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!

The Book (and Urth) of the New Sun

This is the third take I've had on this review. Every time I write my thoughts I find them woefully inadequate. There are concepts in this book I had no idea that I needed in order to understand myself, nevermind the world. And, now that I'm coming to the last fifty pages of The Urth of the New Sun, I find that I am terrified of ending the book. But end it must, and I must figure out what I will do from here.

The previous two iterations of this review became more and more grandiose as they progressed, to the point to where I found that the painful humanity of the book was lost. But when I tried to walk it back the grandeur was also lost in sweeping statements on how petty the main character could be. I could not focus on both, even though the book did.

The last few years of having PTSD have been some of the most rewarding and insanely painful of my already-painful life. I've seen highs and lows that I wouldn't have known that anyone else had experienced, were it not for this book. Reading Wolfe's thoughts on time travel and salvation left me speechless. There are things in this book that are so real that they can hardly be believed. But real they are. This man knew, he had done it. But when I try to write about it I destroy what it is that I love about the book. I cannot talk about them, even though the book did.

Ending The Urth of the New Sun is like driving to the airport with someone you love quite deeply. You hang on every word, you savor every last sight, smell, sound, them. You know they will not be there, with you, for much longer, and so you drink them in as much as you can, praying that it's an illusion, hoping against all hope that when you get to the airport they'll say "JUST KIDDING! I'm staying here". You hope that this is the time they stay and you will not have to be parted from them, ever again. Maybe, maybe this time, the dream will not end.

They get on the plane.

The book ends.

And you have to wake up.

It is over.

But the dream continued, this time, somehow. My friends and family will come back to me and in a real way they never left. I will finally be able to fully enjoy the family and friends I have now! The book is over but I will return to it, to enjoy it anew. Eventually that pleasant dream, where the world makes sense and I'm not fighting by the skin of my teeth to maintain even a facade of mental health, will become reality. Eventually I will triumph. Like all properly Christian works, I am left with hope, as Severian strides off into the unknown. Wherever he is going, whatever The Increate will require him to do, he has triumphed.

This is not typical to the types of reviews I write, and for that I apologize. This is a very deeply personal book to me, and I find that it's almost impossible to write about. If you like sci-fi and fantasy, and find yourself wanting something of a similar depth to Tolkien, Lewis, and Le Guinn, you will be not be disappointed here. Wolfe is a master, if not the master, of his craft. I cannot recommend this book enough.

"Games Need to be Accesible"

(Or "sOmE GaMeS ShOuLd bE AcCeSiBlE bUt ThEy DoN't AlL hAvE tO bE, as Aaronsolon said)

So I'm walking into my workplace one day, minding my own business, when a coworker of mine runs up to me and strikes up a conversation. I'd talked with this guy a few times before, but had never talked in-depth with him. As we were going along I randomly decided to tell him about the board game night I and a buddy of mine host on Friday nights, after the kids and spouses are asleep. He was thrilled, but kinda blanked when I told him we would be playing Power Rangers. He told me that Thuy Trang was his eternal love and he would be there. Two other people had RSVP'ed and I was excited! Four people playing Power Rangers meant that we would be past the dreaded three player mark, where the game is probably at its hardest. People were claiming colors and it was gonna be a great  evening.

Yeah, no one else showed up but this guy. Oh, and he was new to anything beyond Monopoly.

I smelled disaster.

Part of the challenge of Heroes of the Grid is that it's a very intense game. You have to really know the character you're playing and have to be talking to everyone else constantly, otherwise the influx of attacks flattens the group. With a system as uncompromising as this game's I was afraid that I would not be able to help my newfound friend figure out the character in time. I was right. We got completely and utterly stomped, losing three times over, but choosing to complete the game anyway. We narrowly beat Scorpina, almost losing for a fourth time in a row. And it was great!... at least for me. We were both emotionally exhausted from the ordeal and it was past midnight. I kinda figured this would the last time I'd see this dude, honestly. Two people had bailed on that night and he was given a game that was completely and utterly overwhelming with few people to rely upon and, especially after the ass-kicking we had been subjected to, I wouldn't blame him if he didn't come back. I was also a little bitter that the game was this friggin' hard.

"So this was great! Let's have more people next time, yeah?"

We had a conversation about the game, and he was practically bubbling about it. Yeah, his luck had been horrible and the game was a bit overwhelming, but it had been such an adrenaline rush! We both wanted to play again, but again, past midnight and all that. I told him about some of the other experiences I'd had and he listened attentively. He said he wanted to get better, so he could have more fun with the game. I told him he would, if he put the time in. He nodded, said he'd be there next week, and left.

I stared, sorta slack-jawed, as he walked back to his car.

