Scarred Lands! Burning Wheel! Numenera! It's a Big Name Kickstarter Bonanza!

It's a New Year Big Name Kickstarter Bonanza! For fans of the Scarred Lands, Numenera, or Burning Wheel, or an unholy mix of the three (The Scarred, Burning Lands of Numenera?), these three new Kickstarters are all set for some fairly epic success from the starting gate. All three are produced by veteran publishers already known for their high quality work, and based on existing well-loved settings and games. It looks like 2016 is starting off with a bang!

It's a New Year Big Name Kickstarter Bonanza! For fans of the Scarred Lands, Numenera, or Burning Wheel, or an unholy mix of the three (The Scarred, Burning Lands of Numenera?), these three new Kickstarters are all set for some fairly epic success from the starting gate. All three are produced by veteran publishers already known for their high quality work, and based on existing well-loved settings and games. It looks like 2016 is starting off with a bang!

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We open play with the Scarred Lands setting, being Kickstarted by White Wolf founder Stewart Wieck. For D&D 5th Edition and Pathfinder, this setting was originally created about 15 years ago for D&D 3E. It was one of the first, and most successful, 3rd Edition campaign settings. Now, Wieck and friends are Kickstarting a 320-page full-colour hardcover book. For $45 you get a hardcover, or for $18 you get the PDF. There's an interesting note on the page about a free adventure, Gauntlet of Spiragos, which you can download for Pathfinder now, or "a 5th Edition version is forthcoming — we’re just hoping for an official announcement regarding 5th Edition games before we apply the finishing touches".

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Next on the menu is a Numenera card game called The Ninth World. Numenera is, of course, the flagship RPG from Monte Cook Games, and this card game is being produced by Lone Shark Games and designed by Mike Selinker. You may have heard of him from previous games such as the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. This game is, in his own words, "one part deckbuilder, one part Eurogame, and one part RPG" and is a competitive card game for 2-5 players. A pledge of $50 gets you the game.


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And last in our little trilogy of epic Kickstarters is Luke Crane's Burning Wheel Codex. This is a supplement for Burning Wheel Gold, and includes life paths, magic, and rules commentary. "We shall create a tome of similar dimension and density to the urtext, Burning Wheel Gold. Its cover shall shimmer cerulean and gold. Its pages shall have the hue of gossamer and bone. Its ink shall be black. And it shall contain: the paths and ways of the Roden, Trolls and Great Wolves; an encyclopedia of traits and skills; an arcane library of magical ways; a libram of magic artifacts; and detailed commentary on nearly every aspect of the urtext itself." This one is steaming ahead already. For $25 you get a copy of the hardcover book.
 

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The Hitcher

Explorer
No love for Burning Wheel in the comments? Consider that rectified. A story engine like no other. I may be running D&D right now, but BW is the only game where I'll buy every release without a second thought.
 



Nightfall

Sage of the Scarred Lands
That would be a pretty straightforward adaptation. I look forward to reading about your campaign =)

Really? Cause I'm not sure that's 100% true. I mean is all magic the same in Burning Wheel? Do Gods and Titans exist? What about ratfolk or even Cthulhu? Psionics?
 

The Hitcher

Explorer
Really? Cause I'm not sure that's 100% true. I mean is all magic the same in Burning Wheel? Do Gods and Titans exist? What about ratfolk or even Cthulhu? Psionics?

Actually a lot of that stuff will be covered by the Codex (the book being Kickstarted), which is an update of a bunch of content from the Magic, Monster and Adventure Burners from the previous edition. Rat men are in there (as a playable race, even). There's a range of different magic systems suitable for different purposes - it would be pretty easy to adapt something for psionics, depending what that means in that world (5E hasn't even worked out what psionics means at this point, mind you - so it may or may not be present in this update of SL). What element of the Cthulu mythos is required? Madness is pretty easily handled through the Traits system (probably with the addition of an emotional attribute - there's a thread on the BW forums where some people hash out a very simple system). There's rules for building monsters - not that fighting in BW is a terribly good idea, most of the time. There are rules for worship of/communication with gods. Not sure exactly what you want when it comes to titans. Aren't they already dead, and just causing ambient effects in the environment?

Not knowing Scarred Lands intimately, it's hard for me to go much deeper than that - but BW is ultimately pretty flexible, especially when it comes to anything built on generic fantasy (and hey, I heard of one group modding it to run a Western). And the tone is already keyed to a darker, more brutal fantasy than standard D&D (something closer to Warhammer FRP, if you know that).

The main issue, I would say, is that BW actually works best with a setting that's only defined in broad brushstrokes. You want to leave certain truths to be defined (by GM and players) as the campaign progresses. What I would do, if I was running BW in Scarred Lands (or indeed any D&D-style setting), is figure out what core elements of that world you want to start with - the big picture stuff, with a few details of the local area - and then let it evolve organically from there (drawing on, rather than feeling constrained by the canon of the setting). In BW, the setting should serve the situation, which in turn should serve character development (which is why it makes for such rich stories).
 

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