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. 2

Steve Carson of Federal Men has an awful easy time investigating this one. When a judge appears to have been kidnapped, Steve naturally suspects the most current criminal defendant and just happens to spot two well-known mobsters outside the man's office. He follows them to a well-known pool-parlor (apparently pool hall is not a common term yet) frequented by the underworld. Now, how does Steve recognize all this? Maybe the Editor gave all that information away as freebies. Maybe he made Steve make skill checks to know it. Or, if Steve's player requested information, and the Editor could not decide if Steve should know it or not, the situation should be resolved by saves vs. plot instead. At lower levels, a basic skill check is easier than most saving throws to make, but an expert skill check is harder than both, so players might do well to be inquisitive and risk that saving throw.

Steve is shown to use an automatic pistol in this story. The judge was actually not kidnapped but was hiding out on his own after thinking he'd run someone over and killed him. The fake accident was arranged by the man on trial. Interestingly, the judge does not recuse himself, but continues with sentencing.

Socko Strong has a strange working relationship with Jerry Indutch; in addition to being Socko's trainer, Jerry is a photographer for the Daily Bulletin. Jerry and Socko are both lured out of town before a match by fake telegrams, but they luckily run into each other on the road as Jerry is driving back. The odds of that seem low, but a basic skill check could be allowed for each of them to recognize the other's car en route. A lucky encounter reaction roll from a motorcycle cop gets them a police escort back to the match (going over 80 MPH, no less -- must have rolled double 6's!).

Captain Desmo's adventure takes place at "latitude 70 degrees, longitude 30 degrees," which is odd because that's nowhere, but if you flip latitude and longitude it would be in modern-day Pakistan, which makes perfect sense for the adventure. The villain in this piece is Vasili Gerke, the sort of Golden Age villain name that is almost impossible to take seriously. Vasili has yet another of those rayguns that can make planes stop flying, but also has a complex irrigation system that allows him to drain lagoons and make them look like suitable landing fields, then flood them again later to hide the evidence. I'm hard-pressed to think of any other adventures where a mastery of irrigation made a villain dangerous...

Skip Schuyler is referred to as a lieutenant in this story, but I had to go back nine issues to find a reminder that Skip works for the U.S. Intelligence Service. Skip is romancing a general's niece outside a party and goes back in to get punch when she is kidnapped and dragged off. Skip can see the evidence of where she was dragged away, but apparently blows his skill check and is unable to track them further. Skip covers for his failure later when talking to her uncle, saying it will be easier to find them in daylight...you know, hours later when they could have done anything to her. Her uncle doesn't seem remotely worried; when Skip tells him he just goes "Hmm..." like he'd just been told a good brain-teaser.

While flying around over the area in his plane, the only clue Skip gets is seeing the sun flash off of something metal among the trees. Skip's player meta-games and assumes this is too important to pass up. Sure enough, that was exactly where the girl, Linda, was taken. Though the story began in the real city of Shanghai, it moves now to the fictional island of Hanyow. The kidnappers try to move Linda again by boat, but Skip makes his skill check this time to spot her. The kidnappers have a repeating rifle (automatic rifle?). Skip flies too fast for the rifleman to aim, but Skip has no trouble hitting their boat at the same speed -- this could be easily explained by the luck of the dice, though.

Skip's shots disable to the boat, but the kidnappers bring up a good point -- Skip isn't flying a seaplane, so he can't get to them and it's a stalemate. The scenario is effectively over for Skip at that point, who has to radio in Army seaplanes to finish his rescue for him.

Rusty and His Pals are in England (still? I'm pretty sure this isn't where they started, but their parents must not be missing them). To get out of the rain, they have to go try to find shelter at a spooky old mansion.  I think I've written about this before, but in comic books, if it's raining, you have to save vs. plot to resist seeking shelter. The old man in the mansion seems paranoid, until his bodyguard (not much of a bodyguard) is dropped by a dart to the neck, and then the old man has a heart attack (Editor's fiat, no game mechanics apply to heart attacks).

(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 #40

We've already seen The Sandman once, but here he is, debuting in his regular berth for the first time, Adventure Comics. There's a delightful slow build to the story after Wesley Dodds gets his plot hook. He spends some time mulling it over, while lounging in the dark in his smoking jacket. We meet his butler, Humphries. We get some unusual insight into Wesley's character, when he puts a doll representing himself in his bed, as if psychologically transferring his identity before becoming The Sandman. Before The Batman, The Sandman is the first crimefighter to have a secret underground laboratory (but not an underground lair; that would The Clock).

The Sandman is shown mixing his own chemicals for his gas gun. Last time, I said I was comfortable not giving Sandman levels in the Scientist class, but here he really does seem to be earning at least one level.

There's also a very interesting caption about color. "Then he dons all black apparel", the caption says, yet The Sandman is wearing yellow gloves, an orangish- tan coat, and a purple cape. It seems clear that authors had little input on the coloring of their own characters; the caption was overruled, but the wording was left there anyway.

The Sandman uses stealth (move silently?) to sneak around unobserved, climbing to get to an upper story window, and finds a secret door.

