In Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight RPG players are encouraged to break canon
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
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