Smash Comics #2 - pt. 1

In Espionage, Black "Ace" (I always liked Black X better) is after the theft of this anti-electric raygun. It is like the larger device the Masked Marvel encountered a while back, but this one is smaller, portable, and only works on a single target.

Will Eisner seems to taken a stab at future predicting here and was off by a few years -- Russia didn't declare war on Japan until 1945, not 1939. But that's nothing compared to the stab in the dark Black Ace makes here -- correctly guessing the stolen invention will be sold off to either Japan or Russia, correctly guessing it will be sold in China, and even getting the city right! That's some hunch...and makes me think an Editor might have been railroading his player here to get him to go to the right place.

As if the stabs in the dark didn't end there -- somehow Batu knows who stole the plans and manages to find them! Is this his psychic powers on display? It seems like there are at least two pages of story missing here that would explain these connections.

On the bright side, we get an interesting trap, with a touch-sensitive chest of drawers that shoots a knife out of it at anyone in front of it (but where does the knife come out of...?).

Batu calls this hypnosis, but he's instead generating a Phantasmal Image. Curiously, Batu loses consciousness from blood loss and spell fatigue -- two things that have no game mechanic in Hideouts & Hoodlums. If he's supporting cast, this can be flavor text.

Not sure how the bad guys have a second mechanical jammer. Maybe there are three pages missing...

Black Ace's wandering encounter is with a doctor. Doctors were statted as a mobster-type in Supplement V and will probably make it into 2nd ed. too. Note that Black Ace was over India, but the doctor is a white man...

Black Ace regains consciousness quickly, having been only "nicked." It's a new mechanic in H&H that if you reach zero hp, and make a save vs. plot, you're only stunned temporarily instead of unconscious (since BA clearly wasn't out for 2-4 hours).

Black Ace is using the Aviator stunt Deadstick to fly after killing the engine.

Speaking of stunts -- jumping out of a moving plane and landing on another moving plane -- that has to be a stunt.

This is The Lone Star Rider. The snipers are going to be statted as assassins in 2nd ed., though I'll probably include a note about how they can be called snipers.

This is Abdul the Arab. The assassins he runs into use hiding in shadows and backstabbing instead of sniping at a distance.

At least one of the assassins carries poison with a really quick onset time.

Abdul's idea of disguising himself is to change his clothes.

Climbing hand over hand could be handled by just a skill check, but doing it with a full-grown woman on his back, that's got to be a stunt.

Baghdad was ruled by a king, not a sultan, in 1939. Faisal II was, in fact, the last king of Iraq.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Mystery Men Comics #2 - pt. 3

This is from Hemlock Shomes and Dr. Potsam. Although a humor strip, the dressing in this castle -- bones on the floor, shields and crossed swords on the walls -- would work equally well in many hideouts. Also, I'm likely to add a new mobster to Hideouts & Hoodlums, the haunt. It's a harmless poltergeist most of the time, but if it can inhabit a free-standing suit of armor it becomes dangerous.

This is from The Waco Kid. I've heard of guard dogs barking when intruders approach, but guard horses who whinny...?

An example of a gun running empty (ammunition should not be limitless in the game), an example of a chair being more effective than a gun in stopping a fight, and an example of bad guy loot being concealed rather than left out in the open to be claimed.

This is from Inspector Bancroft, Ace Investigator of Scotland Yard, and another example of how you don't need a big bribe to get people to do things that could get them in a lot of trouble. Instead, you just need a good encounter reaction check. Now, if the inspector did have a poor encounter reaction check, he could have produced a much bigger bribe to try to get a bonus. The Editor will have to wing those numbers, based on the circumstances (and how much he wants to milk his players!).

The Inspector likes to keep his nails well-groomed. He also, probably, kept his nail file from being confiscated with a save vs. plot. He "painstakingly" toils at the lock, suggesting that it takes multiple tries. Since he has probably not been in this brig for a full day, I would guess that his Editor is letting him have a fresh try once every exploration turn (10 minutes).

This is the Blue Beetle's second outfit in just his second appearance, and the first to appear to be chainmail armor. Chainmail is treated as a trophy item in H&H, just because it wouldn't have been widely available for sale.

I don't plan to include any game mechanic for ducking and making your opponent hit another opponent behind you -- that seems like a giveaway from the Editor to me.

