Kassil

When, despite having a good memory for anything you read, you go back and re-read the novels (perhaps multiple times, yes) because being more aware of the Cosmere's interactions means spotting things you didn't know to watch for the last time. When you buy the Kindle version of books you own hardcopies of for ease of reading without fear of damaging the book by falling asleep and dropping it awkwardly. Instead you just take a Kindle to the face.

Hm. *digs around* I may be mistaken, actually. I do know that Investiture - which the Shardpools are the liquid form of - will form whether or not there's a Shard present, if there's Investiture, and that the Spark of Life is a little bit of Investiture, and magic is the manipulation of Investiture (which http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=977#51 says existed before the Shattering). I don't know that the pools predate the Shattering for sure, though. Your line of thought seems more in tune with what we definitely know; there's leftover power that isn't in a Shard, and Odium may have slurped that up to augment himself without changing his Intent.

I'd be inclined towards E; Mistborn makes it pretty clear that Investing power into a world diminishes what the Shard has available, since Preservation was just ever so slightly weaker than Ruin after adding an extra dose of the Shard's power to make humans sapient. If Odium hasn't really invested himself anywhere, he'd have more raw power available. On the other hand, Voidspren and the Unmade apparently are Invested with Odium's power, so he hasn't ignored that part of Shardic nature. Maybe D, after a fashion, might be involved - we know Minor Shardworlds have Shardpools - sources of Investiture that predate the Shattering. Maybe Odium's gone and slurped up some of those?

I presume you're referring to things like the Hunter, Slayer, and so on? Yeah, the idea behind those was to essentially make a hybrid of two classes without having two characters jammed into one. They work fairly well, all things considered, and each one has its own distinctive flavor.

Fair enough; I misunderstood the way you phrased it.

I would never abuse Stick like that.

Fate is extremely storyteller-oriented, using the Aspects to define how things are in a given situation. It's much looser than any D20 system, but at the same time the way the flexibility exists requires some odd system shenanigans for some things other systems have hard-coded, like magic.

I can certainly get behind offering someone a stick.

While I'm horrible at keeping up with PbPs, may I recommend taking at peek at Mutants and Masterminds? It's D20-based, same as Pathfinder, but a lot more handily able to build sets of abilities that should be able to reasonably mimic the abilities of the various Cosmere magic sets, and be flexible enough to let you use a worldhopper without having to faff about with kludges. ...I was honestly thinking about how I could run Reckoners as a tabletop game with it a couple days ago.

Welcome to the Shard! Based on what I've heard, be wary of any cookies offered to you.

Harmony doesn't seem to like to directly interfere in events; in AoL he tells Wax via earring that he sent Wax where he was needed, rather than directly intervene. So, by the time he realized the Southern Scadrians were in trouble, he might have already been influenced to nonintervention by the balance of his Shards. Send Kel down there would serve a pair of purposes - one, it'd be a way for Harmony to indirectly work to save the southerners; two, if Kel had regained a body by that point, it would get him away from where he could cause trouble in the north while making him feel satisfied that he was Helping People Survive. I'd lean toward Sazed just not knowing about the Southerners at first; when he took up the Shards, he only had the information stored in his copperminds and his personal experience. By the time he realized they were there and freezing to death, he probably was well on his way to his indirect meddling; he might have helped Kel acquire a body if Spook hadn't accomplished it yet, but sending Kel south seems like Harmony would do as part of a "Well, that was something I should've fixed when I had the chance" response to learning about them. Pretty sure the one-eyed spiked man has to be Kel; the scars on his arms, timing (ten years after the events of HoA, ninety years too early for it to be Spook stepping down from his reign), and the word he commands the elderly Southerner with all make a strong point of it being him.

This is a reasonable theory, given that twins tend to kill each other; I imagine that somewhere in this version of Earth there have been High Epic twins who fought when they discovered that twins don't do well sharing power; not hearing of more of them would suggest that in this hypothetical case, one of them successfully killed the other despite the High Epic status. (about 3.3% of births in the US, according to a quick Google check, are twins. So they're not that rare and there's no reason for a lack of High Epic twins otherwise.)

Bubbling likely-nonsense is one of the things I'm best at, right up there with running tabletop RPGs, apparently. Thank you all for the welcome!

Feruchemy and Awakening for me, particularly since it would imply me being a Worldhopper and therefore able to go harvest investiture elsewhere. With Feruchemy, I can wander around slightly unlucky most of the time, and then - when I need something and I'm not on Scadrial - I can tap Fortune heavily and win a small fortune; and wander around with mild allergies for weeks and heal from anything in an emergency. Breaths (and, one presumes, Stormlight) can be dumped into a metalmind so that even with enough Breath to have all the Heightenings I wouldn't stand out, but they'd be available to feed into Awakening things if needed. A lot of subtle power potential and no glowing or flying-through-the-air things to paint a target on me for anyone else.

I'll be waiting for the current set of Spoiler Timers to count down before posting it, but after that I'll be happy to espouse the bubbling likely-nonsense my brain has produced.