Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere RPG

There's No Stopping the Cosmere RPG!
3 months ago – Thu, Aug 29, 2024 at 10:30:35 PM

Worldhoppers, we've done it! With over 50,000 backers and $14.5 million raised, the Cosmere RPG is now the #1 game campaign of all time and the #3 Kickstarter of all time! For 23 days, this project has felt unstoppable.

And at the moment, it literally is. Late pledges were supposed to start tomorrow, but they seem to have kicked in shortly after the campaign closed. This wasn't intentional, but we'll go ahead and roll with it! We're happy to add more folks to the Cosmere RPG community.

And what a community it has been. Thanks for such a positive, high-energy, exciting campaign! Cosmere fans are truly the best, and from the very first day to tonight's livestream, this campaign has been a heart-warming experience.

On September 22 we'll share a Kickstarter update that shares everything you need to know before our pledge manager goes live during the week of the 23rd. Between now and then, Kickstarter will be charging credit cards and beginning to transfer funds. The pledge manager will be live through October and into November.

That's all for tonight! From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for starting this journey with us. This is just the beginning.

The Final Countdown
3 months ago – Thu, Aug 29, 2024 at 11:01:58 AM

Wordhoppers, we’re almost there!

Thanks to your amazing support, the #1 RPG Kickstarter of all time is now one of the biggest crowdfunding campaigns ever. We’re grateful for the passion of the Cosmere community and for your trust in our vision.

We’re also working hard to live up to that trust. Today we’re keeping it short and sweet, with three pieces of news to share.

Solo Update

A week into our campaign, we announced that we’d be adding a solo mode to our “level zero” adventure, The First Step. Since then, we’ve been looking very carefully at what a solo mode would entail. Here’s what we can say:

• The Cosmere RPG solo mode will have its own rulebook, but our goal is to make it cross-compatible with other Cosmere RPG sourcebooks.
• That book won’t be included in this campaign, and will be released after our Mistborn core sourcebooks, but will be in development as early as next year.
• Solo mode design will be led by the RPG industry’s foremost solo designer, Shawn Tomkin (designer of Ironborn, Starforged, and Strider Mode for The One Ring).

We didn't want to rush this, but after some discussions with Shawn, we’re feeling very excited about the potential for this system to provide a fully-realized solo mode. This is also a perfect example of community feedback making a difference, so thank you!

The Final Stretch

About half of the stretch goals in this campaign were things we planned in advance and hoped we could achieve if things went well. The rest have been added over the course of the campaign, through a combination of backer requests and team brainstorming. We thought we were done yesterday, but we’ve decided to add one final stretch goal!

These custom slipcases will be included in any pledge that includes three hardcover sourcebooks. That includes the GM and Collector, but also the Roshar Pack and Scadrial Pack. This is just a first look at the designs, which will likely undergo some adjustments for the final slipcases.

Closing Livestream

Let’s celebrate the end of this campaign together! Dragonsteel and Brotherwise will be together tonight from 7-9 pm Mountain time. Watch here to join the party:

The livestream will include some live Q&A, art previews, and more. Thanks for everything, and we can’t wait to celebrate the end of this momentous campaign!

Staff Spotlight: Jillian Ross

We've been saving an important spotlight for our final day: Jillian! This project might seem like it was destined to succeed, but Jillian's marketing has been driving it to ever-higher heights. For months, she's been working days on this project while earning her Digital Marketing certification from Northwestern University at night. She's been a superstar all year long, so please congratulate Jillian as her title changes to reflect her growing role as Marketing Manager for Brotherwise Games!

Jillian Ross is a designer, marketing professional, and social media guru based in Columbus, Ohio. She started professionally in the board gaming industry in 2020 after graduating from DAAP at the University of Cincinnati with a degree in Fashion Design. Jillian has been a board gamer since she was a child, and she even designed board games for fun with her brothers growing up! Even though fashion has nothing to do with games and marketing, she attributes her work ethic to her two-year experience as a fashion design intern. 

