Kurkistan

EVERYONE is supposed to care about TIME BUBBLES!!!!!!

Don't forget Everything has Three Aspects. That one's so storming foundational that I didn't realize how little backing it had for quite a while. --- As for names... "Theory Spotlight"? I got nothin'. --- To continue horn-tooting: You know, there's a lot of confusion about time bubbles...

Thought #1 from improperly "physic-ed" Shards: World-destroying weapon of death. "The opposite of this 1 meter cubed block of lead" == antimatter enough to destroy the planet, I would think. On cloning: Watch where you walk here. You may have to get all philosophical on us and define the true nature of the soul and its interaction with consciousness/intelligence if you're going to have "people who are clones and thus aren't really people" walking around. Alchemy abuse time: By golly gosh we just won the war. Any war. Just to be clear: I can take a 1000 ton block of TNT, "capture it's core shard" so that the block goes away and I can now recreate it at will without any effort or additional costs, and then go about recreating it whenever and wherever I like? Question to make this more scary: Can this stuff be triggered at range? Like can I attach the core shard of a stick of TNT to a bullet and then have explosive rounds? EDIT: Read your spoiler. So yes. Please tell me why there are any major government buildings left standing in any country that has engaged in warfare with another since the advent of fire. "Rifting": You have an understanding of just how much energy this is, right? An ingot of lead will be enough to level a country, by my understanding. Where does all that extra energy go when these guys are inefficiently demolishing blocks of it at a time to light candles?

Here's the quote. Source: By my reading, the gun wold probably also be "fast" because it's being wielded by a fast-moving person, and I would guess that the bullet, once it was no longer "part" of the gun, would experience the usual weirdness that bubble-exiting stuff suffers from.

Here are a few that I culled from my sig: Shardic Future Sight (I see you espouse that one too, so...) Physical Color is not the Fuel for Awakening --- And if we're allowed to toot out own horns... Well, you see... unless I'm more biased than usual, my "Form" theories are kind of just... right. To a large extent. These "ideals" seem a rather crucial part of potentially quite a few magic systems that many might not be aware of, then.

The occupancy of the ListTM is determined entirely at the discretion of KURKISTAN LTD., and is not subject to appeal or criticism.

Yeah, that one got a bit odd for me as well. Let's talk more about how exactly mages go about controlling their element. "Still Kel. We've got a lot to talk about. Let's talk detection. How do I know metal is there? If you take a wooden spoon and coat it with silver, will I be able to tell the difference between the metal in the paint and a pure-metal spoon? What if the wooden spoon was just painted with a non-metallic-but-silvery-looking paint ? Can I detect metals without looking at them? Can I direct power to them without looking at them? Can I direct power at metals without knowing if they're there or not? How in-depth does my mental image have to be, exactly?" -As we learned in mistborn, even just knowing stuff is there can be very useful sometimes. --- "Hi, Kelsier the Metal Mage again. Can I please pull the blood out of my enemies by the iron in them?" "Kel here. So this guy's running at me with a sword. I don't really like him. Are you _sure_ I can't Magneto-style the sword into turning around and stabbing him in the face?" "Still Kelsier. What about building a robot and controlling it with my mind? How far can I get it? How small can it be? How fine is my control? How many can I control at a time? Because, you see, I had this idea for a swarm of metallic mosquitos that drilled into peoples' brains, and..." Depending on your answer to that... -"Okay, so I can control metal that I created. Cool beans, that makes sense. So you're cool with how I created a millimeter coating of new metal around that one guy's sword and then used that skin as a control interface to turn the sword around and stab him in the face, right?" EDIT: "Kel still. I'll be 'round awhile. How fast can I grow this metal, and how much from an given point? Can I take a fleck of metal 1mm squared and grow it into a 30 foot spike in half a second? Please?" "Can I shrink metal? Because that'd be nice." If yes: -"HAHA! YOU FELL FOR IT! Now I would like to make myself into a superhero who has thousands of spikes and tentacles and arms and whatnot that punch out of and then retract into my armor however I like whenever I like. Think Doc Oc but better in terms of traversal of terrain (punching through walls and stilting my way around and the like), battling enemies, etc..."

Too busy watching it. And I am now "So 1337 Hoid Can't Compete" at 1337.

The wavelength clarification is inspired by the books in the library in Elantris, I believe.

Just to be clear what this does, Calmseer, this will pretty much guarantee an air embolism as the air mage ensure the gas goes where he wants it to. Let's leave off on posting more test cases until Calmseer give the okay, though. --- If you want some inspiration on "make things grow out of nothing as a combat tactic", here's a fight scene with the Kaiser character we were talking about (Warning: Some spoilers for the serial and also a tad of content warning in terms of gore). There's also another "sprout stuff out of stuff" character who comes in later in the series and has some more fight scenes for you to look at. Slightly more than slightly larger spoilers for the serial, just so you know.

*Note to self: Swimmingly knows a scary amount of biology. And is himself scary. Avoid.*

@Calmseer I probably should have said this earlier (ideally before throwing multiple walls of text at you), but a small note of caution: You are the author here, and this is your vision. If you have a vision of a world and a magic system, then don't let us distract you from it with out own idle fancies. Of course we're more than happy to offer suggestions and criticisms, but you're the one who's going to be sitting down and writing the thing, so you have full control over the discussion. That said, it may actually be worthwhile at some point for a few of us to take on something of an adversarial role to you. It seems you have a fairly deep idea of how you want the magic to function, and may just be having trouble getting it across. So if you say "Wood mages can grow plants really fast out of seeds", that leaves a fairly large amount of wiggle room for terrible people like me to nominate themselves for watchlists with. In that spirit, then, would you like it if I and/or a few others took on the role of an evil mage/organization in your universe who's sole goal is to munchkin the Damnation out of the magic system and subvert it to their own ends? You can then take note of possible holes in your specification of the magic system, and either explain your vision in more depth, realize/accept those implications in your world (and so increase the depth of your worldbuilding), or perhaps even change your magic system entirely to stop such abuse. No matter what, I think your understanding of your own magic system and the world you're building around it can only be improved by such a discussion. So example challenge, then: "Hello, my name is Kelsier ( ) and I'm a Metal mage. I just, from across the room, sprouted the earring my foe was wearing into a giant spike the pierced his skull. Is that cool with you, God Calmseer?"

I think you meant Kaiser there. Worm's a good series, by the way. I sometimes have to restrain myself from saying "just like Shamrock's power!" or the like in magic-related conversation because that series covered so many original power ideas. LONG AS LONG IS LOOOOOOOONG, though.

No problem, you're welcome. I need to justify my extensive cosmere knowledge to myself somehow, and helping out newer Sharders seems a good way.

No, and he would even have some difficulty using Nalthian Breath. Source:

Or maybe Aether could be as simple as "you get everything, but flipped"? So Mr. Evil Aether can produce air, water, and fire and manipulate wood, earth, and metal, but not do the normal stuff? That might be too much for the reader, though, as (as you say), that essentially gives the Aether-born a new magic system to play with.

I like that idea, Swimmingly. Though it seems this is moving away from your "only use magic in bursts" model. You could break the elementals/power-usages into two basic types, I suppose: enhancers or manipulators. So the elemental that lets you move really fast in water is changing how you're moving through the world (enhancing how you can interact with stuff), while the one that lets you control air flow is one that doesn't really change you so much as something else in the world. Maybe even move away from anything that allows for external control, if we really want "binding" with these elementals to be thematically strong? So any time you bind with an elemental its changing you, rather than giving you the ability to just flat-out change other things. That might become too limited, though.

Actually, something did occur to me about the faeries. Have you ever read the Bartimaeus books? It's kind of in line with your faerie idea. The bare bones of it is that all magic in that world is through the control/manipulation of demons summoned/enslaved from another realm by "wizards". The wizards don't actually have any innate powers, they just figured out how to draw the pentagrams right and a few names of demons to summon. So if you have a magic rod of death that shoots lightning, it actually has a pretty powerful demon very carefully (they'll eat your face off if you make a mistake) imprisoned in it. So it could be that "mages" are just people who captured the appropriate faerie. You could even have some nice class division (as happened in Bartimaeus) going on in that anyone can technically be a mage, but the costs of entry are prohibitive: if you can't pay to go to college afford all those precious/semi-precious gems and don't have anyone to teach you the rituals, then you can't be a mage. The population could be more or less aware of how simple the process is depending on how you want to play it. This also makes the "cost" viable (to me, at least) again, in that it seems more natural that merging with an elemental entity will do nasty things to you. You could make it both more and less constraining this way too, in that maybe mages can hold onto individual faeries (and so have access to their powers) as long as they want, but the simple act of possessing their powers is causing the transformation. So the normal mage will only "bond" for as long as is strictly necessary and then spend the rest of their time as a muggle. They could even switch out what kind of power they get, potentially. This also allows for many different classes of mages: those who hold onto power all the time despite the costs because power=awesome or paranoia, those who focus exclusively on one or two elements (let's just say you can only bond one at once, and that the aether-evil-guy has found a special faery or something) while others are more "jack of all trades master of none", etc.

