Burning Wheel is past its twentieth birthday. The game, a famously complex child of the Forge, is one that everyone seems to either love or hate. I personally love it, but in this week’s System Split I’m extending a fig leaf to those on the other side (or at least those who tried to love it and bounced off).

Burning Wheel is a game predicated on its detail; thanks to its long lists of traits, skills, and lifepaths each one of its mechanics operates in a way that is predicated on its setting, itself a nerd-among-nerd’s joy of medieval history (via Desmond Seward and Barbara Tuchman) and Tolkien (via, well, Tolkien). You can’t really take much out of Burning Wheel and have it remain Burning Wheel…when the designers tried to take things out of Burning Wheel, they ended up with Torchbearer.

That all said, just because Burning Wheel is all layered into itself like an indie RPG biscuit doesn’t mean that there aren’t buttery nuggets we can take out. Those systems, like the mechanics around Beliefs, can certainly stand alone even if we usually see them in the context of something more. With that in mind, I turn to the subjects of today’s pondering. Hot Circle, a clear riff on Burning Wheel, is written by Casper Dudarec and aims to take the core mechanics of Burning Wheel down to a simple and portable core. But wait! The Gold Hack, more of a riff on the recent editions of Burning Wheel (i.e. Burning Wheel Gold), is written by Martin Van Houtte and…aims to take the core mechanics of Burning Wheel down to a simple and portable core. Huh.

While these games have differences they both come from similar viewpoints regarding Burning Wheel. To that end, while I might have my preferences it’s completely fair to say that both of these hacks are solid efforts towards their implied goals and worthy of your attention. What they bring to my attention, though, is the inherent contradiction of making a simplified Burning Wheel hack. Both Hot Circle and The Gold Hack pull out the Burning Wheel core gameplay loops for all to see, and make very light and portable games out of them. At the same time, both of them will never be, and hopefully did not aim to be, Burning Wheel.

Hot Circle and The Gold Hack

Hot Circle and The Gold Hack are, on a base level, very similar. Each one identified core elements of Burning Wheel that needed to make it into a lightweight distillation: Testing, character creation through lifepaths, and the Artha Wheel. How each game integrated these concepts is a little different, though. Hot Circle eschews a set skill or lifepath list, instead empowering players to develop their own lifepaths based on the setting developed by the group. There is some rough guidance as to the significance of each lifepath, though, defining them as born, youth, apprenticeship, and so on up to the sixth lifepath, elder. Each lifepath has a dice rating, and the lifepaths, rather than skills, are advanced throughout the game. Skills still exist, but as ‘assets’ which provide bonuses to rolls where they’re applicable. Wises and relationships are also included in this bucket of ‘assets’, which are acquired in an interesting way. Assets each have temporary versions, which can be brought into the game with a roll. The temporary version of a skill is a focus, which can be created with a Deeds Test (as a note, this name may be flavor-appropriate for a Burning Wheel hack but reusing the name of a mechanic you don’t include in your game is almost always a bad idea). A Deeds Test is a flashback mechanic, essentially, and if successful it creates a focus which can be used in that scene. This focus can be upgraded to a skill by spending Fate Points, which reveals one of the most significant departures that Hot Circle takes from Burning Wheel. Fate and Persona are used to advance assets and lifepaths, respectively, which is a pretty severe departure from how the Artha Wheel works in Burning Wheel. The result of the Fate and Persona rules in Hot Circle is a tension between using Artha for temporary gains and saving them for permanent ones, and this is a dynamic that was specifically avoided in Burning Wheel by ensuring that all artha-driven advancement was done based on counts of Artha spent, rather than requiring the player spend Artha from their pools. Besides this currency dynamic the advancement was likely inspired by Torchbearer, where Artha spends help your character gain in level. Hot Circle takes a few other cues from Torchbearer, including simplifying Artha down to Fate and Persona as well as the introduction of Conditions.

The Gold Hack takes a different approach to character creation; Lifepaths are not completely freeform but with only twelve of them the intent is still much more broad than the original. One interesting thing here is that instead of attributes (or assigning values to Lifepaths like Hot Circle), The Gold Hack introduces a single attribute called Potential. Potential starts high in child characters and declines as characters age. It’s an interesting balance, as older characters have more skills which directly translates to more capability, but Potential is used for Beginner’s Luck tests, so younger characters are simply better at learning new skills. For advancing existing skills, though, The Gold Hack maintains a test-based advancement system. Another thing Potential defines is the maximum number of Artha (here just called Rewards) that a character can keep, and that seems a little backward to me. That said, as there are no higher-level Artha rewards here like grey-shading (there aren’t in Hot Circle either), it isn’t as big a deal as it seems at first. Older characters also have more Traits, which is another point of balance against the Artha restrictions.

