Eclipse Phase vs Shadow of the Demon Lord
Compare Eclipse Phase and Shadow of the Demon Lord side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Eclipse Phase | Shadow of the Demon Lord | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Scifi, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic | Fantasy, Horror |
| Play Style | Crunchy, Horror, Weird, Investigation, Espionage, Faction Play, Open Source | Dark Fantasy, Grimdark, Fast Sessions, Beginner-Friendly, GM-Friendly |
| 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 d20 + modifier vs. target number 10. Boons and banes (d6s) add or subtract from the roll, canceling each other out. |
| Dice | d100 | d20 |
| Complexity | High | Low |
| Accessibility | High | High |
| Runnability | Very High | High |
| License | Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | Forbidden Rules SRD |
| Cost | Free (Quickstart) / $$ | $$ |
| Publisher | Posthuman Studios | Schwalb Entertainment |
| Year | 2019 | 2015 |
| 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 fast, dark fantasy with streamlined d20 mechanics and a sense of impending doom. |
| 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. | Fast character creation, quick sessions, single boon/bane mechanic replaces most modifiers, 11 levels keep campaigns short |
| 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. | Dark horror tone limits genre range, setting tightly coupled to core rules |