Millennium

The RPG states that multiple Blessings of the same type don't stack, but it doesn't mention any harmful effect of simply having them. My question is, why don't the four iron spikes in a Koloss simply act as a pair of Blessings of Potency? Or do they act as a pair of Blessings of Potency? Is this perhaps the same thing that would happen to a Kandra with a BoP that gained a second BoP? It would make a degree of thematic sense. Hemalurgic iron isn't good for the psyche in humans, and while kandra aren't human, they do descend from humanity. Perhaps, even though it takes more iron to start having a detrimental effect, the end stages are still similar. I do not think the kandra would experiment with something like this (Blessings are too precious to "waste" in that way), so they might not even know.

He's not lazy or disconnected enough to do it accidentally, but I don't think we can assume he wouldn't do it on purpose, especially since he must know the fans will be expecting them to be related. Certainly there are some interesting possibilities if what the people of Roshar call "Lightweavers" use the magic that the people of Yolen call "Lightweaving", but there are also some interesting possibilities if they don't. Either way promises interesting stuff.

I doubt that, but I'm not sure we can necessarily assume that The Letter's author was talking about elements in the chemical sense of the term. The writer could have been talking about a part of some larger thing: a fragment of a diagram or passage from a text, perhaps, that he (she?) has copied as a tattoo. Given that we're talking about fragments of larger things, it might even be a previously holder-less Shard of Adonalsium that the writer has taken up. This would mean that Hoid isn't the letter's author, but that's not definite right now either.

Not necessarily. Attacks can't get through cuendillar, but there are attacks that don't have to. Pick up a mace and aim for the head: you won't get through the helmet, but you'll give the target one hell of a concussion. Something very similar happened in the real world as thick plate became the norm. It's another step in the arms race, but it isn't the end of the arms race.

Whether or not a shield could protect from a fireball has a lot to do with how Fire (in the One Power sense) interacts with the laws of physics. Real fire would superheat the air around it to the point of lethality, so a shield alone wouldn't be enough to protect people: the fireball would still get too close. But this is fiction, and it's magical fire, so Convection Schmonvection may be in effect.

Thinking back to Bao's coin-mail, there probably wouldn't be any benefit to making it out of cuendillar. The wire used to tie the coins together would still have to be made of something else, and cuendillar "coins" would simply deflect blows into the weaker wire, and so the armor would only be as strong as that. Plus, balefire would get through the holes anyway. Scales should still work (unless the weave for cuendillar patches any preexisting holes in the metal; I forget if it does), but you'd still have to enchant each one individually, and that's probably the most practical style you could do. Also, these styles of armor all have a major weakness: they're flexible. Swap your sword out for a mace and start bashing, and even if the scales don't get damaged, they'll still transmit the energy of the strike to the wearer. Scales that could deform would absorb at least some of that energy, softening the blow a bit; cuendillar can't. End result: cuendillar armor isn't actually all that much better than mundane metals, and in some cases it's actually worse. But as others have pointed out, cuendillar should still be good for making shields. I don't know why they didn't do that.

Power-wrought ammunition would actually be less effective than ordinary ammunition. A lot of a bullet's lethality comes from its ability to deform and expand, which cuendillar and Power-wrought metal can't do. Most forms of armor couldn't be made of cuendillar, because of this property combined with the fact that the weave fuses multiple pieces of metal into one: you'd end up with a rigid suit that can't move or pieces that can't be fastened together. You might be able to do something like lorica squamata (a bunch of metal scales with small holes in them, sewn in an overlapping pattern onto a leather backing), but you'd have to enchant each scale individually, and there are hundreds of these scales in a suit. The coin mail used by Bao the Wyld could probably also be made of cuendillar, but it would suffer from similar problems. Plus, with so many holes in it, I'm not sure that particular style of armor could protect against balefire even if it were made of cuendillar.

Agreed. Let the series be finished: River of Souls was written as part of AMoL, and the Encyclopedia is a reference work, so these get a pass. But after that, it's time to return the series to its creator. The story is done; let it sleep.

I think Brandon once said that the term for someone from Scadrial is "Scadrian."

What I find interesting about this is the implication that there is more to the Cognitive Realm than just Shadesmar.

I'd be interested in an experiment sometime: if someone were to read The Emperor's Soul first (with the way it maps out the basics of the underlying Cosmere), how would it change the way they see the later books? Too late for me, obviously, and most of us. But it would be interesting to see if someone could get a newbie to do it.

It's easy to forget just how few Allomancers there really are in a series that centers around them, but even among the nobility, Allomancers are supposed to be rare. Even the strongest noble Houses will have a limited number of them: too valuable to waste on guard duty, especially when some Mistings' abilities aren't all that useful in that context anyway. Furthermore, all the other Houses have similar issues, and the scion of a noble House would know this. Most of the dangers they face are not Allomantic in nature, so it makes little sense to specialize all of their guards as Hazekillers. They really only need a squad or two, to put down one or two Allomancers (or, Lord Ruler forbid, a Mistborn) attack. Give the rest of the guards training and weapons aimed at more mundane threats: they'll be better-equipped to handle those. Now, all of this said, I suspect that the Hazekillers will be more or less gone by the time of the next trilogy. If the people of Scadrial are using modern technology, then they've probably figured out the Hall–Heroult process of refining aluminum, turning it from one of the rarest and most expensive metals into something relatively common and cheap. The fighting tradition might still exist as a martial art, but with aluminum so readily available, that sort of thing would probably fall out of favor as a way of dealing with Allomancers.

