Action Comics #22 - pt. 1

It blows my mind that, 5 1/2 years into this project, I still haven't finished the first 2 years of Superman stories yet!

In Cleveland, the Daily Star wants its star reporters, Lois and Clark, to cover the War in Europe. Only this war is between Toran (Germany) and Galonia (France?). Rather than sending them to either country, they are shipped (literally, by steamship) to Luxor (Luxembourg), one would assume for the protection of Luxor's neutrality. That won't last much longer, as Luxembourg will be invaded in May 1940 -- but gets bombed already in this story!

Superman's telescopic vision makes him extra-observant/more alert, allowing him to spot a shadowy figure and foil his surprise. Superman, still dressed as Clark Kent, foils the would-be assassin with a thrown belaying pin. Since the panels don't give us a sense of the distances involved, it's impossible to say if Superman is using his powers here, or if he is throwing the pin as far as an ordinary person would be able to throw one.

When the bombs start dropping on Luxor/Luxembourg, Superman leaps up to engage the bomber. He is clearly still leaping at this point, since he has to hold onto the plane to keep from falling. A low-level bomber was probably flying at 15,000 feet, meaning Superman is using Leap III, a 3rd-level power. He wrecks the propeller using his wrecking things mechanic, but choosing to wreck it in such a way that it would normally hurt him, and it doesn't, means he's also already activated his Invulnerability power (level 4). We know he's impervious because he then plunges to the ground from that height and is unharmed. His invulnerability lasts three turns, meaning that Superman is 9th level. At this time, Superman has been around long enough to have enough XP to be 6th level, which means at some point his Editor has given him three brevet ranks to accelerate his power inflation. That...or I need to make the Invulnerability power last longer...

Later, when Superman stops a torpedo and throws it back at the submarine that fired it, that could be the power Turn Gun on Bad Guy in play, but the sequence lasts a whole seven panels, suggesting that other game mechanics might be involved. This might be because the torpedo is slow enough to give him a turn of action first before it strikes, and he grapples it to in order to make it miss, then throws it as an "ordinary" missile weapon.

Next, Superman's X-ray vision picks up a new danger, just as his telescopic vision had before. In this regard, his vision is just a "super-sense" that warns him of danger.

When a ship captain wants Superman to answer some questions, Superman makes a topical reference to "Professor Quiz." Professor Quiz was radio's first true quiz program, broadcast with many different sponsors from 1936 to 1948 on CBS and ABC.

In the end, Siegel naively assumes that German attacks on neutral nations must be the work of insubordinate underlings, and they are punished after Superman confronts them.

In Pep Morgan, we find out that Pep is a volunteer fireman and likes to play pinochle. Firefighting is much more exciting than sports, so I wish they'd stuck with this! When someone is unconscious in a burning building, Pep finds her by methodically searching, no doubt making search rolls each turn. He never seems to be in danger from fire or smoke damage, though.

The next day, having no investment in the storyline other than personal curiosity, Pep returns to the scene and searches for clues. He now finds a match and the smell of gasoline in the grass. A generous Editor could give him both clues with one successful search roll, particularly since he finds them together. Had he thought to search the night before he might have noticed the gasoline smell, but the Editor would likely make a common sense call that the match could not be found in the dark. Naturally, no non-Heroes notice the gasoline smell, to give the Hero a chance to find the clue first.

This is the second suspicious arson in town and Pep finds out all he can about his suspects by pumping non-Hero characters, like a bartender, and his own supporting cast, like his dad, for information. That Pep is getting a drink from a bartender is very interesting, since Pep always seems to be around 18. In 1940, there were 14 states where an 18 year old could legally drink, including New York, where Pep's stories most likely take place.

Pep and his friend Ted stake out the next house Pep thinks will be burnt down for six days before they get lucky and catch the arsonist in the act. All this time, they don't tell the owner, for fear the man will tell his wife -- the implication being that you can't trust women with gossip. While chasing after the arsonist, Pep slips in "wet grass" - very convenient, but likely just flavor text for having failed a skill check to catch up in the chase sequence, and not an indication of any kind of fumble mechanic for chases.

Pep is able to borrow the owner of the house's car to continue the chase, meaning Pep either stole the keys from the house earlier or Jack (the owner) leaves his keys in the car at night. The car chase ends with Pep sideswiping the other car with Jack's car and wrecking the arsonist's car. A fighter has no chance of wrecking things vs. cars -- by himself, but I could see giving him an additional d6 back (normal wrecking things chance, up to 4th level), if using a vehicle to wreck with.

