king of nowhere

i'd like some scenery porn with the spren and the environment. that's something that a movie can reallly do better than a book.

I'm not sure this is the place to ask advice or if it is only to post your stuff, so sorry if i am wrong. I have a bit of a problem; I am starting to DM a D&D campaign. I am very creative when it comes to worldbuilding, so that's covered. But there is one part that my imagination doesn't cover: names. I am absolutely incapable of coming up with good names. I have penty of ideas where I know characters and settings, but with no names. In the past, I've tried to patch it up poorly; I often took names from other fiction that I was sure my players hadn't read, and in one notable case I read a bunch of instructions in norwegian looking for words that could sound nice. Nowadays I know this place, so I'm asking here if anyone can give good advice on coming up with names for places and people.

so atium, stripped of investiture, would be another common metal or element. its difference is spiritual.

brandon says that every ars arcanum explains the magic as it is understood in the story, so there may be further discoveries to change it; we can't consider ars arcanum as canon for the working of magic. so yes, we can't rule out the ppossibility of more pairings. or even people with more than 2 sets of power. and even if they weren't naturally occurring, hemalurgy could make them. That said, there are alrready enough magics in roshar to be confusing. i don't think we need more.

i think it can be handwaved with the speed bubbles having irregularities in the space/time at the edges. say that there are small pockets were space is slightly compressed or expanded, and you can justify a small object moving at high speed being deflected unpredictably. i doubt refraction is aa good explanation because that's something affecting waves, not physicall objects. Also, refraction does not apply for a wave entering perpendicularly to a surface (technically, it still applies, but the wave is not changed, for physical reasons i don't want to go in detail), so if a time bubble is spherical you could shoot outside without problems if you shoot along a radius of the sphere.

huh... that's something i've never seen before. first of all, the edges would crumble under the effect of gravity. a cube is an unstable shape under gravity, so the handwavium you need for that is really big. Another thing is that atmospheric circulation would cause the edges to get more wheatered; sort of like if you pass sandpaper over a cube, the edges will get more scratched than the faces. so even atmospheric circulation would eventually yield a spherical planet, you need some handwavium for that too - nowhere near as much as you need to justify a cubic planet, though. I have no idea how to convert a world map to a cube, unfortunately. as for the wheather, the upper and lower faces would be completely wiithout sun for long amounts of time. i think they would be mostly, or entirely, covered with ice sheets. cold air coming down from those faces would go down towards the equatorial faces, so that there would be a temperate region near the edge and an equatorial region away from the edge. But then, compared to earth, i would expect the temperate area to be much smaller. On earth we have a gradual change in how much sunlight one place receives, with a gradual passage from tropics to temperate to artic. with a cube, the passage would be sudden, so there would be a large swath of equatorial climate on the faces that are directly exposed to the sun, an extreme polar climate on the top and bottom faces, and a small strip of temperate climate near the edges. That assumption is based on the idea that the rotation axis passes near the center of two faces, of course. a configuration like this O □ where the O is the star and the □ is the cubic planet, the rotation axes being vertical on the page. If it is instead like so O ◊ with a vertex for pole, then all the climate would be temperate, because all the planet's surface would have the same inclination respective to the sun.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that's what they were doing and that's what they expected. And they had gotten away with it for three centuries, and would have still gotten away with it without the events of the book.

the ten surges are represented in a circle, and they are only pairead among adjacent ones, so 10 combinations. Now, as to why there are no other pairings, that's not something I can answer. It doesn't seem to be a thing of thematic linking; I don't see elsecalling having anything to do with lightweaving or soulcasting. I'd say it's just the way the world works.

gaaah! what am i going to do until fall 2017? I must find a cadmium bubble! on the other hand, since brandon writes so many different books at the same time, he may as well write dragonsteel and mistborn in space before he has finished the stormlight archive, and wait to publish them.

if you were steris, you'd buy everything the author of a book has written, down to the shoopping lists and his notebook from first grade, then you'd research every person he interacted with and buy everything written by them, then you researched into waht books has that guy read and buy all of them too. Then you'd start reading the book.

