Outrunners vs The Quiet Year
Compare Outrunners and The Quiet Year side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.
| Outrunners | The Quiet Year | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Horror, Cyberpunk, Fantasy | Post-Apocalyptic |
| Tags | Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Narrative, Fiction-First, Collaborative, Survival, Atmospheric, Character-Driven, Worldbuilding, Strong GM Support | GM-Less, Worldbuilding, Collaborative, Narrative, Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Fiction-First, Map-Drawing |
| Core Mechanic | Each character assigns one die from a d20, d12, d10, d8, d6, and d4 set across six stats, then rolls the relevant stat's die against a difficulty number; if half that die's maximum already meets the DC, the action succeeds without a roll. Rolling a die's maximum value without beating the DC triggers a Twist of Fate, exploding up to the next larger die. Fate Points, earned mainly by failing rolls, are spent to reroll, sway outcomes, or invoke the Hands of Fate at a narrative cost. | 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 | d4–d20 | Diceless |
| Complexity | Low | Very Low |
| Availability | Free quickstart | Paid |
| Runnability | 4 of 5 book tools | 3 of 5 book tools |
| License | ORC 1.0 (free SRD) | Proprietary |
| Third-Party Publishing | Not yet researched | Not yet researched |
| Publisher | Einsol's Razor | Buried Without Ceremony (Avery Alder) |
| Year | 2025 | 2013 |
| Languages | English | English |
| Best For | Groups who want a rules-light, emotionally charged one-shot or short campaign about doomed characters racing to outrun a foreseen death, and GMs who want a portable fate-and-survival horror premise they can drop into almost any setting with little prep. | Groups who want to collaboratively build a community's story through map-drawing: 52 weeks of discoveries, projects, and tensions before everything changes. |
| Highlights | Every character begins with a prophesied glimpse of their own death, which seeds concrete clues into the story and ties each session's tension to a deadline the player already knows is coming. Rolling a stat die's maximum without meeting the difficulty explodes it up to the next larger die, turning desperate long shots into escalating last-second reversals rather than flat failures. Fate Points are earned mainly by failing rolls and then spent to reroll, sway outcomes, or invoke the Hands of Fate, so setbacks bankroll later comebacks and every intervention carries a narrative cost. | 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 | The default Adamah setting is sketched in only a few pages and the game expects the table to invent most of the world at session zero, so groups wanting a prepared, detailed setting must supply it themselves. Equipment grants only narrative permission rather than mechanical bonuses, so players who enjoy itemization or tactical loadouts will find nothing to optimize. The foreseen-death premise is built to resolve at the Vision's deadline, making the game strongest as a one-shot or short arc and harder to sustain across a long, open-ended campaign. | 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 |