Weltall

Since per that WoB the Vessel could be in danger if they tried wielding Nightblood (and we know from another that a mortal agent fueled by a Shard would do no better than any heavily Invested individual) there isn't much utility to a Shard trying to use the sword directly and it wouldn't make Nightblood any more powerful. We know that Odium for one would rather embark on a plan that might require him to wait for thousands of years in preference to one that opens him up to the possibility of an attack from Cultivation, so if getting drained by Nightblood permanently hurts the Vessel in a remotely similar way to how the Stormfather says Odium has been 'scarred' from his past battles, I suspect that he'd stay very far away on general principle.

Brandon agrees with you, telling us that Ruin would be most compatible with Cultivation. There's a whole topic here where people discussed combined Shard names. Cultivation/Ruin becoming 'Change' was a pretty good suggestion, since that's what both intents embody. Any Vessel can influence the intent of their Shard by filtering it through their own perceptions, (another example here) but this isn't permanent and it has limits. Ati tried to channel Ruin towards less-destructive ends and we know how that ended.

I'm guessing it's just a coincidence (but a cool one) since Brandon has said that he wants classic fantasy dragons in his works and cites D&D as an inspiration. Shapeshifting dragons predate Stoker by a considerable margin (we're talking four digits here) so the inspiration Brandon is drawing on may be relatively new but itself draws on much older sources. For that reason mainly, I suspect it's just a coincidence. Brandon does have a pretty deliberate vampire parallel in his writing in the form of the Returned, though.

We have a WoB on how Odium got an edge over the Shards he's splintered, though it's not precise. This WoB predates us learning that Odium also killed Ambition, hence only mentioning three Shards. Related to the question of numbers, Brandon has said that Odium would work with other Shards under the right circumstances. One theory for how he defeated Devotion and Dominion (his first victims) is that he had help from another Shard, possibly Autonomy who is known to meddle in other worlds and is the leading candidate to be 'Trell'. That Autonomy could be argued to be an opposite to Dominion in the same way that Odium and Devotion are opposites doesn't hurt the idea, though we don't know enough about those intents to be sure. Other relevant WoBs: It should be noted that the second WoB gives Brandon so much wiggle room that it's almost meaningless, but there you go. So in short, Odium has a bunch of factors working for him, some may be more important than others in any given situation and there are some possibilities we can suspect but can't prove right now.

You don't really need to know anything about how the Fused work to fake being crazy, especially if it's already a common belief that the mentally ill are possessed. Shallan is the one who suggests that idea and if she's heard that belief discussed by the ill-informed, it's a pretty good bet that Iyatil has heard it as well. That said, the Ghostbloods are a worldhopping group and Iyatil is from Silverlight originally so it's entirely possible that she has better information on Roshar's history and the nature of the Fused than most, or at least that she has access to people who she could have learned things from. Though hitting on humming as an addition to her feigning of illness being a coincidence can't be ruled out. Shallan certainly thinks that the comments about killing the ardents if they try to take her mask off were completely sincere so the additional muttering about the voices in her head telling her to kill might have been added to reinforce that part of it, more than an indication that Iyatil has some kind of inside knowledge.

While we don't know what all of the Aons look like, none of them that we've seen look triangular despite this being the only description given for any of the symbols pushed to open the door (aside from that they're all engraved inside circles) so if Brandon wanted to hint to readers that they were Aons you'd think he would have been a bit more obvious about it. For all we know, the symbols were just random shapes that Kelsier came up with to go with an equally random combination to temple leading to multiple fake chambers for fake Bands, since the whole thing was an elaborate waste of time. It would be perfectly in character for Kelsier to hide his fake secret with an equally fake 'message'. That said, the only WoB we have on the subject is of course a RAFO, with a comment added that the questioner also said they mentioned to Brandon that the symbols don't look like Aons to them, and Brandon didn't react. So that doesn't really tell us anything one way or the other.

Hmmm, I'm tempted to go with 'whatever Shard is the one Brandon said he'd pick', which may or may not be Ingenuity, since he's been deliberately vague on whether or not it's actually one of the sixteen. I figure if it's the one he'd want, it's probably really interesting, really awesome or both. Failing that, I'd probably go for Dominion on the assumption that it's broadly describing the desire for things to be orderly and hierarchical combined with the hope that I could control that intent well enough to cultivate something more like ancient Egypt or China on my shardworld (ie long-lived and generally stable civilizations even if the ruling dynasty changed hands every so often) and less like, well, Fjorden.

