Pagerunner

Can you elaborate on your operative definition of Intent? It looks like you view it as a Shardic property, but you also refer to Bavadin's Intent as a separate concept entirely.

I don't believe the terms have been consistently used by Brandon in WoBs (he called the complicated Southerner tech "unkeyed" once), so I don't think they're good phrases to be using at all. (And not just because I think an "unsealed" metalmind is just an "unkeyed" nicrosilmind and associated other "unkeyed" metalminds.)

@Silverblade5, I don't know if this is happening or not, since I haven't gotten any PMs, but I did see everyone yelling at me, so I'm just gonna leave this here, why not?

I started a new save to prep for Master Mode, and decided to arbitrarily limit myself in a couple of ways to make myself get better at combat. No armor, no fast-travelling except if I'm already at a shrine (so no easy escapes), and only eating meals at a campfire (only potions during combat and climbing). I might actually keep the potion restriction, since it has made me actually focus on resource management, which I hadn't before. (I'm the kind of person who very rarely runs past something to pick up, so when you have 200 apples and 50 of basically every ingredient, you never run out of food.) I've actually enjoyed having to pay attention to grabbing bugs (those restless crickets are super important now!), and I've been spending most of my money buying hearty lizards from Beedle, since those and fairies are pretty much the only way I can heal in the middle of a battle. I'd encourage anyone else who feels guilty doing this in the middle of combat, try limiting yourself to elixirs. Most meals are still useful - environmental effects, obviously, have no problems with this, and you eat attack/defense/stealth/speed meals when preparing for a big battle. You can't add yellow hearts in the middle of battle from meals, but you can still cook your +25 bonus heart meals and eat them in advance. And let's be honest, while meat is normally a major healing resource, you're gonna need to sell those skewers to buy more bugs. The only items that really can't be used are Stamella Shrooms and Endura Shrooms, so you either gotta get good at climbing or get good at catching frogs.

Adonalsium had an intent to create sentience: This might not be a capital-I Intent, but more just a general motive. Hoid appears to be collecting magic systems, but it's not like he has an Intent to. Some people think that the Intents were created during the Shattering, but others think that they predate it, that all Intents were aspects of Adonalsium's personality, balancing one another out. It is a point of contention among theorists, and likely will be for a while, but it all goes to say that Adonalsium might not have had a simple, singular Intent, like the Shards do. Have you looked at the Liar of Partinel sample chapters, where we actually see the fain life? The story says they grew from the body of dead gods - but LoP predates the Shattering, so the fain life does as well. The Scar is a possibility, though; although since Yolen was the original human homeworld, I'd be surprised to see it so far away from the other inhabited Shardworlds in the Arcanum Unbounded star chart. Also, Yolen is currently the top candidate for the point-of-view of the chart (the map is in Silverlight, but since Silverlight isn't in the Physical Realm, that's not where the perspective is from), which would preclude it from also being in the Scar.

FYI, there is a new RPG supplement coming out later this year about the Southerners. Brandon may have been too busy with Oathbringer to get them any new fiction; I think the book may already be at the printers, since it was supposed to ship with the board game (which will go out in August, or maybe a little sooner).

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-40422013000800017 I did some quick research. It looks like the potassium has no effect on the reaction, aside from increasing the conductivity of the water. The impact comes from increasing the concentration of hydroxide ions in the water, since oxygen production is our slowest step in the overall reaction mechanism. A neutral metal won't cause water to dissociate more unless it is an ion; otherwise, it will form complexes with water molecules, which won't do anything during electrolysis. So, an interesting idea, but looks like no dice without Harmonium ions.

Break it out by book: Anyone on the Shard from its inception to AoL is 1st generation. (WoK was out before the Shard came online, right?) TWG members grandfathered in, of course. Between AoL and WoR is 2nd. Between WoR and SoS is 3rd. Between SoS and AU is 4th. (BoM really is part of the same wave.) Anyone after AU is 5th. Once OB is released, we'll be getting the first of the 6th generation. If I'm wrong, and WoK was released after the Shard had come online, then bump everyone back a generation.

