Copperkeep

Kandra had their natural feruchemical potential removed. There's nothing preventing them from gaining it by other means.

Pardon, I already knew those were out there, and were pretty basic and obvious haze killer technology. It was a poor attempt at humor on my part. Though you know, when fighting an opponent who's stronger than you, "find a way to hit them even harder" feels like a really inelegant and inefficient answer to me. Not that I have an immediate alternative.

I thought the grenade/primer was Ettmetal, not Nicrosil? Wasn't Ettmetal the only material we saw using allomancy independently of a metalborn operator? I just thought storing metal while burning it instead of time spent as an allomancer would make more sense for game balance purposes, not that it was necessarily accurate to the source material. The MAG takes liberties with a lot of the details.

Maybe it's better to think in terms of opportunity than problems to solve for metal born? The problems you're solving are generally things we would take for granted as the default situation, like "Anyone else who gets my gun could use it against me," or "I need to get to that rooftop and my superhuman flying powers aren't quite maneuverable enough, woe is me." With that in mind, let's consider.... Um. Well. I don't know. Guns that shoot... Really large, heavy bullets, to... stop pewter arms. Um. This is harder than it sounds like it should be. The only idea I have is really tangential because it's the other way around, with allomancers supporting technology- why doesn't every passenger train and ship hire pulsers, to reduce the perceived time of the trip for passengers, or to make perishable items easier to transport long distance?

So, I'm a big fan of the MAG, for all its liberties. I recall reading somewhere that we'd get an additional Alloy of Law supplement after BoM to update us with new game material for the new revelations. I'm guessing they'll include new rules for feruchemical Nicrosil and Aluminum, since the current rules are basically placeholder speculation, and new Kandra stunts and props in line with MeLaan's whole "Amoeboid Warframe" schtick and medical abilities. The new rules for Feruchemical nicrosil are the most interesting for me. I'm guessing the current "feruchemical investiture filtermind" thing will be replaced with something more like "reduce your metal rating while storing, increase your metal rating while tapping." Or possibly storing metal while burning it instead of getting its effect, more for balance than accuracy. Regardless, let's talk about Feruchemical nicrosil Twinborn. One could apparently store their allomantic potency and tap it later to become a more powerful allomancer. The synergy there is pretty frightening for any metal, and especially Nicrosil Compounders, who get Lord Ruler level power with their Nicrobursts, perhaps giving *any* allomancer Lord Ruler levels of power for a brief moment. As a side note, as a GM, I would take the combination of the "mixing powers" note in the Ars Arcanum, the Leecher description in the Broadsheets, and the Twinborn reputation of "steals power and hoards it" to be sufficient precedent to let an Allomantic chromium/Feruchemical nicrosil Twinborn player take a custom stunt to store the investiture they leech from others, "pushing it" into their metalminds instead of just "away." Thoughts?