Rex is secretly an Enforcer/Gralsritter/S-rank Bracer/Ninja, pick whichever one you like. xD Aaaaalmost correct, but one detail's kind of important and slightly off:

A quick and dirty calculation of worldhoppers by planet. Sel: Lots. We know the expedition sent out with the Connection orb numbered twenty (five Ire and fifteen soldiers) and the total number is considerably greater than that. We also have Riino (another Ire member) and Galladon who's in the Seventeenth Shard. So call that 22+. Scadrial: 3 known (Demoux, Aslydin and Felt) and 1 questionable (Lemex's nurse in Warbreaker is confirmed to be a Terriswoman who may or may not be Aslydin) Nalthis: 5 known (Vasher, Shashara, Denth, Vivenna and Nightblood) and 2 questionable (we don't know whether Arsteel and Yesteel ever left Nalthis but they would at least be aware other worlds exist from the other three Scholars) Roshar: 1 known (Mraize) Threnody: 1 known (Nazh) Taldain: 2 known (Khriss and Baon) Silverlight: 1 known (Iyatil, who was born there even though she can trace her ancestry to Scadrial) Yolen: 17 known (the sixteen Vessels plus Hoid) and an unknown number of others including shapeshifted dragons. There are also unknown numbers of people who are at least aware of other worlds but who may or may not have actually visited them, since we know interplanetary commerce flowed through Scadrial (Felt was aware of it during the events of MB1 for example) and Nalthis has Cosmere Customs that you can go through, so whoever runs that knows more of the big picture even if they've never left Nalthis' Cognitive region themselves. We also have the Ones Above but we can't definitively place them right now. So in terms of known worldhoppers numerically, Sel is on top right now by virtue of the Ire being a large enough group to beat out everyone else by a considerable margin. Nalthis is worldhopper-friendly and might boast a larger number than we know of but it kind of sounds more like somewhere you go for a nice vacation I included Iyatil because we know of her but I'm discounting Silverlight since it's not a shardworld per se and while they all know about other worlds because the population is diverse we also know that people can be born there, live their entire lives and die without ever traveling to other worlds. So I'm giving the nod to Sel right now, with the caveat that if we include it there are possibly more people from Silverlight (who do worldhop) in total but we can't quantify that right now.

I knew that one from, of all places, Castlevania, since the Japanese release of Order of Ecclesia used 'Dominus Odium' as the name of one of its key plot points and I looked it up then, a year or two before WoK came out. Funny, the places you learn things. xD Honor's a case that needs to be taken with some caution because as far as he's concerned, he didn't break any oath at all. Per Brandon, there was a suggestion that the Shards should all separate but it wasn't done in the form of an oath that actually would have bound the sixteen. So you have some of the Shards that think they had a binding oath that almost half of them reneged on (plus Odium, who's using the perception of an oath for his own benefit) while Honor and Cultivation apparently recognized that the suggestion was non-binding so they didn't need to follow it. Whether this makes Tanavast a hypocrite for not following the spirit of the agreement turns on how many of the sixteen think the same way that Edgli does (that there was an agreement) and where you come down on the spirit vs letter of the law question. But in his own mind he's not one. Cultivation is also kind of tricky because we have two very different claims made about her. Odium claims she cares about change for its own sake (and that sort of mindset could potentially be very dangerous on a long enough timeframe) but Cultivation herself suggests she's got specific goals in mind with her nurturing and her pruning and this is backed up by what we've seen of her and what Brandon has told us. Given that we know Odium isn't being honest with himself about the whole 'Passion' thing and he's definitely not the only Shard that cares, I'm not inclined to take his claim about Cultivation as gospel. But I'd be very worried if she were to take up another Shard like Ambition or Odium...

