RPG Review: Burning Wheel (Gold Revised) Part 1

“Under his burning wheels the steadfast Empyrean shook throughout…” – John Milton, Paradise Lost

Okay, it’s time to tackle this thing: My favorite RPG I’ve never played.

I’ve been collecting Burning Wheel since the original Revised when it was paperback in two books. One of the few books I picked up when I went to GenCon back in 2010 was their Burning Sands: Jihad supplement. And yet, I’ve never gotten the chance to actually run the game. I’ve run Mouse Guard and Torchbearer, which are descendants of BW, but their beautiful mother has never graced my table.

Let’s get into it.

Burning Wheel Gold Revised is the current rules in print. If you’ve played Burning Wheel in previous iterations and want to know the differences between versions, there are lots of different sites that cover that. I’m going to be talking about the system in general, and the aesthetics of the new book specifically.

Burning Wheel is a fantasy roleplaying inspired by settings such as Lord of the Rings, and Earthsea, though the book itself does not have a hard setting established.

The rules are broken down into three major sections: The Hub, the Spokes, and the Rim. The Hub is the most important and essential rules, the Spokes are the specific implementations of those rules, while the Rim is the various optional rules you can pick and choose to use in your own games.

The Hub

The basic mechanics are quite simple: Roll a number of D6’s equal to your skill, attempting to roll 4’s or higher. If you meet or beat the difficulty number, you succeed. The rules really are that simple, though you wouldn’t know it from the 493 pages.

The other most important aspect of the Hub is the BITs, Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits. These define your character.

Beliefs are what your character believes, what drives them. Each character will create three beliefs. Example: “I will enact vengeance against the bandits who killed my family.”

Instincts are your character’s priorities and reactions. They act as if/then or always/never statements. “Always keep a sharp blade,” or “Hide first, think later.” Your instincts are things that you automatically do without thinking.

Traits are minor character abilities and things that define your character’s personality and appearance. Characters can call on these traits to assist or hinder their dice rolls. The book lists hundreds of traits, attached to various backgrounds and lifepaths.

The Spokes

The Spokes are the rules that are mentioned in passing in the Hub section of the rules, and are important once you’ve really grokked the Hub.

There’s so many specific little rules that modify the hub of the rules that I want to point out some of the mechanics.

Carefully, Patiently, Quickly: When you are testing your abilities, you can choose to make the test carefully, patiently, or quickly. If you work carefully, the time taken with the test is increased by half, but grant an extra die to roll. If you work patiently, extra successes are given to improving the quality of the product. This could be to improve the taste of your stew, or add that extra touch to the sword you’re forging. This is mostly narrative, but these are allocated after the dice are rolled, so if you roll a bit over the necessary amount, you can describe how the end product is improved. Working quickly speeds up the task, with each success over the obstacle reducing the total time. You can mix all three of these rules, to work carefully and patiently, or quickly and carefully.

Let it Ride: One of the most important rules in Burning Wheel is Let it Ride. The GM will never ask for multiple rolls for the same reason during a test. A player tests once and then lets it go. If a ranger is tracking an escaped orc through the forest, he’ll make only one roll. If the conditions change, making the difficulty test harder, they won’t roll again, they’ll use the previous roll. Their tracking now fails, and they’ll need to figure out a different way of tackling the current conundrum.

Fields of Related Knowledge: There are a lot of Knowledge skills in Burning Wheel, as many skills as there are topics. So if you’r character has a knowledge skill such as “storm-wise”, and they’re attempting a Seamanship skill test while in the middle of a storm, they can add an additional die to the roll. These are Fields of Related Knowledge, or FoRKs, and you’ll use FoRKs a lot.

Advancement: Characters don’t level up. Instead, you’ll increase their abilities incrementally. You will check off a box each time you succeed or fail on the roll. Increasing your skills requires both successes and failures to advance, showing that you learn from things just as much when things don’t go your way. Characters can also practice their skills outside of normal use, which advances much slower, but allows you something to do in your off-time.

This review is getting pretty lengthy, and I’m not even into the weeds with this one. We’ll pick it up next week talking about character creation, Lifepaths, and the rim of the wheel, covering all the optional rules for the game.

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