Call of Cthulhu vs Mage: The Ascension

Compare Call of Cthulhu and Mage: The Ascension side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Call of Cthulhu	Mage: The Ascension
Genre	Horror, Modern	Fantasy, Modern, Horror
Tags	Investigation, Deadly, One-Shot Friendly, Atmospheric, Roleplay-Heavy, Mystery, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Corruption, Skill-Based	Freeform Magic, Character Building, Crunchy, High-Power, Roll to Cast, Skill-Based, Lore-Heavy, Fear & Stress Mechanics
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.	Build a d10 pool from an Attribute plus an Ability and count each die that meets or exceeds the difficulty, usually 6. Each rolled 1 cancels a success, and a roll with no successes and at least one 1 botches. Magick uses Arete instead: the highest Sphere plus coincidence or vulgarity and witnesses establishes the base difficulty, with situational modifiers applied afterward. Successes determine the Effect, and vulgar casting risks Paradox.
Dice	d100	d10 dice pool
Complexity	Medium	Very High
Accessibility	High	High
Runnability	Very High	Very High
License	Chaosium Fan Material Policy	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	Commercial publishing allowed — Storytellers Vault
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Cost	$$	$$
Publisher	Chaosium	Onyx Path Publishing
Year	2014	2015
Best For	Investigation-driven horror where combat is deadly and sanity is fragile. Great for one-shots.	Groups who want long-form modern occult campaigns about reality-shaping power, ideological conflict, and the consequences of imposing belief on the world.
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.	Nine Spheres combine to build open-ended Effects, allowing the same capability to emerge through different paradigms, practices, and instruments. Coincidental and vulgar classifications make subtlety a tactical choice because conspicuous magick raises difficulty and accumulates Paradox. Focus ties belief to procedure, so a mage's worldview determines the tools and rituals used to alter reality.
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.	Improvised Effects place frequent adjudication on the Storyteller, who must apply Sphere permissions, focus, required successes, and consequences consistently. Vulgar magick generates Paradox even on success, so overt power can punish a mage through injury or metaphysical breakdown. Faction choices can make a cabal internally hostile, so character concepts need shared motives before play.