Fyi, tagging in quotes doesn't ping people. Which must be on purpose. But I don't recall anything that hasn't already been said. Khriss has also been to Sel, since Elantris has an Ars Arcanum. I would guess that anyone sufficiently prepared could make it through the Selish CR. The question in my mind is: did Galladon worldhop before joining the Seventeenth Shard? Or did they come to him (you can pick the blue aon or the red aon)?

To address some of your specific questions: When asked if the Parshendi were of Odium, Cultivation, and Honor (in that order), Brandon respectively replied not originally, not originally, and no. Not quite what you had remembered. Hoid calls Cultivation "Slammer." Since it's a colloquial term for prison, some people think Cultivation is responsible. I agree with your point of view, since the Second Letter says "whether this was Tanavast's design or not, millennia have passed without Rayse taking the life of another of the sixteen." I inferred that Honor was responsible, even though he may not have been consciously trying to protect the other Shards. Devotion is used as a synonym for love. Before we knew the names for the Selish Shards, people actually used to propose Devotion, in your sense of the term, for Skai's Shard. Brandon found it quite ironic. As to the broad question, I like the concept, but I don't think it needs to occur for every Shard. If you believe, as I do, that the Shards are each a piece of the total divine character of Adonalsium, then I'll agree that each piece requires tempering from other pieces. But I think amoral may not be the best word to use, but something more like 'constrained' or 'limited.' You identified Preservation really well, which goes along with what we saw in Secret History: he wasn't trying to help people, his motives just aligned better with what worked well for the Scadrians. I think it's drawn heavily from Brandon's personal beliefs, which he speaks of in the Mistborn 3 annotations, that all religions have a piece of the truth, even if he doesn't believe they are true religions. But instead of religions that came from men giving undue weight to certain divine attributes (that guy on TV read that God will provide for your needs, but ignores everything else in the Bible), in the cosmere it's a pantheon comprised of actual gods who are driven by those attributes. Sometimes, they turn out very poorly - I'm sure you could make comparisons between Shu-Dereth and some of the stuff happening in the Middle East. Or you could have something relatively 'harmless,' like Pathism on Scadrial and Buddhism in real life. (Or Buddhism and Shu-Korath.) But just because the Shard isn't evil doesn't mean they are acting in complete accordance with deity; Honor might have trouble intervening without proper protocol, or Preservation may support an 'evil' man like Rashek because he hasn't been changing. I guess this might get down to semantics, amoral vs immoral. You said 'amoral,' but it seems you're arguing more for immoral. That all the Shards do things that are wrong, not just have priorities beyond morality that they are driven by. This also gets into the definition of morality, which is a long and winding rabbit trail (as the Shard of that planet, is there anything wrong with Aona killing her followers?), but I think regardless of how you slice it I do think you can make a case that all the Shards are bad gods. Which I think is a major theme of the cosmere as a whole, an exploration of divinity. (And man ascending to divine is a large theme in Mormonism as well, I believe.)

No offense taken whatsoever. But the whole problem is that the simple explanation falls apart when you think too hard about it. Because a hypothetical steel-arm is massless and infinitely extendable, it will behave differently than an arm in ways that are significant, which we discussed earlier in the thread in the context of pushing against a wall vs pushing a basketball. While on the surface, it may match everything, it requires the underlying behavior to be inconsistent. If you're using your arms, you need to push off an anchor to propel yourself because your arms can only reach so far, not because you can't push hard enough. When you throw your arms forward unimpeded, you are actually pushing the rest of your body backwards. Try standing against a wall, hands on your chest, back not quite touching the wall. Throw your arms out to full extension in front of you - you'll feel your back contact the wall as your body moves backwards with the force of your push. You don't build up a lot of speed, because your arms get there so quickly and then your body pulls itself together so you don't fly apart. But you are still pushing with enough force to propel you backwards; it just operates for a small amount of time. But that's not what happened for Vin; she wasn't pushed backwards until the coin reached the wall, because she couldn't push with enough force until the coin reached the wall. If you go and stand against the wall again, and move your arms forward slowly enough you don't hit your back against the wall, you wouldn't be pushing hard enough to push yourself off of anything. You'll need to increase your exertion once your hands are on the wall. When babies surprise themselves with their strength (I've been watching my 6-month-old niece hit herself in the face with her toys, and it never stops being funny!), they're not adjusting their strength, they're going full-bore the whole time like little maniacs. They're surprised, but they've been pushing too hard to begin with. That runs counter to the examples we've seen in Steelpushing, where the force changes even though the Allomancer does not actively change it.