And, in case you think that was a fluke, I had called one of my buddies who had first played this game with me and asked how much he wanted to keep playing, since I wanted to buy expansions for the game and didn't want to waste my money on it if he wasn't going to play. Our first games had been very rough, with the first one ending in abject defeat and the second one sorta being cheated through. So I was pretty nervous. I had enjoyed the game, but I really enjoyed the challenge. I do not assume others have such a thrill at finding a game that takes some work to understand. But his answer surprised me. "Yeah, it felt like whenever I first played Pandemic, that same 'HOW ARE WE GOING TO BEAT THIS??'  was there. But that turned out alright and it's one of my favorite games now, so I figure why not keep cracking at this one? It's a lot of fun, even though we lost!"

The thing is, I don't mind easy games. One of my favorites, Tsuro, is extremely easy and simple. Anyone can play it, at any confidence level. I've never seen someone not be able to play Tsuro, and it's so aesthetically pleasing to lay down those gorgeous to lay down those tiles and laugh as you realize that everyone is screwed and that's OK. And I'll be damned if Smash Bros isn't an immensely fun game to play with people who have no idea what they're doing! It's got a pretty low threshhold of initial play. I certainly think there should be be gateway games for every genre of play imaginable. People need to know that these can be fun and achievable, in that order.

But I also think that some games should not be. The challenge is part of the point of that game, that adrenaline rush as you realize that, while you may not understand the rule-set, it is open to you and it is on you to understand and master and, should you fail, the system punishes you, sometimes severely. The experience is fraught with the danger of being sent all the way back to the beginning, sometimes with nothing to show for your trouble. And these types of games are extremely frustrating at times, especially for the people who love them. A good game that is difficult does not fail you because it failed, but because you failed. And that distinction has to be very, very, very apparent when playing the game. I haven't beaten Ornstein and Smough yet because Ornstein and Smough are intrinsically unfair, I keep losing to Ornstein and Smough because I'm not respecting the rules that the game has bound the world to. I don't dodge enough, I get very greedy for just that one extra hit that won't actually do anything but HE'S OPEN AND I SHOULD TAKE IT AND OH MY GOD IF I DON'T DO IT I'LL DIE. Such a panic mode is a trap, and these games are designed to punish panic. Do not panic. Think. Breathe. Be judicious. If you lose, you know why you did. If you won, you definitely know why you did. You earned it! You faced something that looked insurmountable and almost was, but you did it! The adrenaline high is unlike anything else, to know that, even if others did it or not, you did. Life is different after a victory like that.

There are some, however, who cannot partake in that experience. Whether it be an actual handicap, money, whatever it is, they cannot keep up, and feel bad that they can't. It doesn't help that the people who can weather such experiences rub it in their faces, which is all sorts of wrong, but even if they didn't there'd probably be some people who wanted to experience a different aspect about the game than the difficulty of it. Perhaps the story is something you want to experience, or maybe the aesthetic really appeals to you, or maybe you just want the damned designer to give you a break. And there are games that do this! And I have no issue with that! The designer, the one sending the message, thinks it should be more open. I'm perfectly fine with that.

But some don't, and that's fine too. Games are a communication of an interactive nature. The designer sets up a design and the player goes through it, guided by the rules into an experience that the designer intended. Some designers are a bit more specific about what they intend. They have forged an aesthetic, a set of mechanics, an experience, a message that is inseparable from the difficulty of the game itself. And yes, the designer gets to be the one who makes that decision. Yes, it excludes some people from playing. I doubt I'll ever finish Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. I'm just not very good at platformers. It's not something I really grew up with, and therefore a game that other platforming gamers have told me is hard is something that I'm not going to have the best experience with. And that's alright by me. The world is not about me, and I have no issue with someone telling me "No, this is not for you", because there are plenty of other things that are. In fact I have issue with games that say "this is for everyone!" because it means that they're precisely for nobody at all. I am quite sure that I will some day meet someone who hates Tsuro, although I've no idea if that person will have a true pulse or a soul. I may have to call for an exorcist at that point, but such is life. But Tsuro is also designed for a specific experience: an intro party game. It's not deep, and anyone trying to get real depth of gameplay out of base Tsuro is going to have a really bad time with it. But fortunately Tsuro's design is extremely clear and I don't know of a soul that has ever mistook it for a tactically deep game.

