Chaos

I don't think he would need Hemalurgy to strengthen his Feruchemical gold or youth. I'd think Allomancy-Feruchemy is more than sufficient to describe both of those effects, right?

This isn't a theory, but more of a general topic, because there's a lot we don't know about Shardpools. For newcomers, Shardpools are what we are calling those pools that are related to a specific Shard. Preservation's pool was the Well of Ascension. Ruin had a pool under the Pits of Hathsin. We see Raoden going into a Shardpool at the end of Elantris. The Shardpools, being the liquid essence of a Shard, is related to their Cognitive aspect. As far as I can tell, we've always thought that these Shardpools are just a fact of life in the cosmere. If there's a Shard, there's a Shardpool. That's what I always thought. But that's decidedly not the case, as I randomly found today: This kind of blew my mind, to say the least, and leads me to wonder what conditions must be satisfied for a Shardpool to exist. (Especially since Ruin's is not one centralized pool, either) Atium and lerasium, as well as the both mists, are extensions of Sazed's will. Sazed probably could exert that same sort of influence over both Shardpools. So, if a Shard could do that, why would pools have to manifest at all? Perhaps, since Shardpools are the Cognitive aspect of a Shard, Sazed hasn't held the power long enough for both his pools to manifest. Maybe as a Shard is molding one's mind to its intent, the pool gets larger. Thoughts?

Um, guys, why are we assuming the Well of Ascension increases Allomantic power? The only quote I can find related to this is "It [the Well] was always meant, I believe, to be something of an attuning force." But when looked at in context, it doesn't seem like Sazed is referring to Allomancy at all: (That's from the HoA epilogue epigraph.) I mean, feel free to correct me if there is a quote that directly suggests a link to the Well. But, as intuitive as it seems that "Oh, of course, the Well is of Preservation, so it increases your Allomancy" there really isn't much indication that is the case. Vin noted she was considerably weaker than Elend, on a purely power level. Yes, holding the power made Vin a Sliver, but don't you think Vin would have noticed if she suddenly became more powerful Allomantically? Any effect the Well has on Allomantic power is minimal. If the Well had any considerable effect on Allomancy, we should see it in Vin moreso than the Lord Ruler, since Vin's pure power is much less than the Lord Ruler's. Assuming that holding the Well has any effect, and that it increases your Allomantic power by a constant, the ratio of Well Effect/Vin's power would be greater than the Well Effect/the Lord Ruler's power. We don't see it in Vin, so it's probably negligible in the Lord Ruler. You make a valid point there, but in cosmere terminology, they are both considered Slivers. Perhaps the Lord Ruler was a "stronger" Sliver, but I don't think it has much effect compared to being a lerasium-Mistborn. Well of Ascension aside, the Lord Ruler is obviously a brass savant due to all his Soothing. It didn't take Spook long to become a tin savant, so if the Lord Ruler had been constantly Soothing for a decade, he's already more of a savant than Spook ever was. He's been doing that for centuries. I wonder if you continue to flare your metals, you actually get stronger as a savant over time. If so, the Lord Ruler is easily the most powerful Soother the world has ever seen, or ever will. Being a savant in a mental metal probably has more subtle side effects as a physical metal. I wouldn't be surprised if the Lord Ruler was a savant in bronze and copper, too. Now to comb through this thread more thoroughly. I'm fairly sure his lerasium-Mistborn status, as well as brass savant, easily describes the Lord Ruler's strength in this area. He might have a Hemalurgic spike to enhance it further, perhaps a spike he got in the early days of the Final Empire, when Allomancers were stronger. Maybe the Lord Ruler's Feruchemy-Allomancy trick with pewter moved too fast. Or something. In any case, Vin was kind of more focused on the fact that Kelsier just died. She wouldn't have had time to notice the Lord Ruler getting a bit buffer, I'd imagine. There's also the matter that the Lord Ruler almost assuredly can control the Inquisitors like the koloss. I was persuaded of that fact over in this topic. So, honestly, I think it's perfectly within his abilities to slaughter a lot of people quickly. Can you imagine the massacre there would be if the Lord Ruler needed to directly coordinate the Inquisitors like that? I don't imagine Tevidian would have had the privilege in his lifetime such a slaughter. 100,000 seems fairly reasonable. Those million koloss were mostly created due to Ruin controlling them, after all. Those poor people in the outer dominances... Well, we've already discussed the Lord Ruler's extreme Soothing. But another thing: in the early days of the Final Empire, you didn't need duralumin to control a kandra. I don't care how strong Vin is; she isn't even close to being that powerful. If Mistborn began to fracture into Mistings about 300 years into the Final Empire (which I seem to recall vaguely), that still means the Lord Ruler has 300 years more unadulterated Allomantic potential than that. Copperclouds are all a matter of strength. If you lay out multiple copperclouds, it is harder to pierce them. The effects kind of stack. So it all comes down to how strong of an Allomancer you are compared with your opponent, and the Lord Ruler has plenty more power than anything our heroes could muster. Think about Marsh, who was a good Seeker, and made better by Hemalurgy. Let's say that Marsh got 1.95 times stronger in bronze with that Hemalurgic spike, so very minimal decay. Now Marsh has significantly more Seeking ability than anything Eleventh Century Allomancers can do with their copper. But, could Marsh break a Fifth Century Allomancer's coppercloud? I highly doubt it. That Fifth Century Allomancer has a much less diluted Allomantic ability. If you time-warped any of those older Allomancers to the last days of the Final Empire, I would wager it wouldn't be too challenging for them to break modern-day copperclouds. Thing is, no one in the Final Empire would ever have noticed that power discrepancy, for in any given time period, your Allomancers would be roughly the same strength. You'd never notice breaking copperclouds or someone Soothing through your copperclouds, because the power levels are pretty evenly distributed. Sure, there would always be "purer" Allomancers, but I doubt you'd get a relative difference in Allomantic ability that's makes you twice as powerful as an enemy. Not unless you have Hemalurgy. But in the current days, there is such a massive power imbalance with the Lord Ruler compared to Eleventh Century Allomancers. Even if he had never Soothed in his life, and wasn't a brass savant, it'd probably be such easy work from him to Soothe through copperclouds. In the early days of the Final Empire, though, the Lord Ruler would have needed to augment his Allomancy through Hemalurgy to seem more godlike. Interesting. I never thought of that before. Of course, regardless from my wacky relative-Allomancy discussion, lerasium-Mistborn are pretty dang powerful Really, any of the proposed solutions you had, Thor, don't really match up, because in context, I think it's really clear that the Lord Ruler was one of those nine Allomancers: So, his essential Allomantic strength is the same as all the original Allomancers possessed. That pretty much covers it. He's most certainly a brass savant, perhaps in other metals, too, and Brandon said that he has Hemalurgy somewhere: And now I see the quote where the atium bracers are his spikes: Now, as for what power the atium spikes granted, that's another story. We know that atium can steal any power, but it was the Ministry which conducted Hemalurgic experiments where they determined that it steals Allomantic Temporal powers (which Zas quoted above). I wonder if the Lord Ruler knew the truth about that or not.

Yeah, Brandon is surely keeping that information close to the chest.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who is ludicrously excited about the new Feruchemical powers. These are all very well thought-out. (Also, you made me laugh with that "forming cults" line.) I have no idea if these are right, but I sure think they seem reasonable. Emotion storing would be cool, especially if you could select which emotions to store (just as you select which memories to store in copperminds). It has a nice dichotomy with Allomancy, in that with Soothing and Rioting, you can never influence your own emotions, but maybe in Feruchemy you could. That said, "Spiritual" kind of gives a strange context, so it's anyone's guess. Spiritual may give us more information on the Spiritual Realm. Crafty did say that Brandon explained to them some Realmatics so that stuff would be consistent with the greater cosmere's magics. (Don't take this the wrong way, though: all of these Feruchemical powers are canonical, and there's surely a chart of them in Alloy of Law.) It was entertaining, actually, because they didn't remember the word "Realmatics", so we had to remind them Also, they had no idea about the third Mistborn trilogy. Good times. As for where you could get a copy of it... you'll have to buy it, I'm afraid. I'm not a huge tabletop gamer, because I don't know the right group of people in my area to do that. However, I really wanted to scrounge up the money for it. I was going to paraphrase Brandon's answer on the subject, but I may as well just paste it. From the signing with Brandon and Peter Orullian: I personally think it is a good deal (but then again I paid money for the limited edition Tables of Allomantic Metals...) but these dudes are great fun. I feel really good by helping support them. There's also art from Isaac (I believe the spiffy new Feruchemical table will be included, which is a bit different from the Allomantic variety in shape) and a lot from Inkthinker, too. On the other hand, the ebook will come out on the 25th, and rest assured, you will see a lot of coverage from it on my end. Important stuff will surely be summarized on the wiki. But yeah, to get the story, you'll need to buy the thing itself.

