Marvel Mystery Comics #5 - pt. 3

Two features left!

Second to last is Irwen Hasen's Ferret, Mystery Detective. In it, we learn that the police code for a shooting is 23. At the crime scene, Ferret gets a good encounter reaction roll and the commissioner on the scene let's him keep a clue. We learn that Ferret's car has bulletproof glass, improving its Armor Class value and shielding Ferret from a lot of bullets as he is chased from the crime scene. Mobsters force him to crash -- treat it as an obstacle in a car chase, but with a save vs. science or a skill check to avoid? -- and he emerges with just a light wound on his arm.

We learn that "they've been doing this in Europe for years. You place a dry sheet of paper over a wet one and write a message with a matchstick. When the paper dries it's blank - but wet it again - presto! A message!" I haven't tested this to see if it really works.

Before going into a suspicious building, Ferret leaves his pet ferret outside, so he can whistle and summon it to rescue him later. Which turns out to be a good thing, as Ferret is vulnerable to the "surprise head blow" trope that fells so many golden age heroes. We learn it takes a ferret 30 minutes to chew through a wall (interior wall, I'm guessing -- or that ferret needs to be statted as a superhero!).

After escaping, Ferret has three hoodlums chasing him. He uses a length of rope to trip all three of them. Okay, I've talked about allowing this before, but giving them a bonus to their saves to reflect how his efforts are being divided. What's unusual here is that only two get back up right away to fight him, while the third takes longer. I've always ruled that it takes 1 melee turn to get back on your feet...but what if it should take 1-2 turns, to stagger how fast your opponents can get back into combat?

Speaking of combat, a ferret, at only 2-3 pounds, shouldn't even add up to 1 hit point, but Ferret's ferret Nosey looks like he does 1 point of damage in a fight.

In a queer bit of slang, counterfeit money is called "the queer" in this story.

In Ka-Zar, Ka-Zar steals into de Kraft's tent and steals all his guns. Rather than use the guns against him, he wants to make for a fair fight, so he wrecks the guns against a big rock (possibly for fighters to do, as guns fall only in the doors category).

Ka-Zar is later captured, though, tied up, and slashed with sharp weapons 100 times by natives. This has to be flavor text, there is no way Ka-Zar has over 100 hit points. Despite having been able to wreck guns, Ka-Zar is not strong enough to snap the rope tying him. Without leverage, he could have a significant disadvantage to his rolls. 

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

Flash Comics #3 - pt. 3

King Standish debuts in this issue, a prettily drawn mysteryman feature by Gardner Fox and a William Smith, who I've not heard of before. King is one of those master-of-disguise types, and an excellent pick pocket, able to remove a wallet out of a woman's purse -- while facing her! That's definitely a mysteryman stunt, not possible with a simple skill check (though maybe one at a significant penalty, like making it a 1 in 10 chance).

King's interesting gimmick, at least initially, is his anonymity. He can just show up in evening dress and either admit he's the King or deny it; all he's known by is his calling card, an actual card with a crown on it.

Deliberately walking into a trap to prove to a pretty lady that she's fallen in with mobsters, King is attacked by two thugs in an ambush. Fox doesn't seem to ever get how bulletproof vests work, as King's makes him completely immune to the impact of bullets, and they just bounce off his clothing. King also has a "specially built, high powered car," though we never see what's so special about it. His license plate reads "410-W."

King cracks a combination safe, which would be an expert skill check.

Appropriate for a first level mysteryman, King is about to be overwhelmed by the two thugs along with their boss, and needs to be saved by the aforementioned lady (who's not adverse to killing with a gun, apparently).

In The Whip's adventure, he uses a tripwire to trip at least five running people. The first person reaching the tripwire I would have make a save vs. science to avoid tripping, and then each person after him a +1 bonus. The first person to make their save stops the others behind him from falling for the trap. This is a rather mild trap, only making the runners prone for one melee turn, but since he only uses it to get their attention it is quite effective.

Quite a bit of Spanish is being tossed around in this installment, including common words like "bueno" and "amigos," but also words less common in comic books, like "adelante" (for "go ahead!") and "enredeso" (for "complicated").

The Whip's whip tricks include using the whip like a grappling hook, and then supporting his weight while he climbs a wall, and grabbing and pulling an item with the whip. I hesitant to assign game mechanics to the former; with no time limit, he could just keep trying with the whip until it caught on the balcony (though the actual climbing might require a basic skill check). In the latter case, since it occurs in combat, the grab-and-pull needs to require an attack roll, vs. an Armor Class of the Editor's discretion (it's a complex move, grabbing the shade and pulling it down over someone's head, so I'd say AC 6 or 5).

