shawnhargreaves

The key to this quote is when the Ars Arcanum says "external source", this is external relative to what? I don't think it can mean external to the practitioner, because then Hemalurgy wouldn't be end-negative. A spiked individual goes from not having a power to having one, so in their frame of reference this was a positive transaction. Of course the same thing was extremely negative for the person who got spiked :-) But the Ars Arcanum is pretty clear that Hemalurgy is end-negative not simply because someone gets killed in the process, but because the net result is a reduction of power. The spiked person gains a weaker version of whatever ability was stolen. It only makes sense to label this net result end-negative when looking at some broader scale than just a single magic practitioner. Therefore I think "draws in power from an external source" actually means a source external to the entire physical realm. Energy is not created from nowhere, but end-positive or end-negative magics move energy from one realm to another, so conservation of energy only applies to the sum of all three realms.

Symmetry is important on Roshar, and 10 appears to be the most important number. I like how this is reflected not just in the worldbuilding (magic systems, religion, character names, city layouts) but also in Brandon's writing, with many symmetries between different character arcs, events, structure of each book, and a total of 10 books in the series. But Brandon says Stormlight will actually be two arcs of 5 books each. Is this a clue that what appear to be inworld 10fold symmetries might actually be 5+5 pairings? The most obvious example, which there has already been speculation about, is that Surgebinding could be a combination of 5 surges powered by Honor plus 5 Cultivation surges. I'm wondering if this could be a more general pattern on Roshar?

The concentration doesn't have to match because the thing being affected is so extremely different in size. The Dor has enough power to make a foot-high Aon visibly glow. Stormlight also glows, on the scale of a macro-sized gemstone or even the entire body of a Radiant. But on Scadrial, this theory says it is only a single molecule of metal that gets burned away at a time. The total amount of power is vastly smaller, but so is its focus. fwiw I don't agree with all aspects of this theory (in particular I don't think it fits AonDor or Stormlight particularly well) but I do find it plausible that channeling power through metal can burn away molecules of that metal, and that the way this works may be similar to the draining of color in Awakening.

Fun question! I would absolutely join Dalinar. By far the best set of people around, with the best chance of keeping me safe, making a difference to Roshar, and finding my knowledge useful. I'm not sure how useful my Cosmere knowledge would be at this point, as it's too much speculation and full of holes. There are other planets but I don't know how to get to them. There are pools that you might be able to worldhop through. There are a couple of Shards on Roshar, one of whom is called Cultivation but that's pretty much all I know about her... This is not actionable info for Dalinar right now. Same for my real world knowledge. I know about gunpowder, and airplanes, and electricity, but I have no idea how to bootstrap these things from scratch in a non technical society! What could really come in handy, though, is my near-omniscient knowledge of the first two Stormlight books. I could tell the Kholins about Taravangian, increase their Radiant count by sending someone off to look for Lift, fill them in about what's up with Eshonai, send a scouting party to locate and gather the non-transformed Parshendi escapees, give important background about Szeth. And if they don't immediately welcome me to the fold, I come bearing valuable blackmail material (hey there Adolin...)

Yeah, the "of 16" part is fairly important :-)

Good catch indeed, I really like this interpretation.

I believe the end-positive vs. end-negative terminology is slightly misleading. My theory is that the Cosmere as a whole follows the same conservation of energy laws as our universe, and these terms refer to the transfer of energy from one realm to another rather than actual creation or destruction of energy. Allomancy is end-positive because they move energy from the spiritual to physical realms, while Hemalurgy is end-negative because it takes an existing transfer-of-energy conduit, moves that to a different person, and in the process narrows the conduit so less energy can flow compared to before. Seen this way, Feruchemy is quite different to most other forms of magic because it doesn't require any new energy at all: it just moves existing physical attributes forward in time (have less of something now in order to have more of it at a later time of your choosing). It makes sense to me that Feruchemy would not require any traumatic, spiritweb-damaging event to initiate, since it does not require any spiritual -> physical energy transfer. As for AonDor, the Shaod seems too snapping-ish for me to discount some form of spirit cracking being involved. It's not obvious what exactly that is from the material we see in Elantris, but bear in mind that we only saw the Dor in its broken state there.

That's one of the things I liked about the chasm scene - Kaladin wouldn't have made it out of that without help, and was mature enough to accept that and let Shallan take over.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who didn't figure out Zahel on my first readthrough. It's pretty intimidating when I miss all these non-explicit things, then come here and the forums are full of "well obviously, that wasn't even hidden at all..." :-)

I would use my Truthstone to me Szeth babysit them for me. I think he'd be great with kids.

