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!

 

[agrayday]

i am interested in the business/crowdfunding portion of this project, still not interested in Sandersons lore or books.

How the designers behind the Cosmere RPG soulcast a literary universe into roleplay gold

Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy empire is not so easily bound to dice.

www.rascal.news

Pay article at Rascal

Say what you will about the substance of Sanderson’s high fantasy series, but people love them with a dedication and fervor normally reserved for Taylor Swift and professional football leagues. That means the team of designers, writers and artists at Brotherwise Games tasked with transmuting thousands and thousands of pages into something meant to facilitate collaborative storytelling have a monumental plate to devour. How do you digest the Cosmere’s two dozen books, plus short stories and novellas? According to the leads, one bite at a time.

Rascal sat down with project lead Lyla Fujiwara, lead designer Andrew Fischer, lead writer Lydia Suen, and lead editor Laura Hirsbrunner to discuss their relationship with Sanderson’s publishing company Dragonsteel Books, pleasing both book fans and RPG players, and the drawbacks of leaning too much on familiar systems.

 

[grankless]

People basically only ever talk about the video game-type magic system when they discuss his books. I'd read a billion posts about how cool his magic was for years and it took physically picking up a copy of Mistborn to learn that it's a heist story about a wizard dude named Kelsier. People really do barely talk about what his books are about.

Otherwise my main knowledge of Sanderson is the extremely funny video of him complaining about George RR Martin getting the gig to write on Elden Ring and not him, "a true fan".

 

[Parmandur]

People basically only ever talk about the video game-type magic system when they discuss his books. I'd read a billion posts about how cool his magic was for years and it took physically picking up a copy of Mistborn to learn that it's a heist story about a wizard dude named Kelsier. People really do barely talk about what his books are about.

Otherwise my main knowledge of Sanderson is the extremely funny video of him complaining about George RR Martin getting the gig to write on Elden Ring and not him, "a true fan".

Thing is, it can be hard to summarize these books without sounding absurd or spoiling them.

For Mistborn, "Ocean's Eleven meets My Fair Lady versus Sauron" is hyper-accurate but sounds like word salad.

For Way of Kings, one might say "The Mighty Ducks meets the French Connection and Lawrence of Arabia, but with way more crabs" doesn't explain much, true as that might be.

 

[DonoZen]

I feel like they should have separated the Stormlight stuff and the Mistborn stuff.

You can just do the $1 pledge and ala carte the stuff you want. I just did that myself because I didn't want the Mistborn stuff.

 

[Reynard]

You can just do the $1 pledge and ala carte the stuff you want. I just did that myself because I didn't want the Mistborn stuff.

I read through the beta and I think that system is going to be too fiddly for my current tastes.

 

[bedir than]

My goodness. This thing likely cracks five million on day one.

 

[Parmandur]

My goodness. This thing likely cracks five million on day one.

Yeah, pretty solid.

The last Sanderson Backerkit this year got to about $20 million from 100k backers, and that was for a more niche priduct than these, so this seems pretty normal.

 

[Parmandur]

My goodness. This thing likely cracks five million on day one.

And apparently they actually have stretch goals planned that they haven't even put a fimeline for...

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

When I moved in 2021, there was a period of a couple of weeks where our boxes hadn’t been delivered and we had no internet. To avoid dying of boredom, I decided to go to the local book store and on a whim bought the first 3 books of the Stormlight Archive. It took a while for me to get hooked on The Way of Kings, but once it clicked, I was obsessed with the characters, world, and magic system. I read the first 3 books in 2 weeks. It was only after I looked up Brandon Sanderson’s other books that I realized that not only had I read The Rithmatist in middle school, I also started Mistborn: the Final Empire but for whatever reason didn’t get into it the first time. Over the course of the next year or so, I bought and read most of Sanderson’s books.

I have since fallen behind on his recent books. I read Tress of the Emerald Sea, but haven’t read Yumi, The Lost Metal, or The Sunlit Man. They’re sitting on my bookshelves, I just haven’t gotten around to reading them.

I wholeheartedly recommend the Cosmere to anyone that is on the fence on whether or not to try it. For starting points, I recommend The Way of Kings, Mistborn the Final Empire, or Warbreaker. If you like heists, start with Mistborn. If you like romance, start with Warbreaker. If you like doorstopping, complex epic fantasies that take place on an alien world, start with Stormlight.

I am excited for this TTRPG. I’m glad that it’s a d20 system. I was not able to convince my group to play the Mistborn TTRPG because its dice system is so strange. The artwork looks awesome and I hope Warbreaker is one of the first supplements.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I feel like they should have separated the Stormlight stuff and the Mistborn stuff.

There is already a Mistborn TTRPG, but it has a pretty strange system. I’m personally glad that they found a way to represent the magic systems of both Stormlight and Mistborn.