Fate Core vs Ishanekon: World Shapers
Compare Fate Core and Ishanekon: World Shapers side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Fate Core | Ishanekon: World Shapers | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Universal | Universal |
| Tags | Narrative, Fiction-First, Character-Driven, Collaborative, Tag-Based, Toolkit, Worldbuilding, Rules-Light, Social Combat, Strong GM Support | Character Building, Crunchy, Tactical, Toolkit, Hackable, CC-Licensed Rules |
| Core Mechanic | Roll four Fate dice and add a skill rating to compare with the opposition. Spend Fate points to invoke a relevant aspect for +2 or a reroll. Accept an aspect-based complication to gain a Fate point. | Skill Check: roll d10, add your level in the relevant Skill plus half the matching Stat Bonus (a stat's value minus 10), and meet or beat a difficulty from 1 (Very Easy) to 19 (Nearly Impossible). Attacks instead roll d20 plus a weapon's hit bonus against the target's Evasion. Combat runs in rounds where each character spends three Action Points per turn, with an attack costing two and a natural 20 adding bonus damage. The GM awards Narrative Momentum for inventive roleplay, which players spend together with Action Points on Cinematic Actions: freeform stunts resolved at the GM's discretion. |
| Dice | 4dF | d4–d20 |
| Complexity | Low | High |
| Accessibility | Very High | Very High |
| Runnability | Very High | High |
| License | CC BY 3.0 (SRD) | CC BY 4.0 |
| Third-Party Publishing | Commercial publishing allowed — Open license | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Cost | Free | Free |
| Publisher | Evil Hat Productions | Blaze Reason |
| Year | 2013 | 2022 |
| Languages | English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian | English |
| Best For | Groups who want to build their own setting and follow capable heroes through personal complications and dramatic conflicts. | Groups who want maximal character customization in a free, setting-agnostic system: players who enjoy assembling a bespoke concept from a huge option pool and a GM willing to supply the world the rules deliberately leave blank. |
| Highlights | Compels turn character weaknesses into story complications that earn Fate points. Creating advantages gives allies free aspect invocations to combine for decisive actions. Conceding a conflict preserves some control over defeat and earns Fate points for later scenes. | Characters are assembled from ten Archetypes, more than 210 Sub-Archetypes, over a thousand Abilities, plus Paths, Talents, and Traits, giving a single concept many independent axes of mechanical customization. Abilities draw on a Willpower pool, and spending extra Willpower upcasts them on the fly (scaling effects like damage, area, targets, or duration up to a per-tier limit), so one ability flexes to the moment instead of being a fixed effect. Every feature carries a complexity rating from 1 to 4, and Beginner Traits, a Cinematic Rules mode, and thirteen alternative-rule modules let a group run the same engine as a rules-light game or a dense tactical one. |
| Considerations | Aspect use depends on agreement about which fictional details apply. Full character and setting creation can take an entire session. Magic and other extras require group decisions about permissions and costs. | Character creation draws from over a thousand abilities plus hundreds of talents and traits, so building a character means selecting from a very large catalogue rather than a curated short list. The system is setting-agnostic and ships with no default world, so a group must supply or adapt a setting before the customization options mean anything in play. Skill checks and attacks resolve on separate scales (d10 plus half a Stat Bonus for skills, d20 plus full bonuses against Evasion for attacks), so the two halves of the system use different math players must keep straight. |