The Burning Wheel
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| The Burning Wheel | |
 Burning Wheel and Character Burner |
|
| Designer | Luke Crane |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Luke Crane |
| Publication date | 2002 |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy |
| System | Custom |
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 game's first dedicated setting was 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.[1]
The most recent book by Luke Crane is "Burning Empires", a science fiction RPG based on the graphic novels of Christopher Moeller. Burning Empires was released at Gen Con 2006.
