Brandon Sanderson Is Turning ‘Mistborn’ Into an RPG—and Opening Up His Entire Cosmere to Fans
Players can explore Scadrial, wield its magic and even discover stories that aren't in the novels
Key Takeaways
- Brandon Sanderson says the Cosmere was built as 'a place to be able to visit.'
- The new 'Mistborn' RPG lets players create their own adventures on Scadrial.
- The Cosmere RPG can reveal canonical stories and worlds beyond the novels.
Two decades after Brandon Sanderson introduced readers to the ash-covered world of Scadrial in Mistborn: The Final Empire, they’re getting an opportunity to visit and experience it in a very different way. This time they won’t simply be following Vin, Kelsier and the other characters Sanderson created. They’ll be creating characters and stories of their own.
The Mistborn Campaign Setting is the latest expansion of the Cosmere Roleplaying Game, the ambitious tabletop project based on Sanderson’s interconnected universe of fantasy novels. Digital copies went to the project’s original Kickstarter backers on September 2, with a public digital release scheduled for September 9 and physical editions arriving at retail in November. It follows 2025’s Stormlight Campaign Setting, which brought the world of The Stormlight Archive to gaming tables first.
For readers who have never ventured near a tabletop role-playing game, or RPG, the basic idea is simpler than the terminology sometimes makes it sound. It’s essentially collaborative storytelling in which players create characters and decide what they say and do, while a game master presents the world, its characters and challenges. Rules and dice help determine whether the things players attempt actually work, but there isn’t a predetermined route through the story. What happens depends largely on the choices everyone makes together.
Which, Sanderson says, is precisely why the Cosmere and role-playing games belong together.
BRANDON SANDERSON: “I think there was a lot of pent-up desire for this. I built the Cosmere specifically to be a place to be able to visit. That’s the idea—I’m doing all these worlds and creating this expansive universe because I believe the main selling point of epic fantasy—I’ve said this before—is immersion.
“And, you know, people have been wanting to immerse themselves even further than the books into the stories, and this is how you tell your own stories in the Cosmere—one of the best ways. People have been eager for this. We took a long time getting this ready and picking the right partners. And so I’m just enthusiastic that it’s happening, it’s working, that people will get to do this.”
The fans asked Sanderson for it
In fact, according to Sanderson, the RPG wasn’t a case of someone deciding that a successful fantasy franchise ought to have a game attached to it. Instead, it grew partly from something his readers repeatedly told him they wanted.
BRANDON SANDERSON: “In general, I think given that we don’t want to do too much, what we do is we try to listen to the community as to what do you want most. And this is how we ended up with an RPG. The number one thing the fans wanted was an RPG or a world guide that they could use to tell their own stories.”
The resulting game is a collaboration between Brotherwise Games and Dragonsteel Entertainment, Sanderson’s own company, which oversees and expands his creative work. Rather than merely licensing his fictional universe to an outside game publisher, Sanderson and the Dragonsteel creative team have been involved in developing the material and making sure that it fits the continuity of the Cosmere.
The project was originally announced as The Stormlight Archive Roleplaying Game, but during its 2024 Kickstarter campaign, Brotherwise and Dragonsteel revealed that Stormlight was actually the first piece of the Cosmere RPG, an underlying game system designed from the beginning to accommodate Sanderson’s different worlds.
And the readers definitely responded, with the Kickstarter, which began with a $250,000 goal, ultimately raising more than $15 million from more than 55,000 backers, becoming Kickstarter’s most-funded games campaign at the time. The question then became: How do you build a single role-playing game capable of handling something as sprawling and fundamentally different from world to world as the Cosmere?
Making all of Sanderson’s magic work together
That challenge falls partly to lead designer Andrew Fischer. Unlike a fantasy universe in which magic essentially operates the same way everywhere, the Cosmere includes worlds built around very different supernatural systems. The powers wielded by the Knights Radiant in The Stormlight Archive, for example, bear little resemblance to the metal-based abilities found in Mistborn. The trick, of course, was making everything compatible without making it all feel the same.
ANDREW FISCHER: “The Cosmere has the interesting challenge of compartmentalization to a degree where each planet has its own entirely own magic system…. That was probably the biggest challenge here, identifying those and laying that universal groundwork on the bottom, but then building on top of it enough to create the unique feeling of each magic system and each planet, so that each one felt unique and singular. But we knew that we could make the fundamental rules templating such that everything was going to be compatible.”
The result uses the familiar 20-sided die, or d20, found in many tabletop RPGs, but combines it with its own mechanics, including flexible character-development trees, skill-based magic and something called the Plot Die, which can introduce additional narrative opportunities or complications.
