Popular Comics #22

Our coverage of November 1937 begins with another issue from Dell Comics, which begins with some pages of Dick Tracy I'm choosing not to show here. For those who want to go down to the bottom of this post and follow a link to where you can read them, you'll see Dick talking about poisoned chewing gum (trophy or trap?), and a hot playing tip -- you can write secret messages in butter with a toothpick, which will show up under ultraviolet light, or scratch a message onto paper with a pin and you can read the impressions if the light hits it just the right way.

Of course, we're also asked to believe that a bed mattress can serve as safe cover from a sub-machine gun, so the whole veracity of those tips feels up in the air to me now...

Speaking of questionable things, Don Winslow is shown hollow ice cubes holding poison gas. I guess that could work, but if you're really concerned about not leaving bomb fragments behind, why not just rain the poison down on the island in liquid form? Oh well. At least you could leave a freezer-full of poison gas-filled ice cubes in a walk-in freezer in a hideout, to catch Heroes who habitually try to break everything.

Bos'n Hal learns that incendiary bullets and whale oil are a bad mix -- but should incendiary bullets do additional damage if they hit living targets? Because Hideouts & Hoodlums uses an abstract combat system and one-time damage assignment, it largely ignores continuing effects like bleeding and burning. In Book II: Mobsters & Trophies, I assigned incendiary bullets an additional +1d4 damage because I figured players would expect it, and yet the anticipated demand hasn't been there; my players get more excited about armor-piercing rounds. More to ponder...

Smilin' Jack teaches us that radio compasses on planes were once a luxury, not a necessity!

Did I say before that the Skull Valley strip was getting out there? I didn't know the half of it! Here, we get flying plants, giant tumbleweeds, intelligent cavemen, gas cacti that shoot their needles like darts, and "nameless monsters" that have triceratops-like heads, but backwards-bending legs with clawed feet! I'm not even sure where to start statting!

...Seriously, the flying plants and the giant tumbleweeds are noncombatants, the gas cacti are more like a trap than a mobster-type, cavemen were already statted in Book II, and I can't tell the size of the nameless monster to help me place a HD value on it.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Popular Comics #18

Evidence that the best traps are the ones that are activated by your players' own curiosity -- "best" in that they don't appear arbitrary, or seems like the Editor is out to get them.

I've written before about cover, and soft cover vs. hard cover, but maybe that's too little to cover situations like this, when Pat is behind a window with most of his body shielded from harm. Should penalties to hit instead be based on percentage of cover, or is that not abstract enough? Things to ponder...

Like the importance of knowing the range on missile weapons, as evidenced here.

There is a long tradition stretching back to mythology of imagining ways to make man fly. It seems a little odd how often this keeps coming up after the invention of the airplane, but here we have an invented trophy item that makes people float in the air.

Killer whales -- 30 HD, with 10-sided dice? Not something you want to fight unless you're really high level.

Streaky is really observant. In some games, this would come from using the skill system to roll-play the situation, but another way to play this is just to ask smart questions, as the player, and have the Editor come up with smart answers.

Cars that can turn into airplanes are useful trophies. Tolls are terrible things and, apparently, could be as high as 50 cents back in the '30s!


(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Popular Comics #6 - pt. 1

Though I'm not a fan of the original Little Orphan Annie, here I do owe it a small debt of gratitude for showing me what a small group of slick hoodlums -- here called mountebanks -- could do to whip up a frenzied crowd against some Hideouts & Hoodlums Heroes. I did consider making mountebanks a new mobster type, but the charm ability of slick hoodlums seems like such a good match.

This page raises the issue of how to handle morale saves. Do you roll once for the whole group, or roll separately for each individual attacker? The rules do not specify, leaving this up to the preference of each Editor.



In Dick Tracy, we see trick shoes with concealed compartments in the bottom, and a miniature gun disguised as a fountain pen. Good additions to a minor hi-tech trophies list!

Believe it or not, but Believe It or Not will not turn up here often.  This time, though, the Bowl of Wisdom sounds so much like a magic trophy that I had to add it. Drinking from it should add +1 to the imbiber's Wisdom score!

Ah, the old "bucket of pitch falls on the head, then you step into a rope snare that pulls you off your feet" trick! It's a complicated trap: it must involve an attack roll for the bucket, then a saving throw to avoid stepping into the snare, which must be pretty easy to miss without the distraction of the bucket on the head (maybe a +4 to save without the bucket?).

Ah, the conundrum of being knocked unconscious!  In the game H&H emulates, recovering from being at 0 hit points requires a full day of rest. It sure doesn't seem like Pat has been out that long here.

