Burning Empires review

I picked up Burning Empires for two reasons: one, I dig apocalyptic techno-fantasy and two, the strength of hype surrounding Burning Wheel, the fantasy game from which Burning Empires has sprouted. This is one of the first indie press games I’ve studied in any depth, although I’m passably familiar with the theoretical underpinnings that have led to many indie press games. I have not read Iron Empires, the graphic novel series on which Burning Empires is based. A mention by Iron Empires creator Chris Moeller in BE’s foreward about the original black-book Traveller being an inspiration for Iron Empires clinched the deal for me.

Production Values

Burning Empires is a hardback novel-sized, 656 page full color book. The vast majority of the artwork is either extracted from Iron Empires or is quick (and to my mind, adequately evocative) sketch work by Moeller. There are a couple items by Swedish artist Peter Bergting, who cut his teeth on apocalyptic techno-fantasy developing much of the visual assets of Target Games’ Mutant Chronicles license. I see a lot of Mutant Chronicles, Warhammer 40,000, Fading Suns and Traveller in the visual texture of the game. You can taste the same ingredients in the game’s thematic and setting elements as well.

Text is set in a single column on each page, surrounded by a very generous artistic margin on every page. Many sections start with a full-page color plate from Iron Empires. Some folks may feel this is wasteful, particularly since this is one of the few RPG books I’ve ever picked up and said, “Yeah, this feels/looks/reads like a $45 book.” To my mind, it makes the 600-plus page book a quicker read.

There are color tabs on the right hand side of the spread that indicate the chapter you’re in, but they’re only visible if you riffle through from front to back. Finding particular sections in this thick book can sometimes take a little work. The binding and paper quality is excellent, and the book should hold up well under actual use.

The Setting

Burning Empires is set in an unspecified far future, with human civilization spread across eight vast empires on the verge of collapse in the face of an alien invasion. The aliens in this case are small, semi-sentient worms that require sentient hosts. Humans make good hosts, so the aliens want to eat our brains. Once they’ve taken over – hulled – a human, the new dual-species critter is known as a Vaylen. Pedantically speaking, any sentient/worm team is a Vaylen.

In the grand scheme, the entire Burning Empires storyline is drawn against this Human v. Vaylen death struggle. I’ve never read the graphic novels but the art and backstory hints are intriguing.

Unfortunately, hints are all you really get. The actual setting materials are broken up in a couple ways. The eight human empires, as well as Vaylen society and a couple of Vaylen slave races (genderless lizardfolk and weird, pseudodemonic-looking thugs) get a gloss of history and some general characterizations – enough to know that Empire A is religious and paranoid while Empire B is high-tech and liberal, for example. There are some appendices containing writeups of the setting’s baseline technologies. A large portion of crunchy setting detail appears only in lengthy descriptions of certain Skills and Traits your character acquires during “character burning.”

I’m still deciding whether I like this approach or not. My instinct as a GM and reader is to want to know it all, to have a complete understanding of what my setting is about before I try running a game inside it. On the other hand, the story elements that appear only within someone’s Traits perhaps should be treated as irrelevant. If the game’s superstructure is trying to get all participants to agree to certain common story elements (more on that in a bit), then perhaps you should only know about story elements that are discussed within various characters’ chosen Traits and Skills.

Given I know nothing about Iron Empires, I did feel the game materials gave just enough detail to be evocative but not so much detail that I felt hemmed in. On that note, I suppose trickling out details on a need-to-know-only basis is a good editorial choice.

Fundamentals

Here’s my take on how Burning Empires is supposed to work, without participating in the very active Burning Wheel player community and based solely on several read-throughs and some personal playtesting.

You start by setting the narrative rules for the game’s setting, the single world currently being invaded by those sneaky Vaylen. This process is called World Burning. In fact creating anything in the game – worlds, characters, aliens, technology – is always called “Burning.” Editorial aside: I think this is weird, but a friend I was describing this game to thought “Burning” was cooler than “Creation.”

