Fireborn?

By MDMann, in Legacy Game Discussion

Just wondered what it was, if it was any good and how come it didn't last?

IIRC, Fireborn was an RPG about playing the reincarnations of dragons, trapped in a human body, in a near future (think three to five years) London where magic was returning to the world. Players essentially built hoards of treasure (mundane and magical), experienced their past lives (from a few years ago to the time of myth and legend when they were dragons), and dealt with the oncoming rise of evil magical badness. It was kind of like somebody took the Horrors and metaphysics of Shadowrun, and married it with the conspiracy and "you're a secret monster who can beat up puny mortals" themes of the World of Darkness.

Mechanically.... I seem to recall it had an interesting system for re-assigning attributes. Which I promptly ignored as it seemed to just encourage GMs to throw threats that had to challenge characters on all fronts at the same time (a bit overkill). I know it wanted to push for cinematic action, but it relied heavily on lists of pregenerated moves and combos to do so (and making the same sequence of moves and dice rolls gets old pretty quick). On the flip side, I did like that it had martial arts and combat moves for dragons, and character creation was pretty neat.

Why did it die? A few factors. First, it was in need of errata, and badly so. The game wasn't unplayable, but it was badly broken in a lot of places. That said, errata was released, which a lot of bigger companies never manage to accomplish. Second, it was a game that required two books; D&D and White Wolf get away with multi-book requirements for their games because they're D&D and White Wolf. Thirdly (and tied into the second) was a repeated sense of "this important setting concept won't be developed in these books. We'll get to it later in the production cycle". Again, D&D and White Wolf can get away with this because they manage to publish a ton of books that people; I think gamers looked and Fireborn, doubted it would last long enough to explain itself properly and didn't buy into it, thus making their suspicions a self-fulfilling prophecy. Finally, it wasn't really all that new of a game. It came out around the same time the original World of Darkness games were beginning to stagnate. The RPG market was flooded with little "you play a secret X who comes into power shortly after puberty and fights hidden monsters" types of games that never went anywhere, because they were all just trying to cash in on Vampire. Fireborn actually had some neat ideas and new elements to offer to the genre, but this perception (fair or not) added to its other problems are what did it in.

Plus, shortly after it got launched FFG decided to stop production of almost all their RPGs. Anima, Grimm, and Midnight were the only ones I can think of to continue receiving any support after Fireborn, and their support was fairly minimal.

I think that the single largest contributor to Fireborn's failure was that the game was released at the height of the d20 explosion. As dirge mentioned there was some need for errata and the rule books only hinted at what the game had to offer, but the game was a pretty innovative concept. SCION by White Wolf has a similar, though by no stretch identical, premise in that the characters are in a state of "becoming." One of the innovative concepts in Fireborn was the fact that PCs were simultaneously playing in 2 timelines.

In addition to the d20 comment above, and dirge's comments, another reason for the failure of the game was the B/W interior. I know that color interiors are expensive, but in the rpg industry (a fairly mature marketplace) one needs to really differentiate their products from the competition. One way to do that is through extraordinary production quality. The production quality of Fireborn was good, but it should have been "a force to reckon with."

It's a fantastic setting, I love a number of the mechanics ideas, and I ran some wonderful sessions of the game. But it did need some refining. However, considering the recent attention Fireborn has gotten for FFG's fiction line, I still hold on to hope that a new edition may be in the works.

The game was very interesting too bad the company that made it was interest in making more money then keeping the game alive, a thing, that after years I found is bad. If you keep the players happy they will make you money. fotball games

Very beautiful ,you do a great job, keep up the good work..

This game is really to good and i love to play the dragon games…

may be the people were not into it at all as sometimes such things happen also