The Stormlight Archives RPG Is Actually the Cosmere RPG, Will Adapt All of Brandon Sanderson's Worlds

Get exclusive details on the newly announced Cosmere RPG.

By Christian Hoffer

Brotherwise Games has had a very Brandon Sanderson-like secret in store for RPG fans – the Stormlight Roleplaying Game is actually the Cosmere Roleplaying Game. Today, the tabletop publisher announced that the Kickstarter for the new tabletop RPG, which launches today, will fund the first two phases of the Cosmere RPG, a living RPG that will grow as Brandon Sanderson expands his shared universe. The game will launch with two campaign settings – Stormlight and Mistborn – with both settings including every book that has been published so far in those worlds. Additionally, both settings will grow with future books written in those worlds. 

In an exclusive interview with ComicBook, said Johnny O'Neal, creative director for the Cosmere RPG, explained that the plan was always to create a unified system that could support all of Sanderson's world. "It would be tough to do a Stormlight RPG and then try to figure out how to paste on the other stuff," O'Neal said. "The action economy is a lot of what drives play balance actually in this game. Investiture is a resource for example, you can run through your Investiture. And then you can breathe Stormlight and get some more, but you're giving up actions to do that." 

According to O'Neal, the action economy helps to balance out the various magic systems of various worlds. For instance, the AonDor system from Elantris is incredibly powerful but will be balanced via the action economy. "In Elantris, you've got people who can draw on these magical runes essentially in the air and do incredible things, like powerful wizard-esque things," O'Neal said. "But drawing that stuff in the air, it takes a while. Some of the Aons are going to be three action moves, or potentially more than one turn, like I'm starting to draw, and then on my next turn I finish drawing it. And part of the reason why we broke out our system in actions the way we did is specifically so that we can balance Elantrian superpowers with everything else that's going on, because the other systems are all faster. A Mistborn is moving a lot faster than an Elantrian, even though an Elantrian is pretty godlike in what they can achieve." 

The new campaign settings will be released at a pace of once per year, with Stormlight coming out in 2025 and Mistborn coming out in 2026. "We have a multi-year plan for this," O'Neal said. "In our Kickstarter video, Brandon [Sanderson] says that he wants to support this RPG for as long as I'm writing books. His phrase for it was a living RPG, something that grows as he writes new books, and something where when he writes a new Elantris book, we want to have the Elantris campaign setting pushed out there. At the moment, we can't say for sure because our plans may change, but our third setting might be the Worldhopper campaign setting, which is all about bringing the different worlds together. And maybe pulling in worlds like First of the Sun that don't necessarily have enough material to support their own books at this point in time, but could be part of a larger book." Other worlds teased as future releases include Warbreaker and the aforementioned Elantris. 

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The timing of the RPG falls right before the release of Sanderson's newest Stormlight book Wind and Truth, but O'Neal explained how the game will grow as Sanderson continues his impressive pace of book releases. "When I was a teenager in the '90s, there were some different RPGs that were trying to do the living RPG thing and kind of progressing," O'Neal said. 

While those games (such as White Wolf's World of Darkness games) focused on a sales model where you needed to buy new books to keep up with the meta-storyline, the addition of new Sanderson books just adds more "adventure eras" to the game. For instance, the Stormlight RPG has three eras, while the Mistborn RPG has two but has room to grow when Sanderson moves into the third set of books for that world. "With Mistborn Era 1 and 2, we'll be talking about those two different big eras," O'Neal said. And there's room for when we get to Mistborn Era 3, which is going to be very cool by the way. I mean one of the things that's neat is it's like, we're going to have essentially a Shadow run cyberpunk kind of, he's hitting some of the biggest genres of high fantasy role-playing and sci-fi role-playing, he's going all the way. Wait till you see spaceships powered by Investiture, they're neat."

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The new RPG campaign will launch with two adventures, both written "in close partnership" with Sanderson and best-selling author and Dan Wells.  one tied to each of the game's first two settings. The Stonewalkers campaign adventure puts characters in control of key events that leads into the upcoming Wind and Truth book, while Mistborn Legacy spans two eras of that settings and will solve a mystery that hints at the future of that world. 

The pledge tiers for the new Kickstarter are broken down into five levels – a digital option ($60) with PDFs of both the Stormlight World Guide and the Mistborn World Guide, a physical version ($95) of that same content, and a larger option that includes includes both world guides, Handbooks for the Stormlight RPG and Mistborn RPGs, Stormlight Basic Dice, and a Plot Deck. There's also a $295 options that includes all the books, both adventures, a GM Screen, a Level Zero Guide, Adventure Maps, Item & NPC Cards, Punchboard Tokens, and Demiplane Sourcebooks. The Stormlight RPG content is tentatively scheduled for release in September 2025, while the Mistborn RPG content is scheduled for release in September 2026.

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