Toucan’t Blog

Allomancy For Beginners

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For legal reasons: MIST & METALS is an independent production by Sam Long, and is not affiliated with Dragonsteel. MIST & METALS falls under “non-commercial fan art” as defined HERE. I have no intention of directly or indirectly profiting off of works owned by Brandon Sanderson and Dragonsteel.

Also, MIST & METALS is a theoretical microRPG, and is not in competition with the official Cosmere RPG produced by Brotherwise Games, nor their yet to be released Mistborn setting books Coming Fall of 2026

A NEW SET OF BONES

A couple weeks ago on bluesky, a mutual of mine asked if anyone has “fleshed out” the microRPG Roll For Shoes into a meatier games, and I took that as a challenge…

Almost immediately I thought about Allomancy, the magic system used in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trillogy. It uses three “nested dichotomies”

PHYSICAL vs MENTAL
EXTERNAL vs INTERNAL
PUSH vs PULL

I decided to force Roll For Shoes into this pre-defined skill tree that acts like a scaffolding system that begins broad and is honed into a point. You begin with a dice pool of 1D6 to do anything, then when you roll all 6s you unlock one branch to the next level increasing your dice pool by one for any action that fits on that branch

At this point I decided to make this project into a celebration of Rules-Lite and microRPG game designers, and pull in other mechanics that fit the vibe of Mistborn

One aspect of Tunnel Goons that I have always liked, is how it uses class as its ability scores. How I adapted this to MIST & METALS is what I call “Tactical Approach.” When presented with a problem, are you going to approach the solution as:

And then I further broke down “Mistborn” into the 8 Mistings:

As you may have noticed, I have no mechanic yet to solve problems as a Noble or Skaa—this is where Honey Heist comes in…

"For those few moments, she hadn't really been lady Valette. Nor had she been Vin, for that part of her-the timid crew-member-was almost as fake as Valette was. No, she'd simply been...whoever she was"

…The first book of the Mistborn Trillogy revolves around a heist and an identity crisis of a girl who’s living in two worlds

Honey Heist is perfect, but didn’t pair well with Roll For Shoes as is. How I adapted this system is that I simply translated the points in each stat to dice pool levels. Instead of using RFS’s mechanical leveling, I wanted to stay true to HH’s narrative leveling.

Can I really call this a TTRPG if I don’t include resource management and the fear of death?

Allomancy requires burning metals. Originally I planned an annoying bookkeeping system that acted similar to the power points in pokemon games. That got annoying fast, then I remembered this is a microRPG and I can take some liberties in my translation

Vin first describes her allomancy as her “Luck” so I chose the target numbers of 5 and 6 and I assigned them to hearts, one set per Misting. I arranged these hearts to look like four leaf clovers

To successfully do an action you need to roll one of these two target numbers on at least one of your dice. If you fail you have the option to “burn” one of your luck points to turn your failure into a success. Narratively this is closer to “flaring” your metals, but I don’t care and like the word “burn” more. Burning your luck reduces the available target numbers the next time you try that action, so be careful

Upon a long rest at your hideout, or narratively if you receive a “vile” you may restore all of your burned luck

Now luck isn’t health, so let’s steal the wound system from DURF

If a failure could result in death, roll some risk hit dice. The bigger the threat, the less dice you will use. Fighting an inquisitor would use 1HD, and a normal Skaa thieving crew guy would be maybe 4HD. If the sum of all of the hit dice exceeds your burned luck, then you survive. If it is equal to or less than your burned luck, then you are killed…

”There is a beauty in death - the beauty of finality, the beauty of completion. For nothing is truly complete until the day it is at last destroyed”

…wait, you have Atium right?

The three points you share between Skaa and Noble double as your Atium reserve. Burn one of those tokens to retroactively save yourself from death

Warning: Atium is very rare and will not replenish during long rests

Filing the Serial Numbers Off

I was curious if I could reverse engineer this system I tailor made to a major IP into something more generic, and I was stuck until I came across the 8 Abilities post from DIY & Dragons…

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I had to cut the aspects from MIST & METALS, namely the bits from Honey Heist, but I have some ideas on how to adapt it in the future

I’ll eventually post ROLL FOR BAD on my itch page, and when I do you can find it [HERE]

Thank You

Thank you for reading this far! I’m exhausted because my youngest kid has been in the hospital the last two days, and I’m posting this just after midnight where I’m at—so please excuse any typos

Find me on bluesky HERE