shawnhargreaves

Word. This fits with the end of Shallan's story: "The wall did indeed hide something evil, something frightening. It was the people, like the girl and her village.” Foreshadowing for a big humans-are-voidbringers reveal?

I'm not so sure. Shortly before learning it was Kaladin, we got: Which sure sounds like she's ready to take the time to think things through and be understanding.

I very much doubt that humans keep a bunch of captive Ryshadium's around somewhere waiting to be bonded. My guess is there is a place where you go in search of them, to where they live wild. The knights have to go on a quest to earn their magic horsies!

But here's the fascinating thing about Stormlight: there absolutely is an external force arbitrating morality, at the same time as this changes with scope! It's pretty clear that the rules of the Radiant oaths are fixed (most likely by Honor, although I don't think we know that for sure yet). Kaladin can only advance when he speaks the right oaths. When he betrays them, Syl dies. We see Syl desperate for him to find and speak the words, but unable to tell him what those are. There is no relative morality going on here. And yet, we see many versions of what is honorable being interpreted in different ways by different people. And we have evidence (such as from the WoR epigraphs about the various Radiant orders) that each order saw things in quite different ways, enough so that it sometimes led to conflict between the orders. All following an externally arbitrated path, but all different. And I suspect all equally valid.

I think Stormlight argues otherwise... Should Kaladin have let Moash kill Elhokar? Should Adolin have killed Sadeas? Should Szeth have stayed true to his Oathstone, even when this required him to kill so many? Is Taravangian justified in killing so many, if that is the only way to save a huge number more? I have my opinions about all these, as do all of the characters in Stormlight, but I'm honestly not sure what Brandon himself believes. I think he is doing an incredible job of presenting the complexity of such choices, with compelling rationales for multiple conflicting points of view. This is a big part of what makes the books so interesting to me!

This theme seems quite central to the ideas Brandon is exploring in Stormlight. Multiple orders of Radiants, all powered by different oaths. Different oaths lead to different and sometimes conflicting priorities. There is only one Honor, but more than one equally valid way to be honorable. We saw Kaladin struggle with exactly this sort of inconsistency in WoR. He eventually chose the Windrunner answer, but the other option wasn't presented as necessary wrong, just wrong for him. Adolin for instance is making very different choices, following a different code of honor. Dalinar or Shallan, different yet again. On a more extreme level, we have people like Amaram, Taravangian, Szeth (and perhaps Gavilar?). They're doing things that seem highly suspect if not fully evil/immoral, yet are driven by strong internal moralities. I may not be comfortable with all the eggs they are breaking along the way, but to them these are prices worth paying for goals that they consider important and honorable. I was very interested to read the scene where Kaladin interacted with Roshone, and see how his growth and changing goals led to a very different behavior than I would have guessed. Prediction: this was foreshadowing for a future scene where Kaladin realizes that he needs to put differences aside and cooperate with Amaram toward what turns out to be a shared goal.

Well put. In just two sentences, you explained an idea that I've been struggling to fit into multiple paragraphs! I could not agree more.

I don't believe that Syl is omniscient. We know that her memory is only slowly coming back, piece by piece. And if my theory is correct that Odium has been influencing both sides of conflicts on Roshar throughout its history (as opposed to fighting directly as one side of a simple good vs. evil battle), that means he was deceiving spren as well as humans and listeners. Back in the days of the Radiants, tricking humans would have meant tricking their spren as well. Not entirely sure I believe this part, but I can't help wondering if there is any correlation between the Recreance and the old Radiants realizing they had been misled in this way? "OMG, this entire conflict is not what we thought" seems like the kind of discovery that could lead to such a drastic decision... Yep, and this is exactly what we saw happen to Eshonai. But I think it's too simple to be the whole truth (probably not even most of the truth). It doesn't fit with the feel of the latest Kaladin chapters, or with the various hints that the real enemy is not who we think, or with the scale of carefully foreshadowed and yet surprising twists that I've come to expect from Brandon, or with things he has said in the past about disliking the fantasy cliche of an "evil race" opponent. Looks to me like he is going somewhere bigger, and to my way of thinking much more interesting, than "not evil race, but possessed by evil forms". That would really just be a layer of window dressing on top of the evil race cliche... Are we sure the Everstorm is of Odium rather than Cultivation? We have two shards fully invested on Roshar, plus Odium interfering but primarily based elsewhere. And two storms, going in opposite directions. One per local shard makes a lot of sense to me. In terms of what we've seen the Everstorm do, so far we have a lot of blowing things about, plus releasing the listeners from slaveform. I'm guessing that involves some kind of spiritweb healing, aka. regrowth. Where's the Odium in that? (aside: I will be very interested to see whether Pattern can sense highstorms and/or the Everstorm...) The main reason the Everstorm seems scary is that we saw it get summoned by really scary listeners who clearly had some bad possession stuff going on. But we haven't seen it do anything comparably scary since then, and the freed listeners aren't scary at all (completely unlike the ones who summoned this storm). I think Odium's plan goes something like: Trick humans into being scared of listeners Use a small number of possessed listeners to summon a storm that releases all listeners from slaveform (in a very visible and scary way while humans watch them do it) Trick the now intelligent listeners into blaming humans (it doesn't matter whether rightly or wrongly) for their prior enslavement Everyone fights = Odium wins So far we have seen mostly the human side of all this, which means we are seeing exactly what Odium wants the in-world humans to see, and are drawing the same conclusions he wants them to draw. But I'm convinced there is more going on.