She enjoys horror movies and TTRPGS – better yet; she loves horror TTRPGs! When Jillian isn’t gaming (which is pretty rare), she is usually trying out new food with her partner of 10 years, or cuddling with her two cats. Either way, she feels right at home with the Brotherwise team, and is happy to be a part of the Cosmere community!

The Right Crew
3 months ago – Wed, Aug 28, 2024 at 09:20:55 PM

Tonight’s update will be a little different. So far, all of the updates for this campaign have come from the team as a whole. This time, I’d like to address you more directly and thank you personally for backing this campaign.

So, hi! I’m Johnny O’Neal, Creative Director for the Cosmere RPG. Here I am with my big brother Chris. We co-founded Brotherwise Games eleven years ago, and have had the good fortune to work with Dragonsteel for about half of that time.

The story of how we built this partnership with Dragonsteel is one I’ve already shared, but tonight I want to talk about our approach to the RPG project. Spoiler alert: this update references a scene from early in the first Mistborn novel.

What Would Kelsier Do?

I love the Cosmere, and it’s very hard for me to pin down my favorite book or character, but I have a clear favorite scene. In chapter six of The Final Empire, Kelsier gathers his crew around a blackboard set atop an easel. It’s the kick-off meeting for a pretty big team project: killing a god.

I know Kelsier isn’t meant to be a role model, but something about that scene has always inspired me. In the seven years since I first read that chapter, I’ve tried to apply Kelsier’s approach to the biggest problems in my professional life. When we first started to plan the Cosmere RPG, I specifically asked myself, “what would Kelsier do?”

Lesson 1: Set Your Hopes High

Kelsier’s plan is incredibly audacious: to overthrow a tyrant who has ruled for a thousand years. In our case, we set out to compete with some of the biggest and most experienced companies the RPG industry. When we met with industry experts to propose our development plan, we heard more than once “what you want to do isn’t possible.”

We listened to those experts, and we changed some of our plans, extending our timelines and increasing our budget. But we didn’t take all their suggestions (like “it’ll go a lot faster if you don’t try to build an original system”) and our optimism for the Cosmere RPG never wavered.

Lesson 2: Break Down the Problem

The real magic of Kelsier’s brainstorming session comes when the team starts breaking down the steps they’d actually need to take to overthrow the government. That’s when Vin realizes they’re serious:

And yet, the group regarded their list of “problems” with determination. There was a grim mirth about them—as if they understood that they had a better chance of making the sun rise at night than they did of overthrowing the Final Empire. Yet, they were still going to try.

For us, breaking down the problem meant working backward from our objective – awesome game books in Cosmere fans’ hands – and through all the required steps. We created project plans to understand those steps and all the different roles required.

This schedule wasn’t much more detailed than Kelsier’s chalkboard plan, and a lot changed between this and the final project plan. (We ended up adding about six months to the overall development timeline!) But it helped us get started.

Every time we encountered another seemingly insurmountable task, we followed the same process: work backward from a goal and break down the steps until they didn't seem impossible anymore.

Lesson 3: Find the Right Crew

This was Kelsier’s most important lesson for Brotherwise. Ambitious goals are just chalk dust without the right people to back them up. I can confidently say that my most important role on this project was putting together an awesome team: not just great designers and art directors and editors, but great people, and people who love the Cosmere.

Dragonsteel and Brotherwise have been posting a lot of interviews with our team members. I mean, look at all these!

Just seeing all these video thumbnails together, it's hard not to get a little misty-eyed. I don't think I can put into words how proud I am of this team.

Every member of this crew is a specialized expert, someone as skilled in their way as Breeze or Dockson. What they have in common is how much they care. That’s where I think Brotherwise had the edge on larger companies that could have taken on this project. We weren’t just putting together the biggest Cosmere fans on an existing staff. We pulled together the best crew for this job, hand-picking the right experts from across the industry.

