The Player vs. Torchbearer: Second Edition

Torchbearer Second Edition has been out for a while now. Here are my thoughts.

Note 7/7/26: This article was originally published, somewhat angrily and without much thought, on my old blog in 2021. I never expected anyone to read it. It is of course my fate, then, that it has been the #1 search result for “Torchbearer Second Edition” on Google ever since I migrated to Substack. That was never really my intention, but all these years later, I stand by everything I wrote. I’ve revisited the article and made some improvements with the benefit of hindsight, though I’m afraid that my overall impressions of TB2E are even worse now than they were at the time. If you’re interested in the game anyway, you can buy it here from BWHQ.

Circa 2013, Torchbearer was kickstarted and released by Burning Wheel Headquarters, the indie game publishing house responsible for fantasy RPG The Burning Wheel. Torchbearer would be an old school D&D dungeon-delving pastiche built on some of the same principles as The Burning Wheel, using the heavily mechanistic Mouse Guard system as its engine.

Torchbearer’s first edition is my favorite roleplaying game of all time. Its intricately interwoven rules capture the aesthetic of classic D&D while staying engaging, complex, and roleplay-focused. The system is engineered to create unique and memorable characters who have long dramatic arcs. It is very focused; it is a game about dungeon delving and the psychology of the insane people who do it. It cares about nothing else. Why would it?

But it was never perfect. Long-term advancement, equipment, and especially magic were plagued with imbalances. Thus the announcement of Torchbearer Second Edition thrilled me and my gaming group. We could discard our house rules, at last, in favor of something official: with only small changes, we believed, Torchbearer could become perfect as no game ever had been before.

When the playtest was released, I immediately transitioned my Burning Wheel group over to the new rules. The question we sought to answer was this:

Has the change to TB2E created a more perfect Torchbearer?

The answer was not what we had hoped.

Even after all of these years, I should disclaim that I’ve only ever run TB2E. I’ve still never played it myself. Everything that follows is written from the gamemaster’s perspective. My group made it through about fifteen sessions initially, and I’ve since run another ten or so over the last five years as I struggled to give the rules another shot. I’ve played and run hundreds of sessions of TB1E since 2016.

Too Many Books in the Kitchen

There are many problems with TB2E. Some of them were obvious the instant the playtest PDFs arrived.

2E has way too many books.

TB1E is 200 pages long, in total. Half is purely GM material (you know which because it’s in the back). Torchbearer is an extraordinarily complex game, and it was always my opinion that 200 pages wasn't long enough. 400 would have been appropriate. The core rules were due for an expansion.

So they were expanded. 2E no longer limits its core rules to a single book: instead, it splits them into three. These are:

The Dungeoneer's Handbook, or the player's guide;

The Scholar's Guide, or the GM's codex;

and The Loremaster's Manual, or the graveyard for all 'optional' and extra rules (including most of Second Edition’s new content).

Between three books, the core of Torchbearer has grown from 200 pages to 848 pages.

There are 848 pages between "The Dungeoneer's Handbook," "The Scholar's Guide," and "The Loremaster's Manual."

This expansion is far too expansive. This expansion is less like a sequel and more like an entire library. Torchbearer is not 850-pages complicated. It isn't The Burning Wheel.

But the page count obscures the problem. One gigantic tome is annoying but can be overcome. What cannot ever be surmounted is the logistical nightmare of a tripartite ruleset. Torchbearer is a fiddly, complicated game, and any session will see regular rules checking, referencing, and lawyering by all parties. This is something my group always enjoyed. After years of regularly running 1E, I knew the book better than one of my own novels.

In 2E, I don’t even know which book to check for which rule.

Consider the Camp Phase. Is this considered a player rule, placing it in the “Dungeoneer’s Handbook,” or is it a GM rule, which would put it in “The Scholar’s Guide?” What about Market? Town Phase? Is Might for players to understand, or is that a GM consideration? How about session end rewards?