I think there is some serious misdirection about what is going on with voidspren. I don't believe that the yellow spren which Kaladin sees guiding the listeners is of Odium. Either it's not actually a voidspren, or perhaps there is a larger confusion about what voidspren and voidbringers are in the first place. Toward the end of WoR, we saw what a bad spren does to Eshonai. Those chapters are suffused with a feeling of dread - it's powerful, scary stuff. I don't get anything like that vibe from the recent Kaladin chapters. Sure, the yellow spren hasn't bonded any listeners yet, but why not? It had plenty of opportunities. Actually it seems to have been advising them well, eg. keeping them safe from the Everstorm. The yellow spren doesn't trust Kaladin, and Syl doesn't trust it, but this is similar to the initial suspicion between Syl and Pattern. Yellow spren just smells different to what Venli did to Eshonai. Bigger picture, I don't buy the whole Parshendi-as-voidbringer theory. That doesn't fit with the slavery theme (including aftermath of what having previously been enslaved does to a society) that Brandon is starting to explore. There probably was massive war between humans and listeners in the past, but it wasn't a simple Odium-corrupted-the-listeners-so-they-are-bad thing - instead Odium played both sides off against each other, causing massive damage where none was needed. Odium surely had a few agents under his direct control (on both sides of the conflict) and would have been able to indirectly influence far more (eg. the Thrill), but the vast majority of the combatants on both sides were misled rather than directly evil. So my prediction: The yellow spren is not the same as the one that Eshonai bonded Yellow spren is not of Odium Eshonai's spren is of Odium Much of what people remember as "voidbringers" or "voidspren" is incorrect, and really just means "the other side from that huge unnecessary conflict" Kaladin's next task will be to figure this out, and help Dalinar understand what "unite them" really means

I sorta hope Kvothe's love does turn out to be someone other than Denna, just because I think that would be a really cool and interesting twist, but I think it's unlikely. Not a lot of room left for him to establish a deep enough relationship with any of the other candidates. vs. Denna where a lot of time has been spent building up their relationship in detail over both the first two books. Also it's really only that text where he first talks about how to introduce her that suggests this could possibly be a misdirection, while many statements about Denna later on imply pretty strongly that she really is the one. but, I'm still hoping :-) Particular his comment about how best to approach her, where he says like a wild thing, slowly and indirectly... That could just be why the next chapter talks about other people (including introducing Auri and Devi) before getting around to Denna, but it could also be an admission that the next chapter is being highly indirect and circling around the actual truth. In particular the way he introduces Auri, describing playing his lute without at first mentioning that she was listening, then casually mentioning that she was there only to skip right past her without giving any detail, later looping back to explain how he first met her, but then moving right along to distract us with the much more elaborate story about getting his pipes and meeting Denna... what's that if not a slow and indirect approach to a wild thing?

