Weltall

Read Name of the Wind, have not yet read anything else but since I liked the first book I plan to. Every so often a change of literary pace is good and I don't mind Kvothe. The fact that we know from the present-day chapters that something has happened to him that's broken his ability to use his magic helps too, if you think he's too good in his recollections and the (deliberately inflated) legends about him. As an aside, I've got a friend who I trade book recommendations with. She told me to read it, I threw Warbreaker at her as an introduction to Brandon. I don't think either of us is unhappy with the results. Brandon has definitely spoiled me when it comes to writing pace. I mean, even when he's not writing the book I most want next he's writing something and it's always been enjoyable. On Rothfuss, I'm a lot more optimistic that he'll finish his series than GRRM or Scott Lynch will finish theirs. At least Kingkiller Chronicle only has one more book planned, while ASoIaF has The Indefinitely Prolonged Winds of Winter plus another book (plus anything else he decides to spend time on in lieu of the main series) and Gentleman Bastard has three more books to be written once Thorn of Emberlain is published. I figure there's a chance for Lynch to finish since he's relatively young and maybe he'll pick up the pace again. Martin... not holding my breath nor betting money on ever seeing the final book.

Bear in mind that for most of the story the protagonists have multiple people able to use A-Bronze. As long as they use it before a coppercloud goes up (or they're standing outside it) they can tell if someone in the vicinity is trying to spy on them with A-Tin and plan accordingly if they aren't already in an environment that will make the Tineye's job difficult. Also, welcome to the Shard!

Oh, there's an astronomical logic behind it as well; base 60 is very convenient for such measurements.

Because that's just how they do it on Taldain. The reason that a sixty second minute/sixty minute hour system is the standard on Earth is because that's how the Babylonians did things... because they used base-60 mathematics. Taldain's divisions of time presumably make perfect sense to them, just like Roshar uses tens for weeks and months because that number is intrinsic to their world.

Brandon had planned a new Aether work (actually a series but it never got beyond a few pages for one book) with the overarching title of Aethers of Lor, which would be set on a world of that name. Brandon has said that he still plans for Lor to be a world but he isn't canonizing it as 'the Aether planet' yet. The first book of this stillborn series was where Brandon cannibalized Syl from. So Lor may or may not eventually be the name of the planet but it sounds like that's closer to what Brandon is currently thinking and Vax is something else. As for the in-universe name, I'm not sure that Agaris taking 'Vae' as his persona and using it so often means that it's what he called the world and Makkal and his followers called it something else. The impression I get is that both of these... super-Splinters(?) whatever they are, knew the world as Vaeria and Agaris simply appropriated the name once he realized he had exclusive access to it, to further his designs.

Adhesion could probably be used to deflect the ash and gasses themselves but the heat would be another matter, an issue that would also come up in the case of lava. Given Brandon's adage about limitations being more interesting than powers, I'm pretty sure this is just the sort of thing he'd consider as a problem for the characters to overcome rather than something the magic can deal with entirely on its own. Stormlight healing (possibly assisted by Progression) could help since you don't need to breathe while holding it and could reduce the damage to your body caused by the temperature but that would be a short-term fix. I'm thinking some fabrials that affect temperature would be the best bet.

It would probably be hard, but if Aimia is any indication it should be possible. After all, someone managed to soulcast air into stone spikes so lava should be doable as well. Might even be easier Cognitively since a flow of lava could be mentally thought of as one thing needing to be changeed, as opposed to air where (depending on how it's perceived) you either have countless nitrogen/oxygen/etc atoms, or one undifferentiated thing that you're trying to affect only a very tiny piece of.

Yes, it's a way to get multiple allomantic powers without needing to spike yourself or be a mistborn. Of course, once unsealed medallions become more widespread there will be another way to get multiple powers.

This has been a really neat read, thanks @Jozomby ! Brandon might have been thinking along similar lines to this. He mentions that one reason he picked pancakes for Lift was because most cultures have something similar, even if they're not sweet and fluffy like what an American reader is probably going to immediately think of when they hear the term. One of the unseen pancakes Brandon mentions sounds like something you might get in Japanese okonomiyaki. For the unfamiliar, it's a dish that's somewhere between a pancake and a pizza, can have pretty much any toppings you desire (the name literally means 'cook what you like') and can be made gluten-free with things like rice flour. If tallew is a rice analogue, I could imagine at least the "terrible, awful, seafood" pancake being something similar to okonomiyaki using seafood for the protein. And I'd be one of those people who (unlike Brandon) would love it.

Given that it's a pretty small group posting here, I think the standard assumption is 'wait and see what people tell you they've played and go from there'. But the general approach has been to tag things that are spoilers for a game as such rather than assuming any given game has already been played. And yeah, Hajimari promo material can spoil some stuff by default just because it happens after CS4, and discussion of it moreso. Which is why all the stuff discussing specifics about it get tagged.

Extremely sure. First off, Sazed outright says so in the Hero of Ages epigraphs. Since he is at that point literally the god that's empowering all three magic systems, I think it's safe to say he knows what he's talking about. Also, have these WoBs: And the 'we're really really sure' capstone:

Yep, welcome to the Kiseki Nerd Corner. xD Love the avatar choice by the way. Have you played the Geofront translation of Zero yet? It's out right now if you need a fix during the wait for CS4. And speaking of Kiseki, there have been some updates to the Hajimari website since the last time I commented on them. They added character pages based on the last round of magazine scans, some more details about the Episodes, a page for the quiz minigame and the next chapter of Three and Nine. Commentary spoil-tagged for some indirect CS4 stuff: And lastly there's now a teaser for the Mini OST that's part of the limited edition of the game. There shouldn't be any spoilers in there for anyone who's finished CS3 and is familiar with the ending of Azure.

For a multi-Shard magic system to emerge you need multiple Shards on the same world. We have examples of this on Scadrial where Preservation and Ruin each have their own systems, with feruchemy being the shared one. Roshar has three magic systems (or thirty, in the same way that allomancy could be thought of as one magic or a whole bunch per metal) and all of the magic systems on Sel are mixed Devotion/Dominion with some leaning more one way than the other. On Roshar, Surgebinding is primarily associated with Honor even though Cultivation is involved with it. Look at how you get access to the magic and you'll see how Honor-centric it is, and we know the Radiants of old could speak to Honor but we have no evidence they were as closely connected to Cultivation. We know Voidbinding is the second of the three major magic systems on Roshar and that's of Odium, which leaves a third system for Cultivation. Khriss suspects in the Ars Arcanum that the Old Magic isn't actually a system and Cultivation's magic is something else. Since the only use we've seen of the Old Magic is the Nigthwatcher (a godspren) and Cultivation providing similar effects, it's quite likely that the Old Magic is indeed something unique and not the third system. All other magic systems we've seen in the Cosmere are the result of a single Shard, or are magics that could arise without the direct intervention of a Shard even though they're associated with one by default. Awakening on Nalthis is an example of the former, the Aviar on First of the Sun of the latter. Shards can also be involved with multiple magic systems across worlds; Sand Mastery on Taldain is a directly accessible form of Investiture but there's some other manifestation on Darkside that we don't know much about, and given the number of worlds she's involved with it's pretty safe to assume that she's tinkered with magic on plenty of other worlds even if she didn't have a hand in creating the systems. Or to be more precise, shaping them. Brandon's mentioned several times that Shards don't truly create the magic systems they power, they just influence what arises organically from the interaction of their power, the world(s) and the sDNA of the inhabitants of that world. Also, that there are natural pathways that the magic follows which is why Lightweaving exists on both Yolen and Roshar.

