Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn TTRPG Lays the Groundwork for His Next Series

Last year, Brotherwise Games released a trio of tabletop role-playing game books set within the universe of Brandon Sanderson’s expansive fantasy series, The Stormlight Archive. To further capitalize on Sanderson’s popularity, the company unveiled plans for an expansion to the Cosmere RPG, based on his Mistborn setting, with two books titled The Mistborn Handbook and The Mistborn World Guide.

These books span across two distinct eras representing two of Sanderson’s series, set on the planet Scadrial. Moreover, the Mistborn expansion lays the groundwork for Sanderson’s upcoming trilogy in the setting.

Meric Moir, co-lead designer of the Mistborn World Guide, explained during a virtual interview with Polygon that there was a point in development where they might have needed to limit their work to only Era One. However, Sanderson was actively working on his Era Three novels, and he expressed concerns about the potential for the expansion to interfere with the upcoming series.

Sanderson wanted to ensure the team did not box him in, and the Brotherwise team worked closely with him and Dragonsteel Books to add content for Era Two, set in a period akin to the Gilded Age, without disrupting the future series.

The Brotherwise team managed to expand the lore of how the godlike being Autonomy first came to know about Scadrial and established a secret organization called the Set. Moir mentioned that the team received more creative freedom to develop and pitch ideas that Sanderson could review and provide feedback on. The Mistborn World Guide also offers a glimpse into characters who will appear in AppleTV’s upcoming adaptation of Mistborn.

The team aimed to ensure that all details in the books remained consistent and canonical, with Moir expressing hope that these canonized elements might eventually find their way into live-action adaptations, especially regarding the ethnicity of characters like Dockson, depicted as Black, and Shan Elariel, portrayed as mixed race.

The Mistborn TTRPG books present a vast array of options for characters who can harness 16 different metals, leading to 32 unique powers, far surpassing the 10 types of surgebinding found in the Stormlight TTRPG books. Moir pointed out that not every metal has equal weight in terms of mechanics, as some are developed for game purposes, others have greater depth, and some are even rendered useless on purpose.

For instance, Gold allomancers can perceive possible versions of themselves, represented by just two talents, while using Iron to pull other metal objects is depicted with a seven-talent tree. Sanderson and his team have informed Brotherwise that they cannot disclose all the potential uses of these metals to the fans, but they can reveal what they know about them.

The Mistborn rules also suggest potential pathways for worldhopping games, if gaming groups wish to explore the full extent of the Cosmere. Burning Aluminum, for example, appears useless on Scadrial but could theoretically be used to negate the powers of a surgebinder from Roshar. Moir mentioned that playtesting focused on balancing Mistborn abilities against each other as well as their integration with Stormlight books and other projects featuring magic from Warbreaker and Elantris.

Worldhopping is something that any Cosmere fan would undoubtedly discuss, and expanding this aspect further is a priority for the team.

Moir is also responsible for the RPG director role at Brotherwise's underlying rules system, Plotweaver, and he has been designing the rules with a focus on their applicability to the Cosmere. One example he provided was the vehicle rules, which are being developed with a modular approach. The same core rules can be adapted for use in a science fiction setting, like spaceships, and later customized for a space age Cosmere, such as the Isles of the Emberdark story.

The Mistborn TTRPG is currently available, and Brotherwise plans to announce its next Cosmere project at the Dragonsteel Nexus in December.