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I could get behind that. There are definitely extreme mental consequences, with an addiction to the power itself seeming to be relatively common (with both Roshar and Scadrial versions). That could qualify as the Trauma Cracks, but that would make them more of a secondary consequence rather than fundamental to Savantism itself. The Rosharan version is the one that seems a more extreme, and I go the sense that it's more commonly lethal, but again that may be secondary to an addiction to the power.

Part of why I ask is that it would have implications with the soulcaster savants over on Roshar. Yup, I posted that a bit later:

The third Inroad is full-on Madness, yes? Miles might well qualify for that, especially if there's any accumulated Spiritweb damage from all his Healing (or if he's ever had to heal direct spiritual damage). Tangential question: Would savantism qualify as spiritual damage enough to make it easier for a Shard to influence the person?

I'd previously thought the OB letters also implied that Hoid managed to get there, but that was based on the assumptions that A) the world in question was indeed Taldain, and B)that when Autonomy said they thought "it" was well hidden they were talking about the world and not the avatar itself. But if that is the case, it would imply that Taldain was difficult to get to because it had been hidden/obscured rather than that it had it's perpendicularity disabled.

Pretty fun so far. Im enjoying the combat tweaks. Instead of clothing-based gear changes like in KH2, the keyblades themselves change which alters your combos and whatnot (based on focus charge like KH2) so there's a lot more variety, and you can swap between up to three equipped keyblades on the fly. You also just Get the world's support characters, rather than having to swap out donald or goofy for them and sacrifice combo options, which I like. Looks like there are going to be fewer worlds overall than in KH2, but there's lots to do so it probably wont suffer too much for it. I have to give them credit for managing to make the inter-world space fighting mini-game actually fun this time around, mostly by making it geared toward open-world exploration. There's a lot of completionist fodder (hidden chests lists for each world, hidden Micky emblems to find, etc) but none of it's miss-able so it doesnt bog things down.

Got my girlfriend a PS4 for her birthday last weeek, so we're alternating between Kingdom Hearts 3 (me) and Shadows of War (her), with Monster Hunter, Dynasty Warriors and Red Dead Redemption in the wings.

He's fairly specific that the upper limits of Syl are about human sized, which is also the biggest we've seen her manifest in human shape. Makes me think that others, like perhaps her aunt, that have shown larger forms could become larger weapons. "You've always worried about this, havent you? That the world would come to be ruled by pens and scribes, not swords and generals." (Stormfather, OB, Ch 65)

My guess would be Fire.

I more mean being the person that actually put in the time and commitment to learning the craft of Writing enough to finish a few novels (another similar one would have been actually taking up music). But damned if @SwordNimiForPresident doesnt have a great point! The question then becomes how much does the essence mark being active impact the ease of stamping the book? Does it become easier to alter the past of the book after you've altered yourself, or are all stamps relative to the objective Truth and independent of Forgery meddling?

Most of them would be paths not taken. -If Id stayed in the family business and taken over my father's martial arts club. -If Id joined the military instead of going off to college -If Id chosen a different Major in College, some other engineering discipline or something wildly different. -If Id stuck with it enough to finish any of my various novel ideas -If Id never believed the well-meaning idiot my senior year who convinced a handful of us he had funding to start a video game company, such that I wasnt looking for a job when I should have been. Question: Would it be possible to make an Essence Mark such that I selected the Winning Lottery Numbers many years ago, and thus lived a life of luxury with the best health care and the freedom to pursue my own interests (self education and hobbies, etc) rather than spending all my energy on a 9-5 job? I think that would make for an interesting what-if scenario.

That's amazing, both of you. I can barely read my own writing in english, and it's my native language. I wonder if we can make a windows Font out of the script?

