# the Burning Wheel tags: #game/rpg/burning-wheel ![[the Burning Wheel (cover).jpg|600]] **The Burning Wheel** is Luke Crane's gloriously over-engineered fantasy RPG, the one the hobby recommends to people who read the rulebook for fun and then complain it wasn't thick enough. Its own opening instruction is disarmingly simple — *fight for what your character believes* — and then it makes good on that promise with a boxcar full of interlocking mechanics, until the player who actually believes something is handed enough power to bend the dice to their will. It is also one of the acknowledged touchstones of the **[[Blades in the Dark]]** engine, which credits it among the designs that shaped the Forged in the Dark family. It rewards the reader's patience and punishes everyone else, cheerfully, at length. It is the flagship of Luke Crane's **Burning Wheel HQ**, the house that also put out **Torchbearer**, **Mouse Guard**, and **Miseries & Misfortunes**, each built on the same belief-driven bones. ## Setting Burning Wheel ships with **no canonical world**, and it's proud of the omission. The foreword-folklore and the opening pages reach for the mood of Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Tolkien, run through the grubby medieval histories of Barbara Tuchman and Desmond Seward — "a dirty, complicated world full of uncertainty, but not without hope or opportunity for change." The game hands you the engine and waves you off to build your own fantasy corner, on the sound theory that you'll do it better than a canned setting ever could. What it supplies instead is a worldview about who the player characters are. Nobody starts as a default hero: people are the product of their pasts, **burned** from a chain of lifepaths that carries a dwarf from Hall-born to Guild Elder, a human from village Peasant to Knight, an elf across the Ages, an orc through and against the Hate that drives it. Characters come from four stocks — dwarves, elves, humans, and orcs — and begin as ordinary, fallible creatures with history, ties, relationships, and things they refuse to give up on. Your job at the table is to take those Beliefs into conflict and see what the system does to you; the GM's job is to put what you care about at risk. ## Mechanics The core is a **d6 dice pool** with numbers bolted onto every surface. An ability has an **exponent** (how many dice you roll) and a **shade** that sets the target: black shade succeeds on 4, 5, or 6; gray on 3+; white on 2+. The GM sets an **Obstacle (Ob)** from 1 to 10 describing the inherent difficulty of the task, and you need that many successes. The elegant cruelty is the asymmetry — a merely competent character at exponent 4 simply can't reach Ob 5 alone, so high obstacles force you to recruit help, stack advantages, or take a different route entirely. Rolls are **open-ended** on magic, Steel, and Faith, where a 6 lets you pick up another die and push further. And **Let It Ride** means you roll once for an intent and the result stands: no fishing for a better roll until the situation truly changes. ### Character Creation Character creation is called **burning**, and it drips with history. Pick a stock, then chain together lifepaths — the human résumé might run Peasant → Soldier → Knight, each step granting skills, traits, resources, relationships, and gear while advancing age. Elves accumulate the Ages, orcs are shaped by the Hate, and the whole thing ends with you setting the three **Beliefs**, the **Instincts**, and the **Traits** that will define how the character is played. ### Beliefs, Instincts & Traits The BITs are the heart of the game. Each character carries three **Beliefs** — what they stand for and are trying to accomplish — plus **Instincts** (programmed if/then behaviors such as "if surprised, draw my sword") and a stack of **Traits** that both help and handicap. The GM builds challenges out of the Beliefs; acting on them, win or lose, is what earns you **Artha**. ### Artha Artha is the real currency, and it comes in three grades: **Fate**, **Persona**, and **Deeds**. You spend Fate to re-roll a die, Persona to add dice or open the roll, and Deeds for dramatic turns like doubling an exponent. The loop is the whole pitch — the more faithfully you play your Beliefs and Instincts, the better your dice behave — until the system quietly rewards you for being exactly the character you claimed to be. ### Advancement Every test counts twice. Passed and failed tests alike mark an ability, and once it stacks enough routine and difficult tests the exponent climbs. Failed tests advance you *faster* than passed ones, which makes Burning Wheel that rare game where falling on your face is the quickest road to competence — a gentle push toward reaching for slightly more than you can handle. ### Steel Combat-adjacent characters learn to fear **Steel**, the nerve attribute. See a friend die, take a mortal wound, watch the enemy charge — and you test Steel or you falter, losing your action, freezing, or worse. It's how the fiction of fear and courage gets mechanical teeth. ### Duel of Wits Persuasion gets its own full combat system. **Duel of Wits** is a scripted, multi-volley argument between sides, each fighting for a declared **Prize**, resolved through actions like Point, Rebuttal, and the rest. Win and your position is enforced; lose and your concession is binding. Social conflict, dragged kicking and screaming into the realm of consequential mechanics. ### Fight! Physical violence runs on **Fight!**, a scripted melee where participants secretly choose their next several actions and reveal them together, resolved by reflex and action type rather than a simple initiative roll. It's slow, deliberate, and brutal: injuries climb a wound track up to your **Mortal Wound**, and one decisive blow can end a character whose Beliefs you spent a whole campaign building. Ranged fights draw on their own **Range and Cover** subsystem. ### Magic Magic comes in three broad flavors — **Sorcery**, an open-ended skill; **Emotional Magic** built on Faith, Grief, Greed, and Hatred; and **Natural Magic**, the dwarven arts and elven skill songs. Each is a full subsystem with its own costs, and none of it is simple. ## Editions - **Burning Wheel Classic** (2002) — the original self-published edition; the d6 pools, the Beliefs, the burning, all started here. Long out of print and a collector's item. - **Burning Wheel Revised** (2005) — the second edition, published May 2005 with significant rules and text changes; the core rules and the **Character Burner** were still separate books. - **Burning Wheel Gold** (2011) — the third edition and a genuine rewrite, not a fix; it folded the Character Burner into a single combined book. The foreword calls it "a new how." - **Burning Wheel Gold Revised** (2018/2019) — the current, definitive edition. *In the library.* Gold went out of print over printer trouble, and the Revised printing swept in roughly eight years of errata: "Mannish" and "Man" became "Human," Elven Grief was reworked, and new trait-creation guidance landed at the front of the Traits chapter. The copy in the library is the 2022 tenth printing, the "Fontocalypse" revised printing. The library also holds the rest of the Gold Revised box/line, all *in the library* — supplements, not editions: - **the Hub of the Wheel** — the free "Hub and Spokes" intro, the opening section of the core book on its own. - **[[the Burning Wheel Codex]]** — a substantial companion adding lifepaths, a new playable stock (the Roden), roles of magic, and expanded options, with a foreword by Adam Koebel. - **the Burning Wheel Anthology, Vol. 1** — a collection of short scenarios and essays from the game's contributors. - **The Sword** — a one-scene demo adventure, played with the players pitted against one another over who claims the titular blade, plus its pregenerated characters. - **Twilight in the Duchy Verdoben** — a scenario built to launch a short campaign and workshop Beliefs, plus its pregenerated characters. - **Play aids** — Character Sheets, a Character Burner Worksheet, and the Duel of Wits, Fight, Fight Action, and Range and Cover sheets. ## References - [Burning Wheel HQ (official site / publisher)](https://www.burningwheel.com/) - [Burning Wheel Gold Revised - Burning Wheel HQ](https://www.burningwheel.com/burning-wheel-gold-revised/) - [Burning Wheel Gold Revised - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/448187/burning-wheel-gold-revised) - [RPG Review: The Burning Wheel - Shut Up & Sit Down](https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/rpg-review-burning-wheel/)