Moonlight on Roseville Beach - Starter guide

What is Moonlight on Roseville Beach?

Moonlight on Roseville Beach is a tabletop roleplaying game by R. Rook Studio, written by Richard Ruane. It's set in the summer of 1979 in Roseville Beach, a small queernorm seaside village on Rose Island - a fictional barrier island somewhere along the North American Atlantic or Gulf coast. "Queernorm" means exactly what it sounds like: LGBTQIA+ people aren't just welcome here, they're the default. Straight and cisnormative identities are the minority.

By day your character holds down an ordinary summer job - bartender, backup dancer, piano player, gardener. By night you and your housemates investigate supernatural mysteries: necromantic secret societies, ancient entities, Gothic terrors, and worse. And you do it without any help from the police, who are openly hostile toward the community.

The game is described on its own cover as "a queer game of disco and cosmic horror," and that's a pretty accurate pitch. It's grounded and intimate in scale - you're not saving the world, you're protecting your neighborhood and the people you love.

How does the system work?

Moonlight on Roseville Beach uses a dice pool system built entirely from six-sided dice (d6s). You only roll when an action is genuinely risky - the GM doesn't call for rolls on routine tasks.

When a roll is needed, you build a pool of d6s by counting up relevant factors: you always get one die for being a sleuth, and you add dice for things like having a relevant background, a relevant skill, not being currently Injured or Scared in a way that interferes, an ally helping (and sharing the risk), or acting to protect someone you care about.

The interesting part is how you assign those dice. Before you roll, you identify what's at stake: success (Goal), avoiding physical harm (Injured), avoiding psychological harm (Scared), and the possibility of finding extra information (Clue). You roll all your dice at once, then assign each die to one of those risks. A 6 on the Goal die means success; a 4-5 means partial success or unforeseen complications; a 3 or lower means things go wrong. The Injured and Scared tables have their own thresholds.

This creates genuine tension in every roll. You might have five dice but only four risks to cover - great. Or you might have two dice and four risks, which means something is probably going sideways.

There's also an optional Trouble die: if your pool feels too thin, you can add one extra die, but you must assign a die to the Trouble table, which means someone in your life - an ally, a comfort, a neighbor - is now in danger.

Magic works on the same framework but adds a Control table. Magic is almost always risky, and losing control has real consequences.

What do you need to start?

The core book contains everything you need to play: the full rules, a detailed setting guide for Roseville Beach and its locations, a character keeper, and five complete mysteries. There is no separate GM screen or starter set. The book is written to be self-contained.

The game includes a digital content sheet (part of the character keeper) designed to help groups align on tone and content before play begins - a thoughtful inclusion given the themes involved.

There is no free quickstart available at the time of writing, though the book itself is compact enough that getting into play doesn't require reading everything first.

Who is this game for?

This game is for groups who want something more intimate and grounded than a dungeon crawl. It works especially well for people interested in queer storytelling, 1970s Americana, or horror that feels personal rather than epic.

The ruleset is approachable. Character creation is fast and structured - you choose an Origin Story (options include The Fresh Face, The Scandalous, The Shifter, A Witch, A Familiar, and The Stranger), then a Job, then some backgrounds and skills via rolls. You're playing in under an hour.

Where the game asks more of you is in the fiction. The setting deliberately engages with queer history, the politics of 1979, and the reality that the characters can't rely on institutional protection. That's not a problem to solve - it's the premise. Groups that want to lean into that will find rich material. Groups looking for escapist fantasy with no weight to it might find the tone heavier than expected.

The game is also explicitly written around a group of housemates sharing a bungalow, which means the social dynamics between characters are built into the structure from the start. It suits groups who enjoy that kind of collaborative character work.

How does it differ from other systems?

Compared to Blades in the Dark, which uses a similar dice pool structure, Moonlight on Roseville Beach is more intimate and less mechanical. There's no faction system, no clock-based escalation, and far less bookkeeping. The focus is on characters and community rather than operations and heists.

Compared to Call of Cthulhu, the horror is present but the tone is lighter and more hopeful. Characters here can - and often do - protect what matters to them. There's also no sanity meter counting down to inevitability. Scares are named, contextual, and recoverable.

Where do you start?

Read the Introduction and the Roseville Beach location guide first - it takes maybe thirty minutes and gives you a vivid picture of the world your characters live in. Then read through character creation and run it collaboratively at the table with your players.

The first mystery, The Haunting of Flora Bly, is a solid entry point. It introduces the setting's tones well without overwhelming new players.

For external resources, the publisher R. Rook Studio is active on social media and the game has a community presence on itch.io. Actual play recordings exist online if you want to hear how the dice system sounds in practice before committing.

Recommended products

The core book Moonlight on Roseville Beach is the only product you need. It's a complete, self-contained experience. If the setting resonates with your group, the five included mysteries will give you plenty to work with before you ever think about expanding.