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Grouping the Shards and Metals [Discus]


Karger

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We now have 14 shards.  Grouping them in fours should now be possible.  Here are my groupings, subgroupings and why.  I though subgroupings would be useful.  I have them as positive or negative based on how I think a shard operates.  Note that Negative does not mean evil/dangerous.  Instead that axis refers to weather I think a shard is working too something or primarily against something.  I am also adding internal or external based on if I think the shard's power starts from within or without IE Cultivation pushes things to grow against their environment but Ruin breaks from the outside.  Members of the same group and subgroup are opposites as in allomancy.

THIS IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS.  I would like additional opinions whenever possible.

Change/Probability/Temporal Shards. 

  • Ruin:  Rather obvious but nonetheless clearly belongs here.  Ruin is the shard of entropy.  Its power wants to increase the randomness of the universe avoiding order.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative External. 
  • Preservation: Similarly wants the opposite.  Preservation is the shard of stasis.  It wants to make things happen in more static and orderly ways avoiding chaos.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative Internal. 
  • Cultivation:  A shard of development according to natural rules.  Think evolution, learning, and growth.  Organisms who learn to take advantage of their surroundings based on predictable results.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive Internal.
  • Wimsey:  This one might be a bit controversial but I personally see Wimsey as this temporal rather then emotional shard.  It also functions a lot as an anti Cultivation which is somewhat rational.  Wimsey is random but random in such a way that coincidences seem targeted.  You flip a coin 100 times and never get tails.  You bet your house on this new inexplicable fact of nature and get heads.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive External. 

Connection/Relation Shards

  • Autonomy:  A shard of independence and mastery.  Wants things less connected and for existing connections to weaken.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative Internal. 
  • Honor:  A shard of connection and promises.  Wants things to get steadily more connected and for those connections to get stronger.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive Internal. 
  • Dominion:  A shard of ownership.  Wants for things to fall under an authority.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative External. 
  • Devotion:  A shard of caring.  Wants to give authority to another.  I am going to add the subgroup Positives External. 

Desire/Emotion Shards

  • Valor:  A shard of courage and acting against interest   Works to eliminate dangers and follow through on difficult missions.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive Internal.
  • Mercy:  A shard of defense and reaction.  Works to eliminate cruelty or death.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative Internal.
  • Ambition:  A shard of wants or desires.  Works to grab, take, or master.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive External.
  • Odium:  A shard of hatred and emotion.  Works to topple all wrong or punish those who abuse what they have.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative External.

Interpretation/Creation Shards.

  • Invention:  A shard of advantages and planing.  Wants to create things of interest or use.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive External.
  • Endowment:  A shard of beautifying.  Wants to make a more vibrant, colorful, or interesting.  The shard that made our lives miserable.  I am going to add the subgroup Positive Internal.
  • Speculative shard Prudence:  We know a little about a Wisdom shard.  I choose Prudence because I think it is a good ant-Invention.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative Internal.
  • Speculative shard:  Correction.  A shard of elimination and judgement.  Adonalsium might believe that something is no longer serving its purpose and required alteration.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative External.

Metallic arts to make things interesting and also let me guess a few things about fabrails.  I decided to pair each shard to a metal based on its effects and then use that confection to figure out the rest of fabrails.  I spoilered for length as I think the wall of text was bad enough.
 

Spoiler

Temporal Metals.

  • Gold: Cultivation.  Healing seeing your past and using it to inform you.  Gold in the Tower.  (Potentially) Possibly a spren equivalent of a metalmind.
  • Bendalloy: Wimsey.  Giving you the time and calories to do the improbable.  (Potentially) Tells spren to act less characteristically.
  • Cadmium: Preservation.  Keeps things the same a little longer.  (Potentially) Tells spren to maintain something(ie keep heat at this temperature).
  • Electrum: Ruin.  It's a poor man's atium.  (Potentially) Tells spren to destroy something.