No game (or media) is for everyone, all the time, or sometimes ever. Not everyone can read Dostoevsky. Not everyone can read Gene Wolfe, or Tolkien. I don't think people should be machismo about it (although sometimes a good victory roar and chest pounding feels pretty dang good, particularly Dostoevsky), but let's not beat about the bush here: if you are not talented in the way that a game (or media) demands the designer has absolutely no obligation to make it so. In fact, he has a responsibility to make sure it hits a certain audience, and only them. Communication is, by nature, exclusive. I'm not going to deliberately (yes, that's in there on purpose... sigh....) tell someone else other than my wife and children that I love them with every fiber of my being. I am not going to call my best friends "Beppin", cause that's what I call my wife, nor would I say "DA BUB" to anyone but my firstborn son, because those things are meant to for them, and them alone. Is it elitist? Abso-friggin'-lutely it is, it's only for them and I mean to keep it that way! Are they good enough for me, which insinuates that others are not? Yes! Should I be a jerk about it? No! Just because I love my sons enough to talk absolute nonsense to them with a big grin on my face, in a way that only they understand, should not mean I should share that experience with my brother-in-law.... although I think he'd find that awesome.

I'll have to process that later.

Anyway. 

So, I don't think that games are for everyone, everywhere, at all times. No one is that good at designing. I think you can either say "my game is for everyone" and be lying, however unintentionally, or you can say "No, I've designed for this experience" and, if you don't want to compromise that experience or make a similar experience, there's absolutely no issue with it. Should people be jerks about having that particular talent? No. But those people shouldn't be penalized by not having a game built for that particular experience. They should not have that particular talent excluded from a gameplay experience. Excluding people from your game is an inevitability. The question becomes who do you want to talk to, and why?

And I think that's a lot more interesting than saying "This game is too hard and I think it should be made to fit me". If it's too hard for you, then look elsewhere. I know I have and I'm glad I did. But, sometimes, just sometimes, try it again. And again. And again. And again. You might get something you didn't expect to.

BUT HEAVEN HELP ME IF WE DON'T WIN NEXT TIME

EDIT: I changed a few things meant in good humor that, as it turns out, were not taken that way. There will be a further edit later, but I cannot do that at the moment, so I hope this very short  apology will have to do before I put in a longer one in later. My apologies are offered. It's the internet, so I don't assume forgiveness, but that out of my control.

Burning Wheel: The Dark Souls of RPGs

As a quick aside... So within five minutes of me getting my copy of Burning Wheel, Revised Gold Edition, my one year old son grabbed it, smiled as he held the book, and then ground this magnificent book across our cement front porch. Yeah, it has a cover on it now. I even put ribbons in it! Yeah, the design's kinda dinky, but I love it cause it's so ugly.

My copy of Burning Wheel Revised Gold

.

"Burning Wheel is the Dark Souls of RPGs"- Jonathan Ying

There was a moment, right at the beginning of me getting to know this game, where I realized that I had no idea what the hell I was doing. The rules were so antithetical to Dungeons and Dragons, which was really hard for me to accept. I'd only known DnD and it hurt the brain a bit to jump. I was getting discouraged and wondering if I should just give up and move onto something simpler. I didn't breathe a word of this to anyone at the time, but after utterly screwing up the first campaign and then rebooting the second  I was about ready to just hang it up. And then we did the first Trait Vote, which is where all the players discuss the story and the characters and decide where they want to go from there. And everyone just sat there with this blank look on their faces. They'd never had this amount of control before. They'd never had to think about their characters the way the game was demanding them to think! I watched, entranced, as they dug deep into their guts and made awesome decisions about who their characters and what they wanted out of the story and they connected and they cared and couldn't wait to see how it would all shake out and they were excited and they had opinions and... and...

I almost cried for joy when I went home. And then I picked up my lovely, practically new and totally-not-scratched-because-I-didn't-have-kids Burning Wheel core book, smiled, and went back to reading. It

Burning Wheel is... Burning Wheel is... yeah, I've been playing for years and I still couldn't finish that sentence, not really. I've no idea why. In fact, until Mr. Ying (probably jokingly) called Burning Wheel the Dark Souls of RPGs I doubt I would have found a phrase that so accurately summed my experience of Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel is entirely about character development, in a way that is so uncompromising that it, indeed reminds me of Dark Souls. Most people who have only really played DnD may roll their eyes at that statement, because of course there's character development in their games! Characters develop all the time! This is a fair point, so let me illustrate my point with a few anecdotes of characters that illustrate my point the best.

