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 #10

Oops!  I had started to review this issue one day, got distracted from the project, and picked up on the next comic book in order. Now I'll have to go back and look again at #10 before doing #11...

How's this for starting with a bang?  Larry Steele is in a shootout, with some interesting things going on here. First, Larry manages to shoot a gun out of someone's hand, which is not supported by the game mechanics for "ordinary" Fighters. So what's going on there? The Editor might be:

A. Using stunts (Disarming Shot), but allowing Fighters to use them.
B. realizing that the gangster is at zero hp, but is using flavor text to shake things up; instead of saying the gangster drops, or something like that, the gangster has been removed from the fight by the loss of his gun (and, perhaps, will drop on the following turn).
C. remembering that The Trophy Case v. 1 no. 5 included optional rules for disarming during unarmed melee combat; the Editor is simply allowing those rules to stand in missile combat as well.
D. implementing a house rule of his own -- perhaps on a natural 20, the player can choose a special result from a hit in combat.

There are some other game mechanics possibly at play here. The obvious one is "misses his mark in the darkness", which could well be because of the hide in shadows ability for humans (the "-2 to be hit in dim light" rule), though it could also be just a situational modifier (since I am 95% sure I'm ditching the hide in shadows bonus in 2nd edition, for reasons shared elsewhere on this blog).

The other possible mechanic here is "driving Larry back," and this could be another example of covering fire, a new rule I just brought up yesterday. Only, then I was talking about covering fire making it too dangerous to move through an area, and this page suggests it would actually drive you back out of an area, which may be too powerful.

Also worth mentioning are the words associated with the bad guys. I've always treated "gangsters" as hoodlums, not knowing how I would stat gangsters differently. Any thoughts out there? "Thug", though, is an extra-tough hoodlum that was statted in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies.

Now, this page of Larry Steele brings up a good point about cars. Cars of the 1930s were things of beauty, and some of my favorite cars of all time, but one thing they were not was aerodynamic. That's why, when the mobsters' car is described as "streamlined", you know it's going to win this chase scene. So, "streamlined car" should be its own type of trophy item, which will always win in a race or chase (all other things being equal) against a regular 1930s/1940s-style car.

Cosmo is in India this issue, acting more like an explorer than a mystery man with a penchant for disguise. This is why Heroes need to travel -- because they aren't likely to find temples carved out of the tops of mountains in their home towns. The temple is a great idea for a hideout, but disappoints here, as the interior seems to be only two rooms big.

Note the wild dogs; I would use either the stats for watchdogs or wolves (both in Book II).

There's that disarming shot again! It's so cliche, maybe everyone should be able to do it?

This was probably Cosmo's most exciting adventure ever, so it's too bad it was wrapped up in just six rushed pages. It's hard to say what happens at the end that lets the villains all conveniently escape. Was that a flare bomb of some kind that blinded everyone long enough for the bad guys to pick up the mummy and flee to a secret door with it? Or maybe some sort of Dimension Door Grenade?

Bruce Nelson serials tend to be really talky, but here's an action page where Bruce grabs a knife thrown at him and throws it back. This should be possible in H&H, probably as a new stunt called Catch Missile Weapons, if Fighters are allowed to use stunts.

Bruce Nelson gives us evidence of two shots per turn, as allowed with automatic weapons in the core rules (and slower missile weapons at higher levels).

This month's installment of Spy shows us that anarchists are good at picking locks, and should get a really good bonus to morale saves, if they have to roll at all.

Buck Marshall, Range Detective, has some good advice on searching for secret things. Rolling a d6 and hoping for luck is one thing, but looking for specific things, like checking to see if the embers in a fire are still warm, will tell you information that requires no roll.

Now, Buck's advice about bolting the door behind you, so you're not disturbed while you're searching, may or may not appeal to players. Some players welcome the chance of wandering encounters while exploring as a ready source for more XP.

Slam Bradley, this month, teaches us that hi-tech weapons don't need to be found just with mad scientists. Here, a crooked boxing manager has an electric raygun, perfect for making murders look like accidental deaths (though taken from a murdered mad scientist, behind the scenes).

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Archives)

More Fun Comics #28

We'll start off discussing this issue with the Dr. Occult story, "Vampire Venom". Occult is the first man in comic books to deal with vampires (and this is his second outing against them!), so this strip should be seen as authoritative on the subject. We see that vampires can appear from out of nowhere (probably had been in gaseous form), and that they can have bat wings even when in human form. It turned within sight of their graves, they flee back to their graves rather than fleeing further.

