Weltall

That he didn't like how it turned out is generally known, at least to people who dig into this sort of information since Brandon has mentioned it on his blog, at events and in WoBs. He's also mentioned that the attempt to cannibalize Aether of Night's magic system didn't work out like he wanted it to, and even if it had that's become null and void since that book's going to be rewritten too. The stuff about his current plan and the specifics of writing Hoid are new and neat. And yet, as exciting as it is to hear him mention it at all, I know it's going to be a looooong time before we get to see it. xD But that's okay, I trust that by the time it actually happens Brandon will be able to make it work spectacularly and give Hoid the origin story he deserves.

As noted, Preservation and Ruin are both associated with 16 since that's the number of viable metals (not counting the godmetals and potential alloys of them) and Preservation explicitly used that number as his 'signature'. Honor and Cultivation are also firmly associated with 10 while Odium (being Invested on Braize rather than Roshar) is associated with 9. Beyond that, we have no hard associations and there are so many things we don't know about various systems so any attempt to work out numeric associations in Selish magics or Sand Mastery are just guesswork. BioChroma's also got various possibilities but we know Brandon is holding onto information about that magic for the planned second book. And since we've got that WoB that not all Shards have any particular numeric associations, it's entirely possible that there are none for these other magic systems. And in Autonomy's case, there may be multiple associations since Bavadin isn't limiting her focus to a single world.

It's not just Sazed, anyone who inherited Harmony would find themselves limited due to the conflicting Intents of the two Shards that combined to form it. And Sazed's been noted to be somewhat resistant to the influence of his conflicting Intents due to his own nature, so handing the power off to someone else wouldn't really make a huge difference. In most respects doing that would probably be a Bad Idea, since anyone in a position to take up a Shard in the present would be completely new to the idea and even less experienced than Sazed, who at least had the advantage of his Copperminds to help him best use all that power at the critical moments post-Ascension when he was able to use the power with the least Intent-imposed restrictions. So no, the idea of Sazed passing on his Shard(s) to other people in Era 2 Scadrial or anywhere remotely close to it hasn't even crossed my mind.

Yeah, other than Selish magics which (within our current understanding) have a hard limitation on their use offworld, all forms of Investiture are at least theoretically universal even if some may be harder to use than others. For a rundown: - Allomancy and Feruchemy: Usable anywhere as long as you've got access to the right metals, and it doesn't matter where the metal comes from. - Hemalurgy: As noted above, it has Cosmere-wide application but you need Intent to actually create a spike so nobody is going to discover this one by accident. - BioChroma: We know this can be used offworld both for the passive benefits of Breath and actively in Awakening. It's also the easiest systems to get magic from for a non-native as Breath is keyed to your Identity when you receive it. Though Brandon has said separately that Returning is pretty much locked to people born on Nalthis. - Surgebinding: Could be done offworld as long as you have access to Stormlight, but it would require some knowledge to get the spren away from Roshar's Cognitive 'region'. - Sand Mastery: Usable offworld and the sand can be recharged as long as light from Taldain's star is visible in your current location. - Aviar: Usable offworld as long as you can keep the bird alive.

Psst, you might want to read this. OB spoiler

It's always possible for Brandon to decide to set additional works on a planet later on (like he's announced an interest in for First of the Sun and confirmed for Threnody) but so far we don't have any evidence of non-Stormlight books to be set on Roshar. Given how big SA is going to be and how many other planned series he has, I wouldn't expect much else to be set there once the final novel is finished (except maybe in the mega-crossover that Mistborn Era 4 is expected to be) but as Kelsier would say, there's always another secret so we can't rule it out.

The Plains were supposedly Shattered during Aharietiam and were definitely not shattered during the Heraldic Epochs when there was a city there. Which makes the shattering of the plains something that happened long long after the Shattering of Adonalsium. By the same token, we have WoB that Tanavast was alive to see the Recreance, which happened after Aharietiam. Whatever hit the Plains, it wasn't either of those ideas.

@The One Who Connects That was my WoB and my first RAFO. xD

I asked Brandon this a couple years ago vis a vis a Leecher versus Breath and got RAFO'd. But since then we got the BoM broadsheet which, taken more or less at face value, implies that A-Chromium definitely works on some other forms of Investiture. Not that we know exactly how Nazh's 'Shadegun' works of course.

Pretty much all we know of Ashyn comes from the annual mention in State of the Sanderson and the WoB (which mostly involve its magic system) and the one reading he did of (part of) its prologue. So we have no idea what the people of that world call their system and the other planets in it, or if they're even aware there are other planets.

Brandon has explicitly stated outside of the books (and for that matter it's stated in the books through Rock) that Hoid is incapable of hurting people and it's an involuntary thing. His ability to 'hurt' Kelsier in Secret History has to do with the latter being a Cognitive Shadow and thus in some way outside the parameters whatever is affecting Hoid.