In one of my games there was a character by the name of Joel. He was a common criminal and refugee, trying to get his hands on papers that would make him a native of the city he needed to stay in to stay alive. He was told he needed to grab a young woman to put into a compromising situation that would bring down the Lord Mayor of the town. This he did, not really asking any questions as to what would happen to said woman. Unfortunately the plan went awry and the woman was eaten alive by a lich, in front of Joel, who was paralyzed by fear. The lich licked his lips, thanked Joel for the tasty snack, and walked off to take over the town, which was already in the middle of a massive riot. In despair Joel ran away, only to find himself underneath the town and handed a holy sword by the Archangel Raphael, who told him that he was the only one who could save the city. Joel protested; he was not that guy. He was a coward, a common criminal! Raphael told Joel that there was much more to him than he knew. And Joel was then left alone with the sword. Joel desperately charged the lich who was destroying the town, all caution to the wind. He almost died in the attempt (which may have been the point, the GM doesn't know!), but did manage to kill the lich. Joel wanted to put the sword down and fade into obscurity, but an ancient evil had been reawakened during the riot that Joel had helped start and the sword responded to no one else. So Joel took on threat after threat, each deed more epic than the last. He was regarded as the hero of the city and the townsfolk worshiped the ground he walked on. He was accepted by all except himself, because he was the only one who remembered what he truly had been.

Xellous was a 13 year old enchanting prodigy, raw but with a lot of potential. One day he met a demonic boy called a Flammeous Lad. The encounter revealed a massive alien conspiracy to destroy the world, and in trying to save his wife's brother lost his wife to said aliens. The reclusive enchanter is now the chosen knight of a dead star, not to mention one of the most trusted bodyguards of the king, and the inventor of his own magical system to boot. All to get his wife back.

Every single action described in the above two paragraphs came from mechanics. It wasn't decided by the GM, nor the player, but was a result of us playing the rules of the game and getting story outputs. There were a grand total of three combat rolls in Joel's initial adventure. Not combat encounters, but combat rolls. Xellous probably rolled a dozen combat rolls in as many sessions Mechanics are attached to everything: Steel rolls for fear, surprise, and injury, a host of 400+ skills for every facet of the fantasy medieval life you can imagine, and a robust rolling system that tracks almost each roll you make. It is a lot, overwhelmingly so at times, but it all centers around the Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits of the character, labeled BITs. BITs are the central core of the character, and are as simple as they are deep.

Historical in-game footage of a GM forcing a
player to face the consequences of their Beliefs.

Beliefs are the top three proactive priorities of each character. They include statements like Fire is the king of all creation and I must get forged papers that prove I'm a citizen. I will do as Vincent Durant asks and get a woman, any woman will do, for his designs. For all of the talk about Burning Wheel's crunchiness this, the heart of the game, is the hardest part, by a good margin. The nuances of writing even a single Belief are countless, because you are rewarded for interacting with just one Belief in a number of ways. That's before you throw in the other two Beliefs, which can (and should!) be played off of each, creating moments of intense inner conflict for the character and a series of mechanical/narrative choices for the player. When confronted with one of these situations (and you will run into many) a player will hem and haw and try to find a way to navigate the puzzle the that they had volunteered for, humorously ruing their initial courage in creating a level of conflict this painful. But then it gets resolved, somehow, and the player is up to it all over again, looking for the next adrenaline kick of the GM asking the age old question that all Burning Wheel GMs love to ask: Are you sure you believe that?

Historical in-game footage of a player
having to face the consequences of
their Instincts.

Instincts are the opposite of Beliefs: reactive lessons learned from living. Does your character hate wearing shoes? That's an Instinct. Do they draw their sword at the first sign of "trouble"? That's an Instinct too! Do they take no shit from the man holding them down? Oh, that's definitely an Instinct. Now, you can also write Instincts to protect you from certain things you hate, but the game only rewards you when your Instincts cause trouble in the narrative. Not everyone really wants the trouble, but there are those players who intentionally design these specific little reactions to cause as much chaos as possible. I happen to love these players, because they are so cocky at the beginning, because they think there are no consequences. But that is the job of the GM, to push the consequences of those decisions as hard as he can upon the players. Unlike other games, where you're wondering how to make balanced encounters and trying to engage the mechanics of combat and whatnot, challenging the players to develop is the GM's primary job. There is literally no other consideration for a GM.

And finally there's Traits, which are the passive things about your character that matter. There are three different types of Traits: Character Traits (CTs), which are personality things about your character that you embody to the point of almost caricature, Dice Traits (DTs) which let you break the rules of the game in differing ways, and then Call-On Traits (C-Os), which either let you break a tie in your favor or reroll all your failures, all in relation to a single skill. There's not a lot of rewards for this particular part of the BITs, except for Character Traits, and only if you cause trouble or an unexpected twist with them.

So what are these rewards? They're called Artha, and come in three varieties: Fate, Persona, and Deeds. Fate is given out usually for following your BITs to their logical extreme and Persona for ignoring your BITs or playing them really well. Deeds are the most powerful artha in the game and by far the rarest, only given out for powerfully changing the setting in a way that goes beyond or horrifically contradicts your BITs. If you spend enough artha on a specific skill it becomes mechanically better than other skills, allowing you to greatly increase your effectiveness in that skill. It's a slow burn that rarely happens in any campaign, but when it does? It is remembered. It was deserved, richly.

