Brotherwise Games is expanding its reach into Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere universe with a new tabletop role-playing game series based on the Mistborn setting. The Mistborn TTRPG, which includes The Mistborn Handbook, Mistborn World Guide, and Mistborn Legacy campaign books, spans two distinct eras of the planet Scadrial and is designed to lay the groundwork for Sanderson's forthcoming Era Three novels.
Development of the Mistborn TTRPG required careful coordination with Sanderson and Dragonsteel Books to ensure the new content did not conflict with his future writing plans. "Brandon Sanderson was really starting work on his Era Three novels, and as he got a clearer picture of what he was planning, he was very concerned about anybody adding to Era Two, and wanted to be very clear that we shouldn’t box him in," said Meric Moir, co-lead designer of the Mistborn World Guide.
The Brotherwise team collaborated with Sanderson to expand lore around Era Two, a period analogous to the Gilded Age, without hindering his upcoming series which will shift the setting to the 1980s equivalent. This collaboration allowed for the inclusion of details about the godlike being Autonomy's awareness of Scadrial and the establishment of a secret organization known as the Set. "They started to give us a little bit more freedom to develop and pitch things that Brandon would review and say, ‘Yeah, actually, you know what? I didn't think of that. Let's go that way,’ or ‘I don't have a plan there. Why don't you come up with something, and then I can tell you if that'll work or not?'" Moir added.
Close oversight from Brotherwise co-owner Johnny O'Neal involved weekly meetings with Dragonsteel to meticulously check all artwork for canonical accuracy. This attention to detail is particularly significant as the Mistborn World Guide offers the first look at characters destined for Apple TV's upcoming Mistborn adaptation. "I can always hope that some of the things that Brandon has canonized with us will translate into a live-action thing, particularly the ethnicity of people in the Final Empire, like Dockson, who we got to canonize as Black, or Shan Elariel, who looks mixed race," Moir stated.
The Mistborn TTRPG system features 16 metals and 32 associated powers, offering a wider range of abilities than the Stormlight TTRPG's 10 types of surgebinding. Some abilities, like Gold allomancy, have a more limited mechanical representation compared to others, such as Iron. "Brandon and his team have said ‘Sorry Brotherwise, the fans don’t know all the things that you could do with gold. There will be more, but we can’t reveal that,'" Moir explained. "We can talk about what we know, and right now that’s small. One of the cool things about our system is we can just add on trees if we need to later as more information is revealed."
Brotherwise Games is also exploring the potential for "worldhopping" mechanics, allowing players to integrate elements from other Cosmere settings. The Mistborn rules hint at this, with artwork depicting the use of Aluminum to negate the powers of a Rosharan surgebinder. Playtesting has considered how Mistborn abilities would interface with magic from Warbreaker and Elantris. "Worldhopping is something that any Cosmere fan brings up in the first or second sentence when talking about the games," Moir noted. "Supporting that in a more robust way going forward is definitely on our radar."
Moir, who also serves as RPG director for Brotherwise's underlying rules system, Plotweaver, is designing it with Cosmere adaptability in mind. "One very good example is vehicle rules," Moir said. "We’re doing a science fiction setting so we’ve got spaceships, but the core of those rules will be modular. We can pull them back to Cosmere when Cosmere gets to its Space Age and we can customize it to be what Brandon Sanderson needs for telling an Isles of the Emberdark story." The Mistborn TTRPG is available now. Brotherwise Games plans to announce its next Cosmere project in December at the Dragonsteel Nexus.