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Ubeka

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Ubeka last won the day on October 28 2018

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  1. I personally wasn't sold on AoL till the very end. It was an "okay" read for most of the part and I agree on the previous criticism that it just takes really long for Waxillium to actually jump into action and, y'know, do protagonist things. In a way, most of my frustration with that book came from just not meeting expectations. For one, like many others, I was disappointed to see hardly any callback or even mention of the major characters or even terms and magics from Era 1 - on the other, my eyebrows raised that, after everyone sold this book to me as cowboy-themed and stuff, we leave the prairie after a chapter or two and instead go back to the city. Things came together for me at Miles' execution and when Marsh finally shows up. That was a great callback and such a good setup for sequels. Then the reveal on the train was even better. That was when I suddenly liked AoL. I absolutely loved SoS after that (though, to be fair, that again left me wanting in terms of promises - the Hemalurgy book wasn't even really mentioned or discussed iirc and Trell and everything else the Set was working on kinda left up in the air) and BoM was decent. Era 2 as a whole has a very weird thing going on where, very unlike Sanderson usually, it sets a bunch of stuff up but doesn't really get back to that or actually deliver already. This is sadly true even for basic metals. We've never seen a single nicroburst or leecher in action for example - which is a bit of a letdown when it's only now been revealed.
  2. The beginning of the book throws way too much at the reader at once due to the weird timeskip As much as I love the interconnection of Cosmere stories and speculating on its effects later down the line, this book handed out bigger Cosmere connections out WAY TOO freely Way too many references to Dawnshard to reinforce that I haven't read the spin-off novella and should do so - I liked Dawnshard as well, yes, but it felt less like an author referencing another connected work and more like a weird salesman pitch for me to BUY DAWNSHARD TODAY This book has the absolute worst of Jasnah so far and dehumanizes her incredibly; her sudden romantic relationship with Wit furthermore feels unnatural and makes me downright uncomfortable I could empathize with Venli a bunch, surprisingly - she is not particularly likeable at most points but her self-destructive ego is apparent and understandable where it originated from Under the lens of this book focusing on the order of Willshapers, this book failed It made no sense that Kaladin could kill Lezrian so viciously and maliciously and do a straight up sith eye colour transition without penalty, when previously straying off the right path and calling onto his powers in an actual situation of trying to protect someone almost completely destroyed his Nahel bond All in all still a good read and looking forward to re-reading it soon.
  3. The Dakhor Monks have dedicated quite some time into research of the specific patterns embedded in their bones for magical effect. In fact, they have perhaps the greatest knowledge of Sel's magic systems and their peculiar relationship with geometry. As such, many monks have looked into other magical effects of geometry and, as a by-product, perfected the art of gardening. When a few of them did successfully worldhop and end up in the Rosharan sub-astral, they were quite welcome among many spren societies. Wyndle was in fact a fast friend with one particular Dakhor Monk and will eventually reminiscince of the beautiful gardens they may have been able to grow together. Baon and Renarin Kholin
  4. First off, big props to this well-put together theory! It was a delight to read and very interesting and -mostly- cohesive. Now there are some parts that I kinda want to weigh in on with some skeptic comments and questions, mostly in regards to pathways to power. There are several things I'd like to address here. Let's start with those that regard Hemalurgy. You theorize metal is Hemalurgy's pathway to power - however, I think this is conflating your own pathway concept with the focus. Clearly, what metal the spike is made of influences what can be stolen or transferred - but so does the hemalurgic bind point. Furthermore, you postulate that pathways are consumed in performing the magic. Hemalurgy, however, does NOT follow this if metal is truly its pathway. Spikes are not burnt like metals in Allomancy. They are not consumed by spiking to splice off sDNA or transplant it. I would argue that metal, just like in Allomancy, is Hemalurgy's focus (or at least part thereof - remember bind points). The pathway should be something different however. Perhaps blood? There is the reference that Hemalurgy owes its very name to requiring the flow of blood past the spikes - and perhaps this is where the pathway to power is actually hidden. A similar argument can be made for Surgebinding and its proposed pathway of bonds. Where are these bonds consumed? Also the proposed pathway here is not what provides the Investiture necessary to perform Surgebinding. The Investiture is already available from Stormlight and needs only be breathed in. Now, perhaps the "pathway" is somewhere in that breathing in moment or perhaps just in gems and spheres being able to store stormlight. These are some options I could see. I also am skeptical of the implications when you say "metal may be Ruin's pathway everywhere and not just on Scadrial". I may have missed it but I think a magic user's actual position in the cosmere is relatively unimportant for how their magic works. The effects and focus are decided by the planet the magic originated on - but the pathway, as I understood it, is defined by the correlating Shard and its Spin. Except for Selish magics (and perhaps Surgebinding cause you can't really get Spren off-world as far as we know), this, to me, does not imply that a magic user shouldn't be able to access and work their abilities off-world, so long as they can get Investiture as fuel. Allomancy and Awakening were shown to work just fine off-Scadrial/Nalthis. Curious to hear your thoughts on these discrepancies I noted!
  5. Ubeka