The thing is, I feel like we've been given more than one explanation for TLR's power that would be entirely plausible all by itself, but which for some reason I still don't feel completely satisfied by. He's a sliver, and he remade his body and soul into an enormously powerful allomancer using the full force of Preservation's power, and that probably is enough to explain him being many times more powerful than even a Lerasium Mistborn. (We know he didn't actually take one of the beads himself, at least not for allomancy.) And then there's the weirdly still unanswered question of what he was gaining from hemalurgy. But now we have nicrosil, which seems an even more solid answer, assuming he actually used it. So can any Nicrosil ferring Twinborn store and tap their allomancy to become a Lord Ruler level Misting in moments of dire need? I feel like the MAG is going to have a hell of a time figuring out what "tapping large quantities" of allomantically strength does for each metal. What does super-boosted Allomantic nicrosil do? ....Oh. Actually, that's pretty scary. And now I really want to play a Nicrosil Compounder using our newly understood function of Nicrosil. Utterly insane ramifications. And maybe you could even store some of the nicrosil to control the collateral damage when using it offensively. It would be like using a nicroburst on The Lord Ruler. (Well, actually, it would be like getting a Nicroburst from The Lord Ruler, which would probably amount to something similar.) (Okay, but how about compounded Allomantic chromium?) When you store allomancy, do you store "time as an allomancer"? Because that feels pretty cheap phrased that way- you can just be storing any time you're not actively using your allomancy. Of course, that's a concern for the MAG- the game needs some measure of balance, in theory, but the novels have no obligation to arbitrary balancing rules so long as its own internally consistent rules make sense. It doesn't seem to make much sense to me that you'd store allomancy while burning metals to get the effect, since what would be the equivalent for feruchemy? Heavily invested metal is harder for an allomancer to push on, and makes thinner lines, as if it's a weaker anchor. You can overcome that by tapping weight, but I'm guessing if it's so invested (or so thoroughly blocked by blood) that you can't see it with ironsights at all, increasing weight doesn't help you. Increasing your weight gives you more physical force to exert with steel and iron, but actually doing things like seeing trace metals, seeing metal and souls as glowing investiture and such is definitely a factor of increasing your allomantic strength, not just your mechanical force. I've always felt like the idea that feruchemists are limited by their "power" as to how much they can store and tap was just an arbitrary restriction imposed by the MAG for game balance. Now I'm wondering if the need for large bracers as a practical rather than personal consideration is as well. But there needs to be *something* separating a strong feruchemist from a hemalurgic feruchemist with weakened power, doesn't there? It definitely struck me that all the Lord Ruler's power could be held in a little spearhead, when normal ferring said are seen wearing bracers.

I don't think it does, really. We see the enhancement metals burn away immediately as soon as they have a valid target to act upon.

I thought this same phenomenon was visible from Scadrial during the Final Empire? Mention that the world had no moon, but a belt of bright stars?

I don't think a medallion with four metals is necessary. (Though note that when Allik says he's seen a medallion with "three" metals only twice in his life, he doesn't seem to be counting the nicrosil part.) I'm guessing the Southerners have natural metalborn, and that these "fire-parents" are actually natural Brass ferrings. All they need is the medallion/excisor that grants Feruchemical nicrosil and Feruchemical aluminum, and they can create medallions of Feruchemical nicrosil and Feruchemical brass. ...oh, but the medallions we've seen also store other feruchemical powers. Right. Hm. That might be why I originally believed the "excisor" to be a hemalurgic spike. Presumably, a nicrosil and aluminum spike pair wouldn't interfere with your ability to use a medallion of nicrosil and another metal, so any natural metalborn who took one of those excisors could create medallions. So, um... They'd take the excisor and the medallion made by another metalborn, and so firemother could put Feruchemical nicrosil, Feruchemical brass, and Feruchemical iron all in one medallion. But filtering the power from one medallion through a natural metalborn and into another medallion that combines their powers seems like it would involve some kind of resistance, which is supported by Allik saying those with multiple metals get more and more difficult to create and that you can't use two different medallions at once. Hm. I rambled on pretty nonsensically in another thread as I tried to piece all this together, pardon. Now it makes more sense to me. I'm guessing the interference comes from the nicrosilminds, or the investiture they store, belonging to too many different people, which is why Allik says that to create a medallion with all the powers, you'd need someone fullborn and also an excisor to borrow their power. ...wait. Why would a fullborn need an excisor, if the excisor is either a spike or a medallion granting fN&fA? I feel like there's probably a lot of important pieces to this puzzle that we just don't have yet. .-.

