Do abilities work on other worlds?

[Lawmi]

Does a magic system on one wold work on another (ie could an alomancer on Scadrial use Allomancy with the metal on Roshar? What if they brought the metals from Scadrial?) Just thinking through this amazing universe.

 

 

[Dunkum he/him]

Short version: yes, for the most part.  Metals from anywhere can be used for the metallic arts, for instance.  but for other types of magic, it is harder.  it is hard, if not impossible to use stormlight to fuel awakening, for instance, but if you had a cache of breaths, you could presumably use them to awaken as you normally would.  likewise for other systems, it is difficult, but not necessarily impossible to hack them to use different types of investiture as fuel, but most won't work that way by default.  Selish magic is the hardest one to use offworld, probably, since it is tied to the user's physical location (e.g. aons get weaker as you travel further from elantris)

[Yata he/him]

As Dunkum said Cosmere's magic in generale is not location dependant.

But some magics could have requirements hard or impossible to fuitful in other location.

You could hack some magic to be fueled by other form of Kinetic Investiture but depending by the magic this could be in a spectrum of hardships.

Examples:

- the Metallic Arts could be used everywhere, you Need only a supply of right metals (all' the Cosmere's pure iron is fine for a Lurcher)

- you could awake everywhere in the Cosmere if you have Breath with you.

- you could in theory awake with different form of Kinetic Investiture but for example also a top tier Awakener didn't figured yet how to awake with Stormlight.

- you could Surgebinding with Breath but you Will Need a turnaround to make It work

- you could Mastery everywhere with White Sand but the Sand Will not passivelly recharge. You Will Need a source of Investiture to recharge It (example Stormlight).

- you could not performe Selish magics offplanet as far as our knowledge goes. It's debated if you could fuel Selish Magic with other form of Investiture without Extreme workaround.

Probably I missed some cases but honestly the combinations are really too much

[Lawmi]

Thanks a ton, what wonderful thought out answers.  No matter how much I thought I knew, i ask my first question to the 17th Shard and realize how much I have to learn and that doesn't even include all the material Brandon hasn't given us yet.  Thanks again

[Khyrindor he/him]

I'll expand a little bit.

Some magic systems are easy to use anywhere, and others aren't, for a few reasons.

It mostly comes down to the fuel for your magic. As others have said, you would be able to use the Metallic Arts anywhere in the Cosmere that you have metal. We also know that you can use Hemalurgy to steal magics from anywhere.

There would be nothing against using Surgebinding on other planets, but Stormlight as the fuel only comes from the Storms of Roshar and held in imperfect gems, and would leak by the time someone travelled all the way to another planet. To add to the difficulty, it's apparently very difficult to bring a spren from one world to another. It's possible, Brandon says, but difficult. We don't know the exact reason for it yet.

WoR and Warbreaker spoilers:

Breaths from Nalthis don't leak like Stormlight, so if you brought enough with you to another world, you'd still get the benefits of having them, as well as the ability to Awaken. In fact, we've seen that Hoid and Vasher both have a trove of Breaths while on Roshar, as they both mention (directly or indirectly) life sense. Now, as they're on Roshar, they can't obtain more Breaths except from other people who have them. According to Brandon, it's possible to fuel Awakening with Stormlight, but so far even Vasher (one of the first scholars of magic in the Cosmere) hasn't figured out how. He has figured out how to use it to feed his Divine Breath, but not Awakening. Szeth is also now in possession of Nightblood, and it is implied that he can use Stormlight to fuel him, though he might not know how yet.

Elantris and Secret History spoilers:

Now for Selish magics (and this is where it gets weird). Because of an historical visit by Odium, the Shards Devotion and Dominion were Splintered and somehow shoved into the Cognitive Realm, becoming the Dor. As the Cognitive Realm is location-dependant (unlike the Spiritual Realm, where the bulk of the other Shards resides), places with larger amounts of the Dor are where you can use it to fuel various magics. This is why in the novels, it was harder for the characters to use Elantrian magic the further they got from Elantris. I do think it's possible that you would be able to use the Elantrian magic at other places near the Dor, as we see other characters use their foreign powers in Elantris. There is more here to discern, but I am not the expert on the Dor, so I may have made mistakes. The jist of it is that if you wanted to use Elantrian magics off world, you would somehow have to bring the Dor with you in the Cognitive Realm. We see the Ire do this in Secret History, with the strange glowing liquid they seem to drink, and the pipeline running from their fortress into the distance. They must use the Dor to power their immortality. A brief mention should go to the Moon Sceptre which can apparently translate between Selish magic systems. We don't quite know what that means yet.

That about covers it. There's also some stuff going on with general cosmere mechanics and hacks that one could use as a magic system in themselves, but we won't get into that.