It doesn't really work that way, he'd have a second intent every bit as strong as the one he likes dealing with and he couldn't simply override a new one with his existing intent; it would change his personalty regardless of any mental shenanigans he tried. EDIT: Found an old WoB that's quite explicit about this. Even a small amount of extra Investiture attuned to another Shard would change your personality over time. So yeah, picking up a second Shard would definitely result in a personality that is no longer Rayse/Odium as he currently exists, and he likes who he is. Also, those kinds of mental tricks probably wouldn't do what you're thinking of anyways, because the intents of the Shards are not inwardly-directed. So Odium couldn't just redirect Ambition to mean an ambition to succeed (which also is probably not what that Shard is about) and Devotion is arguably the polar opposite of Odium; Devotion is a synonym for Love or Compassion while Brandon originally had Odium being called Hatred but he changed it because he thought that Odium was cooler. So combining those two Shards would almost certainly produce the same kind of tension that exists with Harmony between the opposing intents of Preservation and Ruin, except that I'm willing to bet Rayse wouldn't deal with it nearly as well. Sazed already had a philosophical stance that was able to accommodate both intents while Rayse being extremely attuned to his Shard and per Hoid "among the most loathsome, crafty, and dangerous individuals I had ever met" is probably not going to do so well when he suddenly has to also juggle the cosmic embodiment of love. Going to the root question, we do have a WoB that if Rayse were to take up other Shards, Ruin would be one of the 'safest' for him.

The one I left up is CS1 stuff, the one I took out and what aneonfox was responding to is CS2 stuff, at the point you're at. I was probably being overly cautious in removing it anyways. Duvalie is a gift that keeps on giving. And congrats on beating Fragment, that's one of my favorite sequences in the entire Cold Steel arc (and series overall) right there. xD

Yeah, she's dressed down in that appearance. I actually removed the comment because I figured eh, maybe that was kinda spoilery if Briar King missed it entirely. Act 1

As usual, the rule of thumb is that if you're still getting good experience from random encounters, keep doing them. Once it gets to the point that you have to grind for levels, you're at the point the game expects you to be at and it's time to advance the plot. It holds true for pretty much every Falcom game since they've been doing the weighted experience thing for a long time now. Except in Zwei, with its food-based leveling anyways. Oh, since I missed this earlier... This is one of those connections to previous games (in this case, to Trails of Azure) as you'd recognize that character right away from their prior appearance. But the role they're playing in Cold Steel is considerably more prominent and CS gives you most of the important context anyways. <popcorn intensifies>

Sean Chiplock's been big on this sort of thing ever since CS1's release, doing clips of unvoiced lines on request as well as things people have handed him. He even ran with that silly Rean Coldsteel meme. And he's voiced a bunch of Memories of Celceta characters plus Hummel from Ys VIII for other Falcom properties. And his recent reaction to trying out the Age of Calamity demo and finding out that his character isn't in it was great. So yeah, cool guy all around. xD Meanwhile I'm still waiting for my CS4 LE to arrive, but I've figured I'll just play on Easy and blow through the gameplay seeing that I've already beaten the game multiple times in Japanese and just came off Hajimari so a low-intensity story run is just what the doctor ordered.

Yeah, I suspect that like Amberite, those were ideas that Brandon liked and has been trying to find a place for. We know Amberite's been in four works and it at least looks the same in most of them (aside from Mythwalker) so Sha/Lum/Nan is probably the same thing. That being said, his description in Final Empire Prime sounds a lot like he's describing Ruin, Cultivation and a different sort of Harmony, while we know that both Aether and FE Prime were cannibalized into the published Mistborn. Those concepts probably contributed to what became Preservation/Ruin/Harmony and he dropped the invented names. Something similar happened between Way of Kings Prime and the published version, with some names in the former that were invented being replaced with more conventional terms.

The series is still a long way from done so you never know what might happen in the future. I have a (totally serious) theory that something like this is going to actually happen at some point before all's said and done. Also, would you really have deprived us of the chance to see that in glorious 3d?

Yeah, there's enough WoBs to work out that the source of all those [REDACTED]s in the Dragonsteel Prime are what Brandon's called microkinesis. There's also that mention of Cognitive Ripples but I have no idea what those are supposed to be, presumably only readers of the full Dragonsteel Prime know. They may or may not be a form of magic on their own. We know there's some manifestation of Investiture associated with Vax and how one gets access to it is unique enough for Khriss to mention it while discussing how unusual Initiation is on Sel, but we don't know anything about it other than that it exists. Brandon hinted that a YA Cosmere story he's thinking of writing involves magic kites, so add that to quasi-canonical I guess. There may be more, these are just things I remembered or was able to find in a brief search.