Often the answer is both. The books repeat themselves constantly, thus making the separation pointless. But they don’t always repeat. Thus when you sit down to play 2E and find yourself questioning a rule, you will spend an extra ten minutes floundering around with two books instead of only one.

This does not create a more perfect Torchbearer.

Have I belabored the point? Wait a little longer, because this isn’t the worst of it. Many “core” rules from the game’s first edition have been deranked to “extra” for no reason in 2E. That means that experienced players will spend hours fruitlessly searching “The Scholar’s Guide” with no luck, only to realize what they wanted was in “The Loremaster’s Manual” all this time.

Revisiting this review many years later, this is probably less of an issue than it once was. A generation of gamers will have been brought up on this system, and they will natively understand which rule is randomly sorted into which book. But having three books will still never be as easy or convenient as having all relevant information in a single, searchable PDF of a book.

There is no benefit to the three-book presentation. This is the first portent of many bad design decisions to come.

The Grind

1E has no interest whatsoever in anything outside of the dungeoneering cycle. Its specificity in this regard could occasionally be frustrating if the story called for an adventure in a city or a royal palace, where its central Grind mechanic stopped making sense, but the game mostly worked anyway. Every rule led the players back toward making money, to recover from wounds, to earn Fate and Persona, to level up, to go into the dungeon, to make money, to recover from their wounds.

Sometimes a group could move beyond this limited scope in-play. When that happened, I transferred my parties over to The Burning Wheel.

2E immediately appears to want to expand the scope of gameplay. It has received an enormous slew of rules for things like waging war, starting settlements, aligning yourself with factions in the world, and running businesses.

Waging wars and joining factions is the business of The Burning Wheel. But 2E wants to bring it into Torchbearer.

My group spent no time starting businesses or waging war using these rules. Why would they? These things are not what we find interesting about Torchbearer. At least they’re easy enough to ignore, but the expansion of the game’s scope is unavoidable in other areas: in addition to their Belief, Instinct, and Goal, each player character now has a "Creed:" a statement that aligns them with a force larger than themselves in the setting. This incentivizes being more than a dirty, selfish adventurer and encourages the player to behave more heroically, presumably.

This has absolutely no place in Torchbearer.

I tried to get my players to use Creeds (we started at level 5, which is when they unlock). We worked incredibly hard to think of statements that would make sense for the pre-established cast, in the pre-established setting, that everyone at our table would find interesting.

We couldn’t. For anyone. Not a single player at my table, all of whom were experienced BWHQ gamers, could invent a Creed. Torchbearer characters are selfish, dirty adventurers. They don't care about the world. The moment they do, they transcend the system itself and retire.

Creeds are anathematic to what I want from this game. A Torchbearer player character might act heroically. But he isn’t a hero. He is an adventurer, delving into dangerous places for the sake of power and profit. That is the engine of the game.

This is the pattern of every new rule. Each is rooted in a misunderstanding of what Torchbearer should be for. Nothing has been done to ameliorate the strangeness the rules have when adventuring in non-dungeon locations. Phases become a burden. The Grind ceases to make sense. Yet this is apparently the norm now. The city-bound adventure, previously rare and undertaken only when absolutely necessitated, is now expected. How couldn’t it be, when you’re founding a village?

If your table is utterly unable to play any RPG except for Torchbearer—an unlikely predicament—then these new rules may be welcome. They do give players stuff to do at level 10, when no sensible person would still be adventuring. But I will never use Torchbearer for campaigns that involve apiculture or electioneering. There are better systems for those things.

But can’t you just ignore Creeds, and Base Camps, and War?

Not really. The shift in systematic focus is present in the rules everywhere in microscopic ways. These cannot be easily excised. Consider that, at level nine, an Elf can now put a glamor over a settlement. This ability makes it impossible to find without magic.

Wow. How tremendously useful. I’m glad that this is my reward for surviving all the way to level 9!