Hi - I'm a professional game developer so this thread got my attention! First a couple of questions if I may? - Is your goal to actually implement this game, or just to design it on paper? - How big a team do you have, and how much time to finish it? I hate to be a party pooper, but there are several things about Awakening that will be technically challenging to pull off in game form: It makes heavy use of cloth and rope, which are difficult to animate, even more difficult to calculate physics on, tough to accurately check for collisions against the environment, and hard to render in a realistic way. You could waste a lot of time dealing with hard technical issues like how to draw a thin piece of rope in a way that will be clearly visible to the player, how to shade an animating cloak so they can tell what it is doing while obeying complex Commands, how to stop that cloak from accidentally going through walls, etc. Another challenge is the extremely open ended nature of Awakening. Much of the fun in this magic system is the wide range of objects that can be Awakened, range of Commands they can be given, and extremely varied purposes to which they can be put. But "open ended" and "student project" do not happy bedfellows make! My advice to beginners (for that matter also to experts working on limited budgets or with small teams) is that the path to success is choosing a scoped, targeted design that requires you to do only one or two things really well. Think Portal rather than GTA. Minor but important detail: Breath is crucial to Awakening, but Breath is invisible! You will need to find some way to make it visible to the player, so they can understand how much they have put where and which objects they need to get it back from. There are many possible solutions to that, but my instinct is it'll probably be more time consuming than you expect to find the right one. Oh boy, reading it back, the above sounds really negative! I really don't mean it that way - just want to make sure you understand what you are biting off here. To put this in context: if a publisher came to me asking to fund a 100-person team to spend a year building this game, I'd say boy, there's a lot of potential in the idea and it's an exciting project, but also very risky so I'd want to spend a month or two prototyping with a smaller team (~10 person) before promising anything. If a student of mine proposed the idea, I'd push them hard to pick one of Brandon's more constrained magic systems instead. Physical Allomancy, one of the interesting Twinborn combinations, or perhaps Windrunning, would be an order of magnitude easier to implement in game form.

I have a strong but unprovable belief that this wetness is a result of transitioning from the spiritual to physical realm. And yes, I agree that Taln is wet for the same reason as a newly summoned Shardblade. If I'm right, Taln is I think our first example of a person traveling to/through the spiritual (as opposed to cognitive) realm.

Is it better to burn forever in the kind of torture the Heralds are subjected to, or for everything to be destroyed entirely? The latter ends in a state of nothingness which at least doesn't hurt any more, but with the former there is at least some slim chance the situation might someday change or you might be able to escape.

A Herald, a chull and a one-armed Herdazian walk into a bar. The bartender says, "is the setup for some kind of a joke?"

Hilarious typo! Adonalsium, the patchwork rug of deities...

A random late night musing that I want to write down now in case it no longer makes sense to me in the morning :-) One of the things I love about Brandon is that his villains are real, believable people rather than the cartoon "muahaha I will now destroy everything while laughing maniacally" stereotype. They do genuinely terrible things, but almost always for what seems to them to be justifiable, good reasons. Either their priorities are out of whack, or they are misinformed, but from where they stand it seems like they're doing the right thing. Sadeas genuinely believed that Dalinar had lost the plot, and that Alethkar needed a strong, ruthless leader to take control and preserve what Gavilar had built. Bluefingers genuinely believed that starting a massive, destructive war was the best way to free his people from oppression. The Lord Ruler genuinely believed that dictatorial control and ruthless oppression of the Skaa and Terris people was the only way to keep control in order to prevent Ruin from ruining everything. SO much more interesting than the all-too-common "I'm evil just because, and I love to destroy stuff for no other reason than that I'm evil..." Particularly interesting to me is how the seemingly obvious Preservation = good, Ruin = bad was undermined by Brandon explaining that both had to work together to create life, and by how many of the aspects of The Lord Ruler that Kelsier found most objectionable were actually due to his overly rigid, static interpretation of Preservation-y rather than Ruin-y directives. So what about Odium? The most clearly evil thing Brandon has written about to date. He hates. That's it: all he does. Oh yeah, and he splinters things too. Clearly bad, in fact rotten to the core. Totally unlike that Honor dude, who is obviously good and noble and honorable... Really? I wonder. I struggle to imagine what could possibly be good about Odium, or how the Honor/Odium conflict could be anything other than black & white good vs. evil. And yet, Brandon's history of nuanced, complex villains makes me wonder. In particular the quote from WoR, "his divine hatred". What is divine about hatred? I have a sneaking feeling Brandon might be about to show us.

I don't think Hoid is evil, mostly because in his various appearances he always shows sympathy for the good guys and tries to nudge them in the right direction. But I do think he might be rather more grey and complicated than we'd like to think. I think he's working toward something big, important, and ultimately beneficial (I just don't buy him as villain) and that he'll try to help out with other "local" problems if he can along the way, but he's too intensely focused on his long goal to get sucked into the gory details of what he sees as small scale, maybe even trivial conflicts that form the plot of the books we've read so far. I also think there's a good chance he might be wrong about his goal. Hoid thinks it is important and good, but it turns out to be the opposite. And then he has to deal with "I let Roshar burn in order to achieve THIS????" Edit: I actually think Adonalsium is a more likely candidate than Hoid for surprise-they're-actually-evil.