Lesson 4: Fake it Till You Make It

One of my favorite storytelling tropes is “we become what we pretend to be.” From Don Quixote to Galaxy Quest, from Spiritual Lightweaving to Kelsier starting his own religion, this is a theme that gets me every time. Professionally, I love to create a vision and move toward it.

“Faking it till you make it” isn’t about being inauthentic. It’s about pushing past impostor syndrome, about putting anything on a blank page to get your creative momentum going. Consulting Designer Max Brooke had us employ this technique in playtesting. For example, when we first started working on Mistborn talents, he instructed us to “make a character and write down your talents as if we’ve already designed those paths.”

This philosophy also helps when you’re launching a Kickstarter, and you’re relying on people to trust the vision for something that won’t be tangible until a year from now. If Kelsier was a real person, he'd probably be really good at crowdfunding.

Lesson 5: Keep Smiling

He forced himself to smile—not out of pleasure, and not out of satisfaction. He smiled despite the grief he felt at the deaths of his men; he smiled because that was what he did. That was how he proved to the Lord Ruler—and to himself—that he wasn’t beaten.

Anyone who reads Mistborn will notice that Kelsier smiles a lot, but something that I picked up when re-reading the series is how often he smiles with purpose. He smiles to inspire others, to show defiance, and to lift his crew’s spirits when the going gets tough.

This project may seem inevitable in retrospect, but there were some real low points along the way, when we questioned our ability to deliver a game worthy of Brandon’s writing and this fandom’s passion. There were times when I smiled my way through challenges to keep the team’s spirits up, and other times when my brother or my coworkers did the same for me.

In conclusion, while Kelsier has some tendencies that I definitely wouldn’t want to emulate, he’s been a great source of inspiration for every step of this project. Come to think of it, Kelsier is great at weaving intricate plots, finding the right playgroup, making stuff up, and keeping things fun… I want Kelsier to be my GM!

Stretch Goal: Welcome to Scadrial

We’ve now unlocked every stretch goal we planned for this campaign, and several more that we hustled to create in response to this project’s record-breaking success. Here’s one that we created in response to fans who asked for Mistborn content.

So we end as we began, with a “Welcome to…” stretch goal that’s meant to bring new folks into the Cosmere. This softcover booklet will come with every Mistborn World Guide, and it’s meant to provide everything that new players need to jump straight into the Mistborn campaign setting!

Staff Spotlight: Johnny O’Neal

Alright, let's wrap up this lengthy update with a quick bio!

Johnny O’Neal is the co-founder of Brotherwise Games. Prior to working in board games, he led product development and marketing for licensed toy lines like WWE, How to Train Your Dragon, Star Wars, Paw Patrol, and Bluey. His first foray into game design was twenty years ago, when he got a couple of articles published in Dragon magazine. He’s the designer of Boss Monster, Call to Adventure, The Dragon Prince: Battlecharged, Super Boss Monster, and Adulthood.

Johnny’s favorite activity is spending time with his wife Beverly and their three sons. When he’s not playing or designing tabletop games, he also enjoys tennis, biking, drawing, karaoke, going to indie rock concerts, and collecting comic books.

Building the World Guides
3 months ago – Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 08:11:02 PM

Hello, Worldhoppers!

We’re now in the final 72 hours of this campaign, and we’re moving up the ranks of biggest campaigns ever. To anyone joining the campaign now, welcome!

Tonight's update is all about how we approach the World Guides, especially the art! The second half of this update comes from Isaac Stewart, Dragonsteel VP of Creative and the world's leading authority on how things look in the Cosmere. 

Stretch Goal: Shadowform Singer

To kick off an update about art and world-building, let’s start with a work that’s still in progress: a new miniature!

This isn’t the final sculpt or posing, so we’re just showing it in silhouette, but that seems appropriate for this miniature! The shadowform singer is a stealthy Regal form introduced in the Stonewalkers adventure, and is integral to its story. It will be added to the Stormlight Miniatures Set, both in physical and STL form.