Dan Wells, Sanderson’s longtime friend, fellow novelist and vice president of narrative at Dragonsteel, was involved in those discussions almost from the beginning. An enthusiastic RPG player himself, his priority was making sure storytelling didn’t get lost beneath the rules.
DAN WELLS: “I was pushing for it to be a lot more narrative, because that’s what I love, but I think we landed in the right spot with a really beautiful blend of narrative mechanics and crunchy mechanics that allows it to feel like a Brandon Sanderson story.”
And that’s important because the goal isn’t merely to reproduce Sanderson’s characters.
It’s to let players create new ones.
Now ‘Mistborn’ gets a shot
If Stormlight established the Cosmere RPG — debuting as the No. 2 top-selling RPG according to ICv2 — Mistborn presents an entirely different test, with the new material encompassing both of the series’ major historical periods. Era One offers the ash-covered Final Empire and supports stories involving heists, rebellion, horror and political intrigue. Era Two jumps centuries forward into a dramatically changed Scadrial filled with railways, automobiles, detectives, secret societies and gunslingers.
Then there’s the magic. Allomancers ingest and “burn” metals to produce specific abilities, while Mistborn are Allomancers capable of using the full range of Allomantic metals. Feruchemists can store physical and mental attributes in metal for later use, while Twinborn combine one Allomantic and one Feruchemical ability. But for Fischer, translating all of that into game mechanics became a puzzle in its own right.
ANDREW FISCHER: “One of the really cool things to me about it is there’s the sheer variety in the different Metallic Arts and how they are kind of designed to work together. It’s like a design puzzle, right? Because we want to accurately represent each of these, but then you want them to synergize in intuitive ways and be independently upgradeable for things like Mistings and Ferrings who are only going to have one set. And so it’s this kind of puzzle, this interlocking puzzle that very quickly gets incredibly complex as they all combine.”
The Mistborn release consists of three principal hardcover books: the Mistborn Handbook, containing rules and character options; the Mistborn World Guide, exploring Scadrial and its lore; and Mistborn Legacy, a campaign-length adventure stretching across both eras and generations. That last book is an example of another unusual aspect of this RPG: Sanderson isn’t necessarily treating it as separate from his storytelling.
The RPG can tell stories the novels don’t
That was already apparent with the Stormlight adventure Stonewalkers. Sanderson revealed its origin during the RPG’s Kickstarter livestream.
BRANDON SANDERSON: “The campaign that you get to play is a narrative hole in the books that I someday planned to plug and never found a spot, and am not planning to plug in any other way. So this is the place to get that story.”
That’s an intriguing proposition even for readers who have no interest in rolling dice. The RPG’s World Guides contain information about locations and aspects of Sanderson’s universe that haven’t necessarily been explored in the novels. At the gaming table, naturally, players are free to take the story wherever they want, but the developers have also established what canonically occurred within the larger Cosmere continuity.
BRANDON SANDERSON: “I think what will be a lot of fun is, I think that someday we will probably do a, ‘Here is a bunch of planets that Brandon might go to and might not go to, that he has thought of for settings, and here’s some basic rules for how their magic might work.’ It would be, I think, pretty fun. It’s just like, you know, a preview of places you can go explore in the Cosmere that haven’t had books written yet.”
In other words, the relationship could eventually work both ways. Rather than the RPG merely following Sanderson’s novels into new worlds, players could conceivably arrive somewhere before his readers do.
Brotherwise describes the Cosmere RPG as a “living” game, meaning it can continue expanding alongside Sanderson’s fictional universe. Current plans eventually extend beyond Roshar and Scadrial into Worldhopper material, allowing characters to travel between worlds, with those sourcebooks planned beginning in 2028 and beyond.
JOHNNY O’NEAL (cofounder and president of Brotherwise Games): “We hope this is just the beginning and fully expect and plan for people to be playing this game for years to come. I can’t wait to see where we go next, whether it’s Elantris or Warbreaker or Worldhopper, or just more cool Stormlight and Mistborn stuff for a while. We’ve got the whole Cosmere open to us.”
‘Mistborn’ RPG Release Dates
- September 2, 2026: Digital editions released to Kickstarter backers
- September 9, 2026: Public digital release
- September 2026: Physical fulfillment to Kickstarter backers begins
- November 2026: Physical books reach retail
- Fall 2026: Mistborn hardcovers Mistborn Handbook, Mistborn World Guide and Mistborn Legacy to be published.
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