The Burning Wheel Fantasy Roleplaying System

by Luke Crane

The latest and greatest version of Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel is an award-winning fantasy roleplaying game in which players take on the roles of vibrant, dynamic characters whose very beliefs propel the story forward.
Starting with a simple D6 dice pool mechanic, this game intuitively builds on its core concepts. The rules detail dramatic systems for task resolution, advancement, trials of belief, tests of nerve, searing social conflict, dangerous sorcery, miraculous faith, and brutal, gut-wrenching martial combat. Behind the dice, your decisions drive the game s systems. Their choices tangibly affect every outcome from glorious victory to ignominious defeat. But there are consequences to every decision, ramifications to every action. The choices you make close off one path, while opening another. This philosophy underpins the character creation system for Burning Wheel. And it's not just a matter of pushing a point here, or nudging a number As soon as a player decides to make a character in Burning Wheel, he is confronted with decisions about the character s past, ethics, beliefs, scars, goals and dreams. Questions whose answers affect not only the player s character, but the shape of the story as a whole.
Burning Wheel is presented in an easy-to-read writing style, with plenty of insight and advice from the designer. If you're not careful, Burning Wheel will change the way you play roleplaying games. The Gold Edition combines both the Revised Edition's Burning Wheel and Character Burner. It has been reorganized for clarity and updated by the author.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Fantasy, Gaming, Games, Reference

600 pages, Hardcover

First published July 11, 2011

Reviews

[Heidi Wiechert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been reading the rule books of different roleplaying games this year like Nobilis and now The Burning Wheel in order to alleviate boredom and socialize with friends while playing the various games online. While doing so, I have come to appreciate the artistry and finesse that goes into creating the games.

This effort is most easily seen in the rulebooks.

The Burning Wheel rulebook is gorgeous. The artwork and binding are lovely. This is a book that feels like it belongs in your hands when you open it.

I realize that the world is moving more digital all the time, books included, and that makes sense. It saves resources, space, and what could be more convenient than having your entire library with you when you travel?

But I think I would miss the experience of holding a physical book and the sensations that go along with that. I watched a YouTube video review of this game that suggested part of the familiarity of the feel of this book might be related to the fact that it was created in the shape and size of a family Bible.

Whatever the draw is, if you're going to play this game, I highly recommend buying a physical copy of the book.

That being said, the game itself is incredibly complex. No matter what you want to do in Burning Wheel, it requires some sort of roll. The most annoying aspect of this complexity is in the "resource" portion of the game. I failed a roll a few weeks ago and now my financially-challenged elf bard has to find a job.

Do I really want to play a game to roleplay something like that? I could just live life as it is right now to worry about resources.

The organization of the rulebook also leaves something to be desired. For example, bard songs and their details are located in a couple different places.

So, say you're playing along, then you want to know what sort of dice you have to roll to sing a song to the trees. In order to find that information, you've got to look all over the place. It doesn't work well at all.

Even the character creation is an unwieldy process. It took two very experienced gamers and I, who admittedly has less experience but plenty of enthusiasm, nearly four hours to put together two characters. Four hours!

Despite its complex and difficult nature, I think experienced gamers who are willing to greatly simplify the rules might still enjoy playing this game. Newbies to RPGs may want to try something else.

[Seán · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing game that I would love to one day sit down and play, but will probably never get the chance. This is a heavy game - not mechanics-wise, but roleplaying-wise. The system is based on creating characters with dense backstories and following a journey that is more about personal development than accumulation of wealth and prestige. The basic mechanics are slightly complex, but nothing that a new player couldn't get their head around. The Character Burner and Lifepaths section are where the real meat of the book lies, with a system reminiscent of Traveller allowing you to detail chunks of your characters life before the game takes place, giving their history, the skills they picked up and the various chance encounters they may have had over the years. Like Traveller - which I have run before - character creation alone could make for a fun Session 0 in on its own.

Where characters go after creation is entirely up to the GM - Burning Wheel does not detail its own world, but rather gives a generic fantasy outline and lets you go from there. This is sensible as I feel like if you are picking up Burning Wheel to run as a GM, you already have some experience running games and have a suitable setting at hand.

Burning Wheel is a fascinating system that will likely prove difficult to get a group to commit to and run. I have it on my RPG bucket list and will hopefully get to it one day.

