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Maybe those cities used to fly...

Honestly, Id never considered it before this thread, but the idea that the Stormlight Archive looses Roshar and becomes a Worldhopping story is all kinds of intriguing. We know the Cosmere is intended to get there eventually, we know that SA was conceived with more inter-world connections than most cosmere stories (ie. all the Nalthis links), and we know Brandon LOVES to subvert expectations. Oooh, What If: The back half is set on Ashyn, to which the survivors of Roshar (human and singer alike) are forced to flee to following the Big Middle Event.

Wayne's a tough one, but mostly because I dont have a great handle on the realmic mechanisms of a Time Bubble. Healing is, at a basic level, about flooding the spiritual aspect with Investiture to renew/restore the current state of the Physical aspect it describes. Time Bubbles are more about tweeking the physical Laws in a radius. Hmmm... You know what, I bet Wayne is actually aging slower than anyone realizes. Notice how nobody knows his actual age or birthday, Wax just sort of found him that day. The basic Idea is that he is good at suffeusing his spiritweb with Investiture, and he's also good at fiddling with the "Time Settings" of the External World; combine the two and he should be able to affect the Time/Age settings of his own Spiritweb (slowing his own aging process rather than slowing the world around him).

You are speaking to Odium's in-world motivations which do not matter at all to the point I was making. Odium has already stated outright that he wants to leave and doesnt care what happens to the world when he does; by Watsonian reasoning there is nothing stopping him, sure. But by Doylistic logic (and WOB) we do know that the entire cast and setting of the story is not going to get nuked out of existence half-way through the story's timeline.

Im not opposed to that, either, and I definitely think there is an element of Choice involved; Shallan doesnt just change them on her own, she show's them something that lets them Change themselves.

HE would not (assuming he'd already accomplished his goal of killing Cultivation, anyway). WE would because there wouldnt be much Roshar left to write about in books 6-10. Since we know some of the POV characters that will be featured in those books, I think it's a reasonably safe bet that the entire planet the character's live on will not be destroyed.

No, not that long for the actual Desolation, but the time between Desolations when the Heralds werent around to preserve knowledge and the survivors forgot so many truly basic things (like if you throw the green rocks in the campfire you can get metal). We know from Taln that the 4500 wasw by far the longest amount of time between them, but in the beginning before the Heralds started to fail and give in to the torture as soon as they were found and captured on Ashyn, I would imagine the last desolation would need to fall entirely out of living memory, otherwise there would still be survivors around to remember the herald's technological teachings first-hand. I'd call it somewhere in the 50-100 year timeframe, depending on life expectancies.

Fair enough. Whether he will prove to be the big bad of the Cosmere is still open (I personally think he's going to prove to be the stooge of Autonomy, who will end up being the true big bad), but he is definately the big bad of the Stormlight Archive, so unless the back half is going to abandon Roshar and become a worldhopping story (a This post has been reported for attempting to skirt the rulesing awesome proposition, now that I think about it) I dont think he's going to be able to escape at the half-way point. It's been very strongly implied (by odium and I want to say WOB as well?) that he is now too invested in the planet to be able to leave without causing catastrophic damage as he rips his Invested essence back out of the world.

Hard to say. In general we've been told that if you have enough unclaimed Investiture concentrated in a single place, it can eventually gain sentience. But there are some caveats to that, there are practical limits. For one thing, Investiture gaining sentience is a lot like INvesture Creating Perpendicularity: it can happen but to happen naturally takes an astronomic amount of investiture, and feruchemy does have limits to how much can be placed in a given volume of metal. The "gaining sentience if left alone" bit is usually referenced in discussion of Devition&Dominion, where the Investiture in question is part of a 1/16th Bucket of ALL Investiture that is not currently held by a Shardic Vessel, so I dont know if the same would happen to a large enough pile of claimed Investiture (like an atium hoard, shardpool, etc). Rosharan Spren are very specifically Created by something (first Adonalsium, then the Shards, then the Stormfather) so they dont really qualify as spontaneous Sapience the way Seons would, any more than Nightblood is a spontaneous development. I think we CAN reasonably say that it wouldnt work via Metallic Arts within about 300 years or so, or else I think the Bands would have qualified. That's all about the whole Naturally emerging intelligence, though. Like perpendicularities vs Elsecalling for realmic travel, there are certainly ways to make it happen willfully with far less Investiture involved, with the example we've seen being Awakening.

Based on what we know of the timeline of when these concurrent stories happens, Trell cannot be Odium because Odium is trapped on Roshar during the time of Scadrial Era2. Era 2 happens aroudn the time gap between SA 1-5 and SA 6-10, so unless the first half of SA ends with Odium Escaping Roshar and destroying it in the process, Trell's identity is pretty much limited to Automony, Endowment (long-shot), or a reconstituted chunk of Devotion, Dominion, or Ambition.

Agreed. The two sides Im seeing are that even for Shards I expect that it would have taken a millennia or two post-shattering for Honor and Cultivation to settle on roshar and do whatever they did to Invest, co-opt and rework the ecology there. And on the flip side I think that even with the massive disruption of a Desolation, it would take a century or two for all knowledge to regress all the way to the Stone Age (since basic copper and bronze knowledge is apparently commonly lost between the early/"normal" desolations. But even with all that, a 5,000 year window is likely more than enough time for what we think happened, especially given how much happened in the generation of the Herald's first lifetime.

That's fair, but the last Desolation was 4500 years prior to the start of the series, and the cycle had been going for a long while by then (often enough for basic technology to be completely lost to living memory), and they presumably had to have enough time on Ashyn post-shattering to get use of Surges and muck things up bad enough to flee the whole planet. So if ~10,000 years agois the max by that reckoning of the Shattering of Adonalsium, I'd guess at somewhere more in the middle of the two points, so around 7500 B.S.A.