A Universe of Artistry

In the eighteen years since Elantris was published, the Cosmere has inspired artists around the world. Some of that art was official: Isaac Stewart’s cartography, Michael Whelan’s iconic cover paintings, and interior illustrations by Ben McSweeney. A huge amount of art has been created by fans, and many of those artists’ work will appear in the Cosmere RPG: Katie Payne, Marie Seeberger, Petar Penev, Ari Ibarra, Antti Hakosaari, Jessica Liu, Botanica Xu, and many more!

As the Cosmere grew, the Dragonsteel team realized that they’d need more illustrations for leatherbound books, games, and collectibles. (It’s also nice to have a bunch of beautiful art assets ready to show off when Hollywood knocks on your door!) Our last Kickstarter, for Stormlight miniatures, laid the foundation for this campaign’s success by developing official, Brandon-approved character models for the books’ biggest protagonists.

With all those pieces in place, the Stormlight World Guide was a chance to visualize Roshar in a more comprehensive, canonical way than ever before. Early in the project, Brandon recognized that the World Guides for this RPG could be relevant well beyond the core audience of RPG players. While the world guide contains adversary profiles – this system’s equivalent of a “Monster Manual” – it’s primarily a lore book and art book.

The World Guide includes chapters on the World itself, its nations and cultures, cosmology and religion, a detailed history, key characters and organizations, points of interest, Shadesmar, and adversaries (including a bestiary of Rosharan fauna). It compiles existing information, introduces new lore, and provides never-before-seen visuals. Some of our favorite illustrations are those that depict people from across Roshar.

Most of these are never-before-seen visuals, but the World Guide also reprints many iconic maps and paintings from the books. In the case of many “Shallan’s Sketchbook” pages, you’ll get to see these images in color for the first time!

A Worldhopper’s Guide to the Cosmere

One of our favorite things about the World Guide is a series of “travelogue” illustrations by Marie Seeberger. Written from the perspective of a worldhopping Lightweaver, these hand-drawn journal pages provide an intimate look at locations across Roshar.

We’ve provided sneak peeks of these travelogues in a number of our updates because we love them so much. For a closer look at Marie’s process, check out this in-depth interview with the 17th Shard!

Staff Spotlight: Marie Seeberger

Marie is also our staff spotlight for today! As “Lamaery,” she is probably the internet’s most prolific Cosmere fan artist. Her work brings a personal, idiosyncratic vision that makes Roshar, Scadrial, and the other worlds of the Cosmere feel more alive. Her Instagram is a must-follow for any Cosmere fan!

Marie Seeberger or Lamaery (pronounced “la Mary” – it is really not that difficult…) is a German illustrator who has loved drawing since she was three and playing pen and paper RPGs since she was seventeen.

In 2020, to procrastinate from finishing her master project in informative and scientific illustration, she started making Cosmere art for fun and hasn’t really stopped since. (She did graduate at the University of Applied Sciences Hamburg in 2022, though.) Next to the art she makes for Dragonsteel and Brotherwise, her professional work mainly lies in live-drawing, graphic recording, scientific communication and corporate communications.

As a concept artist and world guide illustrator for the Cosmere RPG she gets to fully indulge the part of her brain that won’t shut up once it starts to think about worldbuilding and visually make the worlds of the Cosmere feel as lively and tangible as possible in the process.

Guest Article: Isaac Stewart

Today we want to welcome Dragonsteel’s VP of Creative Development, Isaac Stewart! An integral member of the Cosmere RPG team, Isaac meets with Johnny and Katie every week to review the latest illustrations with his eye for beautiful compositions and canonical accuracy. It’s Isaac’s job to ensure that everything we do adheres to a consistent vision. At the same time, it’s always our goal to make sure there’s room for each reader’s individual vision of the story. The remainder update comes from Isaac, in his own words.

Years ago, I worked with a nice gentleman who refused to watch the Lord of the Rings movies. This baffled me, especially when the company was footing the bill to take the employees to watch them. I mean, free movie! Right?