Absolutely. This is on the same general order as Fabrial radios, Soulcasting Nukes, or Lightweaver Lasers; it may or may not even be possibly, but would require a major leap in Rosharan scientific understanding. I doubt it, because I think (with nothing close to proof) that unlike Gravitation, Teleportation used that way is going to work on a similar principle as Soulcasting in that it's easier to affect a single 'thing', either some physical area like the oathgates or something with a unified Identity like traditional soulcasting, and to affect just the oxygen and exclude the rest of the air would require the caster to view all the different atoms as distinct things. It would be far easier to to take a mass of Air and Soulcast it into an equal mass of pure Oxygen (or hell, swamp-gas methane) and ignite that.

Agreed. It would be cool, but if it's possible (and that's a big ol' IF) it would be a Reverse lashing/Gravitation effect rather than Adhesion/pressure manipulation. On the gas liquefaction, a phase change makes it significantly more effective in refrigeration, but a phase change is not theoretically required for the cooling effect. Check out that link on the DIY liquid nitrogen system, it's using simple air in the 3000 PSI range and a regenerative cooling tower. But I completely agree that you just arent going to be able to get it to work in open air around a target, at least before the threshold of "Anything it possible with absurd/Shardic levels of Investiture". On the other hand, if you could make an inverted Heat Fabrial that absorbs thermal energy rather than expelling it there might be some possibilities. But I have no idea what principle (or Surge) that fabrial is working on. Any thoughts on that?

Not quite, but yes in nearly any scenario I can think of Jasnah would be able to counter and destroy a windrunner trying this. If Lashing are a thing that can be applied to selective gasses (ie just oxygen and excluding the Nitrogen part of air), then all he'd have to do is maintain one long enough to spike the O2 concentration around her and then ignite it with a small flame piston pressure effect; that's the only route that I'd see being fast enough to be useful in a fight, and she'd still be able to do the exact same thing faster by Soulcasting the nitrogen into Oxygen, then a touch of Fire Essence. The cycling only comes into play if he's trying to make a liquid oxygen grenade, and that would be more about cycling the air pressures to supercool a metal container until liquid oxygen started condensing out of the air, then you add charcoal as fuel and throw it, the impact would be enough to ignite it without a spark. If he could also lash that object to pull only o2 it would work faster, but isnt necessary since oxygen condenses before the nitrogen. If you somehow managed to do that actively around a person rather than in a container, you'd already have frozen them solid before any ignition became necessary. Wikipedia on Liquid Oxygen Explosives Homemade liquid Nitrogen Generator (same general principle as Liquid Oxygen) Per WOB soulcasting does violate conservation of mass in some instances. The most obvious ones we've seen are when they soulcast lighter materials into Stone or Metal, particularly when they soulcast lighteyed corpses and get a statue of the same dimensions rather than much smaller but the same weight. That being said I have no idea what the specifics or limitations of that are, and suspect it varies by essence.

Turn Off the plate as a whole is an overstatement, true, but it would (potentially) negate whatever active investiture effects are happening in a (very) small field around the bullet itself, right at the moment of impact (of just after with fragmentation), no? It would take an extremely Fortunate shot to time such a thing perfectly, but I think it could have an effect.

I get the right shot (well aimed at the proper structural spot) and the right bullet (aluminum almost certainly) but what's "The right moment" going to mean? Would he have to hit the piece right as it was taking other stresses, meaning that it wouldnt be shattering the piece so much as negating it's magical structural enhancement just as it was taking some other stress? For example Im pictuting him shooting the boot piece just as the shardbearer tried to land from a high-jump, with the aluminum bullet turning off it's magical properties at the critical moment for the weight of the bearer to crush their own plate.