This is a great idea. However, you should probably just put everything into one giant alphabetical list; if they don't know what it is, then they won't know where to look for it. Some things that might be useful: KR: Knight Radiant MAG: Mistborn Adventure Game. A pen-and-paper roleplaying game set in the world of Mistborn. MBEX: Mistborn Era X (Era 1 is Vin and Elend, Era 2 is Wax and Wayne, Era 3 is a 1980s setting, Era 4 is Sci Fi) MBSH: Mistborn Secret History. A Mistborn novella. OB: Oathbringer SSFH: Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell. A cosmere novella. SotD: Sixth of the Dusk. A cosmere novella. WoT: Wheel of Time I suspect most abbreviations will be defined in context; mostly, it will just be books that will come out of the blue. You might get some pushback on your Allomancy and Feruchemy abbreviations. I know lots of people feel strongly about that (I, personally, go with A.Metal and F.Metal), but there is no clear consensus (and some people say there shouldn't be any sort of abbreviation like that).

Post a pic of the last page!

I'm gonna need to step in and pump the brakes on some of this harmonium talk. What we actually have confirmed about harmonium's properties is actually surprisingly little. We have my initial conversation with Brandon, summarized as: I developed a theory around that, which states that having individual electrons be of either Ruin or Preservation will increase the chemical reactivity. I got someone to follow-up at a con a few months later, although I'm not sure Brandon entirely understood the line of questioning: A strict reading of Brandon's answer actually disproves my theory; he identifies the whole harmonium 'atom' as a 'subatomic particle' that has internal repulsion in the Spiritual Realm, not the Physical Realm. I look at it a little more loosely (mainly to keep my theory alive!), but I think he was still only discussing it at a high level and didn't quite get his terms right in a conversational setting. But the whole idea that harmonium is unbalanced towards Ruin is derived from my theory, it is not a confirmed fact. If harmonium shares the orbital structure of a real alkali metal, it will have an odd number of electrons, so that means you couldn't evenly divide electrons between Ruin and Preservation. Unbalancing it towards Ruin tied in nicely with balancing out the extra piece of Preservation that is in humanity. All we have confirmed about the 'extra piece of Ruin' is this: Which doesn't actually tell us anything. We can infer that Sazed is aware of it, so it's not like he's accidentally going to be overpowered by Ruinous tendencies. But as to the exact mechanism, we have no clues. (I used to like the theory of Rust as a Splinter he created and gave to Kelsier, but I seem to recall enough that being debunked past the point of tenability.)

I think you're going down the wrong alley with this reasoning. Brandon had given no other hints about Aslydin directly; her typical Terris name (like Tindwyl or Handerwym) was a clue to connect her to the Terriswoman worldhopper that he had mentioned a couple years prior to that. So, option (C) is that he was tying her through ethnicity to the known Terris worldhopper.

@Extesian, where's that last one from?

I do not know. You could ask Weller Book Works or Team Sanderson directly, or just make sure you're following them on social media. But, for the Bands example, Brandon didn't publicize it until two weeks before release, so I wouldn't expect to see anything too soon.