Another interesting detail is that the smell of his sleep gas reminds its victim of violets.

In Barry O'Neill's ongoing adventure, he has just been doused with gasoline and Count Guniff is about to light him on fire - but it turns out he had the wrong bucket and that was just water. A little help from the Editor, or game mechanics? I have had a player suggest the save vs. plot should work like that, with the player suggested an alternate explanation and allowing the player to roll for it. I'm personally opposed to giving the player veto power over the game Editor...but that does seem to be a reasonable explanation for what I've read here...

Steve Carson of Federal Men has fallen far from taking on giant robots to being knocked unconscious by two counterfeiters, one hitting him with a block of wood. I do envision Hideouts & Hoodlums to be a game that can move effortlessly between challenge levels. Maybe I shouldn't be entirely opposed to hoodlums having a special ability of "backstabbing" Heroes for additional damage, and a quick knockout...

Bulldog Martin is overpowered by three thugs (a pretty tough encounter for a solo, low-level Fighter!), but escapes from being tied up by rope by carrying a nail file on him. He foils a plot to murder a racehorse with a fake camera that can shot a poison needle (trophy weapon, but pretty useless to a Hero if you don't allow them to use poison).

Skip Schuyler is in Hawaii, helping a scientist who has made tiny explosives with the power of artillery shells. We also see a good hiding place to search in a scientist's house, the inside of a lampshade.

Rusty and His Pals is at a climactic scene rarely seen in comics -- an earthquake is destroying the island the whole scenario is taking place on, there's a single seaplane that can get people off, and various factions are racing to get to it. One could make a board game out of this scenario. Combat plays a minor part, but it's movement rate that really wins the scenario here.

Anchors Aweigh is on a new scenario. Don and Red get captured by thugs (that seems to happen a lot -- thugs are tough!) and are left in an uncommon deathtrap -- an island that will flood when the tide comes in, and then sharks will show up. They're tied up so they can't swim away, but escape using the old "focusing light with a pair of glasses". I don't think we need an escape artist game mechanic; rather, any idea you come up with to get out of ropes should just automatically work.

There's also an octopus -- and a normal one, not a giant one!

(Sandman adventure read in Golden Age Sandman Archives vol. 1; summaries of the rest read at DC Wikia.)

Adventure Comics #37 - pt. 2

Skip Schuyler works for the U.S. Intelligence Service and hunts spies...but when he needs a dictaphone planted in a spy's room, he doesn't do it himself -- he asks for help from a dictaphone installation specialist. That's a type of supporting cast member I never expected to need in the game, particularly since the last time I discussed dictaphones here, I said the odds of discovering one should be entirely random. Since all Skip's expert, Garth, does is hide it behind the radiator, I'm not convinced I was wrong.

Skip also uses a skeleton key instead of trying to pick the lock on his own. I believe I have talked before about adding this as a minor trophy item.

Rusty and His Pals deal with a drunken hoodlum and his superstitious hoodlum underlings -- by having an old man put white powder on himself and pretend to be a ghost. Everyone blows their morale saves but the two main villains, only one of whom is armed with a hunting rifle. This scenario awfully pretty easy, even for 1st-level Heroes.

And lastly, Anchors Aweigh -- which I felt had started so strongly -- seems to have come to a weak finish to its first storyline. Don Kerry guesses the identity of El Diablo on rather flimsy evidence -- that El Diablo seemed to have been trying to conceal a German accent, and there's only one German character who's figured into this story so far. Never mind the fact that it could have been another German Don hadn't met yet, or a clever villain disguising his voice to sound like he was concealing an accent; Don just attacks the nearest German and turns out to be right. It's almost like the Editor didn't even know who El Diablo was and let the player decide for him -- which you could do in your game.

(Summaries read at 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)

Adventure Comics #32

These are dark days for this blog, for that amazing resource Comic Book Archives has finally had its plug pulled by a vengeful DC Comics. Which means we're back to secondary sources for much of DC history not currently collected in Archive editions.

What I can tell you about this issue is that, apparently, Barry O'Neill picks up where he left off last time in Fang Gow's flooded room trap. Barry quickly finds a way to deactivate the trap and, it does make sense to have a way of deactivating the trap in the same room as the trap -- for the meta-gaming reason of helping Heroes stay alive, as well as the practical reason of allowing villains to deactivate their own traps if they happen to get caught in them.

A hideout burns down in Steve Carson's Federal Men adventure.  Players will always have to weight carefully the option of burning the hideout down. Will innocents be harmed? Will valuable trophies by damaged or destroyed? Do the mobsters have an escape route to get out, or will they charge out and attack the Heroes en masse?  Would the Heroes have an easier time going in and picking off the bad guys room-by-room?  In this case, the fire is accidental and caused by a dropped cigarette. Smoking rates really peaked post-War, but smoking was still very popular in the pre-War years. Smoking mobsters could be as big a danger to master criminals as Heroes.

