Weltall

Your WoB-fu needs a bit of work, Brandon has clarified that people were misinterpreting that one for years. PS, if you put your WoB citations in quotes it makes it much easier to see where the quote ends and your writing begins and makes quoting you much easier since we don't have to delete large chunks of text that aren't directly relevant to the reply. Also, using Arcanum's Quote function gives a direct link to the WoB which is always helpful for context.

Space travelers from a world we knew about at the time Sixth of the Dusk was written. We know they use actual FTL, are from a known world but Brandon won't say which one and the story takes place later in the timeline than anything else currently published. Future Scadrians are the most popular guess since we know that Era 4 Mistborn is going to be a space opera with FTL, but Brandon has said that other magic systems also have ways to produce Physical Realm travel so they could be someone else or even a mix of different peoples a la Silverlight.

Brandon has said that he wants to save godmetal alloys for in-book reveals and he hasn't nailed down all of them just yet. Also that the feruchemical applications of godmetal alloys are going to become more relevant in Era 3. Khriss teases in this direction in the Era 2 Ars Arcana when she mentions that each godmetal could produce another sixteen metals with their own allomantic/feruchemical powers, but as nobody has lerasium or atium they can't experiment. Randomly, I get this funny mental image of Khriss popping back into a world after being away for a few centuries, seeing how knowledge of the magic has progressed and (after nerding out) realizes that she's gonna have to rewrite her essay yet again.

Her Forgery is just on the line between plausible and implausible. She mentions that it's taking because the wall wants to be beautifully adorned rather than drab. In other words, not only is the painting beautiful but the Forgery itself is a work of art.

It has something to do with Connection. We assume that since their fortress has a conduit to the Dor (not confirmed but it can hardly be anything else) it's necessary to them in some way. We know it's not allowing them to use AonDor but it has some purpose and Brandon has been mum about it.

The intents of the Shards came from Adonalsium's personality, that implies a unitary being. Brandon even refers to Adonalsium as an entity, singular.

You do realize this topic was almost two years dead, right?

For the record, just being heavily Invested doesn't prevent atium shadows from forming, as someone in Shardplate would have one. There's no reason to think that one of Kalad's Phantoms wouldn't produce one.

First off, welcome to the Shard! Please do not eat the hemalurgic cookies no matter how delicious they look Second, this topic was eighteen months dead. Third, Nightblood actually could be considered a spren. He's sapient Investiture, has his own intent separate from the Investiture that created him and he was patterned after the Shardblades which are, wait for it, spren.

Welcome to the Shard! There's a flawed assumption in your question, that allomancy was created deliberately; it wasn't. The Shards have an influence on the magic, Preservation and Ruin possibly more than others because of how they permeate everything on Scadrial, but it's still a process they don't directly control. So metals that don't have a use on their own or are so rare that the odds are minimal that anyone is going to figure out that they are viable in the Metallic Arts don't really break logic. The mechanisms by which magic systems arise sometimes result in funky things. Brandon even pokes fun at this in the (non-Cosmere) Reckoners, where some Epics have really useless powers. That said, A-Aluminum does have uses on its own but not in any situation we've seen in the books as of yet. It can rid the spiritweb of unwanted Investiture, not just destroy an allomancer's metal reserves. A-Duralumin... not so much. But it's going to be a useful power again once medallions start becoming widespread since a Duralumin Gnat can take advantage of their own power to boost the ones the medallions grant. The use of metals in Rosharan fabrials is related, but aside from aluminum being a Cosmere-wide Investiture sink, the sixteen Scadrian metals don't have the same properties across the setting. Silver is useful in dealing with Cognitive Shadows but it doesn't work in the Metallic Arts for example, and none of the metals (aside from the godmetals) are themselves Invested. Brandon has said that things like the metals that go into fabrials are somewhat like Scadrial's metals but what metal is used isn't nearly as important on Roshar. Apparently the upcoming book will go into this in some more detail.

