RPG Review: Burn Bryte

Over the last few days I’ve had the chance to explore Burn Bryte, the brand-new RPG from James Introcaso, designed with, and explicitly for, Roll20. Burn Bryte plunges you into a strange galaxy hurtling toward an inevitable apocalypse.

The galaxy is on fire. At the edges of the galaxy, The Burn closes in, a fiery orange aurora. Most believe it is consuming all life as it advances toward the center of the galaxy, an unstoppable natural force, while others such as The Daylight, a cult who worships it, believe it is part of a divine plan to punish the wicked. Nothing that has been consumed by The Burn has been seen or heard from again. Resources dwindle, and it appears that within the next millenia, the whole galaxy will be completely consumed.

The galaxy is rich and detailed, with a lot of information still kept vague for you to make the galaxy your own. The galaxy is full of magic, powered by plasma drilled from the earth. Plasma powers everything, from starships to communication, from weapons to medical equipment. Spellcasters channel their magic using plasma as a component as well.

The game has built-in safety tools, including a safety deck which has green, yellow and red light cards. I love that it’s built right into the game, and incredibly useful.

As I said, the game is built for Roll20, so you’ve got everything you need to play built into the site itself.

When making characters, there is no human option. All the aliens in the game are distinctly different, with widely different abilities, so their racial abilities reflect that. There’s been a lot of talk recently about removing the racial bonuses from D&D, but with Burn Bryte, it makes sense to have distinct species abilities. The Zivoy, a race of slug-like creatures, is amorphous and can squeeze into tight spaces, or can turn into an aquatic raft. The Ror-nan are telepathically linked tiny insects that form to create a hive being. Your character’s Culture is where your actual abilities will be affected. Each culture will tell you whether their borders are isolationist, selective or open, their diversity is inclusive, homogenous or partitioned, their economy is wealthy, poor or intermediate, and their density is urban, rural or suburban. Each of these will effect your stats, your special species abilities, and your money. Players and GMs are encouraged to invent their own cultures as well, using a combination of the aspects seen above.

The dice in the game are a polyhedral step-up system like Savage Worlds or Cortex. As you increase your abilities, your dice will go from a d4 up to a d12. The skills are designed to be open and vague. You can use your Melee skill to attack someone, but you could also use it to intimidate someone into doing what you want. The way dice work is pretty cool. Say you have a Medicine skill of d8. The GM calls for a check that would require it, and says it’s a complexity 3. You would roll 3d8. If you roll any doubles, the roll fails. So the more complex, the more dice you roll, the more likely you are to roll doubles. The larger the die, the more sides the die has, meaning the less likely you are to roll doubles. It’s a really cool mechanic, and one I haven’t seen before.

Spaceship combat works from a player-ship-focused angle, one I’ve seen in the original Star Wars D20. During combat, enemy ships are placed around the heroes’ ship like blips on a radar. When the players move the ship say, clockwise, all the other ships on the map rotate around the heroes’ ship. There are different zones for distance as well. If players are trying to escape and roll well, the enemy ships may move from the near to the far zone, falling into their rearview mirror. Ships are broken into sectors, so if you have a hull breach or invasion, you can seal off sections of the ship to protect yourself. The game doesn’t seem suited for squadron combat, as you’d be trying to mentally work out all the different facings and zones for each player’s individual ships. It’s better for all the players to be sharing a single large ship together.

The game provides for a lot of options to customize things to your own liking. The setting is vast yet vague enough for you to make the galaxy your own. What is the Burn? Can it be stopped? What other star systems are out there? It’s all for you to explore and determine on your own.

Their compendium is robust, allowing you quick access to any rule or information you need in the game.

I really like Burn Bryte. Hopefully I’ll get a game in soon, perhaps using their Burning Daylight adventure module. There are a ton of great components for the game including a character art pack, and multiple tile packs for you to build maps for the game. Being that Roll20 was initially designed for 4e D&D, it makes sense that the game has a heavy emphasis on maps to utilize what Roll20 is good at. Everything in the game really emphasizes the strengths of Roll20.

You can find Burn Bryte here, allowing you to dive directly into the game. I hope you do.

Roll20 sent Dice Monkey a copy of Burn Bryte for review.