Weltall

Returned also appear to be influenced by not only their own perceptions but that of their society as a whole. So yeah, I suspect that unless something weird is going on Returned!Kaladin would not have his slave brands. Unless maybe it happened on Roshar and by then he'd become some sort of demi-Herald in the popular consciousness, in which case he'd probably still have them because everyone would think that The Stormblessed storming well should have them.

@NightbloodforPM This topic was dead for over a year. Just sayin'. Probably not for two reasons. First, assuming Ivory knows what he's talking about a normal Truthwatcher sees the present, not the future. That's unlikely to cause the same sort of disruption as two people both seeing the future would. Following that line of thought, Renarin's future-sight only works because his spren was corrupted by Sja-anat so just having access to the normal surges woudln't give Szeth that. Second, if the Truthwatcher ability is their Resonance (which seems likely) then by having all the Surges, Szeth would have too many powers so he wouldn't get any perk unless he restricted the number of Surges he used. That means Szeth doesn't get the ability to see the preset or the future so no atium counter one way or the other. Oh, and the hypothetical situation called for Szeth to get his magic from Yelig-nar rather than the normal way, so his Surges are likely to be different in the same way that the Fused's powers are similar to but not quite the same as Surgebinders' own.

Yeah, from an in-universe perspective having a cracked spiritweb (whether it's Kaladin's depression, Shallan's mental block or the trauma that snaps allomancers on Scadrial) makes it easier for magic to get into you, so you're putting the cart before the horse in assuming that Surgebinding makes someone insane. Jasnah has also been a Surgebinder for years now and if anything, she's knurd. We also know that Odium was involved in some way with what happened on Ashyn, so we alredy have a pretty easy explanation for how people could have been goaded into misusing their magic to the point of triggering a cataclysm.

I didn't know that either, hadn't seen that WoB and this is the sort of thing I geek out over. Kudos!

What @RShara said. Scadrial is explicitly the Cosmere's earth analogue and unless we're explicitly told otherwise we can assume everything we see there matches what we have here on earth. Since wolfhounds are a real thing and that was the breed that Vin procured, we can assume that TenSoon looks just like one. Also @Dragon reborn those pictures are adorable.

The title (which by sheer coincidence I happen to have just now) is a reference to a game from Warbreaker. It's played by the Returned (and apparently by the very wealthy, but on a smaller scale), involves throwing weighted wooden balls of various colors onto a marked field and is supposed to be one of the most difficul games in the world. We have no idea what the rules or object of the game are because the character through whose eyes we see it never bothered to learn them, but he still manages to win constantly.

Welcome to the Shard! Brandon actually suggested the name for the site when it was being reorganized and they asked him for permission to become the 'official' fansite. It's named for the in-universe group called the Seventeenth Shard (members of it appear in Way of Kings and the epigraphs mention the organization by name) though we don't know very much about them. If you've only read Stormlight Archive you may not have noticed something yet:

How about a Shardic chess set, so you can play four-dimensional chess like Preservation or Cultivation?

To add to what @RShara said, while Sel looks reltively undamaged compared to Threnody and Roshar it's actually incredibly messed up, just not in the Physical Realm. Sel's Cognitive Realm is a massive storm of Investiture plasma that makes it extremely dangerous to visit and has thus left the world somewhat isolated from the rest of the Cosmere because of how risky it is to try and go there to such an extent that even Hoid finds it difficult to travel there. Also, because of the Dor being located in the Cognitive, Sel's magic is messed up by normal Cosmere standards what with the whole geographic locking. So yeah, while Sel doesn't look as bad as other worlds Odium got involved with, it's partly because he didn't need to take the same steps there as on Roshar and partly because you aren't seeing the real damage directly.

Would you believe there's a WoB exacltly on point? In other words, the area you'd need to enclose with a moat to completely isolate the Tower is huge and the logistics daunting even if you're using water rather than acid, and it will only slow rather than stop them because they'll still find a way across it.

While it's not canonized yet, Brandon's current plan for how humanity got from Ashyn to Roshar involved the Spiritual Realm, which.rather suggests that it is a feasible form of transportation... if you know what you're doing. There's also Aon Tia and the Dakhor monk's methods of teleportation which are point-to-point and so probably send the users through the Spiritual. We know the former requires you to be extremely precise if you don't want to end up in the middle of the ocean, or a rock face or something equally unpleasant and we don't know enough about the latter vis a vis how you specify a destination but since all Selish magic obeys the same principles it's probably similar. So yeah, Spiritual travel for non-Shards is feasible but it seems to be considerably more complicated than hopping over to the Cognitive and walking, and potentially more dangerous. @CrazyRioter hit on the precision risk but there's another possible factor at work and that's how the Spiritual appears dangerous to look into with the unprotected mind. Leras tells Kelsier that spending too much time looking into it could break his mind and the sensation was clearly unpleasant. Transitioning bodily into the Spiritual as a method of travel is probably even more dangerous even before factoring in the extremely high probability that any screwup in travel will leave you in a vacuum.

We can't really assume timeline or that the end of the existing story remains canon, but for sake of discussion let's say they do and everything in Aether still holds more or less. Illuminous and Night were given to humanity by the Fell Twins. Those powers may not have been accessible to anyone at the end of the book but the Twins ended up freed (in a hook for a sequel that will never happen) so they could presumably recreate the powers if they chose to.. It was six and within the context of the story that's all there are (the Former discusses it and he'd know better than anyone) but from an out of universe perspective we know that Brandon had plans for other aethers (involving flying magic) so it's entirely possible that the stain came from one that he created after Aether of Night and which we simply don't know about yet. Actually, I suppose we do have a seventh named Aether via Liar of Partinel, but we have no clue what it was supposed to do and it's entirely possible it was a renamed and reworked Night.