Wayne can't even tap an unkeyed Gold metalmind until he's told what it was. That's interesting- we *have* had it suggested that feruchemist has to be taught or experimented with to understand and use while allomancy is instinctual. I'm pretty sure the medallions are two-way. Otherwise those things would be disposable throwaways, and that just seems odd to me when we don't have any reason to think they're like that. (Though, you know, can't you only store a certain amount of an attribute in a metalmind, so if you have an iron mind that you primarily use by filling it, would you eventually have to take it somewhere safe and empty it out by tapping extreme weight for a while? Then again, we've seen some huge amounts of power stored in relatively small metalminds.) I'm pretty sure the Southerners have natural metal born. They're apparently treated as deities. I'm surprised that the nicrosilminds that anyone can tap aren't bothering me more. The idea that those nicrosilminds each have to also grant the power to tap and store nicrosil, and that the nature of the metal somehow overcomes the catch-22 involved in that would probably be plausible, but I'm expecting there's more to it. (I'm honestly more curious about the "allomantically grenades/primers" that store what some on this forum have called "kinetic investiture" and can do so without the understanding or permission of the one using them.) Hmm. This reminds me somehow of those logic puzzles along the lines of "a is less than c but twice of b where c is half of x is 2 more than a...." Okay, so we have mention of the "firemothers and firefathers" who I'm assuming for now are natural born brass ferrings. I'm not assuming they're natural compounders because apparently any given twinborn combination is so rare that Wax is one of only three recorded Crashers in history, and I'll leave aside for now the question of whether or not they can get compounding from medallions. Natural born brass ferring of a race who require very high temperatures spends her life storing heat for other members of her community. Gets referred to as a god, which is frankly probably deserved if you're constantly storing an important attribute to act as life support for your society. Constantly stores three attributes- warmth, investiture, and identity, in three different metalminds, two of which will go into an unkeyed metalmind medallion. So they have to get the power to store both investiture and identity from somewhere while also being a natural brass ferring. Since all of these powers are feruchemical, the possibility that they're twin born doesn't really come into it, I suppose. You apparently can't tap two unkeyed nicrosilminds from different donors at once. I'll buy that limitation because this isn't hemalurgy and maybe the ability to share power and investiture without actually ripping human souls apart and killing people requires jumping through a lot more hoops. I'm guessing the "excisors" Alex mentions might actually be sets of hemalurgic spikes that grant the power to store investiture and identity. Mostly because I'm getting a headache trying to wrap my mind around a perpetual cycle of these medallions being used in tandem working out. So firemother has spikes that let her store investiture and identity, allowing her to make unkeyed brassminds and unkeyed nicrosilminds that grant access to the power to store brass. (Then again, she probably doesn't have to fill the brassmind, just the nicrosilmind, then anyone who gets the medallion would be able to store warmth in it as a maintenance task. Except that in doing so they'd also be draining the nicrosilmind, so...) But these medallions grant three feruchemical metals, if you count nicrosil among them. Nicrosil, Iron, and Brass, or Nicrosil, Iron, and Duralumin. Always iron, for those who work on airships. Can firemother, with natural Feruchemical brass and the excisor spikes also hold a medallion from a Connector ferring, tap that investiture, and then tap the connection only to store it in another duralumin mind? It feels like this should encounter interference, since medallions that grant multiple metals are increasingly difficult to work on and nicrosilminds apparently interfere with each other? Gaah, I don't feel like I'm getting any closer to the truth or understanding this. I'm not *good* at these kinds of logic puzzles, assuming we even have enough of the pieces to figure out the image. But I feel like this "excisor," whatever it really is, is the mystery we really need to be looking at.

