Forgery Force Armor

[Trusk'our]

@Longshot97 made a comment on the Giant Carved Forgery thread about using an entire stone pillar to stamp someone. I imagine this was mostly humorous in nature, but it got me thinking; what if you made a Soulstamp with above-average amounts of Investiture (probably with the giant modified stamp) and then made a stamp that was designed to fit around the entire body of the person to be stamped?

Soulstamps have a resistance to physical force, so if Invested more they'd resist those forces better. Plus, while you can normally only have one Forgery active on a person at a time- thus limiting the amount of the person's body that would be shielded by the stamp- a stamp made out of a mold that fit around a person's entire body would allow the whole thing to shield the entire body.

Another possibility I suppose would simply to stamp each separate portion of armor that a person could carry, treating them as separate pieces.

Do I think any of this is an efficient use of Investiture? No. 

But if limited to only this system I think it could have some use.

[alder24]

5 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

@Longshot97 made a comment on the Giant Carved Forgery thread about using an entire stone pillar to stamp someone. I imagine this was mostly humorous in nature, but it got me thinking; what if you made a Soulstamp with above-average amounts of Investiture (probably with the giant modified stamp) and then made a stamp that was designed to fit around the entire body of the person to be stamped?

Soulstamps have a resistance to physical force, so if Invested more they'd resist those forces better. Plus, while you can normally only have one Forgery active on a person at a time- thus limiting the amount of the person's body that would be shielded by the stamp- a stamp made out of a mold that fit around a person's entire body would allow the whole thing to shield the entire body.

Merciful Domi, what is this idea? No! Just no...

6 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

Another possibility I suppose would simply to stamp each separate portion of armor that a person could carry, treating them as separate pieces.

Now you're talking sensibly. More reasonable, but there is still not a lot of investiture in a Soulstamp it wouldn't be very effective.

Spoiler

Questioner

I've got a list of various Cosmere bits of metal and I was wondering if you would rank them from like one to ten or just easy to difficult on how hard it would be to steelpush on them. 

[...]

Questioner

A soulstamped piece of metal?

Brandon Sanderson

A soulstamped piece of metal is going to be on the lower, easier side. Not a lot of Investiture going on in a soulstamp.

Salt Lake City signing (March 29, 2014)

Mistborn spoilers:

Spoiler

Easiest way to cheat the system is to Forge the armor to become a full Metalmind. This would require you to provide a loooooot of investiture to fill all that metal up (on Sel it might not matter - just make a bigger Soulstamp if they draw investiture like Aons), but it would be very resilient to all invested attacks. It would still break after a few hits, but it's better than nothing. 

However the problem with Forged armor is that Soulstamps are really fragile - striking an armor or denting it might just collapse the Forgery. Cosmere spoilers WoBs:

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

Questioner

If a Mistborn were to burn a metal that's been Forged by a Soulstamp, is there a different effect from another, or?

Brandon Sanderson

So they Forged it from one metal into another metal?

Questioner

Yes.

Brandon Sanderson

So once they started to burn it, it would break the Forgery and it would turn back into its original metal. So you'd have just the briefest moment of getting what it said it was and then it would go back to the other and then if you were a Misting of the wrong type, you would get no more from it.

Questioner

What about Feruchemy or Hemalurgy?

Brandon Sanderson

So Feruchemy and Hemalurgy. You would have a lot of trouble Investing it because it's already Invested. So you would run into troubles right away trying to Invest it, because it's already got all the Investiture messing with it. You could theoretically make it happen, but it would take enough work and conniving that it just wouldn't be worth it.

Starsight Release Party (Nov. 26, 2019)

 

[NerdyAarakocra]

I think it would be more effective to Stamp someone to make them resistant to damage instead of using the soulstamp as armor.

[Trusk'our]

On 11/21/2023 at 11:38 AM, alder24 said:

Merciful Domi, what is this idea? No! Just no...

Oh, come now, who wouldn't want to shave off all their hair and get stuffed into human mold to become a super soldier 

On 11/21/2023 at 11:38 AM, alder24 said:

Now you're talking sensibly. More reasonable, but there is still not a lot of investiture in a Soulstamp it wouldn't be very effective.

 

Eh, it's more about the physical force the stamp uses to resist physical attacks than trying to use the Investiture to resist other forms of Investiture (otherwise the whole body stamp is rather useless- just use a regular stamp). 

Although, what if you had a suit of armor that had really, really small pieces, something like scale mail? Each section that's Forged would probably have about the same amount of Investiture per stamp, so having 20,000 times the amount of Investiture in a normal stamp spread over an entire suit has to be more effective at resisting physical and Invested attacks.

On 11/21/2023 at 11:38 AM, alder24 said:

However the problem with Forged armor is that Soulstamps are really fragile - striking an armor or denting it might just collapse the Forgery. Cosmere spoilers WoBs:

This is true, I suppose. If you had a bunch of Forgeries woven together in the aforementioned suit I think that would work better though. It's possible that you could simply replace them as they broke, perhaps Forging them to have never been damaged, thus repairing the physical damage and re-Investing them.

On 11/21/2023 at 11:43 AM, NerdyAarakocra said:

I think it would be more effective to Stamp someone to make them resistant to damage instead of using the soulstamp as armor.

Do you mean you think that the stamped skin is more effective than the armor, or do you mean Forging the person specifically to make them more durable?

