Belly of the Beast, by Ben Dutter, is an RPG with one hell of a horrific campaign setting: players take the role of scavengers scraping out an existence in the guts of a titanic, world-eating worm monster thing.

I’m going to level with you: I kind of bounced off the rules system, which I believe is a modified version of the Ethos Engine, Sigil Stone’s house system. It’s a pretty standard variation of a D6 dice pool, with some interesting mechanics baked into conflict resolution that can fuel character development. It isn’t bad, and it handles equipment management (something incredibly important in a game about scavenging) elegantly, but I didn’t find it intrinsically exciting the way I do some other systems. This is probably a Me Problem brought on by reading way too many rulesets in my leisure time.

That said, holy cow, I love the setting. What a messed up idea. There are whole cities of people clinging to life inside the Hungry God. A lot of my love comes through the art, particularly the paintings I’ve reproduced here – in looking at them, you immediately get a sense of the misery of existence and the sorts of things you’ll have to do to survive. And maybe a tiny bit of a sense of what it smells like. Grossness isn’t the focus, though, only the backdrop. This is a game about relationships and survival. Inside the Beast isn’t all that different from a gigantic, slightly gooey cave system. In this way, Belly of the Beast is a lot more like a subterranean Mad Max than it is Inner Space.

My favorite thing about the game, though, is the atmosphere of hopelessness. There is no escaping the Evergut, though players can try (and probably die horrifically in the process). There is a deep  horror, I think, in surviving a situation that will never improve and I am super interested in seeing how players fair in that kind of unrelenting environment.