Fate Core vs The Quiet Year
Compare Fate Core and The Quiet Year side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.
| Fate Core | The Quiet Year | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Universal | Post-Apocalyptic |
| Tags | Narrative, Fiction-First, Character-Driven, Collaborative, Tag-Based, Toolkit, Worldbuilding, Rules-Light, Social Combat, Strong GM Support | GM-Less, Worldbuilding, Collaborative, Narrative, Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Fiction-First, Map-Drawing |
| 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. | No dice, no GM. A deck of playing cards drives play: each suit is a season, each card a weekly prompt. On your turn, draw a card, answer the prompt, and choose to Discover Something New, Start a Project, or Hold a Discussion. Draw on the shared map to represent changes. Projects take multiple weeks to complete. The Contempt Token signals when a player feels unheard. The game ends when the Frost Shepherds arrive (King of Spades). |
| Dice | 4dF | Diceless |
| Complexity | Low | Very Low |
| Availability | Free core rules | Paid |
| Runnability | 5 of 5 book tools | 3 of 5 book tools |
| License | CC BY 3.0 (SRD) | Proprietary |
| Third-Party Publishing | Commercial publishing allowed — Open license | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Publisher | Evil Hat Productions | Buried Without Ceremony (Avery Alder) |
| Year | 2013 | 2013 |
| 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 to collaboratively build a community's story through map-drawing: 52 weeks of discoveries, projects, and tensions before everything changes. |
| 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. | Card-driven structure (one card per week across four seasons) paces the narrative through 52 turns, map-drawing produces a physical artifact of the session, Contempt Token mechanic signals when a player feels unheard, works as a standalone game or worldbuilding tool for other campaigns |
| 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. | Contempt mechanic can create genuine inter-player tension, no way to revisit or undo earlier map decisions, map quality depends on group comfort with drawing, limited replayability with the same group |