Belly of the Beast vs Werewolf: The Apocalypse

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

	Belly of the Beast	Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Genre	Post-Apocalyptic, Horror	Horror, Modern, Fantasy
Tags	Survival, Weird, Player-Only Rolls, Grimdark, Resource Management, Faction Play	Atmospheric, Base-Building, Character Building, Character-Driven, Corruption, Drama, Lore-Heavy, Strong GM Support, Superpowers, Urban Fantasy
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 dice pool, usually from an Attribute plus a Skill. Each 6 or higher is a success, and meeting the Storyteller-set Difficulty wins. Each pair of 10s counts as four successes. Rage dice replace regular dice up to current Rage and can cause Brutal outcomes.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d10 dice pool
Complexity	Medium	High
Accessibility	High	Medium
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	Renegade Game Studios
Year	2016	2023
Languages	English	English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese
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 horror about shapeshifter packs defending communities from ecological and spiritual threats, with violent power constrained by moral and social consequences.
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.	Brutal outcomes can force destructive failures or add four successes to actions the Storyteller judges can benefit from Rage. Choosing a Garou form changes a character's capabilities, creating tactical and narrative options. Caerns give the pack an improvable spiritual home whose traits connect campaign advancement to territory and community.
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.	A Crinos-form Garou who did not kill in the previous turn must spend Willpower at the start of the next turn or enter frenzy, making the war form difficult to sustain outside violent scenes. Harano and Hauglosk can remove a Garou from play when despair or absolutism fills either track, making moral decline a campaign-level consequence. The game centers mature environmental and spiritual horror, including graphic violence and themes of exploitation and extremism that require deliberate table boundaries.