[Chad Steines · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could end up being one of my all-time favorite games, if I could convince anybody else to get through the clunky and over-complicated mechanics of the system. The book itself is pretty poorly organized and full of "you will see this later" without saying WHERE later. It was VERY hard to muddle through and even harder to explain to my players.

Could be an awesome game once it gets going, but it takes an awful lot of willpower and hard-headedness to reach that point.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the Burning Wheel game intriguing from the first time I read about it. In part that was because of the deep, skill-driven roleplaying system, which reminded me of favorites like RuneQuest. However, what really won be over was its BITs system of beliefs, instincts, and traits, which could give the game emotional weight in a way that most classic games can't.

This new edition has all of these strengths, but it nicely combines together what were previously books 1 & 2, and which are really both required for the core game. It also seems to polish up the book and the system and really meld it together into a nicely harmonious whole. A definite upgrade from the Revised Edition, though not a major one.

The only downside is that this Gold Edition continues to refer to Revised Edition books like Magic Burner, Monster Burner, and Adventure Burner, which no longer exist. (Perhaps more recent printings clear that up, as a lot of the new material has now been reprinted in the The Burning Wheel Codex.)

[Bracicot · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I can talk people into it, I think this will be my go-to RPG system.

Because characters are defined/designed in terms of what they believe and what their lives have been like to date (rather than by some more formal notion of character class), and because character advancement is tied only to the things you do and specify during play (as opposed to being determined based on your character class), play is less reliant of physical conflicts: You can reasonably play a baker in a kingdom-wide contest to create the perfect pudding recipe, for example. If your approach to winning is related to baking practice, your cooking skill would improve. If you prefer to win by poisoning the other competitors, the skills relevant to that would improve. If you try to sweet-talk the judges, your diplomatic skills would improve.

This means that when you decide how to approach a problem, you decide not just what you think is the best way to solve the problem, but also what kind of person you want your character to be in the future.

I am amazed by this system.

[Katrina]

If you've played Lady Blackbird or Mouseguard, this is the original system it's based on. Like Warhammer Fantasy Role-play, it has a Renaissance Europe feel and has lifepaths in place of careers. Unlike Warhammer Fantasy, character creation can take hours upon hours, and each player really needs their own book. The advancement system, although revolutionary, is tedious at times and because of the paragraph/prose writing style finding rules can be extremely difficult. The downloadable GM screen is a must, and the summaries at the end of each chapter are indispensable, but you're still left struggling to play and learn if you don't have the benefit of an experienced player to help you through. A lot of thought was put into the philosophy behind the rules, but at the end of the day you have a complicated game with a steep learning curve and sometimes too much crunch for its own good.

[Chadwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Burning Wheel is a fantastic system of rules for any fantasy rpg. It's only downfall is it's apparent complexity: The game can be broken down so that most of the rules can be picked up and learned over time, but I doubt that any but the most steadfast groups will ever implement them all. Nevertheless, the Burning Wheel is a worthy addition to any gaming library.

[John Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

The layout for finding stuff isn't great. But the content is awsesome. Good solid system if you love role playing. Pleases both the role-player and the roll-player. Enough mechanics yo make a good political campaign and allow non-silvertongued players to debate with the best of them if their character has the skill.

Deep role-playing oriented drama where you can select the level of crunch you want for a particular encounter depending on importance.

The only thing is, I am a high fantasy oriented player and these rules make it a bit to gritty for my average campaign. However I am sure a little adaptation would make them perfect.

[Mimsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found Burning Wheel at a used bookstore and picked it up just to look at the gorgeous cover. It was $30, I wasn't sure the books I was trading in would be worth that, and I was hoping not to spend money. I opened up the book anyways and landed on a page detailing Elvish Grief, a mechanic caused by their endless years of pain, joy, and loss. I was hooked. I carried the book around with me and when my trades earned me more than enough to cover it, I brought it home and read it cover to cover in under 36 hours.

Let me make this clear - the Burning Wheel is an incredibly mechanics-heavy system, and I don't plan to play it anytime soon, if ever. But the rich, character-driven mechanics were so compelling and engaging that I set my current read aside for them and even ordered the Codex and Anthology before I had finished the book. Early in the book, they say that reading The Burning Wheel could impact how you GM or play other TTRPGs, and I agree. After seeing how crunchy this was, I knew I would not be playing it - and yet, I knew I would think of it often, that I would see what I could reframe from it into my own D&D games, and fondly recommend it to friends who played crunchier games than I do. The Burning Wheel is an exemplary work of game design. It's not one for all players - and again, not even for me! - but I think it is truly extraordinary.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a review of the text of Burning Wheel, not of the game in play. I have only read the text (twice), not played the game.

