Version 1.2

Welcome to From Beyond Cold Stars, an extremely short rules framework for running eldritch horror investigations. I think version 1.2 may be the last. I may feel an urge to add adventure seeds (as WSCA games tend to do), but I expect I'd run it with existing mystery modules, myself, and recommend you do likewise. (Or just buy the full version of Cthulhu Dark for better advice about making scenarios than I'd put in.)

I started and finished version 1.0 (attached) in the final hours of #wscajam, though the seed of the idea behind it was planted years ago. At a party, I told someone I'd just bought all kinds of strangely-shaped dice (for a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign that never really materialized), and he suggested I use them to run something with Cthulhu. 

I've been noodling on and off for a while since then about how I might do that, and didn't really stumble upon an answer until I saw The Uplift by Kurt Potts. I had too easily dismissed the idea of submitting anything to #wscajam because "2d6 + modifiers – modifiers" doesn't really do much for me, but Kurt's clever "overcharge die" reminded me that jams like this are a great opportunity to riff on original inspiration and take it in other directions. 

I started by trying to use What's So Cool About Outer Space?'s general format and a hint of its rules (as you can see in the original version, attached to this post), but I thought it would be too confusing to enumerate advantages, match that to a die size with a different number of faces, and then enumerate disadvantages. I ended up with a "pick the highest die" approach that's a lot more hand-wavy, but I think better matches how I'd enjoy running it in play. This later version also throws in some more strange graphics, and an approach to typography that will probably get my designer's badge taken away. You can't even really see the cover's title on my phone! But hey, the intent was to make you wonder what the hell you were looking at, maybe unsettle you a little, make it feel a little like a signal from farther away than is really advisable to listen to. Hopefully it does that, at least.

I hope this gives you an excuse to use some Zocchi dice. And I hope whoever GMs your game will wear a big smile when it's time to interpret what "beyond human limitations" means in play.