Hunter: The Reckoning vs R'lyehwatch
Compare Hunter: The Reckoning and R'lyehwatch side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Hunter: The Reckoning | R'lyehwatch | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Horror, Modern | Horror, Modern |
| Tags | Investigation, Mystery, Character-Driven, Gritty, Deadly, Atmospheric, Social Combat, Strong GM Support, Lore-Heavy, Urban Fantasy | Rules-Light, Comedy, One-Shot Friendly, Short Sessions, Player-Only Rolls, Weird |
| Core Mechanic | Roll a pool of d10s, usually an Attribute plus a Skill. Each 6 or higher is a success. Meeting the Storyteller's Difficulty wins. Each pair of 10s counts as four successes. On tests within their creed's Field, Hunters may choose to add Desperation Dice equal to the cell's shared Desperation rating. A 1 on any Desperation Die turns a win into a choice: keep it and raise the cell's Danger, or fail and enter Despair. A failed test with a Desperation 1 always causes Despair. | Players roll a pool of 1–3 d6s against a target difficulty (4 for easy, 5 for average, 6 for hard). Every challenge starts with 1 die: add a second if the challenge matches the character's stat (Agile, Brawny, or Crafty), and a third if their role applies (The Veteran, Rookie, Medic, Gizmo, Detective, or Weirdo). Success means at least one die meets or beats the difficulty. Players spend luck tokens to invoke a perk and lower the difficulty by 1, and recover luck by letting their quirk cause a problem (raising the difficulty by 1). Grit tokens absorb failure consequences; a character who runs out of grit is removed from the scene. The referee never rolls dice during a challenge: they choose the stat and difficulty, then narrate the outcome. Extended challenges (chases, fights, infiltration) deplete a shared pool of effort tokens, one per success. |
| Dice | d10 dice pool | d6 dice pool |
| Complexity | Medium | Very Low |
| Accessibility | Medium | Medium |
| Runnability | Very High | Low |
| License | All Rights Reserved | Proprietary; third-party license and SRD permit derivative works |
| Third-Party Publishing | Commercial publishing allowed — Storytellers Vault | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Cost | $$ | $ |
| Publisher | Renegade Game Studios | Hedgemaze Press / Third Chair Games |
| Year | 2022 | 2023 |
| Languages | English, French, German, Italian, Spanish | English |
| Best For | Groups who want investigation-heavy modern horror in which a cell of ordinary people researches, plans, and confronts a monster at real personal risk. | Groups who want a quick, comedic cosmic-horror RPG that pairs Baywatch-style melodrama with the Cthulhu Mythos. Tuned for pickup play and 2-4 hour sessions, with three tonal modes (Casual, Standard, Horror) that retune lethality without changing the core rules. |
| Highlights | Desperation rises after the cell's setbacks, so mounting trouble adds both dice and risk to later Field tests. Overreach lets a player keep a win by raising the cell's Danger, which escalates the quarry's response against the whole cell. Monsters have weaknesses Hunters can discover, so research pays off as concrete advantages in the final confrontation. | Three difficulty targets and a 1–3 d6 dice pool make up the entire resolution system. Three tonal modes (Casual, Standard, Horror) adjust grit recovery rate, retuning the same rules from sitcom-style play to deadly survival horror without changing any mechanics. All heroes share a universal Slow Motion quirk: narrating a slow-motion moment recovers a luck token but raises the current challenge's difficulty. Adventure generator combines random Objective, Location, and Complication tables for pickup scenarios; also includes an Elder Gods & Cults table, a Monster Maker, and a mapped Sunset Hills setting. |
| Considerations | Desperation Dice apply only to tests within a Hunter's creed Field, so a character's signature boost sits idle outside that specialty. The book recommends ending most conflicts after about three turns, which leaves little room for extended tactical combat. The content warning covers themes such as sexual violence and torture, so groups should calibrate boundaries before play. | Mechanically minimal: no advancement track beyond optional luck and grit cap increases, no gear lists, no tactical combat structure. Pacing assumes 2–4 hour sessions rather than multi-arc campaigns. Setting is anchored to Sunset Hills, California; running the game elsewhere requires reskinning the included cult, NPC, and location tables. Three difficulty values and a maximum 3-die pool give coarse resolution: granular skill differentiation is not the design. |