Given that the apocalyptic war elements have already been repurposed for Mistborn Era 1 (setting aside tonal differences) and even moreso for Stormlight Archive, I imagine the more obvious approach would be to take the more farcical half of the story which he hasn't recycled as much from, use that as the core of the story and then rebuild the second half of the plot around it. As for spliting them up, Brandon's already so busy that there are projects he wants to do which he's having to put on constant back-burner status and may ultimately never write, so turning one book into two books would only make things more difficult. Sure, he could write them back to back but by dividing the plots in the way you're suggesting seems like it would take more effort (and certainly take more time for editing and publishing) than doing one book.

Given that Vivenna and Siri were transplanted from Mythwalker, I'm not terribly surprised that he reused the trope. He just shuffled things around a bit and in the process made the former a much better character. Well, we don't know how Mythwalker!Vivenna would have ultimately developed but given how things were moving before Brandon called it quits, it probably wasn't going to be anywhere near as good and the whole 'coming into her power' thing didn't really work with her Mythwalker magic anyways. This makes me wonder, given that Brandon wants to rewrite Aether of Night now, what would he do with D'Naa now that a lot of her traits were recycled into other characters? I could see him changing her aether so that she's less similar to Vin and Lift. We know he was working on another work either set in the same world or at least using the same underpinnings and Syl originally came from it, so he had plans for more than the six aethers that we saw. Making her non-Invested at first and discovering on her own that it's possible for non-Aedin to bond could be another way of making things more interesting.

Soonie pups for everyone! And given my current title, how about tarachin sets? Rulebook optional.

Sixteen is important to the wider Cosmere because it's the number of Shards of Adonalsium. There are other significant numbers but these are strongly implied to be associated with planets rather than the Shards directly.

Perpendicularities already allow transition between any of the Realms. Khriss discusses it in the Arcanum Unbounded essays and Dalinar notes it when he opens Honor's Perpendicularity. There's also this WoB:

We have a WoB that what Hoid did in Warbreaker has nothing to do with Sand Mastery. The WoB also confirms that what Hoid was talking about involved Yolen specifically. Mraize has some Taldaini sand and Brandon has confirmed that anyone can use it as a sort of Inverstiture Radar. Hoid has a jar as well.

While I acknowledge that pancakes are indeed Awesome, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here. No disrespect to Lift intended, it's not her fault that nobody on Roshar seems to have invented waffles yet, just like it's nobody's fault per se that most of the Cosmere doesn't have access to instant noodles. I even have a song that proves the superiority of waffles.

Please, if you're going to make a topic like this you at least need to get the oaths right: Breakfast before Lunch, Syrup before Butter, Waffles before Pancakes.

These WoBs may help:

That's really just combining two existing powers, F-Iron (weight) and F-Pewter (physical strength, which affects your size via muscle mass). Other than that 'size' doesn't really make any sense as a feruchemical trait. Also Brandon actually does worry about the square cube law and had to design Roshar around making an environment where you could scale things up without breaking plausibility too much. You wouldn't have that on Scadrial. As for F-Malatium specifically, we know Sazed played around with it a bit but he didn't get far in figuring it out. Given how dramatic changing size would be, yeah, that doesn't track.

While the whole alignment system is indeed massively simplified (and is basically intended as a guide to roleplaying) you're reading way too much into that description of what 'evil' is. For example, the Paladin class simply couldn't exist in D&D if evil was read as broadly as you're doing since through 3rd edition they were required to be Lawful Good, yet their role is to be a fighter/spellcaster hybrid with the purpose of fighting evil. That by definition requires harming or killing others at times.

Yeah, if you go back to the early chapters with Niall you'll see how he has meetings with Balwer and another Whitecloak named Abdel Omerna. The latter is the official spymaster and while he's very good at gathering gossip he's completely incompetent at distinguishing the useful/true gossip from worthless nonsense. Anyhow, he was the decoy who let Balwer do all the real spying without being suspected, under the cover of being merely Niall's secretary. The downside of this (for the Whitecloaks at least) is that since literally nobody else knew this they dismissed him as being unimportant once Niall was gone. That freed him up to join Morgase and ultimately Perrin, making it an upside for Team Light in the long run. Speaking of the Horn, it's mentioned that Omerna spent large amounts of the Whitecloak's money buying what was claimed to be the Horn of Valere. Multiple times.

I think it's much more likely that feruchemy 'coming from Preservation' means that he did something to the Terris people that brought out in them a power that everyone on Scadrial has but nobody could previously use. Case in point, the mistsickness was able to snap people who were too weak for the methods normally practiced by Scadrians to work, as mentioned by Sazed/Harmony in the HoA epigraphs. Brandon tells us that the Southerners have the seeds of all the Metallic Arts in them (see here too), which means they must have the sDNA that makes feruchemy possible. Note Brandon's words, it's because they were created by Preservation and Ruin that they have the sDNA It's more likely that Preservation did something similar to the mistsickness with the ancient Terris people that made them much more readily able to use that particular form of Scadrian magic than that he created the system entirely. The first WoB I liinked points out that the only reason allomancy is so powerful in the north is because of the lerasium beads that Rashek found increasing the strength of allomantic sDNA, so we know this is something within Preservation's power to affect even without positing that he deliberately built feruchemy. Plus, y'know, the WoBs I linked earlier which state explicitly that none of the magic is 100% created by the Shards.