get her to read alcatraz, that's thought out specifically to deal with that kind of people as for the original question, i'm with argent there; not too badly as it could have been, you'll know who prof and megan are but nothing else of the plot.

yeah, that can happen and it's a sort of in-between. to a degree, it's inevitable; even the best-plotted story will need some fixes once it's actually written, and the author may yet have a better idea come to him. that's not necessarily bad; the whole wax and wayne concept is the result of this. I'd say the important thing is still how the story overall is plotted; if the author get sidetracked, but he still has this complete story in mind and he's trying to set up the ending, or if he's just going in circles without any intention of coming to an end. it's like a painter realizing that he needs extra canvas to depict this scene that he has in mind, compared to one that is adding more and more random elements because he's paid for every brush stroke. Unfortunately, most of the entertainment industry is like that today. that's the consequence of too much money. but then, if there wasn't all that money involved, we wouldn't have better entertainment; we'd just have less entertainment, although there would be a higher people_doing_it_for_the_art/people_just_in_for_the_money ratio.

huh. i think it would have been terribly suspicious if he had asked a writing board. it would have been better if he had used a charcoal to write on the bed sheets, which were conveniently burned in the morning

I understand that because I am the same. I'm always very distrustful of sequels and spiinoffs, always like "oh, please, do we really need another one of those?" I'm especially annoyed by how many franchises carefully avoid giving satisfying plot resolutions because they want to do more sequels; can't they just give this story a good end and let it stand as a work of art? In fact, if I wasn't hanging on this forum, knowing brandon's long term plans, I'd probably have felt exactly like you. It's really curious, actually; if a story is made, and then random elements are added, it's a bad thing because the meddling executives are trying to milk their golden cow. But! If those extra elements and sequels were already in the author's mind when he started it all, then it's perfectly fine. A really subtle distinction, and one that hinges on knowing what's on the mind of the author, and is open to interpretations. It also has a lot to do with trust. But the distinction is important nonetheless. See, if an author has a big story in mind, then he is telling a story one bit at a time; one long story that needs to be broken in chapters, but nonetheless I know that there is a sense of direction, that the plot makes sense and is going somewhere, even if i may not see it now, and that there will be a satisfying ending eventually. In fact, I know the story is pointed towards that ending, and it will be worth the wait. On the other hand, if the authors are just leaving the story open to sell more sequels, it means there is no direction, and all that is being done is adding new plot threads that will then need a mmeaningful resolution. Bringing more and more plot threads without a good idea on how to resolve them means thatany ending - if they ever decide to make one - is going to feel forced, incomplete, unsatisfying. The good thing is, brandon already has the cosmere plotted out; it's around 60 books if i remember correctly. I don't have to worry that he's just leading us to nowhere as long as we pay the tiket.

when siri starts to interact with susebron, he is writing on a board of some kind. where did he get it? they certainly did not leave a board to write on the chamber, and there's no way siri can hide anything on herself.

Actually, the "kelsier" that was seen by some city guards in hero of ages was tensoon. kelsier didn't have a body, he survived as a sort of god, but he still had enough power to wisper to a few chosen people at appropriate moments. Notice how he kept spook going in his darkest moment, setting up the events that would lead to the ending of HoA. Also, pagerunner makes good points; while at the moment the book is only fully understandable by those who read the forum, it may be that those explanations will be included in the last book of the alloy era.

If you see yourself with ruined lungs, then no, they won't heal. Even worse, but befitting the theme of this thread, if you quit smoking, or get your lungs cleaned by some new medical procedure, magical healing will soil your lungs again.

