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Burning Wheel Creators Launch 'Torchbearer' Kickstarter Drive

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The new indie pen and paper dungeon crawler, Torchbearer, from the creators of Burning Wheel is live on Kickstarter.

Luke Crane, the creator of the popular indie pen and paper roleplaying game Burning Wheel, and his longtime collaborator Thor Olavsrud, have launched their Kickstarter for Torchbearer.

I've written about the new dungeon crawler in the past---you can read about it in depth here and here---and I've been looking over a rough draft of the rules.

Between my conversations with Crane and Olavsrud, my perusal of the rule system, and my experience with both Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard, I can say with some certainty that this is going to be a really neat, really unique entry in the dungeon crawling genre.

I love the slimmed down rules of Mouse Guard but I've wanted to play a more traditional fantasy game using them, and it's actually not an easy system to hack given the importance of Nature in the game, and in particular the Nature of a mouse. As Crane notes in the Kickstarter video, Torchbearer started out as this sort of hack and cascaded into a five-year project.

In Torchbearer, players can play as any of six classes: Dwarven Adventurer, Elven Ranger, Halfling Burglar, or Human Cleric, Mage, or Warrior. (The linking of races to a specific class is very old-school. The original edition of Dungeons & Dragons considered non-human races to be classes in and of themselves.)

Each race has its own Nature which is determined in part by your race and in part by questions you answer during character creation.

Leveling up and class-based roleplaying is new to the Burning Wheel games, but it's integrated into the structure in a way that I think enhances earlier rule systems surprisingly well.

Torchbearer uses a d6 pool mechanic with 4-6 acting as successful rolls and 1-3 as failures. Players roll based on their skill level at any given task, though other players can chip in dice if they have related skills. The trick is to overcome whatever obstacle is placed in your way, from deadly monsters to all the dangers of the cavern itself.

Players also choose aspects like Belief, Instinct, and Traits to help flesh out their characters and how their characters interact with one another and the world around them.

A number of skills determine how your character can navigate dungeons, forage for essentials like food and water, and fight monsters. Traits and skills are determined by both your class and your background, such as home town and various answers you take as you determine Nature and Circles (a stat that determines how well-connected you are in the game world.)

Torchbearer takes great pains to make every decision count, both during character creation and during play.

What you carry in your pack and in your hand matters.

Keeping a torch in hand---or at least near enough to keep the dark at bay---is crucial.

Running out of resources can leave your characters Hungry, Angry, and Afraid---downright miserable, basically, with the diminished dice pool to prove it. Each Condition you suffer from makes you that much less likely to survive. Sometimes, the only option is to return to town or try to set up camp and recover from all your scrapes and bruises.

That's a pretty basic, broad sketch of the game. You can see an example of play over at the Kickstarter page to get a sense of how the game plays.

You can also check out the reward tiers, which start at $15 for a basic PDF copy of the book and go all the way up to $450 for custom, leatherbound copies which, I'm sorry to say, are all sold out.

As of this writing, the project has raised nearly $9,000 of a paltry $14,700 goal. I suspect stretch goals will be forthcoming. (And as I edit this post, the dollar amount crests $9,000 and continues to rise.)

For my part, I'd like to see either a full-color print or a boxed set similar to the excellent Mouse Guard boxed set, complete with Condition, Action, and Item cards, character sheets, and custom dice.

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