This image gives grognards Catholic-guilt erections.
This advertising campaign of the game was comically pretentious about how much it emulated the aesthetics of Oldschool Roleplay, but you can't fault them for lack of effort. Except for the glossy foil Torchbearer title, the book looks and feels exactly like the 1E D&D PHB. The artwork is heavily inked proto-Bronze Age of Comics lineart that wouldn't feel out of place in one of the older manuals. It even has that coarse newsprint paper for pages and that weird waxy cardboard that becomes smoother over time and has those little crosshatches if you look at it hard enough. That said, it's nowhere near as much of an eyesore as the actual 1E D&D PHB. The book makes generous-yet-appropriate use of subsection headings, fonts, and typefaces and the book is very easy to read. The only real failings of the book's presentation are the occasional use of Comic Sans to denote an in-play example and the fact that it costs as of March 2014 35 fucking USD. 35 USD for a newsprint book that's all in black-and-white and literally 200 pages in length counting character sheets and publishing information is fucking highway robbery, even for an upmarket game from a small-potatoes press.
The Credits page doesn't reveal anything particularly illuminating. There are a ton of artists who worked on this book, but they mostly did B&W drawings and a couple of them did exactly one picture. I find the thanks to Greg Stafford (RuneQuest, Pendragon, and King of Dragon Pass) and for serving as a source of inspiration a bit amusing, because this game takes away practically nothing from RuneQuest in crunch or fluff... except for a couple of mind-melting game design decisions that add nothing to the game but hatred, rage, suffering, and woe. We'll get to that bullshit later.
Thor Olavsrud provided the bulk of the writing for this game, so let's talk about him for a bit. Thor does not fit the typical profile of a writer for traditional games. He works (present tense) in the computer industry as an IT specialist and has done his own tech startups. He's a columnist for CIO, known as that magazine you see all the time in the lobbies of office spaces of computer technology-ish companies yet can't remember the name of. So while his background is unusual, he's pretty much exactly the kind of guy you'd want for your flash-in-the-pan hipster TTRPG.
Luke Crane is the other big name for this book. It's hard to tell which portions of the game are distinctly his, but if I was going to guess he was the marketing guy for Torchbearer and helped adapt the game engine. He pops up more often in podcasts and YouTube videos and in fact was in charge of the Kickstarter campaign. The Thank You paragraph (in which he didn't exactly think anyone aside from the editor for production) is much smaller than Thor's and his Google Plus page talks more about hawking Torchbearer goods than promoting the game mechanics. Not to say that he's some kind of company man panhandling 'ideas guy' like Mike Motherfucking Mearls, far from it; he did write the Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard (of this game is a clear derivative) after all and the latter has won several gaming awards and even an article in Wired Magazine. But from what I can tell, Torchbearer is Olavsrud's baby and Crane is the godfather.
Torchbearer can't really be discussed without discussing its position towards OSR. The game specifically marketed itself as 1E D&D, but for REAL MEN. This infuriated the OSR crowd to no end and if you go on certain forums that will not be linked here you can find evidence of their ire. As I've said, this marketing gambit is pretentious in a way that would cause WoD to blush a little bit, but if you've got the moxie to make your posturing stick then go for it. Just be aware that for every successful mic drop of Sega shaming Nintendon't, you have five ads of 3DO falling flat on its face. Or worse, you end up with the Gnome and the Tiefling debacle.
And that's why 3rd Edition fans are stupid doo-doo heads that should buy our games. Wait, where are you going?
All of these are pretty good signs. They clearly put in the effort presentation-wise and the pedigrees of the game designers are modest but promising.“Groups can go in without a guide,” he says of his trip to Clarksville, “but you’re required to wear a helmet with a chin-strap, kneepads, and each person must bring three light sources, the primary one helmet-mounted. It features a number of tight squeezes that you have to worm your way through head first, an underground stream and other hazards.”
Olavsrud says he was “consumed with the experience, but when I got home, it struck me that D&D, even with the AD&D Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide, doesn’t really reflect that experience.”
Introduction
You know what, the book can give a better (nominal) elevator pitch than I can.
This is a grim land. Summers are short. Winters are long. The towns are overcrowded. Food is expensive. Guilds control trade. Nobility control the taxes. Priests pray for our damned souls.
Out there, beyond those walls, are beasts, bogies, monsters. They inhabit the forests, live under the fields, dwell in the ruins of our burned-out fortresses. They kidnap the lone wanderer, harry our caravans, and when they are bold, they attack our towns.
This land is wild, untamable, and in it we struggle to survive. We who thought we could conquer it, subjugate it—we are guests here, our days numbered.