To turn you more towards the light side Swimmingly's side, I thought of some more murderous uses for even the "constructive" elements! (really wish we had the Inquisitor-smiley's from SteelMinistry...) So the basic idea for the constructive elements is you take a bit of a material and make more of it, magically, yes? So a pebble can be made into a boulder or the like? Well, that gets more/less evil depending on how much exactly they can increase the mass by. You see, everything has trace amounts of just about everything else in it (okay, not everything). So food and water and air are all going to have some seeds and trace minerals and metals. So if you can make things 100 orders of magnitude bigger, well... kaboom from the inside for everyone you don't like. Failing that degree of spectacularness, you could still damage by making first-sized lumps of stuff spontaneously grow inside basically any/every part of your enemies. Or even golf-ball sized lumps. You'll almost certainly be taking out the heart/brain, no matter what (ooo, and trace elements + precise control + <any element> == body-bending, actually...) as long as you get something the size of a pea to grow in the right place. Failing that you might be able to get your mages to aerosolize their elements and/or poison the water/food supply with larger doses and get the job done that way. ---- As to the faerie idea, I hadn't given it much thought yet. Let's nail down the bare nature of the magic system first, I think. EDIT: Nvm, I'll just post a new post.

Well I'm glad we could help.

Quotes. Source: Source:

