Eclipse Phase vs Night's Black Agents

Compare Eclipse Phase and Night's Black Agents side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	Eclipse Phase	Night's Black Agents
Genre	Sci-Fi, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic	Horror, Modern
Tags	Crunchy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Weird, Investigation, Espionage, Faction Play, CC-Licensed Rules	Investigation, Espionage, Character-Driven, Gritty
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.	GUMSHOE engine. Investigative abilities auto-succeed: if you have the skill and there's a clue, you find it. General abilities (combat, athletics) roll 1d6 + spent points vs. difficulty 4. Point pools refresh between sessions, creating resource-management tension. Four play modes (Burn, Dust, Mirror, Stakes) tune mechanics to your preferred espionage tone.
Dice	d100	d6
Complexity	High	Medium
Availability	Free core rules	Paid
Runnability	5 of 5 book tools	Book tools not listed
License	Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	GUMSHOE SRD (CC BY 3.0 / OGL)
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	Not yet researched
Publisher	Posthuman Studios	Pelgrane Press
Year	2019	2012
Languages	English	English
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.	Groups who want spy-thriller action fused with supernatural horror: burned agents unraveling a vampire conspiracy through investigation, chases, and tradecraft.
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.	Investigation never stalls: clues flow automatically, Conspyramid campaign structure is a well-designed GM tool, four tonal modes let you dial in the spy genre you want, highly modular vampire creation system, works stripped of vampires for pure espionage
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.	NPC combat math can feel unbalanced against PCs, multiple point pools to track can bottleneck play, narrow genre focus limits reuse, requires significant GM prep for conspiracy networks