Enhancement metals

  • Aluminum: Autonomy.  Purges the soul of everything else makes you more you.  Tells spren to ignore certain stimuli.
  • Duralumin: Honor.  Connects the soul more strongly to other things.  (Potentially) Tells spren to respond more strongly to something.
  • Nicrosil: Dominion.  Allows you to overpower others or master your abilities. (Potentially) allows spren to make other spren act a certain way(IE if two spren are somehow in communication.  You could have a more intelligent/obedient spren command those that are less so).
  • Chromium: Devotion.  Gives others help.  (Potentially) Makes one spren try and imitate another

Physical

  • Steel:  Odium.  Smashes against others.  Moves faster like an "angry" runner's high. Known to act as a repeller and flip polarities. 
  • Pewter: Valor.  Strength.  Enough said.  Enhances fabrails.  COME ON SPREN!  GIVE ME 110%!
  • Iron: Ambition.  Pulls toward you.  Makes deals with substance.  Fabrail is the same as pulling.
  • Tin: Mercy.  Makes you feel everything more.  Fabrail makes the spren feel the thing more so they moderate by pulling back a bit.

Mental

  • Bronze: Endowment.  Allows you to take in knew sensations.  Used to create alerters
  • Copper:  Prudence.  Keeps you safe and makes sure you remember.  (Potentially) used for the same thing with spren.
  • Zinc: Invention.  Pushes the limits comes through with new ideas.  Used to manifest spren more strongly.
  • Brass: Correction.  Pulls back returns to the proper amount(heat).  Reverse zinc for spren.
Edited by Karger
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This is great. For some reason, Autonomy and aluminium really fit together to me. I can't comment about all of it right now, though I do wish to mention that there's a WoB stating that Atium when alloyed gives both temporal and mental effects, while Lerasium gives physical and enhancement effects, and so I'd think that their shard's corresponding normal metal would be in one of those quadrants, though I understand it won't work with the opposites. I'll write more later.

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2 hours ago, Trutharchivist said:

though I do wish to mention that there's a WoB stating that Atium when alloyed gives both temporal and mental effects, while Lerasium gives physical and enhancement effects, and so I'd think that their shard's corresponding normal metal would be in one of those quadrants

Hm.  Godmetals are a bit strange.  There alloys might be more so.

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14 hours ago, Trutharchivist said:

This is great. For some reason, Autonomy and aluminium really fit together to me. I can't comment about all of it right now, though I do wish to mention that there's a WoB stating that Atium when alloyed gives both temporal and mental effects, while Lerasium gives physical and enhancement effects, and so I'd think that their shard's corresponding normal metal would be in one of those quadrants, though I understand it won't work with the opposites. I'll write more later.

This is cool. I put Ruin in the Temporal quadrant of my Shards chart and Preservation in the Physical, so that matches nicely! 
 

So on my chart Autonomy is in the Cognitive quadrant, so it’s secondary would be either Physical or Temporal. 

Edited by Kingsdaughter613
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5 hours ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

Invention has very little to do with Wisdom or Prudence. If it was, we wouldn’t have all the RL problems that resulted from it.

Oh I agree, maybe that's why he didn't go along with those names for the Shard. Are you aware of all the WoBs regarding the Survival / hiding / Wisdom etc Shard? Because I said that in reference to that. Harmony said he couldn't find Invention again, the Survival / Wisdom Shard was said to have been hiding. Brandon also said Wisdom isn't quite that Shard's Intent and that they're realizing maybe to do better than hiding, which is what I think led them to allow Harming to contact them.

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12 minutes ago, Honorless said:

Oh I agree, maybe that's why he didn't go along with those names for the Shard. Are you aware of all the WoBs regarding the Survival / hiding / Wisdom etc Shard? Because I said that in reference to that. Harmony said he couldn't find Invention again, the Survival / Wisdom Shard was said to have been hiding. Brandon also said Wisdom isn't quite that Shard's Intent and that they're realizing maybe to do better than hiding, which is what I think led them to allow Harming to contact them.

