Ishanekon: World Shapers vs Savage Worlds
Compare Ishanekon: World Shapers and Savage Worlds side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Ishanekon: World Shapers | Savage Worlds | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Universal | Universal |
| Play Style | Character Building, Crunchy, Tactical, Toolkit, Hackable, Open Source | Cinematic, Fast-Paced, Tactical, Pulp Action, Heroic, Miniatures |
| Core Mechanic | 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. | Roll trait die + wild die (d6), keep the highest. Target number 4. Raises every +4. |
| Dice | d4–d20 | d4–d12 |
| Complexity | High | Medium |
| Accessibility | Very High | High |
| Runnability | High | Very High |
| License | CC BY 4.0 | Savage Worlds Adventurer's Guild |
| Cost | Free | $$ |
| Publisher | Blaze Reason | Pinnacle Entertainment |
| Year | 2022 | 2018 |
| Best For | 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. | Fast-paced pulp action across any genre. Great for large groups and mass combat. |
| Highlights | 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. | Fast resolution, genre-flexible, handles large groups well |
| Considerations | 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. | Exploding dice can produce extreme variance in outcomes, setting books vary in depth: some provide minimal mechanical content beyond a genre frame |