Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight RPG is clearly D&D-inspired, but there’s a plot twist

Brandon Sanderson, author of The Stormlight Archive series, has been on a roll these last few years with multiple multi-million dollar crowdfunding campaigns. The promise of four secret novels netted his Dragonsteel Entertainment more than $41 million in 2022, and later it earned an additional $23 million for a series of leather-bound reprints. Now he’s partnered with tabletop publisher Brotherwise Games for The Stormlight Roleplaying Game, coming Aug. 6 to Kickstarter. Polygon had an early look at a beta version of the rules, and what we found is a d20-based game that hews fairly closely to traditional Dungeons & Dragons. There’s a major difference, however: A curious little die that sounds very, very interesting. The die in question is called a Plot Die, a six-sided die that only gets used “on especially important rolls,” according to the beta document. These are points in time when someone wants to “raise the stakes” — specifically when a roll might “directly contribute to the current mission,” “play directly to a character’s purpose, obstacle, or goals,” or involve “other tests with high tension or dramatic importance.” On a roll of a five or a six, players earn an Opportunity. Opportunities can be spent to do things like aid an ally, recover a mental resource called “focus,” land a critical hit, or positively “influence the narrative.” A roll of a one or a two, on the other hand, yields a Complication. Complications are roughly the opposite of Opportunities, and will either hinder an ally, cost players focus, or negatively influence the narrative. What’s interesting is that either the GM or the players can decide at any time to raise the stakes on a roll, pending GM approval. That gives players a lot of agency at the table, granting them the ability to imbue potentially any action with some extra spice that could alter the game’s plot. Additional guidance says that GMs should be aiming for roughly a third of all rolls to include the Plot Die, all but guaranteeing that a few interesting narrative twists will pop off during the average two-to-four hour play session. The only question on my mind is if the beta document, and by extension the final version of the game, gives players and GMs enough instruction on what it means to influence the narrative. Is the mechanic something that will enrich the player experience, or is it an example of the developers pawning off design work on the players to improvise story beats at the table? Thankfully, that’s just the sort of thing that a beta test is intended to sort out. Fans of The Stormlight Archive and TTRPGs generally can have a crack at it when the free 94-page document lands alongside an introductory 30-page adventure as the Kickstarter campaign goes live on Aug. 6.