This core paradigm extends all the way down into the deepest dregs of society, where even the most petty legal disputes are resolved by official bouts between representative warrior-proxies. While the Magnificantes themselves may be chosen chosen by the gods (at least, that’s what most of the peasantry and the new budding labor class believes), the proxies further down the scale are just top class warriors with official recognition, lawyers who represent by power of combat skill alone.

Torch is one such city-state, and within the dirtiest of its wrought-iron-encrusted streets is where our story begins. They’re all part of the underworld surrounding the lowest rungs of the Proxy fights, either directly involved with the shady dealings that pervade these bouts, or directly affected (victimized?) by them.

It’s kind of like The Wire meets The Lies of Locke Lamora meets Robot Jox.

The Cast So Far…

Three of the four players made it to the first meet-up. Here’s what we hashed out in that first gathering. Two of the three are three-lifepath characters.

Josh will be playing the ex-lover of Torch’s most recent Magnificante, who died sometime before the game under mysterious circumstances. While he was alive, she was his favored concubine and as such enjoyed a minor celebrity status. Since his death, she’s become old news, last year’s story now long since stale. She believes his death was caused by wrong-doing, and now seeks to expose it, and take revenge on whoever was responsible. To do this, she’s decided to enter the ranks at the bottom as a Proxy, and try and fight her way up to the top. Epic, huh?

Max’s character is a strange one, for certain. Initially trained as a priest, he was lured into the Proxy underworld as an advisor/coach-type figure for the fighters. Darker individuals within the ranks tempted him with Powers That Man Should Not Know, which started him onto the path of Corruption and Blood Magic. Now he draws some strange power from some unknown, dark source, and uses it to “help” fighters in the bouts. I think. My notes here are a bit sketchy. Max so far is the only four-lifepath character, as it just made sense for his concept, and everyone else approved.

Adam is taking on the role of a low-ranking Magister – a glorified term for an official bout bookie. He arranges bouts, takes bets, and turns in the losing bets as taxes to the state. He was once a more influential personage, but an illicit affair with someone important’s wife coupled with discovery and blackmailing by a criminal organization have knocked him back down to the bottom.

I’m meeting with the fourth player next week to work out his details and finalize initial relationships and such.

The Kick-Off

The game will kick off in the fighting pit. Josh’s character was just in a bout with another fighter, over a dispute between a John and the Prostitute he supposedly assaulted. Josh was paid off by an as-of-yet-unnamed character to throw the fight, but whether or not she intended to do that is moot, because the fact is she just plain lost the fight. We will start play with that moment of defeat.

Heavy Metal Bands,
Using Blossoms are Falling:
Duel of Verse – Throw horns!

But damn me if I can’t shrug off my love for the core fantasy setting! It’s straight-up old school fantasy excitement, and my love for it is nigh boundless. The lands are rich with adventure, the gods come down and fuck with mortal pawns like it ain’t no thang, social conflict and strife are everywhere, and ancient beings of infinite malignant power lie slumbering beneath the world’s surface. It’s just plain rad, if you ask me. Of course it also helps that this was the setting I first ever “officially” tabletopp’d in, way back in my middle school years.

Anyway, long story short: KnownWorld was getting old, Palladium’s core system blows hobos, and we switched to Burning Wheel. We’ve had a much better time since then. So allow me to introduce our heroes!

Greggor, the dwarven Centurion

Greggor is something of an anachronism, being a dwarf raised as an adopted heir to a noble within the Great Wolfen Empire. He learned to fight through the rigid Roman-like Wolfen tactics, and is tough as adamantium nails. Greggor is currently in the far southern Timiro Kingdom, traveling through human lands on a mission of equal parts diplomacy and espionage. You see, the Wolfen want nothing more than to welcome all civilized lands into the fold of their great Empire, even if they have to do it through direct conquest. Greggor’s mission is to analyze the Timiro Kingdom, and determine if they would make a worthy ally, a voluntary vassal state, or a target for military conquest.

Lanthris, the elven Hunter

In many ways, Lanthris is the classic Tolkienesque elf warrior. Anything you can do, Lanthris can likely do better, and look good while doing it. His specialties are speed and reflexes, and he’s a damn fine shot with a bow. Lanthris hasn’t had much opportunity to truly develop in recent sessions, but then again neither has most of the rest of the party. I look forward to seeing his gung-ho “liberate everyone but kill all the monster people” attitudes and beliefs come into play in the coming sessions.