World Burning involves the GM and players in agreeing to the ground rules of the setting in a non-mathy way. The first world I created (using the worksheet PDF available online) was a semi-abandoned mining colony, uninhabitable except for interlinked sealed structures. The original corporation still has a small office here, but religious zealots have filled the power vacuum. There are only executives and employees (‘slaves’), with a rampant criminal underworld. Everyone’s paranoid, and the technology of the planet is fairly primitive. The process also gave me a chance to sketch out the most important figures of note on the world. All in all I felt like this was a very evocative way to start the game.

Once you’ve got your world sketched out, everyone moves on to Character Burning. Basically the players build out the figures of note established during World Burning, plus any other characters they think would be interesting to play. There’s a lot of advice in this section on establishing the character’s beliefs and conflicts and passions, all of which play into the game’s reward economics later. Burning a character follows a similar pattern to World Burning: You pick “life paths,” which give you access to Skills and Traits while giving you Skill and Trait points to customize the character later. You pick a handful of Life Paths (the more you pick, the fewer bonus points you get later), go shopping through the Skill and Trait lists to use up the rest of your points, and you’re done.

I found Character Burning good for laying down a cohesive backstory for my test characters but frustrating to my traditional “I have a vision for this character, why can’t I just buy the skills/traits I want?” head. For example, I wanted to build a rabble-rousing slave leader that would lift the world’s population to freedom based solely on the strength of his ideas, but to get there I had to give him several crime-flavored life paths (and even a stint as a student of the church!) before he had the right skills. Not what I had intended, but it produced an interesting leader with a checkered past.

Once you’ve set the ground rules of the setting and the characters, play begins without much prep at all. This will make world-building GMs bonkers, because the game is intended to grow organically from semi-competitive interplay between both sides of the fight (by default, the players handle the human side and the GM handles the Vaylen side). Mostly the GM is there to prompt the first conflict, and from that point on play balls-out against the player’s side.

The only reason I say semi-competitive rather than truly competitive (like, say, Robin Laws’ Rune) is because the over-arching theme of the game’s mechanics is negotiation. Everything gets negotiated. Two sides are in a heated gun battle? Simply killing the other side isn’t good enough – you have to set the stakes of the conflict. Trying to convince a character on the other side that they’re wrong about something? Not good enough! The other side gets a stake in the conflict as well, something they can also win. There are precious few ways either side simply gets what they want via the conflict mechanics; unless you’ve escaped the conflict unscathed, each side wins something every time the dice get rolled.

Roleplaying from 10,000 Feet

Okay, so you’ve got your world and you’ve got your characters. But you don’t quite get to start playing yet. Next up is working out a highly formalized series of “maneuvers” that represent what’s going on in the setting’s big picture. One of the outcomes of the World Building system is to develop a pool of points that represent the relative health (or disposition) of the Human and Vaylen side of the conflict at three phases of the fight: the Incursion (sneaking onto the planet), Usurpation (an attempt to peacefully hull/convert the planet’s leadership) and finally the Invasion (the part where there’s guns and explosions).

The group decides if you’re going to play just one segment of the fight, or go through all three. Within each stage, there will be one or two maneuvers, comprised of several scenes. The point of all this is to hammer at the other side’s disposition. The first side to lose all their points “loses” that stage. I put “loses” in quotes because all the winner’s side really wins is control over the epilogue over that part of the story. In a way, there are really two GMs at work: The person(s) playing the Vaylen and the person(s) playing the Humans. Editorial aside: Mad props to Luke Crane for building the game in such a way that either side is equally playable.

The entirety of the stages, the maneuvers and the scenes are known collectively as the Infection rules.

The Infection rules are fundamentally a structure by which the players and GM are all bidding on control of various story aspects. There’s no direct relationship between what’s going on in the Big Picture and what happens in individual scenes (other than strongly encouraging the focal character on each side to choose a relevant skill to resolve the maneuver). I think the game would be very easy to modify to take into account individual scene successes playing into the big Maneuver roll, but that’s not the designer’s intent.

