The Power of Forgery

[Grayv he/him]

We have seen that forgery can change a person physically, mentally, and spiritually. I was wondering if you could use forgery to create a Nahel Bond, sever a Nahel Bond, heal someone who survived a Spiking, or even create or (?)uncreate(?) an Elantrian.

[Kurkistan he/him]

I imagine that if you can come up with a plausible (key word there) past such that X would be the result, you can manage to achieve X. Whether you can permanently heal a Spiking depends on whether Feruchemical gold/Stormlight & Co. could do it, I think, but I think Forgery might just possibly be able to manage it with renewable stamps.

 

There is an open question as to whether Forgery can mimic the magical effects of other systems (so can you give someone a ton of Breath out of nowhere?), though.

Edited March 31, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Senor Feesh]

Difficult question (which means it's a good one).

Investiture interferes with other forms of magic, and Spikes are invested objects. It's plausible that they would interfere with the forgery.

It's been a while since I thought about forgery with any detail; do we actually know where Investiture enters into the system? Obviously it must be accounted for. I assume it's like the Dor, and it bleeds through filtered by the markings made on the Soulstamp? That sounds about right. Can't decide if a heavily invested spike would mess with that process or not, but it seems likely.

[Green Hoodie Mistborn he/him]

Difficult question (which means it's a good one).

Investiture interferes with other forms of magic, and Spikes are invested objects. It's plausible that they would interfere with the forgery.

It's been a while since I thought about forgery with any detail; do we actually know where Investiture enters into the system? Obviously it must be accounted for. I assume it's like the Dor, and it bleeds through filtered by the markings made on the Soulstamp? That sounds about right. Can't decide if a heavily invested spike would mess with that process or not, but it seems likely.

 

It could interfere with the spiked person, but shouldn't matter to the person who was spiked and had that part of their sDNA ripped out (assuming they survived). Forging might be able to heal them... 

[Pechvarry]

I'm in the "Forgery can't grant other Investitures" camp, so that colors my response. But I think Hoodie is right. A spike could repair the damaged personality of a spike donor - and the physical damage which would explain their survival while we're at it! - but it wouldn't restore the stolen attribute without some way to replace that... Investiture with a new... Source.

Huh. I think I just convinced myself the Dor could do exactly that.

[Senor Feesh]

Ah, I misread the original post. I actually thought we were discussing whether or not Forgery could make it so that the recipient of the spike had never actually received it. As in, if you were Stamping the spikee.

Edited April 2, 2014 by Senor Feesh

[Moogle]

I think it should be possible to stamp a Hemalurgic spike and change it from granting Steelpushing to Ironpulling, or stuff along those lines. The Investiture is already there, and the plausibility should be the same so long as only change it to one of the other three Allomancy powers that type of metal can steal.

 

Really, thinking about it, Forgery has a lot of applications if you can do something like this. I also imagine, since any Shard can power any system, that you could grant almost any plausible power and the Dor would power it. It's not all that ridiculously powerful because soulstamps are limited to MaiPon (and require huge amounts of work to use on other planets).

Edited April 2, 2014 by Moogle

[Tempus]

We know forgery takes a very small amount of investiture, according to the questions from the sugarhouse signing. We know investiture needs higher quantities to affect other sources of investiture, so I'm gonna lean towards 'Forgery can't replicate investiture'. But the way it works is so unique, it might work. You can't pull a shardblade, but you could say, pull another piece of metal adjacent and temporarily attached to the shardblade to have the same effect. Forgery might work along those lines.

 

One thing I've been thinking about is recursive forgery. There is nothing invested about stamp material, it can be anything. So, it should be possible to make a stamp detailing the making of an essence stamp, and then stamp it into some soulstone. And if the essence stamp you wrote into the alternate history was a stamp that would make you a better stamp and you stamped it, it should recurse. Either this would cause a universe stack overflow, or you would end up with a stamp that approaches the limit of the ideal stamp to do whatever you liked. It would likely not last long (being literally at the line of plausibility, by nature), but you could quickly stamp an impression into some plaster and have yourself a forgery stamp made by forging that when you stamped with it would cause you to be a better forger.