High Heightening Awakener, but not a Returned.

The thing that gets me is that I cant figure out how the ethinicities settled out the way they did, specifically with Shin. Shin is supposed to be the original home, the motherland, of the Humans on Roshar. Given the diversity among the heralds, we can safely assume there was similar diversity among the immigrant generation of humans that all went to Shin at first, I would have expected shin to have a reasonable mix of the genetic ethnic mixures, or given their recent isolationism perhaps they'd be a homogenized version where the dominant traits had won out and smothered the more recessive ones. But the modern Shin are more or less Caucasian, which is traditionally a large collection of mostly recessive traits.

I think the mechanism at play is the same general thing as radiant Snapping, etc for the Nahel Bond: a spren (and shards are in-world arguably massive spren) needs some crack/gap in the spirit-web to be able to influence it. Hemalurgy is a very reliable way to create massive gaps, but as an example Madness works equally well. Ruin got a boost to his capabilities on Scadrial because he was directly involved in the whole planet's creation so he was more Invested than is typical for a Shard that settles on a pre-existing planet. But he (and any Shard) should be able to do the same thing with any properly Crazy individual (Heralds are debatable), and any Shard (or possibly lesser Investiture beings like spren) should be able to utilize the gaps that Hemalurgy creates.

Per a WOB that I cannot for th life of me find at the moment, food items can be Awakened without additional difficulty, but if the object is then eaten the Investiture that was in the Breaths is returned to Endowment. Same as what happens when a person dies with Breath(s) still in them.

True, but that page has the current glyphs and their pictographic meanings as well as the Alethi calligraphic phonemes that theoretically make them up, which I think are the best we have for that part of the written language. However I now realize it does not include the Alethi Women's Script as I thought it did. That would be found here: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Women's_script Also, useful reference:

Is this what you're looking for? https://coppermind.net/wiki/Glyphs/Index

This is very much not true of allomancy, though it is true of Feruchemy. Allomantic savants were the very first savants we were introduced to in the cosmere, and it mostly just takes prolonged flairing. I really like these. I love the Zinc/Brass combo that seems to mimic the whole way preservation and ruin each had 1/2 of the telepathy equation.

Ice Death aside, I dont think the Southern Scadrials would have regressed too far below what the Final Empire had, and they were a budding Industrial society who's most recent milestone innovation was Canning, which would put their overall development at the Napoleonic War's equivalent. Sure they didnt have Guns, but since they had things like coinshots, atium, Inquisitors, and Koloss, etc. the whole shape of war was wildly different and their weapons development would have followed different paths, so that's not the best yardstick in my opinion.

Oooh, Cool but Weird thought. So far Id say no, he seems to be more of a black hole of Investiture, and I dont think he can emit it to power other abilities. Basically I think his investiture is all preconficgured and spoken for (like say some random lightweaver's illusion) and cant be reclaimed back to an static form.

Oooh, that's an interesting one. One the one hand it should work, but on the other hand its basically a secondary effect of having a Gemheart conduit to the Spiritual Realm, which might be too weird? Hopefully we'll get more details on how it functions as we learn more about how the Parshman were created/maimed.

A worldhopper who's whole schtick was going around collecting different Senses would be all kinds of interesting. Im curious what the limits are... We know you can store Life Sense, Steel/Iron-Sight, and even A-Bronze. Im not sure if you could store the Temporal Vision abilities of burning Gold or Electrum, though Im going to go out on a limb and say you cannot store Atium since it might get the temporal sense but not the Expanded Mental Capacity that Atium grants to actually interpret and use all that branching temporal input. Im confident you could store the Perfect Color Recognition and Perfect Pitch, though it's a very good question whether that would require a separate Sight or Sound Metalmind. Regrdless I dont see much downside in the twinborn segregating them just to be safe. Im trying to think of other possible Cosmere Senses you could try to store... We havent yet seen all that much on Roshar that would qualify as a Sense, though I think there are hints at Lightweaving having an Awareness element (Shalan accidentally draws some True things, and Renarin's whole Inverted Precognition thing). You could probably store the Spren-vision of a Horneater alaii'iku but given that it's a genetic trait you'd need to pull some Medallion or Spike shenanigans to make it happen. One of the more tactically interesting things I can think of is the Combo possibilities of the Dor. The Dor (and to some extent every Dor-based magic) is describes as hacking the Source Code of the Cosmere itself. Unlike most magics it has nearly unlimited customization possibilities (AonDor especially). So there is almost certainly more than one Dor-based Sensory upgrade you could get, and by the Dor's nature it's going to be highly customizable. And the really cool thing is that the Twinborn (TinBorn?) would only have to experience it once to store and compound it, after which he could use it anywhere in the Cosmere! That's right baby, Dor effects fueled by Preservation!

How do you all feel about the possibility that Nohadon is going to play out as a christ-figure, and will have been Tanavast attempting to go incognito and walk a mile in Mortal Shoes?

On the other hand, Soulcasting should theoretically be 100% capable of this. It would simply require a far, FAR more detailed mental construct to encapsulate all the tiny changes it would take (similar to the pages and pages of diagrams that go into that one perfect Seal). Personally I think that is more or less what Shallan is doing with those Drawings that have been able to Nudge a person's self-image. That being said, Im not sure if it's a Soulcasting effect that could override a person's self-Image, or if it's something else (a resonance) that operates more on the level of Emotional Allomancy that can influence thoughts and emotions but in a voluntary way (WOB compared Soothers/Rioters to the way music can influence but not dictate your emotions)