Harakeke

Seems like a recurring linguistic theme, sule. The Duladen language on Sel also uses auxilary words, kolo?

Nice catch! I just assumed Raboniel was adding some wry laughter from her internal monologue, but this makes much more sense. The interrogative auxiliary word also shows up in the Ship Designs notebook page from Oathbringer: "Too fanciful, ha?" I think the ? symbol is one of Nazh's annotations. The "handwriting" style matches his other notes.

Neat! Have you considered putting the same inscription on the other side in Thaylen? I bet it would go well with the vertical layout. If you want to tweak the spacing of the letters in inkscape, you can convert them back to vector art by clicking on the text, and then selecting Path> Object to Path in the top menu. Then right click> Ungroup and you can move the individual pieces around.

I'd suggest writing the individual letters over and over, like in grade school. These practice sheets might help. "The spear that would not break" should look something like...

Oh, great point! I forget we're coming up on the ten year anniversary of WoK...

I suspect the cymatic patterns of were created using an ancient fabriel that replicated the "voidbinding" applications of Tension and Illumination. Take for example Kholinar and Sesemalex Dar. Tension could soften the stone into a malleable form, and Cohesion could alter its shape into the protective windblades and canyons. This initially points to the Stonewards -- but the vast scale seems beyond the limits of the glimpses of what we've seen Stonewards accomplish, and the alignment with auditory resonance frequencies suggest Listener, rather than human application of Investiture. Specifically, Illumination. While human surgebinders use Illumination for Lightweaving, its application can also include "various waveforms", according to the Ars Arcanum. So... perhaps this is related to the the mostly as-yet-unrevealed "voidbinding" powers? That in turn points to the Dawnsingers, except we know that they weren't responsible for big undertakings, such as the excavation of the Palanaeum. Furthermore, the cymatic patterns seem restricted to the earliest portions of the Dawncities, and the means by which they were created was lost over time. Newer cities such as Yeddaw had to be deliberately excavated using shardblades. Much as an Oathgate accesses the surge of Transportation and amplifies it toward a singular purpose, a Tesnsion-Illumination fabrial might allow a single individual to liquefy the stone and vibrate it at the right frequencies to produce troughs and ridges. In some places (such as Kholinar and Sesemalex Dar) the original formations remain, but in most other cities they have been so eroded by Highstorms that the only indication of their existence is the overall layout of streets and buildings. So, tying this all together, here's my theory: Sometime shortly before or after the start of the First Desolation, we had a human going around with a fabrial whose design was inspired by how Listeners were using the surges of Tension and Illumination. This human, with the assistance of a willing (but not Bonded) spren used the fabrials to create sheltering outposts that allowed humanity to expand their territorial presence outside of Shinovar.

Seems likely, although I didn't spot any that matched in this research paper. Based on Nazh's map, it looks like the shattered plains have either 4-fold or 8-fold symmetry.

This may already be known, but as I was casually skimming through Sheldrake, Merlin & Sheldrake, Rupert. (2017). Determinants of Faraday Wave-Patterns in Water Samples Oscillated Vertically at a Range of Frequencies from 50-200 Hz. Water (as one does, once they've exhausted weightier tomes such as the Stormlight Archive), I noticed that some of the resonance patterns seemed familiar. Specifically, they resemble the street layouts of certain Silver Kingdoms cities, as recorded by Ardent Kabsal. Could these mathematical images be the inspiration for the cities' cymatic patterns, much like the Julia set rendering inspired the map of Roshar?

D&D is great, but at its mechanical core it's fundamentally a combat simulator with strictly-defined powers, and Surgebinding doesn't align particularly well with D&D's Vancian model of magic. For a setting as narratively-driven as the Stormlight Archive, I think a PBTA rpg would be more fitting. I'd take a look at Masks as a starting point. Masks is a game about teenage superheroes struggling to balance the mundane and super-powered sides of their lives. One of the game's taglines is: "When the villain hits you, it’ll hurt, yeah—but the real danger is how they make you feel, and what you’ll do to vent those feelings!" That strikes me as very similar to the introspective perspective on Shardbearers we see in the books. It probably wouldn't take much to adapt the Masks playbooks to a Rosharan setting.

There's a new glyph in the WOK leatherbound edition preview art: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/030/073/235/62b46d71ba1e312115ef1519ed48657f_original.jpg?ixlib=rb-2.1.0&w=700&fit=max&v=1596579829&auto=format&frame=1&q=92&s=e2bf2507466055c71ed83129d08b3d8e Can't quite make out the accompanying text in the Women's Scrpt, but the glpyh looks like it says "BEN(A)" -- I'm guessing illustrator Ben McSweeny has gotten the Isasik Shulin treatment.

So, I think I see where some of the typos are coming from. Early on someone made a .ttf file from the translation key, but it had several inaccuracies -- ranging from little things like line heights/angles to larger things like transposed letters. It also coded [sh], [th], and [ch] as capital S, T, and C. It seems like the artist got got ahold of that font file and used it to lay out the text. It's particularly obvious in the artwork for Stick, which has larger, more legible text.

Our worldhopping buddy Nazh recently infiltrated the Calligrapher's Guild -- check out the official interior art from Oathbringer...

That's some pretty Awesome work! I'd love to mess around with the shapefiles if you get a chance. I've always wanted to take a crack at georectifying the various map images, but wasn't sure what projection to set the data frame in. Any thoughts as to the blue and red markings on the Frostlands map? Do they match up with any interesting lines of lat/long?

Burning a glyphward: I'd like this.