"Burning Empires is an American science fiction role-playing game, designed by Luke Crane and published by Key 20 Publishing in 2006. The epic game is based on Christopher Moeller's two critically acclaimed Iron Empires graphic novels, Faith Conquers and Sheva's War. The core book is a digest sized, 656 pages, hardcover book in full colour, including almost 400 pieces of artwork.
Burning Empires builds on the highly successful Burning Wheel game mechanics, while adding in new rules such as:
World Burner
Technology Burner
Infection mechanics
Firefight
Psychology
Alien Life-Form Burner
The game builds on some of the sci-fi elements and scene structure from an earlier Burning Wheel supplement, Burning Sands: Jihad. The game fiction assumes a race of sentient wormlike creatures called Vaylen which infect humans and take over their brains. This infection happens on a massive scale, eventually taking over whole planets in the process.
The phases of a Burning Empires campaign are: infiltration, usurpation and invasion. And these correspond to the stage of the Vaylen infection on the planet. Typically, the GM will take on the role of the Vaylen invaders, while the players will take the role of mostly humans who are trying to actively stop this invasion."
Source: Wikipedia, "Burning Empires (role-playing game)," available under the CC-BY-SA License.