What Burning Wheel book should I buy?

[Jasper the jester]

Hi guys,

I searched briefly for any posts/threads surrounding recommended books and couldn't find any.

I want to get to know the basics of BW and I'm mostly interested in classic or gritty fantasy.

Which book should I buy?

[savagehominid]

The Core Books should do you fine.

If you have a bit of extra cash, I'd also pick up the Adventure Burner. It is chock full of rules commentary, sample characters, advice, and general awesomeness!

[Rafe]

Yeah, BW Revised is all you really need. The Adventure Burner is a great how-to with tons of information in it to help you and your players along.


If you want to get into/under the engine of the game and want the Lifepaths for Wolves, Spiders, Trolls and Roden, as well as a large bestiary, grab the Monster Burner. If you freakin' love magic and want a bunch of sweet magic options/alternatives and a few new LPs and magic items, grab the Magic Burner.

[Daniel H.]

I want to get to know the basics of BW and I'm mostly interested in classic or gritty fantasy.
I don't think any of the Burning Wheel supplements—with the possible exception of Burning Sands: Jihad—pull BW out of the realm of classic or gritty fantasy. The Monster and Magic Burners don’t change the scope of the game, but for starters you’re best off with the core set and the Adventure Burner.

[cathexis]

All you need for the classic gritty dark fantasy BW feed are the core books (obviously).

In order of further purchasing (most to least suggested):
The Adventure Burner is the expanded players and GM manual. It has a lot of advice for running games, for handling situations, and for understanding what the Burning Wheel is all about. Great book, not required.
The Monster Burner is the toolkit book for making new critters, new traits, and pretty much everything else not related to magic. It also has a lot of pre-created monsters as well as doubles the number of racial stocks, so if you want to experiment with the weirder possibilities (or create your own) this is the book.
The Magic Burner expands the magic rules and adds a half dozen or so additional magic disciplines to the game. It also serves as the toolkit book for making new magic spells, schools, and has expanded lifepaths for magic folk. If you're playing a magic heavy game, this book really helps.

The last two are switchable in order, but I've found that the Monster Burner is a better book to have if magic isn't a big deal. Eventually you should pick up all three support books since they are pretty cheap and really add to the game, but the Adventure Burner is probably the best to get since it's basically the philosophy behind Burning Wheel.

Cheers!

[Jasper the jester]

Wow! Thats perfect, thank you so much!

[Alex_P]

Magic Burner is also good if you want to play a sorcerer but find the core Sorcery rules a bit too crunchy or confusing. There are two alternate sorcery systems that are generally lighter on the mechanics (at the expense of being a bit more freeform-handwavy around the edges) -- along with a bunch of other magical abilities and rules for creating spells to use with traditional Sorcery. Art Magic Sorcery is like, my favorite thing ever.

But, in general, I'll echo what everyone else has said: Adventure Burner is the best supplement to get first, since it shows you to to make much, much better use of all the stuff in the BW core.