News

This episode, we're talking about the history and cultures of Sel, featuring sharks! Well, somewhat. Today we have the debut of the Shardcaster Benny. What's a Svordishman's favorite weapon? A Svord, of course. Okay, but really, there's a lot of interesting history and lore on Sel, and it'll be pretty cool to see Elantris sequels someday.

It’s official folks - Stormlight Four has a confirmed title! First announced by Tor then retweeted by Brandon, the newest edition to the Stormlight saga has been confirmed to be named Rhythm of War. Brandon floated this as the tentative title back in February 2019 during the initial outlining of the book, and it appears it stuck firm. 

After Brandon's marathon writing session at the end of 2019, where he wrote 19k words in a single day, Brandon has confirmed via a reddit update that the first draft of Stormlight 4 is complete. Although Brandon still has four other drafts to do between now and July 1st, this marks a major milestone in the writing of this book. While Venli is the focus character for this book and has many viewpoints, it will be more of an ensemble than the previous Stormlight books. 

It's time for a very loopy and entertaining podcast on the Horneaters. We talk about their origins, their culture, Rock and his mysteries, and more. And it is sometimes a little silly sometimes. This week we have Eric (Chaos), Ian (WeiryWriter), Evgeni (Argent), and Shannon (Grey).

Happy Koloss Head-Munching Day!

Yep, it's that time of year again folks. (Or will be, in a few hours, when the 19th rolls around.) The Christmas trees are decorated, the menorahs are polished, the koloss are looking for some heads to munch... And with birthday cake in one hand, Brandon Sanderson is using the other to type out his annual State of the Sanderson address!

Stay tuned for more on that... Oh, and sorry of this post title got your heart thumping. ^_^ No, nobody knows exactly when it will be posted. But you can bet, when it does, it will be all the buzz in every corner of the fandom. In the meantime, I've got something for you to do before resuming your furious CTRL+F5 mashing...

STATE OF THE SANDERSON 2019 BINGO!

Fans of the Stormlight Archive, get hyped because Tor and Brandon Sanderson have officially announced November 17, 2020 as the release date of book 4! 

From what we know, there’s a lot to be excited about in the book. In an article on Tor.com, Brandon says that book 4 will have one of the first scenes he created for Stormlight, and that it may be his favorite in the entire series.

Okay, for reals, podcasts won't stay this long, but we had so many thoughts on Starsight. This is a bit more of a mixed reaction on this one, and so we have an extremely spirited--and not at all salty--discussion on Skyward's sequel. What did you think? Did you like it? Did you dislike it? Obviously, major spoilers in this episode!

Hi all, this review will be a FULL SPOILER review of Starsight. There are full book spoilers here, so if you haven’t finished reading the book, you may want to turn back. Unless you don’t care about spoilers whatsoever, then by all means, continue on!

This review is actually two reviews. The first is by Greywatch, who liked the book, and the second is by Overlord Jebus, who didn’t. Please enjoy and let us know what you think in the comments!

It's November 26th now! Well, I know it has been November 26th for quite a few people in the world, but now it's November 26th in American timezones, which means Starsight is officially out! (I can confirm, I just bought the ebook.) That means you can discuss it in our spoiler board or our #starsight_spoilers channel on Discord. We hope you enjoy reading it! Of course, it's fine if you don't, in which case let us know in our discussion threads! Standard reminder: it's fine for people to like something you didn't, and it's fine to not like something other people liked!

There is a ludicrous amount of stuff to talk about on today's Shardcast. First up, we show off Crafty Games's metal Mistborn dice, which are awesome, then we dig right into the Nalthis Star Chart, which has some... anomalies, you could say. Then we get more of the Stormlight 4 Prologue and confirms what we were thinking last time. Then Harmony, there are so many Words of Brandon from Brandon's trip to Israel and Prague. We get stuff on Dawnshards, Cultivation, avatars, and we get into the weeds. And Rafotory. Obviously. 

Today, Warbreaker leatherbound preorders went up! Dragonsteel is teaming up with a variety of bookstores to do the preorders. See below at the bottom of this post on Brandon's site for up-to-date links where you can preorder the book. This year, they are doing something different for damage prevention and numbering. They are going to pre-sign and number all books before binding them, so each book can be shrink-wrapped and individually boxed. This means they can't offer personalizations, but you'll get a book in the best condition.

Shardcast: Autonomy

By Chaos, in Shardcast,

It's time to talk in-depth about maybe the weirdest Shard of Adonalsium: Autonomy, and its Vessel, Bavadin. There sure is a lot to discuss that have huge cosmere implications, from avatars, Trell, Patji, sand mastery, and Taldain. It's crazy! Also crazy but not unexpected: Ben's terrible pronunciation. This episode also contains possibly the most salt-inducing Who's That Cosmere Character yet. Evgeni isn't a sand master, but he sure might be a salt master.

Isaac Stewart took to Instagram today to share an image of the brand new Nalthian System star chart! Check it out, and watch out for the cognitive anomaly!