I'll take a swing at these. 1. Recall that when people talk about Soulcasting, they almost always mean ardents using the fabrials of the same name, because the fact that you can Soulcast through surgebinding is basically forgotten. It's why Jasnah has a fake Soulcaster in WoK, to hide the fact that she's doing it all on her own. The fabrials are extremely rare and nobody knows how to make new ones so Iri probably just doesn't have any. Pretty much all the ones we do know about are owned by the various governments, with the one that Shallan's family came into possession of being an exception that they have to keep secret. 2. Pretty much any question to do with the Ghostbloods and their goals is a big 'we don't know'. 3. It was Helaran's Blade and we know the person Kaladin killed is very dead because of the way the blade and plate behaved, so unless he gave his gear to someone else (contradicting everything we've been told about what he was doing there) it's pretty safe to say that Helaran's very dead. 4. Because the Sons of Honor want the Heralds to return to guide Roshar and reestablish what they think the proper form of Vorinism should be, so getting a Herald to join them is a pretty big deal. We don't know why the Ghostbloods wanted to kill him but the two groups seem opposed in a lot of ways. 5. No and no, though it's a reasonable assumption that she's in Urithiru somewhere. 6. It might have something to do with how Rayse 'looks Shin' to Dalinar, with the spren reflecting the Shard that they're Splinters of. We don't know yet why the Shin look different from the rest of the humans on Roshar (including peoples who migrated from worlds other than Ashyn) but it's probably going to come out whenever we get details on that critical period in history where so much Important Stuff happened. 7. Yes, his intelligence and compassion are inversely linked and change daily, the story about an illness hides this fact from the public. 8. The Radiants are an institution and everyone is pretty much reinventing it as they go along. We know that the Ideals can be extremely flexible and depend on both the Order you belong to (ie, some could see 'journey before destination' as referring to the whole species) and the individual surgebinder and their spren. There isn't a contradiction in Malata being a Diagramist and a Dustbringer. 9. We have no reason to think she isn't exactly what she presents herself as and by her own admission she was bonded to Spark before she approached the Diagram, so unless you want to imagine that she somehow James Bond-ed her way into wherever the Shin are holding the Honorblades and stole one without getting caught.. xD 10. I don't believe so. 11. Bear in mind that what the characters know isn't necessarily the truth. But the Old Magic appears to be something the Nightwatcher uses on people, while Dalinar went directly to the source and got a boon/curse that was wrapped up in one package and served Cultivation's interests very directly. 12. Yeah, because it sounds like 'Voidbringer', which is why they try to get people to call them Releasers instead. The name doesn't seem to have caught on with anyone outside the Order however 13. They're warning Odium's forces whenever they detect fabrials in use, they may be compelled to scream or it may be just how they've decided to signal what they're detecting. It certainly gets attention quickly. 14. Some of it seems to be Re-Shephir's influence on Shallan but it also probably has to do with Shallan's personas and how she starts losing herself in them over the course of the book. 15. No, they're two separate statements. He uses the visions to find potential Bondsmiths but whether they become surgebinders or not is up to them. Sending the visions as a way of communicating is just something he realized he can do now that he's spent time bonded to Dalinar and doesn't imply that everyone who sees the visions in this way is a potential Bondsmith. 16. We know that reversed shadows have a common source and it seems to be a Cognitive Realm thing. 17. Same things, Midnight Essence. 18. The Midnight Essence is a Re-Shephir thing, which is why she's known as the Midnight Mother. 19. No, for various reasons. You need a recovered and intact body to be Soulcast in the first place, you need somebody nearby with one of the fabrials and you need to be able to pay for the service, so it's a safe bet that plenty of lighteyes (even important ones) don't get the Soulcaster Funeral treatment. But the ones whose families can afford it, yeah. 20. Amaram isn't bonded to a spren, so he doesn't hear the screaming when he touches a deadeye blade. 21. While we don't know how the religion developed, Vorinism treats Honor (the Almighty) as the only divinity, meaning that Cultivation is seen as a pagan goddess 22. It's presumably because they both share the Surge of Illumination. 23. There are nine of them 24. Shallan has a mental block where it comes to the fact that she killed her mother with Pattern. She deals with it by creating Radiant as a new persona that can deal with it, meaning that when she as Shallan summons Pattern it causes some issues. Again, it's setting up that whole plot thread that Shallan has to deal with during the story. 25. We don't know, but the fact that a Bondsmith was essential to the plan to capture Ba-Ado-Mishram is suggestive. 26. Not that we know of, nor do we know what type of spren he is for that matter. 27. Dunno, maybe he just had a flair for the dramatic. 28. The fused. Note that later in the book we see references to Knights Radiant as gods, in the same sense. 29. We don't know yet, either someone was given it or Team Odium is sitting on it and waiting for the right person to hand it off to. 30. Nope, the transformed listeners from the end of WoR are Regals (bonded to voidspren that give access to Forms of Power) while the Fused are the Cognitive Shadows of singers from long long ago when humans first arrived on Roshar, possessing the bodies of their distant descendants. Kaladin has no way to know any of this however. 31. The Parshmen are the ancient singers who had their Connection and Identity damaged as an unexpected consequence of the aforementioned sealing away of BAM, the listeners (Parshendi) were a group that fled beforehand and weren't affected, but lost access to almost all of their Forms. Post-Everstorm Parshmen had their Connection/Identity restored (with some tweaks as they now take after the humans in the regions they were inhabiting) and are now able to bond with voidspren to take those more advanced Forms again, and as mentioned the Fused are their own special thing. 32. She gets the sense that something is missing in Re-Shephir and thinks that maybe at one point she was human. This almost certainly isn't the case but we know the Unmade were 'first made, then unmade' so she's probably not entirely wrong. Again bear in mind that the characters don't know a lot of things and a lot of their knowledge is (to our perspective) either inaccurate or flat-out wrong. 33. We know there's a belief in land within the Origin (see the story Hoid tells about the Wandersail) and we've seen a similar conflation of Jezrien and the Stormfather so it's probably just more of the same.