Also, I'm glad I listened to previous episodes before these last few! In isolation they would have given me a totally wrong impression of Feather. "Grrr! They're being cute! Dang it, now they're having a touching bonding moment! So disgusting!" :-) Polar opposite of my reaction reading these chapters...

The answer to the question "do I want to do part 5 tonight" should always be YES. Good call!

This doesn't sound right to me. With Spook in particular, getting spiked was nowhere near as traumatic as all the other descriptions we have of snapping-like events.

Interesting idea. I can sorta buy this theory, but I don't think just sticking a piece of metal into someone's physical body would be enough to tear a hole in their spiritweb. Seems to me that for this to be the case, the spiking would need to be done in a psychologically traumatic way. That certainly fits with the evidence about how Inquisitors are made. Remember the room Kelsier found after Marsh was spiked - blood everywhere, clearly a very ritualized experience that could well be deliberately designed to be as traumatic as possible for the recipient. Same deal for when Vin was spiked as a child - watching her crazy mom kill her baby brother would be traumatic for sure! And Zane was cracked long before he got spiked. But what about Spook? The scene where he got spiked was physically intense but nowhere near the level of psychological or spiritual stress we see with Mistborn snapping or the various Surgebinders. The actual spiking seemed like almost an accident at the time, so much so that he barely noticed it among everything else that was going on. Doesn't seem sufficiently intense to count as a spritweb-hole-tearing event...

I think this makes sense. These three are what the Ars Arcanum describes as net-positive magic systems, so I find it interesting that they all follow a similar pattern of two different requirements for gaining access, one part of which involves some form of spiritual cracking. Feruchemy is described as net-neutral, and I think Awakening is too, so it makes sense that these would be different. I really want to learn more about how Feruchemical abilities originated! And Hemalurgy is I think the only net-negative system we have seen so far. Returning seems like a different thing from regular Awakening, though. This isn't just moving existing investiture around from one person to another: you die, lose your regular person-sized Breath, then are brought back with a special god-sized breath in its place. New investiture is gained which makes this a net-positive event. Which should mean it works more like the first three? Hmm...

Thanks! This makes me feel more sympathy for the anti-awakening Idrian point of view.

We know that Endowment starts everyone on Nalthis out with one Breath. If they give this to someone else they become a Drab, which means reduced vitality, weaker life sense, impaired immune system, and generally doesn't sound much fun at all. What I'm not sure about is whether the default state of someone on Nalthis (possessing their single Breath) is equivalent to people on other worlds, in which case becoming a Drab leaves them worse off that what we would consider normal. Or does the Breath endow them with better-than-normal vitality to start off with, in which case becoming Drab simply returns them to the same condition as people on other worlds? To put this another way, by giving out these Breaths has Endowment actually improved the average for people on Nalthis, or merely given them the ability to move around and build up concentrations of something all sentient beings would already have?

I was thinking about the similarities between Allomantic snapping, the Nahel bond requiring cracks in the soul, and the Shaod. I can't quite put my finger on it, and this is by no means consistent across all the systems we have seen so far, but there do seem to be recurring patterns in how people gain access to the different magics. In many cases this is a two stage filter. On thing determines a pool of people who have the potential to use a magic system, and then another, completely different thing activates that potential so they can actually use it. I'm going to call these "potential" and "activation". Starting with the magics that most clearly fit this two stage pattern: Surgebinding potential = has a "cracked soul" which allows a spren to form the Nahel bond activation = following and speaking the Ideals Aon Dor potential = tied to geographical location activation = the Shaod, which is apparently random (although I have my doubts about that...) Allomancy potential = inherited sDNA from someone who ingested a bead of Lerasium activation = snapping caused by extreme stress Leaving out systems such as Dakhor and Forging that I just don't know enough about, there are four magics that appear to only require a single thing to gain access: Feruchemy potential = inherited sDNA from however the Terris people originally got this magic (unless I missed something, we don't know that yet?) activation = none required? Hemalurgy potential = unrestricted? (it's implied although I think never explicitly stated that anyone can be spiked, but I don't think we know whether there are special requirements as to who can do the spiking) activation = spike steals ability from some other magic user Awakening potential = anyone on Nalthis can do this? activation = enough other people choose to give you their Breath Returned potential = anyone on Nalthis? activation = die in an especially virtuous way Am I overthinking this, or is there a chance we may later learn that Feruchemy requires some form of activation, while Hemalurgy and Awakening have a potential users filter that we don't know about yet?