Currently Lanthris is following in the footsteps of his missing Grandfather, from whom Lanthris learned many of his now-finely-honed foresting skills. Rumor has it that Grandpappy has headed west into the ruins of the Old Kingdom…

Dulin, the Priest from Another World

Well… not technically another world, but having been turned to stone for who knows how many years (five hundred? a thousand? more?) and then reawakened by magic (and God-Destiny!) has definitely displaced him enough from the ways of the modern world that he might as well be from outer space. Dulin is a militant priest of the “old faith” of Dragonwright, a religion now practiced almost in its entirety as a monstrous cult of violence and bloody rituals. Dulin seeks to return the old ways of God-Dragon worship to humanity once more, and will have quite an uphill battle once the other gods find out about it. I see great potential here to insert the other squabbling deities into the game. Dulin is strong of arm and capable with the spells of his magic-based faith, and serves as both warrior, healer, and spellcaster.

Aalric, the Shifty Summoner

As a member of a race that is universally reviled and hunted into near extinction, Aalric the changeling has been lucky to find himself in a group of friends who accept his nature and don’t fear him. Aalric’s the group’s face-man and deal-maker, and also dabbles in the dark arts of Summoning and Warding. Aalric has the emotional attribute of Spite (which I grafted from BW’s Dark Elves supplement), and it fits him well. He is loyal to his friends, but who knows how that will change as his turmoils levy? Aalric is one damn fine liar and smooth-talking scoundrel, but his toothpick constitution and weak prowess keep him from making much of a difference when the action starts.

The Story Thus Far

Back during the KnownWorld sessions, I started the game off using the loose skeleton from a very old web-published Palladium 1st Edition adventure. We’ve kept the same characters and adventure focus since then, and now that the adventure is pretty much complete and the Burning Wheel rules mostly settled in, I’m eager to push it further into more player-driven territory.

Since the game begin, the heroes have avoided vicious forest trolls, negotiated with rugged kobolds, awakened a sleeping dragon, danced and dined with trickster faeries, bargained with water sprites, infiltrated an ancient stronghold, liberated slaves, procured stolen holy relics, and massacred goblins small and ogres large. However, one major enemy has managed to elude them, and thus Rhaznor the changeling mentalist has now been established as a recurring bad guy. I love recurring bad guys.

In their latest session, while meeting with their benefactor to receive final reward for their harrowing adventure at his request, two of their number (and their employer) were ambushed and arrested by the guardsmen of the human frontier town, while the other two camped outside of town and tended to the “lesser species” (read: wolfen) prisoners they had liberated. It seemed pretty obvious that the guards were tipped off by a Changeling, indicating that Rhaznor was just beginning to try and get some revenge.

Guided by the twisted Stypon the Black – Dragonwright god of Treachery and Murder – Dulin and Aalric have escaped in the night, and now stalk the corridors of the fort imprisoning them, seeking to re-acquire the relics stolen from them and pay Styphons tax of blood for setting them free. Meanwhile, Greggor and Lanthris, unaware of their companions’ actions and fate, make plans to try and rescue them from this very same fort. The odds look highly stacked against them both, however: dozens of armed and trained frontier soldiers against a priest, a conman, a woodsman, and a centurion?

The Future

After our last session we talked about where we want to the game go next. All agreed: fuck this crappy bumpkin frontier town, let’s head west, back into proper civilization before heading out to the Old Kingdom. I look forward to it. I have some wicked ideas I’m excited to implement. Adventure, intrigue, honor, warfare, meddling gods and more, the future looks pretty wicked cool.

We only play about once a month, but I hope to have more updates as the game proceeds.

First, I want to talk about my feelings on Burning Wheel. If you know me at all, then you know of my curious obsession with this game. I own most of the major books of the system, sometimes multiple copies (for loaning and fan-conversion!), and have even had them all custom spiral-bound for ease of frequent use at the table (one of the most useful things I’ve ever done with a game book, and I recommend it to everyone). I’ve read them all multiple times through, and have burned up hundreds of random never-to-be-played characters in my idle time. And yet, if there’s any system that I would call my “White Whale” of gaming, that system is Burning Wheel. Despite many attempts to either run or play in Burning Wheel games, all my efforts mysteriously fail, either days before the games are to begin, or after only one or two sessions of actual play. I frequently get the feeling that Karma is working against me, and just doesn’t want me to play and enjoy this game system, no matter how many hours and dollars of devotion to its secrets.

Another problem is that I believe that the Burning Wheel that I have read and come to understand is a very different Burning Wheel than the game that its official forum-goers seem to enjoy. I only truly came to realize that recently, while working on translating this very campaign. When I started working on the conversion, I had multiple people refer me to the Burning THAC0 fan rules, telling me that those would do exactly what I wanted. Problem is, all that document really does is re-emphasize the core rules of Burning Wheel itself, with no real changes at all towards accommodating a more adventurous focus of play. The same people who referred me to the document intoned that the best way to run an “old-school” style of adventure in Burning Wheel is to get the characters into the dungeon and then turn them against each other, and then just sit back and watch the chaos. Wait… what? I was under the impression we were adventuring, and not playing Diplomacy (a game I have come through experience to now refuse to play with actual friends).