He’s indicated that Prudence may be a Shard name though, and they would be two very different things.

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  • 3 weeks later...

wouldn't preservation also oppose cultivation.

the way i saw it was more 

ruin - "negative" change (towards entropy or chaotic change)

culti - "positive" change (away from entropy or controlled/directed/specific change)

preservation - no change

 

 

the shards change themselves in the context of other shards. preservation would preserve things to not be destroyed in the context of Ruin. with Cultivation it would want to preserve the original state or Identity.

Edited by beejsbj
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Interesting idea, but we shouldn't forget that there are more than 16 relevant metals, if there's a shard-metal parallel it's possible one of the Shard is grouped with silver and Hoid or Frost is grouped with one of the 16th, Sanderson did say there was a reason he called his group the 17th shard

Also I'm a bit frustrated by the Connection/Relation quadrant, one one hand I feel like Honour is not as much opposite of Automony as Dominion but on another hand I feel like Devotion and Honour being opposite is quite dumb and on a third hand I feel like Autonomy should be external and Devotion internal (Autonomy is about me needing the other people and Devotion is about how I feel toward this other person/cause)

On 19/12/2020 at 9:11 PM, beejsbj said:

wouldn't preservation also oppose cultivation.

the way i saw it was more 

ruin - "negative" change (towards entropy or chaotic change)

culti - "positive" change (away from entropy or controlled/directed/specific change)

preservation - no change

 

 

the shards change themselves in the context of other shards. preservation would preserve things to not be destroyed in the context of Ruin. with Cultivation it would want to preserve the original state or Identity.

Nothing can decrease entropy except maybe the big crunch. Also Preservation loved LR's kingdom despite it undergoing serious instability every hundred years (quite similarly to how forests need to burn a few times per century) so I doubt he's enough on the "nothing must change" mindset to be an intrinsic opposite to Cultivation.

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On 20/11/2020 at 2:30 AM, Karger said:

We now have 14 shards.  Grouping them in fours should now be possible.  Here are my groupings, subgroupings and why.  I though subgroupings would be useful.  I have them as positive or negative based on how I think a shard operates.  Note that Negative does not mean evil/dangerous.  Instead that axis refers to weather I think a shard is working too something or primarily against something.  I am also adding internal or external based on if I think the shard's power starts from within or without IE Cultivation pushes things to grow against their environment but Ruin breaks from the outside.  Members of the same group and subgroup are opposites as in allomancy.

THIS IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS.  I would like additional opinions whenever possible.

Change/Probability/Temporal Shards. 

  • Ruin:  Rather obvious but nonetheless clearly belongs here.  Ruin is the shard of entropy.  Its power wants to increase the randomness of the universe avoiding order.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative External. 
  • Preservation: Similarly wants the opposite.  Preservation is the shard of stasis.  It wants to make things happen in more static and orderly ways avoiding chaos.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative Internal. 
  • Cultivation:  A shard of development according to natural rules.  Think evolution, learning, and growth.  Organisms who learn to take advantage of their surroundings based on predictable results.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive Internal.
  • Wimsey:  This one might be a bit controversial but I personally see Wimsey as this temporal rather then emotional shard.  It also functions a lot as an anti Cultivation which is somewhat rational.  Wimsey is random but random in such a way that coincidences seem targeted.  You flip a coin 100 times and never get tails.  You bet your house on this new inexplicable fact of nature and get heads.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive External. 

Connection/Relation Shards

  • Autonomy:  A shard of independence and mastery.  Wants things less connected and for existing connections to weaken.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative Internal. 
  • Honor:  A shard of connection and promises.  Wants things to get steadily more connected and for those connections to get stronger.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive Internal. 
  • Dominion:  A shard of ownership.  Wants for things to fall under an authority.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative External. 
  • Devotion:  A shard of caring.  Wants to give authority to another.  I am going to add the subgroup Positives External. 