*GULP*

These rewards make the uncompromising d6 pool system that the game runs on not only bearable but awesome. There's never really a moment where you're not getting something out of a roll. You log almost every single test you make, classifying it by its difficulty, which is determined by how many dice you rolled. It's a lot to handle and most people I know balk upon seeing it, with similar tones of voice as when meeting the Capra Demon for the first time. And it's not entirely unfair: it's a huge system, turning even the simplest of dice rolls into something that is agonized over as you wonder if you really afford to take one more helping die, as that changes the type of test you're logging and hurts your advancement. As laborious as it can seem at first, the rolling system of Burning Wheel allows for a level of control that is hard to explain until it is experienced. You are utterly free to address the problem however you like and can calibrate failures to still net you what's needed for your character advancement. It's hard to communicate how freeing it can be to have control. You are the master of your fate, one way or another, regardless of the outcome. And yes, that statement makes a whole lot of sense in the game. Play it to see what I mean.

There are a lot of supplemental systems that Burning Wheel has, three for extended conflict mechanics.This is probably where Burning Wheel gets the most undeserved ribbing. The three in the book are Duel of Wits (arguing), Fight! (melee combat) and Range and Cover (skirmishes and ranged combat). The core of these systems is an often-terrifying rock-paper-scissors-Spock... on steroids. These systems take the finickiness of the dice rolling system and amp them all the way to 11. I've never seen a lukewarm reaction to them; you either love them or hate them. If you love them it's because the tactics are just your kind, and if you hate them it's because you never would love something like it. I'm on session 14 of a campaign where these extended conflicts have never been used and the game goes just as well as it does for me when they are. I don't know if they'll come up at all in this game and I'm fine with it. They are truly optional, no matter what the naysayers are baying at this particular moment in their little hater hovels.

This game is not for everyone. Period. It is demanding, more than a bit finicky, and there are moments where you wonder if you're losing your mind. But there's these incredible moments of transcendence, where the rules drop away and you realize that the rules are, to quote the designer Luke Crane "a ramp", not a cage, and you are flying high in the sky and you're falling and you have no idea what will happen when you hit the ground but dear God, you are ready, cause you are the storm. And those moments are the ones I live for in my games.


If any of this makes sense, any of it, get the game. You will not regret it.

Bleak Spirit

In explaining the system Chris Longhurst, the creator of  Bleak Spirit, states: "Bleak Spirit is a tabletop roleplaying game inspired by the empty, haunted worlds of video games like Dark Souls, Hollow Knight, and Salt and Sanctuary." Now, I totally watch VaatiVidya, so for me this meant a whole heck of a lot... and literally every single person I tell that to as a selling point gives me the same blank, confused, look, including fans of Dark Souls and Bloodborne! Turns out that people, when they think of Dark Souls, do not think of the incredible lore and stories that are buried into the code of the game. Which is quite unfortunate. Of course I called my brother-in-law Kyle, who had introduced me to Dark Souls in the first place, and that's where I found out that by saying "stories like Dark Souls" means absolutely nothing.

So I described the basics of the game to him: there's one Player Character, the Wanderer, who walks into an area and attempts to take out the Big Bad of said area, all in one session. No dice are used, and there is no randomization beyond an *optional* set of cards. Nobody owns the Wanderer, and nobody stays as the GM. The three roles, Wanderer (the lone PC), the World (kinda like the GM of other games), and the Chorus (not available for two player games, helps the World), rotate each scene. The scene economy is relatively strict, allowing everyone to lean onto the structure and be as creative as they like.

But the key of the whole game is that you're not allowed to talk about what you think is happening and no explanations are allowed of any action. This absolute lack of information, which I'd normally abhor, makes the game incredibly tense. You are supposed to Leap to Conclusions, which is where you follow a series of prompts after every scene to write out what you think happened during that scene. These Leaps to Conclusions are meant to be wild, speculative, and utterly unsubstantiated. Well, unsubstantiated yet, at least. Because you then take what you think is going on and play it out against what everyone else thinks is going on.

And, since the roles switch every scene, that means that this almost baffling narrative unfolds, as the other players block your moves and you adapt your fiction, pushing your point with the narrative as it has played out.  This is where the *optional* cards fit in, because they break the rules in unexpected ways. For instance, in the game where Kyle and I played, he introduced a card that let him get two scenes in a row! I was completely floored, as he attempted to take even more control of the narrative and push his ideas as hard as he could. The joke was on him, though, because my plan was completely different than he'd thought it was, and so the extra push on his part was wasted. And this creates a unique tension, unlike any dice game I've ever played where, because everything is canon, you are not wondering if something is going to be successful, but what you're going to do about it.

