Through Monday, July 13 we present the Torchbearer Bundle featuring Torchbearer, the FRPG of desperate adventure from The Burning Wheel. You’re a born-to-lose vagabond, out of options. Cash slips from your hands as easily as the blood from your wounds. But there’s lost loot out there, in forlorn ruins full of terrible monsters. If you salvage it, it’s yours to sell or keep.
Funded in a smash April 2020 Kickstarter campaign, Torchbearer Second Edition adapts the core rules, character builds, and conflict system from the Mouse Guard roleplaying game to a grimmer, harsher world. Torchbearer expeditions tax your body, your mind, and your very nature. To survive, you must carefully manage food, water, and light resources. To excel, you must fight for what you believe in. To prosper, you must fill your bags with loot and treasure. These competing needs create a tension unique to Torchbearer. You balance these factors in every decision you make. The deeper you venture, the heavier and more costly each decision becomes. Still, this life is your only hope to prosper. If you’re lucky, smart, and stubborn, you might win out.
Torchbearer makes the logistical and physical challenges of dungeon-crawling interesting and fun. You must carefully husband resources like gear, tools, light sources, food, and water. The inventory system makes these easy to track, but the decisions around who should carry what, what you absolutely must bring with you, and what can be left behind are fraught. The bookkeeping is easy. The decisions are hard.
One of your most precious resources is time. As you delve into haunted ruins and other desolate places, you grow hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and so on. These are the elements of the character’s “damage” track. Neglect your characters’ needs for too long, and they eventually sicken and die. Planning and teamwork can help, but inevitably you’ll need to return to town to rest, recuperate, and restock essential supplies. Better hope you score some loot first.
In these trials and tribulations, you learn who your character really is. Your character has a belief, a goal, and an instinct, all challenged at every turn. Facing, overcoming, or turning away from these challenges earns rewards. Your traits help and hinder you. Your fellow players can assign your character new traits or upgrade existing ones based on how they perceive the character.
Like The Burning Wheel, Torchbearer is a technical game that rewards mastery. You don’t start this game as a hero, but with perseverance and dedication you may become one. Or you might choose to become a hardcase who’s only in it for the treasure. You’ll discover through play.
Pay just US$14.95 to get our entire Rulebook Collection (retail value $65) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete two-volume Torchbearer Core Set (consisting of the Dungeoneer’s Handbook and the Scholar’s Guide), the Lore Master’s Manual of optional rules, and the Scavenger’s Supplement with new character classes, traits, weapons, denizens, and summoning spells.
[Note: The Scavenger’s Supplement isn’t available on DriveThruRPG. Get it from your Wizard’s Cabinet download page on the Bundle site.]
And if you pay more than the threshold (average) price, which is set at $19.95 to start, you’ll level up and also get our entire Adventure Collection with three more titles worth an additional $35, including the six-scenario Cartographer’s Compendium, the full-length adventure Bridge of the Damned, and the mini-scenario Ghost Tower of the Illmyr Fens.
We presented Torchbearer First Edition (2013) in the November 2014 Cornucopia 2 and again in the January 2020 Classic Hits offer. This is the 2021 Second Edition.
This Torchbearer offer succumbs to Hunger, Anger, Fear, Exhaustion, Injury, and Sickness Monday, July 13.
