Life path burner

Burning Wheel Subsystem Advice and Guidance
1

BWG and its Codex do not provide guidance for wholly remaking human lifepaths for settings for which they are innapropriate. The text cautions about trying to do so and advises reskinning lifepaths or making only small incremental changes to the lifepaths.

What the advice does not include and what the suggestion does not itself let you get to is a setting whose lifepath settings are structurally rearranged. For example the born peasant/village/city/noble/sea split and the leads from them imply a certain kind of world - thats part of what makes the books so cool! However those arrangements don’t suit a hunter-gatherer society or nomad hordes or a caste system society.

Does anyone have advice on good-practices for how to rearrange lifepaths and leads (imagine for the purpose of this question that i was actually going to leave every individual life path unchanged other than its leads and setting)?

What careful balancing/analysis was done during game development to achieve the current arrangements of lifepaths?

Thanks!

2

Hi all,

Seejaie, I believe that the human lifepaths are set up for 12th to 14th century western Europe equivalent era role-playing, while they can be used from 1CE to 1700 with minimal modification is wonderful.

But what you want is outside these parameters, for a Caste based society, I would either restrict or ban changing castes. The minimum I would do is to pull all the roles from the peasant, sea and villager settings and place them in the castes that you want them in. You will need to make a cultural package and include it in the created born (caste x) life paths.

Good luck

Simon

3

thanks Simon. I agree that for example of the caste system that would be a good way to start. I was hoping for more generic suggestions in the kinds of concerns to think about when going about the process more generally. How might you know when you have broken something or done a good job?