I want to point out that the idea that aluminum and chromium leaves the metal in the body, unburnable, draws attention to some (in my opinion) unsatisfactorily answered questions about how allomancers deal with metal toxicity. (Mistborn can sidestep that by burning pewter, I'll grant, but most allomancers aren't mistborn.) So we know the power doesn't come from the metal, but instead the allomancer's spiritweb holds a lock for which that metal's physical composition is the key. (I don't think it can be straight chemical composition, since aren't alloys mixtures, not compounds? And I'm pretty sure an allomancer can't swallow an alloys components separately in order to get the allomantic effect. Feel free to correct me if my high school level understanding of chemistry is incorrect.) And we know that Chromium/Aluminum (I'm assuming they do essentially the same thing- I'd be fascinated to discover they actually work on different principles, and do let me know if you think there's reason to believe that's the case.) "cleanse" the subject of investiture. I'm pretty sure that everything we've seen and been told suggests that after your metals have been sapped, you'll still be able to down another vial of metals and burn those normally immediately after if you have it available. And now a first hand account by a leecher tells us that rather than "burning the metal to no effect" like I assumed, the metal stays, but the investiture goes. Assuming this is accurate, what is the leecher actually doing to the metals? Is it somehow twisting their physical composition so they're no longer burnable? Is it actually imbuing them with some sort of counter-investiture to make them effectively inert for the allomancer? Neither of those answers seem to be consistent with the idea that Aluminum cleanses a subject of investiture. So I think the OP is posing a really good question. Things from the Secret History novella and brief scenes in The Bands of Mourning suggest that souls and metal look to be invested in similar ways when seen from the perspective of Scadrism shards or super-potent Steel/Iron sight. So is metal on Scadrial special somehow or isn't it? If it is, then this whole thing with Chromium leaving metal but removing investiture makes sense. But I thought that would contradict what we've been told in WoB, that an allomancer from Scadrial could burn metal on anger world without difficulty. This is what I feel throws a wrench into things. Or am I actually misremembering, and that was one of the things he said would require the allomancer to "jump through hoops" or do something special to make it work? In that case, all of this fits together, but I really, really want to know what metalborn have to do to burn metal from other worlds.

I'm tempted to say that Feruchemical iron might present a solution, since storing weight makes you lighter on your feet and tapping weight simultaneously preserves you from the burden of additional weight on your body. It feels dubious though, when it's the *natural* state of your body to be in the process of being crushed under its own weight. And allomantic Pewter really might provide a solution since it makes you stronger without changing your physical size. ...I really don't want to meet a full Koloss pewter savant, though. Anyway, I thought at least AoL era Koloss lost their allomancy and Feruchemy when they took on their spikes? Or is that just the MAG? (Come to think of it- why is that? Why would gaining hemalurgic powers of strength destroy your natural metalborn talents?)

Okay, that's good to know. (Can you link to the WoB?) That really begs the question of why either The Lord Ruler or Ruin (probably the latter?) would give one of their inquisitors the power of Feruchemical Atium. The only thing I can think of is that Ruin wanted his Inquisitors to be effectively immortal, in case the fight to end the world went on longer than he projected? What am I missing? Still, we do know that Ironeyes is an Atium Compounder and I think it's fair to assume he has the power for other metals too. Do we have a complete list of his spikes anywhere? (I'm guessing not yet.) So a description of what his use of powers is will be interesting. Or, hell, maybe we'll get flashbacks or descriptions from The Lord Ruler's perspective in The Bands of Mourning, though it's a stretch.

I suppose that interpretation does make sense, though I'm not entirely convinced. With most other stores attributes, there's not so much of a meaningful distinction between "more of the same" and "more of what this metal stores," because what they store isn't variable, so I guess we'll have to see. We do have vague confirmation that Twinborn of all kinds, not just compounders, have strange additional effects with their powers, though there's been no elaboration on the point- mixing the powers does things to them, and compounding even moreso. What are the chances of us getting to see a fullborn in action from their perspective any time soon, do you think? And I really want something from Marsh's perspective, both to see how his character and identity has come along and just to get a better idea of his powers. It drove me crazy for a long time trying to figure out why either The Lord Ruler or Ruin would give an inquisitor a spike that held the power of Feruchemical Atium, before I realized I was being an idiot and that Harmony probably gave him additional powers, just like he did for The Lord Mistborn. Hm... so is Ironeyes a fullborn now? He's a natural Seeker, and I'm assuming based on what we know that the Preservation can't make someone a natural double-Misting, for example, because that's just not how the power works. If he *is* a full twinborn now, with the additional power from his spikes... Of course, I'm not sure what additional feruchemical spikes offer for a hemalurgist in the source material. In the MAG, your Feruchemy rating limits the maximum you can store or tap all at once, but I'm pretty sure that in the novel's themselves, Feruchemy is "you have it or you don't" in terms of power level, since it operates on a form of equivalent exchange anyway. Is that interpretation wrong? If not, what is it that gets lost or reduced in that power when a hemalurgically spike carrying a feruchemical power suffers decay? -- Wait, I thought the shard blade covers were conjured the same way the blades themselves were, and were just as mysterious to the people of Roshar? (It may be because I'm very close, but not quite at the end of WoR.)

