Shardcast

    Rhythm of War is OUT! We hope you've been enjoying it. This is our first Rhythm of War Shardcast, and it does NOT have full book spoilers, just through Part Two. Honestly, we don't really talk about anything other than the Part Two epigraphs, so as long as you've read those, you are ready for this! Please no full book spoilers in the comments! And if you've read the book, well, you know why we are talking about this first.

    It's our second Dawnshard episode (and our last Shardcast before Rhythm of War), and this one is pedantic! We're getting to... well, the big thing we didn't talk about in the last one. There's so much to discuss here. And here's a great line from this episode: "I guess we are going off different definitions of the word 'action' here." Excellent. Grace also blows Eric's mind at one point.

    Dawnshard is out! If you're a Kickstarter backer, you already got it through Backerkit. You can also get it through Amazon, and will likely appear in other ebook stores soon if they haven't already. We have TWO Dawnshard podcasts coming this week, and this is our first one, on our spoiler-free Dawnshard reactions, characters, and some lore topics. Of course, the big lore topic will be the next one, which I will try to get out as soon as I can. Please support us on Patreon to fund the soda I need to get through editing this huge pile of stuff this month.

    The Original, an audio-only story cowritten by Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal came out on September 14th. It's science fiction about clones and lots of other things! In this episode, we blab all about it, and yes, The Original is over three hours long and we talked just below two hours twenty minutes on this. Yeah that's a sizable fraction of the audiobook! Over 50% of it in fact, and you know what, we could have talked more about it. There's so much to delve into!

    This episode of Shardcast, we are returning to Mirandus and the world of Dark One for more lore and analysis. You can get the ebook of Dark One right now, but hardcovers of it start shipping August 17th. You can get them here. This is our second Dark One podcast, our first one happened at the beginning of July. We anticipated this one would come out a bit earlier, but then stuff kept happening! We hope you enjoy this one. 

    We wanted to do a "short" episode of us discussing the reveal of the novella that will be out prior to Rhythm of War, Dawnshard! But then we blabbed. We blabbed a lot about a lot of things. Things we know basically nothing about. But now you will also know the nothing we know about Dawnshards and Aimians together. After all, the real Dawnshards are the friends we met along the way. 

    Last week, when the Way of Kings leatherbound Kickstarter came out, Brandon sent one of his newsletters and it contained a brand-new chapter from Rhythm of War! So that's what we are talking about today. If Rhythm of War pre-release content is not your jam, don't listen to this one! I worked hard to be as vague as possible with the title of this to not spoil you. This chapter has not been revealed before, so it's pretty cool.

    If you’re anything like us, you’re pumped for the release of Rhythm of War in a few months. And there's no better way to prepare for it than by rereading all the books! But we’ve already done that about a thousand times. So instead, we’re revisiting our old Shardcast questions. This playlist has been designed to be the perfect refresher to listen to over the next few months. We take you through everything from the major characters and worldbuilding elements to the most esoteric questions still on Roshar. And of course we’ve got plenty of our trademark PedantiCast shenanigans. 

    Dark One (book 1) is out and it turns out the graphic novel is really good! Come here for our reactions (spoiler-free) and then we go into detail on some of the in-depth stuff of this universe. It's cool, and there's so much to talk about we'll have another episode on it later! This is the freshest takes you'll get from us since this is literally the first time we were discussing this book! You can get Dark One here: https://store.vaultcomics.com/products/brandon-sandersons-dark-one

    You know how we say on Shardcast that we don't need rails? Well turns out we rarely had rails to begin with. Today we are taking a look at our old cosmere theories. And when I say old I mean real old, like from 2008, pre-Hero of Ages. We'll talk about some fandom history on the forums, tell you how we got into the fandom, and mock old our old theories all around. Then at the end we'll give you some advice on how you can theorycraft better. Hopefully you'll enjoy this retrospective, and I imagine eventually we'll do another one of these!

    Have you missed PedantiCast? Well, then you're ready for this episode! Today we are talking in-depth about the magic in Warbreaker. We talk about Awakening and BioChromatic Breaths. We discuss the Heightenings and more. Also, surprisingly, lizards, and Ian returns with new pedantry.

    Well, we are all in quarantine, so we wanted to do some fun nonsense to take our mind off things. So it's time for some more Ship it or Rip it! We ask the real questions here, like "what is kingdom," will Shannon continue her commanding lead from last time, and will Eric be just as terrible at this game as before? 

    This episode, we're talking about the history and cultures of Sel, featuring sharks! Well, somewhat. Today we have the debut of the Shardcaster Benny. What's a Svordishman's favorite weapon? A Svord, of course. Okay, but really, there's a lot of interesting history and lore on Sel, and it'll be pretty cool to see Elantris sequels someday.