In a sort of a plot twist, the arsonist turns out to be just who you expected all along, instead of going for someone surprising.

"Chuck" Dawson is tracking a killer and finds a clue on the ground -- the silver honcha Chuck shot off his hat band as the killer was riding away. If you're wondering what a honcha is, so was I...it's what looks like a little buckle on some hat bands. You don't call it a buckle because, in most cases, the honcha is merely decorative and doesn't work like a buckle.

I don't normally like "Chuck" Dawson, but he gets in some good dialog in this installment that makes him more enjoyable; my favorite line is, "You're going to feel about as comfortable as a sage-hen in a coyote party..."

(Superman story read in Action Comics Archives vol. 2, the rest read at readcomiconline.to)

Fight Comics #3 - pt. 2

We're going to skip the introduction and jump right into this issue's Kinks Mason story. These mermen are too strange to stat as ordinary mermen. They are called nothing but amphibians all through the story, so I'll keep that name. They don't seem all that tough; I wouldn't give them more than 1+1 Hit Dice (Kinks kicks their butts bare-handed), plus a -1 to hit because of their monocular vision. As true amphibians, they suffer no penalties for fighting out of water. Maybe they get a +1 to grappling rolls too, since it seems to be the only thing they're good at? It looks like they can be encountered in groups up to 8.

I don't have much to say here, but I like the layout of this factory. There's enough detail that one could start to fashion a map based on it.

"Huge fish?" Is Kinks not aware that looks like a dolphin or porpoise?

Kinks is immune to the bends, or just making all of his saving throws?

It's unclear if Kinks has more than one crew member on his boat. It doesn't seem to be that big, so it's possible there is just this one guy.

Wait, didn't they want to test that ray on Kinks first? I guess Plan B was to invade the surface world without running any tests on the ray yet.

Kinks' strategy might work over time in a chase scene; if not everyone makes their skill checks to increase speed, then some pilots will fall behind and create these gaps between ships.

This is also an interesting example of rayguns having limited charges. 

Spoiler - Kinks wins. So let's jump ahead to Fletcher Hawks' favorite lumberjack, Big Red McLane. We've talked before about pacing golden age scenarios and sometimes they can require a lot of patience (this is baked into Hideouts & Hoodlums in various ways, from the low chance of wandering encounters to the slow rate of healing from hit point loss). Here, we see that Big Red has to wait out in the woods for two whole days before this encounter finally happens.

The six bad guy lumberjacks -- what do I stat them as? Brigands, maybe? -- they don't fare well against Big Red despite two of them having weapons vs an unarmed attacker, and using the tactic of surrounding him to make sure at least some of them are getting an attack-from-behind bonus to hit.

This is an unusual reward for a scenario, both the flapjacks and the percentage stake in the company rescued. The latter is actually a great idea, giving the Hero(es) incentive to keep protecting the company against future threats.

The lumberjacks were careful to use facing to their advantage in the above encounter, so I share this page of Oran of the Jungle to show how Oran deliberately tosses away any benefit he would have from it by jumping down into the middle of the group of natives. It seems like the smart thing to do would have been to jump down before they reached him, so he can block them from getting to the village, or jumping down after them, so he can attack them from behind. The only benefit I can see here is if he is expecting to get the "combat machine" advantage of fighters and multiple attacks against low Hit Die mobsters, so he places himself within reach of the maximum number of opponents.

Oran tracks them all night. Just think about how dark that second panel would really be, then, compared to how clearly we see the tracks in the dirt, and try to imagine what kind of penalty you would assign to Oran's tracking skill check. Then he successfully tracks them for hours. How many skill checks should that be? I would count this time in exploration turns, which means he has to succeed at six skill checks per hour. That is a lot of lucky rolls!

Oran is overwhelmed because the natives use "heavy weapons." H&H doesn't distinguish between normal weapons and heavy weapons. I would take this simply to mean that the weapons feel heavy as they are bludgeoning him for so many points of damage.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

All-American Comics #4-6

From the tail end of #4...

From Hop Harrigan, I learned that air mail pilots were required to be armed.

Spot Savage, a humor/adventure strip with an odd sense of humor, has had Spot locked up in an insane asylum, in a straight jacket, for one week of "game time" now. I can't imagine any players being happy with that game session.

Moving on to #5...

