Burning Wheel vs Torchbearer

I backed Torchbearer the instant I saw it. I'd just finished my first successful Burning Wheel campaign, Revenge of the Countess of Fire, and was hot for anything else that BWHQ was making. I played in one campaign, which was pretty fast and loose on the rules. A rapid series of events occurred over the next four years: enlistment, bootcamp, AIT, marriage, deployment, two kids, and leaving the Army. During that time I GM'd a number of successful (if shortened) Burning Wheel campaigns, but Torchbearer was packed away, and the brief one shots that I attempted ended in TPKs. Years passed, and with successful Burning Wheel campaigns and unsuccessful Torchbearer one-shots piling up I found myself wondering why on earth I'd ever play the game ever again. But finally it clicked. The differences between the two games are their focus on characters vs. the world.

For the past few years, whenever a campaign idea popped into my head it was a villain, or a collection of villains. I would get motivations and plans to recoup losses or accomplish victories over others. These personalities pop into my head, almost fully formed. The question then becomes how these characters accomplish those aims. The setting becomes the why the villain exists. I have a solar system where I house my games, with shared elements between those planets, but in the case of Burning Wheel I have one particular planet that I like to use, because the character dynamics that come from that setting really jive with the villains that pop into my head. Everything is secondary to the characters, including history, which for me is a pretty fuzzy thing. Character is primary in Burning Wheel.

But new ideas have begun to pop into my head. I'm no longer thinking of characters, per se, but of dilapidated buildings, of murals, of animals that have wandered into areas once thought sacred but so long abandoned that nothing remembers it was once important. I keep thinking of structures built like Zelda dungeons, built for their particular inhabitants. I see a world society that is so oppressive that the only place for sane people is to go to these places, where wonder and magic and intense danger are supreme. The physics of this world are in my head, something that I never thought of as interesting before. And Torchbearer is built to handle these sorts of things! The mechanics are set up to where you have to determine the history of the dungeon as you build it, characters have to manage their inventory, and character choices are limited more to immediate interaction with the world. And what's left of the Burning Wheel mechanics are explicitly made to be cause friction with the mechanics of the world.

I don't think these two games are in conflict with each other, because they focus on very different aspects of the fantasy experience. Burning Wheel focuses on the characters primarily, with the fantasy setting providing context for their struggle, but providing little else than that. Torchbearer, however, wants you to interact with the world in a direct manner, making the world itself the primary antagonist of the players. The setting becomes the direct avatar of the GM, something that he takes and forms directly. Both scratch different itches. And, honestly, I'm starting to move over, even just a tad, to where I'm beginning want to want both. Took me a couple of years, but here we are. It may be a hot minute before you see campaign journals on this site, but rest assured, I'm in the middle of prepping a Torchbearer game as we speak. We'll see where it goes from here!