Eat the Reich vs Mage: The Ascension

Compare Eat the Reich and Mage: The Ascension side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Eat the Reich	Mage: The Ascension
Genre	Historical, Horror	Fantasy, Modern, Horror
Tags	Pulp Action, Combat-Heavy, High-Power, One-Shot Friendly, Mission-Based, Playbook-Driven, Rules-Light	Freeform Magic, Character Building, Crunchy, High-Power, Roll to Cast, Skill-Based, Lore-Heavy, Fear & Stress Mechanics
Core Mechanic	Roll a pool of d6s equal to your stat plus one die per piece of equipment or ability you activate; discard any die showing 3 or less, count 4–5 as a success, and 6 as a critical. The GM builds a separate Attack pool equal to the engaged Threat's rating and rolls it. You then allocate each remaining die to one of five slots, narrating one scene detail per die as you place it: advance an Objective, eliminate a Threat, defend against the GM's Attack dice, feed for Blood, or trigger a SPECIAL (criticals only). Any GM Attack dice you don't cancel with defence dice inflict Injuries.	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	d6 dice pool	d10 dice pool
Complexity	Low	Very High
Accessibility	Medium	High
Runnability	Low	Very High
License	Proprietary	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	Rowan, Rook and Decard	Onyx Path Publishing
Year	2023	2015
Languages	English, Italian	English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish
Best For	Groups who want a self-contained, ultraviolent anti-fascist action romp playable in two or three short sessions with pregenerated characters and zero campaign overhead.	Groups who want long-form modern occult campaigns about reality-shaping power, ideological conflict, and the consequences of imposing belief on the world.
Highlights	Every die spent on attack is a die not spent defending or feeding for Blood, so each turn forces an explicit tradeoff between killing nazis, staying alive, and refueling the abilities that make you dangerous. Reinforcement rules ratchet pressure up each round (defeated Threats roll d6 to restore rating and every active Threat's Attack rating ticks up by one), so lingering in a scene gets steadily more lethal. Six pregenerated vampires with fixed mechanics but explicitly malleable backgrounds let the table skip session zero entirely and be drop-coffin-deployed into Paris within minutes of opening the book.	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	Built around a single fixed scenario (the assault on Hitler's Paris stronghold) with no support for other premises, settings, or open-ended campaign play. Character creation is reskin or hack-from-the-pregens only; the book offers no point-buy or formal chargen system. Splatter-violence tone and nazi subject matter are confrontational by design; the rulebook opens with content warnings, lines-and-veils guidance, and an evil-calibration checklist the table is expected to work through before play.	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.