My buddy Jahmal Brown is running his first ever Kickstarter as part of their Zine Quest promotion, an adventure/campaign/culture booklet for Burning Wheel (and Dungeon World, via stretch goal by Johnstone Metzger) called By Aecer’s Light! It’s a setting, a cultural writeup, and a campaign frame all in one. The cool angle to the whole thing, and I cannot emphasize this enough, is that it’s about marginalized fantasy races. Yes: Roden (rat people), Wolfen (you can guess), Rakshashi. No: mainstream elves, humans, dwarves, fuck those guys. He says “outsider,” not “marginalized,” but BAL! is right there in the same lane as the X-Men.
I’ve watched Mad Jay run this countless times in his role as Burning Wheel ambassador (an informal role taken on by him and him alone, he’s a superfan like me) at conventions all over the country. It’s a better self-contained romp through Burning Wheel and its various systems than any of the adventures you get in the Codex.
I’m sure plenty of folks are wondering why any self-respecting indie gamer should still bother with Burning Wheel, yeah? It’s pretty long in the tooth. For my money, though, BW is still best-in-class for a particular kind of adventure fiction, and it’s still a powerful model for play shaped by incentives. It’s the most important indie game I’ve ever played (by a pretty big margin), and I played a lot of them.
Anyway! Do yourself a favor and back this cool ass zine. You can even plug it into your Dungeon World game if you’re not persuaded to take on the big spicy meatball that is Burning Wheel.