Long-time followers of H&H will remember when I had to read a whole lot of Blue Beetle for his write-up in Supplement IV and how much I disliked his stories then. I'm not liking them anymore this time around. I find it particularly hard to take him seriously in that last panel, where he's doing the bunny hop to the window.

Blue Beetle is still a mysteryman here, so he burns a stunt to leap into that moving car, but I would not let the stunt also absorb the falling damage from that height. So Blue Beetle -- still a 1st-level mysteryman at this point -- just took 2-12 points of falling damage. His Editor must have rolled snake eyes!

This is Captain Denny Scott of the Bengal Lancers (another long title!). Usually, "bandit" is a racist term for Mexican outlaws in the comics, but we've also seen nomadic warriors in the Middle East called bandits. Here, we get "bandit" being used as synonymous with "slaver" in India.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Mystery Men Comics #2 - pt. 2

Richard Kendall is getting his butt kicked by Chen Chang's men, in part, because they have a +1 height advantage bonus to hit while on horseback.

I thought it was refreshing to see a Dragon Lady-like villainess here, not falling for the Hero ala Terry and the Pirates.

 The narrator says Richard "missed", but it appears that he tried to grapple, Chen got the upper hand, and flipped Richard instead. I've finally worked out what I think is a fairly elegant, one-table grappling system that would allow for those results within 1 turn.

Again I have to question the narrator; there is no real reason for Chen to "stumble", either game mechanics-wise or even visually explained in the story. More likely, Richard grabs Chen successfully this time and throws him so hard that he lands without his coat!

It does seem odd that stopping to open secret doors never gives Richard a chance to catch up during this chase through a hideout, but maybe Chen is making better skill checks to pick up speed in the long stretches (this is a new game mechanic from 2nd ed.!).

Wing Turner, Air Detective, executes a power dive to give him an advantage in this aerial dogfight. This is actually a good example of a stunt from 1st ed. that isn't translating well into 2nd ed's skill system. Aerial combat will probably need more complex rules that will have to wait for the Advanced Hideouts & Hoodlums game.

Normally I like Zanzibar the Magician, but this story is just plain loopy. When a famous statue goes missing, instead of looking for it...Zanzibar goes back in time to get the statue from the past? Way to mess with all of time and space, Zanzibar!  Not to mention that a time travel spell that lets one go back over 2,000 years is super high-level.

"Hey, I'm in ancient Greece! I might as well visit the most powerful of the Greek gods while I'm here!"

What interests me is the serpent dragon guarding Zeus' house.

We don't get to see what it can do because Zanzibar blows it up with a single spell on the next page, but the serpent dragon looks huge and must have had a good chunk of Hit Dice.

And then thinks get even wackier! Hercules is polymorphed into a bird. Zanzibar takes on Zeus in a wrestling match, and is winning. I'm having a very hard time believing these are the actual gods of myth, and not some guys using the same names.

Zeus doesn't appear to have been petrified into stone, so I'm guessing this is Hold Person. Zanzibar releases the manacles with a Knock spell. But then he...takes Venus (actually Aphrodite, if this is Greece) into the future...to replace the missing statue? Is she going to turn into a statue as soon as she reaches the future, to close up the time paradox Zanzibar is creating? Way to be a total jerk, Zanzibar!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Mystery Men Comics #2 - pt. 1

We finally reached September 1939! And Mystery Men Comics #2!

We meet up with The Green Mask again, this time involved in a tong war. Tong wars apparently were real things, plaguing New York and Chicago into the 1930s, so they seem to be much on the mind of comic book writers even years later.

The Fu Manchu-like villain this time is called San Sin and, luckily, Green Mask seems to know exactly where San Sin is headquartered as if there was a sign out front. And, amazingly, the very first Chinaman Green Mask points a gun at just happens to know exactly where San Sin is and leads him there.

After that, things get a little more interesting. Sure, pit traps are old hat already, but San Sin doesn't try to flood it, or let in a crocodile, or have the walls close in -- he plans to just hold Green Mask there until he starves or gives up.

Green Mask playing along seems, at first, to be a cheap trick to stretch out the story, but the Green Mask has information we were lacking, that San Sin is a smuggler. Green Mask is playing along in order to be led to the people San Sin is getting his contraband from.

How long was Green Mask staking out this hideout before the adventure started? Somehow he knows even the hidden entrances to this place, even though no one ever showed him.

