Weltall

Welcome to the Shard, @DarthHoid! Aside from the hubris explanation, there's another angle to consider and that's Ruin's own goals. Remember that Ruin wanted Rashek out of the way becase the latter was aware of the big picture and thus represented the biggest stumbling block to his goal of freeing himself. He's implied to have created the 'legend' of the Eleventh Metal himself in order to manipulate an unwitting agent (Vin by way of Kelsier as it turned out) into killing Rashek for him. While things ultimately worked out for Ruin's plan, instigating Yeden's fatal decision wouldn't really have benefited Ruin since it removed one potential tool his unwitting agent had, without directly contributing to the primary goal.

We've seen Aimians multiple times. Axies is a recurring interlude character and he, Arclo and the Dysian posing as the ship's cook in Kaza's interlude (as part of the 'keep people away' thing) are all seen away from the island and they're not the only ones. All it really tells us is that whatever reason(s) spurred them to keep people away from Aimia doesn't apply to the Aimians themselves.

I fixed that for you...

True, though Brandon did loosely connect the two instances of metal-swapping. He originally thought of using silver in the place of aluminum once he realized he needed to replace the former with tin in the Metallic Arts but decided against it because of what @RShara mentioned.

Not the first time this has been proposed. By the way, all Returned are faster and stronger than normal humans, hemalurgy is not required to explain it.

This question was answered long ago by that arbiter of all that is good in the world, Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The fact that open oceans exist on the Cognitive side makes it clear that the entire planet is represented, even though those have only transitory life. Thinking about a region will create Cognitive 'space' for it.

Where are you getting this? I'm pretty sure that's nowhere in the Liar of Partinel excerpts and the reference to the gem refers to something from Dragonsteel Prime (not having read it, I have no clue if it's even explained there, but it's mentioned in the shared chapters) which happens at some point after Liar.

Hoid was human originally, which rules out sapient Investiture. And this WoB is somewhat narrower but could be read to rule out various flavors of 'created agent of Adonalsium'

Not really. Brandon really doesn't like people reading it because of various flaws he's mentioned in it and he generally doesn't consider it very good, aside from the one bit that he cannibalized into The Way of Kings. However, since he wrote it as a master's thesis he can't prevent people from accessing it since those are part of any university's publicly available archives. However, he's not required to make it any easier to access, hence the requirement that you either get it via interlibrary loan (if you have access to a library BYU will loan it to) or you go there in person. Here's one WoB on the subject: So yeah, short of doing it the hard way, your only option is to do it the really hard way, invent a time machine and go back to a point when Brandon did share some of his older works... and if you could do that, you'd be better off going into the future and bringing us back copies of his complete works and save us time waiting and Brandon time writing them. Just watch out for paradoxes.

Brandon confirmed that was a typo, though the point is generally valid in that Sazed clearly didn't learn any really useful information about Adonalsium by the time he produced the epigraphs, at which point he'd Ascended for long enough to relocate Scadrial, terraform it back to its original ecology and adjust all the flora and fauna that Rashek had previously tweaked back to their original forms as well. So he'd had some amount of time with two full Shards and didn't get more than a name and vague sense that his power was a part of something larger, once. Dalinar shouldn't have gotten even that much then.

I kind of asked something along those lines a couple years back, whether storing Fortune would make you more likely to suffer effects similar to the entropy curse from The Dresden Files (so tapping it would make good coincidences more likely) and was told that F-Chromium may not do what we think it does (paraphrased) and that he intended to RAFO all questions on the subject until it showed up in the books. Odds are he's not going to answer a question about Spinners and marksmanship for the same reason. Sidenote since WoT has already been mentioned, the curse from Dresden Files is functionally similar to the crazy coincidences ta'veren cause by being in an area (specifically, the negative coincidences) except directed at a specific individual. I think Jim Butcher had entirely too much fun with one of them...

Welcome to the Shard! Brandon has said pretty directly that Larkins are not Dragons. Isaac apparently called them 'dragon bugs' upon hearing Brandon describe them and we've been invited to use that too, but they're probably not actually related to Cosmere dragons in any significant way. Much of what exists on Roshar evolved there as a consequence of the planet's highstorm cycle and the Investiture-eating Larkin is unlikely to be a special exception, just a particularly unique adaptation to the amount of Investiture present on that world. They also apparently don't get very big, while Cosmere dragons do. Still, good catch on the silver eyes. It's possible there's a more subtle connection there, like how red in the Cosmere is a sign of co-opted Investiture.

