At a glance, any given page from Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere RPG looks a lot like a page in a Dungeons & Dragons source book. It’s not surprising. D&D has spent decades iterating on how to present information easily to players, and most modern tabletop RPGs tend to use relatively similar layouts to D&D‘s 5th edition. Nothing here is identical, but from font choices to info boxes, it’s all very familiar.
The Cosmere RPG does, however, make some interesting tweaks. Some of these are related to the system’s unique rules, like boxes for Opportunities and Complications that result from the proprietary Plot Die. The best change, however, is one that I can’t believe D&D hasn’t already done.
The Cosmere RPG Makes Roleplaying NPCs Easy
One Box To Rule Them All
Flip through a few pages of the Cosmere RPG‘s Stonewalkers adventure, and you’ll likely come across a yellow box with the word “Roleplaying” at the top. Next to the word will be the name of a character — Ubo, Kaiana, Heth, you name it.
Not all of these characters are major forces in the Stonewalkers narrative, but they all have a role to play. Basically, if you come across an NPC in the Cosmere RPG, there’s probably a Roleplaying box just for them.
Each of these boxes contains three key bullet points — Characteristics, Goal, and Appearance — along with a small paragraph or two discussing the character in more depth. Here’s an example (one of the shortest ones, for brevity’s sake):
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Roleplaying Ellar |
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Characteristics: Belligerent, intolerant, self-important. Goal: Be seen and treated as a respected authority figure Appearance: Ellar (“Eh-lar”; he/him) is a human Alethi sergeant with close-shaved hair Ellar enjoys his position of relative power in the caravan. He relishes shouting orders and makes quick, surface-level judgments about those he meets. |
You can glance at a Roleplaying box in a matter of seconds and get the gist of how a character operates. It could hardly be simpler, which is why I’m so shocked that D&D didn’t adopt this system before the Cosmere RPG did.
D&D Doesn’t Always Organize Its NPC Info
Get Ready To Skim Those Pages
It’s not like D&D doesn’t offer enough to work with. I’ve been running Curse of Strahd with my group, and plenty of Barovian NPCs have the perfect hooks to make compelling characters. Even when they don’t, it’s not hard to spin up a character shtick. Some of my party’s favorite NPCs in D&D have been ones that I’ve thought up on the spot, and a character’s voice or conversational tic might be more memorable than their motivation or trauma.
All the same, the Cosmere RPG‘s approach makes things easier than ever. D&D‘s flirted with the concept, but to my knowledge, it’s never deployed roleplaying boxes in such an organized manner. Ghosts of Saltmarsh is a good example of a scattershot approach. One of the first key characters, Sanbalet, has an info box with a description that includes his goals and personality.
This box doesn’t appear when he’s first mentioned, though, and many other characters in the book lack this feature. At other times, key info about characters will be distributed entirely through regular text, or pushed to the back of the book alongside major stat blocks.
Organization is key to the utility of reference materials, something that D&D‘s 2024 revisions are clearly aware of. The new books feature better glossary and indexing features to make the lives of Dungeon Masters easier, and I’ve greatly appreciated these changes.
The most recent campaign books, however, still don’t feature anything as good as the Cosmere RPG‘s Roleplaying boxes. The one exception is D&D‘s new starter set, Heroes of the Borderlands. This features NPC cards with key information, but these are a specific bonus for the newcomer-friendly starter set, not an approach that’s likely to reappear in other modules. Meanwhile, books like Vecna: Eve of Ruin and Dragon Delves make no comparable overtures.
The Cosmere RPG Could Inspire D&D’s Future Books
Good RPG Ideas Help Everyone
It makes sense that the Cosmere RPG is putting NPC roleplaying first and foremost. Brandon Sanderson’s books feature plenty of memorable characters, and bringing that aspect of the Cosmere to life is a crucial part of making the RPG tick. A lot of D&D games, on the other hand, could scrape along with NPCs who do little more than ask the party to venture into dungeons and hand them supplies.
Many D&D tables lean into roleplaying, though, and it’s certainly a central part of modules like Curse of Strahd. The more time I’ve spent looking at the Cosmere RPG, the more I’ve become baffled that D&D hasn’t adopted a universal system for character info boxes. It’s not a transformative evolution, but it’s an incredibly natural one.
I’m sure the Cosmere RPG isn’t the first RPG to do something similar, but it’s another one of the little things that’s impressed me about it so far. The system isn’t turning TTRPG tradition on its hand, but the areas where it’s choosing to make changes feel intuitive. Brandon Sanderson’s RPG has taken plenty of D&D inspiration and ran with it, and now I’m hoping that D&D will take some inspiration back.