Ok, so in practical application it's probably not going to work within the timeframes of any direct fight, though he were trying to accomplish something sneaky with more time he might be able to pull a LOX bomb off (if at far more difficulty than a soulcaster or dustbringer). So this is very much a distant tangent to the actual topic of Windrunner Vs Elsecaller. Fundamentally, if you compress a gas it heats up, if you decompress a gas it cools down. So if you have a collection object (basically a metal container, and repeatedly decompress a gas in or near it, you will lower its temperature by an incremental amount, and if you can do that repeatedly it will get lower and lower until it starts cooling the air and various elements start to liquefy at normal atmospheric temperature. The way we do this is by first compressing the air, giving it a bit of time to equalize back to room temperature, and then releasing the gas to atmospheric pressure which cools the gas and whatever it's touching. This basic concept is how we do most of our refrigeration, with minor changes depending on the compressor fluid used (air, Co2 for dry ice, various refrigerants with beneficial thermal properties, etc). Assuming that a Windrunner can directly create magical Vacuum rather than just the compression that we can, they'd be able to skip the compression and temperature equalizing step, but the pressure difference at each "release" cycle would be a lot smaller (1 atmosphere as compared to the 100-ish that industrial compressors will often do) so they'd need more cycles, at which point the limiting factor becomes how fast they can crank those cycles out magically. Now if some combination of Pressure and Gravitation allows him to be chemically selective, such that he can choose to move just oxygen atoms rather than the whole air mixture, he can fiddle with the Oxygen concentration directly. Then said Windrunner would be using the same mechanism as the Flame Alchemist from FMA. He'd could generally skip the liquefaction idea entirely and be able to just make a bubble of high percent oxygen atmosphere around the target, then use any available spark (or a tiny bit of super-compressed air for ignition heat the way flame pistons work) to burn a person up using their own hair and skin and clothing as the fuel. Though the liquefaction described above would still be on the table as a way to make an inexpensive bomb.

Barring the generic caveat that manipulating one bit of Investiture with another is difficult, I think this should work, though I think the jury is still out on how much bloodlines affect the type of misting you become, and I think the original kings that were made mistings would imply that the genetics do have a specific leaning. Another similar route, if you managed to get an era1 spike that came from a full mistborn and/or full Feruchemist, it would probably be a relatively simple Stamp to rewrite it's history to have stolen a different power, and maybe even charge it by convincing it that is had been kept in Blood storage the whole time. Then you'd only need two spikes to be any kind of Twinborn. Either way, yes, it would require that you remain on Sel to make it work, barring other realmic shenanigans to extend the connection. But it may be possible given that the Ire are Elantrians that manage to persist away from Elantris and made an expedition to Scadrial.

From a purely practical standpoint I think they still have to, they just dont bother as much specifically for gems since there is an easier way to get far higher quality gems. But Mining for metals and quarrying for stone is still a thing. Shallan's family was supported by marble mines (even if they were secretly creating new deposits with a soulcaster). And while soulcasting other things to metals and stones is certainly possible and present, it was implied that the needed soulcasters are relatively rare. There's a whole Nation that's famous for the fact that it has a single Soulcaster capable of bronze, and there's that trader who was prized by the Shin for being able to certify that his goods were entirely soulcast and not mined or quarried. Both these things imply to me that using pure soulcasting for metals and stone are not going to be able to support the entire economic need.