The Gold Edition of Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel is no quick read. My copy is nearly 600 pages long, and there is not much filler in the text. Thankfully, it is a well-written text, with a conversational tone that values clear meaning over cleverness. It is also a well-organized text that presents the concepts of the game in a logical and helpful order, each thing building on the thing before it, and very few occasions of pointing to things not yet discussed. On top of all that, the organization makes it easy to go back and find the topics and the specific rule you might look for again. It’s laid out as a teaching text more than a reference text, but it suffices as the latter thanks to that organization. The indexes at the back seem thorough, and the layout makes it easy to follow the relationship between the paragraph you’re reading and the rest of the material in the chapter. It’s a thoughtfully constructed text.

The game itself walks a fine line between simple and crunchy. It’s successful in this walk, I think, mostly because it is set up in layers, so you can always fall back on the simple elements at any time you don’t feel like dealing with the crunch. This design is obviously purposeful, as the book presents the information in those very layers. (Of course, Crane uses the imagery of a wheel rather than anything with layers.) At the center is the hub, and here we have the basic mechanic at the center of play. When an outcome is in doubt, the player rolls a pool of D6’s against an obstacle determined either by the GM or by an opposed roll. Each 4, 5, or 6 on a dice signify a success. If the number of successes is larger than the obstacle number or the opponent’s roll, the action is successful. Advantages add dice to the roller’s pool, and disadvantages add to the obstacle rating. The character’s stats tells you how many dice are in your pool, so if you have nothing more than a character sheet, an active imagination, and a number of dice, you can play the game. All the crunch really comes from fine tuning when and how you get advantage dice and what affects the obstacle number. Each subsystem is about the myriad factors and details that need to be weighed in a given particular circumstance.

Beyond the hub are the spokes of the system. In Burning Wheel, the spokes are all about advancement and improvement of characters through play. Improvement is a constant feature in play, since every time you roll the dice, you are adding to your character’s experience which can potentially result in an increase to that skill or stat, which in turn results in a larger pool of dice to use those skills and stats. The crunch at this point comes in all the ways the game needs to measure when a roll adds to your improvement and when it doesn’t. At heart, the game wants to model a gritty reality in which people learn by doing, through both their successes and their failures. They need to do a thing a lot, and they need to do it at varying levels of difficulty to truly improve, so you need so many routine experiences, so many difficult experiences, and so many challenging experiences. Some skills, stats, and abilities improve whether you succeed or fail, and some only benefit from your doing it right.

But improving by doing is only half the game. What makes you want to do anything at all? That’s where the second half of the improvement system comes in. The game calls it “artha,” and players gain artha for their characters when they play their characters with purpose and vision. Artha is divided into three kinds. The most common kind is “fate,” and a player gets fate points when they play their character according to that character’s beliefs, instincts, and traits. Fate points can be spent to make a good roll better. The uncommon kind of artha is “persona,” and a player gets persona points when a character drives the story forward in small but significant ways by playing their character according to the character’s beliefs, instincts, and traits. Persona points can be spent to add dice to a roll. The rarest of the artha are “deeds,” and a player gets deed points when their character pushes the story forward by accomplishing something larger than their own personal goals, changing the world significantly by their decisions and pursuits. Deed points can be spent to greatly increase the dice for a roll or to reroll a pool of dice entirely. Finally, if you spend enough artha points on a single skill, stat, or ability, you can eventually make your character more heroic by making a 3 on the D6 a success as well.

This multi-faceted advancement system gives players a chance to advance at every stage of play. In the short term, you have each individual test to contribute to the improvement of a single skill, stat, or ability. Over the course of a session, you are striving to get a few fate points and a persona point. Over the course of a number of sessions, you aim for a deed point. And over the course of dozens of sessions, possibly years of playing, you can raise your character to truly heroic and god-like stature. Moreover, the system rewards the most basic acts of play as well as rewarding portrayal of character (for its own sake) and advancement of the story through that portrayal.

When I summarize it all like that, I see it is an elegant and tightly designed system. But it is easy in reading the text to lose the forest for all the trees. The designer’s desire to capture the gritty reality of life in the middle ages means that there is a lot of crunch added to these basic elements, and a lot of things to track and monitor. You can of course ignore that crunch, but the basic system is not so glorious that it warrants usage without the crunch. I suspect that everyone who plays Burning Wheel does so fully embracing the crunch created by that drive for realism.