Desire/Emotion Shards

  • Valor:  A shard of courage and acting against interest   Works to eliminate dangers and follow through on difficult missions.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive Internal.
  • Mercy:  A shard of defense and reaction.  Works to eliminate cruelty or death.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative Internal.
  • Ambition:  A shard of wants or desires.  Works to grab, take, or master.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive External.
  • Odium:  A shard of hatred and emotion.  Works to topple all wrong or punish those who abuse what they have.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative External.

Interpretation/Creation Shards.

  • Invention:  A shard of advantages and planing.  Wants to create things of interest or use.  I am going to add the subgroups Positive External.
  • Endowment:  A shard of beautifying.  Wants to make a more vibrant, colorful, or interesting.  The shard that made our lives miserable.  I am going to add the subgroup Positive Internal.
  • Speculative shard Prudence:  We know a little about a Wisdom shard.  I choose Prudence because I think it is a good ant-Invention.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative Internal.
  • Speculative shard:  Correction.  A shard of elimination and judgement.  Adonalsium might believe that something is no longer serving its purpose and required alteration.  I am going to add the subgroups Negative External.

Metallic arts to make things interesting and also let me guess a few things about fabrails.  I decided to pair each shard to a metal based on its effects and then use that confection to figure out the rest of fabrails.  I spoilered for length as I think the wall of text was bad enough.
 

  Reveal hidden contents

Temporal Metals.

  • Gold: Cultivation.  Healing seeing your past and using it to inform you.  Gold in the Tower.  (Potentially) Possibly a spren equivalent of a metalmind.
  • Bendalloy: Wimsey.  Giving you the time and calories to do the improbable.  (Potentially) Tells spren to act less characteristically.
  • Cadmium: Preservation.  Keeps things the same a little longer.  (Potentially) Tells spren to maintain something(ie keep heat at this temperature).
  • Electrum: Ruin.  It's a poor man's atium.  (Potentially) Tells spren to destroy something.

Enhancement metals

  • Aluminum: Autonomy.  Purges the soul of everything else makes you more you.  Tells spren to ignore certain stimuli.
  • Duralumin: Honor.  Connects the soul more strongly to other things.  (Potentially) Tells spren to respond more strongly to something.
  • Nicrosil: Dominion.  Allows you to overpower others or master your abilities. (Potentially) allows spren to make other spren act a certain way(IE if two spren are somehow in communication.  You could have a more intelligent/obedient spren command those that are less so).
  • Chromium: Devotion.  Gives others help.  (Potentially) Makes one spren try and imitate another

Physical

  • Steel:  Odium.  Smashes against others.  Moves faster like an "angry" runner's high. Known to act as a repeller and flip polarities. 
  • Pewter: Valor.  Strength.  Enough said.  Enhances fabrails.  COME ON SPREN!  GIVE ME 110%!
  • Iron: Ambition.  Pulls toward you.  Makes deals with substance.  Fabrail is the same as pulling.
  • Tin: Mercy.  Makes you feel everything more.  Fabrail makes the spren feel the thing more so they moderate by pulling back a bit.

Mental

  • Bronze: Endowment.  Allows you to take in knew sensations.  Used to create alerters
  • Copper:  Prudence.  Keeps you safe and makes sure you remember.  (Potentially) used for the same thing with spren.
  • Zinc: Invention.  Pushes the limits comes through with new ideas.  Used to manifest spren more strongly.
  • Brass: Correction.  Pulls back returns to the proper amount(heat).  Reverse zinc for spren.

I'd group them slightly differently but I agree with the broad concept.

 

I think they will be based on how Intent drives them.

