The Burning Wheel: Monster Burner (The Burning Wheel, Book 3)

Not bad. Plenty of ideas from all over the spectrum making it sure to please everyone.

It fulfilled all of my wildest fantasies!! The book is a must have for crafting burning wheel campaigns. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in this game.

I got exactly what I was looking for in a very good amount of time. It was very much appreciated, especially during a busy holiday season.

Fantastic addition to an already fantastic game!

To quote directly the first paragraph of the book: "This isn't just a 'book with monsters in it.' I said to myself, if I was going to release a monster book, it must contain everything a player needs to build his own monsters. This book contains nothing less."Truer words were never spoken. The process presented is lengthy, detailed and chock full of advice. It talks about monster building from the perspective of concept and story role as well as mechanically. It offers insight into how the game's rules fit together to produce different kinds of results. It ultimately includes not just rules for statting out monsters, but rules for constructing traits, lifepaths, and whole character stocks for them. In the end, you'll potentially have produced something that's detailed and robust enough to use for player character creation. Luke Crane walks you through the process using that classic staple of fantasy, the dragon, as an example, citing the dragons of Ursula K. LeGuin and J. R. R. Tolkien as inspiration for his decisions.As if that weren't enough, there are four whole new pre-built character stocks included, complete with multiple lifepath settings. With no prep work, you can use this book to create PCs who are Roden (rat-people), Trolls, Great Spiders or Great Wolves. If you're sick of traditional Tolkienian fantasy races, here's your chance to play Mirkwood from the spiders' point of view, or orc raiders from the perspective of their warg mounts. Or leave Tolkien behind entirely and play something that's, say, Princess Mononoke-inspired.Finally, at the end, there are plenty of pre-burned monster examples, including a bunch of entries complete with illustrations and game hooks, and an assortment of bare stats for things like barnyard animals.There is one caveat to this book's overall usefulness, and that is that it never got updated to the new  Burning Wheel RPG Gold Edition  rules. Though the monster creation process is still useful, care must be taken to ensure that your decisions reflect the changes to the rules since this book was written. This is a crying shame, and it is my strong hope that Luke Crane will update these supplements someday. Until and unless that happens, the Monster Burner is still a useful book, but it will require work, care, and a solid understanding of the system to use it fully.