Eclipse Phase vs Mutant: Year Zero
Compare Eclipse Phase and Mutant: Year Zero side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Eclipse Phase | Mutant: Year Zero | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Scifi, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic | Post-Apocalyptic |
| Play Style | Crunchy, Horror, Weird, Investigation, Espionage, Faction Play, Open Source | Sandbox, Survival, Exploration, Character-Driven, Worldbuilding, Narrative |
| Core Mechanic | Roll d100 and try to land equal to or under your skill (or aptitude × 3 for unskilled checks), adjusted by difficulty modifiers in ±10 increments. The 33/66 rule grades each roll on a single throw: a success of 33 or higher is a superior success, a failure of 66 or lower is a superior failure, and doubles (00, 11, 22, …) are criticals. Four pools, Insight (mental), Moxie (social), Vigor (physical), and Flex (wild card), spend to add +20 to target numbers, flip-flop a roll's digits, upgrade a success, ignore wounds or trauma, or introduce narrative elements like NPCs and environmental details. | Roll a pool of d6s (attribute + skill + gear). Each 6 is a success; one success is enough. You can push your roll to reroll failures, but 1s on attribute dice cause trauma and 1s on gear dice cause damage to equipment. Mutations cost Mutation Points and can misfire with unpredictable side effects. |
| Dice | d100 | d6 dice pool |
| Complexity | High | Medium |
| Accessibility | High | High |
| Runnability | Very High | Very High |
| License | Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | Proprietary |
| Cost | Free (Quickstart) / $$ | $$ |
| Publisher | Posthuman Studios | Free League Publishing |
| Year | 2019 | 2014 |
| Best For | Groups who want hard transhumanist sci-fi with cosmic horror undertones, dense subsystems for hacking and body-swapping, and the Firewall conspiracy framework where cortical-stack backups turn death into a setback rather than the end of a character. | Post-apocalyptic campaigns where mutant survivors explore a deadly Zone, build up their home settlement, and search for the mythical Eden: with the Year Zero Engine that spawned a family of games. |
| Highlights | The ego/morph split separates mind from body: characters back up their cortical stacks and can resleeve into biological morphs, robotic synthmorphs, or digital infomorphs between sessions, making body choice a tactical decision and death a recoverable setback. The 33/66 rule grades each percentile roll on a continuous scale of superior success or superior failure without rerolls, so a single throw produces a degree of outcome rather than just pass/fail. Seven distinct reputation networks (@-rep, c-rep, f-rep, g-rep, i-rep, r-rep, x-rep) replace cash for many transactions in post-scarcity territory, modeling factional standing as a parallel economy with its own favor limits and weekly refresh caps. | Push mechanic creates tough choices, Ark development gives players a shared home to build, Zone exploration is tense and rewarding, eight distinctive roles with built-in relationships and dreams, launched the Year Zero Engine family |
| Considerations | Bookkeeping splits across an ego sheet (mind, skills, traits, pools, rep) and a separate morph sheet (body, ware, Durability, derived combat stats), and resleeving mid-campaign swaps out the morph half including pool maximums. The book takes an overtly political stance: the introduction states it is "not the game for you" if you support authoritarianism, and faction writeups present anarchist and autonomist values as the authorial baseline rather than one option among many. Routine cortical-stack backups make character death recoverable by design, so traditional life-or-death stakes need to be reframed around backup destruction, exsurgent infection, or memory lack to carry weight. | Mutation randomness can frustrate planners, metaplot requires significant GM commitment, Ark development bookkeeping adds between-session overhead, Zone travel can feel repetitive without varied encounters |