I plan on making Bleak Spirit a part of my regular rotation, joining Burning Wheel, The Marvel Universe RPG, and Hearts of Wulin. It's fun to not have to GM, but to be involved in a struggle to make a story about one person trying to make a difference in a world that has forgotten itself. If you love having mystery and intrigue and shadow wars in your RPGs I really suggest backing Bleak Spirit. It's been a brilliant time for me. Even my brother-in-law, who normally doesn't like rules-lite games, found himself having a lot of fun.

Praise the sun indeed! And yes, that's the name of one of the cards. Dead serious. It's an awesome card too.

The Marvel Universe RPG Review

When I was younger my mom used to let me go into Borders to read whatever I liked while she went into Whole Foods, which was next door. I would browse the shelves of unlimited knowledge, usually stopping at the art books or the graphic novel section. And, of course, the RPG section was right next to it. While it would be a number of years before I started playing RPGs this section was always very interesting to me, particularly the non-DnD stuff. The game that caught my eye the most was The Marvel Universe RPG. In between reading graphic novels and checking out the weirder RPG titles I would stare at this game. It was the only diceless game in the whole shelf of a (relatively) diverse shelf of games, and that piqued my interest! What was this thing like? Why did they decide to go diceless? I had no answers.

Years went by, and I finally began to play DnD. Eventually I jumped ship to Burning Wheel and, to be honest, they ruined most dice RPGs for me. Burning Wheel's engine appears finicky but, once the learning curve has been mastered, it is a masterpiece. It is complete and utter control, at least as far as dice systems can go. I found myself "selling" my other dice games back to Half-Price books, mostly because I knew that I didn't actually want to play them. The bar had been set, for better or worse, at Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, and Torchbearer (Urban Shadows is still sitting here, needing playing!).  There was a bit of a heavy feeling in my stomach as I gave the extra games I had away, but I wanted others to be able to use what I wasn't.

Of COURSE this was sitting at Half Price Books.
Of course.
WASN'T I TRYING TO CUT BACK??

Yeah yeah yeah, I picked it up.Yes, I rolled my eyes at myself as I did so. It had been about eighteen years since I'd last seen this game, so why even bother now? I had Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, Urban Shadows, and Torchbearer, why did I need of any other games?

Yes, I backed it. So what? I like Chinese film!

I CAN QUIT WHENEVER I WANT!

ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME AND THIS ISN'T EVEN AN RPG!!!!

OK, that's just spite.

So, after the usual self-loathing I encounter was played out in a manner everyone else finds funny (comedy is tragedy remembered, after all!), I began to look through the book. The system is simple: if you have the stones (resources) to spend on the action, you can do it. There's a Difficulty and Resistance chart that you helps set up the minimum number of stones necessary to start the action and the number of stones necessary to complete it. A lot of the time those two numbers are the same, but not always. In the case of the Resistance being higher than the Difficulty the action could take multiple panels to complete. What's a Panel, you ask? A Panel is the standard increment of time in the game (30 seconds if it's a question of timing, although most of the time the actual timing of Panels is incredibly open), with a certain number of stones regenerated at the top of each Panel. An undefined number of Panels making a Page. An undefined number of Pages makes for a Mission, an undefined number of Missions makes for an Issue... not incredibly well defined, any of that, nor is there any actual mechanics attached to this names. They're just there. The rulebook is also filled with editing errors of a structural and rules nature, making some things unclear and necessitating some research to verify how often Stones recharge and the structure of sessions. My armchair designer senses began to tingle. Where was the tension in this game? Why was it so badly edited? How on earth was I going to GM it or play in it? I called my buddy Andy and we went over it, but the more we went over it the more confused we got. A playtest was in order.

As we began the playtest I found that the session organized itself into a natural comic book script format. I have reproduced what we wrote, in a semi-script form, which can be found here. And... we had a blast. None of our questions seemed relevant, not one! Andy was always scrambling to pay for the actions he wanted to do, and there always seemed to be a clear idea of when to end a page. We're both fairly analytical people when it comes to RPGs and we had no idea why what we did worked. Oh sure, we both thought the idea of constructing a comic book page could be taken a whole lot further than what the game did, and that recharging stones could be hooked into a splash and double splash page economy. But we had such a blast playing that we found ourselves hardly caring, at least at that point. I awarded him a Line of Experience, which is basically a blank check to the player, allowing them to write down an experience and attach it to an Action. Whenever you use that action you get to add a stone for all the Lines you have that apply to that situation. Ten such bonuses nets a permanent +1 to that action, those Lines are erased, and you start all over again. And that was great too! Andy wrote down "Dodged automatic gunfire". He chose how the character advanced. I'm a huge fan of the player getting to define the experience and what's important to them about it, and it did my heart good to see such a freeform reward mechanic.

