The Burning Wheel

The Governor's Daughter

First Impressions

The Burning Wheel is by far the crunchiest game we've played since starting playing story games. It is easily crunchier than The Riddle of Steel, which had the lead for us up until now. The game is very cool though, and as a medieval buff, I have to give kudos to Luke Crane and crew on researching the games' Lifepaths, they are just fantastic!

I still game with my friends Lars Karlsson, Daniel Malmqvist, and Fredrik Dahlman. While Dahlman recovered from recent surgery, Lars, Daniel and I played the Burning Wheel introductory adventure "The Sword." After playing it twice, we felt bold enough to try burning up our own world and characters, starting our own campaign.

Initial Prep

We did one World and Character Burning session without Dahlman, where we settled on the big picture for our game. The game starts as a pirate ship has just sunk one of the local governor's ships, and in doing so kidnapped the local governor's daughter. This is our group kicker.

We were not able to get through Character Burning during our first session, and Dahlman returned from surgery in time to join the second one. I think we all expected to burn up his character in no time, since there'd be three of us to help him, but we were wrong. Instead we barely managed to finish any of the characters, but mostly because we came up with so many new ideas.

We worked everything out during the third session, and are now cooking with gas! We added to the situation, so now they also kidnapped the ship's doctor from the governor's ship, the doctor is Dahlman's protagonist. All of us are excited to start playing. The situation rocks! The protagonists and their BITs rock! This has the potential to be a fantastic game.

The Burning Wheel rocks on toast!

Notes after Actual Play

After playing a few sessions all we can say is that the game is awesome!

The FoRKing (Fields of Related Knowledge) rules, which allows bonuses on skill tests where you roleplay how the FoRKed skill colors the application of the main skill, leads to awesome roleplaying! In combination with Beliefs, Instincs and Traits it keeps color and campaign feel in focus at all times, while still centering the game on an action-packed story.

The Helping rules, have made my players yearn to get their protagonists in the same scene. So they work overtime on finding ways to get involved in each other's action. Could you ask for more as a GM?

My firearms house rules are certainly gritty, which is what we were after, but I've since come to love Light Wounds as much as Luke Crane himself. They kick ass! However, my firearms rarely, if ever, dole out Light Wounds. We'll keep playing with the stats the way they are, for now, but might actually drop everything back down to map closer to the damage of the standard medieval missile weapons.

The BITs (Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits) are some of the best flags ever! They make coming up with cool bangs and scenes a snap. The game pretty much plays itself as soon as you get over the initial hump, that is, get through the kicker and solidly entrench the protagonists in the central conflict.