 

I haven't really worked out the details exactly, but by abusing recursiveness you should be able to take forgery to its natural limits.

[Moogle]

We know forgery takes a very small amount of investiture, according to the questions from the sugarhouse signing.

 

But this isn't the same as saying that it can't be higher-Investiture if you want. Elantrians can add modifiers to their Aons to increase their power, so it is very possible Forgers have a similar sort of construct to give them enough of an extra boost to affect an Invested object.

 

Edit: Also, there's this WoB:

 

Q:  Would it be possible to Soulforge NIghtblood and change the command that was given to him when he was Invested?

A:  That is possible. That would actually not be a very difficult Soulforge.  The problem is, he's Invested.  So reInvesting him, which is what Soulforgery is, is really hard.  So you'd have to figure out how you could use Forgery on something that is already Invested.  But forgery can get through some of those hoops a lot easier than some other magic systems can.

Edited April 2, 2014 by Moogle

[Shaggai]

We know forgery takes a very small amount of investiture, according to the questions from the sugarhouse signing. We know investiture needs higher quantities to affect other sources of investiture, so I'm gonna lean towards 'Forgery can't replicate investiture'. But the way it works is so unique, it might work. You can't pull a shardblade, but you could say, pull another piece of metal adjacent and temporarily attached to the shardblade to have the same effect. Forgery might work along those lines.

 

One thing I've been thinking about is recursive forgery. There is nothing invested about stamp material, it can be anything. So, it should be possible to make a stamp detailing the making of an essence stamp, and then stamp it into some soulstone. And if the essence stamp you wrote into the alternate history was a stamp that would make you a better stamp and you stamped it, it should recurse. Either this would cause a universe stack overflow, or you would end up with a stamp that approaches the limit of the ideal stamp to do whatever you liked. It would likely not last long (being literally at the line of plausibility, by nature), but you could quickly stamp an impression into some plaster and have yourself a forgery stamp made by forging that when you stamped with it would cause you to be a better forger.

 

I haven't really worked out the details exactly, but by abusing recursiveness you should be able to take forgery to its natural limits.

I think the problem is that you'd have to know what the ideal stamp was, so you couldn't really make a better stamp than the best one you could think of. On the other hand, you could probably Forge yourself so that you got better training in Forgery, which could give you a recursive effect with being better and better at Forgery. It depends, of course, on what opportunities you had to learn Forgery, so there might be a limit to your Forging skill which would be lower than the natural limits of Forgery. A good enough Forger might be able to circumvent that, though, so it would depend on how good you are at Forgery to begin with and what the limit of plausibility is for you. Once you hit a certain threshold, you could probably go on until you hit the limits of Forgery itself.

[Tempus]

I think the problem is that you'd have to know what the ideal stamp was, so you couldn't really make a better stamp than the best one you could think of. On the other hand, you could probably Forge yourself so that you got better training in Forgery, which could give you a recursive effect with being better and better at Forgery. It depends, of course, on what opportunities you had to learn Forgery, so there might be a limit to your Forging skill which would be lower than the natural limits of Forgery. A good enough Forger might be able to circumvent that, though, so it would depend on how good you are at Forgery to begin with and what the limit of plausibility is for you. Once you hit a certain threshold, you could probably go on until you hit the limits of Forgery itself.

 

Except you don't have to know what the ideal stamp was. If you were required to know EVERYTHING about a subject, then Shai's essence stamps (especially the knowledge retention one) would be very useless, as she would have been required to know all those things before being able to stamp them.

 

I'm pretty certain that forgery isn't about knowing the exact details of a thing, but instead about making the right connections. The knowledge you need isn't one of a creator of things, but more one of a jeopardy trivia master - knowing all about a thing without actually having the ability or experience to use that knowledge.

 

In other words, a forger doesn't need to how to do something, but how to how to do something. They encode those connections onto their stamps, and it runs like a little program.