My local group has been playing Burning Wheel lately and in an attempt to improve my own mastery of the system I’ve been digging through various online resources and figured I’d share some of the best ones I’ve found.
The Burning Wiki – full of useful information.
Burning Wheel Forum Threads – here are my favorites
- Belief Workshop – Beliefs & instincts are probably the hardest part of character creation for those new to the system. This thread walks your through the process.
- More advice on beliefs
- Advice on using beliefs to drive the story
- Help with the Fight! mechanics – this thread has lots of good advice.
- The Arena: Belina vs. Gord – this is an example of a fight between two characters. I’ve found that reading through it with the rule book in hand really helped clarify the rules.
- Importance of scripting & exponents in a Fight! – lots of little pearls of wisdom in this thread.
- Why are there so many skills? – this is one of the things I’ve battled with early on and this thread helped me understand the reasoning behind the skill list. In particular, Paul B’s post was useful for targeting core skills that the group will want to have covered.
- Advice on running a Duel of Wits
Sean Nittner’s LJ – Lots of insight in to the game, from somebody learning it. Pure Gold.
The Seven-sided Die’s AP report – Much more than an AP report, this blog post has lots of good info in it for someone thinking about starting a Burning Wheel game.
Online Character Burner – Very cool way to deal with the crunch of character generation. However, you need to have the actual Character Burner book to use it.
Spinning up the Burning Wheel - The Seven-sided Die blog has a links to a good overview of the system plus feedback from someone learning to run it (30 Days of Burning Wheel) – the original feature has lots of useful info but you have to skip through a lot of non-RPG stuff to see all the posts and then they suddenly just stop. The Seven-sided die blog post has links to the specific posts of interest to save the bother of paging through a lot of stuff you won’t find interesting.
Some advice on writing beliefs pulled from a thread. This is by Judd Karlman:
- One Belief about the situation at hand, a concrete goal.
- One Belief about the other characters, again something concrete.
- One long term Belief or some kind of philosophical Belief that the character can grind up against during play for ze Fate artha.
loading...
This is a great collection of resources (and thank you for the kind words).
I wondered about skills too at first. Although I’ve since made my peace with the oddness of such a huge skill list, the thinking behind it should be interesting and will probably teach me something. I’m going to go read that thread as soon as I click Submit.
loading...
[...] Harnish over at Gaming Brouhaha has put together a great collection of resources on the Burning Wheel for new players and the curious.1 I found the link to the discussion of BW’s skill list [...]
[...] Doyce, MJ Harnish and Martin Burning Wheel [...]