Back in :checks notes: early January, I made the following series of comments:

[Lunar] would be better if it were Dead Man’s Hand… in Space

Cowboys on the Moon:
– DMH rules
– Every weapon gets a piercing/bludgeoning stat.
– Piercing weapons work as is
– Bludgeoning weapons get a different table: get a distance in cm they push the target back but can’t do anything but confer Under Fire Markers. Oh, and mass effects the table.
– Done?

Dead Moon’s Hand

Dead Man’s Hand remains what I want out of any game that isn’t Infinity: rippingly fast to play, interesting enough to play a lot, every decision meaningful but not weighty enough to introduce analysis paralysis.

Lunar is neat, but… far too fiddly for me to love.

Then, in late February, I saw a Wargames Illustrated video where they reskinned Dead Man’s Hand for Medieval period (calling it “Dead Man’s Sword”). They tweaked the rules “as little as possible” to do so and it looked like it worked really well.

That was my motivation to finally get Dead Moon’s Hand written up. So, here it is!

Dead Moon’s Hand

I’ve playtested it a couple of times, and I think it works pretty well! It’s a lot of fun, moves quickly and yeah: decisions are meaningful.

It’s as much core Dead Man’s Hand as possible: I think the biggest change is pushing and close combat – shooting results might look like the biggest change, but it’s an unpacking of the existing DMH approach to weapons having different sets of results.