I was incredibly curious why he didn’t want to go. Were the movies too violent? Did he have a grudge against the director? I figured it wasn’t my business. What if it was because of some very personal reason? I didn’t want to embarrass him or me, but my curiosity eventually won out, so I broached the subject with him in what I hoped was a respectful way.

Turned out The Lord of the Rings trilogy of books was his favorite series. He’d read and re-read them over the years, shared them with his children, and built the stories into the fabric of his life.

“I have a clear idea,” he said, “of what these characters look, act, and sound like. If I watch the movies, over time my version of these characters I know and love will be supplanted by the movie versions.”

I’ve gone back to that conversation many times, especially when it became my job to help develop Brandon’s worlds visually.

At first, it was just a handful of us developing the look and feel of Stormlight, and we had a pretty firm missive for those first few books: Don’t depict the characters.

Brandon wanted the readers to be able to envision the characters themselves, and he didn’t want any of our official art to invalidate how a reader was already imagining a character.

It was a big deal when Ben got to draw Adolin in Shallan’s sketchbook in Words of Radiance. But even then, we were saying, “This is our version of the character.” We didn’t feel like we needed to dictate that all fan art of Adolin should look like our version. And even then, our view of Adolin has shifted and become more refined as we’ve worked with more artists and had to think deeply about him, for example, when working with Audrey Hotte to design his canonical look to be used with the Stormlight miniatures.

Again, we try our best to not invalidate how readers imagine Roshar and its peoples. As Brandon has often said, a reader is the director of the movie they see in their mind as they read the book. A reader can see who they want to see in the roles of the characters. A reader can pronounce the character and place names however they want to (even “Urithiru,” though you’ve got to let me pronounce it my way, so that those who haven’t read the books don’t immediately ask themselves “I’m a what? What’s a ‘thiru’?”) A reader is the director. The novel is their script.

Eventually Stormlight got to a place where we had to start defining the world and the characters more. If we wanted to branch out into other forms of media, we needed a consistent way to portray the world and characters.

In the visual development of a world, character, or story, one of the trickiest things to find is the right balance between author vision and fan expectation.

That’s what we set out to do when crafting our official versions, asking questions like: Where does Brandon’s vision of a character, for example, overlap with how fan artists are depicting that character? How do we meet fan expectations without going against how Brandon wants his world and characters being depicted?

A lot of it has to do with the tone of the stories and creating a visual world that matches the tone. Part of it is creating visuals that can be nothing else but from out of the Stormlight Archive.

I often ask myself this question during visual development. If we make this or that design decision, will how we present Roshar still feel like Roshar to the fans?

It’s walking a tightrope. I’m not perfect at it and have learned some great lessons along the way. We’re not going to be able to please everyone, but as Hoid once said…

“Art is about emotion, examination, and going places people have never gone before to discover and investigate new things. The only way to create something that nobody hates is to ensure that it can’t be loved either. Remove enough spice from soup, and you’ll just end up with water.”

It’s taken me twenty years to more fully understand the answer my coworker gave when I asked him why he wasn’t going to watch the Lord of the Rings movies. A valuable part of his life would never exist the same way if he did watch them. His vision of these beloved characters, who had been his friends for many years, would be replaced by doppelgangers imagined by someone else rather than how he wanted to see them. His personal vision might wind up replaced with a broader visual vernacular.

In the intervening years, I’ve wondered (and sincerely hoped) that he’s been able to keep his pre-movie vision of Middle Earth intact, especially with how pervasively the movies have become a part of pop culture.

So, I think of that answer when I set about working with artists and Brotherwise to visually develop Brandon’s worlds, and we do our best to present a Roshar that feels right to you, even if it’s not quite what you envisioned the first time you read the books.

And even then, our vision of Roshar doesn’t mean you can’t have your own, one living and thriving in your mind or in your sketchbooks.

Afterall, you’re the director of the movie in your mind, and our visuals will always be here if you ever feel you need a production designer.

Beyond the Physical Realm
3 months ago – Mon, Aug 26, 2024 at 07:46:18 PM

Happy Monday, Worldhoppers!