The closest system I can think of to Infection is the Mandate of Heaven rules in Exalted, which is also fundamentally a campaign-generating system. The biggest difference, for those familiar with MoH, is that MoH places a high priority on gaining in-setting tactical advantage while it feels like Infection is more about creating narrative hooks on which to hang more traditional RPG-type scenes. There is extensive discussion of how to resolve the concept of winning a scene but losing the Maneuver.

Roleplaying on the Ground

During each Maneuver, every player has a budget of several different kinds of scenes: Color scenes, which are really just there to fill in story and setting details; Interstitial scenes, during which two characters interact; Building scenes, where each side tries to improve its position for a future fight, largely through abstracted actions: building a shipyard, exploring new resources to mine, hiring offworld mercenaries; and Conflict scenes, where each side uses physical or social combat to force concessions from the other side.

So you’ve got these scenes sketched out and agreed to by the player’s “side” of the equation. Every phase requires a Figure of Note – one of the folks your side picked out as important during the World Burning phase – be the spotlight character. Within a phase, each maneuver will be comprised of a strict budget of scenes for each player. This ensures every player has some input into how the maneuver plays out.

Every kind of conflict – Infection maneuvers, Duels of Wit, and Firefights – requires each side determine its disposition, a pool of points representing their investment in the conflict. The point of every conflict is to drive the other side’s disposition to zero while keeping yours from dropping. Every conflict starts with a stated intent behind the conflict. Both sides negotiate their stakes: what they’re looking for by victory and what they’re willing to concede in defeat. This requires the players accept a certain level of abstraction to what’s going on, and in each kind of conflict there’s a set of options that represent abstracted strategies.

Actual conflict resolution seems easy enough. Once you’ve figured out what the obstacle number is (i.e. difficulty) and how many dice you’re going to roll, you roll a pool of d6es and add up the 4-6 results as successes and the 1-3 results as failures (or “worms”). Your side got enough successes to beat the obstacle? Done! Move on. The fussiness of the system is in establishing the final roll and what stakes are at play, and usually negotiating partial victories in the event both sides lost a lot of their disposition.

Some neat bits worth mentioning: the Firefight rules start out looking surprisingly precise for a narrative-oriented game, but it turns out all the mapping and “my guy moves here” stuff gets turned into mini-stakes available for capture or loss. Both sides agree to how the battle area looks – any battle area, since the abstract fighting rules apply to any and all scales of warfare – and take turns declaring battlefield elements important. You do the same thing with physical cover. Notice the theme of negotiation again. Once the field’s in place, each side secretly scripts out their next three actions. It looks chaotic and very non-tactical, insofar as precise character position and individual shots aren’t relevant to the actual conflict resolution. Personally I’m looking forward to trying this one out.

You got your Sanskrit in my Sci-Fi!

The character reward system in Burning Empires probably deserves its own mini-review but here’s how it basically works. Characters earn three flavors of Artha, a Sanskrit word Crane chose to represent power and success. To my ear, this phrase bumps up hard against my sci-fi expectations. I suppose it makes a certain amount of brand identity sense for hooking Burning Empires into the Burning Wheel family.

Anyway, three flavors of Artha. Fate artha is generated by playing to your character’s beliefs, ignoring instincts (a clever mini-mechanic by which the character defaults to certain behaviors in absence of player input: i.e. I always carry a gun, I always let someone know where I’m going, etc.), invoking traits in a way that harms your character, or having the right skill required to keep the game moving forward. The GM can also earn Fate by giving good story. Persona artha is generated for capturing the “mood” of the story, playing against a belief, fulfilling personal goals, and again for having the right skill at the right time. The table can also vote for MVP during a maneuver, and reward a Persona point. The third is Deeds points, earned by the characters on the winning side of a phase.

