Minireview: Magic Burner

Well, the long-awaited (by some) Magic Burner is finally out. It’s a “magic system toolkit” for Burning Wheel, expanding on systems given in the core game book and adding a ton of new options. There’s also a system from creating your own magic systems, which was used in the creation of the systems presented in the book – a meta magic creator, if you will. The systems themselves are pretty cool, providing lots of different views of magic, how it is used and (this is important) what it costs you. The last part is ignored too often in many fantasy games, where you just have “magic points” and magic works just like a superpower. That can be fun, of course, but to me the most interesting magic/supernatural systems in games or fiction in general have always been ones where magic is subtle, mysterious and/or dangerous to use. This book provides lots of options for bringing all that to a Burning Wheel game.

I can’t say much more about this book than “looks cool”, since I have yet to actually run Burning Wheel and cannot really comment on how the systems might work in practice. It looks solid, but the real test is always in how it plays. I do know that I’d probably want to try some of these options out, were I to run BW at some point.

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