# Black Stars Rise *Created:* 2026-10-29, *Modified:* 2026-10-29 ![[Black Stars Rise (2014 Playtest) (cover).jpg|600]] **Black Stars Rise** has the best pitch in cosmic horror, and it's the one the genre usually refuses: you play the people in the town where the X-Files episode happens, and Mulder and Scully never show up. No federal badge, no hypothesis, no monster-of-the-week to file at the end. A mechanic, a librarian, a priest and a detective who already live there, finding out that their street is one of the strange places. Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel built it in the open between **[[Dungeon World]]** revisions, and then never finished it — what exists is an incomplete playtest text that states its own incompleteness on page one and gets on with it anyway. ## Setting Contemporary, small-town, ordinary — the book's own line is "a game of normal people caught up in the strange dark truths of the universe." It's built on **[[Apocalypse World]]** by way of *World of Dungeons*, and it assumes you already know one of those, so it only writes down what it changes. The setting isn't a place so much as a border. The characters' mundane lives are theirs to define, in as much detail as the table wants: houses, jobs, families, the bar everyone drinks at. The mythos is emphatically not. The GM is told to keep asking questions — how is your character reacting, what do you least want to happen — while refusing to let the players fill in what the strangeness actually is. "It's big and scary and most importantly unknown," and the moment the table starts explaining it, the game has lost the thing it was for. ## Mechanics Underneath it's PbtA with the fat trimmed: three stats — Fit for physical power and resilience, Sharp for quick thinking, Steady for mental fortitude and nerves — and the familiar 2d6 ladder. - **Take a Risk** is the workhorse, the *Defy Danger* / *Act Under Fire* of the set: 10+ it goes as well as could be hoped, 7–9 a complication and a tough choice, 6− it turns out badly. Aiding someone is a specific case of it, usually +1 on a 7+. - **Study** is the characters' knowledge, deduction and instinct: roll+Sharp and ask the GM questions — what here should I be worried about, what here might be useful, what's about to happen. - **Suffer Harm** is where the fatalism lives: roll 2d6+Fit minus the damage. 10+ you tough it out; 7–9 −1 ongoing until you get medical attention; 6–4 your injuries catch up and the GM wounds one of your moves; 3− it's life-threatening and two moves get wounded, and if you don't have two unwounded left, you're dying. Damage comes in dice — light weapons one, heavy two, special three or more — and you roll them all and keep the best. Armor subtracts. NPCs don't take hit points at all; they have a Threshold, and damage over it means a condition of the GM's choosing. - **Keep It Together** covers the horrendous, the supernatural, the mind-shattering: roll+Steady, and 7–9 makes you pick your own poison from a short list — scream and panic, lash out violently, beg and plead, curl up and shut down. On a 6− the GM picks, and the move gets wounded. **The move cards are the best idea in the game.** The four basic moves are printed as two-sided cards, and the reverse is the wounded side, marked with a splatter. You don't get to look at it until the rules wound that move. Losing a fight or losing your nerve doesn't subtract from a pool — it flips the card you were relying on into a worse version of itself, in front of everybody. It's the cleanest physical expression of "your character is coming apart" I've seen in a PbtA hack, and it costs one piece of card stock per player. **Breaks** handle the mental side without a sanity track. When the rules say so, the player draws from a printed break deck and gets a lasting condition from it — a new move that sits in the character concept, like *Edward* (an invisible friend who comes by to hang out and would like you to take up his hobbies), *Dr. Doolittle* (the animals talk now, constantly, and they're not interesting), *Dog Beneath the Skin* (you smell everything, and the GM may feed you nothing else), *Missing Time*, *Painless*, or a tongue that slides into Aramaic or Awadhi without asking. Nobody is measuring how crazy you are. You just accumulate things that happened to you. **Relationships** are the stability mechanic. Each career hands you relationship statements; you fill in names. Risking something on a relationship's behalf, or deliberately reinforcing it, charges it — one check, and it's spent to reroll any roll+Steady, keeping the better result. Your ordinary life is literally your reroll supply, which is a neat piece of design: the people you know are the only thing keeping you level, and the rules make you spend them. ## Careers Eight half-page playbooks, and occupation is the whole architecture: **Doctor**, **Reporter**, **Librarian**, **Detective**, **Mechanic**, **Professor**, **Priest**, **Artist**. The repository's later text adds two more, farmer and park ranger, for the rural setups. Each sets your three stats, gives you a lifestyle (all of these are middle class or well-off, with richer above and struggling below), a recovery rule, two moves out of five or so, and the relationship statements that tie you to the town. Being cut off — fired, disowned, gone — drops the lifestyle, and enough of that removes it altogether. Buying above your lifestyle has a price in favors or complications rather than a price list. The unused careers don't go back in the box: the GM turns each one into an NPC. That's the quiet engine of the game. Your town's doctor, priest and reporter already exist as sheets, so the GM has faces to hang the weirdness on without inventing them, and the missing profession at your table is a person you'll have to go and talk to. ## Play structure Sessions make arcs, arcs make campaigns. A setup launches each arc: a situation, a few choices for the GM, a few for the players, and a note on which careers it suits. When the setup has been dealt with — survived, escaped, bottomed out — the arc ends, and you can start a fresh one with a new setup, new characters, new location, maybe a new decade. The people who come next know nothing about what happened, which is exactly the horror the game is going for. The GM advice is short and unusually good: ask questions about the mundane life and let the players fill it in, then take the mythos back and keep it. **Portray a twisting world** — twisting, not twisted, because a thing that's already broken is scenery and a thing that's changing is a threat. And build **NPC triangles**, so that every strange event doesn't land on the player characters: it lands on the barkeep, and the players get to watch what it does to someone they know. ## Editions - **Black Stars Rise** (playtest text, March 2014) — 19 pages, incomplete, and self-described as such; the four basic moves are given as two-sided card sheets, then the eight careers, then one setup, *Mansion on the Hill*. *In the library.* - The repository's later text (to October 2014) — not a PDF, and further along than the packaged copy: the last commit (28 October 2014) carries ten careers and four setups, adding *The Woods*, *Last Gas* and *Renovation* alongside *Mansion on the Hill*. The text lives as XML feeding both the web version and the InDesign layout, and no built PDF sits in the repository — so this playtest file is the last packaged state of a project that kept writing after it stopped printing. ## References - [Black Stars Rise — GitHub (Sagelt/black-stars-rise)](https://github.com/Sagelt/black-stars-rise) - [Black Stars Rise on Github — LaTorra.org](https://www.latorra.org/2013/10/23/black-stars-rise-on-github/) - [Thoughts on reading Black Stars Rise — The Daily Apocalypse](https://daily-apocalypse.com/rpgs/thoughts-on-reading-black-stars-rise)