In Pirate Gold, Dennis (there just aren't enough Heroes named Dennis) uses a whip to disarm. Given how common disarming is in comic books, I'm still inclined to say this is a combat maneuver that should be open to everyone and not a game mechanic specific to whips.

This page from Bob Merritt gives you a good idea of how large the scope of a war on crime could be in your H&H campaign. This isn't an enemy nation's air force in the sky -- this is a "gangster fleet". I'm counting at least 26 planes in that remarkable panel, each probably equipped with at least a machine gun. Looks like a battle for high-level Heroes...

This page of Johnnie Law supports an idea I've been having for an optional rule, where a head blow would have a chance of temporarily knocking out someone, This would have to be entirely different from the hit point mechanic, where being reduced to zero hp means a long recovery. Perhaps the attack roll would have to score 5 or more better than needed to hit, with the stated indication of going for a head blow, and the target would have to fail a save vs. science or be rendered unconscious for only 1-20 minutes?

This panel with "constant firing" is making me think of an optional rule for suppressive, or covering, fire. It would keep combatants from being able to move through an area, while not directly targeting any particular combatant.

A shot, like this one in Jack Woods, I would normally consider as evidence of the Trick Shot stunt for Cowboys.  However, it should be possible to make this shot even in a campaign without stunts or the Cowboy class. It might require a lucky hit roll vs. AC -1, however...

Brad Hardy's environment is a mix of the mundane and the fantastic. The intelligent races tend to be humans of a different color, like the grey people. Animals might be mundane, like pythons, or fantastic, like the bull-boar (which is itself just two animals combined). I would, at a guess, make the bull-board 3 HD, with a goring attack with that unicorn-like horn that would do 2-8 damage.


(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

More Fun Comics #22

This isn't so much a playing tip, but this page of Sandra of the Secret Service amused me, reminding me of my new players in a game of Hideouts & Hoodlums, and how tying people up and hiding them in closets was their go-to plan for a significant portion of our first session...

Hey, look! It's another villain, pushed backwards off a cliff and dies!  As often as I'm seeing this, I'm thinking that a "push back" or "bull rush" combat mechanic isn't the solution here. What this needs is an -

Official for H&H: The Falls off a Cliff and Dies Rule

Any time a Hero is about to get killed because of unlucky dice rolls, and you don't want it to happen (because it will spoil the narrative of the story, send a player home unhappy, etc.), you are free to have the Hero's opponent fall off a cliff and die. It is preferable, but not essential, that a cliff actually be present in the scene. 

The bad guy has the drop on our Hero, Wing Brady, his gun pointing right at him. The Hero's intention is to spin around, pick up a stool, and throw it at the gunman before he can pull the trigger. Our Hero is toast, right? Then you haven't read enough comic books. This is precisely why, instead of a realistic initiative system, we need the abstraction of 2 dice rolls, higher roll goes first.

I have no idea what giant vats of boiling oil were used for in 1930s laboratories, let alone futuristic ones. Regardless, they apparently make for good hideout decor.

Now, immersion in boiling oil could be handled in one of two ways by the Editor. One is random damage (1-6, or higher, depending on how hot the oil is) per turn until the immersed is rescued, and the other is a straight save vs. poison or death. The choice might say a lot about what kind of campaign mood the Editor is going for.

The ease with which a panther is killed by one of the Bradley Boys with just a knife is a good argument for going with same damage for everything, and not scaling to an expanded weapon damage system that penalizes the "lowly" knife.

As common as cannibals are in Golden Age comics, I've shied away from using them as a distinct mobster type. Instead, I've lumped them together with other racist portrayals under "Natives" in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies.

Here Brad Hardy encounters some kind of underwater dragon. The real lesson here is, as long as you can count on your players never to turn around and fight, you can throw encounters as big and spectacle-worthy as you like at them. Of course, then it's beholden on you, the Editor, to provide someone else to do the fighting for them.

Hence, mermen with underwater lightning guns.



In a page of Doctor Occult, not shown here, Jerry Siegel shows off his talent for cleverly playing with science fiction motifs again (as we have already seen him do in Federal Men). In the last issue, Dr. Occult was killed. In this issue, a scientist brings him back to life, ala Frankenstein's Monster, only here the mad scientist is more obviously the villain and the "monster" is more obviously the Hero.

The trophy item used to bring the Doctor back must be a mad science raise dead machine.

Proof that cowboys can climb walls. It's not just a Mysteryman skill anymore!

And lastly, a page of Johnnie Law, included here because it's actually an example of good detective work -- using a clue to narrow down a smaller list of suspects, and then meticulously tail each of them.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)