Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive TTRPG Makes $1M In Under An Hour

The highly anticipated Stormlight Archives TTRPG Kickstarter--now renamed the Cosmere RPG--broke the million dollar barrier in under an hour, joining the million dollar Kickstarter club.

Published by Brotherwise Games, the game encompasses Brandon Sanderson's entire universe of novels. It includes a world guide, a rulebook, and an adventure called Stormlight Stonewalkers. It's a new game system, based on a d20 mechanic with talent trees and skill-based magic.

The question now is whether it can beat the Avatar Legends TTRPG's almost $10M record? Avatar hit the million dollar mark after the first few hours, so--at least at this point--the Cosmere RPG is tracking ahead of it. Brandon Sanderson already holds the Kickstarter record for the most funded project ever--his novel series made over $40M on Kickstarter in 2023!

 

[Parmandur]

I went through the beta rules and starter adventure and it seems pretty good. A mix of 5e (base mechanics), 13th Age (icons), SotDL (paths), and Genesys (plot dice). I really want to playtest it, but none of my friends have read The Stormlight Archive, and the setting is way too alien and complex for me to explain during the one-shot.

Yeah, it's at least cool that the Kickstarter includes a literal primer.

 

[Zaukrie]

I went through the beta rules and starter adventure and it seems pretty good. A mix of 5e (base mechanics), 13th Age (icons), SotDL (paths), and Genesys (plot dice). I really want to playtest it, but none of my friends have read The Stormlight Archive, and the setting is way too alien and complex for me to explain during the one-shot.

Why would you need to explain the setting for a one shot? No judgement, I just don't understand.

 

[Parmandur]

Why would you need to explain the setting for a one shot? No judgement, I just don't understand.

Indeed! Actually upthread I posted an hour livestrema where Sanderson was talking with one of the two brothers who run Brotherwise Games, the one who wrote the Bridge 9 one shot thst ia currently available for free. And he said he had two goals with the one shot: to act as an introduction to RPG mechanics for those unfamiliar by rolling then out, and to serve as an introduction to the Setting for folks not familiar with it scene by scene.

 

[bedir than]

This isn't a singular Kickstarter, but a multi-year project -- so quite different than Avatar

Brandon Sanderson plans to support the Cosmere RPG “for as long as he's writing books”

Brotherwise Games seems happily married into Sanderson’s fantasy empire, to the tune of $5 million and counting.

www.rascal.news

 

[Parmandur]

This isn't a singular Kickstarter, but a multi-year project -- so quite different than Avatar

Brandon Sanderson plans to support the Cosmere RPG “for as long as he's writing books”

Brotherwise Games seems happily married into Sanderson’s fantasy empire, to the tune of $5 million and counting.

www.rascal.news

True, but it seems that for Avatar there was a lot more buy-in at lower pledge tiers. Which we might see here after 3 week, who knows.

 

[Parmandur]

This isn't a singular Kickstarter, but a multi-year project -- so quite different than Avatar

Brandon Sanderson plans to support the Cosmere RPG “for as long as he's writing books”

Brotherwise Games seems happily married into Sanderson’s fantasy empire, to the tune of $5 million and counting.

www.rascal.news

They were talking on the livestream about how they built this system to scale to every world in the Cosmere, and play nicely together innthe longterm: mechanically it will be possible to mix the Miatborn and Stormlight material right out of the gate.

 

[Morrus]

This isn't a singular Kickstarter, but a multi-year project -- so quite different than Avatar

Brandon Sanderson plans to support the Cosmere RPG “for as long as he's writing books”

Brotherwise Games seems happily married into Sanderson’s fantasy empire, to the tune of $5 million and counting.

www.rascal.news

Every Kickstarter is different. Different strategies, different plans, different goals, different scales, different promises, different reach, different plans, different coverage. The one thing they have in common is that they’re all Kickstarters, and that’s the one thing we can compare them by.

 

[Pedantic]

I have, but not recently. At the time, I didn't find it to be particularly helpful. Even Sanderson's own "where to start" page only describes two books and only one of them describes the tone.

In contrast, both official and fan sites for the Discworld books -- another potentially daunting wall of books -- are aggressively about entry ramps, describing each potential series, POV characters, what kinds of stories are told there, etc.

In any case, this thread shouldn't be about me or my issues. It's about Sanderson's fans being on track to fund possibly the most successful RPG crowdfunding campaign of all time, which is amazing. I cede the floor to them, whom it should have been about all along.

I think the disconnect you're running into here is that Sanderson's appeal is primarily about setting. You're getting details about magic systems and political conflicts and social setups because that is the selling point. His characters, like his prose, tend to be serviceable rather than compelling, and his plots can be pretty contrived in service of letting him show off details or reveal secrets. I wouldn't call any of it bad, but the word I'd use is "sufficient."

In his writing podcast, he's talked before about how the primary draw of fantasy is setting, and that's clearly something embraced in his work. You're not hearing what the books are about, because that isn't what's interesting or important about them, what's interesting is the cool worlds and places and situations and magical interactions he's dreamed up.

If I'm being pretentious, I'd say Sanderson's found an audience in people who view genre literature as fundamentally being for escaping to other realities, not people who are invested in stories or storytelling.

I can immediately see why that's a compelling case to many people for a TTRPG. His books are essentially written a lot like metaplot in a campaign setting already.

 

[Von Ether]

Yeah, it's at least cool that the Kickstarter includes a literal primer.

I opine that the primer is a big draw for the KS for fans who won't ever pick up a die will buy the set for the system agnostic primer alone.

However, those people also love pretty books on their shelves so they won't be so mad about having those gorgeous ttrpg books either way.

 

[VenerableBede]

If I'm being pretentious, I'd say Sanderson's found an audience in people who view genre literature as fundamentally being for escaping to other realities, not people who are invested in stories or storytelling.

I have found myself extremely invested in many Sanderson stories, and many Sanderson characters. I don't entirely agree with this statement, although I do completely agree that setting and magic systems are a core part of the Sanderson appeal, and thus very important to the majority of the audience.