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What is the coolest thing you can do with soulstamps?


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I couldn’t find very many threads about forgery, and the possibilities of soulstamps, so I made one! I honestly think soulstamps are really cool, and I’m curious to see what people think up about how you can use them. ( I also may or may not be gathering ideas for my alleyverse character :ph34r:).

I’ll start with an idea that came to my mind: what if you could soulstamp a sword while fighting to make it extra hot or frigid, or to soulstamp poison onto it or something? You could even change its shape, and switch tactics in a flash. I don’t know If that sounds dumb, but I figured the possibilities could be cool :P.

Edited by Rosharan A.C.
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I'm not sure you could use stamps to make a sword hot/cold/poisonous. When you stamp something, you're changing its past. So to change it into any of the aforementioned states, the changes would need to occur right before you're using it which would be impossible to predict in advance. I could see a stamp being used to change your weapon to a different type of weapon by making it so the blacksmith made an mace instead of a sword for example. I could also see maybe toppling a building by having its foundation weakened in the past to make a quick escape, but you would need to have your escape route planned well in advance. Other than that, if you're trying to use stamps for combat purposes, I see more utility in changing yourself or allies rather than objects. 

Edited by Harrycrapper
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Honestly I could do a lot with soulstamping.  Its strength is really substituting for past experiences in which you did not do as well as you should have.  I want to have done better in school.  OK just soulstamp to make it so I studied for those tests.  Some fun side notes though. 

Could you make a computer network think that you had bought apple stock 30 years ago? 

If something is unknown like where a treasure is buried could you plausibly forge the entire treasure? 

Just now, king of nowhere said:

[ducks]

Throws something. 

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  • 5 weeks later...
On 5/12/2020 at 5:39 PM, Aluminum said:

you probably could rewrite the history so that you had poisoned the sword before

 

This is still going up against the same problem. I'm not an expert on poison, but I would think most poison would lose efficacy over time so you would need to know the exact time you needed it poisoned. The poison would definitely have a bigger window than the cold/hot options, but you'd really need to plan that out in advance and that stamp would be a single use, not something you could re use in any situation. I guess you could change yourself so that you very often have the tendency to poison your weapons, but you could also just decide to do that without a stamp...

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47 minutes ago, Harrycrapper said:

This is still going up against the same problem. I'm not an expert on poison, but I would think most poison would lose efficacy over time so you would need to know the exact time you needed it poisoned. The poison would definitely have a bigger window than the cold/hot options, but you'd really need to plan that out in advance and that stamp would be a single use, not something you could re use in any situation. I guess you could change yourself so that you very often have the tendency to poison your weapons, but you could also just decide to do that without a stamp...

Nah, a lot of poisons are relatively stable.  You'd basically just need to have had a decent chunk of time since you last drew the sword, enough that you could have applied the poison since you last used it. That being said, you would be applying a Soulstamp to the object right at the start of (or in the middle of) a fight, and I suspect it would be similarly difficult to apply the Stamp under pressure as it would to apply the literal Poison.  

 

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In a more modern era, you could have cars with dedicated sets of soulstamps, because a lot of the time, problems with cars are due to minor factors that result in failure. If the battery dies, you use the soulstamp that says that it has just a little more charge, and you use that time to find a replacement. If the engine overheats, you use the dedicated soulstamp it to have not overheated to the point of failure, during which time you let the engine cool off. If the tire goes flat, you pull out the soulstamp that says that the tire was strong enough to not be punctured.

When you buy a car, it would come with a box of soulstamps and an instruction manual that identifies which soulstamp should be used for which problem, and there would be a warranty for the stamps as well (*This stamp comes with a 5 year warranty for damages caused by normal use*)

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Since soul stamps work better the more plausible the scenario is, I think it could be exploited by creating scenarios where several outcomes have a near equal probability. For example, you could turn an entire library into a single book like so:

  1. Give each book in the library a number.
  2. Use some uniformly random system to choose a number.
  3. Copy the entire contents of that book down into a new, blank book.
  4. Now, whenever you need a book from that library, create a soulstamp for the book you copied the information into. In this soulstamp, the only thing in the object's past that changed was the random number that was chosen in step 2. While we don't know much about the mechanics of soul stamps, such a small and plausible change should be a fairly straightforward soulstamp, and should take well.
  5. With the right tools, you now have portable access to an entire library!
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  • 2 weeks later...

