ILuvHats

@Ookla the Silent I agree generally. Everyone should respect others’ opinions even if they differ from their own. However, the exception for me is when the reviewer states their views as facts. There are some things that can be objectively criticized, but a lot that can’t. So it’s always infuriating whenever someone states that a book is objectively horrible and irredeemable, especially when you love that book. I can respect your opinion as long as you admit it as such, and admit that even if you can’t see what’s good about the book the author is apparently doing something right considering it’s been generally well received. But if they present their criticisms as a fact, it always feels like they’re implying that you’re stupid if you disagree with them. So though you shouldn’t verbally assault such people, I don’t think there is any reason to respect their opinion when they obviously don’t respect yours.

If you're looking to add limitations to the magic system, your options are pretty much unlimited. Here's a few questions you should be asking. - How do magic users fuel their magic? Are they drawing on an external force, their own body/life force in some way, or other's bodies? Maybe their own sanity? This allows you to determine the upper limit on what they can do. - Does using the magic change them in some way? Are the side effects immediately obvious or do they gradually appear over time due to sustained use? Are the consequences good or bad or both? - What are the differences between different classes of magic users? Maybe each one suffers different side effects/consequences that are tied to their abilities. This would inherently help balance Woodsmiths if they suffer all the consequences in addition to having all the abilities. You've probably answered a decent number of these questions, but if you want to add more limitations maybe you should reconsider what some of the answers are. If you're looking for specific ideas, here are a few. - A side effect of manipulating the growth of organic matter is uncontrolled growth in the magic user's body. So they get tumors. They could be cancerous or noncancerous. If you want your magic users to generally be able to live to a ripe old rage, maybe tumor growth doesn't occur significantly unless they overextend themselves, so they've learned to moderate their use. This would also mean that Steelbloods would have much shorter lifespans since using the abilities for combat is going to be much more intensive than using it for craftsmanship. - Every time a magic user uses their abilities on organic matter, they become aligned with the object and come to know it fully. I'm imagining they see the entire "lifetime" of the object as well as it's "perspective." They don't necessarily retain all of the information, but they come out of it with a greater sense of what or who they used their powers on. As a result of this, magic users are generally pacifists as a natural outgrowth of their powers is that they see the value in all life. I still think they could create weapons, because the world isn't black and white and sometimes weapons can save lives in the long run. However, due to this world view, it's taboo to use their abilities on living matter, or anything that used to be human since even on dead flesh it's considered a violation of that person. This makes Steelbloods even more monstrous since they need to be extremely callous, perhaps even borderline psychopathic to use their powers for destruction. I haven't the faintest clue if either of these ideas fit with your setting the story you want to tell, but hopefully they spark some ideas of your own. I think it's an interesting magic system you built so far. It just needs a touch more to expand it, though maybe I'm just saying that because I haven't actually seen the world building ramifications. Anyways, I hope to hear more about it in the future.

My question is how will this set up conflict in the second half of SA? Considering Taravangian is bound to never harm another life again, and the fact that the shard's intent couldn't corrupt him over only 15 years, Odium's forces would be basically defeated. Sure, Taravangian is inexperienced with wielding a Shard, but the instinctual understanding combined with 15 years of study should be more than enough for him to figure out how to neutralize the Fused, the Unmade, and the Everstorm.

@Halyo_Alex Theoretically could you force 2 non compatible Prime elements to form a Compound? Going along with the chemical reaction metaphor, I’m assuming compatibility has to do with activation energy. So while incompatible elements have unfavorable reactions, you should be able force them to react if you pour enough energy into the reaction, obtaining an unstable Compound. Perhaps the Compound can only be kept from breaking into its component elements by constantly pouring energy into it. It doesn’t fit with the diagram, but I think it would be cool to perhaps make a separate chart for these unstable or forbidden or whatever-you-want-to-call-them compounds. You could name each of them after a sort of paradoxical idea too to get some interesting names. Maybe the reason they’re not on the original chart is that they’re so rare very few people know of their existence. Idk. If you don’t have plans to do anything like this, that’s cool. After all, it would make the system more complicated than it already is. I thought it’d be an interesting idea though. Also, I’d love it if you’d make another post talking about Aether.

I’ll be honest, I imagined the diones to look a bit like Scary Terry from Rick and Morty, except less scary. Also, in my head, I thought of Cuna as female and Morriumur as male. I tried to get out of the habit of thinking of them with genders, with limited success.

To the OP: you make a lot of good points. I’m on the border believing that magical interference was necessary to account for the stunted technological growth. It has been a long time for fabrials to not come into popular use, but a lot of legitimate reasons have been brought up for why an Unmade’s interference isn’t necessary. One point I haven’t seen brought up is that the Recreance has to have set back tech growth a lot. The Radiants probably served as one of the main repositories of knowledge, with all the most talented scholars ending up as one of them or working directly with them. So when the order collapsed overnight, a lot of information was lost. And of course the introduction of dead Blades and shard plate caused mass chaos and disruption as well. Actually, gemstones cannot be created through soulcasting. Shallan mentions this in WoK when she’s thinking about stealing Jasnah’s soulcaster.