I don’t know why I would ever want to use this ability. It would be humiliating to have to select it as a benefit. I made it to level 9 in 1E, and I would have preferred another cast of Eldritch Darts. In any event, if you are an Elf, you cannot avoid this without taking a hacksaw to the rules-as-written.

And if you have to hack the rules apart to get the game you want to play, why are you playing the game at all?

This was our experience with 2E. The rules are desperate for players to do more than go out and get loot. This is utterly baffling.

It is not the path to perfection.

Class Conflict

The original Torchbearer classes are an homage to Basic D&D. They are Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Cleric, Magician, and Warrior. The choice to revive the union of race and class was one of this system’s unique qualities, and though it consternated many a dwarf player, it was one of my favorite aspects of the game. In conjunction with the choice to include Law and Chaos alignment, it is what made Torchbearer feel like a pastiche. It’s a relatively small design decision that instantly creates a huge rift with modern D&D, and it tells the players what they’re getting into straight away.

2E changes the basic classes without allowing for build diversity. Each has received major overhauls, and alignment has been annihilated. The rules have moved toward a Burning Wheel or Tolkien-esque direction and away from old school D&D, while the game's primary designer has canonized some elements from his Norse-inspired campaign setting into the rules.

These changes are horrendous. They might just be what breaks the system.

Magicians and Clerics, renamed Theurges (whatever that means), have both been completely changed. The magic systems are totally reworked. Magic was one of the weakest elements of the original ruleset and desperate for improvements, especially the Cleric’s prayers.

No improvements are found in 2E.

The Theurge

Once a faithful recreation of traditional Clerics, the Theurge now must manage his Divine Burden to avoid Stigmata through careful use of his "Urðr." If you know what any of that means, you are a wiser man than me.

Including Norse characters in our game rules is a problem. For one, I don’t know how to pronounce “ð.” I’ve looked it up, and I still don’t know. I read that “Urðr” is pronounced “Urd.” But if I tell a new player interested in the Theurge class to open the rules to read about his “Urd,” he won’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, because “Urðr” doesn’t look like “Urd,” does it?

Apparently you can find it in the PDF by searching for “Urd.” I never knew that until writing this article. How could I have known to try?

This is such a bad start that I cannot even imagine what the designers were thinking. They could not have made a worse decision. Something like this would be silly in a game themed around Vikings. It has absolutely no place in Torchbearer.

But the new rules themselves manage to be even worse. They are tremendously overcomplicated, cumbersome, and challenging to manage. New players will flounder and be baffled as they try to grapple with their Divine Burden. It has been many years now since I played with a Theurge, but my impression at the time was that, maybe, with practice, these new rules were more interesting overall than 1E’s very bland (and almost never played) Cleric.

That is saying nothing. We needed something much simpler.

The Magician

My ninth level character in 1E was a Magician. I know every little flaw in the first edition’s magic system. It was clearly never designed to go above level 5, and the higher circle spells were patched in via supplementary PDF after the game’s release.

I don’t know how the magic system should have been improved. I found it cumbersome, tedious, and often frustrating, but it also led to moments of unlimited power that I recall very fondly a decade hence. Elements like a Magician’s library were confusing and needed better explanation in the core rules. Changes could have been light for large impact.

The total overhaul in Second Edition was not what we needed.

Magicians now receive far fewer spells per phase. They can earn passive benefits while leveling up, and they can specialize into certain types of magic. They also must test to de- and re-memorize spells.

These changes have made magic vastly more complicated. It now involves tests where before it only took bookkeeping. The new rules are unbelievably cumbersome, feel kludged at every corner, and could hardly be less inspiring.

In 1E, a high-level Magician received more spells than she could reasonably cast per phase. In 2E, spells are so limited that there is no fun in being a wizard at all. Even at level 9 a Magician can never have more than four First Circle spells memorized. If she wants one of them to be Fourth Circle, that takes up all four of her mental slots. I hope she manages to use it!

