Pagerunner

Where are they talking about this? Khriss does indeed state in AU that Ambition is dead, and I don't recall having seen anything official to the contrary. Now, that doesn't mean the Shard's influence is totally gone. It does impact Threnody in a major way, still. It's possible the Vessel's Cognitive Shadow escaped Odium, so the old Shardholder could still be around somewhere. And a Splintered Shard could be put back together, so we might see Ambition, reassembled with a new Vessel, play a role in the future (or even right now in Mistborn). I think those sorts of scenarios are unlikely, but I guess without knowing what arguments are being made, I can't issue a blanket condemnation of those lines of thought.

IIRC, the legends speak of humanity being cast 'down' from the Halls to Roshar, and the Voidbringers then trying to drag them 'down' to Damnation. That could indicate a progression through the Solar System; Ashyn, closest to the sun, would be the highest, and then Roshar is in the middle, and Braize would be viewed as the lowest. It seems like it's up Brandon's alley to have hell be cold, not hot. (Ashyn is hot, lots of lava everywhere, but it appears to have been destroyed in some sort of cataclysm, with only floating cities surviving.)

I don't think you can craft a broad spoiler policy with regards to unpublished books. I think you can and should specify for each unpublished novel what is legal to discuss and where, as a part of a clearly elaborated and easily visible spoiler policy. (People still do not appear to understand how the spoiler policy works, tagging topic titles with "WoR Spoilers" and the like. Granted, of the two ways to err, that is the far better.) Spoilers are a Big Deal these days, so you want to be absolutely sure everyone is aware of what content is out in the open and where. But I would say a thorough explanation of which forums can have what, would also have a list of unpublished works and their allowed zones of discussion. "Dragonsteel is no no except for what has been released as WoBs. Aether is only in its subforum. White Sand Prose is allowed as a normal book, but it must be discussed in spoilers in the main White Sand board. Liar is clear everywhere." Make it comprehensive, include links when you can.

You can pull up your recent posts from your profile and skim for any downvotes.

It's a common theory. I, personally, have my reservations.

Hey, I thought of a couple more ideas: Munchkin is a hoot. Some of the humor is inappropriate for that age range (they don't need to learn about a sneaky b------ sword), but you can take those cards out and play with the clean ones. (Well, as clean as a giant floating nose can be.) Tape over those cards with your own homemade Sanderson versions of Munchkin cards! Another possibility for actual Cosmere is buying the Mistborn dice to play Yahtzee or Liar's Dice. (If you play with 6's as wilds, it will work especially well for the latter, since the sixth face on each dice is a different Allomantic symbol.) They are a little pricey, since they're more a novelty, but if you're trying to sneakily brainwash your kids into reading Mistborn when they're older, that may be your best bet.

The only board game I'm aware of that is out right now is the Mistborn RPG, which is probably too complicated to play with young kids. There is another game, Mistborn: House Wars, that will be coming out this summer. But that is more of a Euro style board game, which is again too complicated for that age group. Once Upon a Time is a competitive storytelling game, where everyone is adding to the story at the same time. It might be a good one to try. For that age range, you might be better off 'adding' a story to a simple card game. I'm thinking of a game like Ascend (which isn't played with a standard deck of playing cards, but an alternate style deck called the Decktet), where the mechanic is straightforward, but the story of the game is ducks climbing a mountain and throwing bombs at one another. You could also take an existing game like Phase 10, and add a cosmere storyline onto it (like maybe you're potion makers from Sel who need to assemble the right ingredients).

Reincarnation?

Well, that was a waste.

Source. So, we've been RAFOd on that particular question, with the implication that one of the three Shards in Roshar may be responsible for its magic. Odium can influence other planets in the Rosharan system, and even though he has been on Braize, Brandon has referred to him as the third Shard on Roshar, which I infer as referring to the entire Rosharan system. Also, what we know of the disease magic indicates that it is a magic you interact with, which would follow that it is a world without a Shard. So, I cannot state definitively that Ashyn has never had a Shard and that its magic is not due to a fourth Shard. (I can't check the AU Rosharan essay right now, but it's possible that is more definitive in saying there are three Shards in the system.) The wiggle room is there in the WoBs. But I feel I can make a strong case against it.

Ashyn does not have a Shard. The magic there is something you interact with, more Realmatic effects (silly science), not a formalized magic system.

Source

Oh, man. I won't say that's obvious, but I will agree with your conclusions. That makes a lot of sense, actually, that Helaran wasn't seeking the Skybreakers to join them, but seeking them to destroy them because of what their teachings did to his family. It doesn't work quite as cleanly with why he was after Amaram, who was expressly trying to bring back the Radiants. But there are plenty of other reasons he could have been at odds with the Sons of Honor. My big hangup with this whole situation was, why would Brandon include that Helaran sought out the Skybreakers, if he wound up being part of a different secret society? This explanation answers that concern.

Brandon has implied that copper compounding may not produce anything useful.

I don't think Hoid considers Kelsier a friend, based on their interactions in Secret History.

Yeah, this was an observation that caused some dissension when the novella was first released, and someone asked for clarification from Brandon on the AU tour. Best I recall, the spren that Ym had bonded was that of a Truthwatcher, But, he was also being evaluated as a potential Edgedancer; he fit the qualities of both Orders, and it wound up that the Truthwatcher spren was the one he eventually bonded with. If he had bonded Wyndle, he would have had access to a different Surge (in addition to Progression, which both Orders share).