 

Outcome Shards (Consequentialism): the end aims you wish to fulfil

Ruin, Autonomy, Preservation, Dominion

Instinct Shards:  underlying emotional/instinctual drives that motivate actions (existentialism)

Odium, Devotion, Whimsy, Ambition

"Journey" Shards (Deontology): how you go about fulfilling aims

Honor, Mercy, Cultivation, Endowment

Ideals/Virtues: the type of person you try to be, basing choices on a specific ideal (Virtue Ethics)

Valor, Prudence (or similar), Invention, suggested Shard of Honesty (based on the unaccounted for attributes of an Abrahamic God)

And they all get rough pairs as well.

 

 

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23 minutes ago, Karger said:

Preservation loved TLR not necessarily his kingdom.

Quote

“Now, now,” God said. “That would be hasty. What would removing him accomplish? It would just raise another leader who is more transient—and cause chaos and even more deaths than the Lord Ruler has caused. Better to have stability. Yes. A constant leader.”

I was indeed wrong about Preservation loving the kingdom, but he still seems to have some kind of tolerance margin about change and destruction.

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On 30.11.2020 at 10:34 AM, Friendshipspren said:

Isn't invention being prudent by hiding for so long ?

Us not having seen Invention is not the same thing as hiding. And that feature is shared by multiple Shards.

The Cosmere in general just has a problem. It is too old to have a peaceful prosperous history and be so primitive technologically speaking.

1 hour ago, mathiau said:

Nothing can decrease entropy except maybe the big crunch.

Here things get complicated. Feruchemy and Awakening clearly break the law of conservation of energy. The Cosmere is not a closed system thermodynamically speaking.

 

39 minutes ago, IndigoAjah said:

I'd group them slightly differently but I agree with the broad concept.

 

I think they will be based on how Intent drives them.

 

Outcome Shards (Consequentialism): the end aims you wish to fulfil

Ruin, Autonomy, Preservation, Dominion

You could just as well put Cultivation here.

39 minutes ago, IndigoAjah said:

Instinct Shards:  underlying emotional/instinctual drives that motivate actions (existentialism)

Odium, Devotion, Whimsy, Ambition

Why isn't Mercy here? Or Dominion?

39 minutes ago, IndigoAjah said:

"Journey" Shards (Deontology): how you go about fulfilling aims

Honor, Mercy, Cultivation, Endowment

Ideals/Virtues: the type of person you try to be, basing choices on a specific ideal (Virtue Ethics)

Valor, Prudence (or similar), Invention, suggested Shard of Honesty (based on the unaccounted for attributes of an Abrahamic God)

You might just as well put Odium here. Or Endowment for that matter.

The problem with such groupings is that too many are plausible. About the only ones that would be clearly wrong are those putting Ruin and Preservation into different groups, aren't they?

 

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21 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

Here things get complicated. Feruchemy and Awakening clearly break the law of conservation of energy. The Cosmere is not a closed system thermodynamically speaking.

Also F-Iron or A-steel + ettmetal break conservation of linear momentum, the flying bridge breaks the conservation of angular momentum and soul casters probably break the 2nd law. Anyway that's not what I meant. I meant that Cultivation, being the shard of nature, cannot have an intent so opposite to every natural laws.

Edited by mathiau
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43 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

 

The problem with such groupings is that too many are plausible. About the only ones that would be clearly wrong are those putting Ruin and Preservation into different groups, aren't they?

 

True, but it's also the problem for ALL groupings. Not just all possible Shard groupings that we are basing on conjecture, nor even groups of other things like the groupings of Metals on Scadrial. All groupings are based on characteristics that were chosen when another set were available. All. Elements. Kingdoms of Living Things. 

There are lots of possibilities. Given Shards are defined by their Intent rather than anything else, that's what I think would make sense to group them. And Intent is intrinsically linked to Motivation, the way we make decisions and why, rather than relationship with physical laws which seem to be a think that cross Shards rather than define then, and I think more likely to be related to the Unintentioned Dawnshards

43 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

 

You could just as well put Cultivation here.

You could but I wouldn't. I wouldn't say Cultivation was an endpoint at all 

Quote

Why isn't Mercy here? Or Dominion?

