Weltall

I'll take 'Any civil war in history, ever' for a thousand broams, Alex. Also any bloodlust generally since the Thrill doesn't care who's fighting who, only that you are fighting. What sort of discussion were you expecting here exactly?

Welcome to the Shard! There have been emperors before Gawx, there will be emperors after him. That Azir has an emperor (or Prime Aqasix) isn't exactly obscure knowledge. Nothing says that Beard was talking about any particular ruler of Azir, especially since it's something he's claiming happened some time ago and he's, y'know, lying. The Purelake is definitely interesting but I don't think we should read anything into that particular exchange.

That's because you've still got a chunk of gameplay to go, during which you'll catch up. You're on track for where you're expected to be by the end of the Infernal Castle. I can dig my Vita out later to see where I ended my first run but I imagine it will be somewhere in the early 130's too. (EDIT: 134 on Hard) EDIT: Oh yes, curious what your reaction was to Absentee Father.

You wouldn't even need to do anything, the body of the Vessel sublimates upon Ascension and naturally reforms once they stop holding that power. We see Leras and Ati's bodies reappear after their deaths, at which point they were clearly not doing anything conscious to (re)create a body. There's also no indication that Rashek had to do anything special to reclaim his body after the Investiture in the Well of Ascension ran out and Secret History shows something similar. It just seems to be a natural byproduct of how the Shards work that once you stop holding the power, it spits you back out as you were before you Ascended. Oh, a couple relevant WoBs on Vessels/Slivers for Celairiel:

Yeah, I think that if Adonalsium had a godmetal and it's something we know about, it's dragonsteel. Other godmetals are the result of Investiture condensing into solid form while aluminum is naturally occurring via stellar fusion, so it would be very odd for the latter to number among the former. Also as mentioned it's possible to soulcast things into aluminum. We know that it is extremely hard to create godmetals via soulcasting, to the point that proximity to Honor's Perpendicularity (which functioned as a huge surge of accessible Investiture) would not be enough. If that much power can't enable you to soulcast a godmetal, there's no way aluminum could be soulcast if it were a godmetal itself.

Get comfy, because we know the story is planned to come out when Brandon publishes Dragonsteel and that's the second-to-last thing he plans to write (that we know of). We'll all be here a while. xD Also, welcome to the Shard!

All the Investiture in the Cosmere got associated with the Shards, so if a Shard happened upon a world with a magic system that went to them, they could put their own little spin on it. We know from WoBs on Sixth of the Dusk that the magic on First of the Sun could have arisen without the active involvement of a Shard but at the same time, Autonomy has now influenced the world. I imagine that the main Aether world could be similar.

I'd agree if the other explicit power of Ferrous wasn't the ability to communicate with the soul inside the corpate. Being able to talk takes a lot of the potentially horrifying aspects out of it. Now, a corpate that gets lost or abandoned somehow...

You have a chance to read it right now. My envy burns hotter than all the fires of Odium. But yeah, since it's not canon and Brandon has said that lots of what's in it is subject to revision, I doubt there's going to be anything seriously spoilery in it. Just from the Bridge Four excerpts he shared and piecing together things from WoBs I know what at least one of the 'censored' things from the former is and I don't feel like that's hurt my enjoyment of anything, and I feel safe in guessing a few other things. So yeah, I figure it's a lot like WoK Prime, where there's some stuff that might potentially be slipped into later works but it'll be so different that knowing it doesn't have a real impact.

Relevant WoBs: In other words, they're loosely inspired by some chivalric codes and there's a rough pattern the different Ideals follow, but it's mostly Brandon inventing them.

As mentioned, the problem with this is that spanreed communication requires a stable writing surface to convey complex information and a party at each end, so you need a minimum of two people who will be occupying a semi-fixed position (at the very least, sitting down with some sort of lap board) and who are going to be helpless whenever they're communicating. That's not a big deal for a major battle where you can have a primary command center behind the lines and set up scribes and messengers to relay orders at other key points, but for a quick skirmish it's really not very practical.

Yeah, that's the one. If you happen to have a save from before you started the quest, it's worth it to go through again with that party composition.

On books, The Saint and the White Wolf from Zero is short and well worth reading. Have you done the quests yet, or just run around looking for dialogue? Because there's something coming up which benefits greatly from party composition and it's not obvious going in. Check under the tag if you're interested. Oh, unrelated to the Kiseki series but relevant to Falcom, the company gave G-Mode the license to release a mobile port/quasi-remake of the late 80's game Sorcerian in 2007. G-Mode is now releasing a Switch port of that game (dubbed Advanced Sorcerian) on 2/4, for 500 yen. For people who don't know the series (which I'm guessing is everyone) think Dungeons and Dragons modules if they were presented as side-scrolling games. It'll include twenty-five scenarios in total, taken from the classic set (one of the classic fifteen being replaced with an original scenario) plus the Sorcerian and Pyramid expansions. I'll definitely be giving it a go and see how it stacks up to the original.