Methinks that people are underestimating the power of the system. Swimmingly's specialization/limitation idea might just be strictly necessary if you don't want these guys to be seriously OP. One key component to recognizing this OP-ness is not thinking of these mages as "squishy wizards" but as warriors who happen to have some magical powers. Let's take a few minutes to think and come up with some HPMOR-style over analysis that will make these powers a bit more clear. I'm sure that a few hours or days of thought could do far better: Note: I'm sticking to the few-meter radius throughout here, and it's still pretty impressive what the elements can do. Water: Hello blood. Goodbye enemies within an X foot radius. Or, better yet, bloodbend them and you'll be outdoing those puny metal/earth mages with their hard-made statues. Other applications: Control you're own body/blood. Heal/staunch wounds, move your body incredibly fast/powerfully at the speed of thought rather than the speed of nerve transmission (stole this idea unashamedly from "Godspeed" in Hunter x Hunter), fly through the air. Water shield: Have a shell of water around your body attacking enemies and blocking attacks. Wield water weapons: Water held under appropriate pressure can cut steel. Easily. Either you could swing about water jets as weapons or you could enhance more mundane weapons by essentially making them into chainsaws. And of course water is in basically everything, so you'll not be too likely to run out of it completely at any point. Earth: Holy hell what can't they do. EVERYTHING in Generic Medieval Fantasy Society B is made of earth or stone. Tear down buildings. Tear out the ground beneath your enemies' feet. Make the ground shoot up and perforate said enemies. Surround yourself with a buzzsaw of flying rocks/sand. Defend yourself. Encase yourself in sand or rocks as continually replenishing armor and go like a green golem on everyone. This last is potentially even the better version of self-bloodbending from the water side, as you're protected in addition to being able to move your body about crazy-fast in response to your thoughts or the like. Also flying, once again. Presumably this includes control over stones of even the precious or semi-precious variety, so also hello magebreaker. You could easily steal/destroy the power storages of enemy mages. Ever seen Gaara in Naruto? He's the guy who controls sand. Albeit he can do it from greater range than you have, but he's scary-awesome. Crushing enemies, protecting himself, traversing terrain, the works. Air: Air also, can cut things at high enough pressure. Actually, take it as a rule that everything can cut things if you increase the pressure enough. MINDBLADES AIRBLADES! Also just about everything Aang does in Avatar. That holds for all the elements here that have correspondents in that show, obviously, (for instance, Earth can probably manipulate Metal a bit), but airbending in particular was always a fairly close-range skill. So, to summarize: flying, cutting stuff, tripping up enemies, deflecting attacks, empowering projectile attacks, etc. Also getting back into creepy land, people kind of need air to live. They carry it around in their lungs. Anyone gets in range and you can either suffocate them if you're feeling nice or you can blow up their lungs. Can kind of maybe get power armor if they compress air around them or the like. Metal: Remember how terrible it was to be wearing metal around a mistborn? Remember that time Magneto used a pair of ball bearings to massacre an entire prison designed to keep him in? METAL. We get the same-old "wreath yourself in your element and have a power-suited field day", we get the vast majority of enemy weapons being either useless or deadly to those wielding them, we get Magneto-style flight, we get whirling blades of death... It's a slightly more limited Earth, essentially, except that it has that nice "kill your enemies with their own weapons" effect. EDIT: Also perfectly "forged" metal armor for you and all your pals, at the very least. Wood: Now you said this was constructive, so we can't have too much fun with wooden floors or door or hilts or ornaments or... As I said, we can't have too much fun with them. I'm going to assume that "wood" is all plants and not just wood-producing ones, though. What we do have, though, is a world where everyone is wearing plant-fiber clothing and wielding weapons likely incorporating at least some wood into their design. If worst comes to worst, you can just have all the enemies around you grow trees out of their clothes. In a projectile-launching sense, depending on how much you hate physics today, you could launch wooden arrow shafts and grow them into logs on the way out. Or drop them and violate the nature of inertia a little less by instead just ignoring the nature of potential energy. And of course hard-wood armor that's perfectly grown around your body,. Too bad we can't actively control the wood, or everyone but Fire (and maybe Air) would be getting power armor. EDIT: This might be the most passively ally-helping, though, as all your friends could also have such armor. Fire: Ironically enough, you might have overdone it by seeking to limit fire here. The few-arms-length limit is... limiting. Throwing fireballs from within your radius at people outside of it (as well as blocking enemy attacks of that kind) seems the only thing to do without killing yourself. Now if by "fire" you actually mean heat... now we're cooking with gas! (pun entirely intended and yes I cackled evilly as I wrote it ) What can't you do with heat? Redirect the heat of a torch into the middle of someone's brain, redirect the heat from their heart into basically anywhere else, freeze blood, freeze the ground, freeze water and metal and stone... If you have to redirect it rather than just sucking it out, it could be a useful limitation on fire mages that they can't just walk around freezing everything because the heat all has to go somewhere within a few arm's lengths of them. On that note, fire mages being able to redirect heat would allow some more fun "human torch" situations where they wreath themselves (or allies, but that would require quite a bit of trust and a lot of care not to get out of range) in fire and redirect the heat from their bodies outward. ----- So, looking at them, my intuition is to rank Water first, closely followed by Earth and Metal, with Air not far behind. Fire loses out big time if it's still just Fire, but probably sneaks ahead of at least Air otherwise. Problem with air is a lot of it's utility lies on the fringes of what's plausible for it (like compressing it down to 1000 psi or something), while the more solid elements always have "just bash someone with it" potential inherent to them. Wood gets dead last if it's not able to manipulate. Possibly takes it's place in the Water/Earth/Metal trifecta of scary-awesome if it can manipulate (think "clothing tearing its wearer apart"), but still probably as the fourth member of the group even then. EDIT: Oops, I forgot that you said Earth and Metal were also constructive... I may have gotten carried away. Eh, still, at least even in the worst case Metal mages can essentially disarm their opposition and wield highly modular weapons themselves. ----- Now the moonlight/crystal cost obviously puts some limit on these things, especially the more large-scale or long-scale things. But still. A single water mage could wipe out a thousand men in a dozen seconds by yanking their blood out. I'm actually not sure about your side-effect. Why must we have a side effect? I know it's a tried-and-true method of "saving" magic for important uses, but what this tells us is that you want this magic to be rare/used sparingly. If you do that, though, you'll have less time to showcase something that you're likely going to be proud of and want to show off and you'll also be heavily constrained in how "hard" your magic can be, as you'll have less opportunity for applications to emerge organically from the plot. Also, to counter my "no one would ever use their magic with this side-effect" complaint, nothing is new under the sun, and Brent Week's Black Prism books do a fair job of building a society that revolves to some extent around a magic where every mage has a strict upper limit on how much magic they can use in their life, and then goes insane after breaking it. On the atronachs: Is their control strictly limited to the "few arms length" limit? Thoughts on aether mages: Why? Is it a worldbuilding thing? Do they get some special limitation? Is an aether mage the main villain? Author's note: I am not a psychopath, I'm just very a little creative. --- Of course, I may simply have grossly misunderstood the nature of your magic system and assumed less/more control than you want to give in any of the sub-categories. Your comment on manipulating creations suggested a general ability to manipulate the elements though.

Also, if you keep reading the definitions, an older definition of "pious" comes to light: archaic dutiful or loyal, especially toward one's parents If you disregard the second clause there I would say "dutiful or loyal" fits Dalinar so Stormfathering well that the dictionaries on Roshar might as well have his face there instead of even bothering with a definition.

Have an upvote for that one. I hadn't recalled that quote.

Yeah, I saw that. Just to clarify things for everyone, this does not enable FTL communication (which is the major thing Einstein had a problem with). Using this method, sending information from A to B requires that you measure A, then use good old fashioned communication to tell the guy standing by B how to manipulate it. So in order to get any actual information you still need light-speed-limited communication. EDIT: Sorry, that came across as a bit terse. The half-dozen "that fool Einstein!!" Lines in the article must have gotten to me a bit. :/