@Pathfinder I went off to research and the conversation mostly moved on, but here's more or less what I found on Oxygen & Ozone. As others have said, both Oxygen and Ozone technically cant burn since combustion is literally defines as Oxygen reacting to some other fuel. So Oxygen cant burn in a vaccum and needs fuel. Ozone is mostly in the same boat in that it's great as a more dense source of oxygen for such reactions but usually needs a fuel. However it is also a molecule at a higher energy state than the atoms want to be at, so it can "degrade" back into o2 and release energy in the process; there seems to be some debate between the chemistry wizards as to whether that can be called burning, and I dont know whether it would look like fire (in a vacuum, again), but it does sound like a high concentration can release that energy quickly enough to potentially give you an explosion, and that's a point worth remembering: Any significant volume change can give you explosions and/or detonations even without actual fire. If you have some free time I recommend doing a youtube search on Thermite & ice or Thermite & lead, they show how simply driving a phase fast enough can cause a proper detonation (and are shockingly cool). Back to oxygen, the critical thing with Oxygen, be it o2, o3 (ozone), or liquid Ox (LOX) is all about concentration. The higher the atmospheric concentration of Oxygen the more explosively reactive the fuels become, and the more things can be considered a Fuel until the threshold become basically any organic material. A cloud of pure o2 or o3 can explosively react with just about anything with carbon in it, so for most practical purposes it's going to cause an explosion, though it still needs an ignition source such spark or significant heat source (though that too can be achieved via pure compression as in the old fashion fire piston). LOX does it better than either of those by virtue of being a liquid and thus a wildly more dense source of oxygen for the chemical reaction (861:1 at earth standard sea level). One big difference is that liquid oxygen will ignite via light impacts if it has a decent fuel present. For example, they use charcoal briquettes soaked in liquid oxygen as a demotion charge in some things like mining operations where it becomes expensive to use traditional nitrate-based explosives. EDIT: on the topic of the hampering effects of plate, Im curios to see if this is the case with an actual Radiant creating their own plate. Shardplate does flex and/or conform to it's wearer to some extent, and forms a similar if lesser Bond in much the same way a deadeye shardblade does. And one of the biggest downsides to shardblades was thought to be the fact that they were so large and ungainly, until we saw a living shardblade that far more readily adapted to the situation, going from sword to knife to spear. I suspect, but cant say for certain, that an active radiant in their own manifested Shardplate is going to find that it conforms to their movements far more readily than a dead/borrowed set, especially for the Orders that are more agility-oriented like the edgedancers. But even if the only change is that they can summon and dismiss it as quickly as they can their blades, that would go a long way to reducing the tactical drawbacks.

It's worth noting that the Singer forms come from bonding lesser spren, not the full Sapient ones. So while there has been a reduction of how many new sapient spren of various races have been created since Honor passed the ability onto the Stormfather, there's nothing to say that there is any sort of limit on the population of lesser spren out there. There's also nothing to indicate that there is only a single type of lesser spren that can cause Mateform; it could be that any lesser spren with a sufficient leaning toward Cultivation can trigger Mateform, for example.

If any individual piece of shardplate takes enough damage, it first cracks and begins to leak stormlight, but enough damage beyond that point will cause it to explode into molten bits, and at that point the piece is lost. So long as a single piece remains it can be fed stormlight to regrow a lost piece, but if all the pieces took that critical level of damage (unlikely and impractical) there would be no piece let that could be fed the stormlight to regrow the whole.

Indeed. And add on top of that the fact that Shardplate can be starved of Stormlight and destroyed while blades cannot, and I think attrition over the years would have further skewed the ratio.

For what it's worth, exposing oxygen to high voltage electricity is a great and relatively easy way to make Ozone, so if any radiants can mimic the lightning attacks of Stormform they'd have the easiest route to Ozone, but it's would be sort of redundant as an attack if you can already throw lightning. If you're goal is to turn oxygen into an explosive with pressure, a viable route for that is actually going to be air liquefaction: if you pressurize and then release air, it cools down relative to the pressure difference, and you can do this over and over again in a cycle until it eventually liquefies the air itself. It's entirely possible to do this in a hobby setting to create your own liquid nitrogen (plans available online), though it's considered extremely dangerous because the oxygen actually starts to liquefy before the Nitrogen does, and liquid oxygen is wildly explosive. But if that's your goal, job done. Generally not something that happens quickly so it would take a lot of magic to make it viable mid-battle, at which point you could probably just make a pure pressure explosion more along the lines of an exploding steam boiler or other pressure vessel. God I love these sorts of threads...

@Child of Hodor "Parshendi" specifically is one that seems to have become a slur, in that it is a modern term that literally means "Parshman who can think" and only has meaning in the context of comparison to the Parshmen that were spiritually lobotomized and enslaved. Not as blatantly derogatory as Shellhead, but at the very least it would probably fall into the "Culturally Insensitive" category, even if back at the beginning when neither side really grasped what had been done to them and when they both were entertaining hopes of peace, it may have seemed more innocuous on both sides.