others have given good answers. i can add that the resurrection thing is pretty well explained cosmere-wise: after your body dies, your soul goes to the cognitive realm, where it will linger for a short time (seconds to minutes, the more magical power - investiture - you had the more you stay), and during that time extreme healing can still bring you back. as for the bands, it was explained fairly well how they worked: by filling a metalmind with identity, you have no identity and your metalmind can be used by anyone. When you burn a metal allomantically, you are accessing the power of preservation in the form of investiture, and you can store that investiture in a metalmind, which can be tapped to achieve allomantical effects. and since feruchemmy has no hard limitation to how much you can tap, you can "flare" a metal harder than any mistborn. On the other hand, I think this hhighlights a potential problems: for us, the fanbase, who have read the interviews and read the forum for the smaller clues, the southern scadrians and kelsier being around are perfectly well explained and foreshadowed. To those who lack that dedication, they can feel like massive chull pull. that's a problem caused by internet forums, actually: if you make a subtle foreshadowing, somebody will figure it out and post it online, and it will become common knowledge in no time, ruining all the suspence. if you make an even subtler foreshadowing, nobody will figure it out, but you'll need the author explanation to enjoy the story.

use atium compounding to stay younger, lose the free ride on public transportation that you'd get as a senior citizen. When you try to get aboard for free by showing your ID card, you also get arrested by the police for supposedly having a fake ID

there is a relatively easy way to duplicate memories, which is copper compounding. and yes, making experienceable memories one can access has definitely great applications. Although I can only think of entertainment implications; tapping a memory won't make one a scientist/engineer/expert-at-something, and have a datasheet that you can memorize at will is only marginally more useful than having the same datasheet on paper.

It's "heil", not "hail"

Also, we live in a time of constant tehnological progress, and we tend to take for granted that a human society, left on its own, will progress. While that's true on a general base, said progress is exceedengly slow and mostly unnoticeable for most of history. Humans separated from the other apes 5 millions years ago. They invented fire 125000 years ago. Agriculture arrived some 11000 years ago. Bronze working arrived a few millennia after, and iron working after some more millennia. The wheel is around 5000 years old. Construction techniques evolved slowly over millennia. So you see, before the scientific revolution in the last 400 years, it was perfectly normal that human technology would evolve at snail pace. You could observe an ancient culture over centuries and see only very limited differences. It's not surprising that roshar advanced so little, but that scadrial advanced so much. In fact, scadrial could only advance so fast because they were helped along the way. Also, as others pointed out, roshar has advanced in a different direction. We think scientific progress always follow roughly the same progression, but that's not the case. The aztecs knew astronomy at least as well as the europeans, possibly better, but they didn't knew iron; in europe iron predates an accurate calendar by what? 3000 years? more?

it's not mentioned. I also would be curious about it. Maybe they burrow into ashes.

industrialization is less about innovation and more about mass production. the two are of course intimately llinked, because the new productive processes are innovations, but the whole point of the industrial revolution is increased productivity. through all the preindustrial history, the GDP has been around 2000 dollars (purchase power parity) per year per capita. all the innovations of the more enlightened societies didn't change that, because there was a hard limit on how much could be produced. that figure started to skyrocket only with the industrial revolution. the availability of large amounts of goods also changed life and everything in a way that hadn't been seen since agricolture. The innovations of a renaissance are an important stepping stone to achieve industrialization wiithin a few centuries, but the process is not inevitable. china had achieved a renaissance level, then some shortsighted emperor decided to forbid boat buildiing, or clock making; had that not happened, it may have been china that conquered europe, and not the reverse. another possibility is that progress is stopped by a devastating war, or epidemics, which may well be what's happening on roshar. other possible missteps are specific of a fantasy setting; namely, can the magic be mass produced, and how feasible is that? If we take as an example a magic system like that of D&D, it becomes clear that a highy enlightened magical society can never achieve industrialization because you can't mass produce magic items; they have a cost in experience points, in diamond dust, and in wizard's time. so a society, by seeking the road of magic for its immediate benefit over natural sciences, may actually go in a dead end. this probably is not the case on roshar; fabrials seem to work under very reproducible principles, and once they are made, they are fueled with stormlight, which can be provided regularly. Still, it's questionable if fabrials can be made in a factory. If they cannot, they are likely to remain the playthings of rich people.

I got the impression that the set was still fine. it was "trell" or whoever is manipulating the set that changed plans and decided to end life on scadrial. Wax sister is stilll a high ranking member of the set, and not likely to turn coat. unless the set realize it has been duped, in which case i expect it to defect en masse to the central government.