[alder24]

22 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

Oh, come now, who wouldn't want to shave off all their hair and get stuffed into human mold to become a super soldier 

Someone who likes joints and movement?

7 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

Eh, it's more about the physical force the stamp uses to resist physical attacks

I need a source for that because I don't remember that at all. 

I've found it on Coppermind. Yeah, no. The seal and ink resist being removed, but the object below might still be damaged by physical strikes - dents, holes etc - and that would collapse the Forgery. 

I don't think you can make a giant Soulstamp in the shape of the object that you want to Forge (is that what you want to make? I didn't catch that earlier), because you're using a specific writing language and just making "letters" bigger, won't make it fit in your shape. Those aren't glyphs from Roshar, you can't change their shape to look however you want. They have very specific shapes you need to follow, and adding a bunch of "white noise letters'' would still provide a meaning, which would disturb the working of the stamp, forcing the object to reject it entirely. So no, you can't do that.

8 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

Although, what if you had a suit of armor that had really, really small pieces, something like scale mail?

Each of them would require its own stamp. Good luck.

A plate armor is still much better than scale armor. A plate armor is very hard to get through - scale is not on that level. Striking a single scale can dent it or break it off, leaving a small opening. In plate armor you don't have that. Plate is always a better option. A scale armor isn't made only from scales but from other pieces like leather strips - which are now your weak points.

13 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

Each section that's Forged would probably have about the same amount of Investiture per stamp, so having 20,000 times the amount of Investiture in a normal stamp spread over an entire suit has to be more effective at resisting physical and Invested attacks.

The larger the object the more investiture it requires to be Forged? Isn't that true? A single piece of a scale would be far less invested than a whole breastplate from the plate armor.

[NerdyAarakocra]

6 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

Do you mean you think that the stamped skin is more effective than the armor, or do you mean Forging the person specifically to make them more durable?

The latter.

[Trusk'our]

29 minutes ago, NerdyAarakocra said:

The latter.

I'm not sure how one would go about doing that; Forgery basically allows you to make something that could have happened to someone or something be what happened to them. I don't know if you could just stamp someone to be physically augmented that way by the Investiture (I'm mostly suggesting the use of a side effect of Forgery for armor, that of the stamp itself resisting physical force).

There's probably some wiggle room for Flesh Forgery, but I think you'd need to do some real work to directly enhance the person in that way.

[NerdyAarakocra]

On 11/23/2023 at 10:46 PM, Trusk'our said:

I'm not sure how one would go about doing that; Forgery basically allows you to make something that could have happened to someone or something be what happened to them. I don't know if you could just stamp someone to be physically augmented that way by the Investiture (I'm mostly suggesting the use of a side effect of Forgery for armor, that of the stamp itself resisting physical force).

There's probably some wiggle room for Flesh Forgery, but I think you'd need to do some real work to directly enhance the person in that way.

Nah, you could just stamp someone to have trained their resistance to pain or something like that. Boom, now your AC has increased by 2.

[Argenti]

On 11/26/2023 at 6:39 PM, Ookla the Lord Ruler said:

Nah, you could just stamp someone to have trained their resistance to pain or something like that. Boom, now your AC has increased by 2.

.... Ac isn't resistance to pain. 
its how hard it is for *You* to get hit.

[NerdyAarakocra]

14 hours ago, Ookla the Silver said:

.... Ac isn't resistance to pain. 
its how hard it is for *You* to get hit.

I know, I play D&D :P.

If we were translating it into 5e, it would probably be something like taking 1 less damage per hit from physical damage.

[Argenti]

2 minutes ago, Ookla the Lord Ruler said:

I know, I play D&D :P.

If we were translating it into 5e, it would probably be something like taking 1 less damage per hit from physical damage.

[Duxredux]

I'm not sure if either of the core ideas would work at all, @Trusk'our. One of the necessary steps of using a Soul Stamp is the 90-degree twist at the end to lock it in. How exactly do you propose doing that with a person stuck in a mold? For the separate armor pieces, it becomes a question of whether or not the armor views itself as a whole or not in the same way that Shai can't Forge the individual bricks in her prison cell. Odds are if was designed and measured to be a cohesive suit of armor, it will view itself as such. Stamping individual pieces may not work. Well... if the issue is the soul of the combined conceptual object resisting only a portion of the soul changing, then maybe you could get a bunch of your friends to stamp each piece simultaneously to get the whole suit of armor to change simultaneously, but that's a theoretical answer.

Honestly, if you're in-system and trying to create Investiture resistant armor, you're probably facing either Elantrians or Dakhor monks. Between Dakhor monks being enhanced and well suited for close combat and the fact that they got obliterated by Aon Daa, makes me think that tanking hits is not your best option. You're probably better off using Forgery for skullduggery or personal enhancement Essence Marks, like making yourself a sword master like Hrathen.

Now it is possible to create an extensive series of individual stamps that work together to create a cohesive change to the target, and they should have an additive effect on the total Investiture involved. This is fundamentally what Shai did in creating the plate and linchpin stamp that created a false soul for Ashravan and is the basis for her Essence Marks. Useful for Ashravan as it probably makes the linchpin stamp on his arm more resilient and less likely for him to go catatonic from banging his arm on a table, but it didn't provide any supernatural durability for Shaizan fighting skeletals. It's also noteworthy that she was able to break the stamp she placed on Zu's horse with a fingernail, so stamps on living things may not be the most resilient.