The Burner Codex Review

This review has a preamble, which can be found here. I recommend reading that first. Hopefully it will provide context that I think crucial to reading this review. This game has a deeply personal meaning to me. We criticize the things we love the hardest.

So you're new to Burning Wheel and have the first book! Congrats! You're probably going through the book and either loving and understanding it, or loving it and trying to figure out what to do. It wasn't too long ago when most of us Burning Wheel folks were in your situation. I know that, when I first started, that I was overwhelmed by the game. There was a lot to process and understand and (in my case) to teach. If it wasn't for the Adventure Burner I doubt I'd be where I am today in regards to this game. This had less to do with the game itself than I had a hard time just... adapting. If you are in this boat (and even if you aren't) the Burning Wheel Codex is incredibly useful. If you wanted more racial options, this book definitely has that as well! There's trolls, wolves, roden, and dark elves, all of whom add a lot of depth to your setting. There's also magical items and a bunch of new magical systems, some of which are add-ons to the already existing Sorcery systems. But the book isn't perfect. We'll get to that later.

So, the Adventure Burner and Commentary advice is the best I've ever read. Period. I don't care what roleplaying game you are playing, if it has a GM role then the advice in this section needs to be read.  You can pick up the book and find everything you could possibly want to and read up on it. My favorite parts of this book are the Adventure Burner proper, as well as the writing on Antagonists, which should be read by all people who want to play in an RPG. The advice is not only universally applicable but the examples given are enough to give me chills that I've read it, over the course of seven years.There is advice on every. Single. Mechanic. In Burning Wheel. And, even if you aren't playing this game, its mechanical advice is so good that it's useful to almost any game you play in.

The Magic Burner's essays continue the breakdown of not just the game, but the genre and types of magical protagonists and antagonists as a whole. There's so much in these essays that, again, if someone needed a general breakdown of the fantasy genre I'd just go and give them this book and they would get a lot out of it. Most d20 games I've read say something to the extent of: "Go ahead and steal for your game!". This book says "Go ahead and steal for your entire GMing career!"The rest of the Magic Burner section has a collection of artifacts, to give a general idea of how to hack your own. They range from the tongue-in-cheek (the Ring of Power) to the awesome (snake armor! Who could say no??) Also included are a bunch of lifepaths for Magical Colleges, magical children who scare the crap out of everyone around them because of their raw power, necromancers, summoners, etc. etc.

And then there's the new stocks. Well, mostly new. Trolls, wolves, and roden are introduced to the game. Trolls are your classical large smelly brutes. They're incredibly strong and ridiculously stupid, but they have a charm to them that makes them interesting protagonists. Great Wolves come straight out of the Jungle Book and Princess Mononoke, complete with their own mythology. Roden, however, take the cake for an other-human culture. The race is divided in half: the good-natured (if slightly odd) Field Roden, whose faith brings the best out of the race, and Those Below, whose faith was corrupted on a sociological level. Dark elves are an add on to elves, showing how low they can stoop.

For my money this book is not a nice option to Burning Wheel, but a vital extension of the core rules. It explains the rules, has some of the best commentary on the fantasy genre I've ever read, adds more stuff, and makes it possible to run just about anything you'd like to, in a system that was already very open to begin with. Don't pass it up!