    General Cosmere Art

  6. Great system so far! I feel that you have worked very well on going deep rather than wide with it, especially with the interesting combination of Shifting and Infusing. I can see some very cool applications of this in a story already. Some things that I noticed, though, is that a couple of the basic rules seem a tad arbitrary. I like the groupings "solids" and "fluids", those are fine. But the A-A, B-B, C-C correspondence doesn't feel consistent. Howcome crystals are paired with smoke, why are metals paired with water? (Another nitpick here would be: metals are crystalline as well but perhaps you could go for gemstones instead of crystals to work your way around that) There's a similar "problem" with Infusing. We seem to have quite mixed effects of whether Infusing strengthens or weakens something within the two categories. Stones become heavier, so there is an increase, while blades (made of metal) cut easier - meaning there's less "force" necessary. This also seems a bit inconsistent. These aren't big issues, mind you, but maybe it'd be good to consider streamlining things a bit here. You did a great job so far!
  7. Ubeka

    The King's Wit

    "I wonder if you could do that to a man. Pull him apart, emotion by emotion, bit by bit, bloody chunk by bloody chunk. Then combine them back together into something else, like a Dysian Aimian." For relaxation I decided to play around with color palettes and ended up drawing Wit aka Hoid from the Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. I loved basically everything about these books so far but Hoid's quips are always a good extra
  8. Been a while! In the meantime I have brooded over some of the mage category names and decided to change Shifters and Changeminds after I had some ideas as to everyday uses of the latter. Changeminds, which have now been renamed to Couriers, are actually rather cherished as message runners and delivery men for the rich and the nobility time. Their abilities lend themselves well to travelling long distance in short time and quickly getting their strength back when resting as well as transporting highly important letters or even packages since they needn't carry them on their person and therefore are fairly safe from being stolen. Shifters got renamed to Shiftminds since I still kinda liked the Changemind name and figured it could well work for people who basically "shift gears" or play around with magnetic repulsion and attraction. I've also decided that the reason why Iridescent Elixir isn't returned in small parts to the donor is because it significantly reduces the quality of the entire Eye Colour sample. In order to maximize magical output, the Elixir has to be applied in one full dose to the same person. Spreading it out over several people will trade in a lot of the potential use. I've also settled on two major candidates for the magic system's name. Looking over my long list, I figured most of them were just a little too technical or focused too much on just the Eye Colour part, which really is just a little facet. So, the two options on the table right now are either Chromastery or Varna (after the Sanskrit word for colour). They're both still very related to the colour aspect but they're not quite as blatant in my opinion. Would love to see what you folks think of the new bits. :>
  9. As a general tip I'd formulate the magic's rules and characteristics a little more in detail and preferably with full sentences. It's a little hard to follow as is. Have you decided what kind of problems your magic should help solve? Since it sounds like you're going for a harder-feel magic and want some strict mechanics to explain in-depth what's happening, perhaps it would help to determine the kinda scenarios where the magic is applied. Will it be largely combat-related? Will it be an everyday commodity used in all fields of life? Will it be used as a source of conflict in the story? That should kinda help you decide on what abilities or categories of abilities you want to use. I generally found it helpful to tie things thematically to a degree. If you're going to use categories, best keep them few in number. Otherwise maybe focus on one specific kind of magic you'd like to do. Also, a little nitpick but: if parasite and host are in symbiosis, the parasite isn't a parasite. Parasitism is taking advantage of a host without giving anything in return. I'm also not sure if I understand what the parasite is getting out of this deal. Do the memories, experiences ect. that are fed to it disappear from the host's mind? Will there be a cost to your magic system?
  10. Ooh, I am a big fan of the adapting-to-light-changes slowness. Added it to my personal notes alongside with reduced contrast perception and a general oversensibility to brightness. That's not really how the categories work. Compression is called that because you compress something from outside in yourself. Expansion is the opposite, and Distribution is just changing "entropy" for lack of a better work. I do like the idea, however, that only Asheyes could Extract Eye Colour. It would make sense for most monks to be Asheyes then and also put some interesting restrictions on the characters that already have some Eye Colour themselves. I also remembered something about the Asheyes, namely that they tend to be easier influenced by the effects of Aura. It makes for some not-so-pretty historical anecdotes where Tyrants were prone to enlist Asheyes to better control them and use them as shock troops in the many bloody wars the continent has seen. Currently I'm working a little on a name for the system overall. Tried a bunch of things with Color-, Chroma-, Spectra, ect. somewhere in there. So far the only ones that really tickle my fancy are Chromancy or Prismancy. I'm not 100% settled on these yet, though.
