This will be a write up and summary of my first Burning Wheel campaign. It started near the beginning of the pandemic in December 2020, and it went on for a little over a year. We had 3 trait votes for what I estimate to be 30+ sessions. The only thing we knew about our situation going in was that we wanted a fantasy French Revolution game. It was most of our first time playing Burning Wheel and I had cut my own teeth several times playing one-shots and another aborted campaign so I had some familiarity with the system. Our goal was to start with the most basic set of rules, and just play to find out what happens to the characters. I do not want to go through all the details of the world we had created for ourselves, but my aim here is to describe how the game mechanics wove into our understanding of the fiction and how the characters changed because of the choices of the players.
The Big Picture:
The King of the Kalmec Kingdom is dead, beheaded by a corrupt cabal of nobles (the Ptolomites) who have twisted the name of the Revolution to suit their own ends. The killing of a King has enraged the neighboring Monarchies and the Ptolomites currently in power are attempting to install a Puppet that they can control.
The Situation:
The Kalmec Archipelago is a powder keg ready to blow. Centuries of papered over tensions between its peoples and cultures have made the situation for the capital city of Hannis extremely volatile. The feudal lords of the Ptolomite faction will cynically use the Revolutionary moment to secure their own power unless they are stopped.
Our Characters:
Wayra Ngata: Bastard prince of the recently beheaded king. He was connected with the King’s family and has relationships with the deposed Queen and the True Heir, only a child and his half-brother. The player of this character wanted to see his PC ascend the throne and unite the islands.
Eumenes Lexicos: A hybrid character of Robespierre and Napoleon. This character was an educated artillery officer who was disgracefully discharged from the Army and is a firebrand of oratory for the True Revolution for the People.
Gwen the Firefly: This character wanted to play a pyromaniac pirate. They were completely uninterested in the political situation so long as they were able to get a ship and then extract maximum concessions from the other political factions in the game. Critically, they took a trait called “Secretly Worships the Dark Sea God.” This had massive ramifications that I was not prepared for!
Some regular Burning Wheel players will note that these players’ beliefs are incredibly at odds with each other. This was essentially a PvP campaign during broad stretches of it, and the players would engage in a stately quadrille when aligning with one another’s beliefs. Not everyone’s character fit neatly into the Situation we had created and this was not fully appreciated by me during character creation. I mean, there’s a pirate in our French Revolution game! This required conscious discussion out of character regarding what we wanted the characters to do and how to steer the story. Because of my Situation’s light sketching, there was a butterfly flapping its wings effect when it came to how exactly our character’s related to each other that we had to work out constantly. Here’s how things shook out:
Wayra Ngata (Born Noble, Bastard, Notary, Courtier):
The player originally built this character to be a lying, conniving bastard and started the campaign showing that they were ready to do just about anything to get on the throne. While their PC was less stat’d out to go toe to toe in the Duel of Wits than Eumenes, this player made extremely creative use of -wises and circles to bolster their position. The first big rift between our revolutionaries happened when Wayra abandoned the party to sail home and protect the True Heir from the Ptolomite faction. This earned him eternal enmity from Gwen for the entirety of the game. When Eumenes rejoined Wayra in the Capital, Wayra brought to Eumenes the widowed queen and the True Heir and hoped to use a falsehood to guarantee their protection. The roll failed catastrophically, and the player controlling Eumenes killed the Queen in cold blood in front of his entire officer corp to cement his own May Insurrection. Wayra changed and became obsessed with protecting his only family, his half brother. He gave up manipulation, trying to reform himself to protect his half-brother while bringing in foreign powers to protect the throne. It was this player that initiated a full blown war across the continent to protect the very brother he was once plotting to usurp.
Eumenes Lexicos (Born Noble, Student, Engineer, Thinker):
This player had the strongest sense of mechanics in the game and built a fearsome PC to handle the Duel of Wits. I had to learn how to handle the Persuasion and Oratory skills of Eumenes to prevent him from running roughshod over every NPC he interacted with. The player was dead set on pushing the Revolution, so I started to ask him just how much that was worth it to him. The PC’s brother was a Noble Ptolomite and Eumenes had the loyalty trait which bound himself to his family. This loyalty was put to the test constantly to conflict the PC’s philosophical and familial allegiances. When the Brother tricked Eumenes to go out to sea, Eumenes returned and forsook his Loyalty to family by cannonade, becoming a kinslayer. The player then chose to kill Wayra’s stepmother and initiate the People’s Revolution, an act that won him the first deed point of the game. Meanwhile, Eumenes sacrificed his own love interest, a fellow revolutionary officer, when their expeditionary force was ambushed by counter-revolutionary forces. Forced between turning his army to save their love or force the advantage against royalist forces, Eumenes chose the latter and sealed his love’s fate. A personable firebrand at first, Eumenes became a bitter shell of himself as the campaign progressed.