Elemental aluminum is extremely rare and only found in very specific environments like volcanoes. Guess what Roshar does not have? In other words, they're not going to find usable aluminum lying around Roshar no matter how you mine and the process for refining it from bauxite is way beyond what Rosharans can manage right now. So not only do they not have the means to mine aluminum if they wanted to, they don't even have any basis for thinking that it can be mined in the first place. They'd need a massive jump in their understanding of physics and chemistry or a worldhopper explaining it to them in order to make the connection. Which is probably how they learned to Soulcast it in the first place, or via one of the Heralds or even the Shards telling them about it.

Adonalsium wasn't shattered at the time we see the Shattered Plains in Dragonsteel Prime, ergo the Plains' existence doesn't really serve as a link between the death of Adonalsium and the death of Honor. And the Plains aren't really 'shattered' in Dragonsteel Prime, they just look that way. Shardblades, not Honorblades. The latter are completely accounted for, with the Shin originally having custody of nine of them and Taln retaining his. At some point Nale reclaimed his, and Jezrien's Blade has ping-ponged around between owners. As for the huge number of Blades and Plate abandoned at the Recreance, some have probably been lost through natural causes (anything left out through a few highstorms unprotected is going to build up enough crem that it becomes effectively indistinguishable from the surroundings) and some other number may be held in secret by groups like the Diagram or by individuals like Liss. There's a lot of theories that a large cache of the shards is out there somewhere but there's no reason to think that it has anything to do with Honor's death. And as noted, a Shard being forced into the Physical Realm would have 'disastrous effects'. Given the comparison in Karger's WoB to an event in Shadows for Silence (which wasn't a Shard being forced into the PR and yet had continent-wide repercussions) I'm pretty sure that Honor being killed in the Physical would have done a lot more than just destroy one city and the surrounding environment. Like, Earth-shattering kaboom stuff. xD Per the excerpts, this is indeed the case and since Frost is the person telling us this I think it's safe to assume he knows what he's talking about.

Currently yes, all examples of Investiture in solid form are metals. The one thing we're not sure about is the Aethers and Brandon's addressed it but only vaguely. The only one we've seen in canon is a crystal and that WoB references one from the unpublished/non-canon Aether of Night which seems to have inspired Wyndle and other cultivationspren in its appearance. Brandon could be hedging slightly since the one canonical example looks like rose quartz and that contains silicon (metalloid) and gets its coloring from titanium, iron or manganese (metals) so maybe that's considered 'close enough'. Or it could be they're not solid-state Investiture, since we're not sure how Aethers work realmatically (and we can't be sure the one we've seen in SA even works like its counterpart in the unpublished novel) so they may end up being something completely different at the end of the day.