And more importantly, does Milliways have instant noodles on the menu? Hoid needs to know.

The point is that they had the power to build a planet from scratch and make it turn out exactly how they wanted it to, right down to size, gravity and ecology mirroring what they'd known before on Yolen. That kind of power over the Physical Realm should translate pretty neatly to being able to deflect harm from ridiculously powerful Physical events, I think.

Shards can probably shrug off the effects of truly ridiculous stellar phenomenon so...

Yeah, but there were perfectly good suffixes that actually mean what -mancy is commonly used for nowadays: -kinesis where the word telekenisis comes from, and -urgy, the Greek root of which is the same place we get out word energy. It's less evolution and more sloppy research.

Fun fact, -mancy is derived from the Greek word manteia and refers to divination. Necromancy would have originally meant divination by means of the dead (for example, Odysseus summoning Tiresias' shade in the Odyssey), pyromancy to divination by fire, geomancy to divination by earth and so on. The use of -mancy to refer to magic that manipulates these things or -mancer to refer to the practitioners of magic that manipulates the thing so named is technically a misnomer, but a very pervasive one.

Uhhhh, those bits you dismiss as childish are actually a fairly integral to non-theistic concepts of morality. Whether they remove any purpose for a supreme capital G God has more to do with what any given religion or member believes about their God than an essential nature of divinity. Belief in a capital G God does not actually require that said God be the foundation of all morality who takes an actual interest in whether humans behave according to any particular set of ideals. Deism is a good example of this, the idea that there is a supreme God who created the universe but who does not directly interact with it in any other way. If it actually exists (something Brandon has indicated he's never going to canonize either way) the God Beyond could be just that sort of entity. As an atheist myself, I really love the amount of work Brandon put into Jasnah's outlook; as mentioned she came to her non-belief through careful thought and is willing to accept new information but has yet to see anything that to her counts as a God. That's a much more nuanced portrayal than you usually see and one that's very true to life for many atheists. And in general I love Brandon's explorations into many kinds of divinity and what it means to be or be considered divine and the ways that can shape worlds. Just because I don't believe myself doesn't mean I can't find the subject fascinating.

The Cosmere isn't the only thing in its universe (we know not all the stars in the Arcanum Unbounded constellation painting are part of the Cosmere) so what happens would probably hinge on whether the metaphysics of the Cosmere apply outside it or they don't. In the former case, if you go past the edge of 'Cosmere Cognitive Space' you should eventually stumble across the Cognitive region of systems outside the Cosmere and be able to explore them. If the metaphysics aren't universal, you might end up in an empty void or (more likely I think) wrap around to the other side of the Cosmere, like an old-school RPG world map.

Brandon has confirmed that Lopen was a squire at that point and didn't have a bond of his own. Oathbringer confirms that squires' power fades away when the Radiant they're connected to is far away but they don't vanish immediately; not much time passes between Kaladin leaving the warcamps to find Dalinar and the scene with Lopen so he still could have taken in stormlight at that point.

No. I see technomancy as more 'magic that affects technology' or 'technology that creates effects that look like magic', basically Clarke's Third Law in action. Magitech by contrast is a fusion of magic and technology. Which is pretty much what the Southerners have with their airships and the medallions and Roshar has with all its fabrials.

Let's not forget the Lightweavers either. They don't swear oaths beyond the First Ideal so they've got less pressure on them in that respect, as long as the truths they swear don't come into conflict with the oaths they swear to any other type of spren. of course as Shallan proves, things can get messy with those truths so it's certainly not an easy process, just potentially less restrictive. A related factor would be having both types of spren get along. We know for example that Honorspren and Cryptics instinctively don't get along, even if there isn't any contradiction between the oaths someone would swear to the former and the truths sworn to the latter. Or as RShara elegantly put it, you'd have to do some fast-talking to make that work.

Sazed is big on informed choice and he's also subtly but actively pushing Scadrial towards developments that will see them become a starfaring civilization. To do that, he's nudging them towards both pure technology and what we might call magitech. That requires that Scadrians start to understand how and why their magic works the way it does, not just what it does. Or some spikes for F-Iron, if Sazed happens to have any of those lying around.

I don't think that would work. Preservation was able to remove a chunk of Ruin's power from the whole and force it to keep recycling in a manner such that the power never went back to Ruin after being used. I think that what Odium did similarly cuts the Spiritual Realm out of the cycle and the power simply goes back into the big Investiture plasma storm in the Cognitive.