It has some interesting features. It rusts very quickly on contact with air and moisture, as I understand it, but when it does, the *way* it rusts makes it nearly impervious to the risk of forming any *more* rust. Just as an example.Edit: Disclaimer: I am not a real chemist.

I wonder about that. For now I'm taking it as "does something weird in every magic system," instead of assuming it does something reasonably consistent among them. I still want to know what makes Aluminum strange in hemalurgy, though. Wasn't it an aluminum spike that gave Marsh the power to burn Duralumin? Or is that just from the MAG?

It would be interesting, but I doubt many people would be interested in trying it. Besides, unless you're a compounder, if you're a Twinborn aluminum gnat you probably just don't bother and stick to identifying yourself as a Ferring. It seems to me it would be a cruel thing to discover, that you're one of the legendary twinborn- but one or both of the powers are effectively useless to you. (Would society even bother testing for aluminum gnats, considering how valuable even small bits of aluminum are? It seems to me the only reason to bother testing, besides curiosity, was if you already knew you were an aluminum Ferring.) More importantly, if you can empty your own metalminds with Aluminum, that suggests you should be able to empty another's with Chromium. Can you imagine the horror of being a Keeper and meeting someone with the power to erase your Copperminds? Or just any Ferring, and finding someone who can destroy years of investment with a touch. (The MAG posits that you can do this with feruchemical Nicrosil, tapping large amounts of it to "overwrite" another's metalminds. I'm still not sure how much sense that makes.)

I'm afraid I don't see the distinction. The point of compounding is to get more out of Feruchemy than you put in. Why wouldn't that work for more specific attributes? When can you get health you didn't store, or wakefulness you didn't store, but not memories you didn't store? Of course, it does raise the very interesting question of exactly what new information would become available and how it would be presented. MAG's version by way of the Stitched Memories stunt is interesting- if you have two or more accounts of an event, you can compound both of those memories to experience a vision as if you had been there, and see to the truth of the matter. Still, as far as we know, that ability is just a placeholder. Aluminum compounders are similarly interesting to me. For a while I had wondered if a "method-acting" aluminum compounder, who does what Wayne does, could become his personas on a deeper level, perhaps even imitating someone closely enough to take their metal minds. That was before it began to sound like the Aluminum hack is so much easier than that, requiring only an aluminum Ferring or a full Feruchemist/hemalurgist with access to aluminum. Then there's the potential of Allomantic gold/Feruchemical aluminum... The MAG calls those Twinborn "Vessels." /tangent.

Actually, yeah. If you compound gold enough to restore a severed limb, that's a lot of body mass. Regardless, does the idea of not being able to get more information out of a Coppermind because what it stores feels more "specific" actually make sense? Most other traits are more fungible, but is there really any reason to assume that affects the result when they're compounded?

I personally don't think I'd expand the term Compounding to cover all the possible interactions between the Arts. So far it sounds to me like it refers to one very specific action. We do know that burning a hemalurgical spike "splices" your sDNA with that of the "donor," and I think that WoB also hinted that doing that when there was a feruchemical charge stored in the spike would do something even more interesting. On the topic of hemalurgic decay, an attribute stored in an Atium spike doesn't decay and is never reduced- and you can store *any* attribute in an Atium spike, if you know how. A lot of people have wondered if there's an imbalance between what Lerasium does and what Atium does in terms of power, but I think that's because they're just comparing Allomancy. Atium is for Hemalurgy what Lerasium is for Allomancy. Which is why I'm even more curious to know what Malatium does hemalurgically than what it does feruchemically.