Jumping in because I've now finished the book (the recent WoB about why he decided it was okay to release now was the last straw) and oh boy, that was an interesting journey. Figure I'll start with some broad observations and likes/dislikes. - It's obviously nowhere near as polished as the final book and there are all sorts of things that just feel off, like the lack of spren that are so ubiquitous in the published version. Those I can mostly get used to, though there's a fair amount of 'tell, don't show' that took me out of it at parts. Dalinar got a fair bit of that since it's not until the end of the book that we really get inside his head, and he's just not nearly as interesting without the driving conflict from WoK or the hints of a darker past. But there's a lot of talk about how honorable he is without really showing it, and his decision that ultimately sets him up against Elhokar felt less like he finally was pushing himself to do what his principles demanded and more an angry reaction to what happened to Aredor when we first saw it. - I wasn't hugely fond of the Merin content; he's just nowhere near as good a character as Kaladin even if it's interesting seeing an early version of the Kaladin/Adolin dynamic come into play a full book earlier. I also got a bit of a vibe from one of Mat's chapters in the WoT books Brandon wrote and am wondering if he had Merin in the back of his head when he wrote it. But yeah, I've been mentally calling him Kaladidn't, as in 'Thank the Almighty Kaladin didn't go this route' and they were probably my least favorite chapters. He did work a lot better than Devin from Mythwalker in the 'classic hero' role though, and I did like his duel with the five Veden Shardbearers and how he figured out what Vasher was really trying to teach him. And 'skepping' was a cool moment and I cheered when he worked it out. Though the way that Radiant Shardblades work mean that it's not gonna be something you have to train at, it would be nice to see some similar stunts in SA. Maybe if Adolin becomes a Radiant, it seems like the kind of trick he'd love... - Speaking of Vasher, I love any chance we get to see Brandon's early work because it's illuminating to see how his characters and concepts (and writing skills) evolve. Like in this case, the character got transplanted to Nalthis, then back to Roshar but with a new name, and the terms Awakening and Return(ed) moved to Nalthis with him, with a discarded idea from Elantris and a whole lot of Mythwalker thrown into the mix. So WoK Prime was very rewarding in that respect. - One thing I'm glad that Brandon changed was just how many invented terms got thrown at the reader in SA compared to the original. There was Sheneres, which was both the code of honor and the name of Dalenar's first son, Epellion instead of Radiant and a whole bunch of Shin terms like Shanalakada that I my mind just started glazing over. - The fact that the Kothen sound much more alien (eyeless heads, weird bone-placement) and are apparently completely absent from Roshar along with the Heralds was interesting and I wonder where Brandon was going with that, since there's no obvious analogue to the parshmen who could be possessed, but Taln suggests that the Heralds are still hiding some shameful secret about humanity's claim to Roshar and we know from his thoughts that they came from another world originally. Same dynamic but with some elements changed. - I was intrigued by the Silence mentioned in that one book Taln read from and found myself wondering exactly what Renarin did later on: What happened the year he, Shinri and Merin were born that they all had magical powers thought lost for centuries? It was interesting that shortly afterwards we get told that Jarnah's war of conquest happened in that same year, and the Shin were involved. I'll bet that when we get the new explanation for why the Shin attempted to conquer Roshar in the past, it will be something Brandon drew from WoK Prime. - Meridas made me very much want to see Jasnah turn him into smoke, or crystal or whatever. But yeah, I noticed that the writing tried to have him be both shockingly competent and a fop at the same time and it didn't quite work and we didn't get an explanation for the mystery of the former part of him. At least Jasnah seems to have found a way to get out of being married to the creep, even if it was a case of political and social suicide. - Shinri's a character I started liking in a 'Oh, she's not Shallan but she's still fun' in the early book and I liked how her former childish behavior came back to help her when things like vases and jades needed to be thrown with precision. Then the later part of the book kind of turned me off since she spends so much time being reactive instead of proactive and jumps into pretty much the same exact problem thrice over. - That gemstone-covered door beneath Ral Eram is going to haunt me. Given the similarity of names, I wonder if Brandon split off some of his original plans to Ral Elorim while its function as fortress and Oathgate hub got transferred to Urithiru. - Ishar betraying the other Heralds, hmmm... - Oh, and on the subject of Taln's death, even setting aside Brandon's confirmation that he wasn't intended to be dead-dead, I figured he was coming back because for whatever reason he was still bound by the mechanics of the Return even if the other Heralds were not, so he'd eventually have either reincarnated naturally or they'd somehow get Shinri the Elsecaller to fetch him, however that works. Jasnah's action at the end really only served to keep the characters in the dark as to whether he was a real Herald rather than rendering him permadead, is how I took it. - Oh, and speaking of not-dead characters I'm pretty sure Renarin would eventually have bounced back from looking too closely at Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. I also liked how the seeds of Brandon's conception of how futuresight interferes with other applications of it were sown here, as Renarin's very existence helped throw off Ahven's attempts at divining the future to the point that he wasn't prepared for the events at the end of the book. But we never did find out what Renarin was writing, since Merin's the only viewpoint character to look at his scrawlings and couldn't make sense of them. And then in an ironic twist that particular role got moved into the character who Ahven became in SA but Renarin still played the same role in upsetting Taravangian and Odium's futuresight. I shouldn't worry about that. Renarin I'm pretty sure would have bounced back and his Truthwatcher powers don't seem nearly as dangerous as Onyxseeing is, in that the visions come randomly. While futuresight can still potentially break your brain in the Cosmere, the only way we've seen that really comes close without a Shard directly exposing a mortal to the Spiritual Realm is the duralumin+atium combo. So Renarin's probably safe in that respect at least. Whether he'll be safe more generally once Team Odium realizes what he is and what he can do on the other hand... And while Aredor is basically Adolin as a person, his character arc has been so completely rewritten that I wouldn't worry about his SA counterpart being in mortal danger just because proto-Adolin didn't make it past the first book. Brandon revised him to be a foil for Dalinar and his new arc (transposed from Prime!Taln) and he's got his relationship with Shallan (not even hinted with Shinri), his position as the most genre-savvy Kholin and maybe becoming the first person to revive a deadeye as ongoing threads that give him plenty of reason to stay around narratively. Plus, he's outlived the person who killed him in Prime so even if he does die before SA ends, it'll be in a completely different context. I'm with you on the army. Pretty much everyone other than Dalenar think that the 'old Pralir nobility organizing a secret army' idea is farfetched, while the Kothen (whatever they are) would make more sense. Taln even remembers 'the pain of crushed limbs and ribs' when thinking about them, while everyone assumes the two armies were killed by a formation of heavy infantry because most of the bodies were, wait for it, largely killed by crushing blows. Taln thinks they shouldn't appear until a year after his Return, but if things are weird this time around who's to say a small group didn't arrive around the same time he did? For the tunnels, some of the oldest cities on Roshar might have them and I'm hoping that Brandon transferred that secret door to Ral Elorim (similar name, the Voidbringer armies during the False Desolation seemed very intent on capturing it) because I want to know what's so special about it too. I'm not sure that Nale and Ash seeming to trust Ishar is good evidence that he isn't secretly a traitor, since they're both insane and thus not really objective judges. I do agree that if he's a traitor to the others in SA, he's been much more subtle about it. But consider that he is the one who convinced the others that they could safely break the Oathpact by betraying Taln (that he was right and this gave Roshar thousands of years of relative piece notwithstanding) and his advice to Nale has been actively counterproductive in getting Roshar ready to face the Desolation so he's already really suspicious. And yeah, I figure that a lot of Prime!Taln's issues are due to him dying so early the last time he was around, so he's still bound by the cycle of Returns but his power was still broken by whatever Ishar supposedly did. The discussion of the Silence suggests that all magic suddenly failed right around that same time, so maybe whatever broke it still affects Taln and whatever un-broke the magic seventeen years prior to the start of the story didn't affect the powers unique to the Heralds. Whether Taln got lucky in dying early or whether he was intended to die when he was sent out to that keep he defended, we can't really answer with what we have. I'm gonna have to take some more time to think about all the other great points you've raised.