8.5/10. Makes me think of imperial storms troopers, which is pretty cool. But it doesn’t invoke any strong feelings. Since I’ve been done, the next person should do Ookla the Very Handsome.

Sure, but the Delvers still felt the hatred whether or not it was projected onto them or not. The feedback that Spensa received from the Delvers made it clear that they were disgusted by what they viewed as insects, and hated these lifeforms enough to want to eradicate them. I didn't really take into account the possibility that the Delver's emotions weren't self-determined since the end of Starsight confused me, and I wasn't a hundred percent sure how to interpret it. Either way, I don't think it really changes this theory much. Jason is from Defending Elysium, a short story written by Brandon some 10-15 years ago. It's set in the same universe as Skyward, but takes place in the past, before humans obtained FTL transportation and expanded beyond the solar system. However, they are in contact with the Superiority, though we aren't given it as a name and simply know that the aliens have built a galactic civilization. Jason is one of the first human cytonics, and we see him venture into the nowhere. However, he doesn't see anything there that could be described as delvers, and simply describes it as completely dark. I originally assumed that this meant Delvers didn't exist at this point. However, RShara's WoB proves that they did exist then, so the Delvers couldn't have been created by humans.

Too long have us Ooklas gone without a somewhere to rate our names! It is an outrage! This oversight must be fixed immediately. Welcome fellow ooklas as well as non-ooklas. This is just what it looks like, a rate-the-name-above-you ookla edition. The rules are simple. Because ookla season will only last a few months, and it’s impossible to see the name during the rest of the year, please write your name down in your post. Otherwise the thread won’t make any sense once this ookla season is over. Non-ooklas are of course welcome, but be warned, your name rating might receive a penalty. My name’s Ooklidean Geometry.

They should come up if you look up Sanderson’s laws for writing on google. I think there’s also videos on YouTube where Brandon talks about them in a lecture.

Nooooo! I really liked Stoned Unhallowed as a title. Oh well. Here’s a few titles I thought of. - Kindred Whispers - Keeping the Wind - The Kiss of White

That’s true I guess. I was assuming that the Delvers didn’t exist during Defending Elysium, and humans seemed like the best bet if that were true. If they were created by an older race, that would solve the problem.

The Superiority believes the training ground was designed by humans to train to fight Delvers, while Spensa thinks it’s a Delver corpse. I think they’re both wrong. I think it was a half constructed Delver. Thats right, I think the humans not only meant to use the Delvers in the war, but also expected to be able to since they had designed them in the first place. The humans clearly had the technology to build Dyson spheres, and while Delvers appear to be the size of a planet, they are in actuality much smaller. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that humankind had the capability to build at least a few, though I don’t think they built all of the thousands that appear to currently exist. And if the Delvers were created, then what else could they be except AI? Think about it. The ban against AI always sticks out as the odd rule compared to limiting cytonics and wireless communication. Of course their use would be banned after humanity’s own creations turned against them. The question then is why and how the Delvers went rogue and came to hate life in the first place. Or rather, forgot that all these insects squirming around them are in fact intelligent life. Here’s a crash course on AIs. There are three types: 1. Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) - These already exist all around us, from our laptops to our phones. They are a basic stream of intelligence designed to perform a small set of tasks extremely efficiently. 2. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) - A general purpose intelligence that can perform a wide variety of tasks as well as improve itself. It’s comparable in intelligence to the human brain. M-bot is an example of this. 3. Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) - An intelligence far beyond a humans, capable of comprehending abstractions impossible for the human mind to think of. This is what I think Delvers are. And if you want evidence, think of how Spensa describes the Delvers as almost completely alien to her, of shapes and ideas she can’t even wrap her head around. To me, that sounds suspiciously like the descriptions of ASIs I found. The development of ASIs is a very real concern in today’s world, since it will likely herald the singularity, which is a point in the future after which life will be so different as to be incomprehensible to us. In fact, experts on artificial intelligence place conservative predictions for the arrival of ASIs as a few centuries, while optimistic predictions place them arriving within some of our lifetimes. We’re talking about something that could change everything, for better or for worse. And they could be coming relatively soon because the growth in AI is exponential. The gap in time between the development of an AGI and an ASI is projected to be only a few years because by that point, AIs will be developing in intelligence at insane speeds. So, M-bot’s existence proves that ANIs were certainly within the human’s tech level at some point. But why do the Delvers hate intelligence life? How did they forget that these creatures all around them are in fact intelligent in the first place? Wouldn’t the humans have programmed them with that knowledge as well as safeguards to obey their creators? I have two theories. 1. During the process of improving themselves and catapulting from AGIs to ASIs, the Delvers minds were expanded to the point that all preprogrammed data became insignificant to them and was lost in the vast influx of new information. Essentially, they forgot. The data could have been recalled at any time, but the Delvers never thought to as it was simply a single grain in an ocean of sand. 2. The Delvers interpreted an order from the humans to involve deleting information about all intelligence life, or at least some vital information about them that led to eventually removing the rest. I think these two ideas or possibly some combination of them are valid explanations for how the Delvers came to be as they are. And, when the first one was created (or at least the first one went rogue), they found themself alone in a vast void, surrounded by insignificant insects. What could be their response to this loneliness except to reproduce? I don’t know if the humans had already created enough vessels to fill with AI or if the Delvers created more physical vessels for their offspring, but either way, a new race was born. There are a few gaps in this theory. The main one is why do we find them filled with alien glyphs as opposed to some form of human language? Maybe the construction of the Delvers was headed by lesser AIs built by humans, and these AIs had already built a more efficient language for communication. Maybe the humans wanted to simply release the Delvers and pretend they hadn’t created them, so they made the Delvers seem alien so they couldn’t be traced. I don’t know, but it’s definitely a flaw in the theory. I also suspect that the Delvers (rather obviously) had something to do with all the missing cytonics. I’m at a loss for any ideas on specifics though. Anyways, I think this idea has merit, but feel free to tear it apart. Edit: (sigh) Looks like the Starsight Release Party was updated on Aracanum this afternoon, and there goes my theory. It happens to the best of us.

