Return to the Wheel

I used to play Burning Wheel two to three times a week. I did that for three years. The campaigns were dark, personal, sometimes more than borderline crazed fever dreams of fun, adventure, grief, and oh so very trippy. Burning Wheel is the sorta game I’d take with me to a desert island because it’s going to keep challenging me and kicking my ass until the day I die. Whenever I GM Burning Wheel know you will get a brutally honest “AND I MEAN IT” with every session. It was all out there. I loved every second of it.

Afghanistan happened. And something in me broke. It happened to be the part of me that enjoyed the sincerity machine I'd turned Burning Wheel into.

I went from GMing multiple times a week to none. I just couldn't do it. I grieved for months, unable to really focus that part of me at all.

Fortunately at the time I was developing Crescendo, so I threw myself into that with abandon. I wasn't running from Burning Wheel, so much as having to dedicate myself to developing that game to a degree that cut out all other games. And, to be fair, Crescendo is a sprawling mess made coherent. It's taken many a draft to make what one of my playtesters called "actually two or three games working together" (it may  be five or six) actually work together. Crescendo, unlike more than a few of the games that are currently being developed in response to Burning Wheel, decided to take the jank of its mother system head on and make it core to the game. Crescendo is gloriously weird. It's not as rules "intensive" as Burning Wheel, but it's every bit as idiosyncratic and demanding as Burning Wheel, in its own way.

As I developed my mythological character development game I realized that I was, in part, processing what made Burning Wheel so important to me in the first place. With each and every mechanic that I crammed into Crescendo I understood a bit better what I was try to replicate: the expansiveness of Burning Wheel's engine, with the intricate knobs and levers that would take a lifetime to master. I wanted to make something every bit as challenging and unique, in its own way. I realized that I really missed Burning Wheel's expanded mechanics, its demand that you accept it as it is, along with its uniquely idiosyncratic approach to character evolution. Just... the whole damn thing.

As I designed and reworked and reworked and reworked and wrote and broke my brain over and over, I realized that how I wanted to play Burning Wheel was changing. Before that point I was a bit skittish about playing Burning Wheel the way I wanted to: with all the gloriously inconvenient crunch at front and center. I thought Burning Wheel was a session-based game and wanted to honor that structure. Well, with the Anthology I know now that was never really what was intended. So I kinda figured "Meh, why not just embrace that? Let the scenarios be long, messy, and filled with all of these gloriously crunchy bits that I enjoy so much?"

And that percolated in the back of my head, as I designed Crescendo. Which, for the record, is also scenario based, not session-based, and also takes an interminably long time to get anything done. Actually it can take longer than Burning Wheel by a very good margin: arcs of Burning Wheel can take between eight to eighteen sessions, maybe longer. That's one arc. Burning Wheel's probably firmly into its second arc by then, if not its third.

And yes I think that's a feature not a bug.

So the other day I decided to go back to Burning Wheel with Lena. We started talking about what we wanted to do, and all of this love for the game just came washing over me. It wasn't what Crescendo did, but I didn't want it to. I wanted my janky and messy Burning Wheel, which helped create all of these really intense and raw moments of gameplay and emotion! Burning Wheel does really grounded, in the moment character development, really well. It doesn't hop around like Crescendo, which will have you doing intense character work, switch to setting stuff for context, and then into making myths another session later... and then dump you back into the story with some more context to hang your character work off of, the whole time at the same breakneck speed of Burning Wheel (if not faster, depending on how you view it). I love how grounded in the present moment Burning Wheel feels. It's something I had really pushed against before, but now that I've got a game that can go from ground-level to the heights of mythology and back down in an instant... I really like that Burning Wheel doesn't. It's got more of a gritty, pulpy sorta a feel in comparison.

And I've been listening to a lot of pulp recently. I really like it.

Time to go back to Heranyt and see how fucked it is. I've missed it so.