I think F-Bendalloy would indeed let you extend your Sand Mastery time, though obviously only to the extent that you have storage. Here's what the Ars Arcanum has to say about the power: That suggests that you can store hydration as well as nutrition. I wonder how feruchemy would handle things like meal replacement drinks where you're combining some hydration with nutrition, but that's a different discussion altogether. We know that the sand (or rather the lichen living on the sand) reacts to all sorts of Investiture and can be used as a sort of radar for the stuff. We saw it react to Shallan's Lightweaving for example, so it might react and thus recharge in the presence of a speed bubble. You'd need a supply of extra bendalloy that you're not using as a metalmind though, for your idea. There's also the question of whether what's inside the bubble would be affected or whether the sand would only react if it's close to but outside the bubble. But as noted, more Investiture wouldn't mean more ribbons, you need to Overmaster for that and there are diminishing returns. Still, you've hit on a trick that works around at least one of the big limitations on the magic without breaking the original story in the way slatrification did.

If you don't mind a tiny bit of advice for some future content:

I suspect that Edgli just shrugs and moves on. She's got to know that the Returned don't remember the details of what they saw when the offer was made and are only getting glimpses of the big picture through dreams and art, and Shards have effectively all the time in the world so even if she had a specific goal she was hoping a given Returned would accomplish, failures here and there aren't likely to bother her too much.

Popcorning intensifies! I mean, if you think about it for a few seconds this shouldn't be too surprising... Oh yeah, still waiting for my LE to arrive. When it does I figure I'll play on Easy and just plow through because I just came off a month and a half of playing Hajimari on Hard and that was surprisingly punishing (in a good way) and now I really just want to see how the CS4 was localized and enjoy the story and the dubbing without having to think too much about the gameplay.

Everyone who's playing for the first time may freely assume that I have my popcorn out and will be looking forward to their thoughts.

I actually waited until my physical copy arrived to finish reading it, which was just last week. I generally liked it a lot (way more than White Sand) and thought there were some good Sanderson twists thrown in there, along with that ending. One comment on nature of the graphic novel and how 'Brandon' it is, from the livestream: Brandon has said that it's a very faithful adaptation of his outline for Dark One as a TV series, including bits of dialogue that he wrote for various scenes. He's left the writers and artists flexibility in the specifics and worldbuilding but in broad strokes it's basically the world as he wrote it. So I very much doubt that the way the ending plays out was a change from Brandon's original concept because something was 'too hard' to convey. Brandon has also mentioned that if he had his way the TV series would be a faithful adaptation of the same outline, but that might change from what he's said. And hey, if it's Brandon and JMS working together to come up with a different spin on the same basic material, I'm all for that. So, some spoiler-y thoughts. I'll probably have more thoughts later but this is what immediately sprang to mind. Looking forward to the next volume and any news about its other adaptations.