In the next edition, there will be expanded rules for what may happen when a Hero reaches zero hp.  Some of the results are better than being out for a day -- but some will be much worse.

Smilin' Jack gets to ride in a hi-tech transport -- a stratosphere balloon, supporting a "gondola" that looks an awful lot like a bathysphere. Being able to ascend quietly to 60,000 feet might come in handy for Heroes some day.

That's quite a weight the grizzled prospector is pulling.  Grizzled prospectors do appear to be tough critters as a cliche, but I hesitate to stat them as Superheroes to get them that strong. Maybe they need to be a new mobster type?  Maybe one with the No Encumbrance power of Superheroes, but without all the rest?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum at http://www.digitalcomicmuseum.org/index.php?dlid=2961)

Popular Comics #4 - pt. 1

Besides Little Orphan Annie, Maw Green was another mouthpiece for Harold Gray's backwards libertarian spiel.  Here, Maw Green tells us it's okay to just grab some stranger's kid and start paddling them, if you think they need it.

Maw Green is also shown here to be a potent fighter.  Making a new mobster called the big maw, with a bonus to grapple and spank, might be called for.  Better yet, I could use it later for characters like Ma Hunkel...

Demonstrating that cowardly hoodlums can look like well-dressed gentlemen.

Also from Little Orphan Annie, Punjab walks through a hail of bullets completely unharmed and contributes it to a bulletproof vest.  A bulletproof vest is only AC 7 in H&H.  This must be a hi-tech bulletproof vest +3, or better!

Smilin' Jack is a catalog of flying trophies this time.  There's Jack's trademark flivver plane, the parasol plane, the autogyro, and something called the vacuum type plane, though I can't figure out what kind of plane that is.  It looks like it has hinged wings...?

In this installment of Terry and the Pirates, Terry, Pat, and Connie get a tour of a great hideout: an abandoned monastery taken over by pirates. Most of the strip details various forms of torture practiced in the hideout, but there is, near the end, a rather "delightful" trap detailed.  In a bedroom, the beds are rigged so that they will flip over and dump anyone in them into a crocodile-filled pit, if a lever is pulled in a separate room.

Tom Mix demonstrates two new stunts the Cowboy class should get: Cheat at Cards and Sense Cheating.

Ella and Her Fella reveals that a half-pint does not necessarily have to be a child, or even particularly young.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum at http://www.digitalcomicmuseum.org/index.php?dlid=3808)

Popular Comics #2 - pt. 1

A little Chicago blizzard slowed down my posting there for a few days, but we're now up to March 1936 and the second issue of Popular Comics!

In Little Orphan Annie, is Punjab casting some kind of Message spell by drumming on an old log, or is this some more plausibly scientific form of communication?  As with many things about Punjab, we're left unsure if it is magical or not.

Mutt and Jeff don't get into a lot of adventures, so we won't be seeing much of them here.  Bulls, however, are featured in comics at least as often as goats, and just as absent in the Hideouts & Hoodlums game so far.  Bulls are powerfully big animals; I would assign them a whopping 6 Hit Dice, a gore attack that does 1-10 points of damage, and a trample attack that does 1-12 damage, but the bull must be charging to use both and then suffers a -2 penalty to hit if the defender dodges from side to side. 

Mutt clearly survives here solely by very lucky damage dice rolls from the Editor...

It might be constructive to point out when something is not indicative of a game mechanic.  Here, in Terry and the Pirates, we see our Heroes forming a human pyramid to reach a high window. This does not necessitate any kind of climbing check. A particularly strict Editor might require a save vs. plot to climb a tree, as Terry does, but most people can climb a tree easily enough so -- unless there were no low branches -- such a roll could easily be waived.  And when Terry dons a dress, he's not attempting to disguise himself in the sense that he's trying to pass muster as a girl while interacting with the skull-faced villain; Terry is using it to try and get surprise at the beginning of the combat turn. If Terry succeeds at his surprise roll, then we can assume the disguise was successful; it would not need a second roll to determine if the surprise was a particularly good one.

Here we see an example of an old trick that any Editor can use. The Editor tells his players the mobsters shoot, rolls some dice -- and then ignores the results because the mobsters never intended to hit in the first place.  The rolling of the dice was just for unnerving the players.  This also works great with wandering encounter checks...

Just happening to find an old biplane in a barn, like Smilin' Jack does, could have been circumstance forced by a stunt used by the Aviator, but it is not so unlikely a plot point that the Editor did not place the plane there himself. Back in the 1930s, when airports were much less common, renting space in barns and taking off on their property was much more common.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum at  http://www.digitalcomicmuseum.org/index.php?dlid=1631)