I gotta say, The Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game was way ahead of its time, and it's a shame too. Had this game come out today it probably would have killed in the Indie RPG market. But it released in 2003, when DnD was really the only thing that dominated the market. I'm really glad that I found it, though. Some things really are worth the nostalgia you attached to them as a kid. Not a whole lot, but man, when it lives up to those shiny moments from childhood, when the world was still an awesome place and when you still had hope, it's worth holding onto that as tightly as possible.

I will, trust me on that.

I'm going back to that Half-Price Books and I'm getting the rest of this game's books, ASAP. I highly recommend everyone else do it too.

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #7

I am still bitter about One More Day. I doubt I will never not be. But there come times when Marvel lets Spider-Man be himself again. The quietly confident, quippy, adult that Peter had grown into sometimes gets to shine back through. And that's the guy I see in Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man again, and man! I missed this guy. 

It doesn't hurt that Tom Taylor is a fantastic writer, with an eye for characters and plot that's pretty hard to match up anywhere else. I mean, c'mon, don't tell me you don't get a chuckle out of the following:

"ARE you mugging him?"
"No! But... I  can see how it would look exactly like that."

"Are you robbing the place?"
"I'm not! But I can see why it would look exactly like that"

Little things like this in plots please me a whole heck of a lot. It means the writer is paying attention, and it's just plain old funny to boot.

The story itself is exactly what I want out of a Spider-Man comic. Don't give me soap operas about the super-villain of the week, focus on the characters we already have. And Taylor uses these elements to incredible effect. I love that May has reopened F.E.A.S.T., and, while I dearly wish if they were going to kill Aunt May they would just leave her dead already, Taylor makes the best of editorial's inability to conceive of anything where Aunt May is dead and gone. I love how the narrative takes full advantage of her health plight, injecting a fair bit of pathos into the story.

Taylor's narrative had been moving a little slowly in the first six issues, but this issue takes all the things that I had been loving about those issues and amps them up, creating an issue where Spider-Man is exactly where he needs to be: near the ground, with the rest of us. Spider-Man is, at his core, an Incarnational hero, a god amongst us. And it's great to see Taylor not only recognize this but take it in new directions.

The REAL Beyond the Wall Review

Welcome to the definition of a mixed bag. Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures is a unique game, with a great idea: make it  possible to make characters, draw up the scenario, and play an entire story, all within one session! It is a lofty goal. There's only one other game I know that tries to do a complete story in a single session, Tenra Bansho Zero, which I also own. But that game has gotten no actual playtime with me so far, unfortunately, because of the prep work involved in setting up a session; BtW has no such issue. But as you get past the brilliant character and session creation rules you'll find a mess of rules that just do not fit together. It's not enough to completely wreck the game, but it certainly doesn't help the game or elevate it into the smash hit it honestly should be.

BtW's character creation is unique. Most games will use either an archetype system or a class system of some sort. BtW uses both an archetype and a class system, to great effect. The archetype system is actually a background generator, building you up from childhood to present day, with quirks, traits, relationships, and then hooking that into a class. And this system works, really really well. It's simple, flavorful, and effective. It's actually so effective it makes me wonder why no one else has done something like this before! If anyone reading this blog has run into something quite like this let me know and I will gladly play the hell out of that game. Generating the session is equally as good. It's detailed and dependent on what the players generated in their character building. And this whole process can take as little as half an hour! Yes, you heard me right! Half an hour! It's amazing! And what's more the hooks generated are very good, more than enough to get the session started.

Unfortunately the actual rules for the session are not terribly good. There are three (yes, THREE) different systems of resolution in this game: roll under, roll above, roll and add modifiers. Every single newbie I've shown that to scratches their head. Fortunately the systems are simple enough for even noobs to adapt to, but they shouldn't have to: there are plenty of ways to take the simple roll under system that is the mainstay of the game and do it through the rest of the system. Whitehack presents these solutions, as do other games, and the fact that this game took the worst that the OSR has in it is head-scratching, particularly when you consider that the designers had another system in mind but chose the system they did for ease of use. It's not enough to destroy the session, but it is a drag on it. I'm going to houserule a lot of Whitehack into this game, if only because at that point it'll be the perfectly smooth system they were talking about to begin with.