Huh, hadn't even thought of that one. Yeah, there's a bit of similarity there. I doubt it's intentional because Brandon wrote Dragonsteel Prime first and Liar after Mythwalker, but it's an interesting parallel. The impression I get from WoBs and the released chapters is that fainlife is less of a pervasive ecological threat in Dragonsteel Prime but that it's still a factor and part of why he wanted to write Liar was to show off how dangerous it used to be. And now you've got me wondering about fainlife again and questions we're not gonna have answers to for a long time... Oh yes, Kelsier would have so much fun punching people in the face here... for that matter he'd probably enjoy himself on most of the worlds we've seen. So many gods to punch and he's got all the time in the world in which to do it. I'm not recalling any strong parallels there. The sorting of role by birth order among the Aedin comes to mind but that's about it and there are enough cultures making up the Imperium that it's a pretty diverse society on the whole. Though the way family hierarchy determines strength of one's Kkell power kind of puts me in mind of Dominion. My guess is Brandon realized while writing Mistborn TFE that he needed a name for his big blue berserkers and wouldn't you know it, he had one lying around in a book he was never going to finish and had already cannibalized from so... yoink! Another fun one is Devin making friends through cooking, which came from Dragonsteel but then got transplanted to Kaladin and Rock in Stormlight Archive. Once we get access to all the 'Sanderson Curiosities' as he seems to be naming them, it's gonna be a lot of fun going through and tracking where elements got started and how they changed over time before ending up in a published work. Sounds like Brandon intends to release almost all of them eventually, though Liar of Partinel is probably off the table.

This is because Brandon's magic systems provide the user with the minimally required secondary powers to make use of the granted abilities. If perception wasn't sped up enough to make use of that speed, Steelrunners wouldn't be very useful because they'd be smacking into things constantly. This is also why Wayne and Marasi don't irradiate everything around them whenever they use speed bubbles, why Wax doesn't crush himself under his own weight when tapping huge amounts of it and so on. F-Steel makes you move faster and lets you react quickly enough to take advantage of it but it doesn't speed up everything. Regeneration is F-Gold's thing, mental speed is F-Zinc's and so on.

The zquiz also reminds me a bit of Aether of Night, where something similar is the primary power of the Ferrous aether. I could see the realmatics of both working similarly enough that if Brandon wants to find a home for the former and also keeps the latter more or less unchanged, the Aether rewrite could be a place the zquiz would fit.

Subtitled Hajimari no Kiseki trailer, behind a spoiler tag because the thumbnail is (sort of) a spoiler if you haven't beaten CS4. Also, a translation of a recent interview with Falcom's president which has a lot of interesting material on Hajimari and the series' future.

This was confirmed years ago via WoB and Oathbringer put the confirmation right in the text (because not everyone is a Sharder and knows where to find those things) when we see the deadeye spren of his blade and she's clearly cultivationspren, like Wyndle.

Sanya is amazing. Especially the way that he shows up in literally the nick of time constantly (because divine intervention) and he always brushes it off as 'must be a coincidence'. xD Of course, this is also a setting where pretty much every god, monster, spirit, mythical creature and loathsome betentacled horror from beyond rational spacetime is equally real, so nobody really has a monopoly on The Truth one way or the other. Yeah, pretty much this when you're using that standard to define a capital-g God. Brandon has been clear that he's never going to clarify whether it does, because he wants a setting in which the various beliefs of his characters can all be valid, and where the readers can approach the work from different perspectives and also be equally right. Relevant WoBs for anyone interested: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/117-boskone-54/#e1695 https://wob.coppermind.net/events/332-jordancon-2018/#e9596 https://wob.coppermind.net/events/31-arcanum-unbounded-release-party/#e1733

Yeah, Falcom redid the engine between CS2 and 3, incorporating feedback from Ys VIII and Tokyo Xanadu, which were their their transition games from Vita/PS3 development to the PS4. They look a lot nicer and it's quite apparent when there are flashbacks that use the original engine (usually with filter effects to somewhat disguise the difference) but Falcom has never been focused on eye-popping graphics so they're never going to look like a AAA title visually. They prefer to focus that effort on the writing and gameplay instead. That said, Falcom games can look absolutely gorgeous but they tend to be more stylized than photorealistic, and their spritework in older games is really good.