Meanwhile, Dragonsteel is running a contest next week, and the prize is an early reading copy of Starsight AND a copy of all four currently released Cosmere leatherbounds! Look for contest details, and two preview chapters for Starsight, in Brandon's newsletter tomorrow. Not signed up for Brandon's newsletter? Do that soon!

Lastly, we've got a quick glimpse at samples for Crafty Games' next Kickstarter campaign: metallic dice for all twenty known Allomantic metals!

Hope you enjoyed your Fall break, because we're back with a new set of Coppermind objectives for November!

First we need to say a big thank you to everyone who helped out with the last round of objectives. The Coppermind has NEVER been in such a good state! We've got less than 5% of articles as stubs and over 2/3 of our articles are marked as complete! So thanks again to everyone for getting us here.

With the release of White Sand Volume 3 and Starsight on the horizon, there will be plenty to do in the coming months, so we hope you'll join in!

After a long and confusing wait, the much barely anticipated conclusion of the White Sand graphic novels is finally here! Those of you following this thrilling saga will know that the listed release date has been pushed back many times since the listing first went up on Amazon. Well, we finally have confirmation that the listed release date is accurate because you can actually purchase and download the ebook. The hardcover, however, is still listed as October 1 and will not get delivered for a few weeks if that’s what you ordered. 

It's been a busy few weeks here at Area 51 Dragonsteel Entertainment the 17th Shard - you can tell because all weeks are busy for our hardworking, handsome, and horribly hantastic (look, I tried) team - and it's pretty much all Brandon's fault. The highlight of it all, of course, was his visit to DragonCon where he held a panel and multiple signings (only days after he posted the fifth Stormlight #4 Reddit update) and read from the prologue of the storming book.

Today we are talking about the Iriali, the strange gold-skinned people in Iri. We're talking about their religion, the Seven Lands, the One, and more! And you know what we talk about more? Kurth. A lot. You could say we were kurthed to talk about it. Did you think there was enough to talk about a single city? Apparently! 

Today, Brandon posted another update on Stormlight 4 on Reddit. This update includes a visual outline of Stormlight 4's structure as well as a warning that the flashback character may not be who we were expecting! The rough draft is 50% complete, at about 200k words long out of a projected 400k. Brandon is still hopeful for a Christmas 2020 release, but he's still about a month behind schedule with a busy October down the road. Note that this update includes some light spoilers, mostly concerning the structure of book 4. (and major Oathbringer spoilers)

We're finishing up our discussion myths this episode, starting with a bunch of Hoid stories, like Derethil and the Wandersail, Queen Tsa sleeps with the moon, and Fleet. Then we finish off with Parasaphi and Nadris, and briefly mention the Ten Fools and what's up with them.

White Sand: Volume 1 was released today on GraphicAudio! 

In an interview earlier this year, Rik Hoskin revealed he was working with GraphicAudio to adapt Brandon's novel yet again! Rik has prior experience with GraphicAudio, which produces audiobooks that include a full cast of actors, sound effects, and cinematic music. While this new iteration is, at its core, an adaptation of the graphic novels, the script also pulls directly from the prose source material, and even includes scenes that had to be cut from the graphic novels.

Check out the book's page on GraphicAudio's website for a trailer as well as a 4-minute sample of some exciting action set towards the end of volume 1, chapter 1! With the prose novel available via Brandon's newsletter, this means we'll have three very different takes on the same story. Are you excited to see this new rendition of White Sand? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Time for another round of Coppermind objectives!

First we need to say a big thank you to everyone who helped out in June and July. I'm pleased to announce that we've officially crossed the 1 year anniversary for these objectives! We started these in July of last year. The amount of help we have received and the number of new people contributing to the wiki has been so encouraging, so I can't say enough how thankful we are for everyone who has participated so far!

We've got some exciting news about the state of the wiki as well... We're only 22 articles away from being 2/3 complete! This is a HUGE milestone that we're excited to hit in the very near future! We'd love to have your help getting there!

Now it's time for, shockingly, a podcast that isn't on Roshar! We're heading to Nalthis, the world of Warbreaker, and we're here to discuss some of the most important individuals on that planet: the Five Scholars! These are early cosmere scholars and researchers of Awakening, and you know, one of them created this little thing called Nightblood. I'm sure it's not that important... So refresh yourself on all of what we know on the Five Scholars, the Manywar, and more! 

This week we actually talk about the news, a brand-new Stormlight 4 reading! Then we discuss Cultivation and her plans. We carefully stay on the rails this time, even though we kind of go into the weeds with Cultivation's maybe-magic system. Come join us on this episode and maybe you'll grow some in your knowledge of Cultivation! Hah, get it? Okay, I'm done.

This might actually be the funniest Shardcast yet. This time, we have a random number generator pick a pair from about a hundred cosmere characters. Two teams must argue whether they should be shipped, or we should rip that ship. The best part is making people suffer arguing for really awful ships. Or maybe Alyx judging a certain Renarin ship... You won't be sad tuning into this one.