Heya, folks, every now and then I’ll go back over some of the old setting books for Burning Wheel – Burning Sands, Blossoms, Serpent Sun – and I’m inspired every time.
I also start to wonder what you all at BWHQ think about them. Do you look back at them fondly? Do you ever pull out one of the old books for a game? Do you think they’re broken, and you’re glad they’re dead? Are you always looking forward to new projects, and so have little time for looking back?
I’m not fishing for the prospect of reprints or anything like that; just as a creator, what’s your mood?
Suffice to say I see only my mistakes and missteps—in anything we create.
We played a UASS campaign about 10 years ago. And Blossoms campaign just before that. Thor and Rich played the hell out of Jihad after it was released. But that was obviously a long time ago.
As a business, my view is that it’d be great for us to have that content in print and working for us. As a creator, I look at them and see nothing but a mountain of really unfun work to update, playtest, layout and edit.
I still love them and go back and look at them from time to time, but they definitely have warts. Some stuff, like the Path of Spite, have gotten reworked and incorporated in the new edition.
As Luke mentioned, we’ve tried to make Under a Serpent Sun work multiple times, both in a Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard framework, but ultimately it’s not an adventure game. It would need its own system to really be itself.
Jihad and Blossoms and Burning Empires are great but would need a lot of work to bring up to our current standards. It’s mostly more interesting and rewarding to work on new things.
I have to say, for me Blossoms was really a high-water mark on using Lifepaths and Traits and the like to bring a setting to life. I also love how it veers away from the RPG trope of “I stab the king in the face!”, because your Emotional Attributes probably won’t let you, and the consequences of doing things the society considers wrong go far beyond running from the town guard.
It was a standalone supplement called Path of Spite that we released as a zine and pdf in the Burning Wheel Revised days (I want to say in 2006 or 2007).