In reading the text, I bounced back and forth between admiring it and being exasperated by its details. It’s hard to imagine players being able to build up steam during play because every roll needs to be accompanied by checking charts to decide how many dice you roll, what the obstacle for the roll is, what the difficulty rating is to mark the advancement track, all while you try to hit your traits and aim for your beliefs. There is necessarily a lot of time spent at the table discussing things that aren’t the fiction of the story. For a lot of people that does nothing to diminish the fun; in fact for some people that is a crucial part of the fun. But for me . . . meh; it’s not what I come to the roleplaying table to do. When I look at each individual rule in the gamebook—what skill is tested, how it is opposed, how the obstacle is determined, where additional dice come from, how it interacts with other game elements—I am impressed by the thoughtfulness, the attention to detail, the consistency, and the coherent design. It’s just that none of it makes we want to play the game.

One of the problems with “realism” in RPG rules is that they can come at the cost of enjoyment. Take the wound and recovery rules of Burning Wheel. I love that combat is deadly and that wounds have dramatic impact on a character’s ability to function. But I love it in the abstract. When I look at it in play, it looks like it would clog up play in weird ways. Your character suffered a traumatic wound, so now he has to rest 3 months. Very realistic, but very much a pace-killer to the game. The game gives you all kinds of ways for other characters to fill in that time, such as practicing a skill, but that’s hardly what we came to the table to do. And if you fail your roll to heal up, woe unto you. The text advises you save artha for your healing rolls. Artha gives you the opportunity to have your character do something amazing, and the wise thing to do is save your heroic moments to recover? Ugh. Similarly, if your character is at death’s door, you need a spare persona point to make them live. If you don’t have one, ugh, again. For some players, that realism might be exciting; they might want to play the minutiae of recovering from a wound. I can see those players being excited by the rules of this game.

All that said, I actually want to get the companion book, the Codex, and read those portions of the game, because in the end, this main book is a kind of player’s manual. The book is all rules and finer points; it doesn’t begin to touch on what it’s like to run the game. There are a scant 5 pages dedicated to “Playing the Game” at the end of the book (not even 1% of the total text). To truly understand the game, I feel like I need to see what the other book says about running an adventure or scenario (the game doesn’t seem to put forth clear language in this text about what to call it). I love that the game makes character creation vital to the details of any given scenario, that the scenario concept shapes who the characters will be and that character creation in return shapes what’s important in the scenario—that is awesome. This is not a game designed for dungeon crawls, although it can certainly allow for that. The rules naturally help the players create something epic both in length and scope to watch the characters change and struggle and become something greater than they are. The longer you play the game, the more it rewards you—or at least that’s how it looks from here.

I would also be interested to see what earlier versions of the game look like. This Gold edition is the revised edition, and seems to have been shaped by Crane’s encounters with Ron Edward and his Sorcerer, Vincent Baker and his Dogs in the Vineyard, Jared Sorensen and his InSpectres, and Paul Czege and his My Life with Master. I can see those influences in the design, and it makes me wonder what elements were already there before those experiences and which are drawn directly from them.

One thing I would like to see changed in the text that wouldn’t affect the game itself is the unwavering dedication to the masculine pronouns. It seems like a small thing, but everything in the book is masculine. All the pronouns, all the sample player names. There are a few womenfolk in the examples, but that’s the extent of it. The text says this is a mere convenience, but everything about the experience says it is designed with men in mind.

[Stuart · Rating 2 out of 5]

NB: I picked up "the hub and the spokes" for free from the Burning Wheel website, I will pick up a physical copy of the book to add to my stack of esoteric storygames at some point in the near future.

Where to start? Burning Wheel has a reputation for being complex and pretentious. That could be the entire review. Because it IS complex and pretentious. Like, hella complex and pretentious. Burning Wheel is basically the post-structuralism of tabletop gaming.

Where to start?

DESIGN/LAYOUT: Art was decent although it could've been more consistent in tone. Layout tended toward the readable/accessible, although a quick "primer" chapter defining some core concepts (artha, e.g.) would've been awesome.

NARRATION: Going to start adding this to every tabletop review. Narrative tone was pretentious but not obtuse. The intro was obnoxious. The occasional place where Luke broke the fourth wall was enjoyable, and I'd probably much rather have a conversation with him about gaming theory than read a blog post from him about gaming theory.