  11. Hey guys, thanks for the feedback! That reasoning definitely makes sense. I'm tending towards making the magic (in theory) available to everyone. I've been wary of giving some baseline buff to people just holding Eye Colour as it treads dangerously close to BioChromatic Breath but since I kinda want the same economical aspect for my magic system it might not be avoidable. It certainly would provide some more conflict of interest, though I'd prefer to keep Eye Colour a "common good" but still finite. I'll brood a little over this and maybe use it as a starting point for refinement of the availability problem. Definitely agree with this. Ideally, if two magic users fought, one "serving" of the Iridescent Elixir should roughly last them for the whole duel. For more extreme cases it'd be paramount to find a place to retreat and delicately replenish your Eye Colour. Well, that is true, there is not really a common theme for these abilities. My workflow for this magic system basically was first to just brainstorm as many cool abilities as possible. Afterwards, while looking at Mistborn's Allomancy and its categories, I figured to set down rough categories myself to help me create a selection from that pool of ideas. I knew I wanted nine basic abilities and so I put forth the three categories Expansive, Compressive, and Distributive (which tie in a little with some worldbuilding from earlier drafts of the story this is supposed to be included in). Hence the actual abilities are widely diverse and perhaps not streamlined enough yet. Yeah, I can definitely see that. It's a bit of a problem since the specialist abilities were introduced sorta to include some more abilities I liked but also to create some more balance in the magic system between different classes. StarChewers, for example, seemed powerful enough with just foresight and perhaps the system's most versatile ability Mimicry so I figured they couldn't have time slowdown as well. For Dancers I meanwhile felt that it fit in with their whole motif of moving about elegantly and precisely. But you're right, there should be some in-universe reasoning for this as well. That said, there's still the possibility of some more specialist abilities appearing. Just not necessarily for each class. The mist is the medium of the ability in this case. Being an Expansive ability, it basically spreads your own being over the perimeter. In the case of Pneuma this is literally spreading-yourself-thin and hence why you yourself remain motionless while controlling the dead around you. If you can dispel the mist, you can also effectively cancel a Stronghold's hold over their puppets. Yeah, that's true. It's something I've been worrying about for some time now but just the concept of this ability was fascinating enough that I really want to keep it. I probably need to impose some more limitations on this like for example that you can't really change density of your body (i. e. turning to smoke or similar stunts won't work). I could restrict it to only give access to properties of solids (translucency/opacity, brittleness/toughness, roughness/slickness). Or perhaps reduce the overall effect, making it so you can become MORE transparent, but not completely, sorta by a rule of averages between your own body and the material consumed. Not sure I get the latter half about an "inherent ability" like in Stormlight. Do you mean just the ability to draw in Stormlight here? I'd like to keep it to just the nine double-ability classes. Having another nine groups with just one ability would be too much in my opinion. Main issue here is just deciding on a determining characteristic and whether it's character-specific (something linked to personal beliefs, behaviour, morals, ect. like the Nahel Bond) or just being randomly born with it (like Mistings in Mistborn). For the latter it may correlate with the actual color of the eyes, which then would not work by our laws of genetics probably. I'm definitely a fan of the idea of the procedure leaving you temporarily blinded. It'd provide a very good deterrent and reason why the Order tightly regulates the Eye Colour economy. Only thing is that I'd want Extraction to basically be an "all or nothing" process. I'm imagining it to look really weird when you drain only one eye. I think making the Iridescent Elixir requires a human's full Eye Colour supply. Only then can Eye Colour be distributed in fractions. Logically this would raise the question why people don't just have their complete Eye Colour Extracted, then be given back at least a few drops of it. It'd result in a smaller payout, but it would be the easiest way to avoid becoming an Asheyes. Perhaps it's something to do with the Elixir requiring some time to become stable or generally being somewhat volatile under air so you'd usually want to only apply it in a full dose as well. I have played with the idea of blindness for Asheyes but I think it's too extreme. One or two characters I have intended for the story would start out as Asheyes, and I feel blindness would be too big of a handicap. The pupil of Asheyes remains black, meaning they can still see. But perhaps the loss of Eye Colour decreases vision in regards to contrast. Asheyes would have a harder time making out precise differences in brightness/darkness. Not being able to regain Eye Colour would also not quite work for my plans. The Order actually Extracts Eye Colour of all their new monks upon joining (a sign of humility and to cut them off from using magic). A select few, however, are allowed to replenish their Eye Colour - to use magic to hunt down runaways and traitors that might spill the beans on how Extraction is performed. This wouldn't be possible if Asheyes cannot regain Eye Colour. So far I was considering that Asheyes are generally associated with being poor and that there is also a bit of a religious prejudice against them where Eye Colour is viewed as a divine gift. I agree that there needs to be more of a drawback to Extracting your Eye Colour (or reversely, a benefit to keeping or even amassing it). Oof, big post. Again, thank you very much for your feedback so far! It's giving me a lot of things to consider for optimization and refinement of the system. Any further input is, of course, just as appreciated. :>
  12. Oh, I've found the gallery already and added a couple pieces there. :> Aside from the three Stormlight books I've read Warbreaker and the first Mistborn Trilogy so far. I either wanna move on to Elantris or Alloy of Law next after I finish a few other books that have piled up in my to-be-read stack, haha.
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