Even stepping back from the Surges, and just looking at fabrials as a way of converting Stormlight into useful work, the Rosharans will have access to a reliable means of energy that is fundamentally different than electricity (whether that electricity comes from coal, gas, solar, wind, nuclear, etc.) or oil (which pretty much all our vehicles run off of). So, how does modern society use energy, and how would Rosharans use Stormlight instead? There are three main types of energy consumption in the US: 40% Residential and Commercial Almost half of that is space heating, space cooling, and water heating. We have already seen heating fabrials, so Rosharans will not need electricity to take care of that. Due to Roshar's largely temperate climate, this may not be as necessary except in the extremes of the continent, but I don't expect to ever see non-magical air conditioners. 7% comes from lighting. Lighting! I don't know if they will have any way to improve on good old spheres, but I doubt they will see a reason to. 6% is food refrigeration. Fabrials would probably be able to take care of this, as well. The rest isn't completely delineated on that chart, but it's got plenty of electronics, which would be challenging. They'd need to operate on electricity, but if Rosharans don't ever develop a true electric grid (since they'll be using Stormlight instead), it would make it very difficult to use devices that don't have their own power supplies. It might mean Rosharans don't watch TV. (The horror.) 28% Transportation This is going to be entirely Gravitation fabrials. Once stuff doesn't weigh anything, it's trivial to transport. Giant flying trains, semi-trucks all over the countryside, or an obscene amount of drones tugging packages everywhere. There are any number of ways to implement this. Oathgates are nice, but logistics will be complicated, and people will want to use them for personal transportation much more than for commercial applications. 32% Industrial This is where things get tricky. Whenever you're manufacturing something, or researching something, you'll need to power your specialized equipment. I don't know if all of that could be replicated by fabrials. Let's look at the oil refining industry - you need tons of distillation columns, heaters, pumps, pressure vessels, and valves, all with controllers and safety interlocks. Unless you can make a fabrial computer, you'll need to do things the 'old-fashioned way,' and by that I mean like we do it in the real world. You could accomplish some of the unit operations, like pumps and heaters, with fabrials (heck, you could use conjoined fabrials to turn valves), but if you don't have a way to precisely control their output based on process variables (i.e. through a computer) you won't be able to have an effective process. Oil refining won't be an issue on Roshar: but how are you going to mass-produce medicine? Purify oxygen? Refine metal? I think this will be Roshar's blind spot; with stuff like Regrowth and Soulcasting, they can do a pretty good job at creating utopia-like conditions, so I they might not need the robust industry that would require electricity. So, fabrials could use Stormlight to satisfy most of Roshar's energy requirements. The question that will then arise is, how much Stormlight do we have? And how many spren can we capture? Will it be feasible for every home to have a heating fabrial? Will we have enough gemstones to capture the Stormlight to power them all, while lighting our houses and keeping our food cold and making our cars fly... and so on and so forth. It might put quite a drain on the Shards in the system if they are powering everything... but then again, there is a piece of Ruin and Preservation in every atom of Scadrial, so it might not be that bad.

Ah. Monkeys on typewriters it is!

I believe you're thinking of lines of theorizing that are mostly drawn from this WoB from 2010: Source This appears to be contradicted by a quote from 2011: Source Having sixteen normal metals, 3 god metals, and 16 alloys apiece for each atium and lerasium would bring us to 51 metals. The implication quite of the first that there are 'way more' than 16 for each of the two pure god metals (to say nothing of harmonium, which we didn't know about yet) would seem suggest that the number of god metal alloys would have to exceed 100. A common theory for distinguishing between these different god metal alloys is the presence or absence of various god metals.

The relevant quote from the synopsis: I don't see how that says Sazed is dead. It's just telling the readers to expect new main characters for this book.

