I went into this project with skeptecism and doubt. I have very specific tastes in games and what little I knew had me suspecting that I had wasted my time worrying about whether or not to purchase any Burning Wheel games.
I was wrong, dear readers... but only half so. This game is not for everyone... in fact I submit to you that the average gaming group might not know exactly what to do with it. On the other hand there are a thousand glittering gems scattered throughout it, each worthy of praise. Presto, a conflict is born, lets change scenes.
My normal, and frankly less than stellar, review practice is to break the book down into chapters and cover what is in them. It is methodical and when done properly allows a certain judgement nil perspective. Burning Empires is frankly too damn big and too damn complex for me to do that without doing it a great disservice.
Physically the book is roughly 5x8, hardbound, and thick like a brick. Its heavy, full color, lots of art from the graphic comics that provided the setting. It is, despite the smaller format, huge. The binding is subpar. I've had my copy less than a week and I've treated it carefully and still the pages threaten to break free and run from it. They seem both sewn and glued in, and the glue is the problem, it's already lost its cohesion. That is the physical book, what about the contents?
Let me start with this: Many things about the setting are poorly, if at all, explained. Stentors, Coeptir and a dozen other terms in the lifepaths. Other things, mostly rules and gameplay are over explained. I suspect a good hundred or more pages could have been excised simply with a cleaner organization and less time spent going over the same ground. Of course, those hundred pages might have been spent actually detailing the little things that make a setting come alive. Who knows.
What I do know is that after an introduction explaining the basic premise of the setting (invasion of the pod people in a fallen galactic empire) the designer gets off to what I think is the greatest failing of the game: World Burning. It starts with an unusual proclamation: the GM is an adversarial player out to win, and goes downhill from there. The primary purpose of worldbuilding, you see, is to limit the player's feild to a single world, and the nature of the campaign to staving off an invasion of the pod people. The players can be either side, which is a nice concession.
Remove the idea of limiting the game to a single world, and the forced adversarial play and this setting would open wide. What good are starships if you are trapped on a single world? Mind you, this is a significant portion of the book, 10% of it actually.
There is hope here. Burning Empires begins with the premise that the characters are 'Important People' and seems to mean it. This is a very cool thing. Too many games seem to focus on starting small and working up to being powerful, Empires starts you powerful (if not actually excessively competent) and moves the play to DOING STUFF with that power. You'll need it.
There is a serious layout issue. A huge number of concepts are thrown at the reader with promises of future clarification. Luke goes on, and I feel like I can invoke his name freely, after all he starts off with himself as the example GM and later moves to using 'I' in his examples of play, about a great deal of stuff, much of which could be ignored until later, causing greater confusion to outsiders. He also stresses competetive play, backstabbing and all sorts of practices that most gamers avoid... all in the name of intensity. For an internet gamer, the Forge-Speak gets heavy, though I doubt less 'informed' gamers would notice. Spotlight time, gauranteed 'scenes' and 'conflicts' abound.
For all it's flaws, I wanted desperately to get into a game, however. Characters are cool, they are the shit if you will, and what you can attempt with them seems nigh infinite. If you will, Luke seems to have captured the heart of the game, and it even if the style of play leaves me cold... well...
For those unfamiliar with Burning Wheel, the game is a dice pool mechanic with a fixed target number using D6's. Count your successes, with variables in adding dice and in target numbers. Characters are generated via lifepath choices, with a fair degree of genericness and freedom. They are defined largely by their stats, skills and traits, though many traits have absolutely NO mechanical effect on play. Characters chose beliefs and instincts, which are actually sort of cool, self written statements about who you are and what you want to do. I find, personally, that 'color' traits are wasted ink and paper. If I want to declare my character is a 'rat bastard' why can't I just do it? Why waste time telling me I can? Bah.
In many ways, Burning Empires strips out a lot of stuff from the game. In a good way. Most things become 'color', diceless things there to add, well, color to the game. This isn't giving away the store, as if it ever becomes important you have to pay for it, and color has no real effect on the game play. A great deal of time is spent dwelling on ordinary uses of game time and game play. Two characters talking without dice is now an interstistal scene, while a showy interlude is a 'color scene'. Repeated several times throughout the book. However, the effect is what works... make the important stuff important and ignore the trivial. No one wants to get bogged down 'playing' while a character negotiates for the embrodiery on his saddle. Here it's color and hand waved, player describes it and the action moves on. If anything, I suspect it would make the games move a little TOO fast sometimes.
