Late to the Party A Journal of Not New RPGs, Movies, Comics, TV and Other Nerdy Stuff

The Burning Season: Campaign Chronicle Introduction

Inspired by the Podgecast’s ‘Kingdom: the Next Generation’ I sold my group on running a Burning Wheel-fuelled Noble House game. I made it clear that all the PCs would be members of a Ducal family in a kingdom teetering on the verge of civil war.

Wheels of Fortune II by ~valkea on deviantART

The flavour for the original pitch went a bit like this:

A childless king sits on the throne

Sorcery is one the rise once more

Street prophets claim an era of change and strife is upon us

The Burning Season is about to begin.

Will your family be the next to rule the land?

For my part, I set up:

• A couple of basic conflicts (chiefly that the Queen and the King’s Half-Brother are jockeying for power in case the sickly and childless King passes away)
• A few big concepts (I turned A Song of Fire and Ice on its head, so setting is about experience an unusually hot couple of centuries)
• A basically blank map with the borders of a few duchies pictured

I got my players together, put the map in front of them and asked them which Duchy was theirs (they chose the North, even though only one of them had read A Game of Thrones).

Then I had the players rate their territory on the following scale (I have kept the description I later added):

Agriculture	Loyalty	Other Wealth	Hidden Potential	Population
2- Your peasants are generally fed, if not fed well.	4- Your people and vassals are loyal to your family. While there is some dissent and the occasional uprising or betrayal, nearly everyone in the north serves you gladly.	3- The iron and steel of the north is the finest in the kingdom. Your merchants do well if not fantastically.	5- As the Burning Age continues more and more of your land is becoming arable. And there is something and/or someone in your territory that can change the shape of the kingdoms.	1- Your territory was not heavily populated to begin with and it has been depopulated by the war. Your lands have still not recovered. There are vast stretches where one can ride for days without seeing a village.

After this, I had them follow a similar procedure to help define their Noble House:

Claim	Relation to Church	Relation to Arcane Societies	General Reputation and History	Martial Reputation
3- You have a direct claim to the throne by way of the old dynasty. Enough of a claim to be confident if the matter of a vacant throne was settled by law	1- Polite hostility. The church strongly disapproves of your tolerence of the old ways and would like to see you replaced.	2- Neutral. To the scholars of the Shackled Tower you are another great house to be aided and advised. To the Weaver’s Guild you are another customer to be assisted if the gold is right.	4- Your family is the stuff of myth. You can trace your line back to the Summer Kings and have a proud history that is sung of far and wide. Yours is the oldest house in the kingdom.	0- Disgraced. Your father and grandfather were routed. Your lands were decimated. No one has faith in your prowess.

From here, they settled on a name (House Valdemar), agreed on who would make the heir to the Duchy and picked the House’s colours and symbol (the Wolf)

On Wednesday, I will tell you about who the Valdemar’s are and then what kind of trouble they have already gotten themselves into!