Dale Daring, in her adventure, deals with the touchy subject of colonization, South American rubber plantations, and slave-like labor. Bear in mind that this is 1938, so Dale's progressive position is that the natives should be treated well and not beaten -- not paid a fair wage, allowed to unionize, or other modern considerations. Players should not be penalized for approaching these issues from a modern perspective, but neither should they be penalized for putting themselves in the mindset of the times.

The Captain Desmo adventure pits him against bandits and, like many earlier comic books, treats "bandits" as an ethnic/cultural role. Also like in some comic books, these bandits are well-armed with both rifles and machine guns.

Pre-Aragorn, Steve in Rusty and His Pals uses pillows stuffed in a bed to fool an assassin. This seems to be such an old trick that it must work on most people, unless they make a save vs. plot (like seeing through a disguise).

(Summaries read at the DC Comics Wiki)

New Adventure Comics #31 - part 2

Don Coyote is another gag strip, and another one of those "I thought I'd never use this strip as an example" situations.  When Don is challenged to a duel, he is given a knife, while his opponent plans to use a spiked mace, or morning star.  There's also a peculiar encounter with a skunk that Don refers to as a "wood pussy" ...which possibly only makes sense in the context that this is a pseudo-medieval setting and skunks, non-indigenous to Europe, would have gone unrecognized there.

This installment of Tod Hunter, Jungle Master, starts with Tod and company, very sensibly, planning shifts of watch duty for the night while they camp outdoors. Have to watch out for those wandering encounter checks!  They don't encounter anything all night, but they do meet two men on an elephant the next day. Isn't it often like that with random encounter rolls?

In The Golden Dragon, Ken Cockerill, comes to in a prison cell and gets led through an interesting-looking hideout. Outside the cell is a "vast shadowy hall, with towering sculptured forms on the walls. At the far end was something that looked like a huge altar, extending the entire width of the building." The altar has a writing desk by it. On the side of the hall is a "sculpted doorway" that "led into a sort of grotto, lighted by a small low altar covered with candles."  The Golden Age habit of including descriptive narrative captions was unnecessary in illustrated stories, but is gold for using as boxed text to read during adventure scenarios!

In the grotto, Ken sees an illusion, but it's unclear if his captors are casting Phantasmal Force, or if this is some feature specific to the grotto.

In Rusty and His Pals, at the center of the island is a high stone wall, probably meant to be the remnants of a dead volcano. Inside its circumference are trees, a pond, and a two-story house. The house is one big prison cell; all the outside doors lock from the outside, and apparently the windows can't be opened (or easily shattered, though Rusty and his pals don't seem to have thought to try that yet).

Despite the care Fred Guardineer has put into Anchors Aweigh, this strip has been relegated to the back of the issue. Red is captured in this issue and is brought before a hooded man who is apparently the "Diablo" he's been looking for. Interesting, Diablo will not speak directly to Red, to keep Red from having the chance of recognizing his voice.

Diablo's bad guys have a sneaky idea -- they tell Red at knife point that he has to read something aloud because they have members who might recognize his voice, but it's a trick to record his voice so they can use it to lure Don into a trap.

(This issue can be read at Comic Book Archives)

New Adventure Comics #26

The first crossover in comic book history was not Batman and Superman. It was not the Shield and the Wizard. It was this installment of Federal Men, guest-starring Sandy Kean of Radio Squad -- even though they never leave the car and we are only told the radio squad is in there. One month before introducing Superman, Siegel and Shuster were already building a shared universe for their characters.

Nadir, Master of Magic, is probably the most reluctant caster of spells of all magicians -- or an actual first-level Magic-User with only one spell. In this installment, we find Nadir doing nothing more remarkable than climbing a tree.  But -- a palm tree? That should be nearly impossible to climb as he's shown doing it. Could this be the first instance of the spell Spider Climb in comic books...?

This is The Adventures of Rusty and His Pals, the feature Bob Kane did before Batman.  It makes the intriguing suggestion that there are both good and bad pirates. The pirates statted in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies were definitely the bad type. I wonder what good pirates would be like...?

There are all kinds of situations that keep popping up in the comics that Hideouts & Hoodlums, as yet, has no rules to handle.  Case in point, how many miles one can cover per day on foot, and how long one can force a march before becoming exhausted. The closest there is are the fatigue rules for combat.

Off-hand, I'd rule that you can move 25 miles in a day, +1 mile for every made save. vs plot.

This is from new feature Captain Desmo.  Yesterday I was talking about campaign moods and how dark Golden Age comics could get. It doesn't get much darker than this last panel, with the newlyweds discussing her suicide to avoid a fate worse than death if captured...

Does Captain Desmo really have grenades? As an Aviator, he has access to the stunt Bomb, which lets him act like he has grenades to drop from his plane. There are several stunts that Aviators can use to "give themselves" trophy-like items that not only exist as flavor text, but can affect combat temporarily.

Also note, Fighter-types can smoke cigarettes.

I was thinking I might be able to make some point about this page in regards to using cover in combat, or "concealing" trophy weapons where they can be easily found if needed -- but, really, I think I'm going to share this page because I would always put down Centaur for being so racist, but DC could be really racist too.



(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Archives)