Burning Wheel: a test character and impressions of this object

Yesterday, I made a burning wheel character for the first time.

The reason I’m doing this is because a group of folks from the Ranged Touch discord were discussing Burning Wheel and its reputation in tabletop spaces as this big influential object that everyone kinda knows is there, but few of us had experienced. We decided to remedy this by putting together a group to actually try the thing. My knowledge and impressions of the object by osmosis alone were basically as follows:

It’s crunchy and intricate. Lots of moving parts that push on other moving parts.

Mouseguard is a descendant of it, and I do think that game is pretty cool.

Torchbearer is a descendant of it. I’m not up on my Torchbearer knowledge.

I had the impression it was tonally pretty self serious, and maybe inclined to try to tackle heavy topics. I’m not against that, and I tend to run pretty heavy and self serious games, but from much experience I find older TTRPG texts to be places that don’t have a great track record with doing well by that.

There’s lifepath stuff I think!

It’s on a lot o folks lists of influences!

(for claritys sake, this is all done using the Gold Edition Revised book, which seems to be from 2019)

And so, to make sure I knew how all this stuff worked before diving in blind session 0, I opened a copy of the text and made Yula, a dwarven revolutionary.

Yula is a 4-lifepath character. She was born among the guild-dwarves, and when very young began working as a wordbearer among them, running messages between the various guild-workers and their clients — picking up a habit of overhearing snippets of gossip in the process. During this time her and her brother Brand kept up a camaraderie based on friendly competition, jokingly telling the other about the eventual day one would be the other’s boss.

Yula’s messenger work made her very qualified to join a group of dwarven scouts as a banner bearer and herald, and this job took her beyond the dwarven borders to a trade town. Her life here felt good. Her and her scout unit fully integrated into the community, working more for this town than for the dwarf lords. She got a girlfriend, she leaned into her role as the town gossip, all was well.

Unfortunately her ear for rumors served her the bad news sooner than she would have liked: A civil war was brewing among the dwarves, and Brand (who had gone on to serve in the dwarven royal court) was prominently on the side that called for the seizure of this trade town on accusations of being a site of corrupting foreign influence on dwarf culture. She was forced to take up an axe and join up with other seditious dwarves to defend it.

Years later, the dwarven civil war has slowed to a hostile crawl between various expansionist, isolationist, and insurrectionist factions. Yula remains on the outskirts, a loudmouthed informant and rabblerouser still loyal to her villages survival, with a burning desire to pay back her brother for his part in disrupting her stable happy life.

I think I filled these out right.

So with that done I can talk about the actual experience of referencing the text to do this:

This book is really fuckin gendered.

It doesn’t even fall back on the annoying but popular he/she, it is just a wall of the players and characters being “he.” Not the ideal reading experience for a trans person who specifically doesn’t want that from experiences in day to day life. Weirdly there is also a dwarf trait (Bearded) that says it is a male trait, despite being called out as applying to every dwarf (who notably have the possibility of femininity acknowledged in the husband/wife lifepath). Also, less fraught but still weird that something otherwise so deeply Tolkein influenced wouldn’t be into the “all dwarf genders are bearded” trope?

Speaking of Tolkein, this game imports the Dwarf Stuff that so much media based on Tolkein takes pains to massage into something less weird and bad. A “stock” (not an improvement on the word race, I don’t think) that has some sort of inborn tendency to be avariciously greedy just sits badly. This sort o thing is present in the text’s orcs as well, but this is one of the truly surprising moments where dwarves are handled as weirdly if not worse. I ended up making Yula’s greed be for secrets and gossip to try to lean out of the material wealth aspect but that’s still well in the realm of Weird Shit.

It’s a long winded book and the prose is not for me. It’s real argumentative and defensive, especially in the exceedingly long rules leading up to the character creation steps, which caused me to miss a few things that then needed to be sought out again during the process. The actual style of the rhetoric just gets way too “person on a forum who wants to sound smart and has a specific idea of what smart sounds like” (I have been that person, to be clear). The actual rules of resolution seem fine, I’m on board with the dice pool system and whatnot, but the long digressions into how and why things are and should be what they are in the game are a big ol slog. It isn’t really helped by the arguments being for things that I at best would rather see argued for in a different way, and at worst just don’t think have held up either broadly or in the way I personally interface with games and play. Perhaps this is inevitably the result of the text being in conversation with old conversations I just am not in or have chosen to reject long ago, butI’ve read systems of similarly storied influence that weren’t like this (Dogs in the Vineyard comes up in BW, and Dogs is not nearly this hard to read!).

It’s to the credit of Lifepath systems as a concept that I have all these beefs and still had a good time making Yula. I think a mechanically identical system with just a lot of the excess trimmed away and some thematic changes would be a great time, not my favorite game but for sure one I’d want to visit once and a while.

I will make more posts about this thing when the games proper start.