Such rules are unlikely to create any kind of power fantasy in play. They are practically engineered for anxiety and frustration. They would be more reasonable, though, if spell effects had been buffed across the board.

They weren’t. In fact nearly every spell was nerfed. Their effects are worse than before, and most now require a Turn to cast; this is a sickening element of kludged-together balance introduced where before none was required. In 1E, the universal rule that magic never took a turn was consistent and elegant. It made magic feel magical. Now you must flip through one of your three books in order to find out if your magic is magic or not.

Magicians in 1E were already hard mode. They couldn’t wear armor or use weapons and needed to do more prep than the other classes to be effective. They didn’t start with the Fighter skill, needed to carry around heavy spellbooks wherever they went, and were often utterly useless in the hands of new players.

All of these things have been amplified tenfold. In exchange for this extra punishment, you receive fewer spells, that are less fun to use, that are harder to use. Meanwhile, things like your home library weren’t given the new rules they needed—the one thing I had been waiting for from 2E.

I like that Magicians get perks now. That’s a good change. But the Memory Palace has gone so far overboard that there are now wizard robes floating beside the wreckage of the Titan submersible.

The Elf

The old Elf was a Warrior/Magician. It was laughably overpowered and by far the best class option available. It has been nerfed massively and moved toward a Tolkienian vision. This moves Torchbearer closer toward The Burning Wheel and farther from Basic D&D.

I don’t want to move away from Basic D&D. That’s what Torchbearer was good for!

As discussed above, the new high-level benefits are less Legolas and more Elrond. Elrond should never have been the progression model for this class. My players want to be Legolas.

The Others

The changes to Warriors, Halflings, and Dwarves are improvements overall. Out of the bonus classes in “The Loremaster’s Manual,” I only managed to playtest the new Thief.

She continues to be terrible. Her downfall in 1E was always her terrible utility, and now, rather than being made more useful in the dungeon, she has a series of benefits that apply only in Town.

You know. The place where torches don’t need bearing?

Moreover, she’s just boring. Allowing a Magician to substitute Arcanist for any other skill is fun. Giving Thieves +1D to setting traps or +1S to Feint actions is not fun. It’s utterly forgettable.

The new classes make Torchbearer Second Edition into a new game. Taken on their own, I believe they are badly designed, with or without consideration of 1E. But in any case, they are certainly not perfections of extant flaws.

More Pointless Changes

Good, core rules from 1E have been pointlessly changed everywhere. If you are a new player, this section might not concern you. But I will give my reasoning as to why these changes were wrong.

The Embodiment end-of-session reward has been removed.

Embodiment is the “good roleplaying” reward. Its awarding can feel arbitrary for that reason. It was the most important reward at my table, though, because it was given out for roleplaying Conditions in an engaging way. There is no other incentive in the game for doing so.

The “Gallows Humor” reward has replaced it. Gallows Humor gives one Fate for finding humor in bleak situations.

Are the rules of 2E suggesting that dark humor in the dungeon is more important than roleplaying your character's deteriorating mental state? That's the behavior we want to incentivize?

Maybe it is at the designer’s table. Maybe it is at yours, too. At mine, we added Embodiment back in after one session.

There have been enormous overhauls to the game's Check economy.

Traits in 2E can only be used to generate Checks once per session. As a GM, it is already tremendously difficult getting my players—even the very best ones—engaged with the check economy. Gamers dislike suffering dice penalties.

What gamers did not need, therefore, was even less incentive to use their Traits against themselves and generate Checks. This is a very bad change.

Marking advancement while helping another player is now done with the expenditure of Fate rather than a Check, presumably to compensate for the above limitation. This change might be even worse. One pip of advancement is never worth a Fate point. It might be worth it sometimes if it could be spent after the test, to see if it was Pass or Fail, but it can’t be used that way.

This means these rules have effectively been removed.

“The Loremaster’s Manual’s” extra rules are utterly pointless and introduce needless complexity.