I don't mean along their original trajectory. I mean that, from what I remember, he doesn't push them hard enough to force a bullet that was aimed at him to arc and fly off in a direction away from him. And I'm guessing that even a bullet aimed perfectly at his center of mass would be slowed, but not stopped or redirected backward. If he were pushing them hard enough to change their course and send them flying directly away from him, then any bullet that appeared to just slide off course would be one that had already missed him before he started pushing on it (or was already going to miss him by a wide margin)- bullets actually aimed to hit him would instead ricochet back in the general direction of the shooter, possibly at a very oblique angle depending on what part of him they were aiming for. Then again, if you *could* push that hard, then anyone who tried to shoot him at close range probably *would* be hit by their own ammunition if they were aiming for anything close to his center of mass.

We know that aluminum "does something strange" in every magic system, correct? It might have been enough that its power seems truly moot in allomancy and that it blocks the metallic arts in odd ways, from protecting a person or item from pushes and pulls of various kinds to stopping the boosted healing of pewterarms and bloodmakers. (Come to think of it, I don't suppose an aluminum lined cap would do anything equivalent to a coppercloud?) But now we know that what aluminum does in Feruchemy is just as odd- the attribute it stores is one key to how Feruchemy works to begin with, resulting in hax. So what's screwy about hemalurgical aluminum? I was under the impression that all it does is steal one of the allomantic enhancement metals, which doesn't seem especially strange to me. Is there something else about it? Does having an aluminum spike have any weird side effects? (Weirder than hemalurgy in general, I mean.) It feels a little strange to me that you can have a spike or a metalmind made up of a material that seems to actively interfere with the metallic arts in any way it can manage... Do we have any word on why Aluminum is so strange in the Cosmere? Are there any wild theories about it?

I too hope that someday we'll have a Cosmere-wide RPG. Perhaps one released closer to the Cosmere's conclusion (in... what, thirty, forty, fifty years?) could also act as a huge Cosmere encyclopedia. Just because of the sheer amount of time involved in the Cosmere, I imagine we're probably going to get multiple iterations or editions of any given particular system, fan-made or official, before we get closer to it all coming together. That's an interesting thought.

I'm far too excited about the prospects for what universal metalminds could do to a world's economy. (I'm a little uncertain, though- would you still have to be a feruchemist of the appropriate metal to be able to tap it, or at least a feruchemist to begin with? It seems like that would be significantly less valuable in practice, but still very cool.) And Lord Ruler, I want to know how the Metallic Arts can be worked into technological creations. Before now, I was certain Hemalurgy was the key, and I still think it might be involved. I also wonder if Hemalurgy will ever somehow become more widespread- for some reason, I can't shake the impression of underground hemalurgic parlours like weird mixes of tattoo/piercing parlors and drug dens in the contemporary era. Maybe if the trick of using hemalurgy non-lethally becomes widespread, so selling pieces of yourself becomes a possibility for the supremely desperate? Back on track, I'm imagining guilds of feruchemists who share metalminds for specific purposes, with some members being paid or rewarded for storing in minds and letting others use them, others paying to use them, or maybe employers of feruchemists paying additional fees to a Feruchemical union to pay for different amounts of stored attributes they want a ferring employee to use- say, paying more to have a steelrunner ferring use more speed (perhaps "refueling" at steelrunner stations run by this guild/union) to carry goods the same distance in less time. It could make for a fascinating infrastructure and economy, and I can't help but think of a union like that as a very "Terris" thing to build, for reasons that are hard for me to pin down. It does raise a lot of questions, of course- we still need full feruchemists, hemalurgy, or fuzzy nicrosil tricks for it to work. Then, of course, this all hinges on the Aluminum theory being correct. When the Aluminum hint showed up in MAG, I honestly didn't expect it to come up in the books this soon.

I love the idea of abstract kryptonite-factors like this that can push Epics to making seemingly bizarre decisions.