Discover the Secrets of the Mistborn

"Mistborn" by Brandon Sanderson Printed and Distributed by Crafty Games ISBN-13: 978-0-9826843-9-9 -- 584 Pages Folks, I think you almost can't go wrong when deciding on a new role-playing game, when the game is also written by the same person who wrote the novels it is based on! Brandon Sanderson's "Mistborn" novels are a six-book (so far) collection of good solid fantasy. I can't recommend them highly enough! So, I also bought the Mistborn role-playing game published by Crafty Games. The usual short fiction piece, called "The Eleventh Metal", begins the book. It gives flavor to the remainder of the text. An introduction to "The Final Empire" follows, with info on the people, the land, and the world. It also mentions the four novels that had been printed before the game's release. Between the intro and the fiction, this takes up the first 42 pages of the book. Then we jump right into Book One - "The Mistborn Adventure Game". Here you build your character, improve your character, find the basics of the rules, how to use contests, setting up conflicts, including physical conflicts, social conflicts, and mental conflicts, how your characters can change the world, and a special new character called a "Kandra". Kandra are natural shapeshifters and must adhere to a strict contract of conduct. Kandra are interesting characters, but I would only suggest them to a player with some role-playing experience. Book Two contains "The Treatise Metallurgic", which is the gist of magic use in The Final Empire. Magic-Users are also limited to a narrow band of classes. "Allomancy" allows mages to eat (yes, =eat=) metal and use the properties of that metal to cast spells. Less common is "Feruchemy", which uses metals as storage containers for various traits and capabilities which can be used to release that stored energy - granting the user superhuman abilities far beyond those of Allowmancy. "Hemalurgy" is the rarest type of mage, who can drive steel spikes into people, killing them, and stealing their characteristics or abilities, then subsequently drive it into another person's body (without killing them) and then passes its contents on to that person as long as they have the spike driven into their body. Following that is a section on the metals and what characteristics each possesses. These fall into four categories, Physical Metals, Mental Metals, Enhancement Metals, and Temporal Metals. There are also two so-called "God" metals. Nineteen known metal descriptions are next. Book Three, "Always Another Secret", dips into what wizards have hidden behind the curtain (which, I may assure you, is not the "Wizard of Oz"). This whole civilization has secrets on top of secrets, underneath secrets, next to secrets, and hidden secrets galore. This is a section primarily for the Game Master. It also has example characters, including the heroes of the Mistborn Trilogy, the Rogues Gallery, and how to create NPC's. An appendix ends this book, and has a rules summary, and sheets such as a Character Sheet, other record sheets, and a good index. A nice feature of this book are the black marks where each chapter is divided, making looking for that elusive rule a bit easier. To give you an idea of how much I love this book, I had Brandon autograph it (as well as the rest of my then trilogy). The concepts of the very unusual mages makes for a very different feel to this fantasy. Some prospective GMs may find this book a tough sell to players, but run correctly, it could make for a very interesting long term campaign, especially due to Mr. Sanderson's new books in the series. It's not based on any other game system, and has three categories for statistics, Attributes, Standing, and Resilience, each of which is broken down into three other stats. My suggestion on this one is to pick it up in a store that has a good place to sit, and scan it to see if you might like it. Fans of Sanderson's books may also want to take a look. Recommended - but only to players and Game Masters with a bit of gaming experience under their belts.