Pagerunner

Source.

The mods actually just created a new chatroom for the 17th Shard over on Discord. If you're coming up with a lot of specific questions, that's a place where you can get a quick response (depending on time of day, of course; everyone needs to sleep sometime).

Huh, that's an interesting idea. I think the back endsheets, with their depiction of a Vorin woman with her safehand covered, indicate that the endpages were created by someone from Alethkar or Jah Keved, though.

Great summary, but one thing to note about Edgedancer. Team Sanderson never recommended Edgedancer as a starting point; I believe it came from a Tor.com article which was later amended. It is very much Stormlight 2.5. EDIT: What do you know, Peter was there in the comment section. The WoR Lift interlude will be included in the Edgedancer hardcover, so that particular format would work better as a standalone. For Arcanum Unbounded, though, you'd still need to have read Words of Radiance.

Yeah, I do that, too, and it's how I got all the random stuff from various threads going back through 2016. It only goes back 1000 comments, so the entire 2015 AMA was unavailable through that method, and I had to actually visit that thread and open everything up the old-fashioned way. Thanks for the heads up, though.

The Worldhoppers group is an excellent idea, and as someone who is not involved in the social aspects of this forum, I think it's the best part of the new Discord. I think it should get its own channel, similar to how the Cosmere Chat Discord has a Cosmere Q&A channel (that is unfortunately never utilized as it should be). With proper 'advertisement' to new Sharders, it would be a great way for people new to the fandom to ask all the questions as they come up in a medium much better suited to it than a forum thread. I'll admit, I probably won't initiate many conversations on the new Discord. (I like the pace of forums better.) But I would gladly hop in when someone is there looking for a place to get started. I think a dedicated channel would make members more likely to be aware of the Worldhoppers group and to ask questions of us.

I see a similarity in Mistborn, if you have read it.

Thanks! I'll get to work on pulling those in. I actually went through all of his AMAs and expanded every comment chain, so if it's in one of those, either I have it, or I decided it wasn't relevant, so no need to post all 100 of those. Looks like most of what you just shared is from other threads, which is indeed the stuff I'm looking for. I'm on the fence about including WoP and WoI, mostly because of one instance where I'm almost confident Peter interpreted a line from the Diagram incorrectly. EDIT: I tracked down where the WoP I was referring to seems to have originally come from. There is some really interesting stuff in there, like confirmation Vax is indeed a planet and that the Element referred to in the Letter is indeed the lerasium bead; but there are other things that Peter is definitely speculating on (the meaning of "the gemstone" from the Second Letter, whether the Dawnshards are the Honorblades), so again, I'm hesitant to take his answers as gospel.

What's in June? The next event on Brandon's website is SLCC in September.

The creatures on the front endsheet appeared several places in Stormlight so far, are small and from Aimia, and match the description in WoR of a larkin, having 'wings that fold out of its back, eyes of solid silver, and a snout and mouth reminiscent of an axehound's.'

One more quote for you: Source I'm on the fence. On one hand, the eye of the Highstorm is indeed a weak point in the boundary between realms. On the other hand, Brandon does imply that Jasnah uses Honor's perpendicularity in WoR. But back to the first hand, Elsecallers don't need a Perpendicularity to transition, so maybe Jasnah just got a hold of some Stormlight. It's an interesting mystery. I have some off-the-wall ideas I've posted elsewhere about Honor's perpendicularity being stationary on another planet. We'll see what we get come November, when Jasnah is back with the crew.

Slowswift is an homage to Tolkien, I believe. An out-of-universe reference, not an in-universe one.

There was a reading. The recording hasn't made it online yet, so all I have is secondhand knowledge.

Oh, right, White Sand has a download link the newsletter now. Here's where you can ask for Aether.