I want to call BtW perfect, I really do. You can do all sorts of wonderful things with this system and the designers are clearly onto something. And you can tell that they have a really good idea. But all good ideas need some cleaning up, particularly unique ones. Burning Wheel needed it, 4th edition needed it, and this game needs it too. I would highly recommend Beyond the Wall, I would just highly advise to not be shocked if a second edition is made, and I would advise to be even less shocked when it's a clearly superior product to the first edition. These guys are onto something. I hope they chase it down, catch it, and make it perfect.

The Saint Ambrose Prayer Book

Before I begin to actually talk about this prayer book there's a few things you should know about me as a person, so that way my review has context. I am an incredibly practical person when it comes to the spiritual life. My first question is not "is this Orthodox?" but "Does it work?" Because if it brings up interior silence while professing the name of Jesus it is Orthodox. Full stop. However you think the spiritual life works is utterly irrelevant to me. If hesychia is created in your soul because of the synergy with God then it's Orthodox. So that's my metric for this prayerbook (and the Western Orthodox rite in general). Complicated speculation disguised as pious reflections are absolutely useless in spiritual combat and I've no time for it.  This doesn't negate the need for solid theology, doctrine, dogma, and a spiritual father, but ultimately the spiritual life is a practical matter, not a speculative one. If that's something you find offensive my apologies, but considering the amount of time and heart (not to mention wondrous silence) put into the Western rite I feel it's best to leave aside whatever gets away from my central question: does it work?

Until I read this prayerbook I'll confess that I did not really understand the Western rite, Orthodox or Catholic. Part of this is the incredibly bad catechesis of the Roman Catholic Church, particularly when I was a child. But that's just a contributing factor, to be honest, because I don't think I've ever been Western. The beauty and the overwhelming grandeur of God has always been what's reached out to me, so much so that it's impossible to understand how on earth anyone could do anything else. I know I'm hardly alone in that; I've never met an Easterner who didn't have a little bit of triumphalist in them. And why shouldn't we? What Easterners do works. And, after living in a world that many of us find almost completely meaningless without God, why shouldn't we have some feeling of triumph in ourselves? 

But I found something in this prayer book that was completely different. There's a tenderness, a specificity, to the prayers in this book that are not usually found in the East. The prayers feel smaller in the same way that a tender caress is smaller than a day in the life of a married couple. One could focus more on the day itself and say "the day went well, thank God!", but one could also say "that quick caress changed everything that day", and both would be equally valid.  It's just a question of approach. Which level do you primarily work on?

This difference in approach is shown in the physical product. It's small, easy to fit into your pocket. The leather-ish is very soft and is a pleasing black, with gilt edges. The paper's a nice white and there's the golden iHs on the front and back. Picking up this book is comfortable and comforting. When I first held the book I wondered why it was so small and I felt a bit gipped  by how small it was. But the more I hold it and look through it the more the production value stands out.

The prayers themselves are unabashedly Western: the specific requests that are relatively rare in the Eastern mindset are bread and butter here.

Most Holy and adorable Trinity, one God in three Persons, I believe that Thou art here present; I adore Thee with the deepest humility, and render to Thee, with my whole heart, the homage which is due to Thy sovereign majesty. -pg 28

 Like said previously, it's the specificity, the tenderness, the wish to not bruise a reed, that stands out. It's not a state of mind that I can do, although it is helpful in getting me to understand  my own self as an Eastern Christian. And, occasionally, I may find myself in this war we call life in a state where I am a lot more fragile than that reed. 

There's one thing that stands out: the Devotion to the Sacred Heart. For most Orthodox this is incredibly controversial, verging on (if not running with neon signs) heresy.The devotion has been edited to evoke more the Orthodox sense of what the heart of Jesus actually is. Uberdox will balk even at this, claiming that nothing Western can be salvaged. Going back to my first ideological point (If it works do it and hang what you think of it) I decided to add the short prayers in the book to my Rule of Pachomius. Nothing stood out as wrong to me and, if anything, deepened my appreciation of the mercy of our Lord, something I'm always in need of reminding. There's nothing in the devotion, as presented, that doesn't work. And that's as far as the criticism should go, as far as I'm concerned. 

There's a lot to this book, surprisingly so. Father John Winfrey has packed in lots and lots of content, including two liturgies, morning and evening prayers, Stations of the Cross, the Rosary, the list goes on and on.  I won't pretend to go through the whole thing. But the prayers are beautiful and (most important) useful. Argue all you like about the Western Orthodox, I really don't care. I'll be happily dipping into this book to supplement my prayer rule and showing my children that there is more than one way to evoke hesychia. There's no harm if they can't use the Jesus Prayer or Eastern prayers to help them evoke silence, because the Western rite exists. I'm very thankful for that.