The Cosmere RPG almost drowns its rich setting in a tidal wave of fiddly rules

Let’s get one thing straight. When I opened my review copy of the Cosmere RPG, I had never touched a book by Brandon Sanderson. Concepts like Stormlight were entirely alien to me. This is something that will undoubtedly have shaped my opinion of The Cosmere Roleplaying Game, and it’s something you should account for when reading my thoughts on whether or not you should try the game.

In producing a Cosmere RPG review, I’ve attempted to juggle two target audiences: those who love Cosmere and all its trappings, and the uninitiated who are here to try a new tabletop RPG. It can be taxing taking on two perspectives, and I might not always succeed. Bias can muddy the waters, even if I don’t mean it to.

I’m overexplaining my position because the Cosmere RPG itself is trapped walking a very similar tightrope. It must manage conflicting interests when appealing to those same two audiences. Additionally, it also attempts to be two different kinds of D20 systems – an ultra-crunchy, build-focused RPG, but also a fiction-first one that prioritizes storytelling over rulings.

Like me, it doesn’t always succeed.

What is the Cosmere RPG?

The Cosmere Roleplaying Game is a new TTRPG system based on the vast fantasy universe penned by Brandon Sanderson. While the system already has plans to expand, its initial books all focus on The Stormlight Archive series.

In this review, I’ll predominantly be talking about The Stormlight Handbook, which contains the basic rules for playing Cosmere. My opinion on this has also been influenced by Stonewalkers, a pre-written adventure for the system. Backers of the $15 million Kickstarter campaign will also have received a dedicated Stormlight World Guide and further adventures, but I won’t be discussing these in detail here.

The Cosmere RPG is a D20 system, which means it shares many traits with market leader Dungeons and Dragons. Gameplay revolves around exploration and social encounters, with extensive rules for managing combat should a battle break out.

However, in many ways, Cosmere feels closer to Pathfinder than it does to D&D. Players have three actions per turn rather than one, and they have a more complex set of decisions to make when building a character. Your strengths and weaknesses are decided by six attribute scores, a horde of possible skills, three types of defenses against incoming attacks, and up to two additional resources that fuel your unique powers.

Rather than a set list of DnD classes, Cosmere splits its character origins and professions into paths. You can pick and choose from many paths at once, which offers immense customizability as well as analysis paralysis.

Additionally, these paths are split into two categories: Heroic and Radiant. The latter allows you to play out the journey of becoming one of the Knights Radiant, from bonding with a Spren to speaking your ideals. This unlocks Investiture, a resource to power new abilities that other paths cannot access.

Some aspects of the game also echo other TTRPGs. For example, there’s an events countdown that could have been inspired by Forged in the Dark, and the endeavor mechanics are basically the skill checks used in earlier editions of D&D.

Cosmere’s signature mechanic is Plot Dice, which throw additional opportunities or consequences into the story. These are added to a skill test when it feels appropriate to raise the stakes. When rolled, opportunities and complications can help or hinder you, both mechanically and narratively.

What’s good about the Cosmere RPG?

The Cosmere RPG is built on a strong foundation, and its core gameplay is both familiar and exciting. Events and endeavors feel delightfully approachable, and they add intriguing ways to resolve scenarios that satisfy players on both sides of the GM screen.

Despite the three-action turns, combat and exploration are streamlined compared with other D20 games. A simplified initiative system, where you simply choose whether to take ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ turns, makes fights feel punchy and fast-paced. There may be three ways to defend yourself against damage, but these expand your strategies rather than the complexity of landing and dodging blows.

On the crunchier side, character advancement is interesting and logical. Talent paths offer a huge amount of variety. The Cosmere RPG gives you ways to tweak and tinker your character at every level, so you can constantly experiment with your build. As you level up, you’ll accumulate many skills to increase your chances of success. However, boosts to key resources like your health become less potent. That means, while you’re better at adventuring, the stakes of failure get higher, and the stories you tell grow more dramatic.