I rather enjoyed the duel of wits mechanics, and finally learned what scripted combats were. This is hardly new, the idea of writing down your 'attack' befor revealing to the other side what you are doing. Reasonably elegant execution, even with the somewhat needless concept of doing it 'three at a time'. This mechanic is used for all conflicts in the game, just about. From the campaign conflict of the Pod Person invasion, to duels of wit, to major firefights... all of it. To work as elegantly as it does, you only have seven choices to chose from, with a fair degree of overlap. Personally, I think the scripting adds only a little to the game, but stripping it out would be more effor than it's worth.
I have two major problems with this, however. The first is that the combats are strictly unit based. There is a supposedly stripped down one on one, but given the depth of the 'battle' combat presented first, the half page or so given over to one on one seems hollow. It is, in fact, hollow, to the point of being disempowering if you aren't commanding a unit. While this supports the conceit of the game, that Characters are Important People, it provides an artificial limitation, moreso when you hear that Burning Wheel, the father game of this, allows far more depth to one on one conflicts.
The second problem is more important in some ways. You see, the campaign, as outlined, is run as a massive conflict spanning several game sessions, as campaigns do, and uses these scripted combat rules to resolve themselves. However, the actions of the players in the game have NO EFFECT on the campaign rolls. None. Only the rolls for the campaign itself have any impact.
To clarify: One 'campaign scene' has the players assaulting a pod person genetics lab. The scene is run both as an assualt with the players vs the pod people AND as a 'Take Action' Manuever in the ongoing conflict. The players can be slaughtered to a man and win the Take Action, they can take the lab, reveal the 'worm' or Pod People threat and otherwise have a sterling night's gaming... and still fail their Take Action maneuver. The two don't affect each other at all. A major disconnect, if you ask me. It is not an accident, as we are told this is a possible outcome, then told to figure out 'in character' why... and make it awesome sounding. Hollow advice.
The Tech Burner is a 'new thing', and is in place to allow players to 'make' their gear, which is then purchaced via resource dice. Normally I dislike abstracted money, but here I'll make an exception. I like how it makes the game flow. Sci Fi games are rarely about the hardscrabble hunt for chests of treasure, and in a game where building a factory to manufacture weapons is a viable, even laudable activity between fights, counting cash seems a bit silly. That said, I don't like 'high tech' settings where the average technology seems to be 'modern era' with fancier guns and armor... or in this case mostly armor. Overall, however, the tech burner seems to do it's job just fine, though like so much else in the game, only in the limited lanes provided by the Designer.
The Alien Burner, on the other hand, seemed less useful. Unlike everything else, the Alien burner seems to be simply lists of abilities your aliens can have, with very little guidance on how to 'build' anything. This is a failing, as it is perfectly feasable for players to have access to alien burning if they play the Pod People.
Social Circles provide about as much cool factor as anything else in the book, which is to say a lot. Given the power level of the game, social circles give you access to thousands of NPC's, whole armies or churches, they provide reputation and a host of other useful things. This is high power political gaming done right... with or without the politics.
Over all I am as torn as I ever was. About half the game I love dearly and want to steal. Things like the Social Circles, the life paths, the often clever mechanics. Even the World Burner has some interesting bits.
The other half of the book is pure trash. I don't need, nor do I want, Luke Crane to tell me how to structure my campaign. Not as advice, and certainly not enforced by rules. I do not care for the limited scope of the scripted combat (as pure unit based, with a crappy throw away for one on one). The game is at it's best at the macro scale, handling the scope of the campaign, and at it's weakest when dealing with the micro scale issues of single players. Sadly, I don't think the game designer belongs at the game table, unless he's there in person.
So, in the final analysis, I want to rip out all the awesome and fill the resultant holes with even more awesome... but if I were to do that, I'd have to practically write my own game. Still, if you like preprinted campaigns and leader based characters, this just might be the best Sci Fi game on the market.