Burning Wheel: Succession of the Phoenix Crown, Session 0, part two (of three?)
For part one, go here
We returned to our second round of Session 0-ing our new BW campaign with character concepts and lifepaths in hand. This session was interesting. My GM showed up with stacks of worksheets he prepared for us that we used to define our noble house's allies, rivals, and subjects. This was juicy! We did so much worldbuilding just by sitting there and talking about who our friends and enemies could be.
The worksheets were one of the best parts, functioning almost like a minigame. I would have just continued filling those out until the cows came home. And, truthfully, we almost did, because we spent so long form filling that we now need a third session 0 just to finish our characters.
And who are they? We're all various flavors of nobles who went down different paths in life. Mine is the only one who went down a typical path. At my co-players urging, I gave my PC a ton of lifepaths that offered an immense, ridiculous amount of resource points. I bought a fortress, a wizard, finery, and all kinds of juicy relationships for myself. I have a secret lover. I throw parties! To my chagrin, a bigger meaner house is already trying to throw a better party than me.
The rest of our cast of characters includes a noble turned nun turned lawyer, probably in disgrace with the noble family, and a knight who grew tired of his life of violence and became a vintner instead. We're waiting on a third player who we hope becomes the family poisoner.
~
After the session, I was really excited about my GM's custom worksheets and had lots of questions about how he put them together. We had tiers of prompts that guided the Rival/Ally/Subject house situations along with answer forms for names/appearances/relationship flavors of individuals within said houses. Apparently, these were adapted over from Burning Empires and Blossoms are Falling, two supplemental texts for BW. For context, Burning Wheel Gold Revised RAW doesn't give you structures for building other communities and your relationships with them. The amount of information you can find on this is equal to a paragraph to a page or two. I appreciated my GMs creativity with hacking Burning Wheel materials back onto itself in order to make a Sci-Fi game's structure fit our campaign's genre and goals.
I had a lot more to say on this before I asked him where he got the idea for the worksheets. Now I am mostly just tired after playing two games, sleeping very little, and writing about them all over again. This post will not get as much from me as I wanted to give it. But the table was good. I've known most of my players and co players in these games for long enough that we all know each other's approaches and can push each other to try new things. I can learn more from them after paying attention to trends in their habits.
Something I had fun with was building my Excel sheet for my BW lifepath math. I could probably find something formatted, but it's weirdly soothing to fill it in myself. Just need to get back to figuring out my stats after a very long nap...