Because I don't think they fit at all here, certainly not based on how I'd define either of those things.  But they could be. Whatever the groupings, if they exist, are, you won't find categories you couldn't argue a Shard should swap for another. 

Quote

You might just as well put Odium here. Or Endowment for that matter.

Again, I think the distinction between those Intents is clear. You can disagree, but Odium as a ideal characteristic just doesn't make sense to me, and Endowment isn't a characteristic of being. It's a characteristic of action. 

 

Anyway, we'll find out eventually.

I like the patterning of Internal, External, Positive, Negative, Physical, Emotional, Cognitive, Temporal compared to Mistborn classifications, but we haven't yet seen that aspect of magic applicable across systems, so the fact that there are 16 Shards isn't enough to convince that the same categorisation works.

 

Though maybe it is, and it would be interesting to see how and which characteristics could be applied to say Radiant Orders. I theorised that Orders could have internal and externally focused pairs, based on interpretations of Honour. I wonder if there are obvious pairings based on Cognitive/Physical/Spiritual/Temporal (looks a hard sell to me) or Positive/Negative?

 

  15 minutes ago, mathiau said:
Quote

Also F-Iron or A-steel + ettmetal break conservation of linear momentum, the flying bridge breaks the conservation of angular momentum and soul casters probably break the 2nd law. Anyway that's not what I meant. I meant that Cultivation, being the shard of nature, cannot have an intent so opposite to every natural laws.

 

Is Cultivation the Shard of Nature? Surely it's the Shard of guiding Nature, by the implication of its name. 

Nature without input from "outside" of it (though technically all things that occur are within Nature, surely?) Wouldn't be called Cultivated.

Edited by IndigoAjah
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12 minutes ago, IndigoAjah said:

I like the patterning of Internal, External, Positive, Negative, Physical, Emotional, Cognitive, Temporal compared to Mistborn classifications, but we haven't yet seen that aspect of magic applicable across systems, so the fact that there are 16 Shards isn't enough to convince that the same categorisation works.

The Internal, External, Positive, Negative part seems to be happening with fabrials, although it's a bit early to be sure

9 minutes ago, IndigoAjah said:

Is Cultivation the Shard of Nature? Surely it's the Shard of guiding Nature, by the implication of its name. 

Nature without input from "outside" of it (though technically all things that occur are within Nature, surely?) Wouldn't be called Cultivated.

More like the shard of manipulating nature, you're right

Edited by mathiau
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33 minutes ago, IndigoAjah said:

Nature without input from "outside" of it (though technically all things that occur are within Nature, surely?) Wouldn't be called Cultivated.

She is the shard that makes things grow.  Remember we are looking at things from a divine perspective.  It would be acceptable to say that the things cultivated by god were natural or that they grew according to the natural process of cultivation. 

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1 hour ago, Oltux72 said:

Here things get complicated. Feruchemy and Awakening clearly break the law of conservation of energy. The Cosmere is not a closed system thermodynamically speaking.

Feruchemy is not totally neutral, and awakened objects consume breath given sufficient time.

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On 23.12.2020 at 11:26 PM, mathiau said:

Also F-Iron or A-steel + ettmetal break conservation of linear momentum, the flying bridge breaks the conservation of angular momentum and soul casters probably break the 2nd law. Anyway that's not what I meant. I meant that Cultivation, being the shard of nature, cannot have an intent so opposite to every natural laws.

Cultivation isn't into that circle of life stuff. She is a Shard of clearing forests for fields. Eternal growth is fine.

On 24.12.2020 at 0:47 AM, Frustration said:

Feruchemy is not totally neutral, and awakened objects consume breath given sufficient time.

The easy way out is to design a mechanism that makes the point moot.

A Feruchemist gets onto a platform resting on springs. The Feruchemist stores weight. The platform rises. He taps. The platform lowers. The key insight here is that the device will generate energy out of nothing even if the efficiency of tapping is zero, as just stopping storing weight would result in movement. Free energy.

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