One of the mobsters the Whip encounters uses the slang "horse-podder." I cannot figure out what that means. In the context of the sentence, it seems to mean BS, and the literal definition of "podder" is "a cup." So I don't get how these things go together.

(Stories read at readcomiconline.to)

Tip Top Comics #22, 23

Or, v. 2, no. 10 and 11, from Feb. and Mar. 1938.

And we'll start with The Captain and the Kids, one of, if not the oldest, comic strip to be republished in comic book form, having begun back in 1914 (though called Hans und Fritz until 1918). For such a superficially Germanic feature, it's odd how long the strip was based in various parts of Africa.

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Game notes: Well...um...still trying to wrap my head around gluing pants to a tree. Would it really be easier to climb out of the pants rather than rip the pants? Climbing out of your pants is normally too easy to roll for, but under these

conditions, I would treat it as an expert skill check just to not tear them accidentally. And wrecking a pair of pants would be much easier than wrecking a door -- same mechanic, but with a +1 or +2 bonus.

Then there's the other issue of running with a barrel over your head and not falling over. Save vs. science to keep your balance? But how often to force rolls? I guess that depends on terrain - maybe once every 360' on level terrain, but every 180' on lightly wooded, flat terrain?

On to Jim Hardy. I'm not interesting in game mechanics for torture, as I've said here before, but I share this page because of the efforts to use a tool to break down the door, which begs the question, should that plank of wood give him some kind of bonus? If Jim had a big sledge hammer in his hands, I'd consider a +1, but awkwardly hitting the door with a wooden

plank in his hands? I think he's more likely to give himself a splinter than to knock that door down.

And then there's the other issue, of how he sees the rocks piled behind the door, even though he couldn't budge the door an inch just a panel earlier. I can't explain that one, but I can explain that the rocks would make it much harder to wreck through the door. Essentially, it is not a door anymore, but a stone wall, much harder to wreck.

In the debut of Frankie Doodle on this blog, we see some new prices -- 98 cents for boys sweaters (gosh!), boys overcoats for ...is that $4.98? And, of course, the joke is that Frankie fails to see sodas are 5 cents.

Chris Crusty learns the advantage - and disadvantage - of wearing a fake deputy badge. I suspect Heroes would not object to this disadvantage, though, and would welcome the chance for danger that it brings. Lawful Heroes would need to save vs. plot to carry badges they know are phonies.

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No real game content here, but I never knew the origin of the word tuxedo before. Remarkable!


And now, we return to Peter Pat, which I had initially enjoyed for its dramatic story, but it really strains credulity for the amount of stuff this little boy can do. I mean, he's like an Olympic-level athlete sometimes.

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Here we have a different kind of ape man. Usually, ape men are just men drawn to look more like apes, and is sometimes dangerously close to just looking like a racist caricature. This ape man is most definitely a gorilla, yet one with human intelligence (and modesty).

We know Peter was at least 10' high in the tree, because you need to fall at least 10' to take falling damage.

Here, our little Olympian uses a trip attack, and then gets tripped, all on the same page, making this the first time I've seen tripping happen twice in the same combat.

Peter also establishes that you can pick up two dropped items in the same melee turn.

And we learn this ape man can talk!

I shared this page because boxing a kangaroo for $5 seems like it would be a fun first scenario for 1st-level Heroes, and give them a good sense for how vulnerable they are at the beginning of their careers.

I have room enough for one page from the next issue I have access to, and it brings us back around to The Captain and the Kids again, this time giving me two ideas for a trap. One is, someone opens the door, and the log swings down and hits the person in the doorway. The other idea -- and it's more in line with what you see in this page -- is that the log swings down, hits a cutout in the door, and the cutout comes out and strikes the person in front of the door. The first version could do a lot of damage, depending on how heavy the log is. The second version would do less damage, as a lot of kinetic energy would get lost in the transference to the cutout, and I'd have that do maybe 1-4 points of damage.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Jungle Comics #2 - pt. 1

Jungle Comics is what happens when a publisher (Fiction House) has one successful title (Jumbo Comics, packaged by the famous Eisner-Iger studio) and decides to launch another, but on the cheap. When Fletcher Hanks is your best artist (and you'll be seeing his contribution in a day or two)...