I think I agree with you, and will raise you one more: when Shallan was Soulcasting the ship at the beginning of Words of Radiance, she needed to leverage the history it had with the sailors who had crewed her for those years... in other words, its Connection to those men. I think there's another example of transformative magic that uses Connection. However, from what we've actually seen F.Duralumin accomplish, it doesn't look like it's manipulating the same kind of Connection. We've seen Connection Medallions that let you tap Connection to one's homeland, letting someone instantly learn another language. It's still a 'transformation' of sorts, though this is mental, not Physical. It depends if F.Duralumin can truly store any Connection, or if it is limited to a particular kind, and those studying Feruchemy do not have the precise terminology to distinguish. (I.e., sleep is a form of energy, so someone could accurately but imprecisely say that F.Bronze stores energy. It's just one specific kind of energy.)

I'd like to see Brandon fit in his own version of the pristinely ungifted, people who aren't affected by magic at all. I have a scene in my head of Hoid creating an illusion to intimidate people, and there's this one guy just doesn't see it and is confused at what everyone else is getting so worked up over.

If you contact him on his website, you can get Aether of Night and the original White Sand draft (which covers what all three of the graphic novels will cover). Brandon asks those he sends it to to not share it with others, so you cannot find anything online.

I don't recall any Dragonsteel sample chapters being sent out, and Brandon has been very tight-lipped about the book recently. (He'll usually send something more recent, like a short story or an Oathbringer excerpt, in a newsletter. But he has gone back and sent out White Sand excerpts.) Like all Masters Theses, there was a copy in the library at BYU, where Brandon got his degree. It was the only thesis that had to get rebound, so many people were borrowing it! I think there still is an active copy floating around, but you pretty much need to be at BYU to get a hold of it, and stalk the bookshelf it lives on.

On a large scale, I take issue with the interpretation of Mandates as primarily personal characteristics imposed on the Shards. I see elements of deity (especially with Odium and Honor) in the actions of the Shards we've seen. The clearest description we've had of a Mandate is from the Second Letter, where Frost refers to Odium as "God's own divine hatred, separated from the virtues that gave it context." If the Mandate of the Shard arose from Rayse's mind at the time of the Shattering, then who is the God that Frost is referring to? If Adonalsium had no mind, no hatred, then whose was it? That being said, I do like how you connected Ati's beliefs to the Shard he wound up taking. I don't think I'd noticed that implications of that particular passage before. But I do not like your approach to how Vessel's fight their Mandates (if the Mandate came from the Vessel's original character, then how is it later in conflict with their character?), but I can't fault your explanation, either, only say that I cannot subscribe to it. Going back to deific understanding, I do think there is a correlation there, that each Vessel took a piece of God that they were compatible with (much like the Ascenscions we witnessed throughout Mistborn).

Side note, I don't believe the one from Ad Astra was actually about an Ardent. The PoV Soulcaster was said to be from Liafor, one of the westernmost Makabaki nations, as they were exploring near Aimia. The Ardentia is the priesthood of Vorinism, an eastern religion; I don't recall seeing Ardents in Lift's interlude, for example, or in Edgedancer. It's a minor nitpick, but one that I found intriguing: maybe Soulcasters are treated differently across the four main cultural regions of Roshar (Vorin, Makabaki, Iri, and Shin).

It's kind of ironic that I don't have a Reddit account to post this over there myself.

Ninja'd. But here's the link.

Whenever Brandon does signings, people are able to ask him questions while he's signing their books. (Or standing outside in the cold because the library closed down and kicked them out, but that was just one time.) That, and pieces of information trickle out from his alpha readers, who have been with him since beginning and have read Dragonsteel and Way of Kings Prime. For Frost, in particular, someone who had read Dragonsteel recognized that the Letter was written to a dragon ("you old reptile" being a literal description, not a generic insult), and connected that with Frost, a character from Dragonsteel. They asked Brandon at a signing, and got confirmation, and that's how that information got out into the public. The Coppermind draws from these sources; there are quite a bit of cool tidbits that you don't get in the books. You can also go to the Theoryland Interview Database, which documents most of what Brandon has said over the years. The site was originally founded for the Wheel of Time, and when Brandon took over that series, they incorporated his signings into their database as well. I'd actually recommend looking event-by-event, starting with the Way of Kings tour in 2010 and going forward from there, skimming past Wheel of Time answers to get to the cosmere stuff. (I would be remiss if I didn't mention my collected Reddit quotes. Theoryland's big blind spot is Brandon's social media, so there is some pretty important stuff in there, as well, that you won't be able to find in Theoryland.) There is quite a lot of 'hidden' info floating around out there. The best way to get up to speed is just to be patient; rummage through Theoryland, look through old signing threads in the Events and Signings forum, read through topics and see what kinds of quotes people are linking to. It will take a while to absorb it all, and even those of us who have spent way too much time on it still find new stuff on a regular basis.