CHARACTER GENERATION: Generation is covered in the "rim" portion of the ruleset, which I have not yet read. HOWEVER: Beliefs, instincts and traits are a really excellent way to make interesting, deep characters.

CHARACTER ADVANCEMENT: The advancement mechanics require a metric fuck-ton of paperwork and attention, although I like the notion of practice advancing skills. It's just a difficult thing to do on pen and paper. I think a better option would be "keep track of the 6s you rolled, at X number you advance" or something would achieve largely the same result. I don't dislike Crane's way of doing things, it just seems burdensome.

GAMEPLAY: The game's treatment of time is very fluid, and the actual rolling mechanics seem geared towards quick play and resolution, which is fun. I like that most "failures" lead to further complications rather than to plain ol' failure. Spending points is cool but holy shit does that get complex. Very storygame-y but not obnoxiously so. I would probably play this game if I had the world's most patient GM.

SETTING: No setting given, and I appreciate Crane not bothering with it.

DECISION MECHANICS: This is my first time reading about dice pools outside of FATE. I like the way it works, and the complexity provides a very deep variation in results. Spending points to modify results, and using assistance/arguing for bonuses/applying related knowledge are all nifty tricks. In all this is one of the better mechanics systems I've found, complexity aside.

BITS AND BOBS: Artha is cool but it's mad complex. I like the idea of completing a task carefully, patiently or quickly. I like the encouragements for players to introduce complexity into their own lives. I like that the game maintains a slightly adversarial relationship between GM and players.

OK I read the whole thing and hoooooooly shit it's 600 pages long. Granted, they tell you not to read parts until you need them but fucking seriously. I could learn how to become an astronaut or a spy with the sheer volume of information presented within the Burning Wheel rulebook, instead of playing some kinda boring Tolkein-esque fantasy dudes. That said, some pieces work pretty well together, especially things like the Duel of Wits.

While I won't suggest this to my gaming group, I will certainly steal pieces and ideas from the rules, and I'll (probably) play if I'm at a con or I run into someone who really knows the system and they're willing to put up with me not getting the rules for the first hour.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of a rare breed of (tabletop) role playing game (RPG) rule books that is an interesting read even if you don't plan to play the game. Like many games, Burning Wheel has gone through several editions and this "Gold" version is a masterpiece of game design.

I'm not saying that the game isn't worth playing. This is a rules-intensive system, but not hard to understand. The mechanics are so central to the play that the rules don't get out of the way of play - they are the way you play. In some ways this is maybe 90% RPG and 10% "board game without a board" in that the rules are always there, waiting to be used. If that sounds fun you perhaps could do no better than Burning Wheel.

If you are looking to see how a great fantasy RPG might be like then look no further.

[Aj Comeau · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a work of art. Beautiful, elegant, well-crafted, and you shouldn't ever touch it. Don't get me wrong, I loved reading the dang thing, and its potential is off the scale, I just know for a fact that if I ever run it, there will be no combat (the combat rules are the one chapter I couldn't finish), and I'll never use the Duel of Wits (social combat, run like real combat, see above). That leaves a fantasy game where characters talk and have feelings and jobs and that shapes the world. Do I want to play that game? Absolutely I do. I want that so bad. But how am I going to convince 3+ human beings to get through the Character burner and how to play before reaching what's basically a storytelling game with THREE DIFFERENT TYPES OF ACTION POINTS? Who needs that many rules?

[Calliope Tangent · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a roleplaying system? Phenomenal, and certainly a new favorite. It's also delightfully written throughout, with little winks and nods that make every chart and table worth scanning over.

But, as a reference book, this is not the best tool. In play, I know I'll be relying on unofficial cheat sheets to quickly refer to moves and rules. I wish the index and appendices were just a little more thorough.

But otherwise, I am actually mad I haven't found this system much earlier.

[Naaj · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite roleplaying game of all time. Even though I've only played it twice. The rules are smooth and conducive to deep character based paly. Also much more than D&D this manages to capture the feel of epic fantasy. Especially how the different non human characters are shown and treated. That is not to say that the system wouldn't work when playing in low fantasy settings (it's very good at those too) just that it truly shines when used to create character based epics.