I was recently in a Q&A with Don McGregor on Facebook and I asked him about pushing the envelope for violence in comics. His response was that he wasn't trying to push violence so much as show that violence has consequences. Which is relevant here because violence is on display on practically every page of Jungle Comics, but a strangely bloodless violence, even when characters are getting stabbed in the face. I found some of these images too unpleasant for sharing on my blog, so you'll just have to take my word on the face-stabbing incident.

Today we're just looking at the first two stories from this issue, Kaanga and Red Panther (called White Panther last issue).

Kaanga is drawn by Ken Jackson -- often free of the constraints of any backgrounds -- and so stiffly that he can sometimes be mistaken for Fletcher Hanks (in fact, I'm not entirely convinced that Jackson isn't just a pen name for Fletcher, with someone else inking over him).

Compared to Kaanga, Arthur Peddy's work on Red Panther is positively dynamic, though still gory. Later, Arthur will join DC Comics and get to work on the squeaky clean later appearances of the Justice Society of America.

Now, let's talk about the pages! In the first one above, we get possibly the first instance of a stick holding crocodile jaws open in comic books. At least he doesn't kill it!

Ape men often look -- or are blatantly -- racist in nature, but this story skirts that problem by depicting the ape-men as white as they can get. Dr. Wratt may be the first mad scientist in comics who won't wear pants. Or shoes. Or socks. I think we can safely assume he's naked under that long shirt. Dr. Wratt may be evil, but he's not too evil; he operates on Kaanga using an anesthetic gas.

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Game mechanic notes: Sticking a stick in a crocodile/aligator's mouth requires a successful attack roll, followed by a failed save vs. science for the animal. The ape man achieves a surprise attack and lands a head blow that stuns -- unless Kaanga was just low on hit points from the crocodile fight, in which case Kaanga has been rendered unconscious at zero hit points."Torn legs" do not require miraculous cures in Hideouts & Hoodlums, just normal rest.

Wratt needs to only establish eye contact with his victim to hypnotize him, but we've had plenty of evidence of how easy it is to hypnotize people in comic books. He does have one limitation, though, he can only hypnotize someone to make them do something they already want to do (like escape the island). To "dominate another's will" he needs that big, stationary machine.

It's unclear if the machine does all the work, or if it only makes his normal hypnotism more effective.

A choke hold is a result on the grappling table in 2nd edition H&H.

Here is a very rare example of tripping two opponents at the same time.

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Wait a minute...if the shore was that far from his lab, how did they see the hypnotized guy get torn apart when he "neared" the shore?





The island is in the middle of a lake (I didn't share the page that established that); the long suspension bridge is the only way to the shore of the lake. But couldn't Kaanga swim the lake...?

We see ape men can be encountered in groups as large as eight.

Are the crocodiles in the lake, a lagoon, or both?

Meanwhile, Red Panther is trying to save missionaries from headhunters.

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A stunt never seen before, or likely since, in comic books, is swinging from a vine held in one's teeth and scooping up two full-grown people, one in each arm. I have toyed with the notion of restoring the multiple levels to stunts that they had in 1st ed. But how to distinguish 2nd level stunts from 1st edition ones? A thought I've had here is that a stunt should only be able to accomplish one thing, but a 2nd level stunt can accomplish multiple things (2? 3?) at once.

A skill check can discover a hidden trap if the Hero is actively searching for them, though Red Panther seems to just happen to spot one here as if by accident. 

A long established practice in RPGs is to combine traps with something to fight, such as a tiger in a pit trap.

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It seems odd that Red Panther chooses to jump into the pit and kill the tiger, rather than simply reach into the pit and pull the man out. He could have even helped the tiger out and sicced it on the headhunters.

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Red Panther is able to use a stunt -- cutting his bonds against the sword -- even though combat has already started because he has not yet taken a combat action.

This is not the first time the term "giant" has been used to apply to a combatant who is actually just normal-sized. This is why I was thinking of creating a pseudo-giant mobstertype.

A push attack does not need to be away from you; here it shows a push attack being used to move an opponent behind you.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Smash Comics #7 - pt. 3

And we're back with Invisible Justice, starring the Invisible Hood.

I get the creepy factor IH is going for, but being invisible inside a visible suit seems to take away any advantage that he has in combat.

Steele seems more than capable of mowing down the bad guys without IH's help. This is why it's important to have your supporting cast lower in level than the Heroes, so the Heroes are less likely to be upstaged (though bad dice rolls can still make it happen).

It's too bad that Steele is one of the good guys, because it would be a much more interesting tactic if IH had tricked one of the bad guys into thinking the two fire-eaters (stat as arsonists) who show up are more ghosts, and then get him to shoot them.

Lastly, it must have been super-awkward when Steele was feeling around in the air for IH's shoulders...

Wandering encounters are the potatoes that go with the meat of role-playing games, but sometimes an Editor may doubt himself and feel he's being too subtle with them. That's when you start having bad guys literally crash into the good guys out on the streets.

Tripping is a surprisingly rare fighting technique in comic books, but rarer still are examples like this that show how a trip attack can set up an opponent for a follow-up attack. So I'm wondering, should I add a game mechanic where you forego your own ability to do damage in the turn, in order to give the next attacker a bonus?

The enemy planes use a stunt (Fly out of the Sun).

Chic's readiness to use guns tells me he belongs to the fighter class.

I'm not sure how often pilots in dog fights would crash into each other, but if I ever write formalized dog fight rules for Hideouts & Hoodlums, it will likely include something about a low chance of crashing per turn.

I've posted plenty of times with examples like this, showing how you should not try too hard to hide clues from your players in your games. In fact, judging by this page, you shouldn't even hide them at all -- just leave them sitting out on a desk for anyone to see.

The 2nd edition rules for transportation includes ramming damage for just this type of scene!

The ramming damage for vehicles can be really high; perhaps it would be fair to split those dice between multiple opponents, like how Chic hits three guards at once here.

This is John Law, Scientective. The brightly-colored cellar is the result of the four-color process and the difficulty of printing gray tones back then.

A skill check to hear noise should also include a general sense of where it is coming from, even if only a basic skill check was successful.

A delightfully scientific trap! The strobing neon light keeps you from being able to see that the bar is actually moving back and forth very fast, when it appears to be still, and anyone walking through that door would take at least 1-6 points of damage. It's a good trap for hurting someone, but I'm not sure about it killing them...

In this rare instance, the villain loses a foot race to a woman in high heels. June can really move! Competing skill checks -- some combination of successful ones on her part and failed rolls on his part -- determined her close call.

The ol' pit trap filling with water trap! Making it a little easier, the Avenger left the hose accessible in the pit, giving John an improvised rope and grappling hook.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Feature Comics #28

Phew! Some of the copy of this issue from Quality is of, well, poor quality!

From this page of Joe Palooka that I can read, I see some prices listed. Now, I am highly skeptical of the $3 offer for a used camper -- I suspect Ham Fisher had a really bad experience with campers -- but more interesting to me is Knobby's accepted offer of $10 for car repairs. So much cheaper than today!

I started out thinking that Porto Bello was a joke about mushrooms, but it turns out that Porto Bello is/was a real place in Panama. Panama was controlled by Spain when this took place, but note how not only does everyone there talk in English, but even the signs are written in English.

The phrase "pike ye the dandy" is an unusual one, as I've never seen "pike" used to mean trip before, but it clearly does here.

Ripping right through this issue, we're on Rance Keane already. And speaking of tripping....Even braced, I have trouble believing that Rance could trip a horse like that; surely, the horse's strength and mass would just pull Rance off the roof. In this instance, I would treat it as an opposed grappling attack, even though Rance is not in melee range. If the horse wins, Rance gets pulled off the roof and lands for 1-6 points of damage; if Rance wins, the horse gets pulled over and is prone. I might even give the horse a +2 situational modifier.

I haven't featured The Bungle Family in a while. Here we see George Bungle taking two good smacks to the kisser, each of which should be doing 1-3 points of damage, and walking away from them. He must be a bit of a scrapper; possibly a 1st level fighter with max (or near-max) hit points.

The ineffectiveness of bare knuckle punching in Hideouts & Hoodlums' current edition bothers me. It's realistic, but leads to no one wanting to fight without weapons. I've been thinking about introducing graduated punching damage, so that they do 1-4 points of damage starting at 2nd level, 1-6 points starting at 4th level, 1-8 points starting at 6th level, and so on.

This is The Clock.  We've seen Heroes be able to boss around beat cops before, but never with an excuse this flimsy -- based purely on having been Captain Kane's driver, The Clock is able to wander around the crime scene and pocket evidence.