Hostage-taking can lead to some tough problem-solving situations for players to role-play through.

It's the futuristic year 2000!  Rex Dexter wants to go to the planet Capris -- Capris? Okay, I can buy that maybe people in the "future" would know of planets the rest of us didn't know about, but how does Rex from 1939 know about this radium-rich planet? Reading travel brochures?

The planet Capris looks an awful lot like Saturn there. Is it just the future name for Saturn? Then again, they're clearly walking on a planet with ground, so they're not visiting a gas giant like Saturn. Maybe Capris is one of Saturn's moons renamed then? Most likely I'm over-thinking this.

A planet so radioactive that it isn't safe to come within 1,000 miles of it -- that seems at least possible.

The Capris-Men (Caprisians?) are some freaky-looking aliens; I'm thinking I would give them 5 Hit Dice. Wilder yet is putting your Heroes in a scenario where they lose if they're stripped naked.

I like how, in the year 2000, we have magnetic ships that can make it from Earth to Saturn (maybe Saturn?) in four days, but men still wear top hats. It's true what they say, men's clothes never go out of fashion!

"I have a vision...of using interstellar tugboats to haul a planet-sized mass within the length of four of the Moon's orbits from Earth, and watch the gravitational pull tear Earth apart." What a Charisma score he must have to make the nations of the world go along with this!

This is from Billy Bounce, and it demonstrates what creative uses pepper and a fountain pen can be put to, so long as your Editor allows it. In some ways, this is no more ridiculous than pulling planets into Earth's orbit...

Chen Chang has thugs working for him. Given they have 2 Hit Dice, that might explain how they are able to pitch men over the railing so easily.

If I haven't said so before, I really like the artwork on Chen Chang...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

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 #41 - pt. 1

There's a bit of controversy over the second Sandman story in this issue. The Sandman pulls a mobster underwater, beats him up, and then we never see that mobster again. The author summarizing stories for DC Wikia believes that Sandman must have drowned the man, making this the Sandman's first kill (despite the narrator's claims that the Sandman has never committed a crime). Thank goodness I had access to The Golden Age Sandman Archives to corroborate these things! I don't think any definitive conclusion can be drawn from that page. We never see the end of that underwater battle. For all we know, before the Sandman surfaces again, he leaves the mobster safely unconscious on a nearby dock.

When Sandman does resurface, the girl he's rescuing says she's "heard a lot about" him, which seems unlikely if this is only his third mission ever. Like with the magic-users and superheroes we've seen so far, there is ample precedent for allowing Heroes to begin with more than 0 xp, or even whole "brevet ranks" (called "big bang levels" in Supplement V).

The Sandman spends much of this adventure out of costume -- retaining his gas mask, but otherwise wearing only a bathing suit and a shoulder holster for his gas gun. At some points he is wearing a coat and hat over his bathing suit. Mysterymen do not seem to need to always be in costume as much as superheroes do.

Barry O'Neill, in his adventure, is in Tunisia -- a welcome departure for me from the habit of creating fictional countries (a personal pet peeve of mine).  Cecil Krull is a great villain name -- too bad it was just an alias.  "Cecil" is a spy, but we already knew spies needed to be a mobster type.

Steve Carson of Federal Men has been slumming for awhile now, but it seems like Jerry Siegel decided to go all out for this issue. An entire town dies, strangely, during a snowfall -- raising the stakes from Steve's recent adventures of stopping crooks. Mobrune is a prophet-like figure who predicts other towns will be hit by the killer snow to be purged of wickedness. As those towns are later hit, Mobrune grows a cult around him (making me wonder if cultist should be a mobster type). Mobrune is actually using a poison gas that is catalyzed by cold air, and the snow is just incidental. A bit bloodthirsty for my liking, but otherwise a plot!

Two of the benefits of a Western campaign (the same with many fantasy campaigns, really) is that a) a trope of the genre is that the Hero is always moving and, b) in a remote environment, any encounter is worthy of description. Which is good because, under normal circumstances an old man looking to go home to see his son -- as Jack Woods meets -- would not seem like much of a plot hook in a busy city.

The bandits Jack Woods meet do something interesting and different -- they just let Jack go, trusting that they've intimidated him enough that he would stay away!