From Red, White, and Blue, we learn that a live turkey is worth $4.  We see the boys, on leave, playing banko, which as late as the 1980s was still another name for the game of bingo. They also play the card game hearts. While searching a room for clues, they find money and a note hidden in a hollow ashstand (a stand for an ashtray to sit on).  Instead of spies, they seem to be opposing anarchists this time. The chief anarchist calls them "cannon fodder," which is amusing because the term gets thrown around a lot in RPG games. It's also interesting to me that they go to a carnival with a shooting gallery and an old mill ride, as both figure into the upcoming adventure module RT2 Adventures in Fun World.  Policeman Mike Flynn (another old friend of Red's) joins them as Supporting Cast this time, and is helpful at catching all the lookouts posted by the anarchists. Lastly, it is interesting that after beating up the anarchists, the policeman admits that the only charge they can charge them with is for concealed weapons. This could be another good reason for Heroes to go into scenarios barehanded instead of using weapons.

According to Reg'lar Fellers, admission to an all-you-can-eat strawberry-eating festival would be $1. I wonder how common those were.

Ben Webster meets an inventor who has put together a thought radio. It can record and play back someone's thoughts, but the person has to be standing about 5' in front of the radio and has to stand still for at least 1 melee turn. It even works on animals.  Curiously, people they meet are quick to believe in the thought radio, rather than suspect Ben and his friend of some kind of hoax.

In Mystery Men of Mars, the Martian pill-bug men have a melting ray that looks sort of like a planetarium projector. It is revealed that Ted's gun is an automatic, and he has to change the clip between throwing slugs into advancing Martians. In fact, so many Martians fall to his vicious onslaught that the bodies become stacked up too high for more Martians to enter the tunnel. I suspect that Ted is making a lousy first impression of Earthlings for them.

Hop Harrigan runs afoul of an arsonist, a mobster type that debuted in Supplement V and will be in the 2nd edition Mobster Manual. Hop can't escape the deathtrap the arsonist puts him in and would have died, but a new character (Gerry) shows up and saves him, then becomes a temporary Supporting Cast Member for next issue. Because Hop's cheap plane (he'll get fancier ones later) is still lined with paper, he has to be very careful about burning embers falling on it and combusting his whole plane.

In Bobby Thatcher, a half-pint is able to kick open a stuck door. For that matter, Gerry was a half-pint too and was able to do pushing "damage" to Hop to land him in a fountain after his clothes caught on fire.  Being young and small does not affect their abilities much -- except in Scribbly, Scribbly is so sickened by a dollar cigar that he's effectively stunned.

In Spot Savage, the "Duchess" breaks into a safe and finds $60,000 in negotiable bonds.

In Scribbly, we learn that Scribbly earned $8 a week as an office boy, plus $2 for every cartoon of his that got published.

I don't know if I've ever gleaned RPG material out of Toonerville Folks before, but this one page tells me that a carpenter would work to fix a shed for $7 back in the '30s.

And on to #6!

In Red, White, and Blue, it appears that Doris lives with her aunt, and that Whitey still lives at home with his parents. Blooey has a pet parrot that stays with him like a Supporting Cast Member.  Of course, the parrot saves the day later by repeating something it hears. Red is thwarted from snooping at a window by a noisy cat, which in this instance is just as effective as a watchdog.  The bad guys are saboteurs again, but since they are all kind of Japanese-looking, this time they are spies. There are five spies, and one of them has a sub-machine gun.  The leader has a pistol and knife and goes by "The Eye." Although much of the fight happens off-panel, Blooey beats a saboteur with a shovel so hard that the man has to go the hospital. 

(Read at fullcomic.pro.)

Keen Detective Funnies v. 2 #2

And we're back!

Meet Dean Denton. He's a scientist-ventriloquist -- yeah, I'm still wrapping my head around that -- who turns his talents towards fighting crime. Not too surprisingly, Dean never once relies on ventriloquism in this adventure, but he is clearly a scientist.

When I developed the Scientist class for Supplement III: Better Quality, my focus was solely on making a class specialized in inventing things. But Dean, perhaps the first scientist-adventure hero original to comics, never invents anything in this story. Instead, he's good at gathering information, short-circuiting power to sections of the hideout, and finding secret doors.