With little confidence in their new feature Dollman, we find this installment pushed towards the back of the book. The "monsterous machine" is an aquatic tank.

This is why I don't like rats -- you never know when they might have dynamite strapped to them. This would also make for a really dangerous encounter!

This is Reynolds of the Mountains. The bright light blinds them during a surprise attack. Then they lose initiative and receive lucky head blows. Had they won initiative, they could have still tried to attack first, but would have done so at a penalty.

Most of this checks out. The floor board is an improvised club, so that does 1-3 points of damage, but that's enough to trigger a disarm check. More curious is how Reynolds misses Sam. Even assuming Sam is at medium range (that's -2), Sam is wearing no armor, has no cover, and isn't moving fast enough in an accelerating speedboat to get more bonuses -- that gives Sam only slightly worse than 50/50 chances of hitting, better if he's higher level already. I guess he just really got an unlucky die roll!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Top-Notch Comics #2 - pt. 2

The second feature in this issue is Dick Storm.  Yeah.  Despite the awful name, this is one of the earliest features drawn by golden age great Mort Meskin.

It also illustrates the value of level titles. When the officers go down, Dick is able to take command because his level title in the fighter class is equivalent to an officer (sergeants are 3rd level fighters and captains are 5th level fighters).

Note to self: still need a tripping mechanic. I've talked about it before here on the blog. I thought it was something I could skip in the basic rulebook, but here it is again already.

I'm normally skeptical of allowing attacks that hit multiple targets, but I would allow someone with a held grappling victim to use that victim as a thrown club.

More doubtful is how Storm is able to throw a heavy keg of explosives as far as he does, unless that hallway is a lot shorter than perspective makes it look. Although a thrown weapon can be hurled 30', for extra-heavy weights I would probably shave some distance off of that.

You'll have to read this page and the next page together before understanding my discussion of them. Indeed, the first page threw me at first because it says The Mystic is "unseen," but the woman next to him is not surprised to hear him speak. It turns out, on the next page, that the two of them came together and she is his supporting cast.

Although the Invisibility spell, as written, ends only when the Magic-User attacks, there must be a way to willingly "switch it off" and become visible again. The spell section in Hideouts & Hoodlums is unclear about if spells can be willed to end by the caster or if he needs to wait for the duration to end, and that is because I wanted to leave that up to the discretion of the individual Editors.

It is unclear how a movie projector could be projecting onto thin air. This reminds me of the 4th level power I came up with for Supplement I: National, called Simpler Explanation. Maybe these tricksters (see the Trickster class from The Trophy Case v. 1 #4) were actually using magic, but the Simpler Explanation power allowed the player to change the scenario.

Of course, a Magic-User would not be using Superhero powers, but we've seen scant evidence of The Mystic being a Mystic so far. He does not, for example, use any real magic to escape at the end of this page, but uses a flash bomb to cover ducking out (flash bombs have been trophy items since Book II: Mobsters & Trophies).  A Superhero cannot turn invisible unless we introduce a new power, or if The Mystic was a psionic superhero (psionics are from Supplement III: Better Quality).

The wording in panel 3 is curious; The Mystic is "surprised" by the thugs (thugs has been a mobster type since Book II), but seems to still get in the first attack. They either all missed in their surprise attacks, or they only "surprised" him by being in his home, and he still won initiative in combat.

The Mystic's disappearing trick resembles the 2nd edition spell (from the basic book) Poof! Diving into the box first could have concealed the smoke cloud that comes with the spell. Or, this could be a magical effect from the box, and the box is itself a magic item (Box of Poofing?).

It's hard to know what's going on here -- is The Mystic using real magic or stage magic? Nadir was a hero like this. If it is real magic, could the mirror and the dummy be flavor text for a Mirror Images spell?  If it isn't real magic, is The Mystic a Mysteryman, throwing his voice at mirrors and dummies and making the thugs save vs. plot or they attack the wrong target?

Objects thrown into a melee, that miss, may hit another random target, so that vase checks out.

I've talked before on here about the ol' pull-the-rug-out trick, which can be a simple save vs. science to resist. But to get tripped so that you fall into your own trap chair? That makes it seem like we should have fumbles for saves in H&H, except that we learn on the new page that he meant to do that so he could overhear them talking after he was "captured".