While we do have evidence that aluminum could stop Investiture from dissipating, that's not really the issue that Splinters are dealing with. The problem that all of them have is that they're Connected to particular Physical/Cognitive 'regions' based on proximity to the Shard whose Investiture created them. I think that if aluminum actively messed with that, we'd know by now. We've seen MeLaan with an aluminum True Body and she mentions that she can store her memories in a compartment that's all-metal. I don't think that would work if encasing something in aluminum altered Connection, or it would work but with really weird side effects. Also, we've seen Cognitive Shadows moving around freely on other planets and they're not walking around in aluminum jumpsuits, so whatever trick is used to leave their original 'region' seems to be more akin to whatever Vasher does to have a Divine Breath but not manifest any of the effects of it other than his continued breathing privileges.

Yeah, as mentioned the Alethi don't treat the fights over gemhearts as proper battles where you prepare everything; it's pretty symptomatic of how their war effort has completely bogged down into a competition for monetary gain and glory instead of being an actual campaign with a specific objective. Even Dalinar, who wants to bring the war back on track, isn't thinking of the battle at the Tower in that sense and with what he was hoping to accomplish there bringing a scribe along didn't make a whole lot of sense. It doesn't hurt that he incorrectly assumed from his recent vision that the Almighty was telling him he could trust Sadeas, so he had even less reason to treat the battle differently. As he saw it, it was going to be a quick raid with overwhelming force that would be a stepping stone to bigger things for the war effort.

https://coppermind.net/wiki/Bibliography Everything in green is a Cosmere work.

Yeah, Brandon has called the Horneater language and culture a mix of Hawaiian, Russian and Scots, so I tend to imagine mainly the first of those given the words we know of. Likewise Brandon has said that a Herdazian accent wouldn't sound like anything we have, but he based the language on Spanish with a Mexican influence so that's where my mind goes there. And Kelsier definitely sounds like Arsene Lupin in my head.

I'm gonna repeat that because it really deserves emphasis: You should read the books; they tend to be very important sources of worldbuilding.

Welcome to the Shard! We know Harmony has trouble using his power because he tells us so, explicitly and on multiple occasions. Relatedly Odium fears Harmony because of his raw power but part of this fear is because he doesn't realize how much trouble Sazed is having directing those two opposing powers: Basically, Sazed is getting a temporary advantage from information asymmetry (which he's usually on the other side of vis a vis the big picture) but that's not a sustainable position.

Welcome to the Shard! A quick search on Arcanum turned up a question and response by Brandon where the questioner shared an image (which seems to have vanished) and Brandon supplied one of his own, for something close to how he'd imagine a darkeyed Vedan (with red hair, which they don't all have) would look. So you've got that at least. There's also cover art and the card art for the Call to Adventure expansion but that one's got some things that could spoil you on future plot points, especially since it was released after Oathbringer and you're still in the middle of WoR. There's also some in-book art that you'll eventually come across. The Natan people you're just going to have to imagine because I don't believe there's any art of them yet and their blue skin/white hair combo is obviously not something you're going to find on anyone in the real world. EDIT: Oh wait, a fellow Sharder created a topic summarizing the appearance of various peoples of Roshar with some cute art to give you a general comparison:

According to Brandon the liquid on the blade is a result of the blade changing from a gas directly into a solid; the scientific term for that is deposition. Descriptions of living Shardblades mention how the spren fuzzes into mist before coalescing into a solid form so it seems like they initially appear in a gas state when fully pulled into the Physical Realm and from there they undergo the phase transition into a solid, and science takes over and causes the condensation we observe. You also have Investiture/energy (they're sides of the same coin) flowing from one Realm to another which is bound to do wonky things. But I don't think the blade is actually drawing energy out of the surrounding air to materialize. There's the related phenomenon of Windrunners causing frost to appear when they swear a new Ideal which apparently has to do with the Order being adjacent to the Bondsmiths. The slightly more distant Skybreakers have something similar as Szeth sees snow briefly appear around him when he swears his Third Ideal. Seeing how one of Dalinar's Bondsmith powers is to open Honor's Perpendicularity and essentially bring all three Realms close together for a brief period, I suspect the same fundamental principle is at work there and for the condensation on Shardblades.

You don't need to go on the tracks that you followed during Act I; the chest is in part of the map that you aren't prevented from accessing, on the nicely paved road. EDIT: I just loaded up an old save from the same part of the game you're in and can confirm that the chest is accessible then and there isn't some kind of 'You can't go to the Bridge at all' plot-based lockout at that time. You're simply looking in the wrong place.

You... just walk right to it. It's located in the underpass leading to Garrelia Byroad and can be accessed from either the bridge side or by using the fast travel point at Terra Shrine and working backwards which will eventually lead you to exactly where the chest is.

The Eila Stele was written by a singer at the time humans first arrived on Roshar and thus before Odium had a chance to do anything on Roshar. The writer mentions that these new arrivals use powers 'of spren and surges' that they (the singers) were forbidden to touch. In other words, manipulating the Surges was something that could have been done (in theory) on Roshar before Odium got there. And yes, as @Halyo_Alex says, (WoB contains Rhythm of War spoilers) Surgebinding is just the Rosharan term for 'magic' in the same way that they'd call all Splinters, the Shards and probably even Adonalsium spren if they knew what they were. Brandon himself says he'd agree with Khriss' argument that Surgebinding as a term should specifically refer to the magic we see on Roshar (while allowing that the other definition has its merits) but we need to remember that in-universe terminology is not always going to be technically precise when applied in a broader context.

Brandon has said that this isn't the case: Brandon has RAFO'd specifics about what Wayne's Resonance is but has told us that it's non-obvious. Truncated for length: