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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9047372" data-attributes="member: 42582">In a Burning Wheel campaign, one of the players built a sorcerer PC who had some key features that linked him into the broader setting/situation:*A Reputation as a minor illusionist; *An Affiliation with a sorcerous cabal; *A hostile Relationship with his older brother, who had been his teacher but is now possess by a balrog (a type of demon); *a Belief (=, in this context, a PC goal) that he will find a magic item to help end his brother's possession; *an Instinct (= a type of character-specific free action) to use Falconskin (a spell that turns him into a falcon) if he falls.Another PC, a magic-using assassin,  had a hostile Relationship with her former mentor - which suggested her former mentor was probably the brother (making connections) - but I'll just focus on the sorcerer PC in this post and gloss over the interactions with the other PCs.At this stage, the start of the game, it's unclear how and why his brother is possessed by a balrog. Just that he is. And we don't know anything about the cabal other than that it exists. I decide that we will start in Hardby - a town on the Greyhawk maps - and tell the players the key fact about it, that it is ruled by the magic-user Gynarch.I started the action in the bazaar: a peddler is selling all sorts of curios including a feather he claims to be an angel feather from the Bright Desert. This is my facilitation - the offering of an opportunity.The player purchased the feather - leaving himself in debt - and then declared that his PC used his Aura Reading to identify whether it really was an angel feather. I had to respond, and - as per the rules of the system - I called for a check. The player explained how he was using his Ancient History to enhance the check, and described his PC's knowledge of the ancient war between angels and demons (maybe it even caused the Bright Desert). Despite the Aura Reading check being buffed by Ancient History , it failed. So I had to respond again, and I told him that he could read the aura, and it was an angel feather that could help him resist a balrog's fire, but it was cursed!The PC then decided to reach out to his contacts in the cabal to find work, given the debt he'd incurred. In Burning Wheel this is called a Circles check (a little bit like Streetwise in some RPGs). The player described a local leader of the cabal, Jabal the Red. I described Jabal's tower, located on a high point in the town (I'd recently been reading the REH Conan story "Tower of the Elephant"). My idea was that, if the action ended up in the tower, the PC might have a fall (responding to the player, and facilitating again, by way of another opportunity).The Circles check failed, and so I decided that Jabal sent one is thugs (whom I named Athog) to tell the PC to leave the town, because of the curse. This was responding by way of opposition. And so on - by the end of the session, the PC had indeed snuck into Jabal's tower, and stolen a spellbook somehow connected to the peddler of the cursed angel feather. (A full session report is <a href="https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/burning-wheel-first-burning-wheel-session.736425/" target="_blank">here</a>.)Hopefully that gives a sense of things.</blockquote>

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