We send this update after a momentous weekend of new backers, and having just reached $11 million in funding. We’re now one of the Top 10 Kickstarter campaigns of all time, with a very real opportunity to rise through those ranks in our final 72 hours.

This will be a busy week for the Dragonsteel and Brotherwise teams, as we hustle to spread the word about this campaign. So today we’ll just take a quick jaunt to Shadesmar!

The Cognitive Realm

“All things exist in three Realms … Physical, Cognitive, Spiritual. The Physical is what we feel, what is before us. The Cognitive is how an object is viewed and how it views itself. The Spiritual Realm contains an object’s soul—its essence—as well as the ways it is connected to the things and people around it.”

This quote from Shai, protagonist of The Emperor’s Soul, perfectly summarizes the three Realms of the Cosmere. Like the nature of Investiture, the three Realms play a role in every Cosmere story. They’re also reflected in the RPG’s attribute and skill system.

While most Cosmere RPG adventures take place in the Physical realm, it is possible to venture into the Cognitive realm, known as Shadesmar in The Stormlight Archive novels (a term also adopted by many worldhoppers). Traveling to Shadesmar is not easy, and during the Era of Solitude, the only reliable path is by ascending the Horneater Peaks and entering Cultivation’s Perpendicularity.

Once you enter Shadesmar, you’ll find yourself in a strange reflection of the world you know, an unearthly landscape beneath dark skies. Where you’d find land in the Physical Realm, Shadesmar contains vast seas of black beads. Where you’d find oceans, you’ll see obsidian plains covered in crystalline flora.

There are settlements in Shadesmar, populated by sentient spren and visitors from other worlds. You’re less likely to find sources of Stormlight, a scarce resource in the Cognitive Realm. Food and water are also at a premium, though some of the local spren cater to worldhoppers.

If you’ve bonded a Radiant spren during your adventures, you’ll find that they look very different in Shadesmar! In the Physical Realm, Radiant spren take forms that are sometimes abstract, sometimes humanoid, but generally small and subtle. In Shadesmar, the peakspren you’ve been carrying in your pocket might have the stature of an Unkalaki warrior!

The Stormlight World Guide contains a chapter on Shadesmar, containing basic lore as well as special rules for traveling there. For example, each bead in Shadesmar represents an object, which can be manifested by a disciplined wielder of Stormlight. Lightweavers and Elsecallers can also shape the beads into simple structures. The World Guide also contains enemy profiles for the beast-like emotionspren that characters can encounter in Shadesmar, such as angerspren.

Stretch Goal: Showdown in Shadesmar

Today’s unlocked stretch goal is a guided tour of Shadesmar in the form of an original adventure for 7th-level characters! This is our last of four e-supplements, which together add a lot of value to every pledge.

This e-supplement will be available in early 2026 ,well after Stormlight reaches backers but ahead of Mistborn. Its default perspective is written for characters traveling to Shadesmar from Roshar, but it will also contain a mode for characters from Scadrial. You could even play as a combination of both, making this the first taste of Worldhopper content planned for the future!

Staff Spotlight: Ace Baldwin

Today’s spotlight is a star in all three realms. ace is one of our newest team members, but has already applied their deep Cosmere knowledge to the Mistborn World Guide!

ace baldwin is a writer for Cosmere RPG. As a longtime writer of fantasy, they discovered Brandon Sanderson via the Writing Excuses podcast in 2011. They finally got around to reading The Way of Kings in 2013, and have been thinking about the Cosmere ever since.

When ace isn’t writing, they’re often found designing systems and puzzles for their home games, or helping moderate many of the Sanderson-related subreddits. By day they’re a UX designer, specializing in systems and interaction design. You will most often find them trying to logic a problem no one asked them to solve.

Being able to combine their love of the Cosmere, writing, and RPGs was an opportunity too exciting not to throw themself at full-force. Outside of this brand of nerdery, they’ve performed and written for metal bands, and sometimes make cute, silly doodles.