the next edition.

Also, Shorty is caught in decent, if not overly original trap. A pressure plate in the floor in front of an obviously-placed safe causes a cage to be dropped over that spot from above (though how the cage was concealed in the ceiling isn't clear). The cage can also more of a delaying, or inconveniencing trap, since it can simply be tilted up/lifted off.

(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)