Love Rothfuss, loved Slow Regard... An out-there idea I haven't seen mentioned before: what if we have the framing vs. "actual" story the wrong way around, and the tale Kote is telling to Chronicler is in fact an elaborate act of naming intended to transform himself into Kvothe? He's trying to recreate himself with a made-up past that will leave him unrealistically brilliant at everything, thus creating the hero needed to fix everything that has gone wrong in the world. Along the same lines as how we hear of Lanre renaming himself and gaining powers in the process. Reasons I think this would be interesting: 1) The obvious place this story seems to be going is that something terrible happened which led to Kvothe hiding his name in the locked box and becoming the Kote we see in the framing story. But watching this happen and then somehow resolving the situation is a LOT of material to get through in a satisfying way in just one more book! Would be fascinating if it turned out to be the exact opposite of what everyone expects. 2) Kvothe is ridiculously, at times irritatingly good at everything. Part of that may be exaggeration (there is plenty of evidence that he's not the most literally reliable narrator) but still, his excessive awesomeness is a common complaint from people who didn't love the books. How awesome would it be if this turned out to be the entire point of the tale? Kvothe is so intelligent, amazing memory, magical powers, musician, lover, fighter, etc, exactly because these are the attributes that Kote wants/needs to gain. 3) The unreliable narrator thing. There are many, many references to how Kvothe/Kote values the shape and aim of a story over exact literal truth - he talks about how his dad taught him which aspects of a tale to cherish, and later on about how the tales of the Edema Ruh are all 'True' even if the exact things in them didn't quite happen in that way. It seems very likely that his own tale to Chronicler is similarly embellished. Which is interesting (thinking about this aspect adds an extra layer of complexity to my rereads) but ultimately unsatisfying because as readers we are invested in this tale and really want it be literally true. If we get our nose rubbed too much in the idea that Kote is embellishing the tale he is telling to Chronicler in order to make the story more perfect and satisfying, that ends up making the tale that Patrick is telling to us LESS satisfying. Pat talks a lot about how this is a story about stories - one way to make that work on every level is if the story-ness of the inner story (as opposed to just the facts that happen in it) turns out to be essential for the framing story as well. Am I crazy? :-)

It's like Arya's list in Game of Thrones, but less sociopathically terrifying.

No more dead Kholins! Thank you so much for making these. I thoroughly enjoyed them. Now counting on more of the same for all future Brandon books :-)

I really hope you are wrong about these, for meta-textual reasons - I would find it emotionally dissatisfying if these abilities come from an external/magical source rather than being innate to the characters. It's awesome and satisfying when magic gives people amazing physical and sometimes even cognitive abilities, but I want these more spiritual aspects to come directly from Kaladin and Shallan themselves. I suspect you are right that all Windrunners are excellent leaders and all Lightweavers can provide this kind of spiritual sustenance, but I think you have the reason for this backward. These strengths are what won them access to the Nahel bond in the first place (so of course everyone who develops a particular bond will share that same strength) rather that a consequence of it. Once established, the bond gives them access to two surges plus a little something extra. Also, the WoB quoted by Kurkistan in the second post of this thread seems pretty clear that the extra Lightweaver ability is mnemonic. I'd expect the other extra abilities to be similar in scope - real and useful, but less powerful than the surges and not the defining characteristic of their order.

This doesn't make sense to me. Things I believe to be true: Humans are primarily physical beings Spren are primarily cognitive Shardblades work by severing spiritual connections Shardblades are spren So shouldn't shardblades cut in the cognitive rather than spiritual realms?

This. It wouldn't make sense for squires to get all the same powers as their Radiant, but also I have a hard time with all squires getting identical powers no matter what order of Radiant they bonded to. Radiant bonds to spren = gets different powers depending what type of spren. Squire bonds to Radiant = same deal, should be different depending what type of Radiant. It Feels Right

Am I the only one surprised by how well Feather held that together? I wasn't expecting her to be able to keep on reading right away! Possible the best quote ever: "I'm sorry I tried to set you up with her" :-)

I've been assuming (without any real evidence) that Renarin's visions are approximately similar to Dalinar's, except that he sees the future rather than the past. In which case they are involuntary, he knows he's in a vision (at least after he figures out what's going on) but is unable to choose to leave it or sense the real world at all until the vision ends. If he moves or speaks in the vision, his real body does the same in the present time, which is why Dalinar is seen to thrash around and speak 'nonsense' syllables. Renarin acts differently (scribbling on walls) but that could just be a difference between him and Dalinar rather than difference in the nature of the visions themselves. Dalinar reacts to strange situations by running around a lot, fighting, and talking to people, while Renarin hunkers down and starts writing...

Hello, and welcome to the forums! This is an interesting theory, but I'm not sure I buy it. The physical forms of magic we have seen so far are crazy special, numinous in one way or another. They are used to power things, rather than being a thing in themselves. Shardplate is amazing stuff, but seems more like an end result of applying powerful magic than directly being made of the magic itself. I guess I just don't buy that raw magic could be engineered directly into such a specialized form. But, you could well turn out to be right! We really don't have a lot of evidence about how Plate was created yet.

I wholeheartedly agree with this theory. The Bondsmith ability could be something to do with how Dalinar is able to receive his visions.

"Obey me". He doesn't have enough understanding to properly apply commands that require judgement, so I would keep responsibility for all decision making myself.

How can you stop there? How?? This is not fair!!!! (runs off to re-read chapters 85+)

Ok, here goes! My main feedback is that this design is far too complicated to be achievable on a student/indie scale. I hope you won't take this opinion in a negative way, as I think there is actually a ton of potential for great games based on Brandon's work. Because I think this, I would love to see you be successful in making such a game and proving that one of his magic systems can be a foundation for excellent gameplay. So I would love to see you be smart about scoping your design to something that can realistically be successful with the resources you have available to implement it (to be clear, I don't know what these resources are - but I'm guessing it's you plus maybe a few friends, and that you don't have millions of dollars to spend on the project?) Choosing the right scope for a game design is more important than many other art forms, for a couple of reasons. You'll often see similar advice given to people starting out in other areas ("write lots of practice short stories before attempting a novel"; "learn the guitar by practicing your scales before you try to play Hendrix") but there are plenty of examples where people have been successful doing the exact opposite. Brandon started writing epic fantasy novels right from day one, worked hard at it, got better and better the more he wrote, and clearly turned out ok. But games are different because: 1) Big commercial examples are INSANELY expensive to make these days. A typical AAA game is the work of between 50 and 100 people, usually for about 3 years. To make something similar requires not just talent but also massive resources, which is different from pretty much all other art forms except film making. The only thing stopping me from writing Stormlight is that I'm not (anywhere near) as good a writer as Brandon, but even if I had all the necessary specialized abilities, on my own it would take several hundred years to make a game like Assassin's Creed! Of course there are excellent indie games (just like there are indie movies) made with far fewer resources, but these aren't just smaller scale versions of the same sort of designs the AAA games are using. Smart indie developers think differently, pick their battles wisely, and choose designs that can be fun after they implement just one or two rather than hundreds of different features, and which won't require huge amounts of expensive content (artwork, animations, level design etc.) 2) Game making involves engineering as well as art, and this means failure is usually hard rather than soft. By which I mean that if a novelist, musician or painter takes on a task that is too ambitious, they will usually still end up with a book, song or painting - it just won't be as good as they were hoping for. They can still show it to friends, get feedback, analyze its flaws, and lean from it so as to do better next time around (which is exactly the process Brandon followed to give us amazing things like WoK). But when an engineering project is too ambitious, the result is a hard failure where you don't end up with anything working at all, and thus there is not much to be learned from the experience. I've been there more than once myself - it's a very depressing place to end up, highly not recommended :-) This makes it important to choose game projects with appropriate scope to fit the available abilities and resources. Stretching yourself a little bit is good (that's how you learn and grow) but stretching too far leaves you with no game at all after lots of hard work. Ok, that's enough about scope. My other main feedback is about focus. Lack of focus is the most common weakness I see in new game designers. This is natural - they're full of excitement and creativity, so why settle for just one or even ten ideas when there are hundreds more just waiting to be invented? But it's actually almost always better to focus on just one or two core ideas because: 1) Doing one thing really well produces a more fun game than doing many things less well. 2) Having too many ideas contributes to impossible-to-actually-implement scope. It takes thousands of times longer to implement an idea than to come up with it, so if you spend eg. one whole day inventing ideas, the result is already a huge pile of implementation work! 3) Most of what people actually do while playing a game is very repetitive, and is at a lower level than what we tend to think of as game design ideas. When we say "fight your way into a building", what the player actually does most is "move crosshair over enemies, then press fire button". It might seem kinda stupid to say that a game design is all about aiming and shooting things, but in fact that's the core mechanic of probably 90% of the revenue the industry makes today! And it's this kind of low level mechanic that is most important to get right. If these fundamental, repetitive actions feel satisfying and rewarding to the player, the game will be fun almost no matter what you later layer on top of them, but if they aren't quite right, no amount of clever higher level design can save the day. Having too many ideas too early in development tends to distract from spending the time to properly tune these fundamental mechanics. Most successful game designers do some version of this, but Miyamoto is famous for formalizing it. During the early concept phase of Nintendo games, he insists that a single core mechanic be identified, and then implemented in a simplified, sandbox type test environment. For Mario, that mechanic is jumping. So he would build a single screen containing maybe one vertical wall and two platforms, and then program a Mario sprite so you could move and jump between them. No enemies, no score, no progression - not really any gameplay at all. Just jumping. Is it fun? He would spend months, in some cases I heard years although I don't know how true that is, tweaking this single mechanic until it was as fun as possible. Once it got to the point that simply jumping back and forth from one platform to another was so dang satisfying that people would happily 'play' this even without any actual gameplay, he would move the game into full production, knowing that when all the extra higher level stuff was added over the top of this solid foundation, the game would be sure to turn out great. I think you would greatly benefit from following a similar approach, especially since this is a somewhat original concept where there isn't a lot of existing control scheme design that can be inspired by previous games. Build a single room with just a couple of objects in it, one of which is a piece of rope. Implement your Awakening control scheme, use it to have the rope do things to the other objects (like the scene in the book where Vivenna is practicing using a rope to pick up a glass of water) then keep tweaking and trying different things until it feels right - awesome and satisfying and fun to play with. Starting out by proving a single core control mechanic will give you a solid understanding of what does vs. doesn't work when you later come to expand this into a full game design, which can avoid a lot of wasted time going down design dead-ends. Creating such a thing also has some practical benefits. If you find yourself needing other people to help make the game, there's nothing like a concrete demo to prove it will work and get them excited to help you. And if you want to get a job in the industry after finishing your course (I'm guessing that must be your end goal in studying this area?) a demo will be invaluable for that too. Finally, some concrete suggestions about ways you could reduce the scope of your design to make it more feasible to implement: 1) Switch from 3D to 2D. This reduces both programming cost (physics, collision detection) and art (modelling, animation) by a huge amount. It's easy to mock up placeholder 2D art for prototyping, then go back later to insert real artwork, but 3D modelling is time consuming even to create rough placeholder versions early in development. 2) If it must be 3D, make it 1st person. Character modelling is hard and very time consuming, and animation even more so, so pick a design that won't require you to do those at all. 3) Cloth and rope animation and collision detection is much harder than rigid bodies. You can't really do Awakening without these, though, so if you aren't willing to consider a different magic system entirely (Allomancy would be much less challenging!) I recommend choosing just rope to get right at first. 4) Parkour / freerunning type gameplay is a monumental undertaking that places tough requirements on character animation systems, collision detection, and environment modelling. I advise against taking this on at the same time as figuring out an Awakening control scheme, which is a big/hard/unknown/worthy challenge in itself - one big problem at a time should be more than enough to keep you busy :-) Ok, I'm done typing now. I hope this didn't come across as too negative. I really would love to see you figure out how to use Awakening as a game control scheme - just trying to inject some reality into the best way to go about that. Good luck!

Isn't that approximately what Syl and Pattern are? I find it interesting that although they are far more sophisticated sentient beings than Nightblood (much more aware of the nuance of interpersonal relationships) they dodge the exact same questions of how to interpret their Ideals as where Nightblood goes wrong. Syl cares very much that Kaladin must follow the Ideals, but when he asks tricky questions like how to balance two conflicting promises, she's no help at all. Bonded spren seem to rely on their human partners to make these subtle judgments about how to interpret their principles, but Nightblood has no such bond. Could the secret to Awakening a non-backfiring weapon be to bond it with a human consciousness, as opposed to just giving it a single static Command?

May I ask how much your goal is to actually create this game in a playable form, vs. just coming up with ideas for its design? If you are planning to implement it for real, I would be happy to share advice on how to go about that. This is an area I know well after 18 years in the industry (roughly half of that as a lead programmer).