Speaking of secret doors, this page made me think about secret doors in hideouts and -- how do the mobsters who need to use the doors know how to find them? It makes sense that there would be a secret marker over secret doors that, if you knew what to look for, you would spot right away -- like the sun emblem that appears to be over this secret door. Of course, if you use that in your hideout, then once Heroes figure out the secret marker once, they'll know where all the secret doors are. But maybe that's not such a bad thing.

This is Ben "Little Dynamite" Trumpson. I could point out that this car chase is resolved with evasion instead of combat, and Hideouts & Hoodlums' car chase mechanics need to account for both. I could point out that smokescreen ejectors have been on the H&H trophy list since Book II: Mobsters & Trophies.  I could point out that playing a Fighter who is really a beat cop makes it real easy for the Editor to dole out plot hooks to you, but could also give the campaign a "railroad-y" feel, since you would be under orders to take up quests in the order given to you. But I'm mainly pointing this out because it might be the first published work by Jack Cole.

"We've invented a secret compartment in the back of a car! We call it...a trunk!"

I can also point out the pacing of this scenario. I think my players would balk if I had them spend six days in the trunk of a car waiting for a wandering encounter. But then, I don't like to hand-wave time passing too quickly.

And then there's the interesting idea of making a parking garage into a hideout.

Proof that you get more than one chance at open doors rolls.

I also had an idea today for a new rule about playing possum. It will become such a cliche in comics, that playing possum should afford some game mechanic advantage. Maybe allowing for a new surprise roll if your opponent fails a save vs. plot?

I need vehicular combat rules with something about ramming damage.

It's also really interesting how it takes Trumpson "two weeks" to heal from "a few cuts and bruises". Of course, the police chief could be exaggerating -- or, this could be proof that, outside of getting some hit points back after a "short rest", that healing should be a slow and laborious process in H&H.

This is Stoney Dawson, who takes a flesh wound to the head from a gunshot and is just "dazed".  We don't have rules for dazing in H&H.  It was possible Stoney was knocked out, but recovered after a short rest. Another possibility is to have a low chance after any damage of being temporarily stunned.

Also note the medieval castle -- you can still have those in H&H!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

The Comics #4

Dresses cost $11, or at least the flimsy dresses that rip while you're punching through fences in Wash Tubbs' strip do

It may seem unlikely that a gunman could shoot a moving rope, but six gunmen, minutes later, are shooting it out in the street and continually missing each other. There are a couple of possible in-game explanations. Perhaps Tom Mix just got lucky -- maybe his Editor gave him a 1 in 20 chance and he rolled well?  Or Tom's player used a stunt like Trick Shooting.

As for everyone missing each other in the street, that's not so unbelievable, given that the average shooter only has a 50-50 chance of hitting. And even then, the Heroes get a save vs. missiles to avoid being shot.

This is Dr. Doom, International Spy's henchman breaking in thanks to drugged wine. It's good that the henchman is doing it, because drugging people is a big no-no for Heroes. I would even make a Chaotic Hero save vs. plot to do this, though maybe at a bonus, with a Lawful Hero having to save at a penalty.

A wagon with a false bottom might not seem like much of a trophy item, but it depends on the setting. This would be a great trophy for a Western campaign just as much as this scenario, set in a poor European country.

Speedboats, like the one Tom Beatty is using, are probably more exciting trophies for Heroes to pick up, but they might come with more risks. There's no game mechanic for shooting at a boat and maybe hitting its gas tank, but an Editor can add complications like that to a scenario any time he feels like it.

This one is odd, as the effect of tear gas is so seldom shown as unconsciousness in comics. It's probably because of the confined space, but there's no game mechanic for that. Maybe G-Man Jim has been exposed to extra-strong tear gas.

Then this page of Myra North, Nurse deals with story pacing. An Editor would have to be very careful and know his players well before making them go a whole week without a clue. Many players would be tempted to ditch the whole scenario long before then.



In [Alley] Oop and Dinny, they go over a waterfall and survive. Of course, in fiction, everyone who goes over a waterfall survives!  An Editor could safely make the same assumption for his campaign, or be harsher and make everyone save vs. science to avoid drowning.

I really don't recommend this trick, seen in Lone Marshal, of allowing thrown knives to pin hands to walls or tables. For one thing, it's just gross. For another, it makes knives very dangerous in combat and players are not going to enjoy having this attack used against them.

At best...the Editor might consider a knife throwing mobster with this as a special ability...

...Okay, maybe I'd allow biting out a fuse to save a Hero from a deathtrap, but there's got to be some consequences from that, like maybe 1-2 points of burn damage?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)