The question implies that the Shard not on a world and the hide-and-survive Shard are, in fact, one and the same. Brandon seems to overlook that, and only talk about hide-and-survive. I seem to recall that the original source for not-on-a-world, specifically asked about a Shard we didn't know other than hide-and-survive. Since it's a RAFO in the end, I don't plan on taking anything away from this. But I'll acknowledge that the possibility is there.

EDIT: Okay, kids. I'm super pumped to see you all using this database and finding good stuff. But please don't tag me whenever you post something from it. Instead, link to the Excel sheet itself, or to this post with instructions on how to filter. Or just link straight to the reddit comment in question. It's my 1000th post, so I figured I'd do something special. Like many of us, I've been concerned with notable info from Reddit that is difficult to find. So I decided to go on the hunt and pull together as much as I can. The following link is to an Excel sheet (you don't need Excel, it will work completely in the browser) with 749 WoBs, some of which were quite hard to find. https://1drv.ms/x/s!AplGxH8o0rfpnV1bJxqsi4NxrKMC I know there are some mistakes in my data; I have a couple WoBs without dates, a few where I mistyped dates and have a WoB from the future, apparently. If you see any of them, feel free to point them out to me in this thread. Also, I only concerned myself with cosmere-relevant stuff, no Reckoners, no WoT, no general writing advice, none of Brandon's terrible jokes. Many of the quotes from the AMAs will already be in Theoryland, but I haven't done a cross-reference to check on the exact extent. Brandon has a habit of returning to an old AMA to keep on answering stuff after people have stopped watching to catalogue it, so the 2015 AMA especially has a lot of stuff that didn't make it to Theoryland. The earlier ones, maybe not so much. I don't have any tags in here. I am working on tagging them in my own database, but that doesn't carry over well to a simple Excel sheet. So, the best way to find something is using a keyword search. If you click the arrow on the right of the first column header, you can use text filters to search for particular words or phrases. Oh, and I did break up any comment that had multiple questions, which should make it easier to skim through stuff when you've run a search. You can also look by specific thread. If you go to the right, you will see many columns for events: 5 AMAs, 6 Oathbringer updates, one Secret History update, and a single column to capture anything that isn't in one of the threads Brandon started. To select all from a particular event, click on the arrow, select "Filter..." and unselect Blanks. (If there's an "x" in that column, it means it was from that event.) This is useful for two reasons: first of all, I think the best way to become familiar with WoBs is to look through an event report, rather than look by subject. And second, this should make it easy to add to Theoryland. (Heyo, @WeiryWriter and @Ted aka WinespringBrother.) It's a little scrappy, but it's functional. Hopefully this will all make it into Theoryland, in which case it doesn't need to look nice here. And anyone else can feel free to download a copy or take this data to use in your own WoB catalogue. But, for now, it's not too complicated to search through here. That being said, I waited way too long to start doing this, and I am missing a good chunk of stuff. Theoryland did a good job cataloguing Brandon's WoBs up through 2013. Due to how Reddit lets you view past comments, I can only look back to April 2016 for anything that isn't a topic Brandon himself started. So, there are just over two years of Brandon's random comments on other peoples' threads that we're missing. I hope he was doing most of his WoB-dropping in the 2015 AMA and in his various Oathbringer updates. But, if you have anything that I am missing from that time period (looking at you, @Kurkistan), please send me links, so I can include them. So, there you have it. Happy 1000th post to me, and good hunting to all of you.