Having just finished it myself, I've got quite a few thoughts on it. The short version is that I don't regret reading it at all and this statement by Brandon largely eased my mind about the possibility of spoiling later SA content. There's some big stuff that looks like it might spoil back-half SA stuff but now it sounds like Brandon has shuffled enough things around that they're not really spoilers. That said, it's definitely something that could only have been released after Oathbringer. The presence of so many Jasnah and Taln chapters are nice if you're really fans of those characters, even though the former isn't as well-developed as SA!Jasnah and the latter had the crux of his story moved to Dalinar. Still, it's nice getting into his head while he's far more lucid than what we saw of him in Words of Radiance. There's also a really interesting inversion in his arc, since material that was at the end of Way of Kings gets shifted to the front and vice versa and that changes the perceptions of his scenes. There's also a lot of interesting moments where you can see how a concept from SA started in Prime and then got moved to a new character or simply developed more. There's also moments where concepts stayed with the original characters but were glossed over in SA but you can go 'Aha, this is what Brandon was drawing on!'. So it's a whole lot of fun if you're into that sort of thing. As with his other available unpublished books, this one ends on a cliffhanger that's never going to be resolved (and things are different enough that we don't know how it 'should' have resolved) but some of the broad contours can be guessed at and the rest are interesting but ultimately irrelevant.