One has to wonder about The Mystic's house. Maybe it makes sense for a stage magician to build a trapdoor in his own home (for practice?), but did the thugs not notice and wonder about the giant slide hooked up to the outside of the house?

I like the idea of the trick telephone that only calls police headquarters.

This is Stacey Knight M.D., and this is a good example of when level titles don't work.  Because a police chief, by level titles, is the equivalent of a 6th level fighter, it is absurd that this doctor can talk him out of doing his job, unless Knight is also at least 6th level. Or maybe he rolled a max score on his encounter reaction check and the Editor decided to go really generous.

1940 is probably the closest to modern day you can get in a story where a doctor can say "there's not much money in this business" and not be obviously lying.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Smash Comics #5 - pt. 1

Black X/Ace doesn't have a clue where the saboteurs are, but he gets a "hunch" that seems to come out of nowhere. I actually wrote a game mechanic for the never-played Detective class that allows him to get a clue from the Editor.

The fight here with the saboteur is a mix of grappling and punching, and I've talked about unarmed combat on this blog plenty (and Black X/Ace doesn't dodge in panel 6; the saboteur just misses). What's worth noting here is that circumstances -- not anything in particular that Black X/Ace does -- forces the morale save (and that saboteur either rolled well or has a fanatical morale).

It's unclear what Batu is doing here, though it seems an awful lot like the spell Locate Object. The casting time seems unusually long, but if Batu is a Supporting Cast Member and not a Hero then the Editor has a little more latitude for changing how magic works for him. Now, the Editor doesn't have a lot of wiggle room for changing things like casting times -- once or twice to heighten tension and the players might overlook it, but used too often it will have the players rightly calling foul.

The crushed forearm is an unusual complication from an injury and, of course, one incompatible with the abstract hit point mechanic. I have talked on the blog before about adding complications for injuries for SCMs, tacked on to hit point loss, but this rule is unlikely to make it into the 2nd ed. basic rulebook now, mainly for space considerations (I'm already past page 110!). I would treat this, then, as just a knockdown/trip attack (and I do need to make sure there's room for that in my combat section) with some pretty brutal flavor text.

Those are some awfully convenient papers Batu finds on Taneo's body. Black X/Ace would be wise to say they were too convenient and might have been intended to falsely implicate another country. That seems a more convincing argument, to me, not to make the papers known.

This is some interesting alternate history, a dream scenario where just the threat of U.S. intervention ends wars. Future history will clearly show otherwise, that the U.S. can't ever seem to end a war in just one year.

The Chief's curious joke about what league the Dodgers were in is, according to Wikipedia, likely a reference to this: "In 1934, Giants player/manager Bill Terry was asked about the Dodgers’ chances in the coming pennant race and cracked infamously, 'Is Brooklyn still in the league?'"  The Brooklyn Dodgers had actually been in the National League since 1890.

Chic Carter is in "Moravia" -- what seems like a clear reference to the then-Soviet-controlled state of Moldova. But the "Arlbourg Pass" must be a reference to the Arlberg Tunnel in Austria. And Brennburg is a barely disguised Brennberg, Bavaria. But, if Chic's train is stopped less than 10 miles from Brennberg, where does that put him? Regensburg is the next largest city, but I believe that would be more than 10 minutes away by train. So that leaves Chic in some little way-stop village along the tracks. No wonder he thinks the place is dead!

The abduction of a Bavarian princess kind of makes sense. The Bavarian royal family, the House of Wittelsbach, was anti-Nazi, and the family's arrest after fleeing to Hungary earlier in the 1930s might have inspired this story.

Bavaria had no king, but a crown prince.

It's a bit of a stretch that the crown prince would want an American journalist's help...but, hey, if that's what it takes to give out a plot hook!

Some Heroes would investigate the duke carefully. Maybe search his home for clues. But our man Chic, he just marches right up to the duke in public and asks him to his face. It's a risky move that angers the duke into attacking Chic with a sword and implicating himself, but an encounter reaction check could have gone a lot of different ways than that.

I'm not sure electric eyes can do what John Law, Scientective, is saying they can, but it's plausible enough for comic books, and thus for Hideouts & Hoodlums.

Also, as a Hero, it pays to check under your hood every once in awhile to look for planted devices. You can never be too careful around villains!

Given how dangerous falling damage is in H&H, levitating someone 35' into the air is a pretty effective trap. Luckily the distance to the trees is shorter, though John's player must have rolled to hit to reach the trees.

(Read at Digital Comic Museum.)