Weltall

1) In between these two events, you omit that Szeth has already told Gavilar that he doesn't know who Thaidakar is. There's no need to say 'Wasn't me, man' because the Szeth has already done that, even if your assumption is correct. 2) Kelsier has no plausible means of learning all the things that would be necessary to fake the knowledge we see and especially not replicate the Aharietiam vision and by implication all the others. Particularly since he's not even really there and is communicating via Seon trickery. 3) The 'Stormfather' sounds like he has direct experience of what it means to be a long-lived Cognitive Shadow, either through close observation or through actually being one. This is the kind of knowledge that Kelsier wants and does not have, which is why he's so intent on chatting with Kalak.

Yeah... you remember how in Kuro's Prologue Falcom would like to assure you that wasn't a once-just-to-shock-you thing and the rest of the game will be entirely Business As Usual.

I look forward to your continued thoughts. <munches popcorn>

One of the things that Brandon mentioned in the SP1 livestream is that the 'core' Aethers do not consider themselves to be creations of Adonalsium. Apparently this is something he wanted to do even back when writing Liar of Partinel which predates the Shattering. Now, just because they believe that doesn't mean it's true but it does suggest that whatever Shard is associated with the Aethers isn't going to be revealed until we've had a chance to see the main Aethers. Otherwise we'd hear whatever they have to say on the matter and the readers would just think 'Well you're wrong, you're associated with Ruin/Valor/Whatever' and that would be kind of silly. He RAFO'd the direct question by the way, because of course someone asked it.

And that is both Van and Calvard in a nutshell. xD

I return, and I bring Kuro II goodness from this morning's livestream. (spoilers for the first game should be fairly obvious)

Vasher is rather keen to avoid repeating the mistakes of his past. Sharing his knowledge could cause another struggle for supremacy on the same level as the Manywar. We know from WoB that if Yesteel got involved it would end very badly for everybody, so not giving anybody the motivation to start a war and checking out what Yesteel's up to are both really good ideas. This isn't a secret only he knows, everyone who has enough Breath to dabble in Awakening does something similar subconsciously when they use only as much Breath as they need to Awaken something, instead of using all their Breaths. Certain people in Hallandren know how to do the Returned-specific version as well, because we know that when one God King passes on their Breath store to their successor, they keep their Divine Breath and are allowed to live out their lives peacefully, removed from the court Brandon has confirmed this was a true statement from Treledees.

Functional perhaps, but badly broken. Kalak himself has a breakdown at the thought of returning to Braize and he can see from looking at Jezrien that he's the same. They were clearly not bastions of mental health when they made that decision even if we don't see the same symptoms out of those two that we're familiar with in the present day, and presumably the others would be the same. It's certainly possible that the binding affected the Heralds in some way that it had unexpected consequences for all spren, but I don't think we can blame everything that we see with the Heralds on that event. Also, Maya says that the spren and their Radiant partners had no idea that they'd be affected by the binding in that way, so I have a hard time crediting Melishi with deliberately engineering a result like that, or thousands of spren being willing to go along with it. They were expecting the pain of broken bonds and maybe death for some (based on what we know of the Fifth Ideal-level bond) but not being made into zombie spren.

If Brandon decides in the future that: Also, I see that parallel of yours and raise you Van Arkride, who seems to have A-Steel powers as one of his revealed Crafts (which he even shows off in the opening movie) as it involves flicking a coin at enemies with lethal force.

I noticed that. I would not be surprised in the slightest to find out in Era 3 that instant noodles are a popular item first invented in the Terris enclaves. The planned protagonist for the era is supposed to be Terris and a computer programmer so her having a love of instant noodles would fit right in. I'm also quite certain that if we ask Brandon before then we'll get a RAFO. xD

60 or below for everyone for me on my initial run, playing on Hard.

We do have a WoB actually. I'd kind of imagined something more Nepali or Tibetan based on their (original) environment but apparently not.

We know that the God Kings are allowed to retire and can still be given enough Breath to stay alive as long as they want (WoB confirms the priests were truthful about that) so they would still have a lot of Investiture assuming they die without ever using the Divine Breath to heal. Whether that counts for Cognitive Shadow purposes is a bit murkier since a Returned already is one. Oh, and of course we have Arsteel who died with a larger than normal supply of Breath and came back as an unusually intelligent Lifeless, for whatever that's worth. Brandon has said that the Breath he got from Vasher made a difference but doesn't mention the Divine Breath.

That was already discussed in literally the second post of the topic. I even linked to where Isaac (who writes Nazh) confirmed it.

The letters exchanged between Hoid and Harmony appear to be written contemporaneously with the events of the books (or near enough to them) and we know that some Shard is already trying to influence Scadrial during the period of RoW. We can reasonably assume the RoW letter was written before Todium because in that same exchange Harmony cautions Hoid about the risk of what would happen if Odium had a better-aligned Vessel, and Brandon has said that the other Shards are going to know about the change pretty quickly. Odium isn't free to meddle on Scadrial during the period of RoW because getting the freedom to do that is one of the things that he wants to get out of his bargain with Dalinar. Also, we have this WoB that says the entity calling itself Trell and the Shard associated with the 'Trellium' spike are one and the same.

That depends on whether you consider the 'soul' and 'mind' to be the same thing. Brandon himself hasn't been consistent on that point and I tend to think of them as synonymous (with the spiritweb that stays around for longer being more like a persistent echo) but I can see how that would be a point of confusion. Terminology aside, it's pretty clear that the thinking Cognitive part of you is on a time limit after your Physical death unless you have X Investiture or more.

