Views of a Sandersonian carnival from the parking lot
A first look at the Stormlight RPG holds its best cards too close to the chest.
There’s no doubt that the Stormlight RPG will succeed. Regardless of what the untested but promising design team within Brotherwise Games manage to produce, Brandon Sanderson’s colossal fantasy universe—his Cosmere currently stretches across 24 books—is such a roaring commercial and popular success that a less scrupulous person could slap the words “Shardblade”, “Odium” and “Bridge Four” across a Dungeons & Dragons 5E-compatible PDF and still rake in enough fan money to rest easy for several years.
Looking over the Stormlight RPG’s Beta Rules Preview reveals a wealth of care and love invested in this officially licensed title, but it’s just as evident that critics—well-meaning and otherwise—will find plenty of footholds to claim that it strays too close to the industry’s reigning monolith. There’s plenty of D&D in this game’s DNA, alongside Pathfinder and Genesys by the team’s own admission, but that’s not necessarily a bad decision. Sanderson’s novels may focus more on mental health and discrimination compared to the average door stopper genre book, but his spun yarns are decidedly high fantasy. Most RPG players will recognize the flavor, even if they’ve never sampled his dishes.
No, the Stormlight RPG’s biggest sin is an apparent trepidation towards showing off its unique additions, about straying too far from the dragon’s path. Glimpses of the RPG’s identity sometimes peek through the cracks of the 90-page rules primer and its accompanying intro adventure, but the view remains blocked behind combat explanations, skills summaries, breakdowns of advantages/disadvantages, and plenty other pieces of traditional design we’ve seen printed in books since the early 2000s. It feels like a magician promised to show me a cool trick and then proceeded to break down how playing cards are manufactured.