Now that you’re earning three flavors of what one might traditionally call “hero points,” you need to keep track of the different ways each can be spent. Fate points can turn a die roll open-ended (i.e. if a 6 came up, spend a Fate and roll another die). Persona points can be spent in various save-your-ass ways. Deeds points are for doubling your die pool, or allow a reroll of all your failed dice (but hands the GM a big f-you in a future scene).

The whole thing seems fairly fussy to my mind, but the economics of it all provide several useful pushes and pulls. You get rewarded for both pursuing and ignoring your beliefs, you can enjoy the save-your-ass benefit of useful instincts or you can screw yourself and earn points, and there are several ways to earn discretionary points by being entertaining. This last bit is troublesome to me, given the semi-competitive nature of the game: If the GM is playing balls-out, what’s his motivation for indulging the player’s side by handing out atta-boys?

Final Impressions

In Burning Empires, it appears what one might consider traditional roleplaying immersion gets traded in for shared, semi-competitive narrative. Rather than getting deeply invested in your character’s goals and in making him more badass, Burning Empires holds the players and their characters at arms’ length. Instead, the emphasis is placed on building the shared narrative. The Infection rules feel to me like they should be more tightly connected to what actually happens in individual scenes, but that’s not how BE rolls. Actual play will probably clarify this point.

The author’s tone is strong throughout the book. You feel like Luke Crane is talking with you about game theory and designer intent throughout. This may be off-putting if you’re looking for simple rules explanations: Every rule, it seems, is accompanied by Crane’s explanation of its intended use. There are also extensive, well considered essays at the end of the book discussing methods of sharing authority at the table. Editorial aside: I wonder if designer intent should be considered “rules” the same way we look at die-rolling mechanics. Should players be able to call BS on each other for breaking the intent of the game?

Strip the game of the author’s philosophies, and its mechanics sometimes stop making sense. In other words, it seems Burning Empires will work best when you play it in the manner in which it’s intended and may work very poorly if you undermine the game’s intent. This is not a knock on the game at all! More games should perhaps clue the reader in on what the designer is trying to accomplish. But it does mean the players all have to be on the same philosophical page. One player who decides he’s going to create disruptive conflicts and waste his scene budget will make the game un-fun for everyone.

Because Burning Empires is attempting so many new things at once, this game feels like it has a very steep learning curve. The Infection rules only click when you know how World Burning and Character Burning works. Character Burning only clicks – or perhaps can only be fully optimized – if you know how the Infection and scene-level conflict rules work. The character-reward system feels fussy, but only because they don’t make sense until you know how Firefight and Duel of Wits work, yet your character building decisions will have a powerful impact on how your character is rewarded. Basically you’ll probably need to read the rules twice and playtest through a couple of maneuvers before all the pieces click together.

Given the World Burning process and the Infection mechanics, this sci-fi game appears to have very, very little relevant space travel. Bouncing between several planets within a system might be useful for color but there’s no real tactical or strategic value to it. Bouncing between multiple worlds in the throes of Infection seems possible with some minor tweaks to the system.

Since Burning Empires is built on a semi-competitive narrative control model, there are some kinds of traditional RPG storylines I’m having trouble envisioning. Mysteries and investigation at the player level seem impossible; the GM and players all have complete knowledge of each others’ characters. You can play out an investigation or a “big reveal” at the character level, but this is anti-immersive: the players have to pretend their characters don’t know certain things. This can produce an interesting shared story but the players won’t ever experience an ah-ha moment.

All that said, Burning Empires appears to be a very impressive work. The game seems designed to simultaneously undermine RPG expectations while break new ground in game play. While the players are perhaps less invested in their personal characters than they would be in a traditional GM-player paradigm, they are greatly more invested in competing for the authority to tell the story their way. The setting is evocative and generic enough to emulate many genres (as long as there’s always an aliens-among-us backstory, since the Infection mechanics require this). The production values are top-notch. It might also be a panacea for time-crunched GMs, since by design you simply cannot spend that much prep time on the game once it’s rolling.