Our forebears succeeded in wedging a toehold—a small point of light in a vast, weird darkness. Their hubris led them to believe they had won, that victory was inevitable. But they were wrong. The forests fought back. The mountains rebelled. The seas heaved in protest. Things issued forth from crevices and caves; the foam and fire spat forth a writhing, crawling answer to our fathers’ “conquest.” We fought them. We banished them. We flung spell and prayer at them. But they came like a creeping tide, forcing us steadily back.
So now most of us crowd into our walled towns and make do with what’s been given to us. Some hardy folk brave the long nights and, far behind our defenses, work the soil at dawn. A few of us—those with nothing left—take up torch and sword and stride forth into the dark wilds.
For underneath the roots are the ruins of those who came before us. Layers of foolhardy civilizations crumbling atop one another like corpses. Each thought they could conquer this land. Each failed.
But in failure, they left us hope. They left us gold, artifacts, secrets, knowledge. Those brave or foolish enough to bring back these treasures are richly rewarded. Those successful enough can even can rise above their station.
Thus, we can become heroes.
...if we survive.
Torchbearer is a riff on the early model of fantasy roleplaying games. In it, you take on the role of a fortune-seeking adventurer. To earn that fortune, you must explore forlorn ruins, brave terrible monsters, and retrieve forgotten treasures.
However, this game is not about being a hero. It is not about fighting for what you believe. This game is about exploration and survival.
You may become a hero. You might have to fight for your ideals. But to do either of those things, you must prove yourself in the wilds.
Because there are no jobs, no inheritance, no other opportunities for deadbeat adventurers like you. This life is your only hope to survive in this world.
Torchbearer is a roleplaying game. And it’s part of the brand of games Burning Wheel HQ has been producing for over ten years. It’s about making difficult choices, and it involves exploring the world and your character through the game rules and systems.
This is a hard game. It’s not a simple game. There are many moving parts and it’s not possible to experience the whole game in one or even two sessions. If you prefer lighter games, there are many other excellent choices available for you designed by our friends. If you’re ready to sink your teeth into a good game that will reward you for mastering the system over 10 or 20 sessions, this is the game for you.
In the spectrum of BWHQ books, Torchbearer is advanced Mouse Guard. While it’s not as complex as Burning Wheel or Burning Empires, it’s certainly more involved than Mouse Guard or even FreeMarket.
This game has an RGB score of 191/255/73.
I have thoroughly whined about criticized these sorts of characters stinking up my speculative fiction game for well over a decade. But let it be known that while I hate what catering to this archetype has done to games like Shadowrun and 4E Dungeons and Dragons, I don't hate these characters or games that support these characters on principle. There's nothing inherently offensive about playing characters who would get their ass handed to them by a drunken washout from the City Guard; I just hate how they interact when mixed with more competent heroes. So Torchbearer is pretty much the kind of game you'd have to pitch at me if you want to get me interested in playing as a Peasant Hero.
The rest of the Introduction is pretty standard boilerplate you'd give to someone unfamiliar with TTRPGs -- though I have to question the wisdom of pitching a game that bills itself as difficult, requiring a dozen sessions to master (the game is thankfully exaggerating on this count), and a throwback to the Gygaxian era of roleplaying. However, then you get to this:
Description Forward!
As a player, you player describe your actions in response to the GM’s descriptions. Tell the GM what your character does, touches, manipulates, etc. Ask questions about the environment. But don’t tell the GM what skill or ability you use! Your description of your character’s actions should fit entirely within the context of what happens in the game world.
If you’re clever, you’ll frame those descriptions around your character’s strengths. Any other player who wishes to help should describe how their character supports the first character’s action.
Explain how you use your gear and surroundings to overcome the environment. Think creatively! Use the skills and abilities on your sheet as inspiration, but always talk in terms of action not using a skill.
“I scout ahead,” not “I want to use the scout skill..." (ED: this is written in that twee Comic Sans font)
The resolution mechanic is pretty simple. Aside from the eye-rolling insistence on calling failed dice 'scoundrels', it works like any other dice pool system. You roll a variable number of d6s for a TN4 against a fixed difficulty. Some game effects will add or subtract dice or outright successes (yes, they're called successes and not 'heroes'), some will let your dice explode, and dice rolls can have margins of success or failure. Difficulties are rated from 1 to 10. What the game doesn't tell you at this point is that you're outright expected to fail a large number of rolls and have to take some kind of compromise to make up for the success gap. It's a pretty integral part of the game and the Burning Wheel system in general; in fact it is really the system's selling point over other rules-light games like FATE Core. So it's puzzling why they don't at least mention it here.
Next Time: Sketching out the portrait of a Torchbearer character.