I'll second publication order, as much as possible. Just from a writing quality point of view, it can be hard to go backwards from Way of Kings, since Brandon grew so much as a writer while working on Wheel of Time. (Although Mistborn 2 and 3 are what stuffer from that the most, IMO, and your friend has already gotten those out of the way.) If you can't get him to read WoK - AoL - WoR - SoS - BoM in publication order, alternating between series like that, have him read Stormlight before Mistborn Era 2.

Hey there, welcome to the Shard! This might go better in the Stormlight Archive subforum, which is focused on more specific discussions of Stormlight (that don't delve into other cosmere spoilers). I'm sure a mod will stop by and move this sometime soon. The concept has been discussed around here before, although not in connection to the Star Wars theory. Brandon's use of keteks in Stormlight, and all the symmetry in general in that story, lend a lot of credence that there will be a lot of similarities between books 1 and 10, 2 and 9, etc. As far as I'm aware, nobody has asked Brandon directly. If you ever get a chance to go to a signing, it would be a good thing to ask. However, I'm not sure we'll be able to reasonably speculate about what things will look like in Book 9. Once we get Book 5, then maybe we'll have enough of an idea that we can figure some stuff out. But it probably won't be character-focused symmetry, since we'll have a different set of main characters for the back five, with our current main ones becoming secondary.

Hmm, I don't recall having seen that connection made before, and I'm not familiar with that deity. Conceptually speaking, it's an interesting idea, although Ruin seems more an embodiment of natural entropy while Ate seems to be aligned with 'wrongdoings' that have negative consequences. The pronunciations don't quite match up, either: "Ατη" will rhyme with 'day.' It's still two letters of a three-letter word matching up, so not insignificant. I'm reminded of a particularly egregious coincidence from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. They discover the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, the renowned '42.' But then they need to discover the ultimate question that is being answered. When they finally do, they learn that it is 'What is six times nine?' Some fans realized that, in a Base-13 number system, six times nine actually does equal forty-two. Confronted with this, Adams rejected it, saying that any way the question made sense was pure coincidence. I think this may be a similar situation, that a Vessel's three-letter name just happens to look like something connected conceptually with ruin in some form or another.

I've seen this one before. There was another one a couple years back where Brandon said that a hypothetical Shard for Alcatraz would be Deception. I don't think it's a definite Shard. Brandon has been very careful with the information he's given out; I don't think he'd slip up like that. My interpretation was like you put it above; that Brandon came up with a new Shard on the spot that matched his personality. Also of note, the Sixteen Shards aren't set in stone in Brandon's mind. The ones he hasn't canonized, he reserves the right to switch up if he comes up with better ideas. So, it's possible, conceptually, for there to be more than sixteen Shards, from an out-of-universe perspective. It's not like a Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart, where there are nine slots that define all of morality. Adonalsium could have split to produce something like Ingenuity, but it doesn't mean that he did. So, not saying it's impossible. But I don't think that's where Brandon was going with it. I wouldn't use this as a proof text for Ingenuity as a Shard.

So, the analogy that we've been using for Identity and unkeyed metalminds actually had it reversed, that Identity is the key and that a metalmind is a lock. Speculation prior to BoM (and, actually, VenDell's itself) was focusing on changing the shape of your Identity to mimic another's, to make a duplicate key that could open someone else's lock. Unkeyed metalminds, however, take a different approach; by blanking your Identity, you're not making a functional lock, it's one that any key can open. The kandra's experiments with Identity haven't yielded anything useful; I think it's because they were going about it the wrong way, working with keys instead of locks. And without Hemalurgy, an aluminum Ferring would be unable to actually use anyone else's metalminds anyways. As to compounding, I think Brandon needs to limit that medallions cannot be used to compound, just for the sake of worldbuilding. This would be a restriction placed on the world, for which he would need to come up with a satisfying explanation, rather than a natural outgrowth of the system. Because the natural outgrowth has a total post-scarcity society where everything, food/health/mental speed, is compounded to infinity in unkeyed minds. And it will also be trivially easy to store speed and strength, making for obscenely powerful criminals who are stopped by equally as absurd heroes. Think Wax at the end of BoM, but that's EVERYBODY. So, for meta reasons, I will assert that an Allomancer cannot use a medallion to compound. I can't say exactly why, but I have some ideas. I thought it would have to do with Identity at first; if the Identity associated with the two powers don't match, then you can't perform the hack. But Marsh is compounding Identity using spikes, so that's obviously not the case. Maybe the medallions only grant the ability to tap, not to store. But, no, the weight medallions need you to be able to store. So, right now, I'm pretty much back to square one; it would break the world if it could happen, so it must not be possible.

Crafty Games has their own forum.You'd best post it over there; I don't think the designers are even on the Shard.

Oh yes.

Yes, Nightblood can feed off Stormlight. It might not be as painful as it was for Vasher and his Breath; Breath appears to 'stick' to people better, since it doesn't run out. Stormlight, on the other hand, is constantly leaking away from whoever's holding it. Vasher's intense pain might have been because the Breath was being ripped from him to feed Nightblood, something that won't necessarily happen for Szeth and Stormlight. But we won't know for sure until we see Szeth actually wield the sword.