Not just the Cosmere's established laws but the 'laws' of the individual magic systems. For example, under our current understanding of BioChroma you can't use that system to fly even though it's a power well within the capabilities of several other magic systems; It's just not something that that magic can do. However, that exact same system could be and was used to create Nightblood, in a conscious attempt to replicate a weapon intrinsic to a completely different magic system. The flip side is that there are applications of magic that do fundamentally the same thing even when they're present in different magic systems. For example Brandon has said that any illusion magic seen in the Cosmere is going to work a lot like Lightweaving from Stormlight Archive, and Hoid's ability to know where he needs to be uses the same underlying principle as Feruchemical Chromium, though he may not actually be using Feruchemy itself. And as @MistLord said, the magic systems aren't consciously created by the Shards but are the result of an interaction between a number of factors including the (Spiritual) genetics of the inhabitants of a given planet, the nature of the Shard(s) Investing that planet and the nature of the planet itself. For example, there are ten Surges in Roshar's magics because that number is linked to the planet. The Shards can and do exert some control over the systems but they aren't consciously designing their associated magic systems. Within all those limitations and various other intrinsic ones, Investiture's potential is effectively limitless. As far as your specific questions go, those should fall within the parameters of what Investiture can do, assuming you could find a magic system that does what you want. For example, a reality-altering pen would depend on what sort of alterations you're thinking of but all sorts of things are at least theoretically possible. Your rainbow-shooting monocle is fundamentally the equivalent of a technological application of Lightweaving (or a creative application of the Aons Ashe or Shao) so it's not too farferched to imagine a magic system capable of creating such a specific thing, or for a Shard to do so directly. It's what the Honorblades are, after all. I'm not sure why a Shard would want a timed rainbow monocle but who am I to fathom the workings of their infinite minds?

That was Mistborn: Secret History He's said that Skyward is not Cosmere.

Ehh, Preservation wasn't killed by the Well being drained or even inconvenienced (Leras had already sacrificed most of his mind long ago in order to keep Ruin imprisoned) so even if Nightblood ate all of that Investiture it probably wouldn't be a huge deal. And Perpendicularities can persist even after the Shard whose Investiture created them has been splintered (Devotion and Honor are both noted as having them, Dominion probably does too) so they're not exactly the Physical Realm weak point by which a Shard could be killed. That said, a Perpendicularity still represents a substantial chunk of shardic power so assuming Nightblood could destroy it (if per that WoB the mists would try to avoid Nightblood I imagine that a pool would try to do the same, which could look really funny) it would definitely hurt the Shard but it wouldn't kill it.

Brandon says he wrote no more than a couple pages of it and whatever he did write was ever shared publicly so I can't link you to it. Pagerunner (who inspired me to ask that question in the first place) compiled everything we know about Climb the Sky here.

Yeah, Khriss isn't a member so she doesn't count for purposes of Seventeenth Shard Invested-ness. We have some vague hints that there's some form of magic magic associated with Darkside (Khriss mentions in the essay on Taldain that it used to be believed that Autonomy only Invested Dayside) but we don't know what form it takes and whether or not Khriss can use it. The prose version of White Sand has some more hints but we don't know if those are canon any more, pending developments in the graphic novel.

While it's not canon as such, we also see the person who will eventually become Hoid in the sample chapters of Liar of Partinel, which takes place some time before the main Dragonsteel arc. And the recently released sample chapters from Dragonsteel Prime make mention of one of Hoid's known aliases, Topaz. Again not canon but it supports the implications seen elsewhere that the person we know as Hoid was definitely around before the Shattering and didn't start calling himself Hoid until later. The Vessels seem to know him as Cephandrius for example (it's what Leras calls him in Secret History) and Frost in the WoR epigraphs knows Hoid as Hoid (he asks if he's still hiding behind the name of his old master) as well as by at least his 'Topaz' alias. Just tossing these out there because Hoid-spotting is a fun game for the whole family to play. xD In addition to the WoB The Sovereign provided, we have another one that Yolen is definitely still inhabited because Hoid is exchanging letters with someone there (Frost) and Khriss mentions it in Secret History though at that point in the timeline she's only heard stories about it. By the time she writes the essays in Arcanum Unbounded she's able to talk about Yolen in somewhat more detail. As for Hoid, yeah, we're assuming that whatever the source of his prolonged lifespan is, we'll learn it in Dragonsteel. One interesting thing that just came out from the Oathbringer signings is that Hoid's inability to hurt people is involuntary. This may or may not be related.

Alcatraz could perform the seemingly impossible and break Kaladin's perpetual gloominess. Aydee and Lift would probably become great friends, especially once the former starts using her Talent to miscount large quantities of food so Lift can become extra-Awesome. And Jasnah and Navani would probably be driven insane trying to make sense of Smedry Talents.

