Forgery rewriting your birth

[Trusk'our]

Forgery can manipulate your spiritweb into believing that your past was something other than what it was, allowing you to make changes to your present self. But, could you change certain "random" elements of your conception? For instance, could you make yourself taller, or have a slightly different facial structure, or be healed of physical defects?

[Honorless]

Yes to everything, but it wouldn't be a one-and-done effect, it will be like what Shai did to Ashravan and the stamp would need to be reapplied periodically.

[Trusk'our]

On 12/7/2021 at 11:22 PM, Trusk'our said:

Forgery can manipulate your spiritweb into believing that your past was something other than what it was, allowing you to make changes to your present self. But, could you change certain "random" elements of your conception? For instance, could you make yourself taller, or have a slightly different facial structure, or be healed of physical defects?

So I actually went into the Arcanum, and it appears that it may not in fact be possible to do what I asked.

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Nazrax

Can Forgery rewrite someone's gender (after all, it's just swapping out an X for a Y ...)?

Brandon Sanderson

Forgery could do this, but it is a tad bigger a change than you imply. Think of it this way: It's much easier for the magic to pretend that a table was cleaned up and polished than it is for the magic to pretend the wood used to make the table instead was used to make a chair.

But then again...

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Questioner

[In Forging], if you rewrite the history of an item, and it took effect permanently, would there ever be a potential to have a butterfly effect, out beyond the history of the item, that might directly affect something somewhere else in the world?

Brandon Sanderson

It would be very very hard for that to ever happen, because it's like spliced DNA or something like that. It's not real. It's a forgery. Nothing else considers it, that it did that. The only tricky bit would be if you have children, and you've rewritten yourself in an interesting way that’s actually changed your DNA, that... might have ramifications.

so maybe you could change yourself in the way I suggest, but it would be harder than changing your spiritweb to believe you had different experiences.