Was "The Mansion of Mad Professor Ludlow" the First H&H?

[Adminenkainen]

Was "The Mansion of Mad Professor Ludlow" the first H&H adventure? It may not be as impossible as it seems...

"The Mansion of Mad Professor Ludlow" was an "AD&D" adventure, written by James Ward, that was published in Dragon #42 (Oct. 1980). I put "AD&D" in quotation marks because, while the monsters inside the haunted mansion are statted as AD&D monsters, it is clearly set in the modern day, with the players playing Boy Scouts/campers who stumble across the place with their compasses and flashlights. The kids adventure genre was, of course, very popular in the Golden Age of Comics.

The campers are statted as 1st-level fighters, but with 50 hp -- much more generous than H&H is -- to balance the fact that they start with no armor and no weapons. But it would be easy to run this adventure for 3-6 H&H heroes of levels 4-7 (in fact, I wish someone would!). To think that, that far back, TSR could have gone in this direction, of modern-day adventures using D&D.

[order99]

   Short, boring pedantic answer: H&H wasn't a gleam in the author's eye when Dragon #42 came out-so, no.

   Long, detailed, fun answer: Yer Durn Tootin' it was!  Standard D&D heroes reformatted into an 'Everyman'  Class but with more HP than an average Lvl 7 Fighter (aka 'Plot Armor'), crazy deathtraps from the Serials of Yesteryear, the possibility of Demonic bargains (with the Sword & Sorcery trope 'Magic Blackens the Soul' heavily implied) gigantic room-sized Computers full of vacuum tubes, standard random D&D Monsters for that 'What the Smurf?' vibe...

  I could easily see some H&H PC's wandering around this scenario kicking buttock and listing names here. In fact, a college group I was acquainted with decades ago adapted this very scenario to the Crimefighters pulp RPG found in Dragon #47 with only a few changes to reflect the format. Sadly, I was unable to make those sessions due to scheduling conflicts   but i'm told that everybody had a blast with it.

   .....Aaaaaaand now you've got me wondering if the Mad Professor had an ancestor in Lighthouse Bay, just ready to snap up a Hawthorne-styled Gothic mansion and decorate it with ornate Babbage Engines, bubbling beakers, a glowing pile of Pitchblende, and a strange menagerie of odd Mobsters.  But not for awhile though-my ode to House of Frankenstein/Plague of the Zombies Carl Russev hasn't had any time to play with my Writers and their PCs yet...

  (and how cruel a Universe it is where friggen' Real Life concerns keep getting in the way of our Elfgames.... ).

[Adminenkainen]

Having reread "Crimefighters" from Dragon #47 recently, I can say that it was not the first Hideouts & Hoodlums. It was its own game system and made no effort to feel like D&D in a different milieu. There are elements there that reminded me of Tunnels & Trolls, and other elements that reminded me of Star Frontiers, and still other elements that were unique and worth resurrecting, like "paying" XP into a monthly stipend for your character.

TSR never did anything with Crimefighters after this one issue, so it clearly never took off. Would H&H have done better back then? I like to think it would have.

[order99]

Nah, Crimefighters isn't even close to H&H in terms of power or flexibility-but if that long-ago college group could go to the trouble of adapting 'TMoLPL' to that rickety (yet fun!) RPG, then i'm sure that the adventure would fit H&H with nary a tweak! I do wonder what would have happened to a Gangbusters-styled revision of Crimefighters instead of the 'Dirty Twenties' version that made it out though...

And if you had a time machine and could go back to the 'Classic' TSR Era (1979-1990 or so?) i'll bet that Hoodlums & Hideouts would have hit the gaming audience like a Bazooka blast full of fun! Sadly, TSR was rather paranoid concerning its Intellectual Property back then(handing out 'Cease and Desist' writs to Fan sites like poisoned candy) and would probably take you to court. Best case scenario, TSR publishes a 'commitee designed' version of H&H and you get a co-creator credit and some cash and residuals out of it.

 How truly bizarre it was that it took WOTC and the D20 system OGL to give a legal soil for the OSR to grow in years later-Real Life is sometimes stranger than Elfgames, isn't it?