# Catch the Devil *Created:* 2026-10-29, *Modified:* 2026-10-29 ![[Catch the Devil (cover).jpg|600]] **Catch the Devil** is what Sage LaTorra built after **[[Black Stars Rise]]** stopped: the same four moves with a wounded version on the back of each, the same ordinary-people-meet-something-wrong premise, tightened into a game you can finish in one to three sessions. The subtitle is the thesis — *a game of suspense in the late Anthropocene* — and it means the horror is the one already in the room. Not a mythos older than humanity: the thing you personally lie awake worrying about, made manifest, amplified, and turned acute. LaTorra wrote it in 2019 and released it under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, with a note offering a free digital copy to anyone who sends him a picture of the book. It's the work of the co-designer of **[[Dungeon World]]** and it reads like someone using PbtA's whole vocabulary to say something bleaker than the games that taught it to him. ## Setting Ours, more or less, at the end of the Anthropocene. "Humanity has had a good run but it's winding down now," and the world the characters live in is like this one "with our darkest fears for what our society may do made concrete and let run wild." That's the whole setting, and it's the right amount: no cosmology, no secret history. The intrusion is whatever frightens the specific people at the table. The characters are ordinary people pulled from the phone book — a nurse, an accountant, a truck driver, a software tester — and the rules are explicit that you don't fully author your own character, because you don't fully author yourself either. ## Mechanics Four stats, range −3 to +3 in play, starting between −1 and +2, with 0 as average: quick for acting and reacting, steady for composure under duress, sharp for attention and reasoning, tough for strength and endurance. Rolls are 2d6 plus a stat, read on the usual ladder — 10+ goes as well as the situation allows, 7–9 succeeds at a cost or a hard choice, 6− is a miss and something bad follows. Four moves, and every one of them exists in two states: - Take a Risk is the catch-all, and the book is strict about it — you're always entitled to know what risk is triggering the roll, which keeps it from swallowing the game. - Study is the guaranteed-information move: observe a person, thing or situation, roll+sharp, and ask. On a 10+ any question, on a 7–9 one from the list, on a 6− one from the list plus a complication. The GM has to answer honestly and fully, and if you Study another PC, that player answers. - Keep It Together is the mental side: roll+steady against the horrendous, the supernatural, the mind-shattering, and on a 7–9 you pick your own failure 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 this move wounds. Either way you're at −1 until you've had a few hours to calm down. - Suffer Harm is the physical one: roll+tough−damage. 10+ you tough it out; 7–9 a cumulative −1 until you get medical attention; 4–6 your injuries catch up and the GM wounds one of your moves; 3− it's life-threatening, two moves wound, and if you haven't got two unwounded left you're dying. Damage is set by the weapon in a short exchange — 1 for fists and batons, 2 for pistols and large knives, 3 for rifles and explosives, with +1 for an especially skilled fighter and −1 for armor. Healing is slow and conditional: a week without significant new physical or mental stress restores one move, and under care, two. NPCs don't roll at all — they have a threshold of 2, 3 or 4, roll a die per point of damage, and take a condition for each die over it; conditions equal to their threshold incapacitate them and double it kills them. ## The wounded moves This is the engine, and it's the same idea as **Black Stars Rise**'s two-sided cards without the card stock. Each PC has a randomly assigned wounded version of each of the four moves — six variants per move, rolled once when a move first wounds and kept for good, even if the move recovers and wounds again. A wounded Take a Risk usually penalises a stat, but one variant gives quick +1, because some people are at their best under pressure. A wounded Suffer Harm can make you fragile, or make you tougher, or cost you a stat. So the deterioration is characterisation rather than arithmetic. Two PCs at the same damage level are in different games, and the table finds out who each of them becomes without anyone having chosen it. The book even opens character creation by asking whether the character has been in a life-or-death situation or had a life-threatening injury — answer yes and you roll that wounded version before play starts. ## Character creation Deliberately random, with an escape hatch: "if any question is too personal or if you don't feel you can portray a certain result you can choose instead of rolling." Stats start at 0; raise one by 1, then optionally take one down and another up. Choose a bond with another PC — biological family, found family, or co-worker — and that player decides what the connection is, and hands you their rolls for the questions it governs. Then roll for name and pronouns, your parents' faith (on a 2d6 table of world religions and none), country of birth, and a job from a 6×6 table that runs from nurse and barista to surgeon, detective and "two jobs (roll twice)". The GM finishes with a few questions of their own. ## The Rot The GM's job is stated as three things: intrude fear into the players' lives, throw the world off-center, and play to find out what happens. The intruding thing is the Rot, and building it is the best-written part of the book. Take something you personally fear. Then, repeating until you've done each at least once: make it manifest in a way beyond the real, amplify it, make it acute. The example given is environmental collapse turned into sentient plant life reclaiming the city after an industrial accident. Give it a goal that puts the PCs in its way — not necessarily about them, but unavoidably affecting them — and three assets: a bought police force, a corporation, a turned family member, a well-meaning community group. The Rot wants deniability, because unambiguous proof would let the characters appeal to authority, so it works subtly and leaves them isolated with only the people who believe them. Then the Rot gets questions. Pose them as the Rot pursuing its goal — "how do I drive the PCs out of the building so I can take it over?" — and every situation you frame in play is the Rot taking a step toward answering one. ## Editions - **Catch the Devil** (2019; this build dated 7 August 2019) — 36 pages, RNDM Games/BWHQ, released under CC BY 4.0; complete and playable but deliberately scoped: no rules for character change, downtime or long-term GMing, "for now." *In the library.* - **The itch release** — $10 with a need-based half-price coupon, listed as in development, with devlog entries running to 10 January 2020 (*Wounded Move Cards*) and later updates free to buyers. ## References - [Catch The Devil — Sage LaTorra](https://svirfnebl.in/catchthedevil) - [Sage LaTorra on itch.io](https://sagelt.itch.io/) - [Dungeon World](http://dungeon.world/)