One of the big names in indie fantasy roleplaying for many years has been Luke Crane’s game Burning Wheel. There have been a few editions, but the one that had the most support was Burning Wheel Revised (I think that was what it was called), which had five books in the line. All five have been out of print for some time, but the first two, which formed the core of the system, were more recently updated and reprinted as a single hardcover called Burning Wheel Gold, now on its fourth printing. The other three, the Adventure Burner (material on setting up and running sessions, adventures and campaigns, including sample scenarios and characters, as well as extensive commentary on the design of the game system), the Magic Burner (new magic systems, variants and modifications for the ones in the core book, guidelines for creating them, lifepaths and traits and such for wizards), and the Monster Burner (systems for creating monsters, lifepaths, traits, and settings, including four playable monstrous races and attendant lifepaths etc) had not been similarly revised for the Gold edition and are not readily available in any form.
Or they weren’t, anyway. Crane just launched the Kickstarter for the Burning Wheel Codex, a collected hardcover of similar format to Burning Wheel Gold, featuring much of the content of those three supplements updated to the Gold Edition rules, for $25 plus shipping. (Burning Wheel Gold is also available through the Kickstarter for the same price.) Crane is kind of a physical book fetishist (particularly for this game, which he refuses to release in digital format) so these are very nice books printed with little to no profit margin. (Crane’s day job is at Kickstarter.) There aren’t a bunch of fancy tiers or addons, either, and if the campaign for Torchbearer is any indication stretch goals are likely to be book order quantity based and mostly go towards making them shinier rather than, say, adding in more content and pushing back release dates, etc.
Fair warning, Burning Wheel is something of an acquired taste - it’s dense, it’s challenging, it’s a lot more mechanically weighty and prescriptive than most indie RPGs these days and a lot more narrativist and learn-by-failure than I think most D&D-spectrum players are used to, even with the changes in 5E. And a lot of people seem to be put off by Luke Crane’s writing voice (you can probably get a sense from the KS page if you’d be one). I’m not actually sure I’d want to play it myself, much less run it. But damn, it’s brilliant. So I think it’s well worth picking up Gold and maybe preordering the Codex too and at least giving them a read, even if you never actually play, and I for one backed immediately.
PS: The one clear omission from the prior edition per the KS page? No more playable giant intelligent talking spiders with web magic. :(
Trolls, rat people, intelligent talking wolves with their own magic, still. But not spiders.