Apparently the trophy list for Kuro has already leaked but I'm not interested in spoiling myself on anything so I'm not touching that. I'm also not gonna be doing any sort of play by play when the game is out but I'll write up my impressions afterwards, whether it's per-Chapter or once I'm done with the whole thing. Like you're guessing, it seems likely to me that it won't affect the overall number of interactive NPCs, it will just mean adding a bunch of extras who don't have dialogue on top of the people they'd already be including, to enhance the feeling of locations being busy.

Ummmm, no, that's the opposite of what I'm saying. If you don't have enough Investiture you inevitably get pulled Beyond whether you want to or not and there's some specific threshold that determines when you've reached that point. All we know for sure is that Slivers qualify by default, but even really powerful mistborn don't and neither do surgebinders from all available evidence. If you're below whatever the threshold is, you may be able to hang around in the Cognitive for a while longer but you will still be inexorably pulled Beyond unless you go over that threshold before your time runs out. We literally see this happen with Kelsier, as he was more Invested than normal people and got a bit more time but he was gonna go Beyond whether he wanted to or not if Preservation hadn't shoved him into the Well. We also know via WoB that if you have less Investiture than normal (say, because someone ripped out a chunk of your spiritweb with hemalurgy) it's going to influence that transition period between 'Physically dead' and 'going Beyond'. Hence, if you were somehow able to get an infusion of 'extra Investiture' post-mortem but it wasn't enough, you might get to hang around the Cognitive Realm for a bit longer but you'd still be pulled Beyond.

If you have extra Investiture but not enough to 'anchor' yourself you might last longer but you'll still get pulled Beyond. This is what almost happened to Kelsier at the start of Secret History when his being a mistborn let him last longer than most people but he would have been pulled to the Beyond in the end if Preservation hadn't intervened.. I think that if you didn't have enough Investiture on Physical death, started to get the necessary 'extra Investiture' somehow and the process was interrupted you'd get to hang around in the Cognitive Realm for a bit longer (depending on how much Investiture you had) but you'd eventually pass on unless you met whatever the threshold is.

Welcome to the Shard! Just to add, Brandon has said he plans to expand the Sanderson Curiosities line, with Dragonsteel Prime being the next one. So if you want to read that and can't get to BYU in the next couple of years, you'll eventually be able to read it anyways. He'll presumably eventually include Mistborn Prime and Final Empire Prime as he's grouped those in his 'second tier' status along with The Liar of Partinel, which he's said he'd consider releasing once he's written and published the canon version of Hoid's origin story. We're probably not getting anything from his third/fourth tiers of unpublished works (the 'bad' and 'terrible' ones) with the exception of the unfinished Mythwalker, which you can read in its entirety through the page that LTT linked you to.

Having gone back and looked up some of the other terms in the Japanese translation, there's some interesting things that have been done with the Metallic Arts. Sadly we're a bit thin on the ground when it comes to Surgebinding due to most of the proper terms not appearing in the books until WoR, which hasn't been translated. As before, the romanization is in brackets. I'm going to use spoiler tags because this is likely to get very long. Metallic Arts Allomancy Other Mistborn Stormlight Archive Like I mentioned, there's not as much to work with in terms of things like Radiant Order names in Japanese but if you have specific terms you're curious about and they show up in Way of Kings, I'll try and track them down for you. Oh, and I forgot to mention it in the earlier post but the word used to refer to the Shards of Adonalsium is 破片, the same word at the root of the translation for Shardblade/plate. So that's consistent.

It's probably in one of the other linked topics but just to put it here, we have another WoB that makes it clear that the metal, the meddling Shard and Trell all refer to the same entity, which per the other WoB is a Shard we already know.

The last Kuro livestream has come and gone (along with a print review of the game) and there was a dungeon exploration segment showing off both types of gameplay, a monster elimination quest and a miniboss fight. Also, they showed off a bunch of S-Crafts in a compilation clip. Assuming I'm following what you're trying to say, enemies in the back half of Cold Steel (generally) only use S-Crafts when they're in the Enhanced status, and that gets triggered mainly by their HP threshold. Odds are they stopped using S-Crafts because they already exhausted Enhanced around the same time they knocked out those characters of yours and they didn't go back into again before being defeated.

You're probably thinking of this WoB where he started to say seons, then corrected himself. Spren predate the Shattering as a general category, but the sapient ones came later.

Brandon does have plans to tie sports into things in Mistborn in Era 3 (including how it will work with the magic systems) and has started laying the groundwork in Era 2. The in-universe reason it hasn't happened yet is that the Scadrians have been focusing heavily on practical matters and one of the things they haven't really gotten around to developing is professional sports. My guess is that for any sports that don't depend on allomantic/feruchemical powers, they would require players to be Leeched beforehand and undergo an inspection for metalminds. We know that detection isn't foolproof because Miles managed to hide at least one goldmind inside his body, but someone flaring iron or steel should generally be able to spot ingested metalminds. I imagine that for sports which do depend on the metallic arts, you'd have something similar to begin and then some official would be in charge of distributing carefully measured metal vials or metalminds as appropriate so that every participant has exactly the amount of magical oomph that they're supposed to. No doubt there will be ways people try to cheat that system too, but it shouldn't be impossible to regulate.