Dang it! You beat me by a day. I just got to that page and was about to post a topic about it when I saw this one. Good job spotting it though.

See that’s what I thought. I didn’t think there were any steel alloys with excess of 2-3% carbon content. Also, thanks for the info about content by percent volume. My knowledge on metallurgy is a bit rusty (pun intended), and I get most of my info from the occasional phase diagram for steel, which are of course by percent mass.

Just a few things: 1. I’d move White Sand Vol. 1 by the other graphic novels, towards the end. I know that you want to introduce them to Kriss, but honestly I don’t think it’s too necessary. More importantly, it’s generally agreed that the graphic novels weren’t the best executed, so if it’s early on, it might put them off, especially if they have high expectations after reading Mistborn Era 1. 2. I’d put Warbreaker before SA. I missed out on the Nightblood reveal since I read WB after WoR, and I’ve wished ever since that I’d read them in a different order. 3. Honestly, I wouldn’t put an order to the short stories at all. I’d just say “read whenever you want, as long as it’s after X.”

I was actually referring to What Hoid (Wit in that setting) said at the end of the way of kings. What I meant is that someone publishing a story you thought about first might take admiration away from your story. But, it doesn't take skill away from you. Keep trying and next time hurry to publish XD I got that part. I mean, I have read SA lol. My impression was that you were using that quote to express that you thought the OP’s idea wasn’t the most original or timely. So I was wondering what you were comparing their dream world to in particular. And in case you didn’t know, Tel’aran’rhiod is (mild spoilers for Wheel of Time)

Looking at it again, maybe you could add a few lines of description at the end to ease us back out if the dialogue. But I think it’s pretty good as is.

You talking about Tel'aran'rhiod or something else? @Coda I think it's pretty interesting, though as danox already mentioned, dream worlds have been done a lot before. I think it is original in some ways, but could use a bit more expanding to make it stand out as unique. Of course, depending on the story you want to tell, the world could be fine as it is. The world doesn't have to be super original and unheard of as long as the story's unique and interesting.

I've heard of both Warhammer 40k and RWBY, but I haven't played/watched either of them. So the fact that I have a rough idea of what's going on in this scene is fantastic. You managed to dive immediately into an action scene that's engaging and requires no prior knowledge of the source material. I'm sure people who are actually familiar with RWBY and Warhammer would be able to recognize the worldbuilding elements (and maybe the characters), but I never felt overwhelmed by everything going on, and you quite wisely did not include any noticeable info drops. Also, your dialogue is on point. You can feel the personality oozing from each character, the dialogue is quick-paced, and it sounded very realistic. Overall, fantastic job. I would totally keep reading the fanfiction despite my ignorance.

Sorry to nitpick, but Brandon revised the cosmere’s status as a dwarf galaxy. Apparently, those are too large for what he wants, so now the cosmere’s a star cluster.

The manuscript for Aether of Night can be gotten through the forums. Post a request in the following topic and you’ll be PMed a copy when an admin can get to it. I’m not sure about the White Sand prose. I think it used to be in circulation through email, but has since been removed and can only be viewed if you go to BYU or request a copy through the library system BYU’s connected to. I’m not a 100% sure though. @RShara, can you confirm or correct me on what the situation is for White Sand? Dragonsteel Prime I know for a fact only exists as a physical copy at BYU, since they keep copies of all their students Master’s theses and that was Brandon’s. So, you need to go there and request a copy, and I don’t think you can take it out of the library. Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot. I’m case you didn’t know, there are sample chapters from Dragonsteel Prime on Brandon’s website (with some redacted sentences). Here’s a link to the first chapter, and you can scroll through at the top to see the others. https://brandonsanderson.com/dragonsteel-prime-chapter-25-bridge-four-1/

If you end up crowdfunding this project, make sure to coordinate with the Shard’s admins to get a short article about it on the news page. This might be kind of “duh” and you could already be planning to do such. But I’m excited to see where this goes and I want it to reach as large an audience as possible. And as you may have noticed, Sanderson Fan Works isn’t exactly the most visited sub forum . Though of course it makes total sense why you’d post here at this stage in the development. Review to be dropped later.

Let the binge watching... begin!