Speaking of different, Socko Strong and his friend Jerry Indutch are shipwrecked on a primitive island but, instead of focusing on getting off the island, Socko and Jerry form ties to the islanders and seem ready to settle down! Socko wins a job as a bodyguard and Jerry has eyes on the chief's daughter. That's creative, proactive roleplaying! The natives use poisoned spears, so the native mobster type needs a 1 in 6 chance of having poisoned weapons.

Should a film projector be a trophy item? Hmm...

Captain Desmo and Gabby are dealing with thugs - the Indian thugs (or Thugees) the word originated with. These thugs are treated as natives, swarming over an Indian city (a fictional city? I can't find a real Jeddur). Since the natives have a huge number advantage, Desmo "has" to resort to wiping them out with a grenade, and the cliche of cutting a primitive bridge over a chasm.

(Sandman read in Golden Age Sandman Archives v. 1, the rest read as summaries at DC Wikia.)

Detective Comics #30

The Batman comes back again this issue, and so does Dr. Death, for a rematch. The Batman still doesn't have a Batmobile per se, but drives a "high-powered auto". He is shown easily going over a "high" fence, but at 8', I think anyone more athletic than me could get over that and I wouldn't even ask a player to use up a stunt for that.

Batman uses a silk line for climbing, but without a grappling hook; he lassos a projection from the wall before scaling it. Using a rope to climb would be a situational modifier to a skill check (probably a +1).

The Batman carries a flashlight. He also has potions of sleep that, when their vials are shattered, release sleep gas in at least a 5' diameter. It doesn't last very long, though, as the Mikhail the Cossack wakes up after what seems like only 1 exploration turn.

He hears a "muffled footfall" and keeps from being surprised. I'll have to check to see if I gave mysterymen both a better chance to surprise and a lower chance to be surprised. He also hides in shadows as if using a skill (though thinking to use heavy drapes for cover should probably be a big situational modifier -- maybe +2?).

A flying tackle is really just a trip attack combined with movement, and isn't treated different mechanically (though Batman gets a +4 bonus for attacking with surprise from behind!).  The Batman then trades damage inflicted for distance to push Dr. Death's cossack out the window.

The Batman's kick to the neck that kills Mikhail isn't supported by the H&H game mechanics.

In Spy, Bart Regan jumps out of a car on a bridge and dives into the water. It looks like a suicidal plunge, but Bart lands safely, because it's water and this is a comic book. But bad guys wouldn't know about game mechanics, so they natural assume he died and drive off. Editors, always remember to be impartial when playing the bad guys and not to use knowledge they wouldn't have.

The mad scientist in this issue has built a mind control device he can use on politicians and secret service members. The device is small -- a box that can sit on a tabletop, with a delicate light bulb-like attachment on top -- but it must have a range of miles.

In a rare example of a Hero having a specific injury, Larry Steele is shot and needs his arm in a sling for the rest of his story.

There's a strange escalation of weaponry in Speed Saunder's mystery. The first murder is done with a 13th century antique crossbow, the second is done with an automatic, but then the killer produces a sub-machine gun when she attacks Speed.

Bruce Nelson's adventure starts with a subtler start than normal; a yellow peril hoodlum simply puts a gun in his back and warns him to scram (or "sclam") and there's no fight. Bruce knows this guy is probably in league with some criminals in the area (combining two cliches, this adventure takes place in both Chinatown and a waterfront). But Bruce isn't interested in going after small fish, so he leaves and pursues the lead he was already on. This is so refreshingly different from the play style I usually see in H&H.

It's also worth pointing out that only the Chinese bad guy talks in broken English; the Chinese good guys in the story (and there are two, not just a token one!) talk perfectly normal. Also, kudos to the author (Tom Hickey?) for being the first comic book writer ever to point out that tear gas isn't "very potent in the open air". I've already read so many stories where gas weapons work equally effective no matter where they're used.

The smugglers use speed boats to reach the waterfront from a freighter in this story.

Cosmo's adventure is the opposite of Speed's, in a way, as the threat level deescalates.  A man who looks like Cosmo is shot and killed by the bad guys, who early in the investigation are ready to murder him. But later on, when Cosmo actually knows who the main villain is, Cosmo is simply knocked out and left behind, an easy chance to kill him, or at least put him in a deathtrap, completely missed. It's a sign of an Editor going too easy on his player(s).

(Batman story read in Batman Archives vol. 1; most of the rest of this issue read at www.readcomics.net.)