The comic mostly contained stories based on characters who already appeared regularly in 2000 AD. Its Eponymous character Diceman (without the space), a.k.a. Rick Fortune, was created specially for the comic (by Pat Mills and Graham Manley), but did not appear until the second issue. Fortune was a "psychic investigator," a 1930s American private detective with psionic powers. He also had a pair of stone dice, recovered from the ruins of Atlantis, which he could use to summon various powers including a three-headed lizard demon called Astragal to assist him. The Diceman strip was different from the others in that the reader not only had to avoid being killed, he also ran the risk of being driven insane (if his "sanity score" dropped to zero).