As @Honorless covered really well, all of the Surges have potential uses. There was a topic a while back on mundane uses for Surgebinding that probably have more ideas, though not focused as narrowly as this topic. Adhesion also seems like it could be really useful in setting up temporary windbreaks like Kaladin does in Oathbringer, and we have WoBs that Windrunners would be great for space exploration due to their combined powers, so a modified form of that using Adhesion to create bubbles in areas full of toxic or corrosive gases would be helpful for search and rescue work.

Yeah, we don't know if something magical was done to make Shinovar better-suited to humanity when it arrived (this sort of thing is trivial for the Shards to manage) or if it was always naturally sheltered, but the environment further east is simply inhospitable to the flora and fauna humans brought with them. Horses can be kept outside of Shinovar but they're noted to be really expensive and pretty much everything else has to be imported from there. The Ryshadium have a spren-bond that's helped them adapt better to Roshar than the original horses they're descended from. Pretty much everything else on Roshar predates the arrival of humanity and the species they were able to bring with them and evolved over time in response to the environment that Adonalsium set up for Mysterious Reasons.

The problem here is that H-Atium doesn't really embody 'Ruin' since it steals things better than other spikes, while H-Aluminum seems the most ruinous in what it does. The intents of the Shards are more about how you get access to magic than what you can do with it.

We know they're trying to consolidate their bloodlines to the point that a full feruchemst might be born again so they probably give off some weird vibes from that alone, since it means some degree of selective breeding and keeping very detailed records on their people. I'm not sure they're up to anything overtly sinister but their somewhat insular nature makes them look suspicious from the outside and if Idashwy is a typical example of someone who grew up in the Village and left, they're probably especially vulnerable to suggestion in the period between leaving and figuring out just how they're going to adapt to life on the outside. Wayne is part-Terris so he's like that cousin who always gets up to some sort of trouble but you love him anyways. I mean come on, it's Wayne, who wouldn't like him? Assuming he hasn't 'traded' something with you recently at least.

Yeah, aluminum works across all magic systems in the Cosmere. It's called Ralkalest on Sel where it's known to be un-Forgeable. Sheets of it are used in Oathbringer to hide soulcasters from detection in Kholinar and we have WoBs that aluminum will block the magical properties of a Shardblade, but won't do anything about the 'heavy chunk of metal with a sharp edge' thing so you'd need a sufficiently thick piece of aluminum to be a truly effective shield. See the Coppermind page for a complete list. This WoB provides the best explanation for why it works this way currently: The out of universe reason why aluminum fills this role is that Brandon wanted a check on magic that would be rare at first and then become commonplace and aluminum is perfect for that because of how rare it was before the industrial processes enabling it to be refined in bulk were discovered.

For further reference, Hoid has a 'real' name but would argue that all the names he goes by are his real name. Another name of his that's implied to be very old is Midius, which the Heralds knew him by. The unpublished (and thus non-canonical) Liar of Partinel gives that as his name and since it's the chronologically earliest Cosmere work it's been assumed to be closest to his real name, but it could be yet another alias even back then or Brandon could change his mind on where and when Hoid first used it by the time Liar is rewritten and published. Peter mentioned last year that he knows what Hoid's original name was at one point but it may not be that any more. So yeah, Hoid's original name is potentially in flux even now.

As already mentioned, the short answer is that we don't know and it's one of the biggest mysteries in the Cosmere. We'll learn it... eventually. Dragonsteel's gonna be a long time coming though but it will answer a lot of questions about Hoid, Adonalsium and the Shattering. Truefact: His grudge with Bavadin is because she isolated Taldain, which was the one place where he could get instant noodles for the longest time. Now he's waiting for Scadrial to invent them. (this part is actually true, instant noodles are Serious Business)