Compressing the Cosmere

Last year, the hotly anticipated Stormlight RPG, based on the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson, hit Kickstarter with a twist. It had vastly expanded in scope, evolving in the Cosmere RPG, a single game covering the whole universe shared by many of Sanderson’s novels. The setting books, initially for the Stormlight Archive and later for Mistborn, would serve not only as RPG supplements, but as official guidebooks and artbooks for non-gaming fans of Sanderson’s work. To say it was successful would be an understatement. The funding campaign raised over $15 million to become the most successful tabletop gaming Kickstarter to date, and the third most successful overall (Sanderson already held the top spot with a $41.7 million campaign to fund four novels in 2022.)

While I read the first Mistborn trilogy years ago, I’d never read any of Sanderson’s other books until last year. I picked up the first Stormlight Archive novel on a whim and was swiftly enraptured. I’m a sucker for his intricate magic systems anyway, but it was the focus on mental health and how the principle characters’ abilities (magical or otherwise) were strongly tied to personal development that really spoke to me. It’s an interweaving of the mechanical and the narrative that my gaming brain immediately latched onto as a great framework for an RPG.

Skip forward to December 2024, and I’ve devoured the entire Stormlight Archive series, including Wind and Truth, the just-released fifth book which brought the first arc of the epic narrative to its conclusion. It delivers a massive change in status quo to the world of Roshar, and my first thought was “How the heck are they going to make this work in the RPG?” My second thought was, “Caelyn, you damned fool, you’re a tabletop games journalist. You can just find out!” I reached out to Brotherwise Games and arranged to sit down with studio co-founder and creative director of the Cosmere RPG Johnny O’Neal, along with Lydia Suen, the game’s lead writer.

This interview, which was recorded in January 2025, was edited for clarity and readability.