Went back and finished up my most of last outstanding action items (Talus and Hinox medals, Mounted Archery camp, a couple Korok puzzles I had stamped but never completed) in preparation for the DLC. (I'm not worrying about all the Koroks, or even maxing out my inventory slots. Although I might still do a little more hunting for a 5-speed horse.) I'm looking forward to the Trial of the Sword; a heavily constructed environment like that should bring back the excitement of the opening hours on the Great Plateau. Hard mode, I could probably do without. I was reminded how bad I was at taking down Lynels; I'm not good with joysticks, so aiming Stasis+ and then an arrow to the face so I can mount it is way beyond my skills, so I wind up going through a couple of weapons to take down a Silver Lynel. Gold ones... man, I'll probably kill one or two just so I can say I did it, and then go back to avoiding them like the plague, like I did at the beginning of the game. I wonder if they will sneak in any cooking/potion modifications along the way, either in this DLC or the next one? I would really like to see you be able to combine different types of ingredients for different effects that either only come from armor or don't currently exist. Stuff like: Hasty and Energizing create a meal that boosts your climbing speed Mighty and Enduring create a meal that makes your equipment lose less durability Armored and Electro resist gives you the Rubber Armor set bonus Mighty and Chill gives all your weapons ice damage Not every combination would have to mean something (because that would be 55 different effects), but I think it's a shame I can pretty much never use the Wild set or the Champion's tunic, since I need full set bonuses to climb/swim/farm dragons. (What I'd really like would be for the Wild set to include all the armor bonuses, and for the Master Sword and Champion's Weapons to be unbreakable, so I can just work on 100% without having to swap out gear all the time and micromanage my inventory... but that would admittedly defeat the point of having environments and breakable weapons in the first place, and I'd might as well just go watch cutscenes on YouTube. I've seen that conversation play out before.)

Your first question is indeed a mystery. He probably didn't go anywhere until Mistborn 3 (since he was still on Scadrial as an informant then), and I'd guess he used Harmony's shardpool (or one of Harmony's shardpools, since I suspect he may have more than one) to get back into the Cognitive Realm after Sazed's Ascenscion. As for why he didn't just grab a bead and jump back into Shadesmar before things got funky... well, Hoid's intentions are his own, and we still don't know his ultimate mission, or what brought him back to Scadrial for the events of Era 2. For the second question, I agree as well, and as I recall they lay that plan out pretty much in detail (even though they never name-drop Elantris directly). What about it doesn't add up? (Or is the title of the topic referring more to the first question?)

Well, you've got a whole year to read the Wheel of Time series so you can partake in the rest of the programming!

Team Sanderson tried something out for Oathbringer, which looks like it has worked well and that they will probably use for future Stormlight books. Instead of putting the whole book through the revision process together, they have done each part on its own. Brandon has discussed over on Reddit how he plots Stormlight books; even though each book is divided into five parts, it can also be viewed as a trilogy. Or, to put it visually (this is something Brandon actually put together!: So, Oathbringer is, in a way, three different books all released at the same time, and Brandon and his team decided not to keep them together during revising. To see how this works, you need to understand how Brandon's editing process works, and what each of his drafts means: What's also important to understand is that drafts 2 and 7 (and I think 8, as well) aren't Brandon's responsibility, they are mainly his editor Peter's domain. So what they did for this book was something like this: instead of waiting until the first draft was completed, Peter worked on the second draft of Parts 1-3 while Brandon was working on the first draft of Parts 4-5. While Brandon was doing the third draft of Parts 2-3, the alpha readers were already reading the third draft of Part 1. (I'm not that privy to exactly what happened, so my specific examples may be incorrect. But each of the three books was at different parts in the editing process, to speed up editing overall.) So, it's not like Brandon finished up his 6.0 draft and is already two-thirds done with another draft. What that meant was, Peter has already done Draft 7 of Parts 1-3 (Books 1 and 2). Brandon just finished Draft 6 of Parts 4-5 (Book 3). It's a good system that minimizes downtime. (Peter's doesn't need Brandon to finished writing all 500,00 words, or whatever it wound up at, before he started doing anything. And Brandon didn't sit around waiting for Peter, either.) I don't think it will be necessary for other books they do, especially the YA ones. But it looks like it has really expedited the editing process, as long as Brandon has a sufficiently detailed outline in place from the get-go. (And he did spend a full year outlining Oathbringer, if I recall correctly.)