The Wheel is Burning
Staring into the crackling fire, the stars standing guard, a couple adventurers sit in silence after an exhilarating episode of drama, hardship, but with shiny treasure. They mourn over their lost friend, yet are filled with hope that they can leave the world a better place if they just keep fighting a little more. Beyond the fire, beyond the spreading forest and over the stretching mountains, new adventures await.
Salve, today I’m sharing something I’ve been working on for quite some time now. When we think of table-tops, we think of a bunch of people sitting around a table, rolling weird, many-sided dice, calculating maths to decide whether their fictive heroes succeed or fail in their quest for treasure, them giving their character of choice a personality and acting it out, and a lot of snacks and fizzy drinks.
There is, however, a somewhat hidden gem among these games, one I only got to know by accident: Burning Wheel. It is an RPG unlike any other, where instead of a Game Master coming up with an elaborate campaign and many side-quests, where adventurers created by players are then dropped in, Burning Wheel places the characters themselves in the centre, making it an actual role-playing game while simultaneously relieving the GM their burdens and turning the making of an adventure into a collaborative process. Each character having so-called beliefs, conflicts in the game revolve around challenging those beliefs, having the characters grow rather than their numbers—although those are important, too—with each gameplay mechanic carefully constructed to reflect this core of core ideas.
Moving on to my announcement:
That’s right, I’ve been at it to prepare this game entirely in Latin for your amusement. Today, I’m sharing with you the character sheet template which might not make too much sense yet, but don’t you worry. There is a lot going on in the background, and everything will surface eventually.
What you see is all the data about Rutilus, a human gambler, whose name originally, in the English version, was Robard, and who seeks out a magical sword in an underground temple because—such is life—he’s found himself in a lot of debt and some less than amenable people waiting for that debt to be paid.
The full version of the game can be bought on https://burningwheel.com/ in the format of a nice-looking hardcover book, but the basic ruleset, about the first 70 pages of the rulebook, is freely available, and is enough to play premade adventures with premade characters.
My plan is to make the contents of those first 70 pages, in one form or another, available in Latin, along with some custom designed adventures, to make Burning Wheel fully playable in Latin. I’m attaching both the character sheet of Rutilus and an empty one for you to check out. If you’re half as excited as I am about this, we’ve already flown over the Moon and the edge of our galaxy is the limit.
On another note…
General News – Inactivity, Latin Stories, Videos
You probably noticed my inactivity in the past few months. I could list all my excuses but none of them would truly excuse me for leading you on and then quite suddenly going silent. Those of you who subscribed to my mailing list might also have noticed a lack of new stories.
I’ll address this latter one first. To be frank, as much as I enjoy you hearing about all my crazy stories and, based on feedback, you most likely enjoy it too, I’m not enjoying writing them as much. I simply couldn’t keep up with a weekly rhythm. I’ll still keep the list open to subscriptions because I might have some ideas for it in the future. I also have one more story prepared, which I will send out in parts. We’ll see where it goes from there. Nevertheless, thank you for subscribing!
About the rest, while these won’t excuse me, you might still be interested in the reasons why I haven’t been producing content lately. There were two bigger events, the first one was me moving from Pécs back to my hometown for a while, simply for financial reasons: there is no point in paying for a more expensive flat in a foreign town during corona because I can’t make friends anyhow, and I work entirely online. The second event was me catching corona itself. That really did me in, and while it wasn’t as horrible as the horror stories we hear, it still knocked me out.
All in all, I’m slowly back on track with my general state of being, and while I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, I’m ready to tackle this and give you some more Latin entertainment.
Valetudinem tuam diligenter cura. Vale.