The Burning Wheel

Infobox RPG
title= The Burning Wheel


caption= "Burning Wheel" and "Character Burner"
designer= Luke Crane
publisher= Luke Crane
date= 2002
genre= Fantasy
system= Custom
footnotes=

"The Burning Wheel" is a fantasy role-playing game independently written and published by Luke Crane. The game uses a dice pool mechanic (using only standard six sided dice) for resolution, and a system of prior-experience for character generation which tracks the development of the new character from birth up to the point they begin adventuring.

Unlike many other RPGs — but explicitly like earlier games — the "Burning Wheel" does not include a dedicated setting, beyond the setting implied by the rules and mechanics and the life-paths used in character generation, which implies a fantasy world by default, though it can be easily modified for other settings.

The core game includes two volumes: the "Burning Wheel", containing rules and mechanics, and the "Character Burner", with life-paths for generating Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Orcs as characters, providing each with unique exceptions or additions to the overall game mechanics. Humans have access to Sorcery and miraculous Faith, Elves have a Grief statistic and spell-songs, Dwarves have Greed and Orcs have blasphemous Hatred. Rules expansions allow additional races, such as Dark Elves, who have turned their Grief into murderous Spite.

The "Monster Burner" supplement includes premade monsters and mechanics for designing and building your own creatures and complete life-paths for them, allowing the game to cover a much broader range of adventure and setting. This volume also contains four new and complete races for BW: Great Wolves, Roden, Great Spiders, and Trolls.

The "Magic Burner" supplement was released in August 2008. It features expansion of the limited rules found in the main rule book "Burning Wheel" to include more in depth approach to forms and rules of magic. New forms of magic such as death magic and spirit summoning. It also adds a system for building more spells, and magic on the fly. This Volume also contains additional traits and skills that might be needed to create wizard characters.

After release of the Magic Burner the game mechanic rule books will include brown, orange, dark green, and blue.

The game has had three dedicated settings:

January 2004: "Under a Serpent Sun", described as "Suicidal despair in a post-apocalyptic wasteland".

August 2005: "Burning Sands: Jihad", a science fiction expansion of galaxy-spanning religious war. A blog associated with the creators of "Burning Wheel" describes this expansion as being based on the "Dune" series. [cite web | title=Burning Empires: From Inception to Finished Product (Part I) | url=http://urdwell.blogspot.com/2006/07/burning-empires-from-inception-to.html | date=2006-06-25 | accessdate=2007-05-02]

August 2007: "The Blossoms are Falling", based in Heian-era Japan. "You play fearsome bushi trapped between honor and shame, wise Shinto priests who seek to placate the spirits who protect Nihon, powerful Buddhist monks who pray for the souls of the dead while plying strong influence at court, and powerful courtiers battling for control of the failing state."

A recent full game by Luke Crane is "Burning Empires", a science fiction RPG based on the "Iron Empires" graphic novels of Christopher Moeller. Burning Empires was released at Gen Con 2006.

Luke has penned a new full game, entitled "Mouse Guard", is recently completed, being scheduled to appear in October or November of 2008. It appears to be derived from Burning Wheel. It implements the setting of the Mouse Guard comics. [cite web | title=Burnign Wheel RPG Page, Archaia Studios Press | url=http://www.archaiasp.com/mouse_guard_rpg.php | accessdate=2008-08-29]

References

External links

* [http://www.burningwheel.org/ Official Site]
* [http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?board=39.0 "Burning Wheel" forum] at [http://www.indie-rpgs.com The Forge]
* [http://www.burningwheel.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page Burning Wiki]
* [http://www.burningwheel.org/wiki/index.php?title=
]
* [http://www.burningwheel.org/wiki/index.php?title=Publication_List Publication List]