Liar happens before Dragonsteel, and as far as we know, the first chronological cosmere story. I believe it to be the story where Adonalsium Shatters.

Also because I'm stupid. *Edits*

I agree with this statement.

http://www.17thshard.com/about.php

I was going to post this in the Alloy of Law Broadsheet topic, but I figured, why not make a topic where people can speculate away? Remember how in the broadsheet, Allomancer Jak's Feruchemist stores a strange "connection" with the koloss? It turns out that this is not crazy bullcrap. We interviewed CraftyGames tonight for the Mistborn Adventure Game (which, by the way, will reveal the Feruchemical powers). Anyways, they said rather offhand that one of the classes of Feruchemical metals are Spiritual metals. Later, I asked them what one Feruchemical power was, and they said "connection". They didn't elaborate, nor did they tell us what metal it was. They did say this was not the most mind-blowing ability. (I'll get the interview up soon, but I wanted to say that immediately, since this is super important.) So. Speculation time! I'm assuming that the Spiritual metals would correspond to the four Enhancement ones. Either way, we have a lot of Feruchemical powers to start theorizing about--and not much time remaining, since the e-book of the RPG comes out on the 25th. What do you think other Spiritual metals would do?

Um, well, technically ardents are more of theory moderators. There isn't a mod group specific to Stormlight Archive. We just stole the names from throughout the cosmere.

This. There's no indication of an additional Shard on Nalthis.

That is correct. Brandon can change and alter stuff at will. It isn't canon until it is published. If someone posts theories based on Aether or Dragonsteel stuff, I wouldn't allow that. But. The cosmere has rules. Reading the unpublished works can shift your knowledge on its rules. If that adapts your knowledge and helps you generate theories, well, we can't stop anyone from doing that. Of course, publicly known unpublished materials, like the Liar of Partinel sample chapters, can be talked about, but that stuff is decidedly non-canon.

I would imagine chemistry and thermodynamics. A lot of the thermodynamics is covered in an introductory sequence of physics (at least mine did, and we learned about free energy and entropy). I couldn't tell you what chemistry classes you'd need, but I just have introductory chemistry knowledge and could basically understand the crux of the idea. For the general relativity, you'd need to be working on a graduate degree in physics. That is not for the faint-hearted or the people who hate math.

There is a Warbreaker edition in that style: I like the US and UK Mistborns both pretty much equally, but I think the US cover for Warbreaker is far more evocative than the UK. It honestly looks like Hermione Granger with a sword and wacky colors in the background... I think the Elantris UK cover is okay, though I like the US one better. I can understand why the UK Elantris would appeal to people. That Warbreaker? Not so much.

There is not an explicit refutation of that. If we can find an instance where Preservation can read minds, we are golden.

Interesting. Thanks for clearing that up, Peter.

I know Brandon hasn't stated how many Shardworlds there are, probably for this very reason. I was under the assumption a good deal of Aether was cannibalized, so I personally would not be surprised if we don't see it. That's okay. Then again, what do I know?

"Oh no, we've released the Brandonium!" "Are you saying I'm fat?" "No, just... verbose."

The guy was both being serious and funny, from what I can tell. From my additional research on relativity (admittedly little), it seems that energy-momentum is conserved, with certain caveats. You just need to factor in the energy of the gravitational field and... other stuff. It gets pretty mathy at that point.

Okay. So I'm not doing any of the work I'm supposed to be doing, but I was reading an article about the meaning of life. (This does have a segue to Mistborn, really) Not a philosophical paper, mind you, so science warning here! Anyway, one expert said, “Ah, that’s easy. The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” Ha. Basically, the idea was, hey, there's a lot of free energy in carbon dioxide, but there isn't an easy chemical reaction to release it. You need to build something up a little before it can get released. "The reason for the complexity of life, which is low entropy considered all by itself, is that it helps the bigger picture increase in entropy." Because as we all know, Ruin can build something up if it knocks two things down later So there you have it. Link: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/03/10/free-energy-and-the-meaning-of-life/ Other interesting things in the article include a little reference to energy conservation not applying in General Relativity, as well as a small reference to Bozeman, Montana.

If Ruin could read minds, Vin's gambits with the atium at the end would not have mattered.

The kandra spikes are charged with those human attributes. You can see that the four Blessings correspond to the four human attributes currently known.

Man, Musicspren, I can't wait for you to read my Inquisitor, when I finish her app. She is pure evil. Yes, once we had two female Inquisitors, I had to make a third. They are the Angels.