It’s worth highlighting, in addition to where each game is different, where each game is the same. The testing rules and the rules for Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits made it into both distillations at a very similar level of detail, and I think that’s a good thing. Here I will give more kudos to Hot Circle for providing some concrete guidance around Beliefs and Instincts (and Traits, though that’s to mitigate the lack of a Trait list). This guidance is perhaps more strict than the rules in Burning Wheel (and indeed an experienced Burning Wheel player will want to break the rules set forth), but it’s also more clear than even what’s in Burning Wheel itself. Especially for the purposes of a lightweight distillation, an easier but more restrictive version of the mechanic is going to work better than a more idealized version of the mechanic that’s harder to understand. 

These similarities help cement the fact that both distillations have similar ideas about the core concepts of Burning Wheel which they wanted to capture. I tend to agree with both of the designers here, and think that both of these hacks are impressive, given that they aim to capture 600+ page Burning Wheel in less than 20 pages. With that length difference, though, it’s obvious that there are omissions from the original game. It’s important to discuss, then, what these hacks do in the context of what the original game does.

The Hacks and the Original

As mentioned above, the key components these two hacks sought to maintain from Burning Wheel were testing, character creation, and Artha. By the same token, the key components they aimed to abandon were the lists and the conflict systems. The conflict systems are, honestly, a fairly easy omission to understand; the core of Burning Wheel works perfectly well without them, and they’re really intended to amp up the detail and investment in conflicts that demand those things. If you’re aiming for a lighter version of the game, it’s easy (and not entirely wrong) to see them as redundant. The lists could certainly be seen the same way; defining hundreds of traits, skills and lifepaths is not purely necessary to run the game, to make use of the mechanics. This, though, is where it becomes clear that the mission of the hacks diverges from the mission of Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel is a game that gets caught up in details. Few games would really have an excuse to have completely separate skills for ‘Drinking’ and ‘Drunking’ (Dwarven drinking), but Burning Wheel has that attention to detail everywhere. Burning Wheel is a game for getting swept up in your character and their story the same way a worldbuilder is swept up in their creation when they decide to write a new calendar and calculate neap tides for a planet with three moons.

In my mind, the hacks have a very different mission statement. By writing 15-page versions of the Burning Wheel mechanics, both Hot Circle and The Gold Hack are casting aside any attempt to emulate Burning Wheel. Their thesis is a lot simpler: Within Burning Wheel is great game design. The testing mechanics and the Artha wheel represent things that deserve to be pulled out and emulated in other places. Hot Circle and The Gold Hack aim to show what their designers see as the core of Burning Wheel…not inside of Burning Wheel. The core of Beliefs, for one example, is a lot easier to understand when not embedded inside everything else Burning Wheel does.

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As could probably be inferred from the several articles I’ve already written about Burning Wheel, I really like the game. I know it’s crunchy and even a bit florid, but it ticks all sorts of boxes for me. That said, I do understand the mission of Hot Circle and The Gold Hack. Both establishing characters through what they believe in and driving characters by what they do are potent game design concepts, and at a conceptual level they’re quite inaccessible within Burning Wheel. Both Hot Circle and The Gold Hack lay that basic gameplay loop bare in a way that is incredibly helpful for someone either intimidated or just turned off by Burning Wheel to grok. I think these hacks have a clear market among gamers looking for fewer, clearer, more direct rules, who may understand the appeal of ‘fight for what you believe in’ but not of a 600 page doorstop. They also lay bare some of the more potent mechanics of Burning Wheel in an easy way to further hack and incorporate. As I say in many of my reviews, though, I am not the target audience. These hacks are ultimately not for Burning Wheel fans, who love the detail and degree of involvement as much as the core mechanics themselves. That of course means that these hacks are in a tough position, where most who know they exist aren’t necessarily all that interested. Therefore, I ask of my readers who want to like Burning Wheel, who raise their eyebrow at Burning Wheel but aren’t convinced, or who tried to read Burning Wheel and found it too much (it is, let’s be real, quite a lot): Check out these hacks. I think Hot Circle is my favorite but they are both quite good. Here you have the core of Burning Wheel laid out in less than 20 pages, for as much or as little money as you want. Even if you’re not an ‘into the weeds’ person like me or many other Burning Wheel fans, you will be able to see the potency and potential of that core gameplay loop. As always, the wheel must turn, and the wheel must burn.

Hot Circle is available at DriveThruRPG, and The Gold Hack is available at itch.io. Burning Wheel, for the first time ever, is available *in PDF* from BWHQ and DriveThruRPG.

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