Belly of the Beast vs Mage: The Ascension

Compare Belly of the Beast and Mage: The Ascension side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Belly of the Beast	Mage: The Ascension
Genre	Post-Apocalyptic, Horror	Fantasy, Modern, Horror
Tags	Survival, Weird, Player-Only Rolls, Grimdark, Resource Management, Faction Play	Freeform Magic, Character Building, Crunchy, High-Power, Roll to Cast, Skill-Based, Lore-Heavy, Fear & Stress Mechanics
Core Mechanic	Roll 1 base d6 plus up to 5 Instinct Dice spent from a refillable pool plus any Advantage Dice, capped at 10 total. Each die is a success on a face value set by your relevant Skill Rank: Rotten (6), Acceptable (5+), Capable (4+), Brilliant (3+). Tasks have a Difficulty (successes needed), Severity (how much failure hurts), and optional Threshold (successes removed before counting). Players roll for everything; the GM never rolls. Spent Instinct Dice are gone until earned back by acting in line with your two Instincts.	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.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d10 dice pool
Complexity	Medium	Very High
Accessibility	High	High
Runnability	Low	Very High
License	Proprietary	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	Commercial publishing allowed — Storytellers Vault
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Cost	$	$$
Publisher	Sigil Stone Publishing	Onyx Path Publishing
Year	2016	2015
Languages	English	English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish
Best For	Groups who want grim survival horror in a confined weird-fiction setting where character Instincts and a scavenging mission cycle (not heroic combat) drive every session, and who are comfortable with a GM who never rolls and tunes threats by feel.	Groups who want long-form modern occult campaigns about reality-shaping power, ideological conflict, and the consequences of imposing belief on the world.
Highlights	Instinct Dice tie character drives directly to dice pool depth: acting on your two Instincts earns dice you spend to survive future rolls, so leaning into your character's flaws is how you stay mechanically competent. Tasks have three independent dials (Difficulty, Severity, and Threshold), letting the GM build a D1/S4/T0 assassin or a D5/S1/T2 vault door that feel mechanically distinct without an enemy stat block. Succumb and Transcend let any player auto-resolve a Task or Scene by embracing or permanently renouncing an Instinct: Succumb leaves the character Ashamed and unable to Advance until they atone, while Transcend removes that Instinct and its dice income from the sheet forever.	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.
Considerations	Players roll for everything and the GM never rolls, so every Enemy, Hazard, and Sickness is a Difficulty, Severity, and Threshold the GM sets by feel during play rather than reading from a stat block. Combat uses abstract Hand/Arm/Reach/Near/Far ranges with no grid, no movement tracking, and no initiative: the GM calls turn order from the fiction. Setting material includes normalized slavery, frenzy-mad cannibals, and an in-fiction gender framing where women are treated as more 'precious' than men due to reproduction: the book flags the last point in a sidebar and suggests GMs skip it if uncomfortable.	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.