A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! vs Murder of Crows

Compare A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! and Murder of Crows side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine!	Murder of Crows
Genre	Universal	Horror
Tags	Comedy, Cinematic, Rules-Light, Beginner-Friendly, One-Shot Friendly, Theater of the Mind, Pulp Action, Fast-Paced	Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Comedy, Mission-Based, Character-Driven, Random Tables, Low-Prep, Freeform Magic, Fast-Paced, Theater of the Mind
Core Mechanic	Roll a pool of d6s equal to one of four Stats (Smarts, Moves, Style, Brawn) rated 1–5, add two extra dice if you have a matching Focus, and sum the total against a Target Number (10 normal, 20 hard, 30 herculean, 40 impossible). Sixes explode and reroll. One die in every pool is the Calamity Die: if the roll fails and the Calamity Die shows a 1, the Director invokes a comedic complication.	Roll 1d6 against the relevant Aspect (Beast, Omen or Trickster, rated 2 to 5): a roll below the Aspect succeeds, a roll equal to it succeeds and earns a Portent, and a roll above it fails. A helping Crow counts the Aspect as 1 higher, to a maximum of 5. When a Crow acts in accordance with its Augury, the player may roll two dice and use either; when it contradicts its Augury, or an Affliction affects the roll, the player rolls two dice and Fate (the GM) chooses which counts. A human may roll 1d6 to resist; if the human's roll matches or is lower than the Crow's, the Crow fails even on a success.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d6
Complexity	Very Low	Very Low
Availability	Free core rules	Free core rules
Runnability	2 of 5 book tools	Book tools not listed
License	Standard commercial	Proprietary
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	No verified route found
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	EN Publishing	Jon Pessin
Year	2021	2026
Languages	English	English
Best For	Groups who want a fast, comedic action movie at the table with minimal prep and the freedom to swap genres between adventures: ghost hunters one night, talking-animal vigilantes the next.	Groups who want a darkly comic one-shot as a flock of crows plotting a human's death, with tables that set up the hunt at the table.
Highlights	Character creation runs through six steps on a comic-book ID Card, so a new Hero is table-ready in minutes: a Role (talking ape, druid astronaut, vigilante), four Stats split across 12 points, a Focus per Stat, and a single-word Trait. Karma is one shared currency that buys extra dice, damage reduction, or Flashbacks where the player retroactively establishes a useful item or prepared action, and Karma is refunded when the player leans into their Trait. Heroes never die: at zero Health you are Knocked Out for five minutes and stand back up at 1 Health, keeping the tone slapstick rather than tragic.	Rolling exactly the Aspect's value earns a Portent, letting the player ask Fate one question answered by a brief, obscure vision. Acting in accordance with a Crow's Augury lets the player pick between two dice, while contradicting it hands that choice to Fate. Fate rolls or chooses with the Crows from d6 tables to set the hunt's victim, motive and complications.
Considerations	The whole rulebook is thirty comic-book-format pages with no advancement track beyond +1 Stat or +1 Focus per adventure, so long campaigns need imported structure. Genre, setting, and bestiary are intentionally a grab bag of one-paragraph Roles and Extras with no published world: published Issues (Spirits of Manhattan, Below Decks, Accidental Anthropomorphic Heroes) carry the setting work. Combat resolves quickly but is mostly damage exchange against flat Defence numbers with no maneuvers, conditions, or positioning rules beyond optional zone-based ranges.	The premise is the flock plotting a human's death, which will not suit groups uncomfortable with murder as the goal. The rules include no death for Crows: a Crow that takes a fourth Affliction leaves the scene or goes unconscious instead. There are no experience, advancement or campaign rules.