News from Dragonsteel 2023: Stormlight 5 Release Date & Reading, Words of Radiance Leatherbound Info, and New Tabletop Games!

Dragonsteel 2023 is behind us, leaving in its wake plenty of Words of Brandon, a whole new book release (have you finished Defiant yet?), and, unsurprisingly, a ton of news. If, like me, you haven't been able to travel to the lovely Utah this year - or if you were there, but lost your memories to the con flu - here's a summary of all the announcements. Of course, you can watch most of them in the Defiant release event.

A quick housekeeping note before we begin - there will be great many pictures in the article, of somewhat small sizes. You can zoom in by clicking on them.

New Stormlight Archive 5 Reading

Yes indeed, we have a new Stormlight Archive 5 reading! It's an unnumbered interlude, and if you're wondering what happens in it, let's just say... it's weird. If you wanna check it out, you can look it up in the Arcanum, right here. You can also watch it here; the link should take you to the right time stamp, but if not, skip to 1 hour 25 minutes. 

As for the overall book, it's about 90% done - which puts it on track for release on December 7th, 2024.

New Releases and Re-Releases

The con also saw the release of a new Cytoverse short story, Hyperthief. Co-written by Janci Patterson (who, of course, wrote Bastille vs the Evil Librarians as well as the Skyward novellas, and is writing Skyward Legacy at the moment), Hyperthief was distributed during the second day of the con. It's not widely available just yet, unfortunately, but you can purchase a bundle that has it on Brandon's site. Presumbly, there will be a digital release sometime, but there's no info on that currently.

The Words of Radiance Leatherbound Kickstarter launches on March 5th 2024; almost exactly ten years after the book's original release. The design for the leatherbounds is apparently all done now - in fact, the books have already been printed. And as for the rewards? Well, for one, we'll be getting Dragonsteel Prime. This very, very old book of Brandon's has so far only been available for those who'd visit the Brigham Young University over in Provo, Utah. It's the origin of the Shattered Plains, the Bridge 4 plotline, and cosmere dragons, so it should be quite a treat.

For the other stretch goals... feast your eyes on this beauty:

Yes, this is in fact concept art for a Syl plushie - and it won't be alone. The plan at the present is to let the backers order plushies of spren from different Radiant orders. I don't know about you folks, but I'm real curious what the Bondsmith ones will look like.

White Sand prose will be getting an official release. Or, well... re-release? Remake? Re-edition? Whatever we call it, this is, if you're keeping count, the fifth version of White Sand that we will be getting, after the original prose (still available by signing up for the newsletter), the graphic novels trilogy, the Graphic Audio adaptation, and the omnibus. This prose version should be the final one, though. Maybe. Possibly. Probably not. After all, there is always another White Sand.

And finally, a bit of bad news to wrap this section up: there's no Cosmere movie coming up. The odyssey of trying and failing to adapt the Cosmere to the big screen continues, and once more, the news is that there is no news. Although Brandon and his team have apparently reached a point where people in mistcloaks were having script reads together, between the actors' strike and the writers' strike, the adaptation has been postponed yet again. So, if you're hoping to see Mistborn on screen in the near future - don't hold your breath.

Future Writing Projects

So what's the release schedule for the next few years? Well, White Sand the Final Definitive Prose Edition is the project Brandon will start working on as soon as he's done with revising Stormlight 5. And after that? Mistborn Era 3, semi-officially titled Ghostbloods. While writing that, Brandon also intends to write Elantris 2 and 3 - all before the first book of Ghostbloods even comes out, so the White Sand re-re-re-remake might be the last Brandon cosmere project for a little while. The wait will be even longer for Stormlight Archive 6, as Brandon does not intend to work on that until both Ghostbloods and the Elantris sequels are complete.

