Ironeyes

I just read Chapter 4, and it's really starting to sound like Sunlit Man. An ancient, famous navigator led a group of people through Shadesmar to a new planet with a unique form of Investiture. Brandon's on a Moses story kick recently, it seems. My money is on Dusk spending the book finding a new planet for his people to settle, then leading an exodus and leaving the huge empires to fight over their planet.

This book has me reevaluating everything I thought about the Order of Skybreakers. I am now desperate to read some of Sigzil's story between when he bonded Auxiliary and when he broke his oaths. The way he acts in his moment of temporary return leads me to believe it's possible to be a Skybreaker without falling into the frankly repugnant culture the current order has under Nale.

I think the book is lying. The implications for the economy if people could go to other dimensions, strip mine for rare materials, and then bring them back are catastrophic. The government probably started a massive propaganda push when dimensional travel became available to the public. They want dimensions to be seen as tourist destinations only, never as potential real estate. As evidence, Logna and her siblings were able to travel "upstream" until they reached a branch point where the next reality up doesn't contain their form of magic/probability/plot_device.exe and had to stop there.

I'm in the middle of my second reading of Tress, and a mildly insane theory occurred to me that explains multiple things at once. It goes like this: Lumar is hollow, or at least has a massive cave structure through its mantle/core. Think Naboo. Some or all of the spore oceans have drainage holes at their bottoms, through which spores sink into the hollow space. One of the spores creates water when activated. The water drains into the hollow space as well. Inside the core, the mixture of this water with Zephyr spores creates immense gaseous pressure, which is then forced back up through the seabed and causes the Seethe. The water also activates Sunlight spores, which create the heat that is absent because of Lumar's non-molten core. Spores that create solid objects do so, but the solid vines and Roseite and such eventually decay in the absence of continuing investiture influx. If that decay doesn't happen, the continuing emptiness of the core could also be explained by the Rose, Crimson, and Emerald seas having fewer and smaller holes for spores to drain into, thanks to having plugged them up over the centuries. The outflow of air would prevent further spores from entering in large numbers. This is all wild speculation, but it explains a few things at the same time. The biggest one is the Seethe. We already have a magical way to generate air, so it isn't a huge stretch to say that it's causing the as-yet-unexplained source of gas from the ocean bed. Second, a massive underground aquifer explains how islands like the Rock have groundwater despite rain being presumably unable to reach the seabed. Groundwater normally relies on rain soaking into the ground (I live in Arizona and we're veeeery concerned with recharging our aquifer this way). With the Verdant sea soaking up all rain, the Rock normally shouldn't have any groundwater to dig a well to. On a related note, having one of the spores create water also explains why the planet hasn't become uninhabitable through dehydration, with the moons sucking water away as fast as they can. Third, if there is a traditional liquid ocean, this explains why people thought it was feasible to settle on this world. There are some hints that they may not be native. Fourth and least important, if the Sapphire sea is draining at the quickest rate, that could be why it's so heavily populated. More land would stick out above the spores. This would probably have to be the case for the Seethe to be so ubiquitous. Granted, Sunlight spores adding heat would also increase the pressure and help drive the phenomenon.

Not sure if this is intentional or a typo. Page 451 of the PDF version: "the Sorceress asked me if I’d like a large yonic symbol splitting my forehead." My assumption is this is meant to be spelled "aonic," but it could be intentional if the spelling has changed over the centuries?

Brandon opened the last episode of Intentionally blank with a Bad Story Idea (tm) about a planet that gets rolled around by a giant on an even bigger planet. The thing that interested him was people having to dash in, harvest something left behind by contact with the larger body, and dash out before getting squished. But that's just what he's done with this new world! The heat of the sun is just as deadly as getting squished, but you have to get in close to it to farm, then dash out before getting scorched. And I'm a cremling if he doesn't have someone miraculously survive the full rotation of the planet in one spot by the end of the book. In short, Brandon is a sneaky, sneaky man and spoiled SP4 days ago without any of us realizing it.

I mean geologically. How did salt deposits get there without large bodies of water? Salt mines on Earth usually mine halite, which is formed by sedimentary deposits of ancient oceans.

In the text version of the sample chapters sent to the email list, the quote is, "'He sailed the Midnight Sea, Miss Tress,' he said. 'Beneath Thanasmia's own moon.'" So that's how it's spelled, and it is capitalized. Thanasmia might be the name of the sorceress.

On the subject of weird water cycles, where does the salt come from?

It's decidedly odd. I'm afraid if an Elsecaller's DM isn't careful it could break things like dungeon crawls. But I'm proud of the gem shattering part, cause it's both true to flavor and a way the DM can limit the ability. Gems start becoming pretty important loot, especially if players aren't able to buy them. That's high praise! I'd love to hear how it goes when you get around to that campaign.

That isn't really what I meant. What I was trying to say is that if Inquisitor #5 is right, the powers of each unmade could hint at what its associated KR order would do if Sja-Anat touched their spren. An enlightened Dustbringer would therefore get something similar to Nergaoul--ie cause an emotional reaction like the Thrill. Perhaps I should have used a different word than "enflame" there.

That's pretty much exactly how the doctrine goes. Lucifer misunderstood the purpose of mortal life, thinking it was just about how people acted. He didn't realize we needed the ability to screw up and learn from our mistakes in order to change into more godly people.

That matches the power set of corrupted Truthwatchers too. Makes me wonder, if Sja-Anat enlightened an ashspren, would its Dustbringer be able to enflame emotions? Etcetera for the rest of the orders. Also it seems you're somehow my biggest fan despite my inactivity on the forums for the last few years?

Funny, those are two abilities I borrowed wholesale from other classes. Strength of Squires is Bardic Inspiration, and Ideal of Crusade comes from the Vengeance Paladin. I wanted Skybreakers to control battlefields, which is why they have Compelled Duel and Hold Person, and other similar spells. It seemed thematically appropriate for them to lock down parties they think deserve some melee-flavored justice. I'll consider that a compliment I either wrote or tweaked all the abilities, then borrowed official art from Brandon's website and the Kickstarter art package. Let's just say my cell bio lecture is really boring.

The hit die was originally a d10, but with cheap self healing, that felt like it would instantly outclass every other tank in the game. I gave Stonewards an extra HP boost that's equivalent to making their hit die a d10, and powered up Truthwatchers' healing factor. They should be the tankiest subclasses. I definitely struggled with the scaling on heavy armor. Should it just be a static boost until Lv17 then?