My current theory is that Honorblades are simply Shardblades tied to Honor, Szeth's is tied to Cultivation, and the others we've seen thus far are tied to Odium. Given current information, it seems that Shallan's Blade is probably tied to Odium simply because that seems to have been what was available to the person she took it from, but there's still room for something strange to be going on in that Blade's backstory that ties it to a different Shard. I've been kicking around the idea of Blades tied to other Shards too: things we've seen on other worlds that have not been called Shardblades and don't look like the Blades we've seen, but may serve an analogous function for their respective Shards.

If I recall correctly, Brandon did say there's a meaning, but it has not yet been revealed. I always thought it was funny that in the Lerasium symbol, and only that symbol, one of the spikes is bent. A swipe at Hemalurgy or its master, perhaps?

The discrepancy is deliberate, as Phantom pointed out. Come to think of it, didn't Brandon say at one point that the true number of Allomantic metals was somewhere around 50?

If we can count on the symbols in the Allomancy chart to match colors with their respective metals, then Lerasium should be a pale yellow-brown. But can we count on the colors in the Allomancy chart? The colors of the Enhancement metals seem wrong, though if you flipped them over the diagonal they'd be plausible.

You can't Nicroburst yourself; Duralumin does that. But the basic principle is interesting: as a Hemalurgic creation, would Inquisitors be vulnerable to mind control in the same way that Koloss and Kandra are? If so, could Ruin override that through its strong connection to them? Misting: Chromium, to bring him down to more or less normal (still probably bigger and stronger than me, but there are ways of dealing with that). Come to think of it, would an Inquisitor be blind without iron or steel to burn? Ferring: Pewter, if we're assuming that I'm forced to stand and fight. Otherwise Steel, because I would rather run. Twinborn: If the trick from the RPG where you can use Nicrosil to burn charges out of someone else's metalmind works, then Chromium/Nicrosil to really bring him down to normal. Otherwise, Chromium/Gold, to negate the one supernatural advantage a Leeched Inquisitor has left. Misting with a spike: Pewter spiked with Chromium. Bring him down to normal, and then augment my strength to negate that advantage.

This could also be explained if Dhakor is of Dominion, rather than of Devotion. If it's tied to a different Shard, then it would probably play by different rules.

Or perhaps aluminum was the metal for Adonalsium, and is useless (not just Allomantically, if we assume that "the unForgeable metal" from TES was another name for aluminum) because of the Shattering.

Perhaps the Shaod existed pre-Elantris, but all it did was bestow a strong enough connection to Devotion to use AonDor. It might not have even been recognized as its own "thing" at the time, with people believing that some people just manifested talent in the use of the Dor while others did not. A similar phenomenon might even continue to exist outside Arelon and Teod: the ability to use the Dor in other ways might be controlled and bestowed by Shaod-like things that just haven't had an Elantris-like amplifier built for them yet.

Alternatively, maybe someone already tried, and it did not go as planned.

What indeed. In fact, is it even possible for Odium to fail to take credit for evil it caused, or would that go against its intent? Taken a step further, can Odium even defend itself against accusations for evil things it didn't do? Or would that go against its intent, much like the people who always pop up in the wake of sensational crimes and confess to them even though they are innocent? Whatever viewpoints Shards have are fragmented and obsessive; we know this. If we can even call their viewpoints human at all, then they must all be seriously mentally ill, even the "good" ones. If Odium cannot defend itself against false accusations, then this would make it an extremely convenient scapegoat for other Shards looking to cover their own less-savory actions.

A box set isn't really what I think of when I hear the term 'omnibus,' which is why I discounted that possibility: I think more along the lines of multiple books released in a single volume. Something like a box set might be more plausible, if they can figure out the logistics. Will they make the box out of cuendillar? Will it come with a forklift for getting the books out of the store? More likely, I think, is that there will be a couple of box sets: maybe 1-5, 6-10, and 11-14. Then they might be able to get away with just including a hand cart.

I thought Brandon said that Lerasium did something different if you were already able to burn metals. Admittedly, the RPG says something else: it says that Lerasium can turn Mistings into Mistborn, or (slowly) increase a Mistborn's power, but at the same time, it doesn't mention anything like the "side effect" Brandon spoke of. I don't think that would work by itself, because there's a metaphysical concept of Identity that can be stored and tapped using a different sort of metalmind. Because of that, increasing your Connection shouldn't affect your Identity. But the reverse should also hold: storing your Identity shouldn't affect your Connection. So if you were to use Aluminum and Duralumin together, to send your Identity through the floor and your Connection through the roof, they shouldn't interfere with one another. That might work to achieve the sort of effect you're talking about, except that instead of everyone seeming to be the same being, you would seem to be all of them at once.

Not right now, I don't think. Maybe for the 10th anniversary of AMoL, or the 15th anniversary of Robert Jordan's death, or something like that, but not when the last book is still fresh and sales are hot. Years from now, in any case, and that's if they decide to do it at all.