Call of Cthulhu vs Fear of the Unknown
Compare Call of Cthulhu and Fear of the Unknown side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Call of Cthulhu | Fear of the Unknown | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Horror, Modern | Horror |
| Tags | Investigation, Deadly, One-Shot Friendly, Atmospheric, Roleplay-Heavy, Mystery, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Corruption, Skill-Based | Tag-Based, Fiction-First, Collaborative, Investigation, Mystery, Fear & Stress Mechanics, One-Shot Friendly, Rules-Light |
| Core Mechanic | Roll d100 equal to or under your skill percentage. Success tiers at half (Hard) and one-fifth (Extreme) of the skill value. Bonus and penalty dice adjust the tens digit. Failed rolls can be pushed for a second attempt at greater risk. | Roll 2d6 and add tags: invoke up to three of your character's tags for +1 each, while the Oracle invokes up to two against you for -1 each. On 10+ you fully succeed, on 7-9 you succeed at a cost, and on 6 or less the Oracle chooses a consequence. The Encounter True Horror move instead adds your accumulated Horror to the roll, where a higher total is worse, so encounters grow more dangerous as dread builds. |
| Dice | d100 | 2d6 |
| Complexity | Medium | Low |
| Accessibility | High | High |
| Runnability | Very High | Very High |
| License | Chaosium Fan Material Policy | Proprietary |
| Third-Party Publishing | Not yet researched | Not yet researched |
| Cost | $$ | $$ |
| Publisher | Chaosium | Sixpence Games |
| Year | 2014 | 2023 |
| Best For | Investigation-driven horror where combat is deadly and sanity is fragile. Great for one-shots. | Groups who want a rules-light collaborative horror mystery that plays to completion in a single session, especially fans of horror films who want to investigate a mystery and face escalating dread without any GM prep. Works well for convention one-shots and players new to narrative RPGs. |
| Highlights | Tracking Sanity as a depletable score ties mental erosion to the fiction, so confronting cosmic horror mechanically wears characters down. The percentile skills resolve on a d100 roll-under, with Hard and Extreme bands at half and one-fifth of the rating. Bouts of Madness convert failed Sanity checks into temporary phobias, manias, or loss of character control. | Every successful Investigate roll hands the player a clue tied to the question they asked, so the mystery advances from what characters do at the table rather than from clues the Oracle hid in advance. The tags a player invokes on a roll become the fictional elements of the resulting scene, so each character's specific traits, not just the dice result, shape what happens in play. Each supernatural encounter permanently raises a character's Horror, which is added to future horror rolls, building escalating dread without a separate countdown. |
| Considerations | The chase rules add a detailed positioning subsystem whose complexity outweighs how often it sees use. Character creation allocates points across a long list of skills, a slow first step for new players. In long campaigns the sanity spiral can strip a character of player control as madness accumulates. | A single Face Peril roll resolves every dangerous situation, from a fistfight to a fall, with no initiative or enemy stats, so groups wanting tactical combat must build it themselves. The Oracle prepares no clues and improvises every answer to investigation questions live, which demands real on-the-spot creativity rather than prepared structure. The three-act structure and epilogue are built for self-contained one-shots, with no advancement loop for ongoing characters beyond gaining and losing tags. |