During the course of the conversion process, there was a great amount of discussion between the players and myself about their opinions on the (crucial) Beliefs subsystem of the game rules. There were a few rather vocal objections towards aspects of that subsystem – aspects which appeared to exist primarily to stir inner-party conflict, and to more deeply dig the trenches that separate the players from the GM. One player expressed his specific distaste for that kind of conflict, preferring instead a more heroic style of gameplay. He was not alone in this, and managed to find a few really heinous examples from the BW forums of GMs receiving advice to take the player characters’ beliefs, twist them into vicious scabby whips, and use them to cause strife and turmoil. Apparently, the consensus there is that such kinds of conflict are key to a good game of Burning Wheel.

I don’t entirely agree with this consensus. This discussion led me to ask the System itself two pretty big questions: is there room in a Burning Wheel game for a character who never questions his Beliefs, who always sticks with his guns? And can the Burning Wheel system accommodate a classic adventure campaign with such heroes, who go forth, fight evil, and save the day, without the GM antagonizing them and trying to make the players cry tears of anguish?

Absolutely. While it is true that a look through the official BW forums shows many examples of GMs being given praise for antagonizing the characters’ chosen beliefs and using them as weapons of Story War against the players, I personally believe that the game can be just as fun for a less heavy-hearted adventure, using the Beliefs primarily as guidelines towards that adventure, and goals to be fulfilled. It is my belief that not every game has to be “Big Choices All the Time,” and after our last session of the game, I’m glad to see that this belief has been justified. Character Beliefs don’t have to be pushed all the time, nor do they have to cause major conflicts of morality. Beliefs can instead be seen as Arrows Towards Adventure, and the system won’t lose any functionality at all. Sure, Hard Choices and Major Life Conflicts can be fun, but I’m glad to see that with just a little bit of perspective re-tooling, Simple Choices and Grand Adventure are just as enjoyable using the Burning Wheel game rules.

On to the mechanics of the conversion. While the setting and the characters of this campaign have been very enjoyable, KnownWorld just wasn’t doing it for us. I don’t believe this is a fault with the KnownWorld rules as much as it is with the core Palladium system that I wrote them to enhance. Despite my love for the setting and my nostalgia for the books, my own experiences have repeatedly proven how terrible the Palladium rules system is, and sadly, this very campaign has shown to us that no level of retooling outside of a complete system conversion will make that game any better. When I finally made the decision to go forth with the conversion, Burning Wheel was the obvious choice for me. We’d already been incorporating simple Beliefs and Instincts into our play, and the dice mechanics of KnownWorld ported with little tooling at all directly into Burning Wheel. The primary Stats were an almost perfect translation, and even the Lifepaths were pretty simple to reverse-engineer.

However, I’ve always felt that while BW’s Lifepaths were theoretically a pretty nifty way to create realistic characters, in reality the final results always left me wanting just a little more. Then one day a pal of mine, and a fellow BW aficionado, gave me the best advice I’ve yet to receive regarding this game system: Just give the characters the numbers you want them to have, and then go play. Use the lifepaths as a guideline, and then add to the results liberally to fill out the spots you feel are empty. Does this break the rules? Hell yeah it does, and it rocks too.

After hearing that, I was surprised I had never thought of it myself. Back when I was still running D20-based campaigns, that was exactly how I would handle character creation (screw your random rolls!). Players were usually too surprised when I offered that method to actually abuse it, and the end results tended to be more enjoyable for everyone at the table. After all players tend to be much happier when they are playing the characters as they actually exist in their mental conceptions.

So when tooling over the KW characters, I used the lifepaths to create close approximations, and then added extra skills and traits as I felt were necessary. While the party consists of a human, and elf, a dwarf, and a changeling, I found that the easiest way to port them over would be as human stock characters with traits to transform them into their respective races. I was quite satisfied with the results, and glad to see them play effectively (and more important: enjoyably) during this past session.

We’ve added a few system tweaks to fit our style of play, and we are all far more excited about the coming sessions now that we’ve adapted to a more functional and enjoyable game system.

I am extremely hopeful. This will be my sixth attempt at getting a Burning Wheel game going, each of the priors being stymied by any number of organizational or game-idealogical setbacks. This time, it seems most everyone is on board. Cross your fingers.

Tomorrow night, the gaming continues with my first ever all-girls game night. I know a surprising numbers of lady gamers who rarely, if ever, get a chance to play. I figured this would be a great opportunity to get them together and let them play without dealing with “The Dudes” who usually grace the table, myself excluded. And given my own *ahem* tendencies, I am slightly less part of that latter crowd than most. I’ll be kicking it off with a one-shot of Cannibal Contagion, with the hopes of gauging their individual gaming styles while having a plain old good fun time. It’s my hope that this can be a semi-regular thing, maybe even allowing me to get my feet wet running 4E for the first time.

Also, Mass Effect 2? Fuck. Yeah.

Grrr.

- NPC