If you're offered a delicious cookie when you first join the Shard (or after you've posted something exceptionally funny/insightful/innovative) you check it for tiny hemalurgic spikes before you chow down, just in case.

Okay then, quick refresher: The initial population of humans on Roshar were refugees from Ashyn, which was devastated by use of the Dawnshards and/or a version of magic manipulating the Surges. They were accepted by the singers and given a region where the plants and animals they brought with them could survive, Shinovar. That's why the region is so much more earthlike and why species we recognize like horses (aside from the Ryshadium, who adapted to Roshar via a spren bond) and birds are found there. There are other human groups who arrived later and from other worlds (chiefly the Iriali) but we don't have a lot of details yet.

Have you finished Oathbringer yet?

If you're feeling warm right now, know that it is my burning envy being transmitted telepathically through the internet in violation of all laws of physics. Yeah, I think the way you'd need to avoid that pitfall is to either come up with powers that won't be absurd if concentrated, come up with costs/limitations that also get enhanced to balance things out or some social mechanism in place to discourage concentrating power too narrowly... or some mix of all of these.

I hadn't even thought of the possibility of sequences for more complex codes, that's a good one. You could do that but it's more prone to detection since any Seeker could 'hear' your messages, while emotional allomancy can be targeted. True, a Seeker will know that someone nearby is Soothing/Rioting but they won't know what's being communicated even if they recognize that it is an encoded communication. Pulses based on a prearranged set of signals that don't have an intrinsic meaning would be better for any covert communication.

On the Amberite thing, I find myself wondering if the term showed up in Mistborn Prime or Final Empire Prime (or possibly even Dragonsteel Prime) since Brandon would go on to use the word in Aether of Night and in his attempt to cannibalize it as a pre-Shattering magic in Liar of Partinel, so it's clearly a word he decided he liked and wanted to try and fit into the Cosmere even if it's changed its nature over time. Unrelated note: I liked Devin's mother more than I ever liked him, despite how briefly she's onscreen. I feel like a little of her went into Hesina. Yeah, it's an odd example of a magic system where there are limitations intrinsic to the system but the situation in the book is such an edge case that Devin blows right past them and is straight-up overpowered as a result. Brandon's 'Second Law' was formulated after Mythwalker and might well have been partially in response to this problem. It could be interesting and I think Brandon could totally pull it off nowadays if he wanted to, but it just didn't work in this instance.

I just had a fun idea for an application of the magic that we haven't seen anyone use yet but which we could see in the future. We know that you can't really read minds with A-Brass/Zinc but we do know that you can target emotions with precision and make very subtle tweaks or very blunt ones. We also know that you can be trained to recognize when emotional allomancy is being used on you even if you don't have any powers yourself, as with the obligators. So how's this for a thought: Using Soothing or Rioting (or both for best effects) to create a non-verbal code. To communicate you simply tweak an emotion in a manner that the other person will recognize. At its most basic level, you could use this as a non-verbal 'Wait for my signal' sort of communication where the parties know to wait for a particular emotional cue. For more complex communication you could use particular emotions to convey broad ideas or you could assign emotions to prearranged phrases. For example if you were pulling off some caper, Rioting anger might mean 'We go with Plan A', Rioting apprehension 'Time for Plan B' and Rioting fear could be 'Ditch the plans, we're making it up as we go along'. If the parties are trained enough to recognize emotional allomancy, nuance could be added by how much an emotion is tweaked and if you can both Riot and Sooth you could throw in additional nuances or simply use the choice of which way to tweak emotions as a form of yes/no telepathic communication. Of course to have any sort of two-way communication you'd need all parties to a conversation to have access to the powers, but that should be easier in the future once medallion technology becomes more widespread. Thoughts?

Brandon also has plans for at least one world where telepathy would be a major thing, but until it's actually written (if it is) he's not going to canonize it.