[Tor.com Publishing]

It's odd! Burning Wheel deserves a lot of credit for reinventing my homebrew RPG campaign, but it is at a remove. It is the stripped down rules in Mouse Guard that won me over, & Torchbearer is a little more my speed than Burning Wheel proper, I think. Which isn't a judgement but a matter of personal taste: I just fall more on Narrative over Game, on Fluff over Crunch. -MK

[Mark Austin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is at the apex of my list of games that are fantastic and interesting reads that I have no desire to ever run. It introduced to me or expanded my concept of progression being tied to skills rather than to levels, of needing successes and failures to advance, the idea of "let it ride" removing redundant "I try again" rolls that kill drama, a completely different stance to play in (I'm an actor with an interesting, complicated, and conflicted character vs I'm the hero who wins), and also was the first (only?) game system that makes you pay at character creation for anything that makes your character interesting - perks and flaws.

It also seems overly complex to determine rolls, the duel of wits/detailed combat systems seem torturous and based mostly on character vs GM skill instead of the character's abilities, and the game as a whole seems so daunting to run I don't know where I'd ever start.

I'd play a game of it to see how it goes, but you'd have to pay me to run it.

[Esteban Cabral · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sistema complejo pero definitivo si los hay, los números pasan a un segundo plano y se premia el crecimiento partida a partida y el contar una buena historia.
Altamente recomendado para jugadores de rol experimentados y para aquellos que les guste más la narrativa que tirar dados.

[Hollowaxis · Rating 5 out of 5]

See my other review on the codex book.

This gold edition book is the more useful of the two books but its more specific to this game alone. The codex is quite useful for TTRPGs in general.

This game might be the most perfect RPG ever made.... For what it is specifically.

Get this and read it.

[Alexander Lenz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Luke Crane thinks himself a wizard, writes one of the best LordOfTheRings-games of all time, repackages it in some of the worst mechanical descriptors and books. Gods. This needs a team of good technical editors to burn down half the words. Other than that? Love it.

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A phenomenal RPG system, although one suited for a VERY specific type of game and roleplayer. Delightful to read, even if you never table it.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest roleplaying game ever.

[Juho Pohjalainen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I want to actually play through a story, craft a real narrative with my fellow players instead of just having fun with deadly dungeons and hexcrawls, I turn to Burning Wheel.

[John Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ambitious - requires a great deal of dedication on the part of a playing group - but probably the most satisfying way to approach an rpg as a group storytelling experience.

[Alaris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unspeakably detailed, although there are good ideas there it seems almost unplayable.

[David Annable · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doesn't get much better than this.

[Tuff Gregg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would love to run this game, but the deep level of commitment required makes it intimidating to propose to anyone but my closest, English Nerdiest friends.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book for running court intrigue in the vein of The Goblin Emperor.

[Edward Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting game system, one that I will keep. I appreciate the detail every character gets and the depth that apparently can be achieved during the course of gaming. It is a workable system that offers much to both player and GM. However, that having been said, I cannot actually say when (or if) I will play this.

From a GMing point of view, the system can offer unprecedented control over much in the game (which is as it should be in a fantasy rpg). The one thing that turns me off from the entire system is the fact that every character type that you can imagine requires a lifepath that offers certain skills for the character at different points in their life. That's just a bit too much required detail and kind of takes away the imagination from the player (and to some degree the GM). I understand that while there are ways to work around this (such as a collaborative effort between player and GM), I can't seem to get myself worked up to really care about it.

Despite my misgivings about the over-detailed aspects of the system, I have to say that the book, itself is a beautifully crafted tome. The illustrations, the format and the feel of the book is worth the price by themselves. It is a shame that rpgs seem to make character creation increasingly clunky for players as time goes by. We've come a long way from the simplicity of he original Dungeons & Dragons rpg, and I can't say that it is all for the better. I can say that it's decidedly different and not for everyone. While some may get more than I did out of the game system, itself, this is not my cup of tea. While I say that, I will say that the time I invested to check it out doesn't feel like a waste. I'm just mildly disappointed at the undo complexity of a system that truly offers a lot but falls short in other areas. I could get detailed about this, but that would suggest that I have more to say about the game, itself, than I already have written. Sadly, this is not the case.

If you're interested in what BURNING WHEEL has to offer, it is my advice to check it out for yourself. Good or bad, it is an experience worth having.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid update of the Burning Wheel system. Fills in a lot of the holes in the earlier edition, such as explicitly dealing with combats involving more than two people. I very much want to get in more than just a one-shot game of this some time.

EDIT: I just have to add that the author's refusal to make PDFs of the game available is a major reason why I haven't been able to get it to the table. It makes me sad.