So I’m not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I have a question about the “setting” (if you can even call it that) of Burning Wheel. The books are rife with little tidbits of setting fluff like Elves being musical casters, for example.
Which leads me to the question: What is the baked-in religion of Burning Wheel?
Obviously, there’s a ton of references in Burning Wheel and the other books to the burning wheel as a religious symbol, and a ton of the content on these forums and on the wiki use religious-sounding phrases (Ex. “Broken on the wheel”) which would make for a particularly interesting in-game faith.
So, while I understand that religions of the game can and should very from game to game, I’d like to know what exactly Luke and the rest had in mind.
There is no baked-in religion. The Burning Wheel as a religion is kind of a joke about the “faith” of all of us who run and play BW games.
The Mannish lifepaths imply a monolithic religion analogous to the Church of medieval Europe. How close it is and the details of doctrine are entirely up to you. Whether you use the Religious lifepaths at all is entirely up to you. They’re fine for European games. Blossoms are Falling has its own variation for Heian Japan. Ancient Greece doesn’t have most of the Religious subsetting. And so on.
I realize that there is no codified faith presented in the books. I’m asking as to what the implied religion could be as represented by bits of religious flotsam like the Wheel of Fire artifact in the Magic Burner or the Immortal Lords in Torchbearer.
The pseudo-religious terms used by the creators and fans of the Burning Family seem to carry the tropes of a faith that would be very interesting to represent in-game. I realize that the phrases used by Luke and the others when talking about the game is just an in-joke, but its an in-joke with some interesting caveats.
The religious lifepaths are really flexible, allowing the same settings to apply to pantheons (D&D, Greek, Roman, etc), monotheistic ones (Christianity, Islam, etc), Shinto, and so much more. And these are examples from actual play, mind you.
But, if it helps to answer your question, the first religion to show up in a BW game was a sort of oriental, elemental, polytheistic one - a pantheon of 5 gods, each overseeing an element. However, the books don’t really reflect this. The books more reflect a monotheistic, Western religion. Though even then, you’ll see there’s no supreme leader LPs. They stop at the Bishop level, I believe.
But again, I don’t think there ever was an intent to embed the rules with a more definitive setting than “western religion.”