Gwen the Firefly (Son of a Gun, Sailor, Artillerist’s Mate, Pirate):
This PC proved interesting to work around in our rather politically charged setting. The player was less interested in the character based play of Burning Wheel, but I hope I illustrate how those players can be accommodated. It became obvious to us as we played the game that we had to work around a faction that a pirate could represent, and it was the player’s fortuitous selection of the trait “Secretly Worships the Dark Sea God” that inspired us. An early religion-wise roll determined that there were split religions between the druidic islanders and people who sailed on the open seas. They were adherents to a Dark Sea God known as Zentharoq, who’s worship was forbidden by the Kalmec Kingdom. We decided that Gwen’s starting NPC relationship was an old captain who was certain she was a reincarnated prophetess of the Sea God. Gwen hated this NPC for undisclosed reasons, and she murdered him in a bizarre ritual under the burned remnants of the Capital City, which she had accidentally burned down O’Leary’s cow-style in session 2.
This ritualized murder of a friend won her first crew of fanatics who spread the tale of the Firefly across the city as whispers of the Pirate Prophetess’s resurrection spread across the sea peoples of Kalmec. The player wasn’t very interested in introspective roleplay, so I tried to balance the mismatch between their character’s stats and the role we envisioned for her in the story with an escalating series of disasters. The player wanted gold and riches and glory, meanwhile she got bogged down in bizarre religious rituals and fanatics that she was completely inept at managing. A terror campaign resulted in the character being horrifically burned beyond recognition, so I thought I would offer the player something out of 40K, the player’s favorite franchise. Recovering from her disfigurement, she became something of an Empress of Pirates who could only croak out her directions which would be inevitably misinterpreted by her coterie of worshippers. This worked for about two sessions before the player balked at their narrative confinement and we time skipped to a date in the narrative when she was more healed. The two other characters would dance around her and try to use her as a sort of attack dog for their own ends, until the religious crusade of freebooting fanatics became its own problem in the setting.
Conclusion:
After several sessions where the characters could not even be in the same room with each other, we talked out of character to decide what the endgame should look like. Eumenes used their deed point to soundly defeat the royalist forces on the main island of the archipelago and later successfully established contacts with another naval group of peaceful Sea God Worshippers that Gwen did not control. Wayra and his brother came to Eumenes to seek protection from Gwen who had grown obsessed with killing Wayra for personal slights against her. Eumenes finally decided it would be better to temporarily ally with Wayra and in a duel of wits, negotiated the Heir’s renunciation of the throne in exchange for their full protection. In the final scene of the game, Eumenes’s forces assault Wayra’s estate where Gwen was keeping Wayra and the Heir hostage. We used the Torchbearer 2 rules to adjudicate this Kill Conflict, and Gwen won. However, it was fought to a Major Compromise, so the win had to be as pyrrhic as possible for the winner. We decided that Wayra fought bravely to his death and secured the safety of his brother, who escaped the battle to a fate unknown. Wayra himself collapsed in the burning wreckage of his family’s estate while Eumenes was carried off the field, wounded mortally with his fate and the Revolution’s unclear. However, Gwen would never have the satisfaction of knowing if she had killed Wayra whose body was never recovered in the wreckage. She’d be cursed to sail the seas as the Mad Pirate Priestess never able to rest that her sworn enemies were dead. The End?
Final Thoughts:
All in all, it was a strange PvP campaign, but one I think about constantly. The players were dedicated to imagining what their characters wanted and active in pursuing it. Some of the biggest moments in the game were decided by leaning into the conflict resolution mechanics of Burning Wheel. Allowing the players to negotiate the stakes of the narrative meant that there was an ownership of how the scenes ended. Your character may have gotten the worse end of the stick, but the narrative was always moving forward and we could point to the decisions that motivated everyone’s reaction and counter reactions. Like some kind of turning motion was happening, fraught with emotional fires that tore at our hearts and made us howl when the dice came up traitors. LIke some kind of Burning Wheel! Even though one player wasn’t really on the ball with the mechanics and introspective character roleplay, their dedication to what their character wanted proved to be enough of a sounding board to the others that did. To this, I cannot recommend enough that players assume that authorial stance and talk to each other about the fiction. We had to make several conscious decisions to write beliefs that would get our PC’s back in the same room and it’s a risk you run when you have players dedicated to following their beliefs whose conclusions are obvious to them, but perhaps not conducive to the table.
Talking about Burning Wheel is Playing the Game!