Shaggai

Ooh! That would be interesting. So when it cuts, it alters the Cognitive identity of the spren to be "the same thing, but with a cut in it", and when it severs it, the spren splits in two?

Maybe it's like the chull?

I see.

Ah, I see. I just find it unlikely that each Radiant would have their own individual suit, when the suit changes itself to fit whoever wears it.

You have to use the specific patterns of Stormlight and so on. I doubt it would be anywhere near as good as Shardplate, as well. It would have to enhance the speed and strength of the wearer, be composed entirely of diamond shapes (for the half-shards), and fit itself to a person. It would be absurdly difficult.

Oh, right. Maybe discretionary magic? The whole "they cut inanimate objects, but not living things" bit is confusing. If they don't cut living things, why would they cut inanimate objects? And if they cut inanimate objects, why not living things?

Fabrials are too limited. Nahel spren don't work. Sure. But a spren bound to a suit of armor wouldn't be as limited, and we know that Surgebinders can semibond lesser spren. Renarin, for example, bonds a Shardblade. Bonding Plate probably works the same way.

I doubt it, mainly because the guards adapt to the Blades. How could aluminum manage that? Maybe they're aluminum with some special properties, but I would expect Blades to be able to cut ordinary aluminum. Not necessarily. If the cutting power of Shardblades is due to them being really, really sharp and strong, as opposed to direct magic, durability would still work.

I'm basically saying the same thing as Argent, although maybe slightly different - I think it's a non-Nahel spren bonded to a suit of armor. The spren does the magic. Like a fabrial, but the spren has more discretion. Your points that are specifically about spren don't apply, for the most part. However, I don't quite understand your points about fabrials. Fabrials contain and use Investiture in the form of Stormlight. If I'm understanding correctly, you're saying that fabrials don't work because the Plate has Investiture in it and fabrials don't. So, therefore, I'm pretty sure that I'm misunderstanding you. Could you explain again?

Exactly. It would work just as well if it was "throg" or "kk'kke'kkakk". It just wouldn't have the same meaning to an English-speaker.

Szeth was probably dead to a similar or the same extent.

So which bit of this was referring to my theory? Edit: Well, not "mine" per se. The one I've been arguing.

Thank you so much for this. Now I understand.

Wood can be Soulcast, so they don't need to do much for charcoal. But you're right, there's no real reason to make saltpetre or sulfur. Fabrials are useful, but suitable gemstones are expensive enough that it wouldn't really be possible to outfit all your soldiers with fabrial things. Soulcasters are used, of course, removing the need for supply transport, but one thing to remember about fabrials is that the science is new. They just came up with the whole "archery platform" thing. In the absence of the True Desolation, I would expect them to have hit a threshold at which technology grows faster and faster. Unfortunately, I suspect that they'll end up back several hundred years by the time it ends.

Because he doesn't care. He can just Soothe them all into the ground, kill a few, whatever. None of it matters.

The Renaissance had less philosophy and riots though. Maybe Enlightenment for ideas, Late Medieval/Renaissance for tech? Ideological and technological progress can be somewhat separate. I think one of the reasons military tech is so far behind is because they haven't reached that critical threshold of tech where it becomes basically an arms race, with increasingly fast advances. I would also expect the Shardblades and Plate to do some of it. Why waste your time with new stuff when you've got Shardbearers to smash their armies?

Well, it depends on how much Stormlight I can get and how many zombies I use it on. If I get enough they should become human. Even if they get brain damage.

It's called Fullmetal, obviously.

1-5. No argument here, or at least none worth the space. 6. Scientific Revolution idea level, maybe? It's just that the Enlightenment parallels are pretty large (lots of philosophy, we've got empiricism in the house, feminism and to a much lesser degree atheism are starting to kind of be things, and the whole "riots in Kholinar" thing is totally going to be the French Revolution). 7. Two things. First, this is the timescale of Shards. Thousands of years isn't too much. Second, I find it much more likely that it would be a hundred to a few hundred years in between. A hundred thousand years for 99 Deolations would be around a thousand per Desolation, which seems to be too much. A few tens of thousands of years are much, much less. 8. The use of 10 works just as well with 100 as with 10. In fact, it might even work better. 9. 99 vs. 9 doesn't seem like a matter of symmetry. If you postulated that it was, say, 83, I might agree that it was possible, but 100 works well enough that there wouldn't be much of a motive to change it. 10. See 7. It's much more likely that it was only a hundred or a few hundred years in between Desolations, because of how long it's been this time. If the space was only four or five times as long, it wouldn't have as much of a kick when the next Desolation came. Whereas if it was somewhere between one hundred and four or five hundred times as long, that would be a serious shock. 11. You're right. Everyone, including me, go upvote some stuff.

Either that or Adonalsium's a real jerk.

Warbreaker, because it's free on his website.

So still too young, but not quite a thirteen-year-old.

There's a difference between attempting to kill someone in cold blood in revenge for what they've done to you, and killing someone in hot blood when they've just said they're going to do everything they can to kill your father. It can be argued that Adolin was protecting, while Moash is just trying to get revenge.

I just realized - Roshar and Shadesmar are both, geographically, two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional cross-section of a four-dimensional Julia set. Seriously, that's a lot of abstraction. What sort of Shard would design something like that?

1. The Desolations start when the Heralds break. If they stay around for too long, sure, a new Desolation will start, but while a Desolation is continuing a new one probably cannot start. It could be any amount of time, although around a hundred years seems to me to be the most likely. 2. Not thousands of years. Taln mentions having to teach them bronze and wishing he could teach them iron. So, assuming that's from before the Radiants were there to preserve knowledge, it only resets them from artificially accelerated Bronze Age to Stone Age. There were only ten Heralds and they couldn't have taught many people how to use bronze. In the Desolations, the deaths of the few people who know how to use bronze... well, it's not that many deaths compared to the total. 3. The Hierocracy was after the Desolations, certainly, but there were plenty of other events. And all of this is speculation. Your ideas are just as much speculation as his. 4. The mageocracy almost certainly existed during the Desolations, and is likely to have existed before the time of the Radiants. The Radiants were inspired by The Way of Kings. If the Way of Kings is the book of the Radiants, then Surgebinders were probably kings even before the Radiants emerged. 5. It's all speculation. Just because those specific epochs and epoch names may not have all been correct doesn't mean that your idea is definitely correct. 6. Roshar seems to be at the level of, say, Enlightenment-era Earth. Lots of scientific inquiry, debunking of past notions, lots of technological advances. There are, of course, differences, since progress is not linear. Not necessarily. The Heralds just finally snapped. Just because they got through 98 without snapping doesn't mean that the 99th means nothing.