The three restrictions that we know of are:

1. They need to be reasonable

2. They need to be detailed. i.e. if you make a superfreezer, you need to know how exactly the process to make it works.

3. Soulstamps are fragile! They can be easily damaged, after which they will be immediately popped off.

4. Changing an object is likely to break off the Stamp.

Spoiler

 

DTF_20170515

Why refrigerate food when you can just stamp spoiled food so that it was stored properly before?

Aurora_Fatalis

You'll have to ask Brandon how that'd interact with gastric acid breaking down the stamp. Or how porous/loose material interacts with stamps in the first place.

Come to think of it... There's a WoB saying the Nightwatcher could change your species, but have a hard time making a spren bond to you. So... could the Nightwatcher turn you Scadrian and make you eligible for Allomantic powers? Or does the Nightwatcher's boons operate on soulstamp principles?

Hell, let's say you bought a vial of the wrong metal on your field trip to Sel. Could you pay a Forger to stamp the vial into being a vial of the right metal (it's believable that you would check before such an important trip) and then drink the metal contained in the vial to fuel your Allomancy?

Brandon Sanderson

All right, all right. Let's see... /u/Aurora_Fatalis, changing metals around with other forms of Investiture is generally going to work, according to how I view the magic right now. The power is there, you just need to align the matter the right way. So forging new metals: not too difficult. This is because Allomancy isn't actually using Investiture in the metals, but using it as a key to get power from somewhere else.

Forging a sword to be a Shardblade, however, would be very, very difficult for multiple reasons. The most obvious one is that the Investiture required would be enormous. A Shardblade is a highly-Invested object, with its own self-aware soul.

If you could overcome the initial resistance invested objects have to being influenced by other magics (something that Forgery is particularly good at doing anyway) you'd theoretically be able to change Shardblade/spren's personality like you could a person's.

Fooling the magic via Connection and Identity is not so hard, under the right circumstances, so making a Forger into an Elantrian (or an Allomancer) for a short time is plausible. Making yourself into a Radiant, however, would be more difficult--because the limitations placed on that magic have to do with persuading a sapient being you are worth the bond.

Aurora_Fatalis

How about regular food? If I stamp a pineapple pizza into a pepperoni pizza and eat it, what nutrients do I end up with?

Brandon Sanderson

The way I have it working now, I believe (though I'd have to do some double-checking, as it's been a while since I've been working on Sel) soulstamps are more fragile than things like Aons, and it would be very hard to eat something with one without breaking it. But assuming you could, you'd get nutrients from what it had become--but those would change back once the stamp broke or ran out.

It is possible to go so far down this rabbit hole, however, that the chemistry of Forging (like the physics of Allomancy) it just can't make sense any more. So be aware.

Oversleep

With things like Stamping metals for Allomancy, you have said that it'd be possible for short time, but then burning it would break the Seal and metal would revert back.

I guess it would be similar with food, right?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, that's the big problem with Forging. Getting the stamp to stay in place once you start to change the object that has been stamped.

General Reddit 2018 (Aug. 27, 2018)

 

 

*Spoiler tag is for the sake of condensing a WoB*

I was wondering if you could Stamp a sword that was close to Nightblood and convince it that it had absorbed the Breath, since there doesn't seem to be an Investiture cap on Soulstamping. It was pointed out that that would probably damage the Dor on Sel, but would the sword still have sentience? We can see that you can change an object that has been Stamped, otherwise the Emperor's Soul just wouldn't have been possible.

I don't actually know where I was going with this, but those are the only limits as far as I'm aware. Otherwise, you have access to the ability to change anything using the Investiture of at least one Shard given enough time and thought.

 

 

 

Edited by Hoidolasium
The last paragraph
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