Brandon has mentioned several Cosmere projects that will eventually be written. Aether of Night is the one that we know the most about since he's released the unpublished draft that currently exists to fans who ask for it (now you can get it from this site) so even though the eventual rewrite will change things we have at least some idea what we can expect. There's also The Silence Divine where diseases give you magic as a side effect and The Dark One which we don't know anything definite about. We also know that whenever Dragonsteel is written, it will have new foms of magic; you can see glimpses of this in the sample chapters that Brandon recently shared with us, which were cannibalized for Stormlight Archive. Beyond that, if there's a Shard directly involved with Siverlight it's possible we'll see a new magic system whenever the novella focusing on it gets published. We also know Brandon is going to write sequels to Elantris which means we'll learn more about the existing magic systems and he'll presumably include others as well as we see more parts of Sel, given how magic works on that planet. After that, your guess is as good as ours. Case in point, Rithmatist. I read it recently and it was awesome.

Brandon does sometimes explicitly give RAFOs just to mess with us in some way. Here's one from another Oathbringer signing. This too would be a pretty simple question to simply answer 'Nope, next question please' but he didn't. Even though he has said that while Rashek knows about other worlds from his time using the Well of Ascension's power, he didn't know specifics, implying that it's vanishingly unlikely that the man ever worldhopped. And the Plains were believed to have shattered during Aharietiam, which assuming that's true puts the event a good three thousand or so years before Rashek was even born. Given that Brandon is aware of how fans have latched onto various Adonalsium-related theories, it's entirely possible he guessed the intention behind that question and just answered with a RAFO to give us yet more fuel for arguing ourselves in circles. xD

According to Khriss, the participants all had their own reasons for doing it. That some of them were apparently motivated by the belief that it was 'the only good option left' is suggestive but doesn't really narrow the options down much. Adonalsium could have been doing something that the future Vessels saw as actively dangerous, he/it could have been uncaring but not malevolent and they felt this needed to change, it could have been that Adonalsium was for some reason no longer using its power at all... too many possibilities and no real way at this point to say what's more likely than not. An interesting possibility comes from the story that Ym tells in Words of Radiance, about One who knew all but experienced nothing, so it became many, in order to experience all things before eventually reforming when something called the 'Seventh Land' is attained. This could be a distorted recollection of Adonalsium and has parallels to certain strains of thought in theology. Adonalsium might have desired to be shattered for some reason and the Vessels helped the process along, whether knowingly or not. Another possible avenue for theorizing has to do with fainlife. It's described in the sample chapters Brandon has released from the Liar of Partinel draft and while that's not canon and everything in it is subject to change, Brandon has made references to it several times so we know that the concept itself is still canonical (for example he mentions that Yolen has 'two competing ecologies') even if the form might not be identical to the old sample chapters.. The concept finally appeared in a published work in Arcanum Unbounded when Khriss compares Scadrial to Yolen in the essay on the former system. By implication from some things Brandon has told us, fainlife isn't the dominant threat of the Dragonsteel sequence (part of why he started writing Liar of Partinel was to show a time when it was a major threat, since Dragonsteel Prime glossed over it) but it's still around so it could be part of the reason for the Shattering. Or not, at this point Brandon only knows. It's highly unlikely we'll get much in the way of substantial information until Brandon writes Dragonsteel when the full story will come out. We may get some tantalizing hints along the way but he's gotta save some surprises for the books themselves.

Typo, I meant to say that not having the right to travel is rare. I've fixed it.

Hah, very nice! Yeah, between shardblades having non-cutting bits and how quickly the spren can change shape, you really could make a shardrazor that was perfectly safe to use. But you'd probably want stormlight handy just in case your spren decided to play a practical joke on you, or they got distracted.

Here's a WoB with a lot of little details. We know there are 'stable' ranks where children inherit the Nahn of their parents and some where children are automatically lower-ranked until they hit the first such stable rank (this seems more a lighteyes thing but it applies to darkeyes too). It's easy to buy an increase in Nahn up to a point. Also, military service tends to immediately cause an increase in Nahn if you're low-ranked and serving with distinction frequently brings an increase. Also, not having the right of travel is actually pretty rare, Brandon says that to be below the rank when you have that right, something has to have gone very wrong in your family's past. Not mentioned in that WoB but in Kaladin's flashbacks is that Second Nahn and higher are permitted to marry into lighteyed families, since Kaladin was considered eligible to marry Laral.

I'm fairly certain you can't steal more than a singular power with a single spike whether different powers or multiple spikees worth of the same one (though once created a spike can be broken up later, as with the Pathian earrings) otherwise there wouldn't be any need for Paalm to have multiple mystery-metal spikes that she swapped between depending on the power she needed. She could have simply used one spike, filled it with multiple powers and then changed the bind point as required.