Radiant American Football/Rugby

[JDSmear7]

If Roshar was to have a Radiant-powered sport that was somewhere between American football and rugby, which orders/surges would be most useful on the field?

Surges:

Adhesion - A full lashing on the playing surface (this would probably be outruled) or a player's clothing could really stop ball movement.

Gravitation - This would need some heavy limitations so that the game is not played exclusively in the air

Division - ?

Abrasion - An Edgedancer or Dustbringer running with the ball could Slick their entire body except where necessary to run and hold the ball.

Pregression - This is not of much use if every player automatically heals while holding Stormlight.

Illumination - Without huge limitations (being more specific and nuanced than for Gravitation), this would remove the fun of the game because each team would just resort to out-illusion-ing the others.

Transformation - ?

Transportation - Elsegates are famously hard to learn/master. Even without that, the game would just end up being played in both the physical and cognitive realms at the same time which would make it a little too wierd to play.

Cohesion - ?

Tension - Idk how this works

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Orders:

Windrunners - Full lashings could be used to create a sort of walking ball magnet.

Skybreakers - Only Gravitation is really useful here. 

Dustbringers - Only Abrasion is really useful here.

Edgedancers - Only Abrasion is really useful here.

Truthwatchers - No really useful surges.

Lightweavers - No really useful surges.

Elsecallers - No really useful surges. 

Willshapers - Only Cohesion is really useful here.

Stonewards - ?

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Allowing Stoneshaping would create a very different game and would make surges like Division and Transformation much more useful and would make Transportation slightly less useless in practice.

If real life sports and video games are a good enough example, it should be expected that every team will try to exploit the rules to the point that the game is no longer fun.

Obviously, Plate and Blade would be completely banned.

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What do you guys think about this? Do you have any ideas of what limitations would be given to players to make the game work well? What would the game look like with Stoneshaping? How would you distribute the orders in a lineup?

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

Transformation could probably be used to turn sections of the turf into oil slicks.

[JDSmear7]

On 7/2/2026 at 3:31 PM, ParaTulip said:

Transformation could probably be used to turn sections of the turf into oil slicks.

That is a possibility, but where would the line be drawn on how much material can be soulcast at once and which materials are allowed as "products" and/or "inputs"?

Soulcasting can have some pretty deadly effects as seen in RoW (pretty big spoiler here):

Spoiler

In chapter 23 (I believe) Jasnah soulcasts a bunch of air into burining oil in a way that would have hurt her if she wasn't in full Plate.

 

Edited 2 hours ago by JDSmear7