Honor + Intrigue vs Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game

Compare Honor + Intrigue and Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Honor + Intrigue	Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game
Genre	Historical	Horror, Historical
Tags	Career-Based, Cinematic, Social Combat, Social Intrigue, Heroic, Fast-Paced, Martial Arts, Ship-Based, Pirates, Theater of the Mind	Fear & Stress Mechanics, Player-Only Rolls, Theater of the Mind, Character Building, Character-Driven, Narrative, Low-Prep, Licensed IP
Core Mechanic	Roll 2d6 + Quality (Might, Daring, Savvy, or Flair) + Career rank vs. 9 to succeed. In combat, Combat Abilities (Brawl, Melee, Ranged, Defense) replace Careers. Bonus Dice roll 3d6 and keep the best two; Penalty Dice keep the worst two. Fortune Points let heroes escape death, add bonus dice, invoke dramatic license, or press the Advantage in duels. Advantage tracks momentum in melee: characters start at 3 and lose Advantage when hit, becoming Defeated at 0. Nine Dueling Styles (Spanish, Italian, French, and more) each grant unique maneuvers and a Final Secret at mastery. Social Combat uses the same framework, targeting Composure instead of Lifeblood.	The GM rates a task from difficulty 0 to 10 and multiplies it by 3 for the target number; difficulty 0 succeeds automatically. When a roll is required, players roll a d20 for tasks, attacks, and defenses and succeed by meeting or beating the target. Skills, assets, and Effort spent from Might, Speed, or Intellect Pools ease the difficulty; Edge reduces those Pool costs.
Dice	2d6	d20
Complexity	Medium	Medium
Accessibility	Medium	Medium
Runnability	Very High	Very High
License	Proprietary	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	Not yet researched
Cost	$$	$$
Publisher	Basic Action Games	Monte Cook Games
Year	2012	2023
Best For	Groups who want cinematic swashbuckling in the style of The Three Musketeers and Captain Blood: dashing swordplay, court intrigue, and sea battles with a fast, career-based system.	Groups seeking community-rooted horror in early 20th-century Appalachia, with player-controlled risk spending and theater-of-the-mind action. It suits GMs who prefer flexible adjudication and explicit horror-safety conversations.
Highlights	Nine Dueling Styles with distinct maneuvers and masterable Final Secrets provide deep fencing differentiation. Social Combat and Repartee use the same mechanical framework as physical combat, targeting Composure. Over 30 period-specific Careers from Musketeer to Temptress replace skill lists. Includes ship-to-ship combat, battlefield rules, and a 17th-century gazetteer covering Europe, the Americas, and beyond.	Character arcs award XP for steps in GM-approved arcs and for climaxes even when their final goals fail, keeping personal stories mechanically active. Single-use cyphers turn folk charms and strange objects into frequently changing powers, encouraging players to spend unusual tools instead of hoarding them. What Wakes Mode widens the natural-roll range for GM intrusions until a ten-hour recovery roll resets it, turning supernatural attention into escalating mechanical pressure.
Considerations	No free quickstart or SRD available. Advantage tracking adds a subsystem on top of basic BoL resolution. The gazetteer and setting material assume 17th-century Europe as the default, limiting out-of-the-box use for other periods.	Stat Pools serve as both health and spending resources, so Effort and abilities can leave characters less able to absorb harm. The GM sets task difficulties and decides when to introduce complications, placing much of the game's consistency in GM adjudication. The game is built around alternate Appalachia in the 1920s and 1930s rather than a portable generic-horror setting.