When Brandon Sanderson began working with Brotherwise Games on the first adventure for The Stormlight Roleplaying Game, he considered how it could help him fix holes in the narrative of his bestselling fantasy series. He settled on a mystery from the first Stormlight Archive book, The Way of Kings, that will have big implications for the fifth book in the series, Wind and Truth, which will be released in December.
The Stormlight Archive is set on the planet Roshar, where 10 heroes known as Heralds spent millenia protecting humanity with the help of highly magical swords dubbed Honorblades. All of them abandoned their duties except Taln, the Herald of the Common Man. Despite Taln’s best efforts, the forces of the vengeful god Odium have returned. Taln was left maddened by his ordeal and soon after he first appears in the books, his Honorblade goes missing. Its whereabouts remain unknown.
“The adventure is answering that question,” Sanderson told Polygon. “What happened? Where did it go? What’s going on? And you get to be part of the story. We were looking for an adventure you could do that would intersect with the canon of the books in an interesting way, and allow you to fill in a hole yourself.”
The Kickstarter for the d20-based game goes live on Aug. 6 along with a beta preview of the rules and a first level adventure meant to walk players and game masters through the setting and core mechanics. The hardcover Stonewalkers Adventure, where players encounter Taln and learn what happened to his honorblade, will be released in 2025 along with the Stormlight Roleplaying Game Handbook and World Guide.
“The Stonewalkers campaign will take characters all the way to seventh level, and each chapter will take two or three typical sessions to complete,” Brotherwise co-founder and creative director Johnny O’Neal told Polygon. “That said, we’re trying to create a cinematic experience that covers a lot of ground without becoming a slog. Most chapters only have two or three combat scenes, and we’re trying to make sure every chapter culminates in a memorable set piece.”
Players will hunt for Taln’s honorblade across Roshar, from the Shattered Plains where much of The Way of Kings is set, to the magical forest of the goddess Cultivation, where bold souls can receive both a boon and a curse. There are a mix of dungeon crawls, puzzles, chase scenes and prison breaks. As they choose how to approach the problems they face, player characters will be able to attract the attention of spren, spirit-like beings who can bond with like-minded people to bestow them with incredible abilities. Completing the mission can allow them to join the newly re-founded ancient order known as the Knights Radiant.
“Bonding a spren is like having a familiar who also gives you pep talks and magical powers,” O’Neal said. “They’re a huge part of the Stormlight RPG experience. From the very first chapter, Radiant spren are keeping an eye on the characters and will respond to those who embody their Ideals. We’ve included a few named spren as NPCs to serve as examples, but we also expect GMs to create their own spren based on characters’ behavior.”
The PCs can meet major antagonists from the books, including the twisted Herald of Justice Nale and the traitorous General Meridas Amaram, and learn how the talking sword Nightblood first featured in Sanderson’s 2009 book Warbreaker wound up on Roshar. As they move through key moments from the series, like the emergence of a raging storm that brings Odium’s most powerful lieutenants back to the world, Sanderson welcomes players to reshape his narrative.
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“When we were teens playing [West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game], our first campaign was about how we accidentally killed Luke Skywalker and then had to save the galaxy with no Luke Skywalker,” Sanderson said. “We did other campaigns where we said, OK, the canon movies happened. We’re not going to interfere with those. We’re just there on the Death Star when it’s about to blow up and we need to get off. I like the GM having the capacity to do both and anything in between. I wouldn’t release an RPG if I didn’t want players to mess with my canon.”
Game masters who worry about players being overshadowed by some of Sanderson’s larger than life heroes can set their adventures far from the main narrative.
“One of the advantages of writing giant epic fantasy novels is that I can hint at a larger world,” Sanderson said. “In The Stormlight Archive, there’s a bunch of chapters called interludes where I just go off the beaten path and show you what other stories are happening. There are lots of stories to be told in this world.”
Sanderson made that even easier by working with Brotherwise to provide a huge amount of information about Roshar that haven’t yet appeared in the books.
“There’s a lot of cultural details being filled in, but at the same time, we dig a little bit further into what each order of Radiants’ oaths, spren, and motivations are,” Sanderson said. “There’s some new stuff there that I think fans will really enjoy.”
Sanderson said he’s always been eager to try new TTRPG systems and settings and that his experience with Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu and the Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game shaped the way he perceives the world and his approach to writing. His novels — most of which are set in a shared world called the Cosmere — all have very clear rules for how magic works, which he believes both makes it easier for readers to understand and to adapt The Stormlight Archive into a game.
“I hope (players) have just as much fun as I do when I’m playing in the Cosmere,” he said. “I get to do this every day.”