I said "Brandon cosmere projects," as other than Brandon's stories, there will also be books coming up in both Cytoverse and the cosmere that won't be written by him. There is, as mentioned already, Janci Patterson's Skyward Legacy, the sequel to the main Skyward series. In addition to that, Isaac Stewart is writing a Nikki Savage book (that's the character from the newspapers from Mistborn Era 2 books). This one's apparently pretty far along already, though Brandon has yet to see the manuscript himself. Dan Wells is also working on his own cosmere project, though this one is in very early stages.

Stormlight Roleplaying Game

If you've been following Brandon news recently, you are probably aware that Brotherwise Games, the company behind the Call to Adventure: Stormlight Archive game and the Stormlight miniatures Kickstarter, is working on the Stormlight Roleplaying Game. This tabletop RPG is based, naturally, on the Rithmatist... no, not really. It's the Stormlight Archive game, of course, and folks attending the con had the chance to watch it be played live, as well as see some of the art that will be present in the final rulebook.

So, what do we know about the game so far? It's a d20 system (for the unfamiliar, this means you roll 20-sided dice and have to roll higher than a specific threshold to succeed), a touch similar to the perennial classic Dungeons & Dragons, albeit instead of classes, characters follow paths, with each path having its own skill tree and each character being able to freely spec into as many paths as their heart desires. The system so far encompasses only Roshar; it's not compatible with the Mistborn Adventure Game, the earlier cosmere RPG (which was developed by a different company, Crafty Games).

We've also learned a bit more about the team behind Stormlight Archive RPG, which includes people who worked on the Star Wars RPG (the Fantasy Flight one), Legend of the Five Rings, Dungeons and Dragons modules, and MCDM rulebooks. You can see the full announcement below; you might notice a few... familiar faces there.

The game is still some ways off from release; its publishing will be funded by a Kickstarter campaign, which will launch sometime in the latter half of the year 2024. If you're looking for more details about the game (and more cool artwork from it), plenty of outlets far more knowledgeable than myself about the world of tabletop RPGs have covered this topic, so for in-depth reading, I would encourage you to check out articles by Comicbook and Polygon.

Other Games

If you thought that the Stormlight Roleplaying Game will be the last cosmere tabletop game, think again. There are no less than two other projects coming out in the future.

First up, we have the as-of-yet unnamed Mistborn deckbuilding game, set to release in late 2024. Little is known as of yet as to the exact mechanics; you will be taking control of Mistborn Era 1 characters, and "purchase" cards (in-game, not with actual money) to conduct high-speed Allomantic battles between them.

We also have another card game coming out, titled Shards of Creation. It's based on - you guessed it - the Shards of Adonalsium, with each suit of cards representing one Shard (though it's possible that not all the Shards will be represented). It will be a trick-taking game; if you're unfamiliar, trick-taking games are ones where each round (or "trick") each player plays one card, and one player wins, "taking" the trick. That's about all we know about Shards of Creation for now; no release date has been given at the moment, and the only artwork out there is what was shown during the announcement:

Other News

Dragonsteel 2024 date has already been decided: December 5th through 7th, 2024. That's Thursday to Saturday, which should hopefully be easier to attend for people. Like this year, it will be taking place in Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, and will coincide with a new book release - that being, of course, Stormlight Archive 5.

Finally, Dragonsteel is using all that money we're throwing at them to build itself an HQ. Known so far as "the DS project", "the Dragonsteel construction project," "Dragonsteel village," "the castle," and probably a few other names, it will be a mix of corporate headquarters, Sanderson bookstore, and a "destination for fans". Who knows, maybe the future Dragonsteels will be held there instead of the Salt Palace - but that's still in the far future. For the moment, the castle exists only as a bunch of sketches and 3D mock-ups.

And that's all! Lots of news, lots of announcements; sufficed to say, between the upcoming books, games, cons, and Kickstarters, being a Sanderson fan is going to be a busy job over the next few years. I'm certainly excited for what's to come (particularly, not gonna lie, the Stormlight Roleplaying Game), but what about you all? Anything you're looking forward to?