Speaking of stories, those who play RPGs for the narrative will find lots to love about Cosmere. Imagination holds a lot of sway, and you’re encouraged to think creatively about what your talents can achieve.

The Plot Dice add multiple outcomes to every critical decision. While this adds more to manage, a confident improviser or excellent planner will revel in the chance to explore so many layers of narrative.

What’s not good about the Cosmere RPG?

Despite the relative simplicity of core gameplay, the Cosmere RPG has a tendency to overcomplicate things. Take, for example, a basic dice roll. You’ll roll a d20 to determine the actual result of this roll, as well as a Plot Die that either introduces an opportunity, a complication, or no additional result. If you’re making an attack, you’ll also roll your damage dice simultaneously.

The Plot Die alone means that, rather than a mere success or failure, there are six possible outcomes to a roll. Since the Plot Die can affect the narrative, that means the GM must be ready to produce six possible outcomes any time that a vaguely significant roll is made. The pre-written adventures suggest one or two storytelling beats you could use for these, but you’ll probably want to do the extra homework of prepping even more for any certain scenarios.

Next comes advantage and disadvantage. You can have more than one instance of these at once, even if they do cancel each other out. For example, it’s possible to have three advantages and one disadvantage, which actually means you have two advantages and no disadvantages. An advantage or disadvantage allows you to reroll any of the dice involved in your skill test (damage, plot, or D20), taking the better or worse result of the two. If you have multiple advantages, they must be used on different dice.

After that comes degrees of success, which the Cosmere RPG encourages you to consider when narrating how close the skill test comes to succeeding. This is simply more plates than a narrative game needs to spin in order to achieve interesting storytelling.

Similarly, the use of Focus to resist successful skill checks feels unnecessarily grind-y. One social skill test to persuade another character to help your cause becomes a series of repetitive rolls to try and wear down their resolve. In the Cosmere RPG, the narrative is made so granular that I worry it begins to strangle creativity rather than encourage it.

These storytelling devices are just as complex as the options for character-building, and all of these could be intimidating for an RPG fan lacking confidence or experience. It doesn’t help that the Cosmere RPG, in general, lacks clarity. The organization of the rulebook is messy, and there are times when it doesn’t seem to follow its own jargon. Advice for play feels bloated and repetitive in places, and it can be tough to find exactly what you’re looking for.

If you’re an outsider to the Cosmere universe, you’re at even more of a disadvantage when trying to understand the rules. While the Cosmere RPG presents a rich setting that’s explained in immense detail, its concepts and conventions don’t always translate well to the tabletop RPG medium. As a newcomer to the franchise, the radiant and heroic paths don’t seem to have distinct ‘class’ identities. Vague naming conventions and shared talents can make it difficult to distinguish between your options and understand what kind of role you’ll play.

Newcomers may also be put off by how harsh the Cosmere RPG’s narrative can be at times. Plenty of character talents have story-related prerequisites, which means that the events of your game could take them away from you. Similarly, important weapons could be broken by a mere consequence roll, and enemies can repeatedly spend Focus to shrug off your successful rolls.

When a player has spent hours, weeks, or even months developing their character’s talents and inventory, it can feel particularly sour to lose these at the whim of the story. Cosmere GMs are expected to make edge case calls on a lot of tricky situations, and the rulebook doesn’t provide much support for doing so.

Who is the Cosmere RPG for?

The Cosmere RPG seems like a fiction-first RPG on the surface, but it’s more suited to lovers of planning and crunch than it is to those who love rules-light improvisation.

It also heavily favors existing fans of Brandon Sanderson’s fiction, as this demographic will have far less research to do than the uninitiated. That being said, if you like the kind of RPG that requires you to become a historical expert on its setting, then you’ll adore Cosmere. Publisher Brotherwise Games has put a lot of love and care into explaining and recreating the world of Cosmere, with heaps of resources for helping you bring it to life.

For many, that will be reason enough to overlook the rulebook’s flaws. Few RPG settings are quite as rich, nuanced, and alive as the one presented by Cosmere. I’m just not sure the game design is strong enough to entice many more to pick up Sanderson’s books for the first time.

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