Mage: The Ascension vs Night's Black Agents
Compare Mage: The Ascension and Night's Black Agents side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Mage: The Ascension | Night's Black Agents | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Fantasy, Modern, Horror | Horror, Modern |
| Tags | Freeform Magic, Character Building, Crunchy, High-Power, Roll to Cast, Skill-Based, Lore-Heavy, Fear & Stress Mechanics | Investigation, Espionage, Character-Driven, Gritty |
| Core Mechanic | Build a d10 pool from an Attribute plus an Ability and count each die that meets or exceeds the difficulty, usually 6. Each rolled 1 cancels a success, and a roll with no successes and at least one 1 botches. Magick uses Arete instead: the highest Sphere plus coincidence or vulgarity and witnesses establishes the base difficulty, with situational modifiers applied afterward. Successes determine the Effect, and vulgar casting risks Paradox. | GUMSHOE engine. Investigative abilities auto-succeed: if you have the skill and there's a clue, you find it. General abilities (combat, athletics) roll 1d6 + spent points vs. difficulty 4. Point pools refresh between sessions, creating resource-management tension. Four play modes (Burn, Dust, Mirror, Stakes) tune mechanics to your preferred espionage tone. |
| Dice | d10 dice pool | d6 |
| Complexity | Very High | Medium |
| Accessibility | High | Medium |
| Runnability | Very High | High |
| License | All Rights Reserved | GUMSHOE SRD (CC BY 3.0 / OGL) |
| Third-Party Publishing | Commercial publishing allowed — Storytellers Vault | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Cost | $$ | $$ |
| Publisher | Onyx Path Publishing | Pelgrane Press |
| Year | 2015 | 2012 |
| Languages | English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish | English |
| Best For | Groups who want long-form modern occult campaigns about reality-shaping power, ideological conflict, and the consequences of imposing belief on the world. | Groups who want spy-thriller action fused with supernatural horror: burned agents unraveling a vampire conspiracy through investigation, chases, and tradecraft. |
| Highlights | Nine Spheres combine to build open-ended Effects, allowing the same capability to emerge through different paradigms, practices, and instruments. Coincidental and vulgar classifications make subtlety a tactical choice because conspicuous magick raises difficulty and accumulates Paradox. Focus ties belief to procedure, so a mage's worldview determines the tools and rituals used to alter reality. | Investigation never stalls: clues flow automatically, Conspyramid campaign structure is a well-designed GM tool, four tonal modes let you dial in the spy genre you want, highly modular vampire creation system, works stripped of vampires for pure espionage |
| Considerations | Improvised Effects place frequent adjudication on the Storyteller, who must apply Sphere permissions, focus, required successes, and consequences consistently. Vulgar magick generates Paradox even on success, so overt power can punish a mage through injury or metaphysical breakdown. Faction choices can make a cabal internally hostile, so character concepts need shared motives before play. | NPC combat math can feel unbalanced against PCs, multiple point pools to track can bottleneck play, narrow genre focus limits reuse, requires significant GM prep for conspiracy networks |