The Burning Wheel – all-new through Mon 19 Jan 2026

Through Monday, January 19, 2026 we present the all-new Burning Wheel Bundle featuring .PDF ebooks of The Burning Wheel, Luke Crane’s landmark medieval-themed FRPG about vibrant, dynamic characters whose beliefs propel the story.

An early success among indie RPGs (original edition 2002, with revisions in 2005, 2011, and 2019), The Burning Wheel lets you (or, rather, compels you to) create unique, well-rounded characters with passionate motivations. In this way it resembles contemporary indie classics like Fate and Apocalypse World. Burning Wheel differs in also providing a comprehensive, challenging array of interlocking high-crunch rules subsystems in the manner of Ars Magica or even GURPS. In a year-long campaign you might read only a fraction of the 600-page rulebook, but the more rules you, the player, can master, the richer your game becomes. The Burning Wheel candidly demands close engagement with its rules. For players who commit, it delivers. Dave Thaumavore’s January 2019 YouTube review conveys the game’s core ideas and approach.

Though The Burning Wheel has no built-in setting – the players collaboratively create the world as needed – the game’s philosophy implies a certain type of place. Its mood and feel are reminiscent of the lands created by Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen R. Donaldson, and JRR Tolkien, and of history books by Barbara Tuchman and Desmond Seward. The game assumes a dirty, complicated world full of uncertainty, but not without hope or opportunity for change.

Starting with a simple D6 dice pool core mechanic, The Burning Wheel rules detail dramatic systems for task resolution, advancement, trials of belief, and tests of nerve, along with modular, drop-in subsystems for searing social conflict, dangerous sorcery, miraculous faith, and brutal, gut-wrenching combat. But more than the die rolls, your character’s beliefs and your own decisions drive the game’s systems. In martial conflicts and duels of wits alike, you face consequences from every choice, ramifications to every action. The choices you make close off some paths while opening others, directly affecting every outcome from glorious victory to ignominious defeat.

This philosophy also underpins the lifepath-based character creation (“burning”) system, the hub of The Burning Wheel. It’s not just a matter of pushing a point here or nudging a number there: From the start, taking any of the 100+ lifepaths, you make important decisions about your character’s past, ethics, and goals – decisions that shape the story as it emerges during play. Every character is broadly skilled (there are 200 skills!) and both mechanically and narratively complex.

The gameplay spokes of the Burning Wheel are transactions of intent and consequence. To undertake any action, you first express your intent (the result you desire); the game master either approves your intent or sets a task (skill roll) to accomplish it, and tells you the consequences of failure; and, only then, you decide whether to roll. All consequences are final. If your roll fails, you can’t reroll until the situation changes.

To influence rolls and to increase your abilities, you can spend three kinds of bonus points (artha) called Fate, Persona, and Deed. You generate artha in various ways by committing, through your actions, to your Beliefs – or letting your Instincts make trouble – or using your Traits to send the story in new directions. You start with a few Traits during character creation, and as play goes on, other players may vote to assign you unexpected new Traits. Conflict among the characters’ competing drives can generate artha; the artha economy is critical to the systems that drive the story (help spin the wheel, if you will). Everything in the game shows this tight coupling of imagination, numbers, and priorities.

The rim of the Wheel is a varied set of independent minigames: hundreds of pages of modular subsystems like Fight, Resources, Sorcery, Relationships, and Duel of Wits. The game’s layered approach means you can learn each system as need arises. You, the player, can get good at these games, and at tracking the interlocking economies of artha generation. Your own real-world skill can engineer spectacular success against the odds.

Jake Norwood (The Riddle of Steel) wrote in his 2011 foreword to Burning Wheel Gold Revised: “The Burning Wheel core mechanics, advancement, and artha rules demand more-than-usual attention from the player. Skill or stat advancement isn’t an afterthought, but rather a crucial part of the game. The decision to solve a problem with cold steel or silken words isn’t just one of better numerical values; it’s a question of who you, the player, want your character to become. Every action, pass or fail, is growth. Every decision affects how your character matures, shifts, changes. Even little decisions impact the character in permanent, subtle ways.

“The Wheel rim, those ‘crunchy bits’ that players like me thrive on, builds tension when the heat is on by putting more control in the player’s hands. Burning Wheel is a game, and like all good games, it requires skill to play. To really enjoy Burning Wheel requires some investment in Burning Wheel. You, the player, have to care. You have to believe.”

The uncompromising Wheel system spun out simpler versions in the 2013 Torchbearer (presented in our November 2014 Cornucopia 2) and Mouse Guard (2008).

If you’re familiar with The Burning Wheel, the very existence of .PDF versions may surprise you. For many years the publisher eschewed digital files in favor of beautifully produced hardcovers. But on the company forums in July 2022 Luke Crane announced the dire Fontocalypse 2023: “In 2023 Adobe shall deprecate all Postscript fonts. Postscript fonts simply will not load into InDesign. […] Our books will be forever trapped – uneditable – in the last version of the .PDFs we created in 2022 or earlier.” On 31 December Luke set up press-ready .PDFs, just before “all my InDesign docs turn to Times New Roman-shaped pumpkins,” and he hasn’t touched the books since – except to make the digital files available on DriveThruRPG, and now in this all-new Burning Wheel Bundle.

Pay just US$19.95 to get all three titles in our Burning Collection (retail value $55) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete 600-page Burning Wheel Gold Revised core rulebook (plus the free 75-page Hub and Spokes introductory rules, a good entry into the system), along with both rules expansions: The Burning Wheel Codex and The Burning Wheel Anthology.

Like an elf whose Grief has reached exponent 10, this Burning Wheel offer lays aside its worldly trappings and passes on into the West, never to be seen again until the end of days, Monday, January 19, 2026.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/BurningWheel

Some Burning advice

Burning Wheel makes unusual requests (not to say demands) of its players. Here’s some guidance to help you enjoy the game more:

• Aim for small play groups – a game master and 3-4 players.
• Every player should know the rules, at least the basic rules in the free Hub and Spokes introductory version.
• Play the game as written. Resist the urge to tinker or make house rules. It may take many play sessions to understand why all the rules work as they do.