The latest campaign was for a tabletop roleplaying game based on his Cosmere universe, which is the setting for many of his most popular book series, including Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive. The roleplaying game includes core rulebooks and setting guides to the worlds of Scadrial (Mistborn) and Roshar (Stormlight). Later material will focus on other worlds, including those of Elantris and the White Sand graphic novel. The setting guides will also include new canonical material provided by Sanderson. There are also add-ons featuring GM screens, miniatures, dice, maps, tokens and cards. The game system uses a d20-driven system inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and will be published by Dragonsteel Entertainment.
The campaign closed this week having raised an astonishing $14,821,921 (£11,288,890) from 53,787 backers. This makes it the most successful tabletop and game-based Kickstarter campaign in the platform's history, eclipsing the $13 million raised by board game Frosthaven in 2020. In 2022 Sanderson raised $42 million in a campaign for four new novels, which remains the most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time, and then an additional $4 million for Stormlight-themed miniatures. Earlier this year he ran a $24 million campaign for leather-bound special editions of his books on Backerkit.
The Stormlight branch of the game, including the Stormlight World Guide, Stormlight Handbook and the Stonewalkers adventure, will launch in 2025. The Mistborn branch will launch in 2026.
Sanderson's next published novel will be the fifth novel in The Stormlight Archive, which will be published on 6 December this year. After that he will be writing a new Mistborn trilogy.
The classic science fiction roleplaying game Traveller has celebrated its 45th anniversary. One of the oldest and most iconic tabletop roleplaying games of all time, Traveller has inspired vast amounts of fiction and video games since its release.
Traveller was inspired by the success of Dungeons & Dragons, which had been released in 1974. Mark Miller realised there was scope for a science fiction roleplaying game with spaceships and technology and developed the Traveller game rules, with help from Frank Chadwick, John Harshman and Loren Wiseman. The game was released on 22 July 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop with a striking black cover.
It was an immediate bestseller, answering the demand for "Dungeons & Dragons but in space," as well as people who were interested in the idea of roleplaying games but not a classic fantasy setting. Traveller was also bolstered by the launch of the movie Star Wars just a few weeks earlier, which created a hunger for everything science fiction.
Traveller was originally a rules set without any setting material, but subsequent expansions introduced a far-future setting where humanity has colonised the stars with an FTL drive, but without FTL communications the various colonies and nations of humanity have splintered into small states, divided between different "strands" of humanity. Aliens exist in the setting but are mostly rare or extinct. Alternate SF settings for the game were created by fans and other creators.
An interview with Marc Miller at Dieku Games.
Traveller introduced innovations to the RPG space, including the idea of "life paths." Rather than characters being relative youngsters meeting in a bar and deciding to join forces (the standard D&D setup), Traveller characters are older and have usually had extensive training or education before deciding to become adventurers. Characters can be former soldiers, bureaucrats, medics, pilots or almost anything else the player can conceive of. Creating a character involves playing a mini-game of its own as players work out their heroes' backgrounds and their career. Infamously, it is possible for a character to die in character creation! This system also rewards extended service but also introduces penalty: the older a character is when they start the adventure, the more skills they have, but also the greater the possibility of injury or a degrading of skills due to old age.
Traveller also focused heavily on a skill system, a stalwart of every RPG apart from Dungeons & Dragons, which didn't really develop a skill system until 3rd Edition (earlier editions experimented with "proficiency" rules which tried to covers skills with a very broad brush). Most notably, this skill system allowed for a greater variety in resolving tasks and situations without combat. Traveller also emphasised its "social" skills to encourage roleplaying.
Traveller has been reissued in multiple editions since its original 1977 release: MegaTraveller (1987), Traveller: The New Era (1993), Marc Miller's Traveller (1996), GURPS Traveller (1998), Traveller d20 (2002), GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars (2006), Traveller Hero (2006), Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition (2008), Traveller 5.0 (2013), Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition (2016) and Traveller 5.10 (2019).
The game is notable for using its own rule system, which relies heavily on six-sided dice rather than the plethora of different-sized dice favoured by D&D. However, over the years the game has been "ported" to other systems, including the D&D 3rd Edition "d20" system, the universal GURPS rules set and the Hero System. Players have also created homebrew variants based on other systems.
The Traveller setting has been used as the background for sixteen novels, published sporadically from 1993 to 2015. Surprising, only two video games have been developed from the setting: MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy (1990) and MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients (1991), both from Paragon. The games were critically well-received and apparently successful, but no further video games based on the system have since appeared.
Traveller was a very forwards-thinking TTRPG when it was released and its influence on the genre remains very high. Here's hoping it carries on for many years to come.
Chaosium has announced that the official Rivers of London tabletop roleplaying game, based on Ben Aaronovitch's highly successful urban fantasy novel series, is coming this year.
The game was recently showcased at last week's Chaosium Con event in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The game uses the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition rules system, modified for this setting.
The Rivers of London series comprises nine novels, the first of which, Rivers of London, was released in 2011. It has been followed by Moon Over Soho (2011), Whispers Under Ground (2012), Broken Homes (2013), Foxglove Summer (2014), The Hanging Tree (2016), Lies Sleeping (2018), False Value (2020) and the recently-released Amongst Our Weapons (2022). The series also comprises a sequence of novellas and graphic novels. The series has been a hit in both the UK and United States, hitting the Sunday Times bestseller list regularly. The series was optioned for television in 2019 by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, but has not made progress since then.
Chaoisum is one of the oldest tabletop roleplaying companies in the world, founded in 1975. Their best-known game product is the Call of Cthulhu line, based on H.P. Lovecraft's mythos. They also publish RuneQuest, Pendragon and 7th Sea, among others.
A new Dune tabletop roleplaying game is on its way from Modiphius Entertainment for release at the tail end of 2020 (although all bets are off because of the pandemic, but hopefully etc). Announced a year or so back, the game now has a logo and a title: Dune: Adventures in the Imperium.
The game will use Modiphius's 2d20 rule set (used in its Conan the Barbarian and Star Trek RPGs, among many others), and, as the title suggests, that the game will be predominantly set before the events of the original novel Dune, in the "classic" version of the setting with the feuding houses of the Landsraad pitted against one another in intrigue with the Emperor, the Bene Gesserit, the Tleilaxu and Spacing Guild pulling the strings in the background.
The original plan seems to have been to coordinate the game's release with the Dune movie from director Denis Villeneuve, which is currently due out on 18 December (pending developments in the pandemic).
Chaosium Inc., best-known as the creators of the classic Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, has licensed Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London urban fantasy series for a new pen-and-paper RPG.
The game will use Chaosium's own rules set, customised to reflect the magic used in the books.
The game is at an early stage of development, so I'd be surprised if we saw it this side of 2021. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are also developing a TV series based on the books.
The Rivers of London series so far spans Rivers of London (2011), Moon Over Soho (2011), Whispers Under Ground (2012), Broken Homes (2013), Foxglove Summer (2014), The Hanging Tree (2016) and Lies Sleeping (2018), as well as related novellas and graphic novels.
Green Ronin are adapting N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy as a tabletop roleplaying game for release this autumn.
Green Ronin already publish licensed RPGs based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series and James S.A. Corey's Expanse books, as well as tabletop version of BioWare's Dragon Age franchise.
