30 Days of The Burning Wheel: pre character burning
After two weekends of a kickass Riddle of Steel game, the Burning Wheel game I’m GMing will kick off next Friday (2006.01.27) with a character burning session. We talked a tiny bit after last week’s great TRoS session, and the only things that were discussed were:
- One player expressed a desire to play it “stock” (elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. in a Tolkien-esque gritty fantasy setting) and the others (including myself) were totally down with that. After the TRoS game’s sorta wacky setting (think “Arabian Nights”-ish with Gothic/Roman Sorceror King fascist/racist overloads — but totally kickass!), I think I’ll be happy with something more “usual,” anyway, but who knows until we get at the table and start letting the ideas fly. We’ll see how it goes Friday night; and
- I said I’d like to come up with an idea that has a pretty set end-game and that we can get through in 4-5 sessions. Short, sweet, hit it and get out. In my experience, knowing that things don’t really have the option of lasting for that mythical open-ended “campaign” frees the players — especially those conditioned by years of D&D and its careful resource management — to do some BIG, powerful stuff from the get go. That’s the theory, anyway.
With the game kicking off this coming weekend, I’ll be spending a lot more time thinking about BW and therefore a lot more time post about it here. I’ll have the “usual” sort of posts coming as well as Actual Play posts from the game itself. I may do those over at The Burning Wheel forums but I’ll link to them from here and probably expound a little on them as well. I should have at least one BW post up before Friday’s session.
