Another challenge for the Green Hornet; his aide, Kato; and their rolling arsenal, the Black Beauty!

Britt Reid, publisher of the Daily Sentinel, sat in his home office, uneasily drumming his fingers on the desk. “Very interesting, Kato.”

“What’s that?” Kato asked, setting a glass in front of his boss and friend. With a flourish, he held aside the sleeve of his white valet jacket and began to fill the glass with orange juice, raising the decanter impossibly high before lowering it at just the right moment to avoid an overflow.

Reid smiled at Kato’s theatrics. “Three of the city’s biggest mob lieutenants have a meeting tonight­­, Kato– a secret meeting with a mysterious fourth party…and it seems the Green Hornet wasn’t invited!”

“Maybe our invitation got lost in the mail,” Kato said dryly. “What do you think it’s about?”

“I don’t know, my friend. But one thing I do know: this is one soiree the Green Hornet isn’t about to miss!”

Kato nodded. “I’ll get the car ready.”

It’s long past time I played some Pulp. Although my Star Trek skirmishes last year scratched an itch for adventures in spaaaaaace; I wanted to get back to some good old-fashioned two-fisted Pulp action. And who better for that than the Green Hornet and Kato?

I used .45 Adventure 2nd Edition, my favorite rules for Pulp gaming. You can get the PDF here for a measly 10 bucks, and it’s well worth it. That being said, I made a few changes; the same changes I used when playing the Star Trek games using Fantastic Worlds. I’ll repeat them here: .45 Adventure has a detailed combat system that involves wound location and deteriorating statistics based on damage received. For example, you get shot in the arm, your shooting and brawling abilities go down; you get shot in the legs, your movement speed decreases, etc. The better your character, the higher his stats and the more wound boxes he has; therefore wounds have less of an effect on heroic characters and a greater effect on scrubs.

For my taste, this was a bit more bookkeeping than I wanted to deal with. I decided a model has a number of wounds equal to its rank and damage resistance (DR) commensurate with their abilities, and that wound location doesn’t matter. If a character is wounded, he loses a wound. Rank 3 and Rank 2 characters are KOed when they lose their last wound; Rank 1 scrubs aren’t so lucky: they’re dead (unless they are supposed to be KOed). This makes combat a lot faster and more deadly, but requires a lot less effort to keep track of a character round-to-round. Heroic characters (like the Green Hornet) may have access to abilities that allow them to shrug off and/or heal wounds, or to act regardless of them, but goons go down fast. As it should be!

The tradeoff is that a lot of special abilities in .45 Adventure are based around wound location, such as Supreme Effort, which allows a model to use his starting stats for a wound location for a turn (regardless of how badly damaged that location is); or Dead Shot, which improves your chances of hitting a specific location. Since I scrapped wound location, none of the models could use these; which somewhat limited the selection of skills I had access to. Each location also has its own Damage Resistance value. It’s generally easier to wound someone if you hit them in the head as opposed to hitting their arm, for example. I scrapped that too, and just assigned a blanket DR to an entire model. The more important or tough the model is, the more DR it has. This makes the game move a lot faster at the expense of some of the detail of the system; I like it, but YMMV.

That about covers the rules. But, what about the scenario?

It’s simple: At midnight, three of the most powerful mob lieutenants in the city are meeting with a mysterious figure. Who do these lieutenants work for and what are they discussing? Who is this mystery man? And why wasn’t the Green Hornet invited? The Green Hornet and Kato plan on finding out the answers to these questions; but there’s another problem: Ace Reporter Mike Axford has also learned of the meeting, and tipped off the police. It’s only a matter of time before they arrive…can the Green Hornet find his answers before then?

Find out next time!