One major flaw of First Edition was its total lack of any rules for travel. My table often chafed against this limitation. But we got over it, because the game didn’t care about traveling that happened outside of a dungeon. One test could cover it. Move on.

“The Loremaster’s Manual” has attempted to rectify this deficiency with comically overcomplicated rules. Where before we had none at all, travel’s rules now unravel over the course of 23 pages.

My players’ single experience using these rules was so bad that we vowed to never try them again. 23 pages of rules for getting from one place to another is excessive for any game. This new system is full of arcane tables and confusing interactions; we wanted to go 50 miles, and it ended up costing us every ration in our inventory. Just for going to one nearby place.

Travel is a microcosm for the failure of the new rules. It does not do what it needed to do. It is, literally, ten times too long.

The new town phase is wrong.

In Town Phase the price of Torches has been raised from an Ob 1 test to an Ob 2. They were already less competitive than Lanterns. Now they're worthless. A more reasonable change is that the 2d6 random events tables have been modified to use 3d6 instead, and each town now has its own table.

I was in favor of this initially. The 2d6 tables saw the same numbers being rolled constantly. But after 20 sessions, I hate the 3d6 tables. They veer way too much toward averages. We received the same Entering Town events endlessly, to the point where I had my players rerolling them. This is fine when 9-12 are generic results, but they aren't. We consequently found ourselves wondering why we kept finding sacks full of babies falling off of wagons every time we went to the Dwarven Halls.

The 3d6 tables are awful.

The aesthetic shift is a disaster.

The monsters in the book have also been altered to reflect the designer’s Norse-ish setting, Middarmark. This aesthetic has nothing to do with Torchbearer. In 1E, the monsters taken from Gygax and the Monster Manual made sense. This perfectly fit the kind of game I wanted to GM. What I didn’t want was Norse versions of werewolves or trolls. These don't fit in my setting, which was originally designed for TB1E!

Aligning the game with Middarmark also forces the rules onto a line that no longer makes sense for it. The union of race and class made sense for a Basic D&D pastiche. It makes no sense in medieval Norway. If this isn’t a Saturday morning cartoon version of 1980s pulp adventuring, why are Elf and Dwarf and Hobbit still their own classes? When the aesthetic of the rules takes itself more seriously, this restriction stops seeming like genre and begins to seem more like racial stereotyping. It frustrates players from other systems who want to do things like play Dwarf Theurges. Why can't they play Dwarf Theurges in 2E?

In 1E, it was because all Dwarves were Gimli. But that really is no longer the case.

What frustrates me most of all is that there easily could have been an advanced character creator in “The Loremaster’s Manual.” This was something we had all anticipated and looked forward to at the time. It wouldn’t have been hard to create rules that divorced race and class.

We didn’t get that. For whatever reason that artifact of Basic persists, when all of the rest of Torchbearer’s old-school focus has been peeled away.

The new equipment section is pointless.

The “extra” rules add in reams of new equipment for no reason. 1E's gear was beautiful in its simplicity: armor and weapons filled every obvious niche, and magic artifacts made up the space between them. We never needed to quibble about the difference between chainmail and scalemail. That is for D&D.

Take a look at the market in “The Loremaster’s Manual,” though, and find a gigantic expansion of the available weapons and armors. There are also new skills, such as Butcher, Fisher, Tanner, and Smith.

All of these weapons and armors and skills do basically the same things as extant equipment or skills. This game doesn't have FoRKs like The Burning Wheel does. Why do we need a Butcher skill when Cook already exists? And Armorer is the exact same thing as Smith! We did not need official rules for Longswords or Gambesons. You can use the power of imagination and narrate your Thief’s leather as actually being a Gambeson, or your Warrior’s ‘Sword’ as being a longsword. The designers have mistaken quantity of choice for depth.

There is no depth in the choice of whether to take Butcher or Cook, or a Sword or a Longsword. It’s just tedious. That’s why the old rules did away with such distinctions.

A few things were improved.

1E had a major problem with weapon balance. The adjusted rules for standard weapons are far superior. Bows are still good, but not as good. Spears are much better. Shields are far more competitive. Greatswords now have an interesting niche. Each weapon has its place.

The new Nature questions for character creation are much improved as they no longer punish players for choosing the “wrong” answer. The additional factors for recovery from Exhaustion have been made less absurdly punishing.

And while I dislike the 3d6 tables, they are an improvement for gear. I once slew a Bugbear in a forest in 1E and rolled a 12 and a 2 back-to-back on the Gear table, thus earning my character a suit of elven armor and a sword to match it in a single Conflict. This was a common occurrence that needed to be rectified.

These are the sorts of changes that create a more perfect Torchbearer. They are very few in number.

Take the Exhausted Condition

The changes to the Exhausted Condition are what made up my mind on 2E. A lot of small issues can be house ruled away, but some problems are too large and speak too pervasively toward flawed design intentions to overlook.

Exhausted in 1E was far too punishing. It was often the first Condition given by the GM, but it was also the most brutal. It couldn’t be removed easily without Alchemy cheese and affected every roll.

A rework was welcome. The rework it received ruins the entire game and destroys the rewards economy.

Rather than increase Obstacles, Exhausted now compounds with Hungry and Thirsty and adds a further -1 to Conflict disposition. This is a decent start. But in addition, it also disables the player's Instinct.

Every character has an Instinct that allows him to make rolls and bypass the Grind. He also gets a Fate point for “benefitting the party” with his Instinct, once per session.

A character who is Exhausted in 2E loses his Instinct. Acting on Instinct still costs a Turn in the dungeon or a Check in camp, just like normal. The fact that the Instinct section of the sheet is being triggered makes no difference whatsoever. It has no effect on the rules.

This significantly alters the game's rewards economy. It allows the GM to rob the player of his ability to earn XP, which is a huge problem. Earning XP in BWHQ games is meant to be about playing well by your own parameters. This is what makes them feel like games, while still focusing so strongly on narrative.

Thankfully the designers realized this. They saw that their change would break the game. Thus the rules specify that, if acting on Instinct while Exhausted, Fate is still earned.

Except the rules also specify that Fate is only earned when an Instinct benefits the party.

Logic would dictate that, if an Instinct does nothing because of Exhausted, then it cannot be providing any benefit. It does not matter if it would have helped. It didn’t. It categorically cannot meet the requirement needed to earn Fate. Something that is inert cannot “benefit” anyone.

But you get the Fate anyway.

This must seem small to you. It is small. But this passage about earning Fate with the Exhausted condition is such an enormous kludge. The designers decided to tinker with the delicate intricacy of TB1E, and they broke it. Rather than rework it entirely to make it tick again, they superglued a dial back in place and released it for sale. This is a fundamental flaw in the logic of the game: not in a minor area, but in the basics of progression and advancement!

I can’t take something like that. Why would you play a game with this kind of issue, when the one before it had no such problem?

In Conclusion

I wanted a more perfect Torchbearer. What I received was a worse Burning Wheel. TB2E is, in my estimation, inferior to its predecessor in nearly every way. Its few improvements to things like gear or level benefits are trivially backported, while its pervasive degradations of the original’s strengths are almost impossible to patch over. It contaminates 1E’s aesthetic strengths for no gain and dilutes the razor focus of its rules with pointless clutter. I see no reason to prefer it.

I’ve given this game enough chances over the last five years. If I ever play TB again, it will be with the first edition ruleset.

There is a fourth book that came with the Kickstarter package of Second Edition, called the Cartographer’s Compendium. Your mileage will obviously vary with boxed adventures; I ran these on days when I had nothing else prepared and found them to be very badly written. You cannot describe an interior